CONCISE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EDUCATIONAL LINGUISTICS
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CONCISE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EDUCATIONAL LINGUISTICS
Edited by BERNARD SPOLSKY Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Consulting Editor R. E. ASHER University of Edinburgh
1999 ELSEVIER AMSTERDAM - LAUSANNE - NEW YORK - OXFORD - SHANNON - SINGAPORE - TOKYO
Elsevier Science Ltd, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, UK
Copyright © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Concise encyclopedia of educational linguistics / edited by Bernard Spolsky ; consulting editor, R. E. Asher. p. cm. ISBN 0-08-043163-1 1. Language and education Encyclopedias. I. Spolsky, Bernard. II. Asher, R. E. P40.8.C66 1999 306.44'03-dc21 99-35653 CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A cataolgue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-08-043163-1
(HC)
© ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Typeset by Polestar Digital Data Ltd., Glasgow, UK. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cambridge University Press, UK.
Contents Editor's Preface
xxiii
Introduction to the Field General Introduction: The Field of Educational Linguistics B. SPOLSKY
1
Applied Linguistics
6
D. A. WlLKINS
Educational Linguistics K. PERERA
17
Ethics in Educational Linguistics A. DAVIES
21
Linguistics and Language Learning B. SPOLSKY
26
The Social Context Society Bilingualism, Societal M. BLANC
31
Diglossia A. HUDSON
37
Language Loyalty R. MESTHRIE
42
Linguicide T. SKUTTNAB-KANGAS & R. PHILLIPSON
48
Minority Languages J. M. Y. SIMPSON
49
Contents Minority Language Rights R. PHILLIPSON & T. SKUTTNAB-KANGAS
51
Multilingual States D. D. LAITIN
54
Multilingualism C. B. PAULSTON
60
Socialization C. B. CAZDEN
63
Sociolinguistics D. R. PRESTON
65
Standardization
70
E. HAUGEN†
Sweden: Immigrant Languages S. BOYD
73
Teaching Endangered Languages L. HINTON
74
National Policy: Language Education Policy and Education Australian Indigenous Languages T. SHOPEN
79
Australian Minority Languages M. CLYNE
80
Canadian Language Education Policy I. PRINGLE
81
Indian Language Education Policy BH. KRISHNAMURTI
83
Irish Language Education Policy T. HICKEY
85
Japanese Language Education Policy T. SHIMAOKA
86
V1
Contents Language Diffusion Policy C. G. MACLEAN Language Education Policy—Africa
92
101
S. G. M. RIDGE Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries Y. SULEIMAN
106
Language Education Policy—Asia B. H. JERNUDD
116
Language Education Policy—Europe J. L. M. TRIM
122
Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union
127
L. A. GRENOBLE Language Education Policy—Latin America
133
N. H. HORNBERGER
Language Education Policy—Pacific R. B. KAPLAN
139
Maori Language Revitalization
144
J. J. McCAFFERY
National Languages C. M. EASTMAN
147
National Language Policy and Education R. D. LAMBERT
151
Wales: Language Education Policy R. MORRIS JONES
157
Literacy and Oracy Literacy C. J. DASWANI
159
Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness M. HERRIMAN
166
vii
Contents Literacy: Phonological Awareness P. E. BRYANT
169
Literacy: Research and Method D. A. WAGNER
171
Oracy A. M. WILKINSON
178
Postliteracy L. BENTON
178
Traditional Religious Education and Literacy in Developing Countries D. A. WAGNER
183
The Home-School Language Gap African American Vernacular English I. F. HANCOCK
187
Ann Arbor Case I. F. HANCOCK
188
Black English (UK) M. DALPHINIS
189
Educational Failure J. R. EDWARDS
192
Gender and Language J. SWANN
200
Home and School Language
202
M. MACLURE
Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar
204
C. CULLEN
Standard English M. FARR & A. F. BALL
viii
205
Contents The Individual Learner Language Acquisition Becoming Bilingual
209
C. LETTS Grammar Acquisition
211
H. TAGER-FLUSHBERG Input and Interaction
219
B. J. RICHARDS & C. GALLAWAY Language Acquisition
225
P. FLETCHER Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability
230
M. ATKINSON Language and the Brain
237
J. M. GURD & J. C. MARSHALL Phonology in Language Acquisition
241
M. L. EDWARDS Vocabulary in Language Acquisition
244
M. D. BARRETT Challenged Learners Deafness and Sign Language Instruction
249
S. WlLCOX
Language Disorders
255
S. L. JAMES Pathology: Intervention
266
B. BYERS BROWN† Pathology: Overview
271
J. M. COOPER Reading and Writing Disorders
275
B. BYERS BROWN† ix
Contents The Blind Child M. GARMAN
276
Second Language Processing Age in Second Language Learning T. SCOVEL
281
Bilingualism, Individual F. GROSJEAN
284
Listening in a Second Language
290
M. ROST Reading in a Second Language A. H. URQUHART
295
Speaking in a Second Language
302
G. YULE Writing in a Second Language
306
U. M. CONNOR The School Context School and Classroom Bilingual Education
311
M. E. BRISK Classroom Language N. MERCER
315
Discourse in the Language Classroom D. ALLWRIGHT
319
Language Across the Curriculum
323
D. J. CORSON Observing Classroom Language A. D. EDWARDS & D. P. G. WESTGATE
325
Pedagogy
332
A. LUKE & C. LUKE
Contents School Language Policies
336
D. J. CORSON Textbooks
337
F. I. DAVIES
Dictionaries Dictionaries for Language Learners
345
R. A. CARTER & N. SCHMITT Lexicology
349
A. P. COWIE Prescription in Dictionaries
353
L. C. MUGGLESTONE
Electronic Age Computer-assisted Language Learning
355
J. D. Fox
Educational Linguistics on the Web
361
L. SELINKER & C. KINAHAN Language Laboratory
363
A. G. SCIARONE New Information Technology in Language Education
366
E. K. L. NG
Teaching Language National Curricula English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)
373
K. PERERA English Teaching in Australia
374
M. O. MEIERS English Teaching in Canada
377
I. PRINGLE
X1
Contents English Teaching in England and Wales
378
R. A. CARTER English Teaching in Scotland R. CAIRNS
380
English Teaching in USA
381
R. E. SHAFER† French Teaching in France
384
D. AGER National Oracy Project J. A. JOHNSON
387
National Writing Projects
387
P. CZERNIEWSKA
Schools Council UK
389
J. J. PEARCE Standards, Scales, and Guidelines B. SPOLSKY
390
Grammar in Mother Tongue Teaching Grammar in British Schools
393
A. M. PHILP Grammar (Mother Tongue) R. DIRVEN
403
Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue) W. B. ELLEY
410
Language Awareness
413
E. W. HAWKINS Systemic Grammar Applied C. S. BUTLER
xii
419
Contents Reading in the Mother Tongue Literature Teaching
425
R. A. CARTER Miscue Analysis
427
H. ARNOLD Readability
428
C. HARRISON Reading: Acquisition
431
J. OAKHILL Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention
440
M. J. SNOWLING & A. EDMUNDSON Reading: Early
450
J. MASTERSON Reading Difficulties
451
M. J. SNOWLING Reading Inventories
453
E. GOODACRE Reading Recovery
453
N. HALL Reading Teaching: Materials
454
K. PERERA Reading Teaching: Methods
457
R. BEARD Reading: Testing
459
P. D. PUMFREY Reading: Theories
462
G. E. MACKINNON
xiii
Contents Spelling in the Mother Tongue Spelling
467
D. BENTLEY Spelling Errors: English
468
C. STERLING Spelling: Invented
469
C. READ Spelling: Learning
470
N. GOULANDRIS
Spelling Tests
473
C. STERLING Writing in the Mother Tongue Writing: Process Approach
475
P. CZERNIEWSKA
Writing in School
477
J. HARRIS Writing Instruction
481
S. W. FREEDMAN Teaching Additional Languages Second and Foreign Language Learning Basic English
483
W. T. GORDON Communication Strategies
484
N. POULISSE
Contrastive and Error Analysis
489
H. RINGBOM Culture C. MORGAN
xiv
495
Contents Intercultural Discourse
500
M. CLYNE Interlanguage
507
E. TARONE Language for Special Purposes
512
A. JOHNS Learning Strategies
518
R. L. OXFORD Morphology
522
I. S. P. NATION Motivation
525
Z. DöRNYEI Native Speaker
532
A. DA VIES Needs Analysis
539
J. L. CLARK Second Language Learning
540
B. MCLAUGHLIN & S. ROBBINS Second Language Learning: Individual Differences
552
R. L. OXFORD The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language
560
GERRY ABBOTT SLA (Second Language Acquisition) Lexis: Acquisition
565
P. MEARA Phonology in Second Language Acquisition
567
A. R. JAMES Second Language Acquisition: Conversation
572
S. M. GASS XV
Contents Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories
577
K. R. GREGG Second Language Acquisition: Sign Language
584
J. G. KYLE Semantics
587
N. DlTTMAR
Syntax in Second Language Acquisition
592
M. A. SHARWOOD SMITH Text
598
J. HOUSE Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy ASTP
603
B. SPOLSKY Content-based Instruction (CBI)
604
J. CRANDALL Fluency and Accuracy
611
I. S. P. NATION Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language)
612
D. LARSEN-FREEMAN History of Second Language Teaching
618
A. P. R. HOWATT Immersion
626
R. LYSTER Intensity
632
K. REEDER Language for Special Purposes: Pedagogy
633
A. JOHNS Listening: Second Language Pedagogy N. F. WHITNEY
xvi
639
. Phonetic Pedagogy
Contents 644
J. C. CATFORD Pronunciation
647
D. PORTER Reading: Second Language
652
E. WILLIAMS Second Language Teaching
656
D. A. WILKINS Second Language Teaching Methods
658
W. T. LITTLEWOOD Speaking: Second Language Pedagogy
668
M. BYGATE Starting Early J. L. M. TRIM
675
Ulpan
677
B. SPOLSKY Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy
678
P. J. SCHOLFIELD
Writing: Second Language Pedagogy
682
T. HEDGE
Testing Foreign Language Testing
689
R. KELLY Language Testing
695
B. SPOLSKY Language Testing: Alternative Methods
703
K. SMITH Language Testing: Fundamentals
707
A. J. KUNNAN
xvii
Contents
Language Testing: Impact E. SHOHAMY
711
Language Testing in Mother Tongue D. SPEARRITT
715
Language Testing: Methods C. A. CHAPELLE
721
Language Testing: Users and Uses
724
T. McNAMARA
The Profession Institutions Journals A. VALDMAN
729
Professional Associations R. YOUNG
732
Research Centers B. SPOLSKY
734
Summer Institute of Linguistics J. BENDOR-SAMUEL
739
People Ascham, Roger (1515-68) A. P. R. HOWATT
747
Alatis, James Efstathios (1926-) E. M. ANTHONY
748
Candlin, Christopher N. (1940-) K. SAJAVAARA
748
Carroll, John Bissell (1916-) C. W. STANSFIELD
749
xviii
Contents Caxton, William (ca. 1415-91)
751
W. HÜLLEN
Cazden, Courtney B (1925-) P. ULICHNY
751
Clay, Marie M. (1926-)
752
S. McNAUGHTON
Comenius, Jan Amos Komensky (1592-1670) J. L. M. TRIM
753
Cooper, Robert Leon (1931 -)
754
B. SPOLSKY Corder, S. Pit (1918-90)
755
L. SELINKER Elphinston, James (1721-1809)
756
A. P. R. HOWATT Ferguson, Charles A. (1921-98)
757
J. A. FlSHMAN
Finocchiaro, Mary Bonomo (1913-96)
758
J. E. ALATIS Fishman, Joshua A. (1926-)
758
B. SPOLSKY Greenbaum, Sidney (1929-96)
760
B. AARTS Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood (1925-)
760
J. FINE Haugen, Einar (1906-94) N. HASSELMO
761
Heath, Shirley Brice
762
C. B. CAZDEN
xix
Contents Hill, Archibald A. (1902-92) C. W. HAYES
763
Hornby, Albert Sidney (1898-1978) A. P. R. HOWATT
764
Hymes, Dell Hathaway (1927-)
765
N. H. HORNBERGER
Jones, Daniel (1881-1967) B. S. COLLINS
766
Kaplan, Robert B. W.
767
Kennedy, Benjamin Hall (1804-89) C. A. STRAY
768
Krashen, Stephen D. (1941- ) D. E. ESKEY
769
Labov, William (1927-)
770
S. ROMAINE
Lado, Robert (1915-95)
770
J. E. ALATIS Lambert, Wallace E. (1922- ) G. R. TUCKER
771
Lee, William Rowland (1911-96) J. E. ALATIS
772
Mulcaster, Richard (1532-1611) A. P. R. HOWATT
773
Nickel, Gerhard (1928-) K. SAJAVAARA
774
Nida, Eugene Albert (1914-)
774
R. E. LONGACRE
XX
Contents Palmer, Harold Edward (1877-1949) A. P. R. HOWATT
775
Passy, Paul Edouard (1859-1940) J. A. KEMP
776
Paulston, Christina Bratt (1932-)
777
M. SWAIN Piaget, Jean (1896-1980) M. L. DONALDSON
778
Pitman, Sir Isaac (1813-97)
779
M. K. C. MACMAHON
Quirk, Charles Randolph (1920-)
780
J. ROBERTS Ratke, Wolfgang (1571-1635)
781
J. B. WALMSLEY Richards, I. A. (1893-1979)
781
J. P. Russo Rivers, Wilga (1919-)
783
R. STEELE Robinett, Betty Wallace (1919-)
783
B. T. DOWNING Smith, Henry Lee (1913-72)
784
C. A. FARLEY-WINER Sonnenschein, Edward Adolf (1851-1929) J. B. WALMSLEY
785
Stern, H. H. (David) (1913-87)
786
B. HARLEY & A. WEINRIB Strevens, Peter (1922-89)
787
H. G. WlDDOWSON
XXI
Contents Swain, Merrill K. (1944-)
788
A. GUMMING Trim, John L. M.
788
J. SHEILS Troike, Rudolph C. (1933-) G. R. TUCKER
789
Tucker, G. Richard (1942- ) J. CRANDALL
790
Twaddell, William Freeman (1906-82)
791
W. N. FRANCIS Valdman, Albert (1931-) B. SPOLSKY
792
Van Els, Theo (1936-)
793
K. DE BOT
Viëtor, Wilhelm(1850-1918)
794
K. GROTSCH Widdowson, H. G.
795
G. COOK Alphabetical List of Articles
797
List of Contributors
803
Name Index
813
Subject Index
833
xxii
Editor's Preface When I was first approached at the beginning of 1998 with the suggestion that I edit a spin-off volume on language and education, I was immediately tempted by the opportunity this gave me to survey the field to which I have devoted my academic life. I am most grateful to Professor R. E. Asher, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics and to Chris Pringle, Senior Publishing Editor for Elsevier Science Limited for the invitation and for the assistance they gave me in planning the volume, and to Helen Collins and members of the production staff for their constant support and uncomplaining effort during preparation. I am grateful to the authors of the articles in the parent volumes who agreed to modify and update their articles or let them appear unchanged. I am especially appreciative of the authors of the new articles who met virtually impossible deadlines and worked with tight space restrictions to produce them. That this volume has been produced so speedily is a mark both of the efforts of those I have named and of the major advantage that electronic mail gave to the work of preparation and editing. Most of my work was done in this way, from seeking authors for new articles to discussing last minute changes in the wording of titles. I dedicate this volume to the group who stand to benefit most from the enrichment and development of educational linguistics, the children who continue to suffer through insensitive and impractical school approaches to language education. Biographical Note Born in New Zealand, Bernard Spolsky was educated at Wellington College and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English from Victoria University. After a spell of high school teaching in New Zealand (where his bilingual Maori pupils set him thinking about a topic that is still central to his research), he taught at high schools in Australia and England before moving, in 1958, to Israel. In Israel, he spent a year in the army supervising foreign language teaching and two years at the Hebrew University teaching English. In 1961, he became Assistant Professor of education at McGill University, and in 1964, having completed a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Montreal, was appointed Assistant Professor of linguistics at Indiana University. In 1968, he moved to the University of New Mexico, where he was Professor of Linguistics, Anthropology and Elementary Education, Dean of the Graduate School, and director of the Navajo Reading Study. In 1980, he returned to Israel, being appointed Professor of English at Bar-Han University, where he also served terms as head of the English Department and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. He has conducted and published research in language testing, second language learning, computers in the humanities, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language policy. In professional service, he has been President of TESOL, Secretary of the American Association of Applied Linguistics, President of the Israeli Association of Applied Linguistics, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Applied Linguistics, and President of the International Language Testing Association. He has held a Guggenheim fellowship and a Mellon fellowship, and has been Adjunct Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington. He has written and edited a dozen books and published some 200 chapters in books and articles in journals. Selected Books Spolsky B 1978 Educational Linguistics: An Introduction. Newbury House Publishers, Rowley, MA Spolsky B (ed.) 1986 Language and Education in Multilingual Settings. Multilingual Matters Ltd., Clevedon, UK Spolsky B 1989 Conditions for Second Language Learning: Introduction to a General Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford Spolsky B 1995 Measured Words: The Development of Objective Language Testing. Oxford University Press, Oxford Spolsky B 1998 Sociolinguistics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study). Oxford University Press, Oxford Spolsky B, Cooper, R L (eds.) 1977 Frontiers of Bilingual Education. Newbury House Publishers, Rowley, MA Spolsky B, Cooper, R L 1991 The Languages of Jerusalem. Clarendon Press, Oxford
XXlll
Editor's Preface Spolsky B, Shohamy E 1999 The Languages of Israel: Policy, Ideology and Practice. Multilingual Matters Ltd., Clevedon, UK Bernard Spolsky Bar-Ilan University, Israel August 1999
Introduction to the Field General Introduction: The Field of Educational Linguistics B. Spolsky
1. Defining the Field of Educational Linguistics
One of the principal goals of the Concise Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics is to define a field and a profession. The article by David Wilkins on Applied Linguistics sets out the underpinnings of the discipline that was its principal progenitor and that remains its home. Applied linguistics, a term modeled on applied mathematics, won out in competition with the equally logical term 'language engineering' to cover a wide range of interests in practical applications or implications of the knowledge that was being developed through the growth of the modern discipline of linguistics. For some, applied linguistics meant no more than language teaching. In many universities, a course labeled 'Applied linguistics' is essentially an introduction to second language pedagogy. For others, it came to include all the fields ancillary to the study of language itself, such as sociolinguistics, computer linguistics, and psycholinguistics. This wider use is the one institutionalized by the Applied Linguistics congresses that started in the mid-1960s and the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) that grew out of them. Because of this, the term is either too narrow or too wide to label a discipline concerned with the intersection of language and education. For more discussion of this point, see the article on Journals below. 'Educational linguistics' was a term modeled on educational psychology and educational sociology. It describes the commingling of an academic discipline (linguistics) with a practical academic profession (education). While it maintains the higher status for the academic field through using it as the head of the noun clause, it rejects the notion that linguistics is just waiting to be applied, as a hammer is waiting for a nail to drive in. Rather, the use of the term asserts the need for a careful consideration of the educational side as well, producing a responsible new field. The scope of this growing field is best defined as the intersection of language and education. From one perspective the task of educational linguistics is to define the set of knowledge from the many and varied branches of the scientific study of language that may
be relevant to formal or informal education. From a second perspective, the term also includes those branches of formal or informal education that have direct concern with the language and linguistic proficiency of learners. There is an ambiguity here, perhaps captured by saying that educational linguistics includes both the various branches of language education and the knowledge from linguistics and other fields relevant to language education. This Concise Encyclopedia has been planned to reflect this view. It aims to present any knowledge from linguistics (whether the core fields like grammar and phonology and semantics, or the 'hyphenated' fields, as Carl Voegelin labeled them, like sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, or clinical linguistics) that may have bearing on the education of children and adults. It also covers the fields specifically concerned with language learning (in the widest sense) and language teaching. This definition combines the brazenness of claiming breadth and depth of influence with the humility of realizing the complexity of finding useful direct implications for knowledge. A. S. Byatt in her recent novel Babel Tower (Vintage Books 1996) describes in detail the knowledge of 1960s linguistics that was acquired by one of her characters when he was appointed to chair a national enquiry into language education. From Saussure, Jakobson, and Chomsky, he learned of developing understanding of the structure of language, and was encouraged to hope that one day neuroscientists and geneticists might find a physical basis for this structure in the genes and brain cells. But Byatt concludes the discussion of this new linguistic expertise brusquely, noting that 'None of this is exactly helpful with the problem of what to teach to small and not-so-small children, with which the committee is engaged' (p. 194). The task of educational linguistics and of this Concise Encyclopedia is to be helpful rather than imperialistic. Its goal is not, as many linguists have been misled by their scientific understanding to believe, to tell teachers how to teach. When I wrote an introduction to a set of articles on language and education some 25 years ago, I opened with a quotation from an 1
Introduction to the Field unnamed colleague suggesting that the audiolingual method was the worst sin ever inflicted on language learners by linguists. The term 'applied linguistics', I suggested then, had the unfortunate implication that any new discovery about the structure of language has an immediate practical application. Structural linguists had developed some useful techniques for determining regularities in various areas of languages. They somehow believed that their findings were translatable into a language teaching method. The result, at its worst, condemned language learners to hours of meaningless drills. At its best, it gave some order to the practising of forms in the foreign language. Rather, I argued (and still believe) that advances in linguistic knowledge have implications for methods and approaches to helping people learn their own or an additional language. Structural linguistics offered the language teacher a more accurate and efficient way of analyzing the nature of language knowledge that a language learner needed. It was, however, a mistake to assume simply that the patterns used by the linguist needed to be directly learned by the language learner. Transformational linguistics went deeper into explaining the nature of language, but more importantly, initiated a revolution by suggesting the models of language processes and innateness that gave rise to the major discipline of psycholinguistics. Concern with the variation unexplained in transformational grammar produced the field of sociolinguistics, which, in its fullest development, brings language and the language learner in a social context. The interaction of these core linguistic fields with related disciplines—philosophy, sociology, psychology, and others—and with the professional and scientific study of education helps explain the breadth of the topics covered and the knowledge base concerned. We seek then not to apply linguistics, but to derive from its many branches and from other fields that study language, the knowledge that will help in developing the language capacity of others. 2. A Taxonomy of Educational Linguistics The articles in the Encyclopedia have been divided into eight sections constituting a useful taxonomic organization of the field. The titles of articles referred to in this introduction are given in italics. Because most taxonomies leak, some articles from other sections are cited; for instance, the article on Spelling Tests which appears in the section on Spelling in the Mother Tongue is also mentioned in this introduction in the section on Language Testing. 2.1 Introduction to the Field To give a general overview of the field that expands this General Introduction, the first section includes four articles. Applied Linguistics describes the parent field, showing how linguistic knowledge came to be seen as relevant to the practical needs of education. Edu-
cational Linguistics and Linguistics and Language Learning set out the range and coverage of the more precisely defined field. The article on Ethics in Educational Linguistics is included here to summarize the ethical basis of the field as a whole and to reflect the growing sense of responsibility of scholars for the social consequences of their work (for more discussion of the ethical issues, see Language Testing: Impact and Language Testing: Users and Uses). 2.2 The Social Context As Wilkins noted in the opening article on Applied Linguistics, 'natural bilingualism' is more common than is widely believed. The recognition of the importance of the social context in which languages are learned and used has had an increasing effect on educational linguistics since Hymes (see Hymes) objected to restricting attention to the 'linguistic competence of the idealized monolingual' as Chomsky proposed. There are a number of articles which place language and education in their social context. The section is divided into four. Thirteen articles look at Society from a linguistic point of view, asking both what is the social basis of language and the linguistic basis of society. The next 18 articles, many of them specially written for this volume and reflecting the newness of work in the field, look at National Policy: Language Education Policy and Education from a national perspective. Seven articles on Literacy and Oracy set out the critical social and educational effects of the spoken and written organization of language. The final group of eight articles in this section focuses on the HomeSchool Language Gap, various aspects of the educational and social effects of differences between the language of the home and the language favored by the school. 2.2.7 Society In this subsection, as in the parent field of Sociolinguistics, the emphasis is on variation in language, its causes, and its results. Language plays a critically central role in Socialization. Though there are some states that act as though all their citizens speak only one language, most are multilingual, with different patterns of demographic distribution and functional use of the various languages and dialects. Three articles therefore deal with Multilingualism, Multilingual States, and Societal Bilingualism. (The terms 'bilingual' and 'multilingual' continue to be used interchangeably by laymen and experts alike, and an editor respecting language variety is hardly the person to try to enforce a new standard.) One special pattern of societal bilingualism, Diglossia, assigns higher and lower functions to two varieties of a language or to two different languages, producing an educational problem where, as is usually the case, one variety is learned at home and the other required at school.
General Introduction: The Field of Educational Linguistics Faced with choices among languages, speakers show differing kinds of Language Loyalty to the varieties offered, and this affects their willingness to learn or teach languages and so contribute to language maintenance, language shift, or even language death. The corresponding variation in power defines some of the languages as Minority Languages and raises concern for Minority Language Rights in the face of policies that lead to Linguicide or the forced destruction of languages. One article describes the case of immigrants (Sweden: Immigrant Languages), a topic that is dealt with again in the articles on National Policy: Language Education Policy and Education. The recognition of the forces working to reduce drastically the existing diversity of languages has led, belatedly, to a concern for Teaching Endangered Languages. To deal with the variation in language by deciding what variants should be used and so clarify the task of the language teacher, a common process is Standardization. 2.2.2 National Policy: Language Education Policy and Education Given the universality of Multilingual States, purely pragmatic needs of efficient communication are enough to encourage the development of national language policies and the decision on official languages. However, as the articles in this section reveal, this seemingly neutral and objective goal is regularly confounded and distorted by the felt need to express nationalistic or symbolical concerns in the assertion of higher status for one or more chosen languages. National Languages then derive much of their importance from their roles, like flags and anthems, in defining national identity or in proclaiming the superiority of one language and its speakers over others. Many nations often go beyond their own borders, establishing Language Diffusion Policy to widen their influence. National Language Policy and Education surveys these conflicting interests and proposes a model of analysis. In the studies of various regions of the world, Language Education Policy—Africa,—Arabic Speaking Countries,—Asia,—Europe,—Latin America,— Pacific and—Former Soviet Union, one can see the various patterns of treatment that have emerged in recent years. By looking at some special and wellstudied cases, Australian Indigenous Languages and Australian Minority Languages, Canadian Language Education Policy, Indian Language Education Policy, Irish Language Educational Policy, Japanese Language Education Policy, Maori Language Revitalization, and Wales: Language Education Policy, the complexity of situations and the difficulties of developing just and effective policies become even clearer. 2.2.5 Literacy and Oracy As Daswani states in his article, Literacy is no longer just a question of an individual being able to write,
but a social issue of major importance. In Traditional Religious Education and Literacy in Developing Countries one sees the importance of sacred languages and texts. Currently, Literacy: Research and Method are at the core of major national concerns and campaigns. More recently, it has been pointed out that Oracy, the equivalent skills in listening and speaking, is of similar educational and social value. Underlying literacy ability are two critical phenomena, the ability to distinguish language and its structure from the content it carries (see Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness), and the ability to recognize the units of the sound system (see Literacy: Phonological Awareness). To deal with the more advanced skills needed for working in the modern world, the concept of Postliteracy is proposed. The school concern with literacy is discussed in the many articles on reading and writing. 2.2.4 The Home-School Language Gap One of the most crucial transitions that most children make is to go from the social and linguistic context of the home to that of the school. The differences between Home and School Language are a major component, and are partly to blame for, the existence of widespread Educational Failure. In Britain and the US, schools usually emphasize teaching and learning Standard English, rejecting the various other varieties such as Black English (UK) or African American Vernacular English (variously called Black English or Ebonics). This policy was challenged in the United States, one important example being the Ann Arbor Case. A more recent example of backlash to this has been the outcry over a California school board's approach to teaching the variety, which they referred to as Ebonics. The teaching of Standard English has led to controversy over Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar. In recognizing social and linguistic differences, much recent study has been concerned with Gender and Language. 2.3 The Individual Learner The third section of the taxonomy, itself divided into three groups, focuses on the individual language learner. Eight articles cover various aspects of what is (under the influence of Chomsky) now called Language Acquisition rather than language learning. These articles mainly deal with the first language or mother tongue. The next six articles consider Challenged Learners and the various pathologies that affect individual language learning. The last six articles in this section look at the nature of Second Language Processing in the individual, covering together or separately various aspects of learning (or acquiring) foreign or second languages. 2.3.1 Language Acquisition Language exists in social context, but it is learned by individuals. Psycholinguistics is the field that is
Introduction to the Field concerned most with the study of Language Acquisition. What is currently known about the neurophysiological basis of language is considered in Language and the Brain. How language is innate and how much it is learned is the question raised in Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability. Input and Interaction raises the related issue of the how active the learner must be in the process. The acquisition of Grammar (Mother Tongue), Phonology, and Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy are looked at independently. Recognizing how common is plurilingualism (a term favored by some European scholars for individual ability), Becoming Bilingual looks at how children regularly acquire more than one language. 2.3.2 Challenged Learners The next section looks at exceptions. The normal process of language acquisition may be interfered with in a number of ways, resulting in some kind of language Pathology, which may often be treated (Pathology: Intervention). There are broad categories of Language Disorders. More specifically, there may be Reading and Writing Disorders. The Blind Child has special problems. Deafness poses major challenges, to which Sign Language Instruction is one solution. 2.5.5 Second Language Processing As noted earlier, many children learn more than one language, either simultaneously or consecutively. Individual Bilingualism (which can be called plurilingualism if more than two languages are involved) is the study of a widespread phenomenon. One regularly posed question is, what effect does the Age in Second Language Learning of a learner have on learning a second language, attempting to explain why so many empirical studies start off saying 'Everyone believes young children learn languages easily' but end up establishing that older learners are more efficient. The other articles in this subsection ask about the skills of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing in a Second Language and how they compare with the processing of the same skills in the first language. 2.4 The School Context The fourth section of the taxonomy deals with the school context involved in most educational linguistics. Its three parts open with the organization of language in the School and Classroom, and then go on to the important aids, Dictionaries, and conclude with the recent reinforcements that have arrived in the Electronic Age. 2.4.1 School and Classroom Formal language education in first or additional languages generally takes place in the classroom, a context marked by its own Classroom Language. Observing Classroom Language then provides a way
of describing and assessing the effect of Discourse in the Language Classroom in the Language Classroom. The language-related activities are directed by externally imposed School Language Policies, influenced by the teacher's style of Pedagogy. When more than one language is involved, a widespread but still controversial approach is Bilingual Education. Language education is not restricted to the language classroom, but may be spread, as argued in the approach dealing with Language Across the Curriculum. One key feature of the classroom is the ubiquitous Textbook. 2.4.2 Dictionaries Most people assume that learning any language is a matter of learning new words, so the field of Lexicology, the science of dictionary making, is especially pertinent to educational linguistics. Dictionaries provide not only description, but implicitly or explicitly, Prescription in Dictionaries concerning the use of appropriateness of words. Dictionaries for Language Learners need to meet special demands. 2.4.3 Electronic Age Since the middle of the twentieth century, there has been a rapid expansion of the use of New Information Technology in Language Education. For some, instruction has moved from the classroom to the Language Laboratory. In the last 20 years, a new field of Computer-assisted Language Learning has emerged. With the growth of the Internet, we now find Educational Linguistics on the Web. 2.5 Teaching Language The fifth section focuses on language teaching. The articles in this section deal in turn with the nature of National Curricula for teaching for mother tongue, the place of Grammar in Mother Tongue Teaching, and then include 13 articles on teaching Reading in the Mother Tongue, and eight articles in Spelling in the Mother Tongue and Writing in the Mother Tongue. 2.5.7 National Curricula In Britain and the USA, there have been continuing efforts to reform the teaching of the mother tongue. The English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales) and the article on the Schools Council UK deal with this, and other aspects are described in the articles on the National Oracy Project and the National Writing Projects. English Teaching in the USA and Standards, Scales, and Guidelines describe similar efforts in the USA. National mother tongue teaching is also described in English Teaching in Australia, English Teaching in
General Introduction: The Field of Educational Linguistics Canada, English Teaching in England and Wales, and English Teaching in Scotland. English writers often refer to the highly developed and centralized approach to mother tongue teaching that may be seen in French Teaching in France. 2.5.2 Grammar in Mother Tongue Teaching Five articles deal with what remains a highly controversial topic: Grammar (Mother Tongue), Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue), Grammar (Mother Tongue) in British Schools, Language Awareness and Systematic Grammar Applied. Does teaching grammar improve students' language? Should grammar be taught explicitly or implicitly? What model of grammar should be used? The topic of pedagogical grammar is also discussed in the first section of the article Linguistics and Language Learning. 2.5.3 Reading in the Mother Tongue Long the central task of schools, the teaching of reading in the mother tongue depends first on understanding the underlying process, which is examined in Reading: Acquisition. There have developed many Reading: Theories. Reading Teaching: Methods have proliferated, and Reading Teaching: Materials have been published, which may be analyzed for Readability. The question of how early a child should learn to read is discussed in Reading: Early. Reading: Testing and Reading Inventories provide ways of tracking progress. Reading Difficulties can be recognized by tests and inventories and from Miscue Analysis. Dealing with difficulties is the task of Reading Recovery. In more serious cases, disorders are noted in Reading and Writing Disorders and ways of dealing with them in Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention. A goal of teaching reading is Literature Teaching. 2.5.4 Spelling in the Mother Tongue With a language like English, Spelling in an important component of mother tongue teaching. Spelling Tests are one way to find Spelling Errors: English: English. Other articles treat Spelling: Invented and Spelling: Learning. 2.5.5 Writing in the Mother Tongue Three articles deal with writing in the mother tongue: Writing in School, Writing Instruction, and Writing: Process Approach. 2.6 Teaching Additional Languages The sixth section deals with the teaching of additional languages (whether second or foreign). Fifteen articles deal with specific aspects of Second and Foreign Language Learning, another eight deal with subfields of the important discipline called SLA or Second Language Acquisition. The last 18 deal with specific topics in Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy.
2.6.7 Second and Foreign Language Learning The articles in this group cover the broad range of topics of recent research in Second Language Learning. A fundamental issue is raided in an examination of the Native Speaker. One basic approach to planning is provided by Needs Analysis, from which might follow Language for Special Purposes. Historically important developments were made by the introduction of Contrastive and Error Analysis (in which Lado and Corder played an important role) and the associated notion of Inter language. The importance of Morphology is argued. Four articles focus on the learner: Communication Strategies, Learning Strategies, Motivation, and Second Language Learning: Individual Differences. Culture is treated as is Intercultural Discourse. There is an article on The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language and another on the attempt in the 1920s and 1930s to foster Basic English. 2.6.2 SLA or Second Language Acquisition The background for this important subfield, first simply an adaptation of research in first language acquisition but now a critical theoretical basis for educational linguistics, is set out in Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories. The various topics investigated in this field are described in Second Language Acquisition: Conversation, Lexis: Reading: Acquisition, Morphology in the previous subsection, Phonology in Second Language Acquisition, Semantics, Syntax in Second Language Acquisition in Second Language Acquisition, and Text. The approach is further extended in Second Language Acquisition: Sign Language. 2.6.3 Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy Against the social and theoretical backgrounds set out so far, this section groups articles that deal with the teaching of second or foreign languages. Historical background is given in the History of Second Language Teaching of Second Language Teaching or as an overview in Second Language Teaching and Second Language Teaching Methods. The teaching of the various component skills is described in Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue) (Foreign Language), Listening: Second Language Pedagogy, Pronunciation, Phonetic Pedagogy, Reading: Second Language, Speaking: Second Language Pedagogy, Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy: Second Language Pedagogy, and Writing: Second Language Pedagogy. Three controversial issues dealt with are Fluency and Accuracy, Intensity, and Starting Early (see also Age, in Second Language Learning). The methods of teaching language for special purposes is dealt with in Language for Special Purposes: Pedagogy. Two special cases, the ASTP (Armed Services Training Program), often considered the forerunner of the Audio-Lingual Method, and the Israeli Ulpan, considered a model for many language revival programs, are examined.
Introduction to the Field Two recent developments, Content-based Instruction and Immersion, are also described in this section. 2.7 Language Testing The seventh section expands on the rather condensed treatment of language testing in the parent Encyclopedia by adding five new articles. Language Testing surveys the topic, and the theory of the field is discussed in Language Testing: Fundamentals. Approaches to testing are set out in Language Testing: Methods, Foreign Language Testing, Language Testing in Mother Tongue, Reading: Testing, and Spelling Tests. New ways of evaluating progress are spelled out in Language Testing: Alternative Methods. The recent concern for Ethics is described in articles concerning Language Testing: Impact and Language Testing: Uses and Users. 2.8 The Profession The final section looks at the profession of educational linguistics by first describing some of the important institutions that support its work. There are articles on Journals, Professional Associations, Research Centers, and on the Summer Institute of Linguistics. A fuller picture of the profession is provided by biographical notes on the 50 or so scholars who have helped to shape it. The people included are forerunners of the field, the founding generation, and a selection of the older current members of the group. Omitted are many of the equally significant younger
scholars whose current activities can be seen by their regular citation in the reference at the end of articles. 3. Is There a Theory of Educational Linguistics Having described the field of educational linguistics and set out a preliminary taxonomy, one is tempted to attempt also to sketch a preliminary theory at least of the field as a whole. As a starting point, one might usefully take the model of language instruction proposed by John B. Carroll (see Carroll). Paraphrased in a single sentence, he postulates that the linguistic proficiency or capacity or competence of an individual is a function of his or her language learning ability, his or her individual or socially determined motivation to acquire further proficiency, and the socially or educationally determined exposure to other varieties of language. The role of educational linguistics then is to spell out the nature of each of the terms and processes in this key sentence, and to track the ways in which they may be modified in order to permit the development of socially or individually desired proficiency. Each of the branches of the field examined in this volume have their own contribution to make to this task, but seeing them as a 'unified field' (to borrow a term) offers the best prospect for producing the most beneficial results. This volume is essentially a record of the knowledge available at the end of the millennium. If its publication in any way helps consolidate this knowledge and clarify the gaps that need further study, it will have fulfilled its purpose.
Applied Linguistics D. A. Wilkins
The use of language is central to human experience. Virtually all human intercourse is mediated through language. Through language, thoughts and emotions are made explicit. In the small child, linguistic and cognitive capacities develop hand in hand. Later, the ability to communicate within and across societies and therefore to maintain effective social relations depends on having a language in common with other members of those societies. It is hard to conceive how the complex social world in which we live could possibly have been constructed without the unique human gift of language nor, for that matter, how, without language, the human species could have built up the body of knowledge that it has of itself and of its environment. The nature of the endowment that makes this possible is the subject matter of 'theoretical linguistics.'
The study of the uses that man makes of the endowment and of the problems that he encounters in doing so is the subject matter of 'applied linguistics.' To understand the nature of applied linguistics, it is necessary to consider its origins, its aims, the relation of applied linguistics to linguistic theory, the kind of issues with which applied linguistic research is concerned and the methods of investigating them, and the relation of linguistics to professional practice in various domains. But first it needs to be appreciated what the potential scope of applied linguistics is and to see why in this article it will be necessary to restrict the detailed discussion to the field which has so far generated the greatest body of research and publication, namely that of applied linguistics in language learning and teaching.
Applied Linguistics 1. The Scope of Applied Linguistics In a broad sense, applied linguistics is concerned with increasing understanding of the role of language in human affairs and thereby with providing the knowledge necessary for those who are responsible for taking language-related decisions whether the need for these arises in the classroom, the workplace, the law court, or the laboratory. Given the pervasiveness of language, it follows that applied linguistics is potentially a highly diversified field. Its concerns might be with speech pathology, translation, natural language processing by computer, first and second language pedagogy, language policy and planning, literacy, bilingualism, the design of writing systems, the development of terminologies and lexica, the preparation of dictionaries, automatic (machine) translation, forensic analysis (of linguistic evidence), and the role of language in institutional relations (e.g., politics, medicine, law courts). While in few of these fields are the issues faced by practitioners wholly language related, the goal of applied linguistics is best understood as being to provide them With a coherent 'conceptual basis' for the analysis and understanding of those aspects of their work which are language related. The full implications of this will be considered below, but one consequence is that because of the diverse ways in which language is engaged in these domains, there is no single body of applied linguistic knowledge which is equally relevant to all applied fields. For example, there will be relatively little overlap between the linguistic knowledge-base needed for the design of a new orthography and that needed for the development of natural language processing in computers. It is this that makes any straightforward, general description of applied linguistics virtually impossible and which accounts for the fact that the term 'applied linguistics' itself is not in fact universally applied to the academic study of all the fields that have been mentioned. In other words, the actual scope of applied linguistics tends to be less than its potential scope. A pragmatic way to proceed in identifying what the scope of applied linguistics usually is in practice is to look at the activities engaged in under the explicit rubric of applied linguistics. What topics are dealt with at conferences on applied linguistics? What is the orientation of books and journals dedicated to applied linguistics? What are courses on applied linguistics concerned with? The program of the international congress held under the auspices of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée in 1993 lists 30 sections representing a fairly broad interpretation of what constitutes applied linguistics. The section names include, for example, child language, discourse analysis, interpreting and translation, language and gender, lexicography, mother tongue education, psycholinguistics, rhetoric and stylistics, minority languages, language disorders, and models of
bilingualism, language-attrition, and language shift. Fourteen sections are devoted to topics directly associated with second or foreign language learning or teaching. It should be said, however, that scholars working in at least some of the fields mentioned would probably not regard this conference as the prime forum for the reporting of their research. The Annual Review of Applied Linguistics has been published since 1980. The policy of the editors is to have thematic editions punctuated every few years with general surveys. The general surveys tend to provide updates on research into issues of relevance to second- and first-language learning. Some thematic editions, those on literacy or communicative language teaching, have a similar orientation, but even those that do not, those dealing with language policy, bilingualism, and language and the professions, for example, have obvious significance for the educational profession. The overall picture is much the same in the case of journals. A number of journals incorporate the label 'applied linguistics' in their title or subtitle: for example, Language Learning: A Journal of Applied Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, The International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, ITL Review of Applied Linguistics, Etudes de Linguistique Appliquee and System: An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied Linguistics. In each of these cases the overwhelming majority of the articles published are devoted to topics either directly or indirectly linked to language education. Books which set out to define or survey the field of applied linguistics such as Corder (1973; see Allen et al. 1973-77) or Kaplan (1980) ignore the noneducational applied fields as do coursebooks or textbooks such as the Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics (Allen et al. 1973-77) and van Els et al. (1984). Wardhaugh and Brown (1976) does include articles on literature and language planning, but is still predominantly concerned with educational applications. It is more difficult to make generalizations about courses in applied linguistics. Applied linguistics is largely taught at the postgraduate level and students are generally experienced professionals from one or other of the language-oriented specialisms in education, training, and remediation who are seeking a more rigorous academic background for their professional activity or an opportunity to train for and undertake research. While the flexibility of graduate study permits individual deviation into other applied fields, the rationale behind course design is generally provided by a focus on issues relevant to language education. It is evident that the term 'applied linguistics' is too broad in its potential field of application to be interpreted literally. In its widest sense no coherent field of applied linguistics exists. On the other hand, the term is perhaps misleadingly inexplicit as a des-
Introduction to the Field ignation of the actual activities and interests of those who engage in what is commonly referred to as applied linguistic research and teaching. It should be said that the appropriation and restricted use of the term to what might be more accurately referred to as 'applied linguistics in education' or 'applied linguistics in language learning and teaching' has caused objections to be raised from those whose applied interests lie elsewhere and who perhaps feel the lack of a forum where their interests might be catered for. It is clear therefore that, wide as the field of applied linguistics is potentially, in reality both historically and in the late twentieth century it is a more narrowly conceived field of activity. It is arguable that it might be better that the label should always be specified further so that the field of application and, in consequence, the nature of the applied linguistics involved are better understood. In practice applied linguistics has developed so far as an enterprise principally dedicated to creating a better understanding of the processes of language, especially second language, learning, and it is to applied linguistics in this sense that the remainder of this article is devoted. As will be shown, not all the problems associated with the term 'applied linguistics' have yet been identified. 2. Applied Linguistics in Language Learning and Teaching
2.1 The Origins of Applied Linguistics Although there is evidence of some earlier use of the term 'applied linguistics' (van Els et al. (1984) cite a 1931 publication by Lockhart entitled Word Economy: An Essay in Applied Linguistics), the use of the 1990s stems from the 1940s. In the USA, general linguists with experience of conducting research into Native American and other little-known languages had been deeply involved in the conduct of language training programs during World War II. They tended to regard the approach that they adopted to teach language as being based upon general linguistic principles, and indeed there was a close resemblance between the methods they used and the fieldwork procedures that they used in studying unfamiliar languages with the help of native informants. One major principle which emerged and which was articulated notably by Fries and Lado at the University of Michigan was that similarities and differences between the forms and structures of a learner's first language and those of the second language were a major influence on the process of language learning. A full-scale comparison of the two languages was advocated as a preliminary step in the preparation of a language course for students with a common language background. This process became known as 'contrastive analysis.' Since it involved comparison of phonological, syntactic, and lexical systems, it required trained linguists to undertake research involving full
linguistic descriptions of the two languages on common linguistic principles. This was taken evidently to be an application of linguistics and the name 'applied linguistics' gained wide currency as a virtual synonym for contrastive linguistics (see Contrastive and Error Analysis for further discussion). Given that linguistics itself was widely perceived as the scientific study of language, applied linguistics was expected to provide in due course a technology of language teaching. The scale of the contrastive linguistic research undertaken in the following decades was enormous. Indeed, although its rationale came to be questioned, in many East European countries contrastive analysis remains a major academic activity for linguists even in the 1990s. Given the appeal of the notion that difficulties for language learners are caused by differences between the first and the target language and that similarities between the languages will facilitate learning, it is easy to see why language teaching itself was sometimes regarded as little more than an application of linguistics. Yet, from the beginning, the psychological principles involved were just as important as the linguistic ones. It was the behaviorist theory of transfer that was turned to to provide an explanation for the linguistic phenomena observed and when it came to the application of the results of the contrastive analysis in actual teaching materials and activities, these were designed according to the requirements of behaviorist learning principles. There is no strong reason why this activity should not have been labeled 'applied psychology.' It may be that it was because the prime movers were linguists that 'applied linguistics' became the accepted term. It became apparent in due course that contrastive linguistic analysis and behaviorist psychology provided an inadequate theoretical and empirical basis for foreign language teaching. In neither case was there a substantial body of empirical research dedicated specifically to foreign or second language learning to lend support to the theoretical viewpoints. A number of things happened which caused the scope of applied linguistic debate to be widened. First, serious doubts were cast on the intellectual arguments for the behaviorist interpretation of language learning and language behavior. These doubts originated from outside applied linguistics, but had a major influence on it. Second, and only partly as a result of the first, the actual process of second language learning came to be looked at much more closely. It was discovered that transfer theory could not adequately explain all that was observed in the language and language behavior of second language learners. Third, awareness grew that important as the linguistic and psychological considerations might be in determining an approach to language teaching, other factors operated, many of them not directly associated with language at all.
Applied Linguistics There was in other words more to the theory and practice of language teaching than simply the application .of linguistics or psychology. The observation of the scope of what actually takes place under the rubric of applied linguistics in the 1990s, will show that it has moved from its origins as a primarily linguistic activity, conceived within a single linguistic perspective, to being an interdisciplinary field which accommodates any research activity associated with matters of second language use and learning. The label 'applied linguistics' remains in use to designate the whole spectrum of activity. This is a descriptively appropriate label for research such as that into second language acquisition which mostly closely follows developments in linguistic theory, or for any other research which has the language system as its focus. It is also used, but much more opaquely, for studies of such things as the relation between personality traits and language learning, or for research into computer-assisted language learning. It is necessary to look more closely at the nature of applied linguistic research and argumentation to see whether there is nonetheless coherence in this diversity. 2.2 Applied Linguistic Theory and Research If, as suggested at the beginning of this article, applied linguistics in general has as its goal the provision of a conceptual basis for language-related decisionmaking, then in the present context the conceptual basis has to meet the needs of those, language teachers and others, who contribute to the teaching of second or foreign languages. This aim gives rise to a number of issues. How is applied linguistic understanding advanced? What is the relation of applied linguistics to theoretical linguistics? What kind of a discipline is applied linguistics? Is it, as is sometimes claimed, possible to distinguish between problem-solving and theoretical disciplines? Is there such a thing as applied linguistic theory? What are the appropriate methods of empirical research in applied linguistics? Is everything that may influence language learning a relevant topic for applied linguistic research? The answers to these questions are best found by considering first the domains of linguistic knowledge needed to provide the conceptual base referred to above. This knowledge is of four kinds: (a) knowledge of the nature of language, (b) knowledge of language use, (c) knowledge of language learning, (d) knowledge of languages. 2.2.7 Knowledge of the nature of language It seems self-evident that it would be impossible to teach a language without having a view of what the nature of language is. In fact there is frequently no explicit view expressed, although it should always be possible to reconstruct one from the design of activities and materials used. Since a language teacher is
responsible for creating in students the capacity to use a second language, the knowledge needed is not only of the elements of the language system itself in its universal and particular aspects, but also of the principles on which it generally operates in communication. This distinction is important since to be serviceable a model of language must be complete. It is not possible to limit the model to certain aspects of language only. Even aspects of language on which sound empirical evidence is lacking must be incorporated into the model. 2.2.2 Knowledge of language use Two kinds of knowledge of language use contribute to the conceptual base. The first is knowledge of the psycholinguistic processes involved in using language. While the processes of speaking, listening, writing, and reading are the primary concerns here, the nature of secondary activities like translating might also be relevant. It is worth noting that knowledge of how these processes operate specifically in a second language may be of special significance (see Speaking in a Second Language; Writing in a Second Language; Reading in a Second Language; Listening in a Second Language). The second kind of knowledge is of the features of language itself in use. Language in specific pieces of discourse is not a direct reflection of the forms that are to be found in a descriptive grammar. People do not speak in perfectly composed grammatical sentences. They use language differently in different contexts. Different types of written text may be structured differently. On occasions a specific use calls on only a restricted language competence which may constitute a subvariety of the language in question. 2.2.3 Knowledge of language learning Knowledge of how language, specifically a second language, is learned is clearly of central importance since it is the role of the teacher to create the conditions which will promote such learning. Information to be incorporated into the conceptual base has various locations. It is to be found in the study of the mental (cognitive) processes involved in second language acquisition (see Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories; Syntax in Second Language Acquisition; Phonology in Second Language Acquisition; Lexis: Acquisition; Second Language Acquisition: Conversation; Semantics). If the external conditions under which language is encountered have an effect on learning and if these factors can be controlled by the teacher, it is obviously highly valuable to know what those conditions are. Relevant information may be found in the study of the relation between, on the one hand, personal and social psychological variables (e.g., personality and motivation) and, on the other hand, relative success and failure in second language learning. It is also to be found in
Introduction to the Field the study of the results and effectiveness of specific pedagogic practices (see also Second Language Learning; Second Language Learning: Individual Differences). 2.2.4 Knowledge of languages While the conceptual base in terms of which language teachers can understand the nature of the task that faces them and their students does not in itself require knowledge of specific languages, the application of these concepts does. Most obviously, language descriptions of the target language are needed which will serve pedagogic purposes. It is a matter for debate whether these are the same descriptions as are available for other uses. These descriptions may not be descriptions of a general competence. They may be analyses of restricted language varieties or uses of a kind that are associated with a limited set of contexts. They could include, for example, descriptions of the forms of language that learners might expect to hear addressed to them as foreign speakers of the language. Further, it is not only descriptions of a target language which are needed. The study of language learning reveals that the first language of learners has an impact on second language learning. Descriptions of that language will be needed to clarify the nature of that impact. Description also needs to be made of the language that learners themselves display while in the process of learning—usually referred to as their 'interlanguage' (see Inter language). 2.3 The Role and Methods of the Applied Linguist Like all scholars, applied linguists are both researchers and disseminators of research. As disseminators they have two audiences, their fellow scholars and the professional world to whom their research relates, in this case teachers of languages. The fact that applied linguists have a particular role in their interaction with practitioners outside the academic world itself imparts a special character to applied linguistics. While much applied linguistic research, like research in other fields, fragments progressively and concerns itself with an ever narrower portion of the field, the need to satisfy the expectations of language teaching professionals obliges the applied linguist to strive continually to form a coherent overall view from highly diverse sources. This influences the nature of applied linguistic research. There are three types of source from which applied linguistics may derive knowledge which it attempts to synthesize into a coherent whole. The first is the theoretical and empirical knowledge that is established in those disciplines whose concerns coincide in some degree with those of applied linguistics. The second is empirical research undertaken within applied linguistics itself. The third is observation and evaluation of the pragmatic experience of those engaged in the practice of teaching languages, a pro-
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cess which itself may be undertaken on an empirical basis. Each of these will be considered in turn. 2.3.1 The relation of applied linguistics to other disciplines One of the many tasks of applied linguistics will be to provide a model of language which enables the practitioner to identify the crucial characteristics of the language system. Another will be to provide an account of what mental processes are involved in the successful use of language in activities such as reading and speaking. For the applied linguist to ignore the views about the nature of language that are held within linguistics or the views about the nature of language processing that are held by psycholinguists would be perverse. At the same time, even if such accounts were completely uncontroversial, which is rarely the case, applied linguists could not simply regard them as authoritative as they stand and incorporate them into the model that they provide. Part of the work of the applied linguist is a process of interpretation and reconceptualization. It is worth looking at the relationship with linguistic theory to illustrate these points. 2.3,1.1 Applied linguistics and linguistic theory The use of the term 'applied linguistics' is commonly understood to imply an activity which is in some sense a client of linguistics—a field in which the concepts and categories of linguistic theory are taken and applied to, say, language teaching. This notion of 'linguistics applied,' as it has been termed by Widdowson (1980), suggests that linguistics itself provides an authoritative source for all that is needed to meet the aims of applied linguistics. In fact there are sound reasons for arguing that the concerns of applied linguistics are in some ways more comprehensive than those of theoretical linguistics and that, at the same time, not all that linguistics may provide is of equal value or significance for the applied linguist. These arguments can be illustrated from past and late-twentieth century aspects of theoretical and applied linguistics. In its early years applied linguistics was closely associated with post-Bloomfieldian structural linguistics. In their efforts to attain scientific rigor in their methods of research, linguists of that period concluded that because meaning was essentially mentalistic and not amenable to direct observation, a scientific linguistics could not include meaning within the scope of its investigations. In consequence neither lexical nor sentential meaning were assigned any importance in the model of language adopted by linguistics. It is not difficult to see that it would have been a serious deficiency in a model of language intended to assist in the problematization of the language learning/teaching process that it should neglect or even overlook meaning. However, this neglect
Applied Linguistics did occur in some approaches to applied linguistics and in some approaches to language teaching too. This difference between the conditions which the applied linguist's model of language must satisfy and those that the theoretical linguist's model seeks to satisfy can also be illustrated from late-twentieth century linguistics. The aim of theoretical linguistics is most commonly (though not exclusively) regarded as being to establish the nature of the human language faculty. For reasons of both methodology and principle this means that the linguist does not take human language behavior as the phenomenon to be explained. This has enabled linguists to limit the object of their attention to language systems themselves and to a deliberately restricted notion of 'linguistic competence.' The applied linguist cannot afford to restrict investigation in this way. The language learner's aim is performance and the acquisition of performance skills. Crucial as linguistic competence may be to this, it is far from sufficient to explain all that is involved in performance and all that may need to be acquired. The insights provided by linguistics about the nature of linguistic competence may be invaluable, but for the applied linguist they give a picture of the nature of the task at hand which is in this sense incomplete. It is also important to realize that even in those domains with which theoretical linguistics is concerned, applied linguists are not simply passive consumers of knowledge handed down by the theoretician but must interpret and evaluate the results of linguistic research for their own purposes. For example, the linguist's concern with the exploration of the human language faculty has given special importance to the discovery of those aspects of language which are universal. It is plausible to suppose that whatever features are characteristic of all human languages are so because of the nature of the language faculty that produced them. It can be expected that the linguistic competence of all speakers of natural languages will conform to whatever general principles of language have been discovered. The gradual elaboration of these principles as a result of linguistic research into human language and languages is arguably potentially a major contribution to the understanding of the human species itself. However, their significance in applied linguistics may well not be comparable. If it is predictable that language learners even in their interim attempts at language production will conform to principles of Universal Grammar, then certain logically but not linguistically possible forms of language will not be produced by them. This will explain why certain types of errors do not occur in learners' language. It is obviously necessary to understand this if the view of the learner's language is to be complete. But insightful as such understanding may be, it does not hold the central significance for language teaching that it does for theoretical linguistics. Error will occur
in connection with the accidental features of the target and source languages and it is these that will claim the greater share of the language teacher's and applied linguist's attention. In this way the applied linguist reaches a different interpretation of the relative importance of aspects of language from that of the theoretician. A different kind of problem arises from the changed nature of linguistics (and indeed of psychology) since the days of early structuralism. Whereas linguistics at one time restricted its scope to observable language data and procedures of classification and analysis that could be directly related to what was observed, a concern that came to be disparagingly referred to as 'taxonomic,' late-twentieth century linguistics has more explanatory aims and, in pursuit of these, postulates mental structures arrived at by processes of deductive reasoning and abstraction on the basis of observed data and linguistic intuition. The resulting analyses are not themselves directly observable. Rather, they attempt to capture mental structures and processes that underlie actual language performance. The higher the level of abstraction, the more remote it is from direct interpretation in terms of specific linguistic forms. The phonological representation of a word, for example, frequently cannot be directly interpreted phonetically. Only when certain phonological rules, themselves of an abstract nature, have been applied, will it be possible to 'convert' the representation into an actual speech form. Whether it is phonology or syntax, such representations and the rules that may apply to them are postulated as mental entities which exist below the level of consciousness. That is the nature of a mentalistic approach to language such as characterizes late-twentieth century linguistics. But being subconscious, these processes can be neither observed nor manipulated by a language learner. Unless one accepts the extremely implausible view that raising these naturally unconscious processes to the level of consciousness would enable a language learner to master them more rapidly, the question of how genuine language forms can be manipulated so as to accelerate the acquisition of these mental processes remains open. What has been exemplified here in relation to linguistics could equally well have been illustrated by reference to psychology, sociology, or any other relevant discipline. What makes applied linguistics interdisciplinary is the fact that the eventual outcome is a form of social behavior (hence sociology), involving language (hence linguistics), the capacity for which must be developed in individuals by learning (hence psychology). The fact that the intended outcome provides a focus in this way has led some to characterize it as a problem-solving discipline to be contrasted with theoretical disciplines. It is certainly the case that the bringing together of bodies of knowledge from different disciplinary sources is justified by reference to a 11
Introduction to the Field central issue (problem) of how individuals can best be brought to learn a (second) language. This does mean that in theory at least there is a purely pragmatic way of assessing any interpretation of what it is that contributes to successful language learning. To put it another way, the aim of applied linguistics is not to produce a better theory but to produce effective practice. But there is a danger in placing too much emphasis on the problem-solving nature of applied linguistics. First of all, the very capacity to recognize that a problem exists depends on one's having a metalanguage that enables one to conceive of such a problem in the first place. There is a role for theoretical linguistics, sociology, psychology, or indeed other disciplines in seeding such notions and preventing people from being trapped within the terms of a prevailing model. The relation between applied and theoretical models of language, for example, is continually renegotiated and this can be so only if there is an awareness of and openness to the claims that linguistic theory makes in its own right. Second, there is a temptation to turn to theoretical research in an ad hoc way to seek a solution to a particular problem, or to justify a particular procedure without regard for the maintenance of an overall coherence of view. But there is no support to be found in a solution the implications of which contradict the suppositions underlying other aspects of practice. In applied linguistics as in other applied domains the dictum that 'there is nothing as practical as a good theory' should not be forgotten. 2.3.1.2 Empirical research in applied linguistics From the late 1960s until the early 1990s, there was a dramatic increase in the volume of empirical research motivated by the desire to improve understanding of the nature of (second) language learning and use. Indeed such research was hardly known previously. On the one hand there was research into language, languages, and learning undertaken by linguists, grammarians, and psychologists. On the other hand there was speculation and innovation in methods of language teaching. Sometimes the same people were engaged in both activities. Sweet, Jespersen, Palmer, and Bloomfield among many others found a natural connection between the study of language and the study of language teaching. Their views of how languages should be taught were derived from their views of the nature of language itself. Nonetheless, what was lacking was any body of empirical research dedicated to the direct study of second language use and second language processes that would enable beliefs about language learning to be evaluated or in some way validated. It was commonly held that second language learning was like first language acquisition (as that was understood at the time) or that a general theory of learning would establish general principles that could be applied to second language learning. Attempts were made in the field of education 12
to conduct comparative studies of the effectiveness of methods of language teaching. Results were generally inconclusive, and were interpreted to show that such research was not a useful way forward because of the impossibility of controlling the multiplicity of variables in the classroom environment and because methods, even if they could be controlled, would contrast on many parameters and it would be difficult if not impossible to determine the effects of individual factors on learning. The thrust towards empirical research resulted from reactions to two characteristics of early applied linguistics. The first was the assumption underlying contrastive analysis that the errors and difficulties of language learners arose from the differences that existed between the first language and the target language. This inevitably led to attempts to discover whether the predictions of contrastive analysis were borne out in practice. The learner and the learner's language have remained the focus of much applied linguistic research since. The second characteristic was the linguistically inspired view that the central issue in learning a foreign language was the learning of its syntactic structures and the assumption that this was a uniform task for all types of learners. The effect of contrastive difficulties apart, it was assumed that the content or target of language learning was the same for all learners. As new demands for foreign language learning arose, it became apparent that the type of language needed and the skills to be exercised were not necessarily universally the same. It therefore became necessary to undertake studies of what learners' needs were and what the features were of the language that they would have to learn. These two developments in empirical research will be looked at more closely. 3. Second Language Acquisition and Learning
Previous studies of language produced by learners had been limited to the collection and classification of errors. While this was sometimes done with implicit contrastive assumptions, the data was not examined for explanatory purposes. The stimulus to the huge growth in studies of learners' language was the discovery that many errors either cannot be explained in terms of transfer from the first language or at least that alternative explanations seem equally valid. The implication that something other than transfer was taking place opened up the whole question of what the cognitive processes involved in second language learning are and it is this issue which has produced probably the largest body of applied linguistic research since. The questions which follow are numerous. Since the linguistic performance of second language speakers often includes forms typical of those produced by native speakers of the same language, how far is second language acquisition itself a similar process to that of first language acquisition? It had generally been thought that the presumably
Applied Linguistics innate language acquisition capacities of all normal human beings became inoperative beyond an age usually taken to be at or around puberty. Does the language of learners throw any light on this assumption? Is it possible that this capacity remains and/or that it operates alongside other learning mechanisms? Do concepts from linguistic theory such as those of universal grammar and learnability offer any insight in the attempts to interpret second language data? Can the individual language learner's linguistic progress be explained entirely in terms of the order, frequency, and other conditions in the exposure to the target language (input)? Or, is the learning in some way preprogrammed, independently of the input, because of inherent characteristics of the language being learned or of the learner's language learning mechanism? What is the relationship between the linguistic input to the learner and the learning process? Are all aspects of language subject to the same learning conditions? Is the learning of syntax, for example, similar to the learning of phonology? A substantial body of research into the learning of syntactic, phonological, lexical, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of language has been built up in the search for answers to these questions and indeed as a stimulus to the formulation of the questions (see Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories; Syntax in Second Language Acquisition; Phonology in Second Language Acquisition; Lexis: Acquisition; Second Language Acquisition: Conversation; Semantics for more detailed discussion). In keeping with the generally mentalistic spirit of linguistic enquiry, this research is above all concerned to try and increase the understanding of the cognitive processes involved in second language acquisition. It deduces from the features of the language data obtained from learners what the mechanisms in operation are. Such research is intended to reveal what the general processes that control learning are. It is little concerned with individual differences or with relative efficiency in learning. Yet it has always been evident that there is widespread variation in the degree of success in second language learning. Whether or not the cognitive processes engaged are identical from learner to learner, it is clear that success in terms of rate of acquisition is not identical. There is therefore another body of applied linguistic research dedicated to the investigation of differences between learners and the effect of various potentially significant variables on learning. Are there different kinds of motivation for language learning? If so, is one kind of motivation superior to another in promoting language learning? Is there such a thing as language aptitude? If so, what are its characteristics? Are personality traits significant in determining language learning success? Do the age or sex of a learner affect language learning? Does previous language learning experience have a beneficial effect? What are the effects of attitude towards other ethnic groups on learning? Are there
differential preferences for different kinds of learning experience? Do some learners tolerate uncertainty in language learning better than others? Research into issues such as these is based primarily on the attempt to establish correlations between scores on instruments which assess individual variables and scores on language achievement tests (see Second Language Learning: Individual Differences; Learning Strategies for further details). 4. Second Language Skills Second language acquisition research tends to be focused on specific aspects of the language system. In contrast, research on learning variables will look for correlations between individual variables and success in language learning, evidence for the latter being found through tests which should establish the level reached in command of whole components of language (syntax, vocabulary) or level of performance on more integrated language skills. This opens up another area of research, namely whether language skills are exercised in the same way when the language in question is a second language as in the case of a first language. One broad question will be what the respective roles of conscious (declarative) and unconscious (procedural) knowledge of language may be. But other questions arise in respect of individual skills. For example, what is the mental status of the two languages and how does this affect speaking? However fluent the speaker may be in a second language, it is extremely unlikely that the two language systems are held entirely separately. What are the connections between the lexical systems in a bilingual speaker, for example? Does such a person have one semantic system with two linguistic outputs? Or are the systems related in some more subtle and complex way? And how is performance affected by those connections? What is the effect of deviations on communication? Similarly how is intelligibility affected by the degrees and types of phonetic deviations from target language norms? In the case of reading skill it is likely that readers of a second language use the same mental processes in reading as they do in their first language (at least assuming a similar orthographic system). In that sense a well-developed second language system should correlate with a high level of reading skill. But reading is not a purely linguistic skill. Extra-linguistic knowledge contributes significantly to the reading process and since this knowledge will frequently be culturally specific, what effect does partial lack of the relevant cultural knowledge have on the reading process and on success in reading? How successful are second language readers in recognizing the implicit messages conveyed by texts as well as what is explicit? (see Reading in a Second Language). There are many questions to be posed about second language skills. What is apparent even from the above examples is that these skills can be looked at from two 13
Introduction to the Field perspectives. In the preceding discussion they have been considered from a psycholinguistic perspective, that is to say from the point of view of the mental processes involved. They can also be looked at from a behavioral perspective, that is to say from the point of view of the social situation in which they occur, the respective behavior of the participants in the language situation and the impact of their language performance on one another. A major interest of the applied linguist is to analyze spoken and written language produced by or directed to individuals for whom the language being used is a second language. This may include the study of language uses, such as academic language, which are not directed specifically at the non-native speaker, but where the non-native speaker is nonetheless commonly part of the audience. One interest, for example, will be to establish what constitutes coherent discourse and to discover what difficulties will be faced by someone attempting to produce coherent writing or speech in a second language. In the case of writing, for example, it is likely that overall text structure and some formal features of language vary according to the text-genre, narrative, expository and so on. Furthermore it is not sufficient to have mastered the characteristics of sentence grammar. The wider discourse environment provided by a text influences choices at the syntactic and lexical levels. The difficulty for the second-language writer is that the norms and conventions that operate here may well be culture-specific. The learner has to learn to adapt to the expectations of a different culture if he or she is to produce acceptable and perhaps comprehensible text. Research into such issues requires not only an appreciation of the cross-cultural differences that exist, but also the analysis of written texts produced by non-native speakers. Speaking skill requires comparable familiarity with patterns of speech in social interaction. This is not so much a matter of additional knowledge of the language system as familiarity with the ways in which the language system is deployed within the culture, the ways in which language is used to sustain social relationships, how language functions to achieve personal goals in communication. Second language speakers may produce language which is formally correct but which is not appropriate within the culture and which may lead to a breakdown in communication. Both native and non-native speakers typically make accommodations in their speech according to the language and level of skill of their interlocutor. In the case of native speakers this is usually known as 'foreigner talk,' but more needs to be known about the nature of such talk, its effects, and to what extent speakers are able to adapt their speech when it is not their first language that they are speaking. One type of language performance involving second language speakers that is of particular interest to the applied linguist is that which takes place in the 14
language classroom among learners and between learners and teachers. In this case the interest is not limited to developing an understanding of what is necessary for successful communication. The language of the classroom is part of the linguistic input to the learning process and it offers an environment in which the effects of different types and aspects of input can be studied (see Discourse in the Language Classroom). Whatever type of second language performance it is that is observed, it is almost inevitable that it will present frequent evidence of instances where the producer's language system has not been adequate to the communicative task in hand. Probably the most common deficiency will be lack of the relevant vocabulary, but it is not unusual for command of syntax to be insufficient to express a conceptually complex message or for a speaker to be unable to achieve a specific functional purpose. In such cases the speaker has to find a way round the problem by adopting some kind of communication or output strategy. A better understanding of second language communication can be obtained by looking at these strategies and how interlocutors react to them. Where all participants have knowledge of more than one language, one strategy available to speakers is simply to switch languages. However, it is likely that the alternation between languages among bilingual speakers is not merely a way of resolving communication difficulties but on occasions has specific communicative significance of a kind similar to that of style-switching in a monolingual environment (see Communication Strategies', Intercultural Discourse). 5. Language Variety
It is normally assumed, however unrealistically, that the ultimate target of a foreign language learner is a linguistic competence comparable to that of a first language speaker and such as is described within a grammar of the standard language. Certainly such grammars are valuable reference points for anyone preparing a general language learning program. It is not usually regarded as the task of the applied linguist to produce such grammars. However, the notion that language is not a monolithic, uniform entity has long been recognized and given that many language learners can identify a restricted set of uses for which they require a second language, it is potentially of considerable benefit to be able to identify the linguistic and associated characteristics of specific varieties of a language and thereby to limit the learning task to what is relevant for a specific class of learners with identifiable language needs. The task of describing the formal and other features of such varieties has fallen largely to the applied linguist. In the process the notion of language variety has been extended and it has become accepted that the analysis of needs has to take account not only of the language forms required
Applied Linguistics but of the skills that need to be acquired (see Needs Analysis). 6. Bilingualism An unexpressed assumption in the discussion so far has been that when reference has been made to a second (or foreign) language learner or to a speaker using a second language, this individual has been someone whose learning has taken place in an instructional environment. In fact a substantial minority of the world's population gains access to a second language without any instruction in that language. Individual bilingualism and societal multilingualism are far more widespread than is commonly appreciated. The interest of the applied linguist encompasses what might be called natural bilingualism as well as acquisition and use through language instruction. Indeed the study of natural bilinguals, whatever level of bilingualism they may have attained, may provide insights into language processes and behavior which are not available by any other means. But the existence of multilingual societies itself generates other research issues. Interest in these is certainly not confined to the applied linguist, but given that the adoption of a language policy for education can scarcely be avoided in such societies, there is a special role for the applied linguist in investigating the relation between the use of a first or second language as the medium of instruction, and concept development and educational achievement (see Bilingualism, Individual; Bilingualism, Societal; Becoming Bilingual; Multilingualism). 7. Research Methods It is not difficult to see from this overview of research interests in applied linguistics that there is no single research paradigm within which applied linguistics conducts its research. Two kinds of study are typical of research into second language acquisition. These are diary studies, in which at most a small number of subjects are followed and recorded with a view to the collection of data on longitudinal development. The language produced by the subjects is analyzed to reveal how the elements of the language system used change and expand over time. The second type of study usually involves the elicitation of language or responses about language from a group or groups of subjects. The use of groups permits quantitative treatment of results and in consequence the assessment of the statistical significance of trends noted. The use of elicitation procedures enables the research to be focused on particular aspects of the language system and specific hypotheses thereby to be tested. The performance of groups at different levels of language proficiency can be taken to indicate the likely progression of language acquisition within individuals over time. Research into variables that affect achievement in language learning uses broad measures of
language proficiency and correlates performance on such tests by groups which have been established to permit systematic comparison in performance according to the variable being investigated. Use of a multicomponent language test with relatively large groups of subjects allows correlations between each of a number of variables and specific aspects of language to be studied. The substantial body of applied linguistic research which deals with either written or spoken data combines an ethnographic approach to data collection and analysis with techniques of descriptive linguistics. The characteristics of an ethnographic approach are that it permits samples of language events, collected as far as possible under natural conditions and without the intervention of the researcher, to be examined qualitatively and interpretively. In this process, categories which reveal significant aspects of the data are more likely to be developed in response to the features of the data than applied according to some a priori system of analysis. This is a particularly noteworthy aspect of the ethnomethodological approach to the analysis of conversation, for example. In contrast, linguistic categories may be largely taken from existing descriptive systems, especially where syntax and phonology are concerned. However, textual and discoursal features have not been scrutinized sufficiently, so that standard systems of analysis scarcely exist in the early 1990s. The applied linguist is able here to make a contribution to the development of a suitable descriptive apparatus. Given also a special interest in the relation between the form of a text and the processes involved in producing or attempting to comprehend a text, researchers have attempted to uncover the unobservable mental activities of writers and readers by asking subjects to verbalize their thoughts aloud. From these 'think-aloud' recordings protocols are produced from which important processes in production and comprehension can be inferred. The increase in empirical research has lent prominence to the development of suitable ways of eliciting data and the development of expertise in statistical techniques of analysis. Language testing is no longer a field relevant only to the evaluation of student performance (see Language Testing). It is the source of the skills necessary for research too. There is, however, a dilemma which, in spite of the undoubted increase in expertise, has not been completely resolved. It is that of knowing to what degree and in what way any performance by a subject in a second language actually reveals the state of that person's linguistic competence. True competence is presumably the unconscious knowledge of language on which natural use of the language is based. This cannot be observed directly but must be inferred from the performance. But it is impossible to know whether the knowledge used to respond to a test stimulus comes from such a competence or whether, for example, the
15
Introduction to the Field subject has simply remembered a form or a rule that was taught and retained in some other part of the cognitive apparatus. While language produced freely in communication probably reflects most closely what the state of the speaker's linguistic competence is, even here that speaker may call on conscious knowledge of the language. But for the researcher, there is another problem. Uncontr6lled language data collection will hardly ever contain sufficient samples of any particular part of the language system for the researcher to be able to test specific hypotheses. For this, far more controlled and directed elicitation techniques are needed. For this reason, most acquisition research is limited in its scope to a specific linguistic sub-system and the elicitation technique be it a multiple-choice test, a word-association test, a grammaticality judgment test, or whatever is constructed with the sole objective of investigating that part of the subject's language. The researcher is still left to infer on the basis of performance of an unnatural kind what the underlying competence is. 8. Applied Linguistics and Language Pedagogy Historically, innovation in language teaching has rarely arisen from the results of empirical research. More commonly, gifted individuals, either through the evident success of their own teaching, or as a result of skilled advocacy have succeeded in convincing the language teaching profession of the benefits of adopting the methods that they recommend. No doubt there has been great benefit from the contribution of such people, but it also explains why approaches to language teaching have been vulnerable to new fashions and why there has sometimes seemed to be too little advance by the accumulation of knowledge and understanding about language learning. Decisions about language pedagogy are not in themselves the domain of the applied linguist, but there are two respects in which there is a role for the applied linguist in contributing to pedagogy. The first is that the applied linguist stands between the theoretical and the descriptive linguist on the one hand, and the language teacher on the other hand. Given the wider concern of applied linguists with how a (second) language is learned and used as well as what the forms of the language are, they are able to look at language in terms of what may facilitate learning, of how it may be necessary to process the language in order to make it accessible to learners. To do this is to look at language structure from a different perspective from that of the theoretician or the descriptivist and with different criteria in mind. For example, the criterion of exhaustiveness is important for the descriptivist who must be satisfied that all data are accounted for. The applied linguist appreciates that a less than exhaustive analysis may be a more suitable basis for language teaching if it makes a part of the language system more accessible to the learner. It is this aware-
16
ness that makes the applied analysis of aspects of the language system a further important contribution of applied linguistics. Informally, information on the success or otherwise of particular approaches or procedures in language teaching has always become available. Among language teachers discussion concerning the merits and demerits of methods and techniques of teaching or of courses based on different principles has always been keen. Because these evaluations are arrived at informally, it has been difficult to incorporate them into any systematic attempt to use classroom-derived knowledge to increase the understanding of language learning. Yet the classroom could be regarded as the most accessible laboratory of all for research. Because the priorities of the classroom are whatever is to the educational benefit of the students, there are limits to what can be achieved by way of research into language learning. There are nonetheless those who advocate a role for teachers in what is often called 'action research' and it would seem that the applied linguist can make a contribution both in assisting teachers to conduct such research and in attempting to introduce a stronger empirical foundation for the evaluations of learning and the effectiveness of procedures that do take place. It is probably fair to say that as yet (in the early 1990s) applied linguistics has not made a great deal of progress in this direction. 9. The Limits of Applied Linguistics The question inevitably arises from this discussion of what, if any, are the limits on the scope of applied linguistics. It has already become clear that the label is what might be called a 'portmanteau' term. It covers a great deal more than the label itself suggests. Are there any matters that impinge in any way on (second) language learning that can be considered to be outside the scope of applied linguistics? If not, should not what is described here be seen as simply a specialized branch of educational enquiry? This is not a question that is often asked, but the answer may be that what is excluded from applied linguistics is whatever may have an effect on language learning (and use) not by dint of the fact that it is specific to language but because it is a factor relevant to all kinds of learning. If there were factors such as social class background or features of the physical environment of the school that affected achievement in language learning just as they did achievement in mathematics or history, then these would not be the concern of applied linguistics however important they might be to the teacher of languages. To put it another way, if it was shown that differences in language learning according to the sex of the subject were reflexes of a general difference in performance by male and female students, this would not be a matter for applied linguistics. If, on the other hand, it was shown that this differential performance was indeed distinctive to language in some way, then
Educational Linguistics this would rightly be a matter for research by applied linguists. The implication of identifying a limit on the scope of applied linguistic enquiry in this way is of course that, in the practice of language teaching, applied linguistic considerations will have to be set against, say, wider educational considerations. As a result, applied linguistic criteria may on occasions have to take second place. 10. Conclusions
By focusing in detail on one field of applied linguistic enquiry, the field that has probably generated the greatest body of research and had the widest social impact, it has been shown that applied linguistics, by the nature of the issues with which it is concerned, is almost inevitably interdisciplinary in nature. It is interpretive in that it must attempt to evaluate, synthesize, and integrate theoretical perspectives that emerge from a number of disciplines, and empirical in that it uses social scientific methods of data collection and analysis to investigate hypotheses concerning the nature of language, language learning, and language use. As stated at the beginning of this article, applied linguistics is 'the study of the uses that man makes of the (language) endowment and of the problems that he encounters in doing so.' The coherence of applied linguistics is determined by the type of language use that the study is directed to. What has been shown here in relation to matters involving foreign and
second languages could have been equally well shown through examination of any other domain of applied linguistic enquiry. See also: Educational Linguistics; Linguistics and Language Learning. Bibliography Allen J P B, Corder S P, Davies A (eds.) 1973-77 The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, London van Els T, Bongaerts T, Extra G, van Os C, Janssen-van Dieten A-M 1984 Applied Linguistics and the Learning and Teaching of Foreign Languages. Edward Arnold, London Halliday M A K, McIntosh A, Strevens P 1964 The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. Longmans, London Kaplan R B (ed.) 1980 On the Scope of Applied Linguistics. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Kaplan R B (ed.) 1980 Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Mackey W F 1965 Language Teaching Analysis. Longmans, London Richards J C, Platt J T, Weber H 1985 Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics. Longmans, Harlow Stern H H 1983 Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Wardhaugh R, Brown H D (eds.) 1976 A Survey of Applied Linguistics. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Widdowson H G 1979 Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, Oxford Widdowson H G 1980 Models and fictions. Applied Linguistics 2(1): 165-70
Educational Linguistics K. Perera
Language is a tool of thought, the medium through which school subjects are taught and a subject of study in its own right. The many and intricate relationships between language and education constitute the rapid developing discipline of educational linguistics (see Alatis 1994; Stubbs 1986). 1. Categories of Language Teaching
The following categories of language teaching can be identified: (a) Language as a mother tongue—which may be either where the mother tongue is the official language of the country, e.g., English in England, USA, Australia, New Zealand (see National Languages); or where the mother tongue is an indigenous language of the country but not the language associated with political
power in the nation as a whole, for example, Welsh in Wales, Maori in New Zealand, Bantu in South Africa; or where the mother tongue is the language of a recent immigrant group (sometimes called a 'community language' or a 'heritage language'), for example, Arabic in Sweden, Italian in Canada, Panjabi in Britain. (b) Second language teaching, where the language is not the mother tongue but is one of the official languages of the country, for example, English in parts of Wales, Irish in the Republic of Ireland, French in parts of Canada, Hindi in parts of India (see Wales: Language Education Policy; Irish Language Education Policy; Canadian Language Education Policy; Indian Language Education Policy). (c) Modern foreign language teaching, where a 17
Introduction to the Field language is taught that is neither an official language nor a community language, for example, French in Britain, Japanese in Australia. (d) Classical language teaching, where a language is taught that has an ancient and extensive literature but no native speakers, for example Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit. The main focus of this article is on mother-tongue teaching. 2. Language Policy and Planning in Education
Given the range of types of language teaching, and the linguistic complexity of many societies, policy decisions have to be made about the role and status of different languages within the education system, and about the provision that is to be made for them (see Bilingualism, Societal; Multilingualism). In some countries these decisions are made at government level, in some at state (or province) level and in some at local or even school level (see, for example, English Teaching in England and Wales; Wales: Language Education Policy; Irish Language Education Policy; English Teaching in USA; English Teaching in Canada; Canadian Language Education Policy; English Teaching in Australia; Australian Indigenous Languages; Australian Minority Languages; Maori Language Revitalization; Indian Language Education Policy; Sweden: Immigrant Languages). Because of the inescapable relationships between language and power, the formulation of school language policies cannot be considered as a purely educational matter, since they reflect and, in due course, contribute to the prevailing political climate (see National Language Policy and Education). 2.1 Indigenous Languages in Education At the end of the twentieth century, there is a fairly widespread acceptance of the importance of the use of the mother tongue as a medium of instruction, at least for pupils who speak a language indigenous to the country (see, for example, Canadian Language Education Policy; Wales: Language Education Policy; Maori Language Revitalization). It is recognized that learning through their own language is a key way in which children develop a sense of their own cultural identity and share in their cultural heritage. (It is also clear that it is the only way to prevent the extinction of many of the world's threatened languages.) This represents a major change from the beginning of the twentieth century when Welsh children in Wales and Maori children in New Zealand, for example, were punished if they spoke their mother tongue on school premises, and young Indian and Inuit children in Canada were forced to go to residential schools where the use of their mother tongues was forbidden. However, this principle is not universally accepted—for example, in Tanzania, English is the
18
medium of instruction in almost all secondary schools even though it is not the mother tongue of either the pupils or the overwhelming majority of teachers (Rubagumya 1990). Nor is the principle completely straightforward. There are practical problems—as in India, for instance, where, according to the 1981 Census, there are 89 languages that are not included in the list of 15 major languages recognized by the Constitution and yet that are spoken by more than 10000 people; it is hardly feasible for teaching materials to be available in all of these languages. And even speakers of one of the major languages may pay to have their children educated privately in an English-medium school in order to improve their employment prospects (see Indian Language Education Policy). There are political problems too. Whereas the indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and New Zealand have fought for the right to be educated in their mother tongue (see Canadian Language Education Policy; Australian Indigenous Languages; Maori Language Revitalization), the imposition of mothertongue primary education on the indigenous population in South Africa by the white minority government during the apartheid regime (see Language Education Policy—Africa) was seen as an act of repression, since it contributed to the exceptional difficulty black pupils faced in proceeding to secondary and higher education, which are in English and Afrikaans only (Janks and Paton 1990). 2.2 Community (or Heritage) Languages in Education As far as immigrant groups are concerned, the provision of mother-tongue education varies widely. In Australia, for example, some states encourage the use of the main community languages (e.g., Italian, German) as a medium of instruction in the primary school; and many languages are available as curriculum subjects at both primary and secondary level: there are 17 in addition to English taught in primary schools in Victoria and South Australia (see Australian Minority Languages). Although Canada has some immersion programs in heritage languages (e.g., Ukrainian and Hebrew), on the whole, the languages are taught as subjects, either as part of the school timetable or after school hours: there are classes in roughly 60 languages in Ontario, for instance (see Canadian Language Education Policy). Sweden also provides primary education through the medium of some of its 126 community languages but there, too, it is more common for the languages to be taught as separate subjects. Children have the right to 2 hours instruction per week in their parents' language; because there are so many different languages dispersed through a relatively small population, this is often provided by peripatetic teachers (see Paulston 1994; Sweden: Immigrant Languages).
Educational Linguistics In sharp contrast, in the UK, where there are something like 200 community languages, of which about 20 are spoken by more than 1000 school pupils—there are no exact figures (Department of Education and Science 1990:83)—the state makes no provision for their use as a medium of instruction and rather little for their teaching as a subject. The Swann Report (Department of Education and Science 1985), which was influential in policy-making with regard to language in education, concluded, 'we cannot support the arguments put forward for the introduction of programmes of bilingual education in maintained schools in this country... we would regard mothertongue maintenance... as best achieved within the ethnic minority communities themselves' (cited in Alladina and Edwards 1991:23-24). The survey of 11 speech communities conducted by the Linguistic Minorities Project (Khan 1985), and the accounts of 33 different speech communities reported in Alladina and Edwards (1991) reveal vigorous communitybased language-teaching programs but rather few opportunities for the children of immigrants to learn their mother tongue in a state school, especially at primary level. At secondary level, the National Curriculum in Modern Foreign Languages (Department of Education and Science 1990) requires schools to offer teaching in one or more of the eight languages that, with the addition of English, comprise the working languages of the European Community (Danish, Dutch, French, German, Modern Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish). They may, if they choose, also offer any of the following languages: Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Gujarati, Modern Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu. In practice, the number of pupils studying these languages is rather small, partly because there is a shortage of qualified teachers and suitable teaching materials, but also because many of the non-European languages are perceived as having lower status within the British education system. In the USA, while in some states there is a limited amount of teaching in Spanish, there is an increasing trend towards assimilationist policies, with large bilingual education budgets being spent on English language teaching for pupils who start school speaking a community language (Fishman 1989; see also Bilingual Education). 2.3 Standard and Nonstandard Language in Education Where English is an official language and the main medium of instruction, there is generally a strong expectation, either implicit or explicit, that the standard form of the language will be used (see Standard English; Standardization). The UK English National Curriculum (Department for Education 1995:2), for example, states:
In order to be able to participate confidently in public, cultural and working life, pupils need to be able to speak, write and read standard English fluently and accurately.
Although it is clear that pupils need to have access to the standard form if they are not to be at a disadvantage in the formal settings of adult life, such as job interviews and appearances in a court of law, it is nevertheless the case that those who arrive at school speaking a variety of English that is markedly different from the standard may experience considerable difficulty both in becoming bidialectal and in acquiring literacy (see Educational Failure). Within education (though not necessarily in society at large) there is widespread support for the view that pupils should not be expected to relinquish their nonstandard dialect but should be encouraged to expand their linguistic repertoire by the addition of the standard variety. For example, the Cox Report, which formed the original basis for the UK National Curriculum in English, said this: To be effective in their teaching of Standard English, schools should teach it in ways which do not denigrate the non-standard dialects spoken by many pupils. It should not be introduced at too early a stage; teaching pupils a new dialect may be confusing when they are learning many other aspects of language use. The profound implications for pupils' relationships with their families and communities should be recognized... This is consistent with a general policy of widening the linguistic repertoire of pupils. (Cox 1991:30-31)
Such a policy is easier to formulate than to implement (see School Language Policies). Closely associated with bidialectalism is the need for pupils to develop an understanding of the concept of linguistic appropriateness in relation to situation, audience, topic, and language mode. The nature of the relationship between standard and non-standard varieties becomes particularly contentious where Afro-Caribbean varieties are concerned. Here the situation is made complex by the existence of a continuum from acrolectal varieties, which may be very similar to Standard English, to basilectal varieties which differ from the standard form so substantially in their phonology, lexis, and grammar that they are completely unintelligible to English speakers who do not belong to those speech communities; further, there are Creoles spoken in the USA and the UK which are based on French rather than English (Dalphinis 1991; Nwenmely 1991). Where white teachers believe that their black pupils are speaking a nonstandard—or even an impoverished or corrupt—form of English, but the pupils, and their families, see their language as an integral part of their culture and community, it is clear that there is the potential for misunderstanding, alienation, and even conflict (see African American Vernacular English; Ann Arbor Case).
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Introduction to the Field Acquisition). Further, they need some awareness of the nature and purposes of print; for example, that it is the black marks on the printed page rather than the pictures that convey the story (see Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness). Perhaps less obviously, at an early stage in their development as readers—and even more as writers and spellers—they need to have sufficient phonological awareness to be able to identify the individual phonemes in the speech stream, if they are acquiring literacy in English or any other language with an alphabetic writing system (see Literacy: Phonological Awareness; Reading: Early; Spelling: Invented; Spelling: Learning; Spelling Errors: English; Writing: Process Approach). Whether children learn to read through an approach that has a strong phonic orientation, or through one that emphasizes whole word recognition, or through an informed and principled blend of these strategies (Adams 1990), they will learn most effectively if they read meaningful, coherent texts written in language that is familiar from stories they have heard read aloud (see Reading Teaching: Methods; Reading Teaching: Materials; Reading: Theories). Once they have become skilful readers they can progress to books in which the differences between the structures of speech and writing are more apparent. In this way, their linguistic repertoire is extended, with literacy itself serving as an agent in the continuing process of language development. From the late 1970s, a small but influential number of people have propounded the view that learning to read is as natural and as easy as learning to speak (e.g., Smith 1978). This position is undermined, however, both by the extensive differences between speech and writing systems with regard to their place and role in the history of the human race as a whole, and by the exceptional difficulty in learning to read that is evidenced by a significant minority of the population. Where such difficulty affects children with normal perceptual abilities, at least average intelligence, and an absence of emotional problems, the term 'dyslexia' is sometimes used, although it is a contentious label (see Reading Difficulties; Reading: Acquisition; Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention). For many children, a particular source of reading 4. Literacy Learning difficulty is the language of their subject textbooks Probably the single most important role of the school (see Textbooks; Language Across the Curriculum). A is to teach children to read and write. Literacy is not number of methods are used to assess the overall just a useful tool for life in the adult world—important level of difficulty of reading material, including cloze though that is. It is the means by which we gain access procedure and various readability formulae (see Readto the accumulated knowledge of previous gen- ability), but the study of the complex interactions erations; the key to both the enjoyment and the cre- between a reader's psycholinguistic processes and paration of literature; and a necessary adjunct to the ticular semantic, syntactic, and discoursal structures in written language is still in its infancy. If children critical analysis of culture and society (see Literacy). Before they can become literate, children need to are to succeed in the education system, they need not have acquired in speech (or in sign language) the only to be able to understand the language of acawords and grammatical structures that they will meet demic disciplines but also to produce it. For this reain their reading (see Language Acquisition; Grammar son a vigorous area of educational linguistic research 3. Language and Learning As language is the medium through which children learn all their academic subjects, the nature of language in the classroom is an important aspect of educational linguistic research. Focusing on spoken language, sociolinguists, ethnographers of communication, and discourse analysts have all sought to identify and describe typical patterns of interaction between teachers and pupils, and among pupils themselves. They have studied how the right to speak is allocated; how questions are asked and answered; how language is used to establish and maintain control; how the specialist terminology of subject disciplines is transmitted, and so on (e.g., Edwards and Westgate 1987; Heath 1983; Sinclair and Coulthard 1975; see Observing Classroom Language; Classroom Language; Language Across the Curriculum). Since the 1960s, researchers have looked for possible linguistic differences that relate to social class differences and that might affect children's ability to profit from their schooling. At first these studies concentrated on features of language form, such as pronunciation, vocabulary selection, and—particularly— grammar (e.g., Hawkins 1977). In the 1980s, there was a greater focus on typical conversational styles, and on the range of functions that language serves, such as establishing relationships, describing, and recalling— with special emphasis on those that are thought to be crucial for academic success, such as predicting, imagining, and hypothesizing (see Educational Failure). The 1990s have seen a growing interest in relationships between language and gender and language and ethnicity in the classroom, as evidence accumulates that certain styles of speech and conversational interaction may be disadvantageous as far as educational assessment is concerned. In addition to the social, 'managerial,' and pedagogic aspects of classroom talk, there are the cognitive aspects. If pupils are given purposeful tasks in structured and supportive settings, they can use talk cooperatively to make what they have learnt their own; to work out solutions to problems; and to formulate and test hypotheses (see Oracy; National Oracy Project).
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Ethics in Educational Linguistics in the 1990s is the description and classification of genres of writing (see Writing in School). 5. Learning About Language Although education necessarily entails the use of language, the extent to which different education systems expect their pupils to acquire explicit knowledge about the nature and structure of the mother tongue varies widely. In Scotland and the USA, for example, language study is an accepted part of the English curriculum, whereas in England and Wales there has been a marked reluctance since the 1960s to engage in any systematic, objective study of language (see Grammar in British Schools; Schools Council UK). The National Curriculum in English (Department for Education 1995); (see English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)) makes a modest amount of such study obligatory under the heading 'Standard English and Language Study,' as does the National Literacy Strategy (Department for Education and Employment 1998), under the heading 'Grammatical Awareness.' It is important that language is studied not in the expectation that this will enhance linguistic skill, since the evidence available does not support this (see Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue)), but primarily because, as the foundation of human society and civilization, it is interesting and worthy of study in its own right. See also: Linguistics and Language Learning. Bibliography Adams M J 1990 Beginning to Read. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Alatis J E (ed.) 1994 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics: Educational Linguistics, CrossCultural Communication and Global Interdependence. Georgetown University Press, Georgetown Alladina S, Edwards V 1991 Multilingualism in the British Isles, vols. 1 and 2. Longman, London
Cox B 1991 Cox on Cox. Hodder and Stoughton, London Dalphinis M 1991 The Afro-English Creole speech community. In: Alladina S, Edwards V Multilingualism in the British Isles, vol. 2. Longman, London, pp. 42-56 Department for Education 1995 English in the National Curriculum. HMSO, London Department for Education and Employment 1998 The National Literacy Strategy. DfEE, London Department of Education and Science 1985 Education for All ('The Swann Report'). HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1989 English for Ages 5 to 16. HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1990 Modern Foreign Languages for Ages 11 to 16. HMSO, London Edwards A D, Westgate D P G 1987 Investigating Classroom Talk. Falmer Press, Lewes Fishman J 1989 Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon Hawkins P 1977 Social Class, the Nominal Group and Verbal Strategies. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Heath S B 1983 Ways with Words, Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge James C, Garrett P 1991 Language Awareness in the Classroom. Longman, London Janks H, Paton J 1990 English and the teaching of English literature in South Africa. In: Britton J, Shafer R E, Watson K (eds.) Teaching and Learning English Worldwide. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon Khan V (ed.) 1985 The Other Languages of England. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Nwenmely H 1991 The Kweyol speech community. In: Alladina S, Edwards V Multilingualism in the British Isles, vol. 2. Longman, London, pp. 57-68 Paulston C B 1994 Linguistic minorities in multilingual settings: Implications for language policies. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Rubagumya C M 1990 Language in Education in Africa: A Tanzanian Perspective. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon Sinclair J C, Coulthard M 1975 Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The Language of Teachers and Pupils. Oxford University Press, Oxford Smith F 1978 Reading. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Stubbs M 1986 Educational Linguistics. Blackwell, Oxford
Ethics in Educational Linguistics A. Davies
1. Current Obsession Ethics, the study of how we are to live, of right and wrong, also known as moral philosophy, has been called 'the emperor of the social sciences' (Scriven 1991: 134). But it is only in the 1990s that the emperor
has been reclothed. Coady and Bloch (1996) refer to the current 'obsession with ethics ... not the ethics of private individuals so much as the ethical behavior of groups, whether these groups are professions, businesses, government or non-government organisations.' (Coady and Bloch 1996: 1).
21
Introduction to the Field There is another reason for this current 'obsession' with ethics, which is its neglect in the first part of the twentieth century. That period, writes Singer (1986) 'was aberrant... due to the influence of logical positivism, with its implication that ethical statements were nothing more than the evincing of emotions.' (Singer 1995). Linguistic philosophy, concerned as it was with meaning rather than knowledge, queried the whole basis of ethics, maintaining that ethical statements were essentially circular. 'Ethics, as I conceive it, is the logical study of the language of morals' (Hare 1952: v). The critical turn in the last decades has made the quest for meaning equally problematic and in a paradoxical way has prompted the search for fragments of knowledge as bulwarks against the emptiness that postmodernism threatens. Docherty discusses the 'basis of an ethical demand in the postmodern,' admitting that 'there is no escape from the necessity of judging in any specific case. Yet' he agonises 'we have no grounds upon which to base our judging.' (1993: 26). Hence, no doubt, the current search for ethical guidance as to what may be expected in group behavior. This search is reflexive in that it seeks to provide some small certainty for the group and at the same time it helps define an identity for the group. Rawls refers to two (equal) principles of justice: '... first each person engaged in an institution or affected by it has an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all; and second, inequalities as defined by the institutional structure or fostered by it are arbitrary unless it is reasonable to expect that they will work out to everyone's advantage and provided that the positions and offices to which they attach or from which they may be gained are open to all.' (1967: 221). And so one of the chief roles for ethics is to balance these two principles, the individual and the social. This requires thought and imagination as much as law-making, offering: '... a way of conceptualising difference which renders it compatible with equality, but also, and crucially, does not simply increase social differentiation.' (Mendus 1992: 414). The danger, of course, is that in our attempts to be fair we end up by destroying completely the social, making all morality individual and therefore never ever achieving fairness anyway. Indeed, Osborne, lamenting the influence on philosophy of poststructuralism and feminism, suggests that we are left only with 'personal ethics or the search for small forms of valid knowledge.' (1992: 181). This is a counsel of despair, but Jackson (1996) shows a way of avoiding such a solipsist trap. Discussing codes of practice she points out that morality is never absolute. For example, codes of health and safety require appropriate protection of employees. At the same time, in all such cases there is a clause
22
(either implicit or explicit) which limits employers' responsibility to 'within reason.' Otherwise, their duty would be impossible to fulfill. Without the recognition of the 'within reason' limitation, we are likely to exaggerate the demands of morality and to assume wrongly that you cannot get on in business or carry out your profession unless you are prepared to cast aside or compromise principles. This is not so. Morality as typically encoded in codes of practice constrains action within reason. 2. Institutional Ethics Ethics has a clear role in institutional settings where there is concern to declare and to limit institutional duties and responsibilities. This applies particularly to professions. House offers this definition: 'Ethics are the rules or standards of right conduct or practice, especially the standards of a profession' (House 1990: 91). It seems important to all stakeholders, both within the institution (e.g., medical doctors) and without (other medical colleagues, patients, the public in general) that professional standards of behavior are stated explicitly (often in an authoritative Code of Ethics or Practice). Academic professions have been reluctant to lay down rules for their members. Thus, in anthropological research: 'the traditional position... is... that questions of ethics are to be decided by the anthropologist according to personal criteria and apart from academic considerations.' (SeymourSmith 1986: 95). But anthropology is no longer so relaxed and laissez-faire: 'this position has been criticised since, it is argued, there is no such thing as a politically or ideologically neutral study in the social sciences.' (ibid.) Since no social science now is immune to such criticisms it becomes less and less tenable for academic disciplines to allow their members the liberty to make up their own minds as to the conduct and practice of their professional research. Indeed, anthropology may have become untenable as a discipline, attacked as it has been on all sides, not only by critical and Marxist theorists but also by feminists, postcolonialists, and anti-imperialists. Critical applied (and educational) linguistics asks us the same question. Following critical theorists in other social sciences, critical applied linguistics has been asking questions about the ethics of applied linguistics and whether an ideologically neutral study of applied linguistics is possible. To a degree this is the current challenge from postmodernism that it questions the professionalism established by the children of the Enlightenment. 3. Professions The relativisation of all knowledge(s) within postmodernism bears heavily on education which has
Ethics in Educational Linguistics become a notable site for struggle as to which knowledge is knowable, in particular in those areas of education in which language is not only the means but also the end, whether in the teaching of the first language (LI) or in the teaching of a second or foreign language (L2) since in both cases what is seen to be at stake is socialization into a culture (see Socialization) as well as the shaping of modes of cognitive development. It is not surprising therefore that in language teaching (both L1 and L2) there is both the yearning for an ethics and at the same time a mistrust of what may be regarded as the imposition of a hegemonic ethics. Institutional ethics or morality (and in particular professional morality) can be seen as standing between public morality on the one hand and individual morality on the other. Public morality is concerned with large social issues in which there is a genuine public interest, for example, genetic engineering, in vitro fertilization, female circumcision, capital punishment. Professional morality is concerned with codes, contracts, professional training, professional ethical norms and standards, the systematic attempt to illuminate the ethos of a profession, and to elaborate its norms. Individual morality is concerned with issues of conscience, which in some cases will be influenced by religion. Right conduct or practice for the individual will influence views as to such issues as divorce, abortion, military service. The public view in such cases may well be reflected in legal enactment, that is, divorce and abortion, may be legalized; exemption from military service may be permitted in certain cases on the grounds of conscience. Individuals may, however, possibly for religious reasons, choose (or feel impelled) not to avail themselves of legal remedies because in their view what is legal is not acceptable morally. What this means is that the boundary between what is public (or indeed professional) and what is individual is not stable: what for some may well be a matter of individual ethics (or morality) may for others, for example, a religious group, be a matter of public concern. There is also the possibility of conflict between what is morally right within the code of conduct established by one's own profession and what is required by one's individual judgement of one's role in society. Homan points to the conflict for an academic researcher who is offered a post in a field which is entirely legal but which for him/her is unacceptable morally: 'the tension between individual morality and professional ethics is seen to be most problematic when legitimate scruples disqualify a student from taking up a research post or other opportunity.' (Homan 1991: 2) Animal rights might be such an issue for a medical researcher.
The current 'flight to professionalism' represents a desire for social status and a search for an ethical framework which will provide the kind of group security that is no longer available to the individual or indeed to those occupations which do not claim 'a distinctive ethos, where an ethos is understood as a characteristic devotion to a particular good.' (Koehn 1994: 3) Koehn considers that what characterizes a profession is that it serves clients rather than makes a customer-type contract. The profession's moral authority is established by its unconditional concern for the client's good, by its willingness to act when needed, by its willingness to sustain its service, by its certified competence, by its preparedness to demonstrate its accountability, by its discretion on behalf of its clients, and by its self-monitoring. Professions make a public statement which dedicates their agents to a position of public trust and it is notable that it is the agent (the member of the profession) who is bound not the client. In a contract, on the other hand, the obligation lies equally on both parties. What the professional offers is service or duty, to be professional, to act professionally rather than to be successful, since success cannot be guaranteed. Nor of course can the integrity of every member of the profession be guaranteed and when a member violates the ethics of his/her profession then the profession's membership sanctions come into play. As we shall see, the problem with sanctions is that they are essentially legalistic rather than ethical and therefore difficult to implement on 'rogue' members. 4. Limits on Ethics Group ethics must aim at balance: not too much (the 'within reason' limitation) but not too little. What is at issue here is the danger of an incestuous concern with the protection of members of the profession by avoiding and covering over complaints and offences to avoid litigation. Educational linguistics does not in general have the life and death risks that medicine does but all professional activity involving language provides for potential complaints and legal action because of the intrusive nature of the activity and its normative role. Safeguards for professional practitioners, in educational linguistics as much as in medicine, are necessary but it is important that the safeguards are also applicable to stakeholders other than the professionals themselves. Otherwise they become not safeguards but fortresses. It has been suggested that in educational linguistics and in particular in language testing, the existing principles of reliability and validity are in themselves sufficient ethical statements, and that a separate ethics is not needed (Alderson et al. 1995). It appears that for some scholars the existing principles are not enough;
23
Introduction to the Field hence the introduction of consequential validity by Messick (1989). But the promise offered by consequential validity smacks of over-reaching; it violates the 'within reason' principle of professional ethics.
5. Codes In view of the limited influence of professional association in the areas of applied linguistics and language teaching studies, limited because they lack sanctions for exclusion of members for unethical conduct as in medicine and law, limited because there are intractable differences and disagreements in personal moralities, limited too because of the practical problems of locating subjects for research and the consequent temptation of researchers to ignore ethical demands, the solution is probably to create a professional community (community of scholars, self-governing, etc), which has agreed on a code of behavior and organized itself into a formal association. Banks (1995) points out that a Code of Ethics can more easily become accepted by an activity which sees or wishes to see itself as a profession when there is a single form of activity (and one basic qualification), where there is mainly one type of work, and where the activity is already strongly organized and formally registered. The professions of law and of medicine are the canonical examples. Coady and Bloch noted that the current obsession with group ethics has produced a proliferation of written statements setting out what the group intends. 'One reaction of these groups to the challenges of government and to the cynicism of clients and taxpayers is to proclaim their ethical standards through establishing or reestablishing codes of ethics.' (1996: 1).
A Code of Ethics is a set of principles which draws upon moral philosophy and serves to guide good professional conduct. It is neither a statute nor a regulation and it does not provide guidelines for practice, but it is intended to offer a benchmark of satisfactory ethical behavior for all those in the profession. It may be associated with a separate Code of Practice which instantiates the principles of the Code of Ethics. While the Code of Ethics focuses on the morals and ideals of the profession, the Code of Practice identifies the minimum requirements for practice in the profession and focuses on the clarification of professional misconduct and unprofessional conduct. Within educational linguistics several organizations have attempted to establish Codes of Ethics and/or of Conduct/Good Practice/Standards. They vary dramatically in what they intend and what they incorporate (Davidson et al. 1995; BAAL 1994). Both documents survey approaches to the codification issue, both with the avowed purpose of leading to the 24
drawing up of a Code of Ethics/Practice for their profession, respectively for the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) and for the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL). It is noteworthy that the process of agreeing a text in both cases has been found difficult: this may be for one or more of the reasons Banks mentions (see above), that the profession consists of a single activity (difficult to claim for Applied Linguistics) and that the activity is strongly organized and formally registered (difficult to claim for ILTA—or indeed for BAAL). Indeed the claim of educational linguistics or applied linguistics (including such sub-areas as language testing, language planning, translation, and interpreting, etc) to be themselves separate professions seems open to doubt since they may not meet the basic criterion of existing to serve their clients' needs: The profession's moral authority is established by its unconditional concern for the client's good' (Koehn 1994). It might be more appropriate to consider these activities as subsets of the profession of teaching. (Koehn 1994: 12) Whether or not educational linguistics can legitimately claim to be a profession is not the point. More to the question is whether there is an ethical code which educational linguistics observe (or should observe). Related activities have published codes (e.g., British Psychological Society, American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education) and others are in the process of development (e.g., British Association for Applied Linguistics, International Language Testing Association, British Association of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes, British Educational Research Association). What this suggests is that in educational linguistics there exists an interest in developing a Code. However, there is a downside to the current development of Codes. Arthurs writes of his lack of confidence 'that codes of professional ethics do have, should have or can have a significance which compels us to deal with them on their own terms as if they meant what they said.' (Arthurs 1990: 93). Beyerstein comments: 'Many people become cynical about Codes of Ethics, because they suspect that such codes are of no help in resolving moral dilemmas ... codes of ethics exist primarily to make- professionals look moral.' (1993: 417). Even so, a Code of Ethics, Beyerstein suggests, can provide guidance to individual professionals, guidance to ethics committees, a pronouncement to the public about the profession's intentions, and information to other professionals as to what they may expect. It may be that our concern with Codes represents a kind of false consciousness of professional activity, a kind of flag of convenience to justify the public and
Ethics in Educational Linguistics professional claims of an activity in relation to society at large. Hence the doubts about the value of Codes. It may therefore be more important to look at less formal statements about an activity, such as the training and the socializing of apprentices. Atkinson writes of practical job training in clinical medicine as 'doctrinal conversion' and of 'passing through the mirror.' He also comments that 'most studies of professional socialization have tended to concentrate on how the novice comes to take on the appropriate perspectives and understandings, behavior and values which characterize their newly-gained occupational culture.' (Atkinson 1981: 19,20). Hence the importance of the 'ethical milieu' (Homan 1991) for professional activity which requires institutionalizing through the profession. Apart from a document setting out the accepted Code of Conduct, which may of course be little more than lip-service, how is that milieu created? Ideally there is a professional association (with regularized membership, an office, officers, publications, etc), agreement on recognized qualifications licensing members to practice as professionals, control (through licensing) on entry to the profession, and therefore on standards and behavior. Of these the last is the most difficult to achieve and probably requires legal support. Even then, as has become apparent recently in several UK instances of rogue members in the legal and medical professions, the sanctions available to their professional bodies appear weak. Perhaps the basic problem with drafting and reaching agreement on Codes is that by their very nature they subtly move what is intended as an ethical framework to a legalistic one. But the activity which lacks Banks's three criteria (see above) has no mechanism for reaching a legalistic accord, and, even where such an accord is possible (as in medicine) even there, as we have seen, Codes may be ineffectual. It may after all be that all that a Code does or can do is to make a single promise, something like the Hippocratic Oath, that what we are about is being ethical, offering our (professional) services to our clients whoever they may be, and being fair to all those affected by our work. In educational linguistics two comments are relevant. The first is that too much should not be claimed: An ethical perspective is necessary. But all professional statements of morality must limit what is achievable or even perhaps desirable. The second is that in spite of their fragility Codes are necessary and through them sanctions can be made available. These may amount to little more than loss of membership of the professional association; but we should never undervalue the importance in professional life of being recognized as a member in good standing by one's
peers. With colleagues like these, such membership would imply, who needs a Code of Ethics? See also: Language Testing: Impact. Bibliography Alderson J C, Clapham C, Wall D 1995 Language Test Construction and Evaluation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Arthurs H 1990 Ideology, interest and implementation of a professional ethical code. In: Macniven D (ed.) Moral Expertise: Studies in Practical and Professional Ethics. Routledge, London, pp. 93-100 Atkinson P 1981 The Clinical Experience. Gower, Farnborough, UK BAAL 1995 Draft Recommendations on Good Practice in Applied Linguistics. British Association for Applied Linguistics, Lancaster, UK Banks S 1995 Ethics and Values in Social Work. Macmillan, London Beyerstein D 1993 The Functions and Limitations of Codes of Ethics. In: Winkler E R, Coombs J R (eds.) Applied Ethics: A Reader. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 416-25 Coady M, Bloch S 1996 Introduction. In: Coady M, Bloch S (eds.) Codes of Ethics and the Professions. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 1-10 Davidson F et al. 1994 Report of the Task Force on Testing Standards. Melbourne/International Language Testing Association, Melbourne, Australia Docherty T Postmodernism: An Introduction. In: Docherty T (ed.) Postmodernism: A Reader. Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York, pp. 1-32 Hare R M 1952 The Language of Morals. Clarendon Press, Oxford Homan R 1991 The Ethics of Social Research. Longman, London House E R 1990 Ethics of Evaluation Studies. In: Walberg H J, Haertel G D (eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Education Evaluation. Pergamon, Oxford, pp. 91-4 Jackson J 1996 An Introduction to Business Ethics. Blackwell, Oxford Koehn D 1994 The Ground of Professional Ethics. Routledge, London Mendus S 1992 Losing the faith: Feminism and democracy. In: Stewart R M (ed.) 1996 Readings in Social and Political Philosophy. Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 40917
Messick S 1988 The once and future issues of validity: Assessing the meaning and consequences of measurement. In: Wainer H, Braun H L (eds.) Test Validity. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Osborne R 1992 Philosophy for Beginners. New York Writers and Readers Publishing Inc., New York Rawls J 1967 Distributive Justice. In: Laslett P, Runciman W G (eds.) Philosophy, Politics and Society (3rd series). Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 219-34 Scriven M 1991 Evaluation Thesaurus, 4th ed. Sage, Newbury Park, CA Seymour-Smith C 1986 Macmillan Dictionary of Anthropology Singer P 1995 Applied Ethics. In: Honderich T (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 42-3
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Introduction to the Field
Linguistics and Language Learning B. Spolsky
The intersection of linguistics and language learning has led to several distinct areas of study. The unifying field of educational linguistics examines issues such as the characteristics of the language being taught, the spread of its use in the community in which the learner lives and in which his or her school is located, factors associated with setting goals in foreign language education, and the effectiveness of teaching strategies in attaining various educational goals. One subarea of educational linguistics is pedagogical grammar, concerning itself with identifying grammatical rules which facilitate the teaching and the learning of a particular language at various phases of its acquisition, in contrast to scientific grammar, which eventually will exhaustively describe the ideal use of a language. Another area of educational linguistics is contrastive analysis, which examines similarities and differences between the mother tongue of the learner and the language being taught, with the aim of predicting difficulties that learners may encounter in the process of mastering a particular language. Finally, error analysis is based on the systematic study of errors that learners commit at various phases of learning a particular language. 1. Educational Linguistics The scope of educational linguistics is defined both by the areas that it encompasses, such as language education policy; first and second language learning and teaching; reading; literacy; composition; bilingual, immigrant, and minority education; language testing; and by the fields from which it derives its theoretical foundations, including theoretical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and anthropological linguistics (Spolsky 1978a). The focus of study may be on the society (e.g., what languages are used for what purposes?) or the individual (e.g., what is the communicative competence of the person whose education is being examined?). A first major distinction arises between rare homogeneous and more common heterogeneous speech communities, where several varieties are in systematically structured alternative use in the same community, resulting in various kinds of societal bilingualism or diglossia, where one variety is used for informal functions usually including school (Lewis 1980; Spolsky 1988). Studies of communicative competence have shown that language education must be concerned with the ability of the learner to participate in a society as a speaking and communicating member. Approaches that are concerned only with a single variety, or with such a narrow issue as the shibboleths or standard
26
grammar rules of a prestigious written variety are unlikely to meet the needs of those being educated. It is necessary to know the patterns of language use in the communities from which children come, the values ascribed to language by different sectors of society, the actual language ability of the children in the various settings in which they are required to communicate, and the modifications in ability that will best fit the children to function as communicating members of the society they are preparing to join. Second language learning is a complex process that occurs naturally in all children. In normal circumstances, children acquire the socially expected control of the variety or varieties to which they are exposed before coming to school. Educational linguistics stresses the broad range of communicative competence and the full social context in which language operates. Basic is the notion that all living languages offer evidence of comparable complexity and so of comparable potential for cognitive development; there is no linguistic evidence of an inherently inferior language, and no linguistic support for the notion that one language is intrinsically better than another. At the same time, all varieties of language are socially valued, and this social value rather than inherent linguistic value or quality is usually what determines language education policy. In a strongly religious community, the variety of language associated with the religion or the language of its sacred texts is likely to have the highest prestige; in a modern industrialized society, the variety used by the dominant social group is usually the prestige variety; in the academic world the style and variety of writing called academic prose has the highest prestige. Prestige is crucial in the determination of rationales and goals for language education. There have generally only been sketchy descriptions of language situations and inadequate methods of measuring the actual level of language control achieved by children before they begin their education; as a result the development of aims and curricula for language education programs is often misguided. Rationales for language education might be linguistic (the notion that acquisition of a variety of language is good in itself), psychological (the notion that mastery of a variety of languages has value for personal, emotional, or intellectual growth), socio-political (the notion that control of a variety of language has value for a social or political unit), cultural (the notion that knowledge of a variety of language provides access to the religious or cultural knowledge of specific bodies), or pedagogical.. The existence of many competing sources of pressure provides the potential for conflict.
Linguistics and Language Learning In heterogeneous communities the study of language education becomes a study of political struggle (Phillipson 1992). There are a number of unfounded opinions about language education which are likely to influence policymakers, parents, and educators. The first of these is the notion that there is a single correct variety of language. In actual fact, sociolinguistic research has shown that all societies have a complex pattern of social values attached to a wide range of registers, varieties, styles, and languages. A second misleading notion is the idea that language education should be concerned with reading and writing alone. Speaking and listening skills are just as important in most communities and deserve full attention from the school, whether in teaching of the mother tongue or of foreign language. A third mistaken notion has already been discussed: there is no evidence of inherent inferiority in any particular language. A forth notion that has not stood up to empirical testing is the dictum of UNESCO experts and others that reading must be taught in the mother tongue: there are many situations in which high levels of literacy are achieved in a second language. A fifth incorrect notion is the idea that bilingualism is in some way harmful. This notion, derived from the work of psychologists who carried out their studies in societies where bilingualism was stigmatized as a mark of membership of a linguistic minority, has been refuted by studies of cases where bilingualism is a mark of membership of an elite group (Skutnabb-Kangas and Cummins 1988). A language education policy may choose to extend and improve the variety of language that a child brings from home (mother tongue education, vernacular education, language arts education, teaching of reading and writing), to add another variety for limited use (foreign language or classical language education) or for general use (bilingual education), or to replace the home language with another language immediately (the home-school language switch, submersion, second language education), or temporarily (immersion foreign language teaching). More than one additional or replacement language may be taught. The policy may or may not be congruent with the actual situation: for instance, failing to recognize the actual home or community language situation, a school may use a mother tongue approach when the pupils are in fact learning a foreign or second language. Fundamental policy questions are starting age and the amount of time to be devoted to language instruction. Assuming that the mother tongue is to be taught, the most general pattern is to teach it first, but in certain colonialist or post colonialist situations, instruction in the mother tongue has been delayed until secondary school. There is considerable controversy over the age at which second or foreign language instruction should begin. Research suggest that an
early start, combined with appropriate methods, leads ultimately to higher levels of mastery (see Age in Second Language Learning; Starting Early). The amount of time devoted to language instruction is varied. A number of experiences (the US Armed Services Training Program and the Foreign Services Institute methods that developed from it, the ulpanim in Israel, the immersion bilingual programs in Canada, to name a few of the better-known) have made clear the value of intensive programs for learners of all ages, so that it is clear that the attainment of mastery of a second language comparable to that of a first require comparable exposure. Political and practical considerations usually mean, however, that only a few hours' instruction a week are available (see ASTP', Immersion; Intensity; Ulpari). The implementation of policy covers the full range of language education pedagogy: method, approach, materials, and teachers. More than most fields, this field's pedagogical history is marked by the regular announcement and temporary acceptance of new panaceas for old ills: a list need only be made of some of the labels that have been popular in the various parts of the field: (a) in reading: phonics, look-see or whole word, speed reading; (b) in heterogeneous speech communities: mother tongue, vernacular, transitional or maintenance enrichment, compensatory bilingual, or bilingualbicultural monoliterate or biliterate, second language; (c) in foreign or second language teaching: new method, natural method, direct method, audiolingual method, immersion, cognitive method, language for special purposes or for academic purposes, notional, functional, or notional-functional, content-based. Curricula and textbooks have multiplied, sometimes but not always reflecting growth in understanding of the complex learning processes involved. With the increase of modern technology, language education has joined the subjects that are considered to benefit from modern equipment, such as record players, tape recorders, elaborate systems of tape recorders organized into language laboratories, film, television, programmed instruction with or without computer control, and videodisks. All of these technologies have been applied to various aspects of language education, with varying levels of success. The selection and training of teachers are also matters of considerable variation and dispute. In traditional societies, the status of language teachers has ranged from that of the Greek slave in Rome to that of the priestly scribe in ancient Israel. In modern societies, people who teach the mother tongue or foreign languages usually share the social status of other teachers, although it is generally the case in tertiary 27
Introduction to the Field education that those who teach use of language have lower status than those who teach about it. The question of who should teach a language—a native speaker of the variety being taught or a native speaker of the learners' variety—is usually resolved on political or economic grounds rather than on pedagogical ones. Similarly, the question of the best training for language teachers 'depends on who has control of the universities or institutions where they are trained, which thus determines whether the major emphasis of training be on the language to be taught, on its literature, on linguistics, or on general educational theories and practices. The measurement and evaluation of outcomes of various programs and the testing of individual students are also central concerns of educational linguistics, but are treated elsewhere in the Encyclopedia (see Language Testing). Organizationally, the field of educational linguistics remains comparatively unrepresented: educational linguists are found and trained in various parts of the university, most often where there is collaboration between scholars in education, linguistics, anthropology, and language departments (see Professional Associations; Research Centers). 2. Pedagogic Grammar A pedagogic grammar is a collection of explicit generalizations about a language, derived generally from one or more scientific grammars to provide practical teaching material. Notwithstanding the systematic relationship between scientific and pedagogic grammars, they differ significantly with respect to two important features: (a) their inherent goals; (b) the manner in which they represent the linguistic rules (Spolsky 1978b). The major aim or underlying motivation of a scientific grammar is to describe and explain linguistic knowledge. Such a grammar seeks, therefore, to develop the best theoretical model or framework to provide a vocabulary for discussing the elements of language, such as sounds, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and discourse units, as well as the linguistic rules that define and explain how these elements are used. The writer of a scientific grammar aims to give a systematic account of the idealized linguistic knowledge or competence that underlies the actual use of language in concrete communicative situations. The goal of a pedagogic grammar is quite different, since its major objective is to impart knowledge. Such a grammar concerns itself with the needs of the learner and the teacher. A pedagogic grammar is therefore, by definition, prescriptive in nature, since it must guide the learner in using language properly. In the process of converting linguistic rules into pedagogic generalizations, the writer of a pedagogic grammar has to follow didactic considerations. The ordering of the rules is, therefore, guided by usefulness, frequency, conceptual familiarity, and contrast
28
with the mother tongue of the learners. A careful process of sequencing, grading, and recycling of information needs to be applied to the ordering of the rules, thus rendering a grammar very different in nature from the scientific grammar or grammars upon which it is based. Some of the rules in the pedagogic grammar give only partial information, and therefore violate the true linguistic validity of these rules, but such partial definitions may be the result of careful pedagogic considerations and are therefore necessary for the acquisition process (Allen 1974) (see Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language)). 3. Contrastive Linguistics Contrastive linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of comparative linguistics concerned with the comparison of two or more languages or subsystems of languages to determine the differences or similarities between them. After some pioneering contrastive studies with a primarily theoretical bias in the early twentieth century, contrastive linguistic analysis received major impetus from attempts in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s to work out effective and economical foreign language teaching methods. The most efficient language teaching materials and techniques were thought to require a scientific description of the language to be taught, carefully compared with a parallel description of the learner's native language (Fries 1945). The underlying theoretical assumption was the idea, expressed by Lado (1957), that the degree of difference between the two languages also correlated with the degree of difficulty. Later on, attention was also called to the similarities between the languages, and it was found that differences and similarities can be equally problematic. In the United States, a series of extensive contrastive linguistic analyses were undertaken in the 1960s between English and a number of other languages, and in Europe several contrastive projects were launched somewhat later (Fisiak 1981). Although the objectives were normally clearly applied, the results applicable for specific purposes have remained minimal, which has given rise to doubts about the validity of contrastive studies. Contrastive studies nowadays may be theoretical or applied. As well as giving an extensive account of the differences and similarities between the languages compared, theoretical studies provide an adequate model for cross-language comparison and determine how and which elements are comparable. Theoretical contrastive linguistic studies are also useful in adding to the knowledge about the languages contrasted. No claims are made as to the applicability of the results for specific purposes. Applied contrastive studies aim at gathering contrastive information for specific purposes, such as language teaching, translation, and bilingual education. The major concern is the identification of potential
Linguistics and Language Learning trouble in the use of the target language. The main concern of early applied contrastive studies was to devise a reliable prediction of the learner's difficulties. This was later to be called the strong hypothesis of contrastive analysis. The strong hypothesis did not prove to be valid because similarities and differences between the languages were not the only causes of problems for the learner. Error analysis was therefore offered as an alternative to contrastive studies, and the predictive role of contrastive studies was superseded by an explanatory one in this weak version of the contrastive hypothesis. Despite continued criticism, contrastive analysis remains a useful tool in the search for the sources of potential trouble. It cannot be overlooked either in syllabus design, or in the preparation of textbooks and teaching materials (Fisiak 1981; Sajavaara and Lehtonen 1975) (see Contrastive and Error Analysis). 4. Error Analysis Correction of errors has always been a common practice in foreign language teaching. A systematic analysis of learners' errors was introduced in the wake of contrastive analysis. Variability in learner performance could not, however, be explained by means of error analysis alone, and the basic problems found in contrastive analysis, such as comparability of specific items and equivalence, remained. Traditional error analysis consists of five stages. In error recognition, an attempt is made to distinguish systematic competence errors from performance errors; that is, mistakes and lapses easily corrected by the learner when pointed out (Corder 1981). In the following stages, the errors are described according to a model and classified. In the explanation of the errors, three causes are usually distinguished: interlingual errors caused by interference from the mother tongue, intralingual errors caused by the target language system, and teaching-induced errors. At the final stage, the errors are compared with target language norms to assess their influence on the success of communication. The decisions about the nature of feedback to be provided to learners are crucially dependent on the systematicity of the errors. More recent approaches to error analysis consider
systematic errors to be markers of the learner's progress—the phenomenon has come to be characterized as interlanguage, transitional competence, approximative system, or idiosyncratic dialect. It is characterized as a distinct linguistic system resulting from the learner's attempts to achieve target language norms (Selinker 1972). The main problem in error analysis is the same as in contrastive analysis. The theory and methodology of linguistics are insufficient to explain the phenomena involved. A wider framework is needed, involving psychological, sociological, neurological, and other related insights into cognitive mechanisms and information processing in the brain and the speech channel as a whole. See also: Educational Linguistics. Bibliography Allen J P B 1974 Pedagogic grammar. In: Allen J P B, Corder S P (eds.) 1970 The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, London Corder S P 1981 Error Analysis and Interlanguage. Oxford University Press, London Fisiak J (ed.) 1981 Contrastive Analysis and the Language Teacher. Pergamon Press, Oxford Fries C C 1945 Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Lado R 1957 Linguistics Across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Lewis E G 1980 Bilingualism and Bilingual Education: A Comparative Study. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM Phillipson R 1992 Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford University Press, Oxford Sajavaara K, Lehtonen J (eds.) 1975 A Select Bibliography of Contrastive Analysis. University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä Selinker L L 1972 Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 10(3):209-31 Skutnabb-Kangas T, Cummins J (eds.) 1988 Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle, Multilingual Matters Ltd, Clevedon, UK Spolsky B 1978a Educational Linguistics: An Introduction. Newbury, Rowley, MA Spolsky B 1978b The relevance of grammar to second language pedagogy. The AILA Bulletin 2(23):5-14 Spolsky B 1988 Bilingualism. In: Newmeyer F H (ed.) 1988 Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
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The Social Context Society Bilingualism, Societal M. Blanc
Societal bilingualism or multilingualism refers to the coexistence of two or more languages used by individuals and groups in society. It should be distinguished from the contact of different languages within the individual, which is sometimes called bilinguality, defined as 'the psychological state of the individual who has access to more than one linguistic code as a means of communication' (Hamers and Blanc in press) and is outside the scope of this article (see Bilingualism, Individual). Societal bilingualism does not necessarily imply that all members of the society are bilingual; in fact, paradoxically, a majority of the members of an officially multilingual country may be monolingual, because the different language groups are territorially separated by more or less fixed and secure boundaries, as is the case in Belgium and Switzerland (territorial bilingualism). Societal bilingualism is a widespread phenomenon, the vast majority of nation-states in the world having more than one language used indigenously within their borders; indeed, this must be the case since the total number of languages has been estimated at around 5000, while there are only some 200 states. The impression that unilingual states are the norm comes from the nineteenth-century concept of 'one nation-one language' and from a confusion between language and official language, a confusion perpetuated by geolinguistic maps. Moreover, language and state are not necessarily coterminous: the same language may be spoken in several different countries. For example, English and French are official in countries the world over, whether spoken as a first or a second language, by majorities or minorities; German is the majority official language in Germany and Austria, one of the official languages of Luxembourg and Switzerland, and spoken as a language or dialect by minorities in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, and Russia, to name only European countries. 1. Origins of Societal Bilingualism Societal bilingualism develops from a variety of contact both between and within countries and com-
munities. It is found in border areas between states, either because of constant interchange through visits, trade, work, or wars, or because a geographical dialect continuum has been interrupted by more or less arbitrary political frontiers. One example is the West Romance language continuum in Europe which cuts across the national borders of Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Italy. Although the standard varieties of Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian are mutually unintelligible, the rural dialects of these languages are linked by a chain of mutual intelligibility, such that speakers on either side of the political borders have few problems understanding each other. Moreover, these people are bilingual, since they speak the official national language as well as the regional or local language/dialect. For example, many Galicians in northwest Spain speak Gallego (a variety of Portuguese) and Castilian; a majority of Catalans speak Catalan and Castilian. In the Valle d'Aosta many Italians speak French as well as Italian, while a majority also speak a Franco-Proven?al dialect which has recently received some official status. Political events may divide people speaking the same language or bring together people speaking different languages. The first obtains in many African and Asian countries previously under colonial rule, where the colonial powers drew arbitrary frontiers regardless of ethnolinguistic realities. Conversely, alloglots may be brought together, whether voluntarily or by force. In the former case, there are free federations, like Switzerland or the European Community; in the latter case there are more or less enforced federations, like the former USSR or former Yugoslavia. Annexations and invasions, migrations, and mass deportations also bring groups from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds together, as witness the many shifts of borders in Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with resulting new language contacts and conflicts. Economic factors can also bring alloglots into contact, whether voluntarily 31
The Social Context
2. Sociolinguistic Variations in Language Contact Situations In a situation of societal bilingualism the status of each of the languages in contact varies as a function of, on the one hand, intergroup power relations and, on the other hand, the perception that speakers form of these relations. When intergroup relations change, status relations and perceptions, attitudes, and uses also change. It is important to stress that it is not so much the languages that vary as their speakers, who select from a variety of possible models which are socially marked. As Le Page points out, change only takes place when the social values attached to the models change and the behavior of the speech community also changes (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985).
Africa, situated at the crossroads of three states: Senegal (official languages: Wolof and French), Gambia (English), and Guinea-Bissau (Portuguese) and of numerous ethnic groups and languages: eight African, three excolonial, and one creole. Speakers in Zinguinchor classify their repertoire three ways: languages of identity, of cross-communication, and of culture. In the wider educational domain boys use French, girls Wolof. Speakers vary from a trilingual farmer who uses Diola (the majority language) and Mandinka with men and Wolof with his mother and sister, to a high school boy who declared speaking twenty languages and used eight daily. In the market place Peul (Kpelle) is the language of transactions, Wolof the language of bargaining power, and French is used to conclude a bargain. An example of how a multilingual speaker uses the different codes in his repertoire is that of an Indian businessman dealing in spices and living in the suburb of Bombay described by Pandit (1979). His mother tongue and home language is Kathiawari, a dialect of Gujarati; he reads his daily newspaper in standard Gujarati; in the market place he uses a colloquial variety of Marathi, the state language; at the railway station he speaks Hindustani, the pan-Indian lingua franca; the language of business is Kachchi; in the evening he will relax watching a television film in Hindi or English or listening to a cricket-match commentary in English. (For a typology of speech/verbal repertoire, see Kachru 1982.) What roles does each of the different languages play in a speech community? These various codes are neither used nor valued in the same way: if they were, all but one would become redundant. They usually fulfill different functions in the sense that each is used according to interlocutor, domain, topic, and role, the choice of one code involving an 'act of identity' (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985) on the part of the speaker.
2.1 Speech Repertoires in Multilingual Communities In a multilingual speech community a whole range, or repertoire, of languages is available to speakers, who use some of them in their linguistic interactions to perform particular social roles. Note that the term repertoire is also used to refer to the range of language varieties, such as dialects, registers, and styles typical of a unilingual community of speakers for whom the choice of one variety rather than another can have the same social value as code selection in a multilingual community (Gumperz 1968). Repertoire applies to both the speech community and the individual. No bilingual speaker controls the whole range of codes that constitute a speech community's repertoire continuum but only a number of these (his verbal repertoire). An illustration of a complex multilingual repertoire is that provided by Juillard (1995) who has investigated the urban area of Zinguinchor in West
2.2 Diglossic Bilingualism When two or more different varieties or languages cooccur throughout a speech community, each with a distinct range of social functions in complementary distribution, we have a situation of diglossia (see Diglossia). Originally developed by Ferguson (1959) to describe two functionally different varieties of the same language, one called the high variety (H), reserved for formal uses and formally learned, the other the low variety (L), used in informal situations (example of diglossia: Classical (H) and colloquial (L) Arabic), the concept of diglossia has been extended to cover multilingual situations. Examples of diglossic bilingualism range from simple binary contexts, for example, Guarani (L) and Spanish (H) in Paraguay, to double-overlapping diglossia, for example, African vernacular (L), Swahili (L and H), and English (H) in Tanzania (the last two are second languages), or
(e.g., the European Community) or from necessity (e.g., immigrants to North America) or by force (e.g., the slave trade). Religion can be a reason for different linguistic groups who share the same faith to live together, whether temporarily (e.g., pilgrimages) or permanently (e.g., the Indian subcontinent, Israel). Conversely, different religious groups may divide a country along linguistic and religious lines: for example, at the time of partition in 1947 the Indian subcontinent split up along religious lines, thereby dividing a common lingua franca, Hindustani, into two distinct official languages, Hindi used by the Hindu community, and Urdu used by the Muslim community. Lastly, a society may decide to make a second language official alongside the indigenous official language in order to gain access to wider markets or information: an example is the increasing use of English as an official or semiofficial language in many countries of the world and its use as an international auxiliary language. But whatever the reasons for societal bilingualism, it always involves languages in intergroup relations.
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Bilingualism, Societal double-nested diglossia, with L and H having each an L and an H variety, for example, Khalapur in North India, to linear polyglossic situations characteristic of Singapore and Malaysia. For a full discussion of diglossia, with numerous examples, consult Fasold (1984); for a critique of the concept of diglossic bilingualism, see Williams (1992) and Hudson (1994). One of the most complex polyglossic situations is found in Northern India (Khubchandani 1979). At the local level dialects vary from village to village to such an extent that they quickly become mutually unintelligible: when a villager visits a neighboring town he must use a less localized variety in order to be understood. This is how local trade languages developed and became regional dialects. Above them is one of the official state languages. Each state language comprises a colloquial and a standard form. Over and above these are the two official national languages, Hindi and English. Hindi is also a regional language extending over several states and diversified into a number of dialects. The Hindi-Urdu-Punjabi geolinguistic area of Northern India comprises 46 percent of the total Indian population and is a vast polyglossic continuum where languages and dialects complement, or merge or compete with one another according to domains, functions, and social group and religious affiliations. Diglossia does not remain stable but evolves and changes. It is said to 'leak' when one language/variety invades the domains and functions previously reserved for the other: this is a sign of an incipient breakdown in the diglossic relationship which reflects changes in power relations between the groups in the society. The result is either a blend of the two former H and L varieties or a language shift (see Diglossia). 2.3 Language Shift When members of an ethnolinguistic group start using the language of another for domains and functions hitherto the preserve of their own language (LI), the process of language shift is under way. Typically, language shift takes place over three generations: the first is either unilingual or dominant in L1; the second is variably bilingual (L1/L2); the third dominant or unilingual in L2. The shift also takes place in synchrony: at a given point in time the first generation is still monolingual in L1 while the last is already monolingual in L2. Throughout this process L1 is affected by L2: its forms and uses are reduced; its speakers borrow heavily from it, mixing, and switching between, the two codes (see de Bot and Clyne 1994). In extreme cases a group's language may cease to be spoken at all: this is an example of language death. A number of factors account for language shift, the most important being changes in the way of life of a group which weaken the strength of its social networks (e.g., urbanization, education); changes in the power relations between the groups; negative atti-
tudes towards the stigmatized minority language and culture; or a combination of all these. Language shift has been studied from various perspectives: sociological and demographic at the macrolevel (see, for example, Tabouret-Keller 1968); social psychological (see Landry et al. 1996); and ethnographic at the microlevel (see, for example, Gal 1979 and Kulick 1992), each approach using specific research methods which are complementary. Language shift and language death adversely affect the state of societal bilingualism in the world and should be better understood if languages and cultures in pluralist societies are to be maintained (Fishman 1991) (see Language Loyalty). 2.4 Lingua Francas, Pidgins, and Creoles In language shift one language is abandoned for another and may die. But there is a situation in which a new language is born out of languages in contact: this process is known as pidginization. When speakers with different mother tongues want to communicate with each other they use a lingua franca, if there is one available; it is a natural contact language, like, for example, a trade language (e.g., Hausa in West Africa, Swahili in East Africa). A pidgin is a contact language which has no native speakers and is the product of a multilingual situation in which people must develop a new language to be able to communicate. One distinguishes between endogenous pidgins, which are born from the contact of a native population and foreign traders, and exogenous pidgins which develop from contact between nonindigenous populations speaking mutually unintelligible languages, as in the case of slaves or indentured laborers on the plantations and their masters. Typically, a pidgin evolves out of low-status substrate languages spoken as Lls (e.g., the African languages of slaves) which are the principle source of semantic structures, in contact with a high-status superstate, or base language (e.g., English, French, Dutch, or Portuguese) which provides the lexical source, language learning universals being the main source of syntactic development (see, for example, Mühlhaüsler 1986). When a pidgin has to fulfill new, more numerous and complex social functions, it develops new and complex forms and structures, until adults begin to use it as the main language of communication and children learn it as their mother tongue (nativization process): the pidgin has become a creole, which is a relatively stable language, though in constant interaction with the base language (see, for example, Jourdan and Keesing 1997). Sometimes, because of economic, social, and cultural pressures, the creole evolves in the direction of the base language by a process called decreolization (Bickerton 1975). Pidgins and Creoles are real languages, suited to the needs for which they are developed. Some even become official national languages, like Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. Their study enables linguists to witness their birth and development; their variety and 33
The Social Context speed of transformation provide new insights into language change and behavior. 2.5 Theoretical Implications of Societal Bilingualism When different linguistic groups come into contact their languages come into contact. These languages may either converge or diverge, or converge and diverge at one arid the same time. This is because the degree of variation in intra- and interlingual uses depends on the relative strength of two tendencies in society: the tendency to reduce intergroup differences (convergence) and the tendency to accentuate these differences (divergence). Convergence is found where speakers are in close and constant contact and there is consensus on the norms of language behavior; it characterizes small communities with dense and multiplex social networks as well as societies where a standard written language is imposed as the legitimate norm on a nation or group of nations (e.g., French, English, and Classical Arabic, as national and international languages). Divergence, on the other hand, prevails in situations where there are no imposed norms and social networks are loose, leading to wide variations in usage. Language creativity is then at its highest, as in pidginization. Sometimes both convergence and divergence are at work, as the following examples show. The 3000 inhabitants of Kupwar in South India between them speak four different languages, Marathi and Urdu (both Indo-European), Kannada, and Telegu (both Dravidian). The village is divided into clearly distinct castes, each identified by its language. As they need to communicate, they, especially the men, learn each other's languages. Over centuries their syntaxes have converged and become more similar than they are in other parts of the Indian subcontinent (the convergence is essentially towards Marathi, the state language). However, they are still distinct in their respective vocabularies, which serve as a powerful symbol of each group's ethnic identity and distinctiveness (Gumperz and Wilson 1971). A case such as this runs counter to a universal of language according to which syntax is more resistant to borrowing than lexis. In Nairobi, Kenya, at a time of great social change, children from four different ethnic and language backgrounds speak Swahili in the streets but, as adolescents they divide into two camps, each one identifying with either Swahili or English, each symbolizing their different social allegiances; as adults, however, they return to their original ethnolinguistic groups through endogamy, but all also use Swahili, while some are capable of speaking English. There are here successively acts of convergence and divergence expressed by allegiance to different groups and languages at different times (Parkin 1977). Mixed languages are in-group languages, usually with their grammatical structure taken from one lan34
guage and their lexicon from another, for example, Maltese (Arabic with heavy borrowings from Italian and English) or Media Lengua (Quechua and Spanish). A very unusual mixed language is Michif in Western Canada and North Dakota (Bakker 1994). The internal structure (phonology, lexis, morphology, and syntax) of the noun group is essentially French (dialect), while that of the verb group is essentially Cree (an 'Algonquian language). Is Michif a case of codeswitching? The answer must be no, since in codeswitching speakers are more or less competent in the two languages and most Michif users speak neither French nor Cree. Is it a pidgin? But Michif is the mother tongue of its speakers and is a fully developed language. Then is it a Creole? In so far as a Creole is a development from a pidgin, then Michif is not a Creole. Thus Michif poses a real puzzle for linguistic theory: What is its syntax? What do categorial rules look like since French and Cree have very different rule systems? How should its lexis be organized? Are there one or two phonologies? Thus, variation and change are the essence of language, because language is at once the expression, symbol, and instrument of a group's identity and of its dynamic relations to other groups in a society. A language is not a homogeneous, static entity; it varies along multidimensional continua and its speakers identify with some of the varieties and their verbal repertoire is an expression of these identities. 3. Language Planning in Multilingual Societies Confronted with many different languages within its boundaries, how does a state solve its communication problems, given the complexity of ethnolinguistic group relations? Historically, the state has imposed one language, usually the dominant legitimized language of the ruling group, upon the other linguistic groups, thus either reducing the latter's languages to minority status or eradicating them by assimilating its speakers through education or coercion. For example, the French state, in its pursuit of national unity, has succeeded in imposing the Parisian sociolect on the whole of its population at home and on the elites of its colonies overseas, thus making French the official language of the French-speaking world (francophonie). Today, however, the state uses the much more subtle instrument of language planning, which is a species of economic planning (Grin 1996). Language planning is of two kinds, internal (or corpus-planning) and external (or status-planning). Corpus-planning, a form of linguistic engineering, is the same in multilingual as in unilingual societies. Status-planning means interfering with the existing status relations between the languages and their speakers and using one or more languages for official purposes. As the status of languages is a function of the relative economic, demographic, social, cultural, and political
Bilingualism, Societal power of the various linguistic groups and of the subjective perceptions of these power relations, statusplanning will necessarily reflect the power structure in society (Fishman 1994). Two main approaches confront each other: nationism and nationalism (Fishman 1968). In the nationist solution a language is selected for reasons of national efficiency (e.g., English and French as official languages in most former British and French colonies). In the nationalist solution language acts as a powerful symbol and instrument of ethnic identification, and the different ethnolinguistic groups resist acculturation by maintaining or reinforcing their language (e.g., Catalan in Spain, Flemish in Belgium, French in Canada). But most cases in the world fall between these two solutions, especially in multilingual states. Usually, one or more regional languages are given national status together with a national or international language. A comparison between Singapore and Malaysia will illustrate the difference between the nationist and the nationalist option. Both Singapore and Malaysia are multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual societies. It is noteworthy that, while these states have evolved along similar historical lines and are composed of roughly the same ethnic mix—though in different proportions—they have chosen very different approaches to language planning. Malaysia has opted for a nationist (or 'depluralization') solution: divided along geographic, political, linguistic, ethnic, religious, and economic lines, it has followed the path of cultural assimilation with the adoption of Bahasa Malaysia (Malay) as the sole official language of the country. In Singapore, by contrast, the traditional cultural values of each major group have been fostered, a policy of cultural integration (as opposed to assimilation) has been pursued, and the four main languages (Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, and English) have been made official. But this policy is not one of strict nationalism, since, while encouraging the three ethnic languages as a foundation for the maintenance of traditional values, it has at the same time emphasized the functional importance of English as the basis for a supraethnic Singaporean identity (Ward and Hewstone 1985). One of the key issues in language planning, particularly in the West, is that between the personal and the territorial solution to the problems of the multilingual state. The personal solution is based on enforcing individual rights throughout the state; these include the right to understand and be understood in public life, to be educated in one's own language, and the right to one's own identity. By contrast, the territorial solution consists of separating the different language populations by fixed boundaries. There are several models of territoriality, of which the Swiss, the Belgian, and the Canadian are examples: all show tensions between the territorial and the personal solu-
tion. In the former Soviet Union the dominant Russian group used the territorial solution on the one hand to protect minorities and, on the other, to protect and promote its own interests: all the republics, with the exception of the Russian Federation, were officially bilingual, Russian being in every case one of the official languages. Russian-speaking minorities had the right to use their mother tongue, while the other ethnolinguistic groups had to learn Russian as well as their own language. But in the Russian Federation only Russian was official. The principle of territoriality led to an asymmetrical, nonreciprocal bilingualism. A presumed link has been suggested between multilingual societies and national underdevelopment: does the fact that a country is culturally and linguistically diverse and heterogeneous cause that country to be economically disadvantaged? Are nation-states more stable than multinational ones? Pool (1969) tried to show that linguistically diverse countries tend to be underdeveloped, while highly developed countries have considerable linguistic uniformity. However, other researchers have challenged Pool's methodology and findings; they argue that both linguistic diversity and economic disadvantage are the legacy of colonialism (Lieberson and Hansen 1974). Moreover, are not some of the most advanced and dynamic countries and cities in the world, such as the US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, among the most ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous? As Weinreich pointed out as long ago as 1953, the greater the linguistic diversity of a country, the greater the degree of bilinguality and bilingualism. Where there are many people who speak many different languages, they will learn each other's languages. In other words, individual and societal bilingualism compensates for linguistic diversity. 4. Education in Multilingual Societies Education is one of the tools of language planning. One of the most intractable yet urgent problems of language planning worldwide is that of ensuring at least functional literacy, that is, a level of literacy that will enable people to function in a given society. This is not so much a technical as a social issue, since illiteracy is an obstacle to informed citizen participation in decision-making and to national development. Illiteracy is a problem not only for the Third World but also for developed postindustrial countries which have recently known a sharp rise in illiteracy rates, owing to the marginalization of immigrant communities and the rise of unemployment. Unfortunately, both status and corpus language planning are not adequate instruments for tackling these wider social issues. The limited success of large-scale state measures would suggest that small-scale solutions with multiple literacy programs at all levels are preferable (Tabouret-Keller et al. 1997).
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The Social Context What of bilingual education and the teaching of the mother tongue to linguistic minority children? Two important contextual aspects in the development of these children must be borne in mind: first, they usually come from a devalued linguistic background and, second, because they often come from socially deprived communities, their literacy-oriented skills are less developed than those of the children from the dominant language group. They suffer from a double handicap when they are schooled with the children of this latter group: they have to develop literacy skills in a language they either do not know or only know for communicative purposes and cannot fall back on their first language for literacy functions. The poor academic achievement of these children is then attributed by the educational system to a cognitive deficit. Cummins (1984) has given a critical review of the use made of academic assessment tests to demonstrate the deficit of minority schoolchildren. He shows that there is strong experimental evidence that valorizing the first culture of these children and introducing literacy skills in their first language enhance both linguistic and academic achievement. Experiments in bilingual education, that is, where the first and the second language are used as media of instruction demonstrate how the subtractive situation in which minority schoolchildren find themselves can be turned into an additive bilinguality: by valuing the first language and culture of these children, and motivating them to learn through their mother tongue enhances their linguistic and cognitive abilities (Hamers and Blanc in press). Unfortunately, the majority of bilingual programs for linguistic minority children are transitional ones which have been decided by the dominant group: the ultimate aim is the assimilation of the subordinate groups who will, in the long run, be at best dominant, at worst monolingual, in the second language, and be acculturated or assimilated. So, even if bilingual education appears to be a necessary condition for the maintenance of minority cultures and languages and the academic achievements of minority children, it is not a sufficient one. Only a strong ethnolinguistic vitality, allegiance to the cultural group, and the use of the mother tongue in the home and the speech community will ensure cultural and linguistic survival. For of all the domains it is the family network that most resists the penetration of the dominant language and perpetuates societal bilingualism. See also: National Language Policy and Education; Multilingualism. Bibliography Bakker P 1994 Michif. In: Bakker P, Mous M (eds.) Mixed Languages: 15 Case Studies in Language Intertwining. Institute for Functional Research into Language and Language Use, Amsterdam, 13033 Bickerton D 1975 Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 36
Cummins J 1984 Bilingualism and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK de Bot K, Clyne M 1994 A 16-year longitudinal study of language attrition in Dutch immigrants in Australia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 15:1728 Fasold R 1984 The Sociolinguistics of Society. Blackwell, Oxford Ferguson C A 1959 Diglossia. Word 15: 125-40 Fishman J A 1968 Nationality-nationalism and nationnationism. In: Fishman J A, Ferguson C A, Das Gupta J (eds.) Language Problems of Developing Nations Mouton, The Hague Fishman J A 1991 Reversing Language Shift: The Theoretical and Practical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Fishman J A 1994 Critiques of language planning: A minority languages perspective. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 15: 91-9 Gal S 1979 Language Shift: Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria. Academic Press, New York Grin F (ed.) 1996 Economic approaches to language and language planning. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 121 Gumperz J J 1968 The speech community. In: Sills D L (ed.) International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. MacMillan, New York, vol. 9 Gumperz J J 1971 Language in Social Groups. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Gumperz J J, Wilson R 1971 Convergence and creolization: A case from the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian Border in India. In: Hymes D H (ed.) Pidginization and Creolization of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hamers J F, Blanc M in press Bilinguality and Bilingualism, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hudson R A 1994 Diglossia. In: Asher R E (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Pergamon, Oxford Jourdan C, Keesing R 1994 From Fisin to Pijin: Creolization in process in the Solomon Islands. Language and Society 26: 401-20 Juillard C 1995 Sociolinguistique Urbaine. La Vie des Langues à Ziguinchor (Sénégal). CNRS, Paris Kachru B B 1982 The Bilingual's Linguistic Repertoire. In: Hartford B, Valdman A, Foster C R (eds.) Issues in International Bilingual Education. Plenum, New York Khubchandani L M 1979 A demographic typology for Hindi, Urdu, Panjabi speakers in Northern India. In: McCormack W C, Wurm S A (eds.) Language and Society. Mouton, The Hague Kulick D 1992 Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinea Village (studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language, 14). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Landry R, Allard R, Henry J 1996 French in South Louisiana: Towards language loss. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 17: 442-68 Le Page R B, Tabouret-Keller A 1985 Acts of Identity: Creole-based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Lieberson S, Hansen L K 1974 National development, mother tongue diversity, and the comparative study of nations. American Sociological Review 39: 523-41 Mühlhaüsler P 1986 Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. Blackwell, Oxford
Diglossia Pandit P B 1979 Perspectives on sociolinguistics in India. In: McCormack W C, Wurm S A (eds.) Language and Society. Mouton, The Hague Parkin D 1977 Emergent and stabilized multilingualism: Polyethnic peer groups in urban Kenya. In: Giles H (ed.) Language, Ethnicity and Intergroup Relations. Academic Press, London Pool J 1969 National development and language diversity. La Monda Lingo-Problemo 1: 140-56 Tabouret-Keller A 1968 Sociological factors of language maintenance and shift: A methodological approach based on European and African examples. In: Fishman J A, Ferguson C A, Das Gupta J (eds.) Language Problems of Developing Nations. Wiley, New York
Tabouret-Keller A, Le Page R B, Gardner-Chloros P, Varro G (eds.) 1997 Vernacular Literacy: A Re-Evaluation. Clarendon Press, Oxford (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics) Ward C A, Hewstone M 1985 Ethnicity, language and intergroup relations in Malaysia and Singapore: A social psychological analysis. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 6: 271-96 Weinreich U 1953 Languages in Contact. Mouton, The Hague Williams G 1992 Sociolinguistics: A Sociological Critique. Routledge, London and New York
Diglossia A. Hudson
The term 'diglossia' was introduced into AngloAmerican sociolinguistic scholarship in 1959 by Charles A. Ferguson (see Ferguson). In Ferguson's formulation, diglossia refers to 'a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation' (1959: 336). 1. Characteristics, Origins, and Evolutionary Course of Diglossia
Ferguson proposed a set of nine features by which diglossia might be identified and distinguished from other sociolinguistic situations: (a) the superposed variety (H) and the vernacular variety (L) are in strict complementary functional distribution; (b) H is uniformly held in higher esteem than L by members of the speech community; (c) H has associated with it a substantial and highly regarded body of written literature; (d) proficiency in H is typically attained as a result of formal schooling, whereas proficiency in L is attained through the natural process of mothertongue acquisition; (e) the pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of H are standardized and tolerate only limited
variation, whereas there is wide variation in the pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of L; (f) diglossic situations are extremely stable, and typically persist for several centuries at least; (g) there are always extensive differences between the grammatical structures of H and L; (h) there exists a series of phonologically unrelated lexical doublets for concepts frequently expressed in H and L; and (i) the sound systems of H and L constitute a single phonological structure, of which L is the basic system (Ferguson 1959: 328-36). Diglossia is distinguishable from the typical instance of a standard with dialects in that 'no segment of the speech community in diglossia regularly uses H as a medium of ordinary conversation' (Ferguson 1959: 336-37). Likewise, diglossia is clearly to be distinguished from 'the analogous situation where two distinct (related or unrelated) languages are used side by side throughout a speech community, each with a clearly defined role' (Ferguson 1959: 325 n.2). Ferguson rejects the proposition that diglossia occurs 'always and only at a certain point in some kind of evolution' (1959: 326-27), and instead takes the position that 'diglossia may develop from various origins and eventuate in different language situations' (1959: 327). Nevertheless, diglossia is particularly likely to evolve (a) when there exists a sizeable body of literature in the language of the community, or in a language closely related to it, which embodies the fundamental values of the community; (b) when literacy in the written variety is limited to a small elite; and (c) when a protracted length of time, on the order of several centuries, has elapsed between the for-
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The Social Context mation of a literary tradition and the democratization of literacy (see Ferguson 1959: 338). Although the diglossic system represents an inherently stable situation once fully matured, its disintegration is frequently accompanied by tendencies toward more widespread literacy, greater communication across social and regional boundaries, and a heightened sense of linguistic nationalism (see Ferguson 1959: 338). In the aftermath of diglossia, H most typically 'fades away and becomes a learned or liturgical language studied only by scholars or specialists and not used actively in the community,' while some form of L, or a compromise between H and L, replaces H as the standard (Ferguson 1959: 339). 2. Incidence of Diglossia Diglossia, so Ferguson has claimed, has probably occurred hundreds of times over the course of history, and is realized in dozens of instances in the modern age (1959: 338). Diglossia has been described as a sociolinguistic areal feature of South Asia, and has been reported for Bengali (Chatterjee 1986) and Sinhala (Gair 1986), as well as for Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu (Bright and Ramanujan 1972: 158; Britto 1986). Whether Sanskrit ever coexisted with any of its IndoAryan relatives in a diglossic relationship is a matter of scholarly debate. Sanskrit was still a spoken vernacular in Panini's time (ca. 500 BC), but had become a superposed, scholarly variety by the first century BC, the mass of the population then being proficient in Prakrit only (Deshpande 1986: 315, 317). Diglossia appears to have existed in China since about the first century AD (Norman 1988: 4, 248-49), and in Japan since at least the seventh (Coulmas 1987: 115-16). The centuries-old three-way opposition between classical written Chinese, vernacular written Chinese, and vernacular spoken Chinese represents an instance of diglossia, or even triglossia, par excellence. Classical Chinese remained the predominant medium for official documents and for literary and philosophical writing intended for the consumption of the educated ruling classes until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 (Barnes 1982: 262). Classical Chinese was also employed as the earliest medium for writing in Japan (Coulmas 1991: 129; Habein 1984: 3). Beginning around the seventh century AD, with the incorporation of Japanese words not translatable into Chinese and of Japanese syntactic patterns, this system was gradually nativized, becoming distinct from the Classical Chinese model while at the same time remaining vastly different from spoken Japanese (Coulmas 1991: 129; Habein 1984: 8-10). This style of writing, known as 'kanbun,' was to remain the style 'in which every respectable book was expected to be written until the Meiji Restoration' (Coulmas 1987: 125 n.8). A more indigenous system of writing Japanese, known as 'wabun,' which
38
employed the native Japanese hiragana syllabary as well as Japanese vocabulary and syntax, was begun some time in the ninth century and perfected by the eleventh; however, although this style of writing initially reflected the spoken language of the period, its basic grammar remained similar to that of the eleventh century, even up until the end of the nineteenth century (Coulmas 1991: 133; Habein 1984: 34, 28). By the end of Meiji era in 1911, however, most literary prose was being written in a style much closer to colloquial Japanese. While some scholars maintain that diglossia in Arabic emerged with the Islamic conquests of the seventh century AD (Blau 1977: 182, 190), others hold that the language of pre-Islamic poetry was radically different from that of the colloquials, and so trace the roots of Arabic diglossia to a period predating the rise of Islam (Altoma 1969: 4; Rabin 1955: 26). Classical Arabic, however, had ceased to be a spoken variety, and had become a purely literary idiom, by the end of the Umayyad caliphate in 750 AD (Rabin 1955:20). Classical Arabic is still used for religious purposes, and is formally taught in schools, particularly in preparation for the study of religion or the study of the Arabic language and Arabic literature (Cadora 1985: 74). Modern Standard Arabic, a modernized and somewhat simplified derivative of Classical Arabic, has become the medium for serious writing, broadcasting, and formal public speaking, and one or other variant of colloquial Arabic, substantially different in structure from the latter, is employed in all informal interaction (Cadora 1985: 75-76). Diglossia is also to be found in several other Semitic languages. In Palestine, from about 1000 BC, spoken Hebrew differed significantly from the Hebrew used in the composition of the Old Testament (Fellman 1985:28; Rendsburg 1980). The latter variety was used for prayers and formal literary composition, while all normal discussion and teaching of religious matters took place in the former (Spolsky 1991). In Ethiopia, the Ge'ez language, which died out as a spoken language between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, remains in active use as the language of worship and sacred literature in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, although as a language of literature it has now largely been replaced by Amharic (Bender et al. 1976: 99-100). Although the language and dialects of oral and written literature in Greek have always differed from the vernaculars, the years following the Roman conquest saw the rise of a movement to replace the Hellenistic koine, by then the normal medium for all prose writing, with the classical Attic Greek of the fourth century BC (Alexiou 1982: 179-80; Browning 1982: 48-50). Up until the end of Ottoman rule in 1821, colloquial varieties of Greek were employed for literary purposes only in peripheral areas of Greek influence or in works of popular edification, not for
Diglossia serious literature in the core areas of Greek cultural influence (Browning 1982: 52). With the establishment of the new Greek state in 1830, an artificially classicized and 'purified' variety of Greek, known as 'katharévousa,' was adopted as the national language, and as the language of civil government and public education (Browning 1982: 53-54); by contrast, the industrialization of Greece, the birth of a nationalist ideology, and the demands for an effective system of public education in the nineteenth century resulted in popular support for colloquial Greek, known as 'demotike' (Browning 1982: 56). Since the fall of the last military junta in July 1974, demotiké has been adopted as the official language of the Greek state, and a decisive expansion of the latter into domains formerly regarded as the preserve of katharévousa has taken place (Browning 1982: 58). The seeds of diglossia in Latin may be identified in the second and first centuries BC with the differentiation of written Classical Latin from the popular spoken variety and the emergence of a Latin literary standard (Hall 1986: 215). From about 100 BC to 400 AD, Classical Latin was widely understood (Pei 1976: 49, 55), although its mutual intelligibility with popular Latin was decreasing steadily (Hall 1986: 213). Later, the functional complementarity between Classical Latin and the early vernacular Romance varieties, combined with the decline in the rate of popular literacy, set the stage for diglossia (Hall 1978: 102, 109). Latin-Romance diglossia of the ninth century was buttressed for a time by Charlemagne's efforts to reform the pronunciation of Latin among the clergy but, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the growth of urban commercial activity, the decline in the relative importance of the clerical orders in secular administration, and the development of oral and written poetry in the vernacular had begun to fuel the expansion of the Romance vernaculars into virtually all domains of interaction (Parker 1983: 336, 338-40). Instances of classical diglossia may be found at various times in Persia, the Slavic lands, and Ottoman Turkey. By the end of the seventh century AD, Middle Persian, or parsi, had become markedly different from spoken Persian, or dari, and had become the medium of administration, religion, and written literature, while dari remained the language of everyday oral communication (Jeremias 1984: 273; Lazard 1975: 596, 598-99). In Russia, the introduction of writing along with Christianity in the tenth century AD, gave rise to diglossia between vernacular Old Russian and a partly Russianized version of Old Church Slavic (Comrie 1991: 161, 165-68). Old Church Slavic was the language of the Orthodox liturgy and of the Old Russian chronicles, although the reported speech of the latter, and legal documents of the period, contain almost exclusively vernacular forms (Comrie 1991: 165-66). In the late twentieth century, Russian Church Slavic is the language only of the Russian Orthodox
liturgy, although its influence on Modern Standard Russian vocabulary is pervasive, particularly in religious and more learned and abstract domains (Comrie 1991: 169). Finally, in sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkey, the court and literary varieties of Turkish began to diverge from the vernacular, becoming maximally distinct early in the eighteenth century (Karpat 1984: 189, 190-91). By the end of World War I, however, Ottoman Turkish, or osmanlica, had become completely moribund and was being replaced by a new standard based largely upon the spoken language of the educated classes of Istanbul and the larger cities (Gallagher 1971: 163). The best known case of diglossia in Western Europe is that between Swiss German and Standard High German in Switzerland. High German, as the liturgical language of Protestantism, the German literary language, and the language of higher education, became the unquestioned norm in the domain of high culture throughout the German-speaking lands (Schiffman 1991: 178). However, whereas Hochdeutsch in time began to displace local dialects of German as a mother tongue in Germany, in Switzerland, antipathy toward nineteenth- and twentieth-century German expansionism has resulted in the relegation of Hochdeutsch to written and formal spoken functions only (Barbour and Stevenson 1990: 215; Keller 1982: 8788). A similar diglossic situation exists in Liechtenstein, where Standard German is the language of administration, parliament, the courts, religious services, and education (Clyne 1984: 18). Yet another instance of diglossia exists in Luxembourg between Standard German and Letzebuergesch, with French as an additional high variety (Clyne 1984: 20-21; Barbour and Stevenson 1990: 230-34; Keller 1982: 73). It seems not to have been recognized that classical diglossia has also existed in Irish and in Welsh. Although a case might well be made for diglossia in the Old Irish period of the eighth and ninth centuries (Ó Murchú 1985: 38), a clearer case is the emergence, around the beginning of the thirteenth century, of a single, tightly controlled, universally accepted, national literary language (Corkery 1968: 41). From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, three main literary styles of Irish could be distinguished, all of them significantly different from the popular vernaculars of the day: an archaizing style used primarily in historical and pseudohistorical writings; a mainstream literary usage known as 'the poets' standard'; and a relatively more casual norm possibly based on the spoken language of the educated classes (6 Murchu 1985: 42). In Welsh, from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, the literary works of the court poets, characterized by deliberate archaism in vocabulary and syntax, became the norm for the Welsh literary language, as did the language of their successors, the poets of the nobility, from the fourteenth century 39
The Social Context 'until the sixteenth (Jones 1988: 126-27). With the translation of the New Testament into Welsh in 1567, and subsequently the translation of the entire Bible, yet another literary standard for Welsh was born, one which was again substantially different from the Welsh of casual social interaction, and one which exercises considerable influence on written Welsh even up to the present day (Jones 1988: 128-31). 3. Typology No single effort to extend, to narrow, or to differentiate Ferguson's definition of diglossia has been as profoundly influential as Joshua Fishman's essay (see Fishman) on the relationship between bilingualism and diglossia (1967) and its various revisions over a period of more than 20 years (Fishman 1970, 1980, 1985, 1989). As defined by Fishman, diglossia is 'an enduring societal arrangement, extending at least beyond a three generation period, such that two "languages" each have their secure, phenomenologically legitimate and widely implemented functions' (1980: 3). The 'languages' in question may be distinct languages or varieties of the same language which are sufficiently different from one another that, without schooling, the elevated variety cannot be understood by speakers of the vernacular (Fishman 1980: 4). Diglossia is the 'stable, societal counterpart to individual bilingualism' (Fishman 1980: 3) in that, while the latter is 'a characterization of individual linguistic versatility' (Fishman 1970: 83), the former represents 'a well understood and widely accepted social consensus as to which language is to be used between which interlocutors, for communication concerning what topics or for what purposes' (Fishman 1967: 34). Fishman's account of diglossia differs from Ferguson's in two significant respects. First, whereas Ferguson restricts the definition of diglossia to situations where the codes in question are strikingly divergent varieties of the same language, Fishman, although limiting the definition to 'significantly discrepant ... varieties,' nonetheless includes within its compass situations where the elevated and vernacular varieties are genetically unrelated (1980: 4). Second, Fishman, unlike Ferguson, recognizes two types of compartmentalization of codes in diglossia: a functional compartmentalization, where different codes are assigned by social consensus to nonoverlapping speech contexts within a single speech community; and a territorial or political compartmentalization, where codes are distributed along population lines within social or political entities comprised of multiple speech communities (Fishman 1967: 33, 1980: 7-8). Fishman's 1980 account of diglossia differs from Ferguson's in recognizing four major categories of diglossia based upon the linguistic relationships between the elevated and vernacular varieties within the code matrix. Ferguson and Fishman both recog40
nize a classical variety of diglossia exemplified by the Arabic and Greek cases, as well as a category, represented by Swiss-German diglossia, where the elevated code is not a classical variety, but rather a written or formal spoken norm in functional opposition to the 'significantly discrepant' variety of spontaneous discourse (Fishman 1980: 4). However, Fishman departs from Ferguson in distinguishing between those instances of diglossia in which the high variety, whether classical or not, is a structural variant of the vernacular and those cases where it is not. Thus, the case of Hebrew and Yiddish in many Jewish speech communities is advanced as an instance of a classical variety in diglossic partnership with an unrelated informal variety, while the case of Spanish and Guarani in Paraguay is advanced as an example of a nonclassical, formal or written norm in a diglossic relationship with a genetically unrelated indigenous vernacular. Fishman's extension of the term 'diglossia' to include cases where the elevated and vernacular varieties are not genetically related in any immediate sense has led to numerous efforts to develop a typology of diglossic situations. Most commonly, the degree of relatedness between the codes in the speech repertoire has formed the principal axis along which the various types have been differentiated. Thus, Kloss distinguishes between in-diglossia, or Binnendiglossie, referring to diglossia between genetically related codes, and out-diglossia, or Aussendiglossie, referring to diglossia between genetically unrelated codes (1976: 316). Timm (1981: 363-64) and Pauwels (1986: 15) capture the same distinction with the terms 'intralanguage diglossia' and 'interlanguage diglossia.' Fasold (1984: 52-54) uses the term 'broad diglossia' to subsume the categories of 'superposed bilingualism' in the case of distinct languages, 'classic diglossia' in the case of significantly discrepant varieties of the same language, and 'style shifting' in the case of minimally differentiated stylistic variants. This same tripartite division surfaces again in Britto's terminological distinction between 'superoptimal codes,' 'optimal codes,' and 'suboptimal codes' (1986: 10). Among the various typologists of diglossia, Britto and Pauwels, in particular, note the importance of the nature and degree of social compartmentalization of codes as an axis of classification orthogonal to that of structural relatedness. For his part, Britto distinguishes between situations where the varieties in question are used by separate speech communities having no direct linguistic contact with each other, situations where the dialect of one particular region or social group is used as the standard variety by speakers of other dialects, and situations where a single community uses two or more distinct codes for within-group communication, each with its own particular range of functions (Britto 1986: 35-40). Britto refers to the first of these categories, where there is
Diglossia no within-group differential functional allocation of codes, as 'pseudodiglossia'; to the second, where the elevated or standard variety is not a superposed variety for all members of the larger community, as 'useroriented' or 'dialectal diglossia'; and to the last, akin in this respect to the classical diglossia of Ferguson, as 'use-oriented' or 'diatypical diglossia' (1986: 3540). Pauwels makes a comparable distinction between situations in which virtually all of the members of a speech community learn the elevated variety as a superposed variety, which she refers to as 'general diglossia'; and situations, which she labels 'partial diglossia,' in which only a substantial proportion of the members of a speech community acquire the high variety as a superposed variety (1986: 15). Pauwels also distinguishes between 'rigid diglossia,' in which there is minimal functional overlap between codes, and 'fluid diglossia,' in which some functions, at least, are less rigidly associated with a particular code (1986: 15). The proliferation of diglossia types, and the many attempts to systematize these types within a general classification, reflects the multiple ambiguity which has crept into the use of the term since it was first employed by Ferguson in 1959. It is this ambiguity that is in large measure to blame for the often conflicting points of view which different scholars in the field hold with regard to the origins, evolutionary course, and social consequences of diglossia. There is little prospect of progress on these issues until such time as a single definition of diglossia is adopted to the exclusion of all others, or, until the various subcategories of broad diglossia are expressly and consistently identified in any theoretical treatment of the phenomenon. There is little agreement on how to proceed. Fasold (1984), Britto (1986), and Pauwels (1986) advocate the use of the term 'diglossia' in a general sense to refer to a situation where a speech community makes use of high and low variety ranges, each with its distinctive functional allocation, and where the high variety, or repertoire of varieties, is customarily acquired later in life, normally through the process of formal schooling. Others, including Hudson (1991: 16), advocate a return to the essence of Ferguson's original definition. The most comprehensive bibliography on diglossia is Fernandez 1993. A shorter bibliography is available in Hudson 1992. (See Ferguson 1991 for a retrospective appraisal of the original article on diglossia.) See also: Multilingualism; Bilingualism, Societal. Bibliography Alexiou M 1982 Diglossia in Greece. In: Haas W (ed.) Standard Languages: Spoken and Written. Barnes and Noble, Totowa, NJ Altoma S J 1969 The Problem of Diglossia in Arabic: A Comparative Study of Classical and Iraqi Arabic. Center
for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Barbour S, Stevenson P 1990 Variation in German: A Critical Approach to German Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Barnes D 1982 Nationalism and the Mandarin movement: The first half-century. In: Cooper R L (ed.) Language Spread: Studies in Diffusion and Social Change. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN Bender M L, Hailu F, Cowley R -1976 Two Ethio-Semitic languages. In: Bender M L, Bowen J D, Cooper R L, Ferguson C A (eds.) Language in Ethiopia. Oxford University Press, London Blau J 1977 The beginnings of the Arabic diglossia: A study of the origins of Neoarabic. Afroasiatic Linguistics 4: 175202 Bright W, Ramanujan A K 1972 Sociolinguistic variation and language change. In: Pride J B, Holmes J (eds.) Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings. Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK Britto F 1986 Diglossia: A Study of the Theory with Application to Tamil. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Browning R 1982 Greek diglossia yesterday and today. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 35: 49-68 Cadora F J 1985 Who are the Arabs?: A sociolinguistic view. In: Inaugural Lectures 1984-85. College of Humanities of Ohio State University, Columbus, OH Chatterjee S 1986 Diglossia in Bengali. In: Krishnamurti Bh, Masica C P, Sinha A K. (eds.) South Asian Languages: Structure, Convergence, and Diglossia. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi Clyne M G 1984 Language and Society in the Germanspeaking Countries. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Comrie B 1991 Diglossia in the Old Russian period. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10: 160-72 Corkery D 1968 The Fortunes of the Irish Language. Mercier Press, Cork Coulmas F 1987 What writing can do to language: Some preliminary remarks. In: Battestini S P X (ed.) Developments in Linguistics and Semiotics, Language Teaching and Learning, Communication across Cultures, Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1986. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Coulmas F 1991 Does the notion of diglossia apply to Japanese?: Some thoughts and some documentation. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10: 125-42 Deshpande M M 1986 Sanskrit grammarians on diglossia. In: Krishnamurti Bh, Masica C P, Sinha A K (eds.) South Asian Languages: Structure, Convergence and Diglossia. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi Fasold R 1984 The Sociolinguistics of Society. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Fellman J 1985 A sociolinguistic perspective on the history of Hebrew. In: Fishman J A (ed.) Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. E J Brill, Leiden Ferguson C A 1959 Diglossia. Word 15: 325-40 Ferguson C A 1991 Diglossia revisited. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10(1): 214-34 Fernandez M 1993 Diglossia: A Comprehensive Bibliography 1960-1990. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Fishman J A 1967 Bilingualism with and without diglossia: 41
The Social Context Diglossia with and without bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues 23(2): 29-38 Fishman J A 1970 Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Fishman J A 1980 Bilingualism and biculturism as individual and as societal phenomena. Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development 1: 1-15 Fishman J A 1985 Bilingualism and biculturism as individual and as societal phenomena. In: Fishman J A, Gertner M H, Lowy E G, Milan W G (ed.) The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival. Mouton, Berlin Fishman J A 1989 Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon Gair J W 1986 Sinhala diglossia revisited or diglossia dies hard. In: Krishnamurti Bh, Masica C P, Sinha A K (eds.) South Asian Languages: Structure, Convergence and Diglossia. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi Gallagher C F 1971 Language reform and social modernization in Turkey. In: Rubin J, Jernudd B H (eds.) Can Language Be Planned? Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice for Developing Nations. University Press of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI Habein Y S 1984 The History of the Japanese Written Language. University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo Hall R A Jr 1978 Bi-(multi-)lingualism and diglossia in Latin and Romance. Forum Linguisticum 3: 107-17 Hall R A Jr 1986 From bidialectalism to diglossia in early Romance. In: Elson B F (ed.) Language in Global Perspective: Papers in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Summer Institute of Linguistics 1935-1985. Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, TX Hudson A 1991 Toward the systematic study of diglossia. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10(1): 1-22 Hudson A 1992 Diglossia: A bibliographic review. LiS 21: 611-74 Jeremias E M 1984 Diglossia in Persian. Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 34: 271-87
Jones D G 1988 Literary Welsh. In: Ball M J (ed.) The Use of Welsh. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Karpat K H 1984 A language in search of a nation: Turkish in the nation-state. In: Scaglione A (ed.) The Emergence of National Languages. Longo, Ravenna Keller R E 1982 Diglossia in German-speaking Switzerland. In: Haas W (ed.) Standard Languages: Spoken and Written. Barnes and Noble, Totowa, NJ Kloss H 1976 Über 'Diglossie.' Deutsche Sprache 4: 313-23 Lazard G 1975 The rise of the New Persian language. In: Frye R N (ed.) The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 4: The Period from the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Norman J 1988 Chinese. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 6 Murchu M 1985 The Irish Language. Government of Ireland, Department of Foreign Affairs and Bord na Gaeilge, Dublin Parker I 1983 The rise of the vernaculars in early modern Europe: An essay in the political economy of language. In: Bain B (ed.) The Sociogenesis of Language and Human Conduct. Plenum Press, New York Pauwels A 1986 Diglossia, immigrant dialects and language maintenance in Australia. Journal of Multilingual & Multicultural Development 7: 13-30 Pei M 1976 The Story of Latin and the Romance Languages. Harper and Row, New York Rabin C 1955 The beginnings of Classical Arabic. Studia Islamica 4:. 19-37 Rendsburg G A 1980 Evidence for a spoken Hebrew in Biblical times (Doctoral dissertation, New York University) Schiffman H 1991 Swiss-German diglossia. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10: 173-88 Spolsky B 1991 Diglossia in Hebrew in the late Second Temple Period. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 10: 85-104 Timm L A 1981 Diglossia old and new: A critique. Anthropological Linguistics 23: 356-67
Language Loyalty R. Mesthrie
Language shift and death are overlapping terms used to describe situations in which a language ceases to be used by a speech community. Language shift occurs when a new language is acquired by a community with the concomitant loss of its erstwhile primary language. If that community is the last (or only) one to use the obsolescent language it is possible to speak, in addition, of language death. Language death may also describe a situation in which a language is lost without a new one replacing it. This is occasioned by the destruction of the speech community itself. Language maintenance denotes the continuing use of a language
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in the face of competition from a regionally and socially more powerful or numerically stronger language. 1. History The extinction of Cornish in England in the eighteenth century is an example of language death as well as shift (to English). The demise of an immigrant language like Norwegian in the USA exemplifies shift without death, since the language survives in its original setting in Norway. (Some commentators might, however, speak of the death of this immigrant dialect of Norwegian.) Language death without shift is exem-
Language Loyalty plified by the fate of Tasmanian, whose speakers were almost entirely wiped out just 73 years after the first contacts with British settlers in 1803. The last speaker of Tasmanian is said to have died with her own language intact, and with no knowledge of English, save for a few loanwords (Swadesh 1948). Although, in popular parlance, languages like Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit are referred to as dead languages, this use of the term is inapplicable within the framework of this article. Languages like these gradually evolved by continuous intergenerational transmission into dialects which gave rise to autonomous and eventually standardized speech forms. At no stage was there a sharp break from one colloquial speech system to another. On the other hand, it is accurate to speak of the death of ancient languages like Pictish, Etruscan, and Gothic. Hebrew provides the unusual example of a language which did die as the medium of everyday conversation, but was revived with considerable effort in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is estimated that in the period 1490-1990 about half of the world's languages disappeared. However, one scholar (Brenzinger 1992) is of the opinion that for East Africa, at least, language shift and death are not necessarily more frequent today than before— they have been side effects of migrations and expansions of ethnic groups over the last 5000 years. In the late twentieth century, Aboriginal languages of Australia are greatly in decline. It is estimated that of the 200 languages of pre-contact Australia, fewer than 50 have viable communities in which children are able to speak the language in the 1990s. In the USA the fate of Amerindian languages is not much better, although at least one language— Navajo—is thought to have had as many speakers in 1990 as it had at any stage of its history. In Europe, the Celtic languages struggle to survive against English and French. In southern Africa languages of the Khoi and San families have been the victims of shift and death. Generally, minority languages on the African continent have given way to other more prestigious African languages rather than languages of European colonialism. 2. Causes of Shift For a large number of cases involving indigenous languages in Australia and the Americas the causes of shift and death are clear. Once viable and autonomous speech communities were either destroyed or deprived of their traditional land and resettled with other groups who did not always share the same language. Eventual reorientation to a new westernized society further attenuated the viability of traditional forms of the surviving languages among the young. It is one of the few points of agreement in studies of minority and immigrant languages that there is no single set of factors that can be used to predict the
outcome of language maintenance efforts. Causes of shift are generally multiple and interrelated. Kloss (1966) has pointed out that many of the factors may even cut both ways. Thus, no uniform or predictable consequences for language maintenance or shift are derivable from (a) absence or presence of higher education in the dominated language, (b) relatively large or relatively small numbers of speakers of the dominated language, (c) greater similarity or greater dissimilarity between groups speaking the dominant and dominated languages respectively, and (d) positive or hostile attitudes of the dominant group to the minority. The factors that are most often discussed in individual cases of shift can be grouped as follows: economic changes; status; demography; and institutional support. 2.1 Economic Factors Economic changes are by far the most salient of the factors leading to shift, though the relation is neither necessary nor sufficient. The juxtaposition of different speech communities is frequently brought about by invasion, seeking of refuge, immigration of workers, or trade. All of these (except, perhaps, for refuge) have an underlying economic motive. In many countries modernization, industrialization, and urbanization often lead to bilingualism in a vernacular language and a more widespread regional language associated with the economy. In conjunction with other factors (discussed below) these may lead to shift. Jones (1981) traces the beginnings of language shift in Wales to the creation of an upper ruling class from the Tudor period onwards, which became increasingly Anglicized as it grew more and more drawn to the social, economic, and cultural sphere of London. The second phase in the decline of Welsh involved the immigration of English speakers into the coalfields of south-east Wales in the second half of the eighteenth century. With respect to Scots Gaelic, Thomson (Haugen, et al. 1990) argues that the exodus of people from the Scottish Highlands in search of work in English-speaking areas in the nineteenth century was a key factor in its eventual decline. Economic factors thus counteracted the efforts of the Gaelic Schools Society to foster stable Gaelic-English bilingualism. Less commonly, economic changes can positively affect a threatened language. Paulsen (1981) describes the case of the Ferring dialect of Frisian spoken in the North Sea islands of Fohr and Amrun. After the decline of traditional herring fishing a school was founded in the sixteenth century to teach navigation skills to boys, who subsequently found employment in the new Dutch overseas shipping companies. Speaking Ferring was an advantage and immigrants had to learn it if they wished to become members of this closed seafaring community. This was one of the 43
The Social Context main factors enhancing maintenance of a previously threatened language. 2.2 Demographic Factors Numbers of speakers do have a bearing on successful language maintenance: it might seem obvious that the smaller the size of a community, the stronger the threat of language shift and death. However, it is not possible to specify a 'critical mass' of speakers necessary for the survival of a language. Brenzinger et al. (1991) cite the case of Bayso, an Eastern Cushitic language of southern Ethiopia, which has resisted language replacement for 1000 years although the number of its speakers has always been small (in 1990 in the region of 500). Apart from absolute numbers, or proportions of speakers of dominated language to dominating language, the distribution of speakers is of some significance. Enforced or de facto segregation of immigrant communities would appear to offer better chances of language maintenance, all other things being equal. Li (1982) found that third-generation Chinese Americans residing in Chinese-dominant neighborhoods ('Chinatowns') were less likely to have adopted English as their mother tongue than their agemates outside the Chinatowns. Endogamy within an immigrant group will also improve chances of a family language being transmitted to offspring. Brenzinger cites intermarriage between the Yaaku and Maasai of north central Kenya as one of the main factors leading to a shift in economic practices among the former (from hunter-gatherers to pastoralism), and to an eventual shift in language. 2.3 Institutional Support The use of a minority language in education, religion, the media, or administration may assist attempts to bolster its position. But for minorities, this can only be done at great cost. There are limits to the extent to which a nondominant immigrant language (or, more usually, languages) can be used in schools. A major asymmetry exists between use of a minority language in educational settings (associated with formal and standard norms of a language) and the hypercolloquial and localized use characteristic of a language in its dying stages. The role of German in the religious sphere among the Old Order Amish and Mennonites is considered to be a primary cause of maintenance of Pennsylvania German, though other factors are also implicated (endogamy, resistance to economic and social change, etc.). For many communities religious activities demand an archaic form of their language or a register far removed from colloquial speech. 2.4 Status Some writers consider a group's self-esteem and the status of their language (oral or written, vehicle for 44
sacred texts, major regional language elsewhere in the world, etc.) to play a role in maintenance or shift. These are not entirely separate from economic and class factors, however. Thus, Arabic is a high-status language in the Middle East, but not in Europe, where it is mainly connected with immigrant working-class speakers. In his review of the field, Fishman (1972) emphasizes the ambivalence of generalizations that might seem to have obvious validity. Thus, language maintenance is not necessarily a function of intactness of group membership, particularly of such ideologized expressions of group loyalty as nationalism. Urban dwellers are not necessarily more prone to language shift than rural dwellers. It is not always the case that the more prestigious language displaces the less prestigious one. Women may be in the rearguard of shift in some instances, men in others. 3. The Course of Shift It is obvious that a shift from one language to another cannot be effected without an intervening period of bilingualism. In the initial phases of the relationship the languages may show characteristic distribution patterns over specific domains. More formal domains may, by force of circumstances, be allotted to the dominant societal language; more informal domains like the home to the minority language. Language shift involves the progressive redistribution of the languages over these domains—the home, religion, folk songs and tales usually being the last bastions of survival for the dominated language. Many shifts involve more than one minority language, whose positions are weakened not only by the dominant language but by each other. Immigrant communities from different areas of origin may develop close associations in the workplace and neighborhood, which demand the use of a lingua franca. The most expedient or neutral choice is often the dominant societal language. A similar ethos among different Amerindian groups in the USA, and Aboriginal groups in Australia forced into reservations, has accelerated the pace at which English developed as a lingua franca, often to the detriment of the indigenous languages. The process of shift is often gradual, involuntary, and unconscious. While the circumstances of the shift may be centuries in the making (as with Welsh, Irish, Scots Gaelic, etc.), there are instances of languages which have been demographically stable for several centuries experiencing a relatively rapid shift. Dorian (1981:51) characterizes this as a sudden 'tip,' after which the demographic tide flows strongly in favor of some other language. Two examples recently cited include the tip from Nubian to Arabic in Egypt, and from Scots Gaelic to English in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in the 1930s and 1940s.
Language Loyalty Leap (1981) believes that there have been no instances, historical or contemporary, where an Amerindian community has intentionally allowed ancestral language fluency to disappear. Although this would appear to be the general norm worldwide, there have been a few instances of shift which have been deliberately hastened by members of the speech community. Eidheim (1969) discusses the case of the Saami fjord community which aspires to full participation in the public network, as it is defined by Norwegians. Many families have taken the drastic decision of preventing their children from learning Saami. Brenzinger et al. (1991) describes the conscious decision made by the Yaaku of East Africa in the 1930s to give up their language in the face of social, economic, and linguistic pressure from the dominant Maasai. After adopting the value system of the pastoralists, the Yaaku considered the Maasai lifestyle and their language to be superior and to have higher prestige than their own 'hunter-gatherer' language. They discouraged the use of the old language even within their own community, insisting that the Yaaku language with its semantic emphasis on hunting was unfit for a cattle-breeding society. The shrinkage of domains in the course of shift is paralleled by receding generational competence in the outgoing language. In its last stages speakers may exhibit an age-graded range of competence from full command to zero. In between these are the competences of young fluent speakers, semispeakers, and passive bilinguals (Dorian 1981). Young fluent speakers are those who have native command of the ancestral language, but who show subtle deviations from the fluent older speakers' norms. Passive bilinguals have full receptive skills in the ancestral language, but are unable to use the language in productive speech. Semispeakers are those who have had insufficient exposure to the ancestral language, but continue using it in an imperfect way some of the time, out of a high degree of language loyalty. Dorian characterizes the semispeakers of Gaelic in East Sutherland, Scotland, as having relatively halting delivery, speaking in short bursts, and exhibiting linguistic deviations of which older speakers are mostly aware. On the other hand, they are able to build sentences and alter them productively, a trait which distinguishes them from the passive bilinguals. Other scholars draw finer distinctions between reasonably fluent semispeakers (who are still able to interact with older speakers despite lack of full proficiency) and weak semispeakers or terminal speakers (whose interaction arises mainly out of necessity of clarifying things for older monolingual speakers, rather than out of language loyalty). A finer distinction can also be made between passive bilinguals and 'rememberers.' The latter exist in the last stages of shift, when a group of older fluent speakers no longer exists with whom to exercise their receptive and
productive skills. That is, passive bilinguals interact within the community of ancestral language users, rememberers cannot. Some language death situations give no evidence of the semispeaker phenomenon. Swadesh (1948) reports on the extinction of the Yahi language of northern California, whose last speaker's competence he characterizes as 'flawless.' This man, Ishi, learnt English only in his last years, after being taken to the University of California in 1911. The Californian languages, Luiseno and Cupeño, whose obsolescence involves shift and death, apparently have no semispeakers. People either speak fairly well or not at all (Dorian 1981:115). The emergence of semispeakers might seem to hinge on the rapidity of death or shift: protracted shift allows for semispeaker competence (and a command of the new language); rapid shift (or 'tip') and death do not. However, this generalization, like much else in the field, admits of many exceptions—Luiseno and Cupeño are cases in point (languages with a relatively protracted period of shift, but no semispeakers). Dorian attributes the existence of semispeakers (rather than young fluent speakers or passive bilinguals) in East Sutherland to the following factors: (a) Late birth order in a large, relatively languageloyal family. In such a family the eldest might emerge as a fluent speaker, whereas the last two or three children may emerge as semispeakers. Although their parents might continue addressing the last two or three children in Gaelic, the influence of elder siblings who bring back English from the school and playground is stronger. (b) A second factor is strong attachment to one or more grandparents (most often a grandmother), who usually use far more Gaelic than one's parents. Less commonly, it is the influence of aunts and parents that encourages the semispeaker phenomenon. (c) Temporary absence from the community often fosters a reawakening of loyalty to the dominated language, which may be first activated as semispeech if there are fellow exiles who share those feelings. (d) An inquisitive and gregarious personality might also lead some young people to participate in conversations with elders in Gaelic. Presumably, such outgoing individuals actively wish to conduct conversations in the preferred language of the other party, irrespective of the possible stigma of their own errors. 4. The Linguistics of Obsolescence Where the actual effects of incomplete acquisition histories on linguistic performance are concerned, equal diversity is found in case studies. An early hypothesis was that dying languages might undergo many pro45
The Social Context cesses reminiscent of pidginization. In dying languages and pidgins, for example, vocabulary is relatively restricted, inflections are simplified or generalized, and movement rules lost. A preference for more analytic syntax (compared to the base languages) is another common feature of pidgins and dying languages. Pidginization often involves a degree of language mixing that was thought to hold for semispeaker speech as well. A second hypothesis saw semispeech as a kind of creolization in reverse, since pidgins become creolized by entering into the primary socialization of children, whereas dying languages cease to be used for primary socialization. The pidginization hypothesis has not stood up to close scrutiny. Unlike pidgins, dying languages do not show a tendency to uniformity in word order. Nor are there any reports of the kind of wholesale breakdown of morphology in dying languages that one finds in pidgins. In connection with dying East Sutherland Gaelic, Dorian maintains that allomorphic variety does not undergo substantial change (see below), that word order is unchanged, embedding handled with ease, and certain categories which have marginal or indirect semantic significance persist. None of these is suggestive of processes of pidginization. Dressier (1972) suggests that languages die on account of rule loss, rule simplification, and the like. Denison (1977) rejects this line of reasoning, claiming that languages become obsolete when speakers no longer deem it worthwhile to communicate with children in a particular variety, and children are no longer motivated to acquire an active competence in that language. In the same vein, Mohan and Zador (1986) place a question mark over exactly when a language may be said to be dead, claiming that the language of semispeakers is not the prelude to death, but the visible signs of an event that has already come to pass. They suggest that the biological metaphor of death is apt in implying a state, not an ongoing process and that languages die intact and earlier than suggested by other writers. Part of the controversy, and other inconsistencies in pinpointing the characteristics of semispeech, can be resolved by taking into account the amount of exposure that the semispeaker has had to the ancestral language as a child, and of opportunities for its use early on. As Menn (1989) emphasizes, a learner who has encountered the language in question through heavy exposure to ritual language will display rote or formulaic language, but rarely preconventional speech involving overgeneralization of words, morphemes, and constructions. A learner who has had good exposure to the ancestral language till schoolgoing age, and little further opportunity, will lack a formal register in that language. Such speech can be expected to lack embedding and other constructions that are rare in caretaker speech. On the other hand, overgeneralization of morphemes by analogy is to be expected. 46
Some characteristic features of individual dying languages will now be considered. These must be taken as examples of individual outcomes, rather than of a grand design. One of the problems facing researchers is that the kinds of changes that dying languages undergo are not qualitatively different from ordinary, contact-induced change in 'healthy' languages, and even from language-internal developments in non-contact situations. It is the quantity of such changes in a relatively short timespan in dying languages that is the distinguishing factor. Breatnach (1964), describing obsolescent dialects of Irish, claims that the effects of disuse are evident at all stages mainly in the vocabulary, and secondarily in morphological, phonological, and syntactic patterns. The purely phonetic character of the language resists influence to the end. Dorian's (1978) characterization of the morphology of East Sutherland Gaelic will be taken as a more detailed exemplification of the linguistics of language obsolescence. Among the ways of forming the plural of nouns in the traditional dialect of the area are the following: (a) Suffixation of the ending -en to some nouns (b) Final mutation (e.g., th —>ch) (c) Suppletion (e.g., the 'house' (sg) versus thro:r 'houses'), (d) vowel alternation (e.g., makh 'son' (sg) versus mikh 'sons') There are still other ways of forming the plural of specific nouns, involving combinations of the above processes (e.g., final mutation plus suffixation, vowel alternation plus final mutation plus suffixation, etc.). In semispeaker performance some degree of simplification is present. There is the notable rise of suffixation (especially the use of a 'favored' suffix by individuals), which leads to grammar simplification. However, a great deal of the original complexity remains. Final mutation, vowel alternation, suppletion, quantity change, subtraction, and zero formation are still in use among semispeakers, though to a lesser extent than among fluent speakers. Dorian (1978:608) concludes that 'East Sutherland Gaelic may be said to be dying, at least with regard to noun plurals and gerunds, with its morphological boots on.' Mithun (1989) outlines the characteristics of an obsolescing polysynthetic language—Cayuga (an Iroquoian language) of Oklahoma. There is a shrinkage of the lexicon, with specific terms being lost before more general ones. Words for objects no longer observed have been forgotten (e.g., animal terms like 'moose,' 'beaver,' 'mink,' 'weasel'). Other changes that do exist in obsolescent Cayuga are quite subtle. Although the inventory of affixes is unchanged, speakers rarely combine several affixes within a word. The reluctance to combine morphemes within single words extends to noun incorporation. In terms of phonology and syntax there are no major changes, leading
Language Loyalty Mithun to remark upon the nearly complete retention of an amazingly complex morphological and phonological system under limited opportunities to use it.
5. Conclusion—Reversing Language Shift
Studies in language maintenance and shift are clearly of great importance for their potential to contribute to language planning on a societal level. The experience of sociolinguists in this area can also be used to help beleaguered communities to stabilize their languages in the face of encroachment of major regional and world languages. Such cooperation is particularly noticeable in the 1990s, with linguists participating in 'endangered language projects' in many parts of the globe. Some important cases of symbiotic cooperation between linguists and local communities are discussed in the journal Language (vol. 68). In his book Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages, Fishman (see Fishman), a pioneer in the field of the sociology of language maintenance and shift, has provided a theoretical framework for diagnosing and treating language shift. He devised an eight-point scale which characterizes different stages of shift and the extent to which a language is endangered. This Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale is rather like the Richter Scale insofar as it measures and reflects different degrees of sociolinguistic disruption and disarray. (Stage 8 is the weakest stage where most users of the endangered language are socially isolated old people and the language needs to be reassembled from their mouths and memories and taught to demographically unconcentrated adults. Stage 1, the strongest for a minority language, involves use of a language in high school, occupations, government, and media, without the additional safety provided by political independence). Corresponding to this scale is a scheme for reversing language shift, via specific activities at each point. The aim of this program is to eventually ensure continuous intergenerational transmission of dominated languages as spoken vernaculars, not just for special purposes like reading or religious recitation. Fishman (1991: 12) believes that 'there is no language for which nothing at all can be done.' The teaching of endangered languages is discussed further (see Teaching Endangered Languages). See also: Linguicide; Minority Languages; Multilingualism. Bibliography Blanc H 1968 The Israeli koine as an emergent national standard. In: Fishman J A, Ferguson C A, Das Gupta J (eds.) Language Problems in Developing Nations. John Wiley and Sons, New York
Breatnach R B 1964 Characteristics of Irish dialects in process of extinction. In: Communications et rapports du premier congrès international de dialectologie générale. Centre International de Dialectologie Générale, Louvain Brenzinger M 1992 Patterns of language shift in East Africa. In: Herbert R K (ed.) Language and Society in Africa: The Theory and Practice of Sociolinguistics. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg Brenzinger M, Heine B, Sommer G 1991 Language death in Africa. In: Robins R H, Uhlenbeck E M (eds.) Endangered Languages. Berg, Oxford Denison N 1977 Language death or language suicide? IJSL 12: 13-22 Dorian N C 1978 The fate of morphological complexity in language death. Lg 54: 590-609 Dorian N C 1981 Language Death—The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA Dorian N C (ed.) 1989 Investigating Obsolescence—Studies in Language Contraction and Death. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Dressier W U 1972 On the phonology of language death. In: Peranteau P M, Levi J N, Phares G C (eds.) Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting, the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago, IL Eidheim H 1969 When ethnic identity is a social stigma. In: Earth F (ed.) Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. George Allen and Unwin, London Fishman J 1972 Language maintenance and shift as a field of enquiry (revisited). In: Language in Sociocultural Change. Essays by J. A. Fishman, selected and introduced by A. S. Dil. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Fishman J 1991 Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Gal S 1979 Language Shift—Social Determinants of Linguistic Change in Bilingual Austria. Academic Press, New York Haugen E, McClure J D, Thomson D S (eds.) 1990 Minority Languages Today. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Jones B L 1981 Welsh: Linguistic conservatism and shifting bilingualism. In: Haugen E, et al. 1990 Kloss H 1966 German-American language maintenance efforts. In: Fishman J Language Loyalty in the United States. Mouton, The Hague Leap W L 1981 American Indian languages. In: Ferguson C A, Heath S B Language in the USA. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Li W L 1982 The language of Chinese-Americans. IJSL 38:109-24 Menn L 1989 Some people who don't talk right: Universal and particular in child language, aphasia and language obsolescence. In: Dorian N C (ed.) 1989 Mithun M 1989 The incipient obsolescence of polysynthesis: Cayuga in Ontario and Oklahoma. In: Dorian N C (ed.) 1989 Mohan P, Zador P 1986 Discontinuity in a life cycle: The death of Trinidad Bhojpuri. Lg 62:291-319 Paulsen J H W 1981 The Faroese Language Situation In: Haugen E, et al. 1990 Schmidt A 1985 Young People's Dyirbal—An Example of Language Death from Australia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Swadesh M 1948 Sociologic notes on obsolescent languages. IJAL 14:226-35
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Linguicide T. Skutnabb-Kangas and R. Phillipson
A taxonomy of policies which a state can adopt towards minority languages (Cobarrubias 1983: 71) distinguishes between the following: (a) attempting to kill a language, (b) letting a language die, (c) unsupported coexistence, (d) partial support of specific language functions, (e) adoption as an official language. The first policy is overtly linguicidal; the second and third may be covertly linguicidal. Linguicidal policies have at times been overt, for instance US policy in Pacific islands such as Guam in the early twentieth century (Kloss 1977). Calvet (1974) describes French colonial overtly linguicidal policy as ' glottophagie' ('linguistic cannibalism,' dominant languages replacing and extinguishing dominated languages) and in 'La Guerre des Langues' (1987), 'linguistic warfare' is not a metaphor but the reality of the politics of language and relations between languages (see Mateene 1985 and Phillipson 1992 for further analyses). Linguicide is the extermination of languages, an analogous concept to (physical) genocide, whereas language death is the withering away of languages, by analogy with natural death. Linguicide, by contrast, implies that there is an agent involved in causing the death of languages. The agent can be active ('attempting to kill a language') or passive ('letting a language die,' or 'unsupported coexistence,' also often leading to the death of minority languages). In liberal ideology, only an active agent with the intention to kill languages would cause linguicide, whereas the other two would fall within the domain of language death. Linguicide is the extreme end result of linguicism (linguistically argued racism) at group level-. Seen from the perspective of a conflict paradigm, the causes of linguicide and linguicism have to be analyzed from both structural and ideological angles, covering the struggle for structural power and material resources, and the legitimation, effectuation, and reproduction of the unequal division of power and resources between groups based on language. The agents of linguicide/linguicism can also be structural (a state, e.g., Turkey vis-a-vis Kurds; an institution, e.g., schools; laws and regulations, e.g., those covering linguistic rights or the position of different languages on time-tables in schools; budgets, e.g., for teacher training or materials in certain languages) or ideological (norms and values ascribed to different languages and their speakers). There is thus nothing 'natural' in language death. Languages cannot be treated in an anthropomorphic way, as organisms with a natural life-span. Language death has causes, which can be identified and analyzed. 48
When the United Nations (UN) did preparatory work for what was to become the International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (E 793, 1948), linguistic and cultural genocide were discussed alongside physical genocide, and were seen as serious crimes against humanity. When the Convention was accepted, Article 3, which covered linguistic and cultural genocide, was voted down and is thus not included in the final Convention of 1948 (see Capotorti 1979: 37). What remains, however, is a definition of linguistic genocide, which was defined (in Art. 3, 1) as: Prohibiting the use of the language of the group in daily intercourse or in schools, or the printing and circulation of publications in the language of the group.
Some countries commit linguistic genocide openly and brutally, and Turkey is the most blatant example in the contemporary world (see Skutnabb-Kangas and Bucak 1994): imprisonment, torture, and killing of thousands of people, in addition to threats, hefty fines, and confiscation of Kurdish books, journals, and property. But linguistic genocide is today mostly committed in more covert and sophisticated ways, for example, in educational systems. Here the use of a minority language is prohibited more indirectly, by ideological and structural means. The use of a minority language is in fact prohibited 'in daily intercourse or in schools' every time there are minority children in day care centers and schools, but no bilingual teachers who are authorized to use the languages of the minority children as the media of teaching and child care most of the time. This is the situation for most immigrant and refugee minority children in all Western European countries and in the USA, Canada, and Australia. Immigrant minority education in these countries is thus guilty of linguistic genocide, as defined by the UN. So is the education offered to most indigenous first nations. Dominant or majority languages expand at the expense of dominated (or minorized) languages when minority language speakers are forced to learn dominant languages in a subtractive way (instead of their own languages), where it would be perfectly possible to learn them in an additive way, adding competence in dominant languages to maintenance and further development of their own languages. Linguists estimate that up to 90 percent of today's oral languages (and most sign languages) may not exist in the year 2100 (Krauss 1992). Binding linguistic human rights are urgently needed to prevent linguicide. The UN, UNESCO, ILO, OSCE, OAU, Coun-
Minority Languages cil of Europe, etc., have been concerned about the 'endangered languages' of indigenous peoples and linguistic minorities, but existing international, regional, and national protection and support are clearly completely inadequate (see Kontra et al. in press, Skutnabb-Kangas 1998, Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994,1997, Thornberry 1991,1997, de Varennes 1996). Widespread linguicide, and, occasionally, language death are fatal for linguistic diversity and, through that, also to biodiversity on earth (Maffi et al. in press). See also: Minority Language Endangered Languages.
Rights;
Teaching
Bibliography Calvet L-J 1974 Linguistique et Colonialisme: Petit Traite de Glottophagie. Payot, Paris Calvet L-J 1987 La Guerre des Languages et les Politiques Linguistiques. Payot, Paris Capotorti F 1979 Study of the Rights of Persons Belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. United Nations, New York Cobarrubias J 1983 Ethical issues in status planning. In: Cobarrubias J, Fishman J (eds.) Progress in Language Planning: International Perspectives. Mouton, Berlin, 4185 Kloss H 1977 The American Bilingual Tradition. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Kontra M, Phillipson R, Skutnabb-Kangas T, Varady T (eds.) in press Approaches to Linguistic Human Rights. Central European University Press, Budapest Krauss M 1992 The world's languages in crisis Language 68: 4-10 Maffi L, Skutnabb-Kangas T, Andrianarivo J (in press) Language diversity. In: Posey D, Dutfield G (eds.) Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity. United Nations
Environmental Programme, New York and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Mateene K 1985 Colonial languages as compulsory means of domination, and indigenous languages, as necessary factors of national liberation and development. In: Mateene K, Kalema J, Chomba B (eds.) Linguistic Liberation and Unity of Africa. OAU Inter-African Bureau of Languages, Kampala Phillipson R 1992 Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford University Press, Oxford Skutnabb-Kangas T 1998 Human rights and language wrongs—a future for diversity. In: Benson P, Grundy P, Skutnabb-Kangas T (eds.) Language Rights, Special issue, Language Sciences 20:1, 5-27 Skutnabb-Kangas T, Bucak S 1994 Killing a mother tongue—how the Kurds are deprived of linguistic human rights. In: Skutnabb-Kangas T, Phillipson R (eds.), in collaboration with Rannut M Linguistic Human Rights. Inequality or Justice in Language Policy. Contributions to the Sociology of Language 67. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 347-370 Skutnabb-Kangas T, Phillipson R 1994 Linguistic human rights, past and present. In Skutnabb-Kangas T, Phillipson R (eds.) in collaboration with M Rannut Linguistic Human Rights. Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Contributions to the Sociology of Language 67. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 71-110 Skutnabb-Kangas T, Phillipson R 1997 Linguistic human rights and development. In: Hamelink C (ed.) Ethics and Development. On Making Moral Choices in Development Cooperation. Kok, Kampen, pp. 56-69 Thornberry P 1991 International Law and the Rights of Minorities. Clarendon Press, Oxford Thornberry P 1997 Minority rights. In: Academy of European Law (ed.) Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law. Volume VI, Book 2, 307-90. Kluwer Law International, The Netherlands Varennes F de 1996 Language, Minorities and Human Rights. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague
Minority Languages J. M. Y. Simpson
Various international conferences have been held on the subject of minority languages. For example, the First International Conference on Minority Languages held at Glasgow in 1980 had as its theme 'the present-day problems of minority languages, particularly those of the British Isles, The Netherlands, and Scandinavia.' The questions arise: what is a minority language and what kinds of problems does such a language face? The term presents certain difficulties of definition but it seems safe to say that a minority language will exhibit some at least of the features listed below. The problem can be summed up as the danger of the language becoming extinct.
(a) A minority language lives in the shadow of a culturally dominant language, dominant usually because of political factors, which puts the minority language at risk. Thus Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic live in the shadow of English; Breton lives in the shadow of French; Frisian in that of Dutch; and Serbian in that of German. In many cases the absolute number of speakers of the minority language is declining. (b) As a corollary to the above, a minority language is not the language of all areas of activity indulged in by its speakers. It may, for example, be excluded from formal spheres such as admin-
49
The Social Context
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
(g)
(h)
(i)
50
istration, education, or the mass media and may be confined to the home, religious life, or literature. Scottish Gaelic, for example, is (within the Gaelic-speaking area) widely used in church services but only marginally employed in other forms of public gathering, e.g., sports fixtures, political meetings, parent-teacher meetings, etc. It has no part in national government and virtually none in administrative paperwork. It is only modestly represented in the press (yet Scottish Gaelic literature flourishes). Bilingualism is a characteristic of its speakers. Thus, apart from the very young, there are virtually no monoglot speakers of Irish, Scots Gaelic, or Welsh. In the case of many minority languages, the speakers may be said to form a network rather than a community. For example, there are no urban centers that could be described as Bretonspeaking, Irish-speaking, or Scots Gaelicspeaking. Because the dominant language is used for discussing certain topics, the minority language may lack areas of vocabulary found in other languages that share the same general culture. Indeed its vocabulary may be influenced by that of the dominant language to the extent of accepting borrowings where native terms exist. There may be no standardized form of a minority language. There is, for example, no agreed standard for Scots. Similarly, conventions for such things as writing letters may be lacking. The minority language may be at risk from opponents actively dedicated to its extirpation. An early example of this is the 1616 Education Act passed by the Scottish parliament. This established schools in every parish with the object of imparting the English vernacular so that Scottish Gaelic, described as the source of all barbarity, should be 'abolisheit and remouvit.' Since knowledge of the dominant language is usually necessary for economic advancement, it may be the case that native speakers will not pass on the minority language to their children. Because the language may lack areas of vocabulary, or because there is no standard, or because speakers are completely bilingual, there may be reluctance on the part of native speakers to speak the language to learners or even to other native speakers from different dialect areas, on the grounds that differences of dialect present insurmountable barriers to mutual comprehension. Thus the minority language becomes the marker of an increasingly small in-group. Opponents of the language seize upon gaps in the vocabulary, the absence of a recognized norm, and the reluctance to speak the language to outsiders in order to demonstrate that the language is in some sense 'inferior.'
(j) The cause of a minority language may be taken up by proponents (groups or individuals) dedicated to its preservation or revival. Cymdeithas yr laith Gymraeg ('Welsh Language Society'), founded in 1962, and the Scots Language Society, founded in 1972 as the Lallans Society, are two examples. (k) Efforts to promote minority languages may include language planning or language purification in order to fill the gaps mentioned.in (e) above. Thus there are lists of technical vocabulary compiled and published for both Irish and Welsh. (1) Problems arise in education and official policy varies from country to country: the language may be banned in school; it may be taught as a subject; or it may even be the medium of instruction. (m) Historical factors may be relevant. The language may not always have been a minority one and it may therefore have possessed at least written norms that it now lacks. Hence a modern writer may incorporate usages from an earlier written language that are no longer found in any spoken variety. A curious claim sometimes made by proponents of individual minority languages is that they are 'old.' If such a description has any meaning, either it is that the language in question was established in its present location at an early date, or first written down at a relatively early date, or that it represents an alleged earlier state of historical development. It is not clear what any of these interpretations has to do with the value of a language; unfortunately, 'oldness' continually crops up as a kind of guarantee of respectability. It should be noted that what is a minority language in one country may well be the dominant language in another. Thus various dialects of German constitute a minority language in France, but Standard German is the official language of (among others) the Federal Republic of Germany. In such a situation the users of the minority language will have a standard to relate to, if they wish to avail themselves of it. See also: Linguicide; Language Loyalty; Minority Language Rights. Bibliography Oftedal M 1969 What are minorities? In: Holmestad E, Lade A J (eds.) Lingual Minorities in Europe. Det Norske Samlaget, Oslo Price G 1969 The Present Position of Minority Languages in Western Europe: A Selective Bibliography. University of Wales Press, Cardiff Simpson J M Y 1981 The challenge of minority languages. In: Haugen E, McClure J D, Thomson D S (eds.) Minority Languages Today. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Wardhaugh R 1987 Languages in Competition. Blackwell, Oxford
Minority Language Rights
Minority Language Rights R. Phillipson and T. Skutnabb-Kangas
People can be discriminated against on the grounds of their gender, class, 'race,' or language. The reality of such discrimination, and the urge to combat the injustice of it, have inspired many human rights covenants and some national legislation. Language can itself be discriminatory in several ways, or it can be used in discriminatory ways. The 'form' of the language itself, its vocabulary (or lack of vocabulary in areas of importance to dominated groups) and connotations, can be racist ('nigger') or ethnocentric ('developing' country), sexist, classist, ageist, militaristic, nationalistic, etc. Words can make some groups of people or their characteristics invisible (the rights of 'Man'), or appendices to others (lady doctor, male nurse), or stereotype them negatively ('Third' World). Language can also be used in discriminatory ways, so that some groups become invisible ('the anglophone countries of Africa' ignores the fact that the vast majority of the population in such countries have no command of English). Several professional associations and publishing houses have issued codes of linguistic conduct which instruct authors how to avoid such discriminatory language. Individuals and groups can also be discriminated against on the basis of language: how they speak (class background, geographic origin, etc.) or which language(s) they speak (or do not speak). Judgments of class background made on purportedly linguistic evidence lead to attributions of competence and moral qualities as well as to the creation of aesthetic norms and feelings of solidarity, as social psychological studies have shown. The class bias of the 'standard' language that schools inculcate has a major influence on school achievement and discriminates against many children (see Pedagogy). This article concentrates on the kinds of discrimination that speakers of minority languages, indigenous, regional, or immigrant, encounter because of their mother tongue(s) (see also Minority Languages).
1. Linguistic Rights and Human Rights
Many minority groups were granted specific protection in the treaties signed at the end of the First World War. Since 1945, within the framework of the United Nations (which has a Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities), a series of human rights covenants have been devised and ratified which attempt to provide minorities with inalienable rights. Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) declares:
In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities exist, persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language.
A major survey was conducted for the UN (Capotorti 1979) to analyze juridical and conceptual aspects of protection against discrimination, and to solicit information from governments worldwide so as to assess how minorities are treated de jure and de facto. Immigrant minorities were explicitly excluded from consideration, 'because of their voluntary assimilation' (Capotorti 1979: 10), or because they were not to be encouraged to 'form within that State separate communities which might impair its national unity or its security': they 'could not be regarded as minorities as this would endanger the national integrity of the receiving States' (Capotorti 1979: 33). These fears, which reflect a monolingual norm (see below) seem to be largely unfounded (see Joshua Fishman's comparative study of correlations between number of languages in a country, economic prosperity, social strife, and many other variables; Fishman 1989, see also Hide 1995). The Capotorti report concluded that most minorities, not least linguistic ones, were in need of much more substantial protection. It stresses the key role of education through the medium of the mother tongue for linguistic and cultural maintenance and vitality. It also interprets article 27 as imposing an obligation on states to actively promote minority languages. This presupposes that states provide adequate financial support for these languages. The UN Human Rights Committee has in a recent General Comment (6 April 1994) interpreted Art. 27 as: protecting all individuals on the state's territory or under its jurisdiction (i.e., also immigrants and refugees), irrespective of whether they belong to the minorities specified in the article or not; stating that the existence of a minority does not depend on a decision by the state but requires to be established by objective criteria; recognizing the existence of a 'right'; imposing positive obligations on the states. There is, however, abundant evidence of groups and individuals being deprived of their linguistic human rights, and that language shift occurs as a result. Many international covenants, beginning with the UN Charter, declare that discrimination should be outlawed but do not oblige states to promote minority languages. Many states in fact expect their indigenous and immigrant minorities to assimilate to the dominant culture and language (see Linguicide). 51
The Social Context 2. Action Against Linguistic Discrimination
Awareness of linguistic discrimination has led to, inter alia, several European Parliament (nonbinding) resolutions in support of minority languages, to explicit support for them in the draft Universal Declaration on Indigenous Rights, and to the Council of Europe elaborating a 'European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages' and a 'Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities' (1994, not yet in force in January 1998) where the Article covering medium of education is much more heavily qualified than any other. A draft Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights was presented to UNESCO in 1996 as a first step towards further elaboration and adoption. Its 52 wide-ranging Articles grant rights to three entities: individuals ('everyone'), language groups, and language communities. Even in this Declaration, it is clear that educational language rights, in contrast to cultural rights, are not seen as inalienable. They apply unconditionally only to language communities, and 'everyone' (individuals not members of linguistic communities or groups) has fewer rights to learning their mother tongue than members of communities have to learning any foreign language. The Declaration gives language communities very extensive rights but leaves 'everyone' with very few rights. This makes the people to be covered by the Declaration vulnerable in several respects. Many states claim that they do not have minority language communities, and do not want to grant minorities any language rights. A Declaration which gives most of the rights to linguistic communities, without specifying firm dutyholders, makes these communities completely dependent on the acceptance of their existence by states, an acceptance that many states are not willing to grant. For these reasons the existence of firm individual rights is enormously important. But such rights are the weakest part of the Declaration. The Declaration is completely unrealistic as it stands and needs a major revision. It is, however, the first major international attempt to specify universal linguistic rights. Court action can be a significant way of challenging linguistic discrimination. In the USA, a number of cases have been brought for this purpose. Significant is the case of Lau v. Nichols, in which students of Chinese ancestry claimed that the San Francisco Unified School District failed in its obligation to provide adequate education for them. The US Supreme Court ruled that 'Under these state-imposed standards there is no equality of treatment merely by providing students with the same facilities, textbooks, teachers, and curriculum; for students who do not understand English are effectively foreclosed from any meaningful education' (quoted in Center for Applied Linguistics 1977:7). Many court cases in the USA have challenged discrimination on the basis of language or dialect in education, hiring practices, and promotion.
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A case of central relevance to minority education was brought against the Norwegian state. A Sámi (called 'Lapps' in colonial language), Johan Gávppi, who knew no Norwegian when he went to school and whose teachers knew no Sámi, got little benefit from school and was illiterate until his own children taught him to read and write. He sued the Norwegian state for damages for failing to give him the basic education he was entitled to under Norwegian law. The case was deemed obsolete by all Norwegian courts and the European Commission on Human Rights but other cases may follow. This case has wide symbolic significance. If the principle is established that a minority child is entitled to financial compensation for inappropriate education, then one can envisage indigenous and immigrant minorities worldwide following suit. The relevant academic arguments were already assembled back in 1953 in an authoritative UNESCO report which considers it 'axiomatic that the best medium for teaching is the mother tongue of the pupil' and that this should be 'extended to as late a stage in education as possible.' This has been confirmed in new educational guidelines issued for the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel, The Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities & Explanatory Note (October 1996). In the section on 'Minority education at primary and secondary levels,' mainly mother tongue medium education is recommended at all levels, including bilingual teachers in the dominant language as a second language (Articles 11-13). The Recommendations are an interpretation of international human rights law (see the special issue on them, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights. Special Issue on the Education Rights of National Minorities 4:2; 1996/1997). The education of minorities is still a controversial issue. What needs stressing is that relatively little research has been conducted by minority group researchers themselves. The structure of the academic world (research financing, careers, dominant paradigms, etc.) militates against minority voices being heard (but see SkutnabbKangas 1988). 3. From Sticks to Carrots and Ideas; From Biologically Based Racism to Ethnicism and Linguicism
The means of control over all dominated groups (not just minorities) are progressively shifting from 'sticks' (physical violence) to 'carrots' (negotiation) and 'ideas' (psychological violence). Resisting the powerholders used to lead to physical punishment (an external negative sanction) and later on to shame, a guilty conscience, or a feeling of having chosen wrongly (an internal negative sanction). Submitting leads now to rewards (internal positive sanctions). Rewarding those who submit and making them feel they have made the right choice (by glorifying the dominant
Minority Language Rights language, stigmatizing dominated languages, and making the choice to drop these in favor of the dominant language seem rational), is a less expensive and more efficient way of upholding control than the use of physical violence (armies, police, etc). Making those who do not submit and achieve rewards believe that their own characteristics, deficiencies, and handicaps are to blame, ensures hegemony in a less risky way than the use of physical force. An important criterion worldwide for determining which groups obtained less than their fair share of power and resources used to be their so-called 'race.' 'Race' has, for several reasons, become an untenable criterion. It is no longer claimed that certain 'races' are more fit to rule than others. Biologically based racism as an important ideology of hierarchization has been progressively replaced by ethnicism (Mullard 1988) and linguicism (Skutnabb-Kangas 1988), which relate to cultural (rather than biological) characteristics ascribed to various ethnic groups and languages. Instead of superior races, certain ethnic groups (or cultures) and languages are now seen as fitter to rule and expand; others are to adopt their cultures and learn their languages. The characteristics attributed to these cultures and languages relate to modernization, technology, efficiency, development, Western capitalist middle-class market-oriented values, and so on. Since global market connections and the colonization of the mind of the less powerful require the use of a common language, the smaller languages are marginalized and underdeveloped. Internationally there is a hierarchy with functional differentiation between local languages and a 'world' or 'international' language (and its concomitant culture). Internally in countries which do not boast a 'world' language, local languages are increasingly confined as the traditional languages of the home and hearth, whereas the major languages are used for international instrumental roles in business, administration and politics, and also increasingly in domestic contexts (for instance, as the in-house language in transnational corporations, in higher education, in the media, etc.). These processes underlie the dramatic rise of English as an 'international' language in recent decades. Discrimination by means of language can be analyzed as a reflection of linguicism. Linguicism is defined as: ideologies, structures and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined on the basis of language (Skutnabb-Kangas 1988: 45)
Language is thus in several ways increasingly important as the instrument through which groups
with less access to power and resources are controlled. Proficiency in the colonists' language was vital for social mobility in the colonial period, and this position has generally not changed since independence. For immigrant groups, proficiency in the national language of the country of residence is regarded by the dominant group as the vital goal of education. This is so, even when there is plenty of research evidence that educating minority children through the mother tongue would be advantageous for their overall educational, cognitive, psychological, and social development and can lead to high proficiency in the dominant language (Skutnabb-Kangas 1988, Cummins 1996). Linguicism ensures that most resources, in teacher education, curriculum development, and teaching schedules are allocated to the dominant language. These structural measures are accompanied by an ideology of maximum support for the dominant language and marginalization of other languages. The latter tend to be regarded as educational handicaps rather than as resources. Education is inspired, misguidedly, by a monolingual norm. This norm implies at a societal level a belief that 'one state, one nation, one language' is a desirable and inevitable state of affairs, necessary for national unity, modernization, and progress, and that multilingualism leads to national disintegration, backwardness, inefficiency, and poverty. At an individual level monolingualism is seen as normal and healthy, and bi- or multilingualism as a temporary, negative phase on the path from monolingualism in one language (e.g., minority mother tongue) to monolingualism in another language (the majority language). The monolingual norm also implies 'either-or' thinking: either you maintain your minority mother tongue, and that means that you do not learn the majority language properly, or you want to learn the majority language, and therefore you cannot maintain your mother tongue (Skutnabb-Kangas 1996). Education inspired by this monolingual norm is organized subtractively (see Lambert 1975) for minority language speakers: they learn a major language instead of their own, not in addition to it. By contrast the foreign language learning of the dominant group is additive, they add more languages to their existing linguistic repertoire, at no cost to their mother tongue. See also: Linguicide; Minority Languages; Diglossia.
Bibliography Capotorti F 1979 Study on the Rights of Persons Belonging to Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. United Nations, New York Center for Applied Linguistics 1977 Bilingual Education. Current Perspectives. Vol. 3: Law. Center for Applied Linguistics, Arlington, VA Cummins J 1996 Negotiating Identities: Education for
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The Social Context Empowerment in a Diverse Society. California Association for Bilingual Education, Ontario, CA Eide A 1995 Economic, social and cultural rights as human rights. In: Eide A, Krause C, Rosas A (eds.) Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. A Textbook. Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, pp. 21-40 Fishman J 1989 Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Lambert W 1975 Culture and language as factors in learning and education. In: Wolfgang A (ed.) Education of Immigrant Students. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto Mullard C 1988 Racism, ethnicism and etharcy or not? The principles of progressive control and transformative change. In: Skutnabb-Kangas T, Cummins J (eds.) Min-
ority Education. From Shame to Struggle. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Skutnabb-Kangas T 1988 Multilingualism and the education of minority children. In: Skutnabb-Kangas T, Cummins J (eds.) Minority Education. From Shame to Struggle. Multilingual matters, Clevedon, UK Skutnabb-Kangas T 1996 Educational language choice— multilingual diversity or monolingual reductionism? In: Hellinger M, Ammon U (eds.) Contrastive Sociolinguistics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 175-204 Skutnabb-Kangas T, Phillipson R (eds.) 1994 Linguistic Human Rights. Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin UNESCO 1953 The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education. UNESCO, Paris
Multilingual States D. D. Laitin
A 'state' is a territorially bounded organization in the permanent business of rule. All states, at least in their early periods of development, have encompassed populations in which there are many speech communities, and therefore were in their origins multilingual states. (A multilingual individual is a person who is competent in more than one language; a multilingual state is a political entity in which there is more than one speech community.) For many states, an important component in the business of rule has been to effect language change in the population within their boundaries so that all official communication can be transacted in the language preferred by the rulers. It is possible, through individual multilingualism, to have a single official language in a multilingual state. But, historically, the imposition of a single official language has fashioned monolingual societies, which provided a cultural foundation for a 'nation-state.' A nation is a modern, socially differentiated society, in which most of the people imagine themselves to be members of a 'community.' Since uniformity of language creates an aura that all inhabitants of the state form a natural community, the homogenization of language helps to create, but is not a necessary condition for, a nation-state. Not all states become nation-states; many remain multinational, with each national community within the state relying on its own language. Societal multilingualism may persist because leaders do not seek to create language uniformity or because substantial numbers of people ref54
use to learn the language favored by the ruler. Why some states construct language uniformity within their boundaries and others do not remains an important research question in political science. Political scientists also seek to discern the consequences of different language outcomes in the process of state-building, especially for economic growth and democracy. 1. State Rationalization The nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber used the term 'rationalization' to refer to the process of efficient and orderly rule. The development of a professional civil service, with a well-specified division of labor, was for Weber the essence of rationalization in the modern state. The establishment of sharp territorial boundaries, the standardization of the calendar, of weights and measures, and the issuance of a common currency are important examples of state rationalization. A common language is a crucial element of a rationalization program. Legal uniformity is easier to assure when court decisions are delivered and recorded in a common language. Tax can be collected more efficiently and monitored more effectively if merchants all keep their books in the same language. State regulations can more efficiently be disseminated if translations are not necessary for compliance to take place. And territorial boundaries are easier to patrol if the population at the boundary speaks the language of its political center, one that is distinct from the language
Multilingual States of the population on the other side of the boundary. Given these considerations, it is not surprising that rulers of states have sought to transform their multilingual societies into nation-states through policies that can be called 'language rationalization.' Language rationalization policies usually entail the specification of a domain of language use (e.g., appeals court cases, or church sermons) and a requirement that the language of rule be employed within that domain. When rulers have established power over a territorially based speech community, they are easily able to induce some of its members to become bilingual, so as to translate documents from the language of the speech community to the language of the ruler. To the extent that political rule is stable, more and more members of the population will find it useful to learn the language of the ruling elites. Language rationalization is successful when there is a sufficient number of bilinguals among the speech communities with languages different from the official one so that the business of rule can be transacted in a single language. In many cases of successful state building, language change is greater than rationalization would demand. On the individual level, rationalization requires only 'unassimilated bilingualism,' that is to say, that individuals use the language of the ruling elites only for specified domains. But individuals can move to 'assimilated bilingualism' where they use the language of the central elites for most domains, and use the language of their speech community only for family affairs. Finally, in some populations, 'assimilation' takes place, where virtually all members of the speech community become monolingual in the language of the political center. When this occurs, a 'nation' that is commensurate with state boundaries can most easily be imagined. In the real world, there are no examples of the complete elimination of societal multilingualism. Certain minority groups retain their languages despite changes in the rest of the society; immigrant groups often retain the languages of their home area for some generations; and language shifts take place within a single language, yielding de facto multilingualism even when members of the various speech communities claim to speak the same language (e.g., Black American English). Of even greater political importance, groups that had assimilated into the language of the political center may find themselves parties to a 'language revival' movement that challenges basic assumptions as to whether the country involved really is a national state. These sorts of questions persist in politics because there are no clear divisions between unilingual and multilingual societies, or between multinational states and nation-states. Ambiguity feeds political struggle. Despite the ubiquity of minority speech communities, many states have successfully pursued language
rationalization policies. Here we shall outline the processes of rationalization in France, Spain, and Japan, and discuss the anomalous multilingualism in Switzerland, which is clearly a nation-state. 1.1 Language Rationalization in France In 1539 King Francis I issued the Edict of VillersCotterets which established Francien as the only official language of the realm. At that time many related dialects, such as Norman and Picard, had more literary prestige, but the Francien dialect was spoken in the capital and the surrounding Ile-de-France, so it was politically more attractive. There were in the King's realm a number of German, Flemish, Catalan, and Basque speech communities as well. The many languages of the southern region, collectively called 'langue d'Oc,' had long literary histories, and were not mutually intelligible with Francien. But the purpose of Francis's, edict was not to change the language repertoires of his ordinary subjects from different speech communities; rather it was to give support to a national vernacular as opposed to Latin, which was the prestige language of education and law. The language of the court immediately changed to Francien. It was not until 1762, however, when the Jesuits were expelled from France, that Francien could replace Latin in higher education. Rationalization, then, was a long but successful process. France nonetheless remained a multilingual state until the final third of the nineteenth century. As late as 1863, by official estimates, about a quarter of France's population spoke no French. The rigid centralization of administration organized by Napoleon, the rapid increase in enrollments in public education which supplanted the Catholic Church in providing basic literacy, and military conscription all worked to create in France a nation-state where virtually all citizens, in large part through sharing French as a mother tongue, imagine themselves as members of a common nation. The nation was not natural, however; it was created through policies of rationalization. 1.2 Language Rationalization in Spain Spain was multilingual when the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, presided over the final reconquest of the peninsula from Muslim rule. Castilian, Catalan, Basque, and Galician were the major languages of Spain. The Habsburg kings, following the treaties of Ferdinand and Isabella, respected regional differences in language and in law. Spain's wealth from overseas conquest, however, attracted artists and writers from all over Europe, and Castilian became a language of prestige throughout the peninsula. The literary florescence of the Golden Century (mid-sixteenth through mid-seventeenth century) induced well-to-do families throughout the country to educate their children in Castilian.
55
The Social Context It was not until 1716 and the Decree of the Nueva Planta, under Spain's first Bourbon King, Philip V, that Castilian became Spain's language for official business. A series of decrees in 1768-71 required all primary and secondary education to be in Castilian, and in 1772, all commercial establishments were required to keep their accounts in Castilian. Despite these laws, as is shown in the section on language revivals, multilingualism persists. Spain's status as a nation-state was never fully realized. 1.3 Language Rationalization in Japan Japan, because it is an island and had insulated itself so long from foreign influence, is often described as the quintessential nation-state. Yet even in Japan, regional dialects (hogen) were quite distinct. The four major hogen groups are those of Eastern Japan (known as Kanto), Western Japan, Kyushu, and Ryukyu, each with subdialects. The Japanese Alps, dividing Japan east to west, helped form the most politically significant dialect divisions. There is a considerable folklore about the deficiencies and lack of intelligibility of the eastern dialect in the west, and vice versa. Over the course of Japanese history, there were many forces which sustained language differences. The seventh-century borrowing of Chinese orthography created a division between written and spoken language which lasted over a millennium. In the Tokugawa period, the establishment of the provinces, or han, each with its own lord who blocked open communication with rival han, helped to sustain regional differences. On the other hand, the samurai, who served as the military officers for the lords, were educated through manuals that emphasized the dialect of the capital city. It was not until the Meiji period (1867) that the notion of a Japanese standard (hyojungo) emerged. The Meiji rulers, through national education programs, promoted this standard, based mainly on one of the Tokyo dialects (Yamanote) that was heavily influenced by the eastern dialect. This composite is known as Kyotsugo. Even with a century of standardization, and with extensive radio and television, Japanese linguists report that people who speak some hogen, while they can understand Kyotsugo, cannot themselves speak it. Their dialect is hardly comprehensible to Yamanote speakers. The political organization of the Japanese state created conditions so that young students from the regions would want to use Kyotsugo and deemphasize their reliance on their hogen. Japan's nation-state was therefore, at least in part, created politically; the idea that Japan enjoyed a natural condition of linguistic homogeneity is historically suspect. 1.4 Switzerland as a Multilingual State Language rationalization did not occur in Switzerland, which remains a multilingual state. Four languages—German, French, Italian, and Rom-
56
ansch—all have official status in the Swiss confederation. The key to understanding Swiss language politics is that rationalization occurred not at the political center but at the cantonal level. Swiss national identity developed over centuries, and did so without need for a common language. From the origins of the Swiss confederation in the latethirteenth century through the end of the eighteenth century, German was Switzerland's sole official language. In the sixteenth century, the confederation expanded into French- and Italian-speaking areas. The collapse of the confederation during the French Revolution and the installation by the French of the Helvetic Republic, led to the formal recognition of French and Italian. With the fall of Napoleon, however, German again became Switzerland's sole official language. Civil war erupted in the early 1820s, only to yield peace in 1848, in which German, French, and Italian were all accepted as national languages. In 1938, a constitutional amendment declared Romansch as the fourth national language, but it did not receive the same full rights as the other three Swiss languages. Despite societal multilingualism and a history of some language conflict, the imagined community of Switzerland developed without homogenization of mother tongues. Yet notions of a common Swiss culture are built upon clear notions of cantonal autonomy. Each canton is permitted to set its own language policies, and the cantons have been strong rationalizers. In 1970, 96 percent of the German Swiss lived in the German region; 92 percent of the French Swiss in the French region; and 79 percent of the Italian Swiss in the Italian region. It is extremely difficult for Swiss citizens living outside their language region to get an accredited education (public or private) through the medium of their mother tongues. Therefore migration of people across language zones has been minimal for centuries. The rationalization of language at the cantonal level is so important to Swiss national consciousness that language is one of the few areas in which the central government supports welfare redistributions. Because the Italian and Romansch areas do not have the resources to invest in higher education and television in their languages, annual subsidies have been sent to these cantons to help authorities defend their languages. The case of Switzerland demonstrates that rationalization of language is not a necessary condition for the creation of a nation-state; but it demonstrates as well how important language rationalization is to rulers, even in a country that has accepted its own language diversity. 2. Immigration and Language Rationalization
Nationalism, the ideology behind movements to build nations out of the diverse populations within states or
Multilingual States to create states to coincide with nations, has often been suspicious of mass immigration, which might threaten the cultural uniformity of the imagined community. Yet massive immigration has, with very few exceptions, led to intergenerational assimilation into the national language. This is so because immigrants leave their home areas—often escaping from poverty or persecution—in order to make a better life for themselves and their families than they could do in their own communities. Except in rare instances when an entire community uproots itself seeking to preserve its lifestyle in another country (for example, the Amish in the USA), each immigrant family finds itself in its new society seeking scarce jobs and limited opportunities. While each immigrant may want to preserve the language and culture of his/her home area, it would be better for him/her if some other immigrant family organized special schools and organized a supply of sufficient reading material to support the language. If every family is better off relying on someone else to help preserve the language, a 'collective action' problem ensues. The likelihood that the preservational activity will be organized is therefore low. Immigration, then, is rarely a threat to the national unity of the host country. Research on immigrants to the USA, European states, India, and Japan all shows that the degree of love any group has for its own language can only marginally affect the timing of intergenerational shift from monolingualism in the language of origin to monolingualism in the language of the new home. In some cases, where the immigrant group fears it might be deported (southern Indians in North India), or where the immigrant group speaks the language of the political center but not of the region of migration (Andalusians in Catalonia; Russians in Estonia), evidence shows language assimilation to be much less likely. Since the 1960s, there have been political movements in immigrant communities to use the power of the state to help immigrant communities retain their mother tongues. These movements are most often led not by the immigrants themselves but by second- and third-generation citizens who seek to solidify a political bond with their own people by generating support for a popular issue. These efforts will help support 'assimilated bilingualism,' where the descendants of immigrants retain competence, albeit limited, in their language of ethnic origin, but they will not stem the general tide of language assimilation.
3. Language Revivals Rationalization from the political center is sometimes countered by revival movements from the periphery. These movements are extremely easy to get going, in large part because language is such an emotional issue. Yet they are difficult to sustain, because while people
may vote for the revival of a language in desuetude, they may not like the idea of having their own children educated in it. It is a safer investment most of the time to educate one's children in the language of opportunity rather than in a language that is considered by the descendants of its core speech community to be one of folklore but not science. In modern European states strong revival movements have occurred in those regions where there was more economic growth in the region than in the political center. Under these conditions, an alliance could form between cultural elites who always wanted to preserve the language and the regional bourgeoisie that was interested more in international business contacts than national ones. Successful revival movements in regions of contemporary states include Catalan in Spain, Flemish in Belgium, Kannada in India, Estonian in the former Soviet Union, and French in Canada. Successful revival movements in countries that overcame colonial rule to become independent countries include Somali in Somalia, Hebrew in Israel, and Finnish in Finland/ Unsuccessful revival movements include the Celtic languages in the UK, Alsatian and the d'Oc languages in France, Maithili in India, and the indigenous languages in most newly independent African countries. A particularly long and involved revival movement supporting Landsmaol in Norway had mixed results. The successful revival movements teach us that apparently stable nation-states need not remain officially monolingual. Like Switzerland, countries can develop bases other than language to imagine themselves a community. Yet these revival movements also show us that when rationalization weakens at the center, the pressure for uniformity becomes even stronger in the region. Proposed language laws in Quebec, Catalonia, and Karnataka (where Kannada is the official language) have been far harsher in demanding uniformity than were usually the case in the states from which these regions sought autonomy.
4. Late Development and Stable Multilingualism In states whose boundaries were settled before the nineteenth century, language rationalization was the norm. Here France, the UK, Spain, Sweden, Japan, and China are the principal examples. In Germany and Italy, following the successful nation-state models of their neighbors, nationalism meant political unification to make the language-based nation and the state commensurate. The ideology of the nation-state was so powerful that the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire was organized largely along linguistic lines. Nearly all states in Europe after World War I (except for Switzerland and Russia/Soviet Union) 57
The Social Context were, at least until language revival movements arose, officially monolingual. 4.1 The Former Soviet Union as a Multilingual State European Russia might have broken up into monolingual states like the Austro-Hungarian empire if it too had lost the war. But the Soviet government was able, until 1991, to retain control over a state with over 100 languages. Like France and Spain, the former Soviet Union achieved a remarkable degree of rationalization, with high percentages of the population of all regions having become competent Russian speakers. The business of central rule could take place entirely through the medium of Russian. But like Switzerland, there were 14 Union Republics outside of the Russian Republic, each with its own official language. The 'titular' nationals who are the majority population in these republics have instituted language rationalization programs. Among the citizens who speak former Union Republic languages, there was considerable resistance to the learning of Russian. Whether there exists an imagined community among these now-independent republics that can override language differences remains to be seen (see also Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union). 4.2 Rationalization in Settler Colonies In the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and North and South America, the language of the settlers dominated the language of the autochthonous populations, who were excluded from political representation in the period of state formation. Only in the case of Paraguay has an autochthonous language (Guarani) taken on an important official role. There have been language revival movements elsewhere, but none with any important success. The settler colonies followed the pattern of early developers. 4.3 The Postcolonial Multilingual State Countries that achieved political independence after World War II have established a new norm, that of the multilingual state. Two factors account for the establishment of the norm of multilingualism for the postcolonial states. First, by the twentieth century, an essential part of the business of rule was to provide public education to all citizens. Heads of state were no longer just interested in efficient extraction of taxes or in the basic provision of infrastructure (e.g., roads and irrigation systems). A highly literate population became associated with economic growth and political power. Ministers of education in multilingual societies recognized the near impossibility of providing literacy in a single language, and they pressed for state recognition of language diversity. A second factor which helped sustain multilingualism in these late-developing states has to do with the colonial experience. Countries in Africa and Asia had, under colonial rule, modern bureaucracies
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before they had political independence. These bureaucracies operated in the colonial language. Students from the colony who were able to learn the colonial language got positions of power and prestige in large part due to their language competence. Once these countries received independence, these bureaucrats were essential to implement the policies of the new nationalist leaders. Yet they had an interest in maintaining the colonial language as the language of administration and higher education. Leading bureaucrats overemphasize the difficulties and political inequalities that would result from the choice of an indigenous language as the sole official language of government. This bureaucratic pressure has made the choice of a single official language quite difficult. A standard compromise has been to rely on the colonial language as official, but to elevate one or more indigenous languages as national, and to have them play a symbolic role in political life. 4.4 India and the 3 + 1 Language Outcome India is a postcolonial multilingual state that is not moving toward rationalization or to linguistic uniformity. During its independence struggle, the Congress Party leaders assumed that upon achieving independence, some form of Hindi should be India's official language. But the Indian Administrative Service and other bureaucratic agencies operated entirely in English, the language of colonial rule. Officials in these agencies had a strong interest in preserving English as the language of administration. Although the Indian constitution called for the imposition of Hindi as the All-Union language 15 years after independence, opposition from bureaucrats and from citizens in non-Hindi-speaking areas indefinitely delayed the change. Consequently, there are now two AllUnion languages, each of which can be used for official dealings within the Indian state. Meanwhile, during the 1950s, citizen pressures at the regional levels compelled the government to redraw federal boundaries consistent with language zones. Each state has an official language today, and most of them are zealously pursuing language rationalization policies within their states. By one official measure, as of 1980, only 2.7 percent of the Indian population has as its primary language a language different from the official language of their state. The Indian constitution, however, assures all minorities the right to an education in their own language." India thus has a multilingual state in which citizens who wish to have a broad range of mobility opportunities must learn 3 + 1 languages. English and Hindi are necessary languages for communicating with the central state. It is necessary as well to speak the language of the state in which you live. This makes for a 3 language outcome. A citizen of Tamil Nadu must learn English, Hindi, and Tamil to be able to operate in a wide range of activities within India.
Multilingual States Those citizens who live in states where Hindi or English is the official language need learn only 3—1 or 2 languages. Citizens who are language minorities in some states (e.g., Marathi speakers in Karnataka) must learn 3+1 languages: Hindi, English, Marathi, and Kannada. Thus, there is a range from 2 to 4 (i.e., 3+1) languages that citizens must know. The result has become accepted by most groups in India, and therefore it is probable that India will remain a multilingual state (see Indian Language Education Policy). 4.5 Other Postcolonial States Many other postcolonial countries, including Nigeria, Zaire, Kenya, and the Philippines, may follow India's track, with a colonial and an indigenous language sharing central stage in the business of rule. In others, such as Algeria and Zimbabwe, the colonial language will remain as a lingua franca, but not at the expense of the continued official reliance on indigenous languages, at least on the regional level. Some postcolonial states, such as Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Tanzania, and Somalia, are on the road toward rationalization. The situation in these countries remains fluid and merits continued observation.
5. Political Implications of State Multilingualism Throughout this discussion state multilingualism was considered as an outcome of social, economic, and political processes. Political scientists and sociologists have also studied multilingualism as a causal factor explaining political and economic outcomes. This research is not fully developed, and clear patterns have not been specified. 5.1 Multilingual States and Economic Growth Simple correlational studies have shown that multilingual states are less advanced economically than linguistically unified states. However, these correlations are spurious, because so many early developers have become linguistically unified and so many late developers are multilingual. The causal variable here seems to be timing of development rather than level of multilingualism. It is known that multilingualism is not a barrier to economic dynamism, as can be seen in from Switzerland. But the precise role of language diversity for economic dynamism remains to be specified. 5.2 Multilingual States and Democracy Political science approaches to democratic theory originally emphasized the importance of language uniformity for democratic stability. It was thought that because democracy requires public participation in
open debate this would be difficult to sustain when citizens are unable to communicate effectively with each other. More recent models of democracy, sometimes termed consociational, suggest that decentralized systems, in which each language community has considerable autonomy, are a viable form of democracy. Belgium and Switzerland are used as models for decentralized democracies. Since the 1970s, with the Catalan and Basque languages in postFranco Spain, and with French in Quebec, it can be seen that while multilingual states may suffer considerable tensions in managing democracies, multilingualism itself does not preclude democratic stability. While rationalization of language may have some association with democracy, the process of rationalization necessarily entails the curtailment of minority rights. The suppression of Welsh in Britain, of Catalan in Spain, and of Alsatian in France was not done in a democratic spirit. Leaders promoting similar decrees seeking to rationalize Amharic in Ethiopia and Malay in Malaysia have been accused of contravening basic democratic rights of minorities. In twentieth-century state-building, democrats will be compelled to adjust to multilingualism; they will not, in most cases, be able to rationalize language in their states through democratic procedures.
Bibliography Anderson B 1983 Imagined Communities. Verso, London Deutsch K W 1953 Nationalism and Social Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Haugen E I 1966 Language Conflict and Language Planning. The Case of Modern Norwegian. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Kirkland M (ed.) 1990 Language Planning in the Soviet Union. St. Martin's Press, New York Laitin D 1977 Politics, Language and Thought The Somali Experience. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Laitin D 1988 Language games. Comparative Politics 20:289-302 Laitin D 1989a Linguistic revival: Politics and culture in Catalonia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31(2): 297-317 Laitin D 1989b Language policy and political strategy in India. Policy Sciences 22(3-4): 415-36 Lieberson S 1981 Language Diversity and Language Contact. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA McRae K 1983 Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies Switzerland. Wilfred Laurier University Press. Waterloo, Ontario McRae K 1986 Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies Belgium. Wilfred Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario Pool J 1986 Optimal strategies in linguistic games. In: Fishman J A et al. (eds.) The Fergusonian Impact, vol. 2. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin Weinstein B 1983 The Civic Tongue. Longman, New York
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The Social Context
Multilingualism C. B. Paulston
Multilingualism is here defined as the presence and use of two (bilingualism) or more languages within a modern nation state. Classical diglossia (Ferguson 1959), where two dialects of the same language coexist in functional distribution, and where there are no native speakers of the prestige dialect (H form), constitutes a special case of bilingualism (see Diglossia). The social meaning of languages in multilingual settings is not necessarily different from the social meaning of standard language and dialectal variation in monolingual settings. 1. Introduction Bi/multilingualism holds an enduring interest for scholars from many disciplines. Linguists are interested in multilingualism for the historical changes of the languages in contact and for the insight bilingualism may give on the process of language acquisition; psychologists study the relationship of bi/multilingualism to intelligence and cognition, to personality and sense of self, to motivation and achievement; sociologists seek to understand questions of the relationship between multilingualism and sociodemographic factors like language shift and its causes, between language and occupational patterns in multilingual situations, the role of national languages (see National Language), etc. Educators take an interest because they have to deal with the practical concerns which are involved in teaching children in multilingual settings. The focus of scholarly work on bi/multilingualism may then take various forms: (a) language(s) may form the primary unit of research; (b) the bilingual individual may be seen as the focus of investigation; or (c) bilingualism may be seen as a characteristic of social or ethnic groups. The specific focus follows from the questions asked about bilingualism and from the conceptual framework chosen in answering them. Few areas of study so intertwine theoretical issues and practical concerns, and much of the theoretical interest surrounding bi/multilingualism is the result of the practical problems educators are facing in schooling children in a second language (L2) (see Second Language Learning). 2. Group Multilingualism Most linguistic definitions of bi/multilingualism involve the competence of the individual (Bloomfield 1933; Weinreich 1953; Hornby 1977). Others are concerned about group bi/multilingualism which may be unofficial, as in the USA, or official and institutional, as in Canada, where institutional bilingualism grants 60
each citizen the right to use the official language of his or her choice in dealing with the Federal Government. Institutional bi/multilingualism does not entail that all individuals are bilingual, but often the opposite with only a small group serving as brokers between the two groups. So, for example, in multilingual Switzerland, German-speaking Swiss do not typically also speak French, Italian, or Rhetoromance (Romansch). In discussing group bilingualism, Gaarder (1977) makes the crucial distinction between elitist bilingualism and folk bilingualism. Elitist bilingualism is the hallmark of intellectuals and the learned in most societies as well as of upper-class membership as in Western Europe. It is a matter of choice. Folk bilingualism, on the other hand, is the result of ethnic groups in contact and competition within a single state, where one of the peoples becomes bilingual involuntarily in order to survive. National concern and interest in multilingualism typically involves folk bilingualism, since elitist bilingualism rarely presents any problems on the national level. (There are of course exceptions: the Sanskritization of Hindi and consequent failure of Indian language planning can be seen as a consequence of elite bilingualism.) 3. Languages of Wider Communication Most nations in the world are multilingual, that is, they contain ethnic groups in contact within their borders. Even Europe, considered frequently the one nation-one language ideal, has only two monolingual countries, Iceland and Portugal. In addition to multilingualism within nation states, one needs also to consider the larger federations like the former USSR and the People's Republic of China, where demographic factors lead to the development of lingua francas or LWCs (Languages of Wider Communication; Fishman 1971) as a means of communication between peoples of mutually unintelligible languages. The former Soviet Union had Russian as an LWC and there was much pragmatic concern over its dissemination in the vast federation. China uses intrastate pu tong hua, a reformed version of Mandarin, as its LWC after a very lengthy process of language planning. China has also gone through a protracted process of changing the interstate official LWC from Russian to English with the retooling of teachers, new curricula, and textbooks; this process illustrates another function of LWCs, that of international communication. The world has always needed international languages, and the Western world has during the last two millennia seen a succession from Greek to Latin to French to English.
Multilingualism Such a generally accepted world language is a matter of expediency and practicality, but in one sense, it is really only in the twentieth century with advances in modern technology of communication and travel that one can truly speak of a world language. There are many factors which contribute to the status of a LWC but one common factor is the prestige and power of its speakers. There are many bases for prestige and power, but the most common are military, political, and economic, and English forms no exception. The development of English as a world language can be traced to World War II, which ended with victory for the Allied Forces. Other major factors were ex-colonial British influence, American technological advances, and the state of the world economy. Even after prestige and power have passed from its native speakers, one may speculate that English is likely to remain as an international language because of the enormous investment of effort and money in English as a world language. In the late twentieth century English has more non-native than native speakers (Fishman et al. 1977). 4. Ethnic Groups in Contact In order to understand multilingualism within nation states, one needs to understand the relationship of ethnic groups of which multilingualism is the direct result. As Schermerhorn points out, 'the probability is overwhelming that when two groups with different cultural histories establish contacts which are regular rather than occasional or intermittent, one of the two groups will typically assume dominance over the other,' (1970: 68), and he says elsewhere that it is the nature of this dominance which is the major factor in ethnic relations (1972:379). The central question, then, in research in ethnic relations (immediate causal factor of groups' multilingual status) is 'what are the conditions that foster or prevent the integration of ethnic groups into their environing societies?' (1970:14.) Schermerhorn sees three causal factors as determining the nature of the relationship between ethnic groups and the process of integration into the environing society. The first refers to the origin of the contact situation between 'the subordinate ethnic and dominant groups, such as annexation, migration, and colonization'; the second to 'the degree of enclosure (institutional separation or segmentation) of the subordinate group or groups from the society-wide network of institutions and associations'; and the third to 'the degree of control exercised by dominant groups over access to scarce resources by subordinate groups in a given society' (1970:15). 5. Language Maintenance and Shift Ethnic groups within a nation state, given opportunity and incentive, typically shift to the language of the dominant group. Voluntary migration, especially of individuals and families, results in the most rapid shift,
of which the great immigration countries of America, Australia, and Canada give evidence. Annexation and colonialization, where entire groups are brought into a nation with their social institutions of marriage and kinship, religious and other belief and value systems still more or less intact, tend to result in much slower shift, if at all. Such groups are also likely to be exposed to higher degrees of enclosure and control with concomitant strife and conflict, which often becomes expressed through language conflict. The 1976 Soweto riots in South Africa, in which many black students were killed, concerned a change of medium of instruction in the schools from English to Afrikaans, neither of which language was native to the students, but Afrikaans had become a symbol of apartheid and hated oppression. Schermerhorn also posits three contextual variables which modify the effect of the independent variables of which the most important for students of multilingualism is the agreement or disagreement between dominant and subordinate groups on collective goals for the latter, such as assimilation or pluralism. He then makes the distinction between assimilation, which is cultural, and incorporation, which is sociostructural. Economic incorporation of an ethnic group with access to the goods and services of a nation is the common goal of minority groups and the most common reason for the recent migrations in Europe (some also claim religious freedom or refugee status). Economic incorporation is different from cultural assimilation and the giving up of values and beliefs, but it is primarily to the perception of forced assimilation that strife over language policies in multilingual nations becomes tied. If economic incorporation necessitates, as it mostly does, learning the official language, ethnic minority groups do learn it, frequently with consequent language shift and certainly often with assimilation to the dominant culture. But what is not generally recognized is that language maintenance is not a necessary condition for maintaining culture and ethnicity, as Lopez (1976) documents for the Chicanos in Los Angeles. It is possible for groups to maintain their own ethnic culture even after language shift, as with groups like the English Gypsies and many Amerindian tribes. Language shift in multilingual nations only takes place if there are opportunities and incentives to learn the national language. Such opportunities of access would include participation in social institutions like universal schooling, exogamy, military service and religious institutions; access to mass media like television; demographic factors like urbanization, etc. There are many kinds of incentives, but the two major ones are economic advantage, primarily in the form of source of income, and social prestige. Without rewards, language learning is not salient. Sometimes language shift is held to be problematic (Quebec),
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The Social Context sometimes it is encouraged as national policy (France), sometimes it is resisted by ethnic groups (Catalonia), but it is invariably to the social factors one must look to understand what happens with multilingualism within a nation state. Where shift does not take place, it is for three major reasons: (a) self-imposed boundary maintenance (Barth 1969), always for reasons other than language, most frequently religion, like the Amish and the orthodox Jewish Hassidim; (b) externally imposed boundaries, usually in the form of denied access to goods and services, especially jobs; and (c) a diglossic-like situation where the two languages exist in functional distribution where each language has its specified purpose and domain. Although most ethnic minority groups within a nation do shift language, they will vary in their degree of ethnic maintenance and in their rate of shift. Some causal factors can be identified. For example, in Pittsburgh (USA) the Greeks' shift over a four-generation span compared with the threegeneration shift of the Italians. Factors contributing to the slower Greek shift were: (a) knowledge and access to a standardized, written Greek language with cultural prestige and tradition, which is taught by the Greek churches in Pittsburgh; (b) arranged marriage partners directly from Greece (who then are monolingual in Greek). The Italians in contrast spoke a nonstandard, nonwritten dialect of Italian with no prestige, and they shared their Roman Catholic churches with the English-speaking Irish, typically with Irish priests and nuns, so they found no language maintenance support in the churches. Nor was there any pressure for endogamy as long as the marriage was within the Roman Catholic Church. Important features in supporting prolonged language maintenance are marriage patterns of endogamy, a prestigious language with a literary tradition, and access to a social institution with formal instruction, that is, literacy in the original mother tongue, a very important feature. Ethnic groups also vary in, quite vaguely, ethnic pride or ethnic stubbornness in culture maintenance even after they have shifted language and become socially incorporated into a nation. Alba says in the preface to his book about Catalonia: 'Catalonia is not especially notable for anything except its persistence— its stubbornness in existing despite the most adverse conditions' (1975:ii). The survival of Catalan exemplifies the notion of stubbornness, as Alba calls it, in group maintenance. Groups also vary in group adhesion and there is wide intragroup variation in members' attitudes toward language maintenance and cultural assimilation (see Language Loyalty). 6. Language Problems and Language Policies
With ethnic groups in contact and competition within multilingual nations, certain problems arise and must be considered. Language planning which does not
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consider the social context of language problems, and especially the forces which contribute to language maintenance and shift, is not likely to be successful. Language choice is one of the major language problems, whether it be choice of national language (as in Finland and Israel), choice of national alphabet (as in Somalia), or choice of medium of instruction (as in Norway, or indeed, most multilingual nations). In Israel, social conditions and religious attitudes toward Hebrew and the Promised Land made possible the rebirth of Hebrew and its implementation as a national language; Israel serves as an example of social forces facilitating national language planning. In contrast, Peru, during the Velasco government, in May 1975, officialized Quechua and Aymara as national languages with resounding failure of implementation. In Peru, as in much of Latin America, race is defined primarily by cultural attributes, and to embrace Quechua would be to declare oneself Indian with all the accompanying socioeconomic stigmatization. Such planning held no hope of successful implementation and Peru serves as an example of language planning which goes counter to existing sociocultural forces. Language can be seen as a resource which is available to ethnic groups in their competition for access to the goods and services of a nation. The case study of Bangladesh documents how an ethnic group, the East Bengal Muslims, when they perceived such action best suited to their purposes and demands,- claimed religious status and identity and Pakistani nationalism; later they claimed linguistic-ethnic nationalism and separatism and independent status for Bangladesh founded on religiolinguistic identity. Throughout the course of the twentieth century, language and religion have been resources variously utilized in the battle for survival in a harsh world. Other ethnic groups are not very different in this respect from the Bengalis. When they see that learning the national language well and fluently is in the best interest of their children (and there are social institutions available like the schools and the church, which can help them do so), there are very few problems associated with the educational policies for minority groups. Within the single city state of Singapore, with her four official languages and three major religions, there is no sign of ethnic strife or major educational problems. Because of Singapore's very strong and expanding economy there is enough of the good of this life for everybody, and competition takes place on the basis of individual qualities, not along ethnic lines. But when these same ethnic groups see, instead of socioeconomic opportunity, stigmatization, economic exploitation, and systematic unemployment, they are likely to use the original mother tongue as a strategy for mobilization. Language boundary maintenance reinforced with religion is an even stronger tool, a process which the Turks in Europe have frequently followed.
Socialization The most visible (and the most costly) problem which accompanies multilingualism is the educational policy of mother-tongue medium of instruction. There is no general scholarly consensus based on research findings, and most policy decisions are political in nature. See also: Bilingualism, Societal; National Language Education Policy. Bibliography Alba V 1975 Catalonia: A Profile. Praeger, New York Barth F 1969 Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Allen and Unwin, London Bloomfield L 1933 Language. Henry Holt, New York Ferguson C A 1959 Diglossia. Word 15: 325-40 Fishman J A 1971 National languages and languages of wider communication in the developing nations. In: Whiteley W (ed.) Language Use and Social Change. Oxford University Press, London
Fishman J A, Cooper R L, Conrad A W (eds.) 1977 The Spread of English. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Gaarder B 1977 Language maintenance or language shift. In: Mackey W F, Andersson T (eds.) Bilingualism in Early Childhood. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Hornby P A 1977 Bilingualism: Psychological, Social and Educational Implications. Academic Press, New York Lopez D E 1976 Chicano language loyalty in an urban setting. Sociology and Social Research 62:267-78 Schermerhorn R A 1970 Comparative Ethnic Relations: A Framework for Theory and Research. Random House, New York Schermerhorn R A 1972 Towards a general theory of minority groups. Cited in Verdoodt A 1972 The differential impact of immigrant French speakers on indigenous German speakers: A case study in the light of two theories. In: Fishman J A (ed.) Advances in the Sociology of Language, Part II. Mouton, The Hague Weinreich U 1953 Languages in Contact. Linguistic Circle of New York, New York
Socialization C. B. Cazden
Socialization is the process of internalization through which human beings become members of particular cultures, learning how to speak as well as how to act and think and feel. The term 'language socialization' is used more often for the primary socialization that takes place during childhood within the family (for which Schieffelin and Ochs 1986, is the best short review); but it should also refer to secondary socializations throughout life to specialized forms and uses of language in school, community, and work settings. Language socialization is a more inclusive term than language acquisition, emphasizing pragmatic as well as syntactic and semantic competence; it is the preferred term in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and culturally oriented psychology. 1. Relationships between Language and Socialization Language relates to socialization in three ways. First, language is the primary medium for socialization into culture; that is, there is socialization by or through language, where language is the means. Second, there is socialization for language, where situation-specific and culture-specific language use is the outcome. Third, there is socialization about language in the form of knowledge about, and attitudes toward, language forms and functions. While these three aspects of socialization occur together in real life, they
are often studied separately, and by different research techniques. 2. Socialization through Language Language plays an especially important role in socialization because it is such a pervasive and orderly feature of everyday life in every culture (Sapir 1962). Three characteristics of language contribute to this role: its propositional nature makes possible explicit cultural instruction; its reference to the non-here-andnow permits the sharing of memories and knowledge of the past, plans for the future, and imagined worlds; its indexicality means that units of language, such as terms of address or speaking one dialect rather than another, point to culturally interpreted aspects of the nonverbal world. (Ochs 1990 discusses this last, and more subtle, relationship.) 3. Socialization for Language Learning to speak is never simply a matter of learning a particular language or dialect—i.e., the words, syntactic patterns, and accent spoken in a particular community; it also involves learning multiple registers, that is, particular ways of using language in particular settings within that community. When one shifts registers, one also often shifts what one is talking about, and the values and beliefs implicit
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The Social Context in those words. For this reason, Gee uses the term 'discourses' for 'forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities' (1996:127; see Discourse). He then distinguishes primary and secondary discourses (including literacy in the latter), and also dominant and nondominant discourses according to their social prestige and power (see Literacy). Even young children exhibit some register variation—for example, by speaking differently to adults or their peers (reviewed in Andersen 1990). For most people, secondary socialization in additional registers continues into adulthood, as they acquire new ways of speaking in new roles. Examples include the nearly universal, but culturally expressed, roles of student (Cazden 1988) or parent (Snow and Ferguson 1977); professions such as doctor or lawyer (Philips 1982); age-specific rhetorical styles such as 'the talk of the elders of bygone days' in Mexicano communities in the southwestern USA (Briggs 1986); and occasional oral tasks like chairing meetings, or conducting sociolinguistically appropriate interviews in a particular speech community (Briggs 1986). Most research on language socialization is ethnographic. But experimental situations such as role playing can reveal register knowledge for roles never enacted in reality. Andersen (1990) provides both a research review of such knowledge in children, and a report of experimental research in which 4- to 7-yearold children gave a doctor puppet lower pitch and more imperatives and questions when talking to a nurse, and gave the nurse more polite requests to the doctor. 4. Socialization about Language Socialization about language includes both knowledge and attitudes. One kind of metapragmatic knowledge is evidenced in the way speech is reported in narrative. Whereas 7- and 10-year-old children frame direct speech, usually with 'said,' 4-year-olds often provide no verbal framing but sometimes differentiate voices by pitch (Hickman 1985). Other kinds of knowledge become important when children enter school and confront the task of learning to read (see Pedagogy). Where alphabetic orthographies are used, learners must become aware of the sounds in oral language and their relationship to letters; and even teachers, whose mental representation of language has been influenced by experience with written texts, may have to learn to distinguish the number of phonemes in a word from the number of letters. As with oral language, 'literacy socialization' is a more inclusive term than 'literacy acquisition': while the latter may refer only to learning to encode, decode, and comprehend print; the former points also to uses of reading and writing for different purposes in different settings.
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Attitudes toward language can often be inferred from observations of which forms available in an environment are in fact learned, and from spontaneous comments about other people's oral or written language use. More systematic study of language attitudes requires more experimental techniques, often by social psychologists. One widely used technique is the matched guise in which subjects evaluate messages spoken in different languages or dialects but, unknown to the subjects, by a single speaker. 5. Environmental Influences on Language Socialization There is general agreement that primary socialization occurs through participation, and through interaction between children and more mature speakers, both adults and peers. In fact, family and community settings for the virtually universally successful process of language socialization are often cited as the prototype of effective learning environments. While implicit immersion in language-related activities is certainly crucial, there is also evidence that more explicit tuition also occurs, for example, in elicited imitation routines found in many cultures in which an adult will direct a child to say a word or phrase (Ochs 1990). How secondary socializations can be aided in school is less clear, and educational controversies continue over the most effective combination of implicit immersion and explicit instruction. Heath (1983) gives a vivid picture of primary socialization in three communities that differ in race and social class, and an optimistic report of how teachers adapted their teaching for more effective secondary language socialization in school—including getting learners to 'become ethnographers' and study language use themselves. In the study of language socialization, gender differences in ways of speaking—sometimes referred to as genderlects—are especially interesting because most children are exposed to both men's and women's speech during their primary socialization. Differential socialization cannot, therefore, be explained by differential exposure (Warren-Leubecker and Bohannon 1989). 6. Socialization and Resistance Many writers on language socialization imply that language socialization is always successful as long as the learning environment is at least minimally adequate. But resistance does occur. Familiar examples are immigrant children resisting speaking the language of their primary socialization at home, if the language of the school is also the language of the wider society, or nondominant dialect speakers resisting speaking a standard dialect despite its availability at school and on television. Writing about the more general field of the socialization of cognition Goodnow (1990:280) states: 'I
Sociolinguistics seek an account of socialization that goes beyond saying that the individual must be regarded as agent or actor, or that influences are bidirectional... [E]ven if much of one's life is spent in puppet fashion, there remain at least the occasional times when one notices the strings and decides to cut them.' Of all forms of learning, language is closest to one's social and individual identity; and that identity helps to account for both resistance and learning, and is also their result. In Sapir's words, 'In spite of the fact that language acts as a socializing and uniformizing force, it is at the same time the most potent single known factor for the growth of individuality' (1962:19). See also: Intercultural Discourse. Bibliography Andersen E S 1990 Speaking with Style: The Sociolinguistic Skills of Children. Routledge, London Briggs C L 1986 Learning to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Cazden C B 1988 Classroom Discourse. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH Gee J P 1996 Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. Taylor & Francis, London Goodnow J L 1990 The socialization of cognition. In: Stigler
J W, Shweder R A, Herdt G (eds.) Cultural PsychologyEssays In Comparative Human Development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Heath S B 1983 Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hickmann M 1985 Metapragmatics in child language. In: Mertz E, Parmenter (eds.) Semiotic Mediation Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives. Academic Press, Orlando, FL Ochs E 1990 Indexicality and socialization. In: Stigler J W, Shweder R A, Herdt G (eds.) Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Philips S U 1982 The language socialization of lawyers: Acquiring the cant. In: Spindler G (ed.) Doing the Ethnography of Schooling. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York Sapir E 1962 In: Mandelbaum D G (ed.) Culture, Language, and Personality: Selected Essays. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Schieffelin B, Ochs E 1986 Language socialization. Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 163-91 Snow C E, Ferguson C A (eds.) 1977 Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Warren-Leubecker A, Bohannon J N 1989 Pragmatics: Language in social contexts. In: Gleason J B (ed.) The Development of Language, 2nd edn. Merrill, Columbus, OH
Sociolinguistics D. R. Preston
The relevance of Sociolinguistics to second language acquisition (SLA) is twofold: First, it is concerned with the variation of language itself—the product, process, storage, and acquisition of such variation, including the variation learners acquire in a target language. That concern is surveyed in Sect. 1—Quantitative Microsociolinguistics. Second, it concerns itself with sociocultural and social psychological aspects of language, again including those involved in the acquisition and use of other languages. That concern is surveyed in Sect. 2 1. Quantitative Microsociolinguistics 1.1 The Labovian Paradigm A central claim of this approach is that the alternative forms of variable linguistic elements do not occur randomly. The frequency of their occurrences is predicted (a) by the shape and identity of the element itself and its linguistic context, (b) by the stylistic level
of the interaction, and (c) by the social identities and relationships of the interlocutors. The first attempt to apply this style of analysis to SLA data was very likely Dickerson (1974). Figure 1 shows the sensitivity of Japanese learners' pronunciations of English /r/ to the phonological environment. Before low vowels ( V10), the pronunciation is fairly accurate (around 75 percent); before mid vowels ( Vmid), however, it drops to around 45 percent accuracy, and before high vowels ( V hi ), it is categorically wrong. The shape of variable /r/ in the Japanese learner's English is dramatically predicted by the phonological environment. The predictability of the different realizations of a linguistic variable is often expressed in terms of a variable rule, one aspect of which allows the degree of influence of each determining factor to be expressed as an independent probability. This style of analysis is used by Bayley (1990) to show the influence of linguistic, stylistic, and social factors on Chinese lear-
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The Social Context
Figure 1. Percentage of acceptable pronunciations or English /r/ in three environments by a Japanese learner (Fasold 1984: 250; adapted from Dickerson and Dickerson 1977:20).
ner's deletion of final t/d (in such clusters as mist, left, and walked). These probability scores are to be read as follows: those above 0.50 have a promoting effect on the rule; those below 0.50 have an inhibiting effect. (Here the rule is of t/d deletion; it could have as well been one of t/d retention, reversing the probabilities.) Like Dickerson's work, Bayley's shows that the following phonological environment is significant: vowels and pauses inhibit t/d deletion; consonants, liquids, and glides promote it. The stylistic dimension is also important in quantitative sociolinguistic work. The less monitored a performance, the more natural and governed by earlylearned rules it will be. Labov (see Labov, William) refers to this stylistic level as the vernacular and to the difficulties inherent in eliciting it in such potentially inhibiting settings as tape-recorded interviews as the 'observer's paradox.' Nonvernacular styles usually reveal not only a greater density of speech community prestige forms but also later-learned and less systematically applied rules (Labov 1972: 208-09). To tease out stylistic variety, sociolinguists have employed minimal pairs, word lists, reading passages, and techniques which promote various degrees of attention to speech in spontaneous talk. Table 1 shows Table I. Word-final t/d deletion probabilities (in consonant clusters) in Chinese learner-English (adapted from Bayley 1990:8). Following segment:
Style: Social network:
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Vowel Pause Glide Consonant or liquid Reading Elicited narrative Conversation Chinese Chinese and American
0.40 0.45 0.55 0.60 0.30 0.53 0.67 0.39 0.61
Bayley's elicitation of the stylistic continuum at three points; his respondents read a set passage, recited a narrative (the story line of which was familiar to them), and engaged in spontaneous conversation. The least-monitored form of the language learners' performance ought to reveal the interlanguage vernacular, and, indeed, these respondents increase t/d deletion in their least-monitored style (0.67) and decrease it in their most heavily-monitored one (0.30). The stylistic continuum is represented in several SLA accounts of learner variation. Krashen's monitor model, for example, Krashen 1987, turns the continuum into a two-way distinction, suggesting that some few, easily-represented rules are the result of conscious activity (learning) but that most rules, difficult to describe, are the result of nonconscious activity (acquisition). In performance, Krashen claims, learners do not have sufficient time to monitor the learned rules, and their systems fail. Native speaker studies, however, have been little concerned with the monitoring of overtly learned rules. Even the most carefully-monitored (or 'formal') end of the stylistic continuum results from the application of rules which native speakers lack metalinguistic awareness of. From this perspective, monitoring refers to general attention to speech, not to attempts to retrieve consciously formulated rules. It is true, however, that native speakers, particularly in unfamiliar and/or status-ridden settings, may attempt to monitor ancient secondary school prescriptions or other shibboleths (e.g., who versus whom), and a relatively small number of such often socially damaging stereotypes exist in every speech community. Krashen may believe that an even greater number of rules have just such status for the language learner. Since it is only dichotomous, however, the monitor theory provides no explicit account of variation within both learned and acquired sets of rules nor does it appear to allow learned items to permeate the area reserved for acquired ones. In contrast, the continuous competence SLA model, for example, Tarone 1982, suggests that the stylistic continuum of the language acquirer operates much like that of the native speaker. The more attention the learner pays to speech, the more prestige forms are likely to occur (where prestige forms are construed to be target language forms or learners' understandings of what those forms are). Tarone's characterization of what style is, however, borrows heavily from the operational devices used to elicit this dimension rather than from its underlying causes (e.g., degree of formality). Stylistic fluctuation, in her account, is due to the degree of monitoring or attention to form, and varying degrees of attention to form are by-products of the amount of time which various language tasks allow the language user for monitoring (e.g., writing perhaps the most, spon-
Sociolinguistics taneous conversation the least). This variation, however, all takes place for the language acquirer within only one envelope.of performance or register; language learners, at least those in the early stages, are monoregistral. Only more advanced learners acquire different registers which entail such matters as genre and other complex norms of interaction and use which, in turn, contribute to the positioning of a task on the stylistic continuum. Perhaps just some such distinction is at work in the data reported by Bayley in Table 1. The operational realization of the stylistic dimension is satisfactorily explained by the notion that greater monitoring leads to more target-like performance (presumably the retention of t/d/ in final clusters). Oddly, however, the respondents whose network associations show greater contact with native speakers also show an increase of t/d/ deletion (0.61). This apparent contradiction may be explained in the following way: the respondents with low network associations with native speakers have a single register of performance, something which might be called the learner register. In it, absolute t/d realization is the target norm, and t/d/ deletion is the learner vernacular. (The sources of the latter may include Chinese syllable structure, universal preferences for syllable structure, stage of learning, and other matters.) For them, the stylistic continuum is operationalized as tasks and is straightforwardly represented in their scores as those tasks allow them more or less monitoring time. In contrast, the respondents with greater native speaker network contacts may have begun to acquire some of the complex registral factors which lie behind the continuum. In those registers which promote informality (where, presumably, less monitoring goes on), native speakers also delete t/d in final clusters. Superficially, all the respondents appear to be observing a rule that states that the more they monitor, the more they delete. The different network relations, however, suggest that different factors lie behind this performance. For the low network relations group, the stylistic continuum is driven only by the amount of time made available for monitoring by the linguistic task set. For the high network relations group, the continuum is indeed defined by the amount of attention given to a task but as determined both by the purely linguistic shape of the task and by the nativespeaker like registral considerations which contribute to the determination of a task's position on the continuum. An apparent fly in the ointment of the stylistic continuum, however, emerges in such sets of data as those shown in Table 2. The third person singular indicative marker (3rs) follows the predictions made earlier— the more attention paid to form (obviously "here the grammar test), the greater likelihood of native-like performance; but the article shows exactly the reverse trend—the greater attention paid to form, the less target-like the performance.
Table 2. VARBRUL probabilities for target-like realization of third singular indicative markers (3rs) and articles in English by Japanese and Arabic learners (Tarone 1985). Japanese Arabic Grammar test Interview Narrative
3rs 0.63 0.37 0.63 0.48 0.39
Article 0.42 0.58 0.23 0.56 0.72
Preston (1989) suggests that this apparent contradiction may be explained by incorporating something of the monitoring distinction into the continuous competence model. The 3rs in English is clearly marked—it (and only it) of the present indicatives has phonological substance, and it is, except perhaps for its morphophonological adjustment, simple, controlled by the purely local concern of agreement. The article, on the other hand, is multifunctional, has alternative forms (including even null), and is driven by such non-local factors as presupposition, given-new information, and so on. The 3rs, therefore, is the sort of form which monitoring will provide the right answer for, even if learners have come up with theories of their own rather than being explicitly taught. Rumination on what form (if any) of the article to use, however, is apparently more likely to lead to disaster than success. Its rules are complex and not guided by an immediate, simple context. Preston (1989) concludes that, in general, marked forms will make more rapid progress in the interlanguage development of more highlymonitored styles and unmarked forms will more quickly develop in the unmonitored ones. Native-speaker studies of variability were done at least in part to show how variation was central to linguistic change, and studies of respondents of different age groups (studies in apparent time) rather than longitudinal ones have predominated. Only a few SLA studies have followed this lead; Young (1990), for example, shows that for Chinese learners of English the factor of low proficiency retards plural marking on nouns with a probability of 0.32 while the factor of high proficiency promotes plural marking with a probability of 0.60. SLA studies may, therefore, use quantitative methods to indicate the degree to which level of proficiency contributes to the predictability of target-like performance for a given feature. 1.2 The Dynamic Paradigm The most noteworthy of the competing models in quantitative microsociolinguistics is associated with the work of Bailey, Bickerton, and DeCamp, particularly in its application to Creole languages. Their work makes use of an implicational scale, which is sensitive to relations among variables in the entire
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The Social Context Table 3. Implicational ordering of the acquisition of English /8/ in five different environments by French Canadians (Preston 1989: 32; adapted from Gatbonton 1978). Linguistic environments Heaviest V
VCT VS Lect 1 1 1 1 1 1 1,2 2 1 3 1,2 1,2 1,2 4 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 5 1,2 1,2 6 1,2 1,2 2 7 1,2 1,2 2 8 2 1,2 2 9 2 2 2 10 2 2 2 11 2 2 V = preceding vowel VCT = preceding voiced continuant VS = preceding voiced stop VLCT = preceding voiceless continuant VLS =preceding voiceless stop.
VLCT. 1 1 1 1 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 2
2
Lightest VLS
1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 1,2 2
Number of subjects N 3 7 3 0 2 2 3 1 1 0 0
1 = categorical presence of nonnative substitute for English 2 = categorical presence of native or native-like English 1, 2 — variation of 1 and 2.
system rather than to the set of determining influences on one variable. The first application of such techniques to SLA is very likely Gatbonton (1978). Table 3 shows an implicational array of the voiced interdental (/6/) for Canadian French learners of English. The controlling environments (here the preceding sound) are arranged on a scale of heaviest to lightest, but these weights are not only related to probabilistic influences of the various environments on the feature in question. The weight is an expression of the relation between one environment and all the others and the lect which that unique relationship defines. Lect 1, for example, is the grammar of learners who have not even begun to vary between non-native and target-like performances of /6/ in the most likely phonological environment for target-like performance (i.e., after vowels). What is implicational about this arrangement is that every lighter environment also has, predictably, categorial non-target-like performance. Conversely, speakers of lect 11 who have invariant target-like performances in the lightest environment (i.e., the one least likely to promote such performance, here a preceding voiceless stop) predictably have it in every heavier environment. Such implicational arrays are apparently not arbitrary, for of the 28 respondents sampled in Gatbonton's study, only six did not fit one of the predicted lect patterns. The dynamic paradigm approach is perhaps even more appropriate to semanto-syntactic and morphosyntactic variation, for the emerging lects are seen as ones which reveal redefined form-function units
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increasingly in line with target language norms. Huebner (1983), for example, in a year-long longi tudinal analysis of an adult Hmong acquirer of English, shows, among other things, how is (a) moves, in different environments, from marking asserted (or comment as opposed to topic) information to the range of functions which is has in the target language. At first, there may appear to be only trivial differences between the Labovian and dynamic paradigms. The first studies the exact degree of influence of each factor; the second specifies the categorial states before and after variability and ignores the precise contribution of each controlling factor during variability, although the weight of each shows its relative effect. The psycholinguistic corollaries of the two modes are, however, quite distinct. The system which encloses the variety of probabilistic influences within the Labovian paradigm is a unified one. That is, variability, although clearly related to change, may also be relatively stable within the single competence of a monodialectal speaker. In short, variability is inherent. In the dynamic paradigm, any inherent variability is short-lived, lasting only during the brief transition between categorial presence and absence of formfunction change (in a given environment). The greater variability which appears to be present is, in fact, simply the shifting back and forth from one lect to another. In short, most variability is apparent. The psycholinguistic ramifications of these two differing views have not been worked out in either native speaker or SLA contexts.
Sociolinguistics 2. Language in its Social Context The second group of general research trends surveyed here is represented by a variety of schools, the first three of which in particular are only briefly summarized. 2.1 The Ethnography of Communication Closely associated with the American anthropological linguists Hymes and Gumperz, this style of sociolinguistic inquiry examines an array of contextual concerns in language performance, status, intent, reception, and the like. The targets of investigation typically include larger forms (e.g., genres, speech acts, and events) as well as those investigated in quantitative styles, and the manner of investigation is more often qualitative. The results of such studies characterize the elements necessary to the communicative competence underlying appropriate speech behavior. Generally speaking, the influence of this area of sociolinguistic inquiry on SLA has been on the description of native-speaker behavior as a target model for speech acts (particularly in such culturally variable speech activities as warning, complimenting, requesting, and the like). 2.2 Ethnomethodology and Discourse Analysis Discourse studies are associated with Sociolinguistics, at least in part, due to the important contribution of such sociologists as Garfinkel, Goffman, and Sacks. In general, such studies hope to find a grammar of larger units, particularly the grammar that is created in the give-and-take of conversation. Like the ethnography of communication, discourse studies of native-speaker interaction have been held up as models in SLA, although an important additional trend has been that of the study of classroom interaction, and those and other studies have focused on the conversational details of native-non-native and nonnative-non-native interactions (see Intercultural Discourse; Discourse in the Language Classroom). 2.3 The Sociology of Language SLA studies have also been sensitive to the larger concerns of societal and individual bi- and multilingualism and to the concerns of language planning, minority languages, area linguistics, and emerging standards and varieties (see Multilingualism; Bilingualism, Individual; Bilingualism, Societal). 2.4 The Social Psychology of Language Language attitude studies have been related to SLA concerns from their beginnings, although early work in such studies by Lambert and Fishman focused on the affective domain in bilingual settings. Consideration of attitudinal factors (both towards and of acquirers) has been a component of many approaches to SLA. Krashen's monitor theory, for example, includes an affective filter which may impede or pro-
mote acquisition (see Krashen). Schumann's acculturation model (e.g., Schumann 1978) suggests that maximum or attenuated social distance between learners and members of the speech community they wish to join may result in a frozen, pidginized variety of the target (a dramatic form of fossilization). Gardner (1985) reviews SLA theories which contain strong social psychological elements or are themselves byproducts of investigations into the social psychology of language. Studies in this framework are generally quantitative, often experimental studies of affective responses to language samples. Some studies, however, focus on linguistic details and others on social factors. Such studies as Schumann's, for example, detail the pidginized forms of an unsuccessful language learner and suggest that the learner's rejection by and of the new language environment is a major factor. On the other hand, studies carried out in the tradition of Giles and his associates, following on earlier work by Lambert and Fishman, detail the attitudes toward native and target languages and their speakers by learners and hosts, and reason that language learning success or failure is related to positive or negative valuations, respectively, on both sides (see Second Language Learning: Individual Differences}. 3. Trends and Prospects The Labovian and dynamic paradigms are being brought together in such quantitative work as Bayley's and Young's, for probabilities are being assigned to underlying semanto-syntactic categories as they emerge in new varieties of a developing interlanguage. Perhaps such focus will provide insights into the important psycholinguistic differences between the two models of research. For ethnographic and attitudinal studies, Preston (1989) has suggested that the development of an interlanguage is best thought of as a process which will produce a competent bilingual, not one which will clone a native speaker. That understanding should allow even more careful investigation of the developing rule systems of an interlanguage, perhaps even singling out those subtle rule differences which effectively symbolize the nonnative but successful speech community member. Speech communities are made up of speakers who share norms of communication, not necessarily of those who share the same native language. As interlanguages develop, it is logical to assume that learners are putting together a competent but distinctive system (open to quantitative analysis), which gives them a place in the speech community (or communities) where they intend to interact, such interaction being open to the various means available for the study of language in its social context. Both approaches will surely engage the interest of those
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The Social Context who care to look at sociolinguistics in SLA settings (see Inter language), Bibliography Bayley R 1990 Modeling interlanguage variation: -t, d deletion in Chinese English. (A paper presented to NWAVE-XIX (New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English), University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, October, 1990) Dickerson L J H 1974 Internal and external patterning of phonological variability in the speech of Japanese learners of English: Toward a theory of second-language acquisition. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL Dickerson L, Dickerson W 1977 Interlanguage phonology: Current research and future directions. In: Corder S P, Roulet E (eds.) The Notions of Simplification, Interlanguages and Pidgins and their Relation to Second Language Pedagogy (Actes du 5ème Colloque de Linguistique Appliquee de Neuchatel, May 20-22,1976). Libraire Droz, Geneva Fasold R W 1984 Variation theory and language learning. In:
Trudgill P (ed.) Applied Sociolinguistics. Academic Press, London Gardner R C 1985 Social Psychology and Second Language Learning. Arnold, London Huebner T 1983 Linguistic systems and linguistic change in an interlanguage. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 6:33-53 Krashen S O 1987 Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Labov W 1972 Sociolinguistic Patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA Preston D R 1989 Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Blackwell, Oxford Schumann J H 1978 The acculturation model for second language acquisition. In: Gingras R G (ed.) Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching. Center for Applied Linguistics, Arlington, VA Tarone E E 1982 Systematicity and attention in interlanguage. Language Learning 32: 69-84 Tarone E E 1985 Variability in interlanguage use: A study of style-shifting in morphology and syntax. Language Learning 35: 373-103 Young R 1990 Variation in Interlanguage Morphology. Peter Lang, New York
Standardization E. Haugen+
Any vernacular (language or dialect) may be 'standardized' by being given a uniform and consistent norm of writing that is widely accepted by its speakers. It may then be referred to as a 'standard' language. The requirements posed in this definition involve (a) an explicit norm and (b) speaker acceptance. The first is fulfilled by an individual (or a competent group) who selects the forms of one or more dialects and decides on a suitable transcription for the standard. The second is fulfilled by the wide acceptance of the standard as a desirable mode of writing the vernacular. In its initial phase the users of a standard are usually a tightly knit group of elite members (a coterie, a church, an academy) and are only gradually extended to include a whole people or a nation. Throughout the world, language standards are the product of either military conquest, immigration, or commercial contact. 1. History of Standardization The idea of standard languages arose during the Renaissance in Europe, and it may be questioned whether there were any standardized languages prior to the invention of printing in the fifteenth century. Most standards were preceded by a profusion of scri70
bal varieties, which reflected either the scribe's local dialect or some personal idiosyncrasy. An example is Sanskrit, which was based on a dialect spoken by Hindus living in northeast India from ca. 1500 BC. While the spoken dialects kept changing, Sanskrit was codified in the fourth century BC by the linguist Panini. After that it became the sacred medium of Hinduism and was preserved in a ritualized form which resembled the modern standards. But it remained the possession of a small coterie of specialists. Greek has been known since the fourteenth century BC but its literature was written in several dialects until the Hellenistic period, i.e., the fourth century BC. It then achieved a fairly unified form known as the koine, or common language, based on Attic Greek. Modern Greek is ultimately based on the koine, but is widely different. When Adamantios Korais (1748-1833) in the early years of the nineteenth century conceived the idea of a new standard language for Greece, he adopted a highly literary form, partly based on the koine, which came to be known as the Katharevousa, or 'pure' language. Modern writers have in part deviated by adopting elements from spoken Greek, the Demotike, or 'popular' language.
Standardization Latin began as just another Indo-European dialect in Italy, spoken from the fourth century BC. But Rome's conquest of the peninsula in 338 BC laid the foundation for the replacement of the dialects of Latium by the Latin of Rome. Early writers like Plautus and Terence have been credited with writing the first forms of Latin. In the development of Latin, Greek played a large role. The Latin language was then spread by the conquest of what became the Roman Empire. This was for centuries the learned language of European nations, while the spoken vernacular developed into the modern Romance languages. It was roughly codified by Latin grammarians in the early centuries of our era. Even though it was spread widely, the lack of printing kept it from counting as a true standard language. 2. Institutional Efforts at Standardization The idea of the Language Academy as an instrument for creating a standard language was launched in Italy by Count Cosimo I of Florence. He founded the Accademia della Crusca in 1582. A generation later Cardinal Richelieu followed suit by founding the Academic franfaise in 1635. Richelieu gave its 40 'Immortals' the power to encourage all that was 'noble, polished, and reasonable' in the French language, but as has been pointed out, there was hardly one of the members who was trained in linguistics or lexicography. They were really social arbiters whose function it was to decide on criteria of good taste in language. However, they did produce both a grammar and a dictionary of French. A similar institution was founded in Spain by King Philip V, the Real Academia Espanol in 1713, designated to 'clarify, purify, and glorify' the Spanish language. Here the first codification had already been made by Antonio de Nebrija, who presented a grammar of Spanish to Queen Isabella in 1492. In its wake other academies were founded in the countries of the Spanish New World. In Germany Sprachgesellschaften sprang up with the idea of 'purifying' the German language. In Sweden an academy was established by King Gustav III in 1786. In Hungary one was established in 1830. Arabic academies grew up in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. A Russian Academy produced a dictionary (1789-94) and a grammar (1802). Conspicuous here is the absence of any English institution of similar import. There was active agitation for the creation of one in the eighteenth century by persons as eminent as Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. But in typical Anglo-Saxon manner, private enterprise took over. In 1720 the indefatigable Samuel Johnson produced his English dictionary, which fulfilled the needs of the English. The example was followed in the United States by the work of Noah Webster.
After the Reformation the Scandinavian languages were standardized by the translators of the Bible, working in close contact with the royal chanceries. A Danish version of the New Testament came in 1529 by Christienn Pedersen, who also published a LatinDanish dictionary (1510). The official Danish Bible appeared in 1550. A Swedish New Testament was translated in 1526 and the complete Bible in 1541 under the guidance of the reformers Olaus and Laurentius Petri. An Icelandic New Testament by Oddur Gottskalkson came in 1540. Norway as a dependency of Denmark did not receive a translation of its own, and consequently no standard language. Two initiatives to create a Norwegian standard were launched in the mid-nineteenth century, after Norway was detached from Denmark in 1814 and got autonomy in a union with Sweden. In 1853 the dialectologist Ivar Aasen devised a norm of Norwegian based on the rural dialects, especially the western ones which retained most of the Old Norwegian quality. He was opposed by the schoolman Knud Knudsen, who in 1856 proposed a Dano-Norwegian norm that took account of the cultivated speech in the cities, especially in Eastern Norway. Aasen's standard was known as Landsmål 'Country Language' (now Nynorsk 'New Norwegian'), Knudsen's as Dansknorsk or Riksmål 'Language of the Kingdom' (now known as Bokmål 'Book Language'). These two standards have contended ever since for supremacy; in modern times the Nynorsk has captured only one-sixth of the school districts, none of them urban. In the twentieth century the Scandinavian languages have emphasized the principle of 'language cultivation' (Swedish språkvård, Norwegian sprdkr0kt, Danish sprogr0gt). Beginning with the Swedish Nämnden for svensk språkvård ('The Committee for Swedish Language Cultivation') in 1944, a whole series of such committees were established in the Scandinavian countries: Swedish Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and the Faroes. Each of these countries also has Centers of Technical Terminology, with the special task of unifying the specialized terminologies of their languages. After intense controversy the Norwegian Language Committee was reorganized in 1972 as the Norwegian Language Council (Norsk Språkråd) with new guidelines. In 1978 a joint Scandinavian Committee was established with offices in Oslo. 3. Means and Effects of Standardization As will be seen, the creation and propagation of a standard involves on the one hand the creation of instruments for standardization in the form of grammars and dictionaries, and on the other the presence of a population that finds the standard useful in its communicative efforts. Standardization in effect creates a new language, since it can never capture the entire language nor remain entirely static. Beginning
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The Social Context as a reading language, it may in time lead to a new standard spoken language, which may in part be imposed on a population, either by coercion or voluntarily. It usually has a greater prestige than the vernaculars on which it is based and serves to unify the population ruled by a central government. An example is the switch of Turkish from an Arabic to a Roman script, decreed in 1928 by Atatürk. While this in itself did not change the language, it was accompanied by an increased activity in purifying it from Arabic and Persian elements. The 'revival' of Hebrew in Israel after its settlement by Jewish groups in the 1900s is a striking example of the adoption of a traditional language as a written standard, resulting in a new spoken vernacular, following the initial agitation of Eliezer Ben Yehuda. However, the modern vernacular is far from identical with biblical Hebrew. It is said to be influenced by the thoroughly Western substratum of its predominantly Yiddish origins (Yiddish being a dialect of German). Chinese is not a single language, but several mutually unintelligible ones, often called 'dialects.' They are joined by a common writing system, which goes back to a classical script known as 'Wen-yen.' This script has no common pronunciation, but is read by each speaker in his or her particular dialect. The most prestigious variety of Chinese is the Mandarin, spoken in the north; this is known as 'Modern Standard Chinese,' and is based on the Peking (Beijing) dialect. There are two major systems of romanization: the Wade-Giles devised in 1859 by Sir Thomas Francis Wade; the present-day official Chinese romanization is known as 'Pin-yin' and was adopted in 1958. But the traditional characters persist. Japanese is spoken in various dialects, but the Japanese adopted the characters of Chinese as their writing system in the early centuries AD. The characters are known as 'kanjf and are still used, though restricted in number. Because of the entirely different, structure of Japanese, an additional, more phonetic, system was devised, known as 'kana.' This comes in two versions, the 'hiragand' or 'common kana' used for grammatical particles, and 'katakana' 'one-sided kana,' used for foreign loanwords. This cumbersome system has resisted all attempts at reform, though some changes have been made in a colloquial direction since 1880. Korean was also first written in Chinese characters, but a native script was introduced in 1446. This 28letter alphabet was devised by a group of scholars working at the behest of a reigning king, but did not win the recognition of the literati until the beginning of the twentieth century. Korean can be written in two ways in the late twentieth century, one which is purely alphabetic and one which is a 'mixed' script, including some Chinese characters. The former is used in North Korea, the latter in South Korea. Arabic is a language whose Classical form was established by the religion that bore it to triumph
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through North Africa and the Near and Middle East in the seventh and eighth centuries AD. It was used by Muslims through the Middle Ages and is still the language of the school and administration in all Arabic countries. There is a considerable gap between the often mutually unintelligible vernaculars that are derived from classical Arabic. Except in Malta, which has adopted Roman writing of the language, it is everywhere written in the Arabic alphabet. Both Arabic and Hebrew writing are descended from an alphabetic Phoenician script. The major Indo-Aryan languages of North India are written in the Devanagari script or varieties of it, developed in the seventh to ninth centuries. It has remained essentially unaltered to the present. Varieties of it spread with Buddhism from India into other south Asiatic countries as far east as Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The languages have been standardized at various times. 4. Colonial and Missionary Efforts at Standardization
In Africa a number of lingua francas have developed to bridge the tremendous number of native vernaculars of the continent. Of these, Swahili is official in Tanzania and Kenya, and is used widely in East Africa. Others are Lingala, Fanakalo, and Sango. Hausa is used in Nigeria; Amharic is official in Ethiopia, Wolof in Senegal and Gambia, and Kongo near the Congo River. There are also countries where nonAfrican languages are in common use, including Arabic, English, and French. The Island of Madagascar has a Malayo-Polynesian language. Although the first grammar of an African language (Kongo) goes back to 1659, extensive study was not begun until the nineteenth century. Yoruba boasts the earliest dictionary written by a native speaker (1843). There has been intensive missionary activity, resulting in many local grammars, but there are few languages that can be described as standardized. In South Africa the formerly Dutch population uses Afrikaans, the English a variety of standard English. American Indian languages are also numerous, with many local grammars and dictionaries, but little if any standardization. As in Africa, most such initiatives were taken by linguists. An interesting exception is the Cherokee syllabary, devised in 1821 by a halfCherokee native named Sequoyah and widely used for a time. In Greenland the first book in the native Greenlandic was published by the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede in 1742. A systematic orthography in Roman letters was devised by the German missionary Samuel Kleinschmidt in 1851. But as a self-governing overseas administrative division of Denmark it has Danish as one of its official languages (along with Greenlandic.) As this brief survey of selected languages shows, standard languages are usually artifacts of religious or military penetration and the needs of a central
Sweden: Immigrant Languages government, abetted by an ever-expanding literate population. Bibliography Edwards J 1985 Language, Society and Identity. Blackwell, Oxford Haugen E 1972 The Ecology of Language. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
Haugen E 1976 The Scandinavian Languages. Faber, London Palmer L R 1961 The Latin Language. Faber, London Priebsch R, Collinson W E 1962 The German Language. Faber, London Sebeok T A 1963-1976 Current Trends in Linguistics, 14 vols. Mouton, The Hague Språk i Norden 1961-1989. Cappelen, Oslo
Sweden: Immigrant Languages S. Boyd
Prior to World War II, Sweden was an unusually homogeneous country, both ethnically and linguistically. This situation has changed dramatically, so that by the late 1990s there were over a million resident immigrants (12 percent of the country's population). Immigrants have come to Sweden as labor migrants, refugees, and members of the families of natives and of immigrant residents already in the country. Provisions have been made for the education of immigrants and their children at virtually all levels. Labor migration was dominant from the late 1950s through the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s, workers came from other parts of Europe, particularly the other Nordic countries (with whom Sweden established a free labor market in 1954), and southeast Europe. Restrictions were made on the migration of non-Nordic residents in 1967, and all labor migration was ended in 1973, but the open Nordic labor market and 'family-tie' migration kept the figures high during the 1970s. The increasing importance of family-tie migration has changed the official view of immigrant minority groups in Sweden from that of guest workers (typical of early labor migration) to that of immigrants. The migration of spouses and the subsequent birth of a second generation in Sweden have also changed the demands minorities have placed on Swedish society as regards education, social services, opportunity to practice non-Christian religions, etc. Sweden has also received refugees during the entire postwar period, first from Eastern Europe and South America, later from the Middle East and former Yugoslavia. During the first half of the 1990s Sweden granted asylum to between 12000 and 45000 people annually, most of them from Bosnia and other parts of former Yugoslavia, but since 1995 the number granted asylum is only about 5000 annually. The official policy of the Swedish state toward immigrants is relatively generous as it stands. Its basic point of departure is that immigrants should be
granted the same rights and privileges as the native population. The government provides extra resources to facilitate a certain linguistic and cultural 'freedom of choice' for the immigrants. This is theoretically intended to provide the opportunity either to practice the culture of their country of origin, or to adopt Swedish culture. The official policies also apply to a broad category of people, not all of whom actually consider themselves to be immigrants. Accordingly, an individual is an immigrant if they were born abroad or had at least one parent born abroad. Persons born in other parts of the Nordic region, particularly in Finland, comprised about one-third of all foreign born residents in the middle of the 1990s. Other minorities with over 30 000 members included immigrants from Bosnia, other parts of former Yugoslavia, Iran, Turkey, and Iraq. In the compulsory school in the mid-1990s, over 100000 pupils (12 percent of all) report that a language other than Swedish is regularly used in the home. The number of mother tongues reported was 120 nationwide. Of these 100000 pupils, over half received instruction in their mother tongue (L1) and almost as many instruction in Swedish as a second language (Sw2). Both these subjects now have their own official curriculum. Instruction of pupils with non-Swedish Lls is sometimes provided within the framework of a preparatory class, where pupils with a variety of backgrounds receive short-term intensive instruction in Swedish as a second language, and sometimes in a mother-tongue class, where all pupils have the same non-Swedish first language and receive instruction in most subjects in their LI as well as instruction in Sw2. But the vast majority of pupils with non-Swedish L1 attend regular classes with Swedish children, and receive instruction in Sw2 during school hours and/or instruction in their mother tongue after school, by a peripatetic teacher. The provision of instruction in mother tongue classes has decreased 73
The Social Context since the mid-1980s. At the same time, the number of independent schools offering instruction in a language other than Swedish has increased, and the proportion of pupils with other mother tongues attending independent schools is higher than the proportion attending public schools. In the upper secondary school, a comparable proportion of pupils are of foreign background. Here, the main thrust of instruction has been in Swedish as a second language for pupils who have inadequate Swedish to pursue regular studies in the upper secondary school. For adult immigrants and refugees, introductory courses in Swedish have been provided free of charge since 1965, the organizers and amount of teaching provided changing several times since then. In the mid-1990s approximately 25000 adults participated in this instruction, most of which was organized by municipalities. Despite the official policy of freedom of choice, and the provision of 'home language instruction,' language shift in the second generation is widespread, and retarded only slightly by measures such as mother-tongue classes. This picture may change, however, as immigrants and refugees from more distant countries arrive in greater numbers. Although the policy towards immigrants, particularly in relation to language may be seen as relatively generous, several problems have remained pressing particularly within the field of education. First, much of the instruction in the compulsory school, especially in Sw2, but previously also in L1, has been organized along the lines of remedial education, requiring pupils to leave their regular classes for one or more lessons per week. In the late 1990s, L1 instruction has taken place primarily after school hours, when children are
tired and other activities compete with it. Instruction in Sw2 thus has taken on a quality of compensatory education, while L1 instruction has become an 'extra' subject of minor importance, like sports or music lessons. Second, teacher training courses have not met the demands for teachers in the field, so many.teachers providing the programs are inadequately trained. As regards home language instruction, problems are exacerbated by the large number of minority languages in any one school, and in many cases, by the small number of pupils with the same L1 in a particular area. Third, many teachers and other personnel in close contact with minorities feel the need to incorporate a multicultural component in their own training, as well as in the school curriculum, in order to meet the needs of individuals from an increasing variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds now living in Sweden. As immigrants come from further afield and from a greater diversity of cultural backgrounds, language instruction alone is no longer adequate to meet the needs of immigrants and native Swedes in an increasingly multilingual, multicultural society. See also: Australian Minority Languages; Canadian Language Education Policy; Multilingualism; Bilingualism, Individual; Bilingualism, Societal. Bibliography Breeder P, Extra G 1999 Language, ethnicity and education. Case studies of immigrant minority groups and immigrant minority languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Hyltenstam K, Arnberg L 1988 Bilingualism and education of immigrant children and adults in Sweden. In: Paulston C B (ed.) International Handbook of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Greenwood Press, New York
Teaching Endangered Languages L. Hinton
There are presently more than 6000 languages in the world, but almost half of the human population are native speakers of the top 10 of these languages (Grimes 1996). What this means is that the majority of human languages are spoken by very small numbers of people. We are in the midst of worldwide social change where economic and political forces combined with a revolution in communications are working against the continued existence of these small languages. Language shift to the world languages is so rapid and so extensive that we can well expect that 74
over half of the languages on earth will disappear in the coming century (Krauss 1992). We call these languages 'endangered,' especially, as is the case with so many now, they are no longer being learnt at home by children, but are known only to adults or even just to a few elderly speakers. The decline of linguistic diversity in the world is linked to the world political economy which invades and takes over the territories of indigenous peoples, threatens the ecosystems in which they live, and wipes out their traditional means of livelihood. Because of
Teaching Endangered Languages these links, the right to maintain minority languages has become a human rights issue, supported by such international organizations as UNESCO. A worldwide movement for the rights of indigenous peoples is resulting in the development of language revitalization efforts in thousands of speech communities. The revitalization of Hebrew, which had not been spoken as a native language for 2000 years, was an exceptional early case of the revival of an actually extinct language. A more typical case, however, involves revitalization of a language that still has some (perhaps only a few) speakers. Current strong revitalization programs are underway in such locations as New Zealand (Maori), Hawai'i (Hawaiian), Spain (Catalan), Wales (Welsh), and Ireland (Gaelic). The multitude of indigenous languages of the Americas are especially threatened, and in recent years literally hundreds of maintenance and revitalization programs have developed all over the hemisphere. 1. The Role of Schools in Language Revitalization The core of a language revitalization movement necessarily involves second language teaching, since by definition endangered languages are not spoken by a large portion of the population to which that language belongs. Most revitalization efforts are centered in schools. This has an ironic twist to it, because schools themselves have been one of the parties most responsible for language decline. In North America, for example, the first half of the twentieth century saw a purposeful policy of language eradication toward indigenous peoples through the establishment of boarding schools where children were removed from their families and cultures, and punished whenever they were 'caught' speaking their language anywhere on the school grounds. Even when schools do not purposefully set out to destroy languages, their influence on language development and social development is so strong that the children of minority groups may abandon their language of heritage early in life. The end result is that in one generation or another the language ceases to be spoken at home, at which point it becomes moribund. Despite the fact that schools have played such a major role in language shift, they are also capable of being the major players in reversing language shift. When the families find their ancestral language silenced at home, their only hope for reversing language shift is in second language learning, and communities look to schools as the place where second language learning can most effectively take place. 2. Differences Between Teaching Endangered Languages and World Languages The teaching of endangered languages is very different from the teaching of world languages, in terms of the following factors:
2.1 Resources Available for Language Teaching Resources may be slim for teaching an endangered language. Funding is rarely stable, pedagogical materials may be nonexistent (at least initially), and finding teachers who are also speakers may be difficult or impossible. Expertise may be lacking in state-ofthe-art language teaching methods. Thus, any language revitalization program must have a strong training program and must spend a good deal of energy on the development of materials and curriculum, or else on developing a teaching methodology that is not strongly dependent on materials and fixed curriculum. 2.2 Goals In a typical foreign language classroom, goals are usually simply to learn the language in order to communicate with native speakers of the language or read literature in that language. For an endangered language, the goals are much larger and the stakes much higher. The language has ceased being the languageof communication, so not only must people learn to speak it, but communicative functions of the language must be recreated in order for it to be used again. If the classroom is the site of learning, for a language to be revitalized it must also leave the classroom, and be brought back as the language of communication within the community. The goal, then, is Reversing Language Shift (RLS), as termed by Fishman (1991). Furthermore, language revitalization must be seen only as part of a more general cultural revitalization, usually accompanied by the reaffirmation of traditional activities and values and possibly efforts toward ecological restoration as well. All of this means that any language program in the school must be part of a community-wide program, and cannot simply be something the school itself designs and implements without strong community involvement. In fact, very frequently revitalization programs involve the setting up of separate schools, rather than the establishment of a program within an existing school. 2.3 The Consequences of Language Teaching In the case of successful RLS, the second language learners of today will become the main carriers and teachers of the language tomorrow. This means that any incomplete learning (accent, grammatical, or lexical deficiencies, etc.) will become part of the future of the language itself. The only way for a learner to become fluent is to create an intensive immersion program. In schools, this generally means a program where the language becomes the language of instruction in the school. Endangered languages, which are not presently used as the language of communication, lack much of the vocabulary needed to talk in today's world and today's classroom. Generally connected with intensive second language teaching for endangered languages 75
The Social Context must be a way to generate new vocabulary, and some authority structure to oversee the development. All in all, then, one of the consequences of teaching an endangered language is that the language will undergo intensive change. The social and political changes that accompany RLS are also often very profound, both in the speech community and in the surrounding 'mainstream' community, as we will see in the Hawaiian example below. 3. Hawai'i One of the most successful programs so far in achieving RLS through second language teaching is the Hawaiian program, run by the 'Aha Punana Leo Foundation. It now has nine preschools and two highschools (one public, one private) with Hawaiian as the main language of instruction, and 14 elementary schools with Hawaiian-language tracks. A recently opened Masters Program in Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo means students may go all the way to a master's degree with Hawaiian as the main language of instruction. Children enter preschool knowing English only, but through structured immersion principles, they are usually using Hawaiian exclusively in school within 6 months. Since few people of professional age know Hawaiian fluently, people planning on becoming teachers in the program learn the language at the University of Hawai'i. As the 'lead group' of students progressed through school, the University of Hawai'i at Hilo kept a year ahead of them in producing materials and books, having to develop the curriculum and write or translate books for all school subjects. This also demanded the development of a massive new vocabulary, so a 'Lexicon Committee' was founded which meets regularly to determine what the new words shall be. For the computer, important programs such as Claris Works now have a Hawaiian language version. Since people of parenting age do not know Hawaiian, unless they have learnt it in college, parents of the children in the immersion schools are encouraged to do volunteer service in the classroom, and go to once-a-week night classes to learn basic classroom Hawaiian. Parents sending their children to this program often have a strong commitment to the language, and there are a dozen or so families who have committed to making Hawaiian the language of their homes. In order for this program to succeed it needed legislative support, for up to then, it was illegal to use anything but English in the classroom. After a great deal of hard work, Hawaiian and English were made the co-official languages of the state, and it was made legal for schools to teach in either language. Through the enormous efforts of many dedicated and talented people, this program has resulted in the growth of several thousand new fluent speakers. 4. Other Programs New Zealand served as a model for the Hawaiian program and, like Hawai'i, is experiencing a great
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resurgence of the Maori language. Some other programs around the world, such as Irish, also teach the language in schools nationwide, but do not have such a strong emphasis on immersion and use of the language as the primary language of instruction (although there are enclaves where such schools exist). Smaller groups, such as the Blackfeet and the Mohawk, have developed immersion programs on a smaller scale. Bilingual education has been the focus elsewhere, such as among the Navajo, and the Quechua in the Andes. In some communities, the schools have not been the primary focus of language education. Some of the Pueblos (e.g., Cochiti) have summer immersion programs and after-school classes. In California, where 50 languages are still spoken, but only by a dozen or less elderly speakers each, a unique intertribal program has developed, called the 'MasterApprentice Language Program,' where adult learners pair up with elderly speakers and are given training that allows them to interact informally together for up to 20 hours per week using only their ancestral language. Some 60 teams, for over 20 languages, have gone through this program over the last 7 years. The goal is for the young apprentice to gain fluency in the language and then to be able to teach children in whatever setting is available (Hinton 1997b). 5. Documentation An important part of any revitalization program should also be documentation. In their zeal to get new speakers, sometimes communities forget that while the elders are there to help now, they will not be there in the future and they have much knowledge that will probably not be adequately transmitted during their lifetimes. Audiotapes and videotapes of the elders are of tremendous value long after their death, and often form the basis of excellent CDs, storybooks, and other pedagogical materials. 6. Role of the Linguist In all of these programs, linguists have played a central role in design, development, training, and implementation. The most important functions of the linguist are to bring analytical knowledge of the language into the program where needed, good knowledge of documentation, and effective theory and methodology of language teaching into whatever kind of program is developed. Immersion, communicative competence, and links to cultural revitalization are stressed in all the most successful programs; the role of writing may also be important (e.g., with Hawaiian and Gaelic), or it may be insignificant (as with the California masterapprentice program, where most of the languages have no official writing system or literary tradition, or with the Cochiti, who have officially decided not to write their language at all). Each community has unique needs, and the linguist and the community must work closely together to develop the right program.
Teaching Endangered Languages Bibliography Hinton L 1997b Survival of endangered languages: The CalFishman J A 1991 Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical ifornia master Apprentice Program. InternationalJournal and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened of theSociology of Language 123: 177-91 Languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, PA Krauss M 1992 The world's languages in crisis. Language Grenoble A, Whaley LJ (eds.) 1998 Endangered Languages. 68: 4-10 Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Reyhner J (ed.) 1996 Stabilizing Indigenous Languages. Grimes F (ed.) 1996 Ethnologue: Languages of the World Center for Excellence in Education, Northern Arizona (13th edn.) Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, University, Flagstaff, AZ TX Reyhner J (ed.) 1997 Teaching Indigenous Languages. Center Hinton L 1997a Hawaiian language schools. News from for Excellence in Education, Northern Arizona UniverNative California 10(4): 15-22 sity, Flagstaff, AZ
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National Policy: Language Education Policy and Education Australian Indigenous Languages T. Shopen
There were over 200 languages in Australia at the time of European conquest. In the 1990s only 20 of these are still spoken by children in their full form (Schmidt 1990). Over half of these are being used along with English in bilingual schools, including Yolngu and Warlpiri in the Northern Territory, and Western Desert language varieties in South Australia and Western Australia. The teaching of Aboriginal languages has special urgency. Many Aboriginal people want their languages used in school. But opinion is divided, with other Aborigines believing their children should have their education in English only. 1. Bilingual Schools for Aboriginal Children
A factor in Aboriginal language death was a policy of 'English only' in schools. When a Labor government came to power in 1972, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam proclaimed that all Australian children should have the right to become literate in their native language first. This led to government bilingual schools for Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory, where most surviving Aboriginal languages are spoken, and the start of several such schools in Western Australia and Queensland. The ones in Western Australia and Queensland are no longer in operation. There are, in the late twentieth century, four nongovernment bilingual Aboriginal schools in Western Australia, two Catholic and two independent. Queensland has none. South Australia has eight, all run by the government. It had bilingual education for Aboriginal children in mission schools as early as the 1940s, and the government there has had bilingual Aboriginal schools since 1969. The issue does not arise in New South Wales, Victoria, or Tasmania, where there are no living Aboriginal languages. With about 80 major communities in the Northern Territory in which Aboriginal languages are still spoken, the government there has 17 bilingual schools,
but some of these are in small satellite communities. There are four nongovernment bilingual schools for Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory, three Catholic and one independent. The government schools follow a transition model of bilingual education: children receive their introduction to literacy skills in their native language and then all their academic work is in English. Aboriginal languages are used only for traditional topics such as dream time stories and hunting trips. This program has been badly undercut in the late 1980s and early 1990s (see Bilingualism, Societal}. 2. Lack of Academic Success for Aboriginal Children
Most Aboriginal children do not succeed academically, with or without bilingual education—few go on to secondary school—because schools have culturally inappropriate activities without enough input from Aboriginal teachers. More important than bilingual education for the support of Aboriginal language and culture is the development of Aboriginal teaching staff and Aboriginal pedagogy. With all its shortcomings, the Northern Territory bilingual program has been important because it has raised the status of Aboriginal teachers as well as of Aboriginal languages. There are several independent Aboriginal schools, including Yipirinya in Alice Springs and the Strelley school in Western Australia, where attempts are made to use Aboriginal languages as much as English throughout primary school. Work has been needed to develop vocabulary and ways of talking in Aboriginal languages about European concepts, and here the work of Aboriginal teachers has been crucial (see Intercultural Discourse). 3. Other Use of Aboriginal Languages in Schools
Aboriginal people take pride in knowing about their languages even when they no longer speak them.
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The Social Context Urban Aboriginal writers are writing poetry in the languages of their ancestors. In some communities where the traditional language has died or is spoken only by old people, people have struggled to develop school programs where Aboriginal children can learn about their languages as part of their cultural heritage. But there is no permanent support structure providing adequate skills, resources or advice for these programs. There are several institutions where adult White Australians learn Aboriginal languages, some schools where White school children learn about Aboriginal languages, and a few schools where they learn to speak Aboriginal languages. 4. Prospects for Maintenance of Aboriginal Languages
From 1987 to 1990, the Federal Government gave 2.5 million dollars to the National Aboriginal Language Program, with aid for language education programs (Lo Bianco 1987). By the early 1990s this money had run out. Despite discussion in the government about renewing support no other funds have been allocated. Language maintenance will not be possible without
social maintenance. Speakers of Aboriginal languages have Third World status in a First World nation. Young Aboriginal people see the helplessness of their elders and this discourages them from taking their parents as models and continuing to speak the traditional languages. In a program where Aboriginal people gain self reliance and improve their health, education, and employment, the use of their languages in education could take on great significance (Shopen et al. 1987). See also: Wales: Language Education Policy; Maori Language Revitalization; Teaching Endangered Languages. Bibliography Lo Bianco J 1987 National Policy on Languages. Commonwealth Department of Education, Canberra Schmidt A 1990 The Loss of Australia's Aboriginal Language Heritage. Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies, Canberra Shopen T, Reid N, Shopen G, Wilkins D 1987 Ensuring the survival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages into the 21st century. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 10(1): 143-57
Australian Minority Languages M. Clyne
About 90 community (immigrant) languages are in daily use in Australian homes as are about 50 of the 150 still extant Aboriginal languages. The most widely used community languages are Italian, Greek, Cantonese, Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, and German. As Australia is a federation, the provisions for teaching Aboriginal and community languages vary from state to state and are partly determined by the demographic situation. However, education is one of the key domains covered in Australian languages policy (e.g., Lo Bianco 1987) which encompasses aspects of all languages used in Australia, including English, and strongly promotes language maintenance and second language learning (see English Teaching in Australia). State policies on languages in education are complementing the national policy with implementation strategies and timetables to facilitate the availability of a language other than English as part of the normal primary and secondary education of every child. Timetables vary in relation to the situation in the state concerned. Provision for language maintenance in education, while part of the policies of all major pol80
itical parties, had not, by 1992, been enshrined in legislation. Australia does not usually pass laws on matters of this kind, in the way that, for example, the USA does. Since multiculturalism replaced the former assimilation policy in the early 1970s, schools have increasingly supported the use and maintenance of languages other than English. Victoria and South Australia each teach a total of 17 languages other than English in their primary schools, most of the languages being those of sizeable communities. The extent of bilingual education varies too between the states. Such programs for mother-tongue speakers of the language are less prevalent than in some other countries, notably the USA. They may be found in inner-city areas settled by recent immigrants and are usually followed up by maintenance programs. But Victoria and, to an increasing extent, other states as well, is focusing attention on the second generation who are losing their community language; educationists see immersion principles as an appropriate methodology to serve both the children of immigrants and second
Canadian Language Education Policy language learners. Thus many primary schools are now teaching some subjects through the medium of a community language to all participating children. Fifty-three languages are examined at the external final secondary school examination. These include Arabic, Latvian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, indigenous languages, and Australian Sign Language. Where children wish to take languages not offered at their school, in some states they can learn them on Saturdays at a regional language center of the Ministry of Education. Teacher training in community languages, though increasing, is lagging behind school demand. Curriculum materials are being produced in a range of languages, and language teaching is supported by initiatives in multilingual TV, radio, and library services. Bilingual education for Aboriginal languages, especially in the Northern Territory, although pre-
dating the community language programs, has not covered all the languages required, and very few White Australians have the opportunity of learning an Aboriginal language at school. There is a strong community input into Aboriginal bilingual education. A college program in Darwin trains Aborigines to undertake descriptions of their own languages. See also: Australian Indigenous Languages; Maori Language Revitalization; Sweden: Immigrant Languages; Multilingualism. Bibliography Clyne M 1991 Community Languages: The Australian Experience. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/Sydney Lo Bianco J 1987 National Policy on Languages. Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra
Canadian Language Education Policy I. Pringle
In Canada, education is a jealously protected area of provincial responsibility. The federal definition of Canada as an officially bilingual and multilingual country therefore does not require that language in education reflect federal policies. Nonetheless, a combination of historical precedents, openness to the interests and rights of most linguistic minorities, and offers of federal funding for provincial programs held to be in the national interest, has ensured that the 10 Canadian provinces and the three territories have policies for language in education that now reflect much of the complexity implicit in the federal definition. In most discussions of language policy in Canada, distinctions have to be made between the Official Languages (English and French) (see National Languages), the Indigenous Languages (Inuktitut, Ojibway, Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi, and about 50 other languages, most of them spoken only in Canada), and the immigrant 'Heritage' Languages (spoken by immigrant groups), of which there are probably close to 200 in daily use. 1. Official Languages Education is of course compulsory in all provinces and territories, usually to age 16. All provinces and territories except for Nunavut Territory provide for education through the medium of the locally dominant official language (French in Quebec, English elsewhere) from the elementary level to the university
postgraduate level. In addition, all provinces and territories make some provision for education through the medium of the other official language. These provisions are most extensive in Quebec (which is officially French speaking), but they are also considerable in New Brunswick (which is officially bilingual) and Ontario (which, though not officially bilingual, has high concentrations of French speakers in the east and north, and makes extensive provision for French-language services in these regions), as well as in Manitoba. In all these provinces, as well as Alberta and Nova Scotia, education up to the university graduate level is available to mother-tongue speakers of the minority official language (English in Quebec, French elsewhere). At the other extreme, Newfoundland currently has only five and the Yukon Territory only one French-language school for mother-tongue francophones resident there. In all jurisdictions, study of the other official language is a mandatory component of the elementary and usually the secondary curriculum. In the Englishlanguage schools in Quebec, French is required from grade 1; in the French-language schools, English begins no earlier than grade 4. In French-language schools in other jurisdictions, English is usually obligatory from grade 1, while in English-language schools, French (in the form commonly referred to as 'core French') is usually mandatory at least from grade 4 to grade 8, 9, or 10; in some provinces, one
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The Social Context year of high-school French is a prerequisite for highschool graduation. An exception to the pattern of 'core French' is the pattern known as 'French Immersion.' This Canadian invention of the late 1960s seeks to create effective bilingualism in Canadian anglophone children by segregating them in classes in which (initially) all the instruction takes place in French, thus taking advantage of the ability of children to acquire a new language with relative ease when it is being used as the medium of communication. Such programs are available in every province and territory. The official languages are extensively taught as second languages to adults, as well, in a huge variety of programs. Their major purposes are to insure that immigrants can function in one of the official languages; to enable speakers of one official language to communicate with (and perhaps even understand) speakers of the other; and to maintain a sufficient cadre of bilinguals to insure that civil servants and others working in bilingual areas can serve the public in either language. 2. Heritage Languages
The 1996 Census revealed that close to 44 percent of the population of late twentieth-century Canada is descended from speakers of languages other than French and English, and some 17 percent claim a language other than French or English as their first language. Nonetheless, immigrant languages are little used as the medium of instruction; indeed, in Ontario, it is illegal to use any language other than an official language as the medium of instruction except in 'transitional' programs designed to help recent immigrant children acquire enough French or (usually) English to pursue further education in an official language. In other provinces, the model of French Immersion has been used to provide for partial (usually 50 percent) immersion schools using Ukrainian, German, and Hebrew as the medium of instruction in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta; Russian in the Castlegar region of British Columbia; and (in summer programs) Gaelic in Nova Scotia. Otherwise, the concern of immigrant groups for the maintenance of their ancestral languages, in keeping with the definition of Canada as a multicultural society, has been addressed through the 'Programme d'enseignement des langues et cultures d'origine' (PELCO) in Quebec (currently suspended pending a review), and by what are usually called 'Heritage Language Programs' in the rest of Canada. Such programs are virtually nonexistent in Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick, but all other provinces and territories have some, and in Ontario, and British Columbia they are of considerable political importance with (for example) about 100000 children in Ontario receiving instruction in about 60 languages. The details of these pro-
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grams are quite variable. What they have in common is that they provide 2-3 hours of instruction per week in the heritage language to ethno-linguistic minority children (who may or may not already speak the language). In Quebec, these classes were integrated into the regular program; in Ontario, however, they are usually offered either after school or during the weekend. At the same time, the Ontario government requires all school boards to offer a heritage language program in any language for which 25 or more parents make an official request. Most heritage language programs are offered only up to grade 7 or 8; in the larger metropolitan areas, however, the commoner languages can often be taken as subjects for as many as three years in high school (i.e., after grade 8), and the Province of Manitoba also grants credit on examination to students who demonstrate fluency in their mother tongue even if that language is not taught as a heritage language. 3. Indigenous Languages
The generosity towards immigrant languages implied by the heritage language programs is in marked contrast to traditional policies concerning the indigenous languages. Education of Indians and Inuit used to fall within federal jurisdiction. Traditional policies were avowedly assimilationist and often brutal, with school-age children removed from their home communities to residential schools in which they were forbidden to speak their mother tongue (even when, on arrival, it was their only language) and were punished and humiliated for doing so. In addition to the devastating effects of these policies on native cultures and natives' self-esteem, they also did great harm to the survival of Amerindian languages. In the 1990s, 50-60 are believed to survive. Of these, about 40 have fewer than 1000 speakers, and are in imminent danger of extinction within the next generation. Only Inuktitut (about 27 000 speakers), Ojibway (about 23 000), and Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi (about 85000) appear certain to survive. Nonetheless, attitudes have changed radically. Currently, language and education are central components of the Aboriginal drive towards political self-determination. Increasingly, policies governing Aboriginal education are being devolved upon the indigenous communities themselves, albeit with federal control still exercised through power over funding and provincial or territorial control of standards, certification,- and interpretations of official languages legislation. The picture is thus one of rapid change in both policies and practices. In some areas of the country, language retrieval programs modeled on New Zealand's kohanga reo ('language nests') (see Maori Language Revitalizatiori) have been put in place to help bilingual grandparents pass on the ancestral language over the heads, as it were, of their own monolingual children. The three territories recognize local Aboriginal lan-
Indian Language Education Policy guages as official languages within their education acts, and make variable but growing provision for education through the medium of these languages. In most provinces, Aboriginal language and education policies are under review. Minimally, Aboriginal language programs are provided in at least some locations under the same conditions as heritage language programs, i.e. as 'core' second language instruction at the elementary level or as accredited subjects at the secondary level. Most provinces provide some support for boards engaged in curriculum development for indigenous language teaching. It is, thus, no longer a matter of conscious attempts to destroy the indigenous languages, as was the case in the earlier period of federal domination. Nonetheless, it is widely recognized that instruction on second-language models will not guarantee language retrieval or survival. Only programs which provide for mother tongue education, such as those of the Kativik and James Bay Cree boards of northern Quebec, the Baffin District Board of Nunavut Territory, and some smaller community initiatives such as those of the Mi'qmaq of Nova Scotia, seem to hold any such promise.
See also: Australian Minority Languages; Sweden: Immigrant Languages; Wales: Language Education Policy; Irish Language Education Policy; Indian Language Education Policy; Australian Indigenous Languages; English Teaching in Canada; Teaching Endangered Languages. Bibliography Commissioner of Official Languages 1997 Annual Report, 1997. Canadian Government Publishing Centre, Ottawa Fettes M 1998 Life on the edge: Canada's Aboriginal languages under official bilingualism. In: Ricento T, Burnaby B (eds.) Language and Politics in the United States and Canada: Myths and Realities. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ MacMillan C M 1998 The Practice of Language Rights in Canada. University of Toronto Press, Toronto Statistics Canada 1998 Nation Series: 1996 Census of Canada. Ministry of Industry, Ottawa http://www.statcan.ca;80/english/Pgdb/People/Population/ demol8b.htm http://www.statcan.ca;80/english/Pgdb/People/Population/ demo39a.htm http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/971104/d971104.htm http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/980113/d980113.htm
Indian Language Education Policy Bh. Krishnamurti
Of the 1652 mother tongues registered by the 1961 Census of India, 197 were spoken by 10000 or more speakers and fell into four major language families: Indo-Aryan, 98; Austro-Asiatic, 21; Dravidian, 26; Tibeto-Chinese, 52. The corresponding figures for 1971 (221) and 1981 (104) are indeed puzzling. The 15 major languages recognized by the Constitution (adopted in 1950) consist of four literary languages of the Dravidian group and 11 literary languages of Indo-Aryan, including Sanskrit, a classical language (see Table 1). In 1992, three more languages were added to the schedule: Gorkhali (Nepali) (1 252444), Konkani (1584063) and Manipuri (904350). The linguistic diversity poses enormous problems in the use of language in education. Multilingualism is encouraged in education but the status of the major regional languages vis-a-vis English has remained undefined for want of proper planning.
Table 1. Scheduled languages in descending order of speakers' strength (1981 household census). Number of Percentage of Language speakers total population 1. Hindi 264188858 39.94 2. Telugu 54226227 8.20 3. Bengali 51503085 7.79 4. Marathi 49624847 7.50 5. Tamil 44730389 6.76 6. Urdu 35323481 5.34 7. Gujarati 33189039 5.02 8. Kannada 26887837 4.06 9. Malayalam 25952966 3.92 10. Oriya 22881053 3.46 11. Punjabi 18588400 2.81 12. Kashmiri 3174684 0.48 13. Sindhi 1946278 0.29 14. Assamese* 70525 0.01 15. Sanskrit 2946 — *No census was taken in Assam.
1. Pre-Independence (1947) Period
The nineteenth century was marked by three conflicting views of the use of language in education. 'Orientalists' fought for the preservation and pro-
motion of Sanskrit and Persian, while 'Anglicists' wanted Western knowledge in science, letters, and philosophy to be imparted through English. The 'Ver83
The Social Context nacularists' championed the cause of the native languages. Thomas Babington Macaulay's celebrated minute (February 2, 1835) inaugurated the use of English in education in India. It says: 'We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern... a class of persons, Indian in blood and color but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect' (Kanungo 1962:25). After the British Crown took over the rule of India from the East India Company in 1857, many policy changes were effected which extended the use of Indian languages in education. Vernacular schools were established after 1913 and Sir Michael Sadler's Commission of 1917 clinched the issue in favor of the use of regional languages in education. (For details of this controversy, see Kanungo 1962.)
implemented the three-language formula in education, the Hindi-speaking states introduced Sanskrit and English as second and third languages. The purpose of the Three Language Formula' requiring that every high-school student must have command of two modern Indian languages (Hindi and one other) besides English has thus failed. Tamil Nadu has ruled out the use of Hindi in education thus adhering to the twolanguage formula. Most states have introduced by legislation the use of the mother tongue medium for instruction beyond the secondary stage, up to first degree level, as optional to English (the latter mainly for linguistic minorities). But the universities, by and large, continue to use English as the medium of instruction—compulsorily in professional courses, and as a subject at the Bachelor's level where the instruction medium is the regional language.
2. Post-Independence Period
By the time of Independence in 1947 the dominant regional languages became the media of instruction up to the high school level (XI Class, age 15) and English was taught as a subject from the IV or V standard (age 8 or 9) onwards. At college and university levels, English continued as the medium of instruction for all subjects (arts, science, and technical courses). Schedule VIII of the Constitution of India lists 15 languages. The population figures are given in Table 1 (1981 Census). They constitute 95.58 percent of the total population which contrasts with 87 percent registered in the 1961 and 1971 Census. Linguistic States (based on dominant regional languages) were formed in 1956. Most of the states have since adopted the regional languages of the majority as the official languages of the states; the exception is the northeastern hill states where no one language is dominant. Hindi in Devanagari script is the official language of the country (see National Language) with English given an 'Associate Official' status. The University Education Commission report of 1949, and the Education Commission Report of 1964-6 emphasized the use of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction up to the highest level (see Educational Linguistics). The latter report also suggested that three languages should be introduced and taught before the end of Class X: mother tongue/regional language from the primary level (I-X, age 5-14); then Hindi and English at postprimary and secondary levels (V-X, VIII-X), introduced one at a time, depending on the predilection of the State Government. In the Hindi-speaking states, where the regional language and the official language of the country are one and the same (viz. Hindi), English was to be taught from Standard V onwards and a modern Indian language (preferably a South Indian language) from VIII to X. Even the phased introduction of three languages in education has failed. While the Southern states, by and large, have 84
3. Deficiencies in Language Planning
Owing to defective planning by policy makers both at the state and the federal levels, the English language has emerged as the favored language in education. Because of legal complications, graduates with the regional language medium get no preference in employment. State and central administration and courts at all levels use English as the major official language. Industry, business and trade continue to use English in transactions. A consequence of this has been the mushroom growth of English-medium schools during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, to replace regional language medium schools in the private sector, and the former are now favored even by lowincome groups for their children. All these developments cause concern to educationists, since the pre-Independence pattern of language use in education produced scholars, professionals and intellectuals who had not lost touch with their native language and culture. Further, the demand for English teaching from the preprimary stage is not matched by supply of teachers of an acceptable standard in that language. There are nearly 7000 colleges and 154 universities at present turning out every year about 4 million undergraduates and 400 000 postgraduates in various fields. The quality of education has suffered, because of the denial to the population of the right to learn through their mother tongue. The northeastern hill states (Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya) have adopted English as the official language. The rate of literacy in India in 1991 was 52 percent in the population aged 7 +. Among the literate population, about 4 percent can use English with some confidence. They control all positions of power in education, politics, industry, and business. Language planners and policy makers have to grapple with the complex problems of multilingualism and of keeping the Indian languages center stage by giving them their
Irish Language Education Policy due place in the educational process and national development. Linguistic minorities and minor languages (including tribal languages) pose a different set of problems. Linguistic minorities (migrant populations from other major language areas) prefer to study in Central Schools through the medium of English or Hindi. Teaching materials for minor languages (those not in the VIII Schedule of the Constitution) are not available, thus denying the children their right to have literacy/primary education in their mother tongue. While the use of more than one language is the official policy in education, a clear definition of the functional role of each language within the framework is either ignored or blurred. The New Education Policy of the Government (1986) supports the Education Commission Report of 1964-66 (adopted by Parliament in 1968) insofar as the roles of different languages are concerned, but in actual implementation very little has been done in an organized manner. See also: Canadian Language Education Policy; Multilingualism; National Language Policy and Education.
Bibliography Census of India 1961, vol. 1, part II-C (ii), Language tables 1964. Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India, New Delhi Census of India 1971 Language handbook on mother-tongues in census 1972. Office of the Registrar General of India, New Delhi Census of India 1981 Series 1 India, Paper 1 of 1987. Households and Household Population by Language Mainly Spoken in the Household 1987. Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, New Delhi Kanungo G B 1962 The Language Controversy in Indian Education. Comparative Education Center, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Krishnamurti Bh 1986 A fresh look at language in school education in India. Int. J. Soc. Lang. 62: 105-118 Krishnamurti Bh 1990 The regional language vis-a-vis English as the medium of instruction in higher education: The Indian dilemma. In: Pattanayak D P (ed.) Multilingualism in India. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Pattanayak D P 1981 Multilingualism and Mother-tongue Education. Oxford University Press, Delhi Report of the Education Commission (1964-66): Education and National Development 1966. Ministry of Education, Government of India, New Delhi Sridhar K K 1989 English in Indian Bilingualism. Manohar, New Delhi
Irish Language Education Policy T. Hickey
Irish is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland. Some small communities which are Irishspeaking exist (known as the Gaeltacht) mainly on the western seaboard. However, most areas of the country are English-speaking and the majority of children only begin to learn Irish on entering school. Figures from the 1991 Census indicate that about five percent of children entering school in the state have at least some home-generated competence in the language. Almost a third of the total population reported an ability to speak Irish in the 1991 Census, but 6 Riagáin and 6 Gliasáin (1984) estimated that only 10 percent of their survey sample had at least conversational Irish. At its founding in 1922, the state's objective was the revival of Irish, using the educational system as its main instrument. Some progress was made towards the initial aim of achieving bilingual or immersion programs in all schools, despite early difficulties. The number of Irish-medium schools peaked in the 1940s, but then declined significantly. This decline coincided with a perceived (unofficial) change in state policy away from the promotion of bilingual education. This precipitated the founding of a parent-led movement
(Gaelscoileanna) in 1973 to lobby for Irish-medium education in particular localities. As a result, recent years have seen significant growth in the number of Irish-medium schools, to 113 all-Irish primary schools outside of Gaeltacht areas, with 18 000 pupils in 1997, and 24 second-level schools, with 5000 pupils. In addition, there are about 170 Irish-medium preschools (or naíonraí) with about 2500 children outside of the Gaeltacht (Hickey 1997). However, this recent resurgence of interest in Irish- medium education is still restricted to a minority, and Department of Education statistics for 1995-96 indicate that only about four percent of primary school children in Englishspeaking areas are educated entirely through the medium of Irish. While the ideal of producing competent Irish speakers might be better served by more partial-immersion or immersion programs, surveys show that there is no broad public support for Irish-medium instruction for all children. Although general support for Irish-medium education has risen somewhat, to 30 percent in the national survey of adults in 1993 (6 Riagáin and Ó Gliasáin 1994) reporting that they would choose an 85
The Social Context all-Irish school primary school for their own children if one were accessible to them, nevertheless 70 percent of those surveyed favored the teaching of Irish as a subject only as the norm. For the majority learning Irish a subject in primary school, it is estimated that about 20 percent of the school day is devoted to teaching Irish and Irish reading (Mac Aogáin 1990). The audio-visual course introduced in the 1960s encouraged expectations that children would leave school with a basic speaking competence in the language, despite the absence of pressure to communicate in Irish outside school, and relatively little inside. Dissatisfaction has been expressed with the poor results from this approach, though Harris (1988) suggests that this is due more to the frustration of unrealistic expectations than to a substantial fall in standards. A new Irish curriculum has now been drafted for primary schools, based on the communicative approach, and it is expected to be put into practice by the year 2000. Irish is a compulsory subject at secondary school level. Until 1973 it was necessary to pass in Irish in order to be awarded state certificates. While this acted as an incentive, it also increased negative feelings towards the language. The loss of this status and a decline in the perceived utility of Irish led to a fall in the numbers taking higher-level Irish courses, and a substantial rise, to about a third of pupils, in the numbers failing or not sitting the examination. Second-level Irish courses leading to Junior Certificat and Applied Leaving Certificate have been changed towards a more communicative syllabus in the 1990s, but the mainstream Leaving Certificate courses remain traditional and literature-based. The absence of an Irish entry requirement for third-level institutions outside of the National University of Ireland has contributed to the decline in the perceived utility of Irish. Thus educational policies regarding Irish since the founding of the State have changed from aspiring to provide for all Irish-medium education towards that of teaching Irish as a single subject to the majority, with a small minority only in Irish immersion schools.
Schools now find themselves in a dilemma: while they have an official state policy of language promotion and a majority of public opinion which favors the teaching of Irish, yet they must also recognize that the language is becoming increasingly marginalized, with a decline in its utility for employment and higher education, and current low levels of usage. Nevertheless, the growing sense of Irish cultural identity in response to greater contact with continental Europe, the success of Irish-medium schools, and the advent of Teilifis na Gaelige (An Irish-medium TV channel) have led to some favorable changes in the image of the language in recent years. However, 6 Riagain (1997) concludes that, while there has been some measure of revival in the last 70 years, the long-term future of Irish is not yet secure. Turning to the study of other languages, the majority of pupils at second-level study at least one modern language. The most popular language is French, studied by 75 percent of candidates for the Junior Certificate (age 15), while German is studied by 30 percent. A pilot projected introducing modern languages for the upper grades of primary school was initiated by the Department of Education in 1998, with funding from the European Science Foundation. See also: National Language Policy and Education; Teaching Endangered Languages. Bibliography Harris J 1988 Spoken Irish in the primary school system. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 70: 6987 Hickey T 1997 Early Immersion Education in Ireland: Na Naionrai. ITE/Linguistics Institute of Ireland, Dublin Mac Aogáin E 1990 Teaching Irish in the Schools: Towards a Language Policy for 1992. ITE/Linguistics Institute of Ireland, Dublin 6 Riagain P, Ó Gliasáin M 1984 The Irish Language in the Republic of Ireland Preliminary Report of a National Survey. Institiuid Teangeolaiochta Eireann, Dublin 6 Riagain P 1997 Language Policy and Social Reproduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
Japanese Language Education Policy T. Shimaoka
Japan's contact with Europe and America officially started in 1868 when the Tokugawa Government returned political power to Meiji Emperor. Japan found to her surprise that she had been left behind during 250 years' isolation, and that unless she took
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some action, she would be at the mercy of foreign powers, particularly in the field of science and technology. The reaction of the government was to adopt a policy of 'Enrich the nation and strengthen the army.' The language policy adopted then was to produce
Japanese Language Education Policy the personnel who could read and understand anything relevant to the military. Direct communication with English speakers was not of primary concern, and the so-called grammar-translation method was the one usually adopted nationwide. This was all the more so, because there were very few native English speakers available to teach English in the educational system of Japan at that time. The natural method or direct method was adopted by a very few leading teachers in Japan, and it attracted the attention of a small number of teachers. The end of World War II (1945) was a significant turning point in the history of English teaching in Japan. From then on, teachers of English came to pay more attention to the oral aspect of language teaching. The policy adopted widely was the oral approach, mainly disseminated from ELEC (The English Language Educational Council) where some first-class linguists, such as Charles C. Fries, Freeman Twaddell, and many others advocated the oral approach. This article focuses on policy in Japan for the teaching of English, as there is no other foreign language teaching comparable in scale, size of teaching staff, number of learners, and facilities. The teaching of German, French, and other foreign languages is mainly conducted at the college and university levels. Classical Chinese is an elective subject taught at the senior high school level, and it is psychologically accepted as part of Japanese language education. The body responsible for language teaching policy as part of school education is the Ministry of Education of the central government. For its decisionmaking, the opinions of language teachers are monitored, mainly through a dozen or so recruited committee members representing opinions in the language teaching profession. Foreign-language learning starts in the seventh grade or the first school year of junior high school. The Ministry of Education issues the suggested course of study for language teaching for junior and senior high schools. 1. Who are the Students and How Often are They Taught? More than 95 percent of all age groups in junior and senior high school students study English, although a foreign language is not a required subject. They have three to four classes per week for the first three years in junior high schools, whereas in senior high schools, the number of classes per week is usually 5-5-5, that is, five English classes per week for each school year. The types of English classes and the standard credits are shown in Table 1 (up to 1993 for junior high school and to 1994 for senior high school). English I is a multiskills course, including the review of junior high school English. English II, more advanced level English, has more complicated grammatical structures and more difficult vocabulary items.
Table 1. Standard junior Standard senior high school high school credits credits 4 English I 3 English Bk 1 5 English II English IIA 3 3 English Bk 2 3 English IIB 3 English IIC 3 English Bk 3
English IIA is for conversation practice, English IIB for extensive reading, and English IIC is for composition. Most of the high schools which encourage their students to enter universities usually offer English IIB and English IIC as school subjects, but not English IIA. It is to be noticed that there is no grammar instruction per se, as there is a basic understanding that grammar is not a subject to teach, but a useful means of understanding the structure of language. 2. The Use of Authorized FL Textbooks Japan seems to be one of the few countries in the world which spell out the English teaching curriculum in great detail in terms of grammar and vocabulary selection. Too much restriction may cramp originality in authorized textbooks, but in other respects, it may help produce neatly arranged teaching items. Japanese FL learners in nonprivate schools are required to use textbooks authorized by the Ministry of Education. The textbooks are given free to all junior high school students, as the first 9 years of schooling are compulsory. In order for textbooks to be authorized, textbook editors must follow the suggested course of study issued by the Ministry. But this does not mean the teacher-led classroom activities will be restricted. FL teachers are free to adjust the textbooks to the level and needs of their students. However, in each locality the board of education as well as the professional training center will make their presence felt. Information on English teaching is disseminated not only through English teachers'journals but also through the board of education and English teachers' local conferences, big or small in scale, held fairly regularly every year. The 'Course of Study,' as one of the determining factors of language policy in Japan, has been modified several times to reflect the changes that have taken place in the field. Today there is more emphasis on the practical use of English. This will be expanded in Sect. 4. 3. Teaching Methods 3.1 Emphasis on the Oral Approach—Using Tape-recorders in English Classrooms Since 1945, government policy has been to 'democratize' Japan after the American model. The 6-3-3 87
The Social Context system of schooling was enforced and it was decided that the first 9 years would be compulsory, although it was predicted that there would be an acute shortage of teachers, schools, and facilities to meet these new educational demands. From the standpoint of teaching, the new public education system expanded the role of English. Almost all Japanese junior and senior high school students were to learn English. Yet, teachers with a good command of English, especially listening and speaking ability, were hard to find, probably because English had been scorned during the War. The foundation of ELEC in Tokyo in 1957, thanks to a contribution from the Ford Foundation, provided a basis for implementing a language teaching policy that would encourage learners to use English orally. ELEC regularly held English teachers' meetings in many parts of Japan, and introduced the methods of the oral approach: pattern practice or substitution drills, mim-mem practice, etc. The positive sign then was that, even when there was no native English speaker in English classrooms, the newly invented tape recorders made it possible to reproduce native-speaker models in class. The oral approach suddenly became popular thanks to the use of the audiotape. The installation of language laboratories in some schools was subsidized by local and central government, and the Language Laboratory Association (LLA) was organized to exchange and disseminate information concerning its effective use. Despite this, it is an open question whether the use of these machines is sufficient or not. 3.2 Oral Communication—a Native English Speaker as an AET It was recognized that even the most sophisticated language laboratory cannot replace genuine, live, direct face-to-face interactions with real human beings—whether native English speakers, Japanese teachers of English, or students. Encounters with native English speakers in classrooms are real communication experiences which have great and lasting impact, compared to simulations and other artificial forms of communication. After the verification of the effectiveness of teamteaching, namely, the teamwork of a native English speaker and a Japanese teacher of English, the government decided to recruit young college graduates from English speaking countries to work as Assistant English Teachers (AETs). The government concluded that conflicts between Japanese and AETs because of cross-cultural differences offered a good opportunity to understand cross-cultural differences more deeply and to learn how to deal with them. This scheme, supported by a majority of Japanese teachers of English, was further extended to comprise nearly 5000 AETs as of the 1998 school year. Although AETs are only supposed to be 'assistants,'
their contribution as cultural ambassadors has been highly significant. The AET's presence in classrooms transformed the attitudes of students and teachers who had never been exposed to face-to-face communication situations with native English speakers. That is, English has become not so much an object of study, as an instrument of communication. And communication with new visitors is a pleasant experience for all people. Most AETs do a good job not only in class as assistants but also as friendly 'big brothers or sisters' for the students outside class. Language teaching emphasizing communication seems to be in tune with the times. In order to cope with an ever-changing world, the Ministry of Education revised its suggested course of study, effective in 1993 onwards for junior high school and in 1994 for senior high school. This will be the topic of Sect. 5. 4. Influences on Language Teachers
In evaluating the language teaching situation in Japan, two major influences have to be considered: the first are decisions taken by the Ministry of Education and the second are the activities of nongovernmental bodies. The three main functions of the Ministry, as far as language teaching is concerned, are to determine language teachers' qualifications, to formulate a course of study, and to authorize textbooks to be used in nonprivate schools. The Ministry does not limit textbooks to one kind; it authorizes any textbooks that meet the requirement of the 'Course of Study.' In order to be a language teacher, one has to take certain credits at a university: Japanese Constitution, educational psychology, child and youth psychology, methodology, and language-related credits. Teaching practice is also required. In addition, one has to pass the examination administered by the board of education in each locality. Multiple choice questions about background knowledge, and interviews designed to test oral proficiency in the target language are the main hurdles for prospective teachers. Japanese teachers of a foreign language do have some freedom in their classrooms and are not completely bound by the guidelines of the Ministry. In almost all parts of Japan, there are language teachers' meetings where they can discuss and familiarize themselves with various teaching methods. First year language teachers must go through a few months' professional training, including some weeks' training during a special voyage on a ship during the summer vacation. As far as nongovernmental bodies are concerned, language teachers in Japan have long been under the influence of two important institutions: one is the Institute for Research in Language Teaching (IRLT) founded in 1923 by Harold E. Palmer and the other is the English Language Educational Council (ELEC) founded in 1952 with financial support from the Ford Foundation.
Japanese Language Education Policy 4.1 Harold E. Palmer and the Institute for Research in Language Teaching Harold E. Palmer is well-known in Japan for the way in which he promoted the oral method. He stated clearly that understanding is not sufficient, and that 'fusion' is necessary for effective use of the language. As a first step in language learning, almost complete oral mastery of easy and useful words and structures is essential. His theory and practice are still alive today in some high schools. The IRLT, founded by Palmer, holds an annual convention where English teaching demonstrations are shown to more than 1000 teachers and prospective English teachers who come from all over Japan. Beside teaching demonstrations, there are presentations and discussions on some current theories and practice of TEFL. 4.2 Charles C. Fries and the English Language Education Council Charles C. Fries's book, Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language (1945), was read very widely in Japan as a source of inspiration with regard to the oral approach. One of the most often quoted passages is as follows: In learning a new language, the chief problem is not that of learning vocabulary items. It is, first, the mastery of the sound system—to understand the stream of speech, to hear the distinctive features and to approximate their production. It is second, the mastery of the features of arrangement that constitute the structure of the language ... (Fries 1945: 3)
For the initial ELEC activities, they adopted Fries's suggestion and focused on phonemic contrasts and pattern practices. Fries, other famous linguists came to lecture at the annual ELEC Convention. Next to Fries, mention should be made of Twaddell's foreignlanguage learning theory, known as 'Five-Step Learning.' Twaddell lectured at ELEC in 1960 and again in 1980, exactly 20 years later. In his second lecture, he asserted that the theory he had proposed 20 years previously was still valid and that he had never changed his mind during that time. His five-step learning theory is as follows: Recognition Mimicry Repetition Variation Selection With relatively few exceptions, this five-step development process—starting with understanding, going on to mimicry and repetition, then consolidating sentence patterns with substitution drills, and finally doing creative language activities as selection—seems
to be still widely followed by language educators in Japan. 4.3 Other Influences The geographical shape of Japan, an archipelago, may give the impression that it is like a fortress—not receptive to outside influences and new ideas. However, as seen above, Japanese people are ready to welcome new concepts in foreign-language learning. They have not always been tied down by the Ministry of Education's guidelines. The Ministry of Education has had no policy regarding the introduction of foreign language teaching at the primary school level. But it appears to recommend that the teaching of Japanese reading and writing should precede that of foreign languages. The Modern Language Institute, attached to the Department of Literature at Tokyo University of Education (now, University of Tsukuba) felt this was inadequate, as the learning of foreign languages does not make learning Japanese more difficult. In view of the limited availability of primary school teachers qualified to teach English, the MLI tested the effectiveness of teaching with audiotapes. This was done with financial support from UNESCO. The conclusion was that statistically speaking, there was no significant difference at least for the first 40 class periods between an experimental group taught by audiotape and a control group taught by the teachers who recorded the tape. The unexpectedly high achievement of the learners who used audio tapes led to a sudden increase in the use of tapes by teachers at the primary school and kindergarten levels. In 1998 it was estimated that as many as two million children start studying English before the seventh grade. To the eye of foreigners, the decisionmaking process in Japanese education may look rather slow. This is true to a certain extent. However, starting English teaching in public primary schools from 2002 has already been decided, and each prefecture—there are 47 prefectures in Japan—has now provided one pilot school where English is being taught experimentally in order to collect the necessary information for English teaching in primary schools. 5. Future Development of Language Teaching as Stipulated in A Course of Study The following four basic policies were outlined by the Provisional Education Council (Rinkyoshin) and are reflected in directives issued by the Ministry of Education, valid from 1993 for junior high schools and from 1994 for senior high schools. Schools should: (a) bring up broad-minded and strongly independent individuals; (b) instill a strong will to learn in people and foster their ability to adjust to new environments or situations; 89
The Social Context (c) instill the basic knowledge and develop the skills all Japanese citizens need to have, and enrich their educational environment in such a way that each individual's potential will be more fully realized; (d) foster the kind of international understanding which will make it possible for Japanese and non-Japanese to respect each other's culture and traditions. In line with these four guidelines, the aims of Japan's future language teaching policy are to help the learners to cope with worldwide internationalization, and to enable them to do well in situations of international communication. In particular, two aims are to be emphasized: the development of communicative abilities and the development of cross-cultural understanding. The most recent Rinkyoshin report was issued on July 29. Although this report is basically the same as the previous one, an emphasis is laid on fostering 'the mind to live positively.' This includes among other things, the mind and capabilities for task-finding, selflearning, thinking independently, deciding and judging by oneself, taking action based on one's decision, and trying to find the better solution to any problem in turbulent society. At the same time, Rinkyoshin lists as desirable human qualities, a rich and broad mind, a cooperative spirit, and a sympathetic and responsive mind. The report naturally stresses the importance of maintaining health and developing physical power so that one can enjoy the positive way of living. Along this line, five-day a week school attendance should be put into force based on further reduction of learning content in the syllabus. There still seems to be unsolved 'articulation problems,' that is, how to relate what one learns in primary schools to the junior high school syllabus. The junior high school syllabus is based on the assumption that the students start learning English as beginners. Thus the primary school English curriculum will be such that the students do not study reading or writing English but enjoy oral communication including games, singing, etc. as part of comprehensive school subject. At what grade they start English class depends on the decision of each primary school. 5.1 For Public Junior High Schools The Ministry's directives are based on the recommended emphasis on communicative abilities and international understanding, as follows: (a) to give more importance to listening and speaking without neglecting reading and writing; (b) to focus teaching more clearly on specific items so that it may be more effective; (c) to foster a positive attitude towards the mastery of a foreign language among learners, to help them become good speakers of a foreign language, and to enhance their understanding
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of foreign countries by developing their interest in language and culture both at home and abroad. Authorized textbooks are to be edited in accordance with the above directives and they are to have the following characteristics: (a) The four skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing will be separated; (b) a more flexible arrangement of the grammatical items to be taught will be adopted; (c) the 507 vocabulary items suggested by the Ministry of Education and about 1000 vocabulary items in total will be included in authorized textbooks. The number of weekly class periods over the 3 years will most likely be 4(3 +1)-3-3 or 3-3-4(3 +1) in the majority of cases. How to make the best use of the extra period each week is a question that will have to be answered through discussion in each setting. 5.2 For Public Senior High Schools The four basic principles mentioned above also apply to foreign-language teaching in senior high schools. An emphasis on communication and on the acquisition of basic and fundamental knowledge needed to understand language and culture both at home and abroad is apparent in the revised 'course of study,' in force after 1994. As regards the kinds of English classes and their frequency, there will be more variety and credit requirements will be more flexible. Table 2 may clarify this point. English I is an expansion of junior high school English, meaning multiskills instruction. English II is a higher level of English I. Oral Communication A is for daily conversation about the learners' immediate surroundings. Oral Communication B is for listening activities, and Oral Communication C is for speech, discussion and debate. These oral communication activities can be done in any of the school years. It is expected that the team teaching involving JTEs (i.e., Japanese Teachers of English) and AETs will be effective in developing the learners' communicative abilities. Reading and writing courses are to be taken after the completion of English I.
Table 2. Standard English I English II Oral Communication A Oral Communication B Oral Communication C Reading Writing
4 4 2 2 2 4 4
Japanese Language Education Policy 6. Language Teaching Policy at the Higher Education Level 6.1 Achievement Tests and Proficiency Tests Higher education in Japan still seems to leave more room for academic freedom than secondary education does. University professors give credits based on their own subjective judgment. Higher education is predicated on self-willed or autonomous learning. It is, thus, desirable to check what the students learn on their own. Some universities have included proficiency tests in their evaluation system. 6.2 Hours of Language Instruction at the University Level The national university law in Japan requires eight credits in one foreign language, usually English. But the Ministry of Education wants each university to evolve its own approach to the teaching of foreign languages, thus allowing each university to decide how it will implement the law. What is being discussed in the 1990s is whether a second foreign language should be required or elective. It is feared that if second foreign language classes become elective, there will be few students taking German or French, not to mention Chinese and Korean. However, if it is elective, the students who are highly motivated will be able to learn more quickly. 6.3 The TA System The usefulness of teaching assistants was discussed above in Sect. 4.2. They were to work not as instructors but as assistants to the professor in charge. If it is found that TAs are instrumental in making foreign language instruction more effective, the TA system will be widely adopted on a regular basis. 6.4 Residential Programs The major business groups have tried to coax universities to turn out graduates with better language skills. The universities responded by saying that their goal is not to produce business-oriented people, but to educate people so that they know the world and can form their own judgment. Faced with this unfavorable response in the mid1960s, several top business leaders decided to collect donations from among major companies and put together their own immersion program during the summer vacation. They call it ITC, an acronym which stands for Intensive Training Course. To help the participants overcome any psychological barriers, they offered enough money to hire young native English speakers who would stay with them during the whole program.
It is regrettable indeed that because of the 1973 oil crisis, businesses stopped making donations and the ITC program came to an end. However, some former ITC participants, who developed their confidence in speaking and socializing in English, decided to start their own ITC program for their junior students. It is hoped that these highly motivated university students will continue to be the cutting edge for further enhancing the proficiency level of future leaders. It is also hoped that this kind of total immersion program will offer an alternative to some traditional English classes taught by a grammartranslation method. 6.5 Proficiency Tests English being the international language nowadays, proficient users of English are in high demand in Japan as in other parts of the world. To recruit them, the test results of Eiken (English proficiency test sponsored by the Ministry of Education in Japan) are widely taken into consideration. In some colleges and universities the students who obtained a high ranking degree of proficiency in the Eiken test are given certain credits without attending some regular English classes. Recently there has been an increasing interest in TOEIC, TOEFL, and some other internationally wellknown tests and the numbers of those who take the test are increasing. From the administrative viewpoint, these tests are desirable because they reflect the test-takers' proficiency level more objectively and reduce 'apple-polishers' who want favorable treatment from classroom teachers. Bibliography Fries C C 1945 Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Ministry of Education 1979 A Course of Study for Senior High School. Monbusho, Tokyo Ministry of Education 1988a A Course of Study for Junior High School. Monbusho, Tokyo Ministry of Education 1988b A Course of Study for Senior High School. Monbusho, Tokyo Palmer H E 1968 The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages. Oxford University Press, Oxford Palmer H E 1921 The Oral Method of Teaching Languages: A Monograph on Conversational Methods, Together with a Full Description and Abundant Examples of Fifty Appropriate Forms of Work. Heffer, Cambridge School Curriculum Council (Kyouikukateishinngikai) 1998 'Kaizen' on Principles of School Education. Ministry of Education Shimaoka T et al. 1993 Sunshine English Course. Kairyudo, Tokyo Shimaoka T, Yashiro K 1990 Team Teaching in English Classrooms: An Inter cultural Approach. Kairyudo, Tokyo Twaddell F 1958 Preface to the first-year seminar script. In: Yambe T (ed.) 1988 Applied Linguistics and the Teaching of English. ELEC, Tokyo
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The Social Context
Language Diffusion Policy C. G. MacLean
The promotion of a language by a government outside the government's territory may be achieved in a number of ways. The evidence of history is various and often paradoxical. Military advances have usually resulted in the spread of the victor's language—or at least parts of it—but the effect has sometimes been only temporary. Missionary activity, not necessarily funded by government, has helped to spread some languages, but in many contexts missionaries have aimed to make contact in the language of those they wish to convert. Policies of either persuading another to speak one's own language or of learning to speak another's language can be equally imperialistic in politics or religion or commerce. Propaganda, religious or political, is generally more likely to be effective if it is in the language of the target audience. Likewise, many commercial activities are seen to require the use of the language of the target market: in even the strongest countries, lack of language ability restricts companies from trading abroad. Tourism is noteworthy: in 1992 France was reported to be the most popular tourist resort in the world. Though the French government is eager to preserve and promote the use of French outside France, it would be unwise to do this in the literature promoting France as a tourist resort, and perhaps it should expect the strength of tourism in France, even with a copious provision of phrase books, to have no more than a marginal effect on the learning of French in schools abroad. Radio and television have brought their own challenges and techniques. Radio sidesteps some problems of literacy and language learning: one recorded voice can be heard by millions, many of whom may be illiterate, and the one voice may offer instruction in a new language. Television language may be dubbed or subtitled, essential processes if the television programs are to be sold to the target viewers. While the above factors have all been related historically to language promotion, none may be simply correlated to the proportions of the world population now speaking certain languages. Neither is there a discernible correlation between the numerical supremacy of the major languages (see UNESCO tables) and efforts, as seen in the examples that follow, by governments to promote languages. The promotion of a language is at best a slow and unpredictable process. And the promotion may be significantly and suddenly reversed: compare the learning of Russian in Europe and beyond in the early 1980s and the early 1990s.
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This article provides some examples of language promotion by governments in the late twentieth century: the languages are German, French, Hebrew, and English—the last promoted by several governments. All cases reflect, though in different ways, an acceptance of an obvious reality, that is, that people outside a government's territory have need to or can readily be persuaded to learn the language or languages spoken in the country of that government. Also, all the cases here cited reflect, in various degrees, a combination of self-assurance and self-assertion. Clearly there is a strong commercial element in most language promotion, but governments tend to give priority in their reports, program proposals, and promotional literature, to loftier aims, with claims that knowledge of the language will allow closer international links to be established. Also, more specifically, offer is made of access to and appreciation of a culture—literary, artistic, social, historical, etc. More precisely, cooperation is made available in fields of scholarship and professional expertise, not least science and technology. Such activity is at times competitive: 'We have learned to market Britain's strengths against fierce international competition,' said Sir David Orr, retiring chairman of the British Council, in his introduction to the Council's annual report for 1990-91. And: 'How to resist the Anglo-American steamroller? It is so powerful...': see Sect. 1.2. The information about Canada (Sect. 1.3) differs from what is provided about other countries in that it relates to the entire Canadian aid program. Noteworthy in the context of this article is the fact that Canada has two official languages, English and French. Canada's internal commitment determines in some measure the way it views its aid program: this program divides Africa into Anglophone and Francophone Africa. Any country, in providing aid, may well be influenced by its language, by history, or by geography, all of these probably being related. But the Canadian situation by itself highlights the interlocking of these three and might be used to assess, comparatively, the way in which the language interests of a country providing aid (of any kind) tend to confirm and promote the use of a language or languages in recipient countries or regions. An appreciable number of governments provide large sums of money and resources in aid of many kinds to other countries or to citizens of those countries. The cultural, educational, and arts elements of such aid vary greatly in proportion to the total sums. The proportion attributed to language promotion cannot be precisely stated or estimated, even when a
Language Diffusion Policy specific sum is described as allocated under this heading, for there is inevitably some degree of language promotion in most contacts between donor and recipient. One sector of aid to developing countries (as of all aid between countries with different national languages) which may be expected to promote language is that of scholarships and study grants enabling people to spend time in the donor country. This form of provision may have long-term benefits for the donor country but may be counterproductive long-term as aid to a developing country, compared, for instance, with aid which encourages the developing country to build up its own resources of secondary and higher education—in institutions which are, however, less likely to give priority to the language of the donor country. Looking to the twenty-first century, so far as culture in its widest sense is concerned, attitudes to the promoting of a nation's language may perhaps come to be affected by internal tensions about the nature of the nation's culture. Immigrants and indigenous groups may assert their right to preserve their own culture, so may eventually argue that their numbers in the nation qualify their culture to be seen as part of a national amalgam, or what the black Mayor of New York, David Dinkins, called a 'gorgeous mosaic' (The Independent June 22,1992). They may then argue that they should not be required to speak the official language of the nation: at which point it may be politically inconvenient for the national government to be promoting any one language. For instance, the 'melting pot' policy in the USA, as propounded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and envisaging the use of English by all groups in the USA, was resisted in the 1980s. Resistance of this kind is not confined to the USA. The Australian policy of assimilation was discontinued in the 1970s. It remains to be seen whether such resistance affects national policy on aid by any donor government. Certainly by the end of the 1980s policies of and pressures towards multiculturalism and multilingualism had advanced in a number of countries. The culture argument becomes sensitive, too, if the suggestion is made that the culture brings with it a 'civilizing influence.' There have been times when one language more than another has been seen by some to be associated with civilized values. Below there are examples of unargued claims about 'democratic values.' However, the willing absorption of one foreign country's culture or values through the learning of its language, the reading of its books, and the appreciation of its arts may well in one person be accompanied by the determination to purchase a car or hi-fi equipment from another country, whose civilized values are not considered to be of material importance. One other cultural issue arises in the context of language promotion. For example, in the information
given below, three countries—the UK, the USA, and Australia—all actively promote the learning of the English language. It is to be expected that those who learn from teachers provided by these three countries will bear traces of the countries' distinctive accents and vocabulary. Here the cultural question is twofold: does the donor country attempt to suggest that one of its accents or dialects is superior and preferable? Then does the receiving country eventually develop its own form of the language learned—as of course the USA and Australia have done with English over the years? The following examples show several ways in which countries perceive, and try to meet, the need for knowledge of their own language outside their own boundaries. They show, too, some of the ways in which such information is provided by government bodies in different countries. No two are easily compared, even within the English-language group. To some extent Germany and Australia may be compared, each in the context of influence on one region of the world. French and English may be compared in the context of historical, imperial influence. The UK and the USA merit consideration as two styles of promoting the same language worldwide. Canada is distinctive in its dual commitment. Israel is perhaps unique in representing a situation with no obvious comparison past or present. All differ appreciably in output, areas of operation, level and style of funding, arguments deployed, and aims expressed. Together they raise a number of arresting questions about motivation and effectiveness, and not least (against the background of the languages known to be spoken by many and those spoken by but a few) about the likely, possible, and desirable ways in which the popularity of languages here considered, or of any other, will rise or fall. In this context, three sets of statistics merit thought. First, UNESCO figures for 1989 show that the total number of English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers, though all numerically in the top 12, represent only 24.8 percent of the entire world population. Second, of the total number of English speakers, in the UNESCO figures, 23.2 percent are classified as 'potential' (i.e., principally learners rather than mother-tongue speakers), and this number of 'potential' speakers is 48.4 percent of the total number of 'potential' speakers of all languages in the top 12. Third, such figures may also inform reflection on the fact that (according to The Independent of January 8, 1992) in 1992 Radio Finland transmitted a weekly 5-minute news bulletin, "Nuntii Latini' in Latin across the globe—perhaps the most minuscule promotion of any language anywhere, in this case not the language of the broadcasting country. Latin was at one time more forcefully promoted, and to some effect. Sic transit gloria mundi. Thomas a Kempis's saying is described in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 93
The Social Context as 'a classic statement on the transitory nature of human vanities.' The Latin phrase is intoned at the coronation ceremony of the Pope. On Vatican City State Radio, Latin features in daily broadcasts of the Mass. The words 'Laudetur Jesus Christus' precede all transmissions and are then repeated in the language of the broadcast; 'Christus Vincit' is the station's interval signal (World Radio TV Handbook). For the rest, Vatican Radio is listed as broadcasting in over 30 languages, even including the international (artificial) language Esperanto. 1. National Promotion /./ Germany For the German government, cultural contacts are those not seen as political or economic. Most German organizations devoted to cultural and scientific exchange with other countries have their origins prior to the German economic crisis of 1930 and the Nazi dictatorship of 1933-45. From 1949 exchanges were resumed. Academic relations are nurtured by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the German academic exchange service, established in 1925, which promotes relations with other countries, particularly through the exchange of students and academics in all disciplines, including language. DAAD is publicly funded (in 1989 the Federal government and parliament contributed DM220 million), and also receives funds from the European Community and several national and international foundations and institutions. DAAD projects include the DAAD Lektoren, teachers and lecturers who, for the most part, teach German at foreign institutions of higher education for a period of 2-5 years. From its origins in the 1920s, the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft (CDG) became an international exchange agency in the field of vocational further training. The developing countries became the organization's favored partners: some 7000 places were provided annually. In the 40 years after 1949 more than 100000 persons from all parts of the world participated in the organization's programs. More than 60 associations of former scholarship holders were established in 50 countries. In Germany the CDG runs seven language centers with board and lodging facilities for around 700 participants. CDG funds are provided by the German government and the Bundesländer (constituent states), and German industry provides trainee places. In the 1980s the German Foreign Office in Bonn commissioned from the Mannheim-based Institute of the German Language a survey on where German is spoken in the world: the report was entitled 'Germanspeaking Minorities.' Inevitably classification of varying groups was found difficult. The 1.6 million persons 'speaking German at home' in the USA top the list of the 27 countries; 112545 speak German at home in
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Canada. Only about 100 000 of the 635 000 of German origin in Australia speak German at home: the decline is attributed to the Australian policy of assimilation (which was discontinued in the mid 1970s). Barthold Witte, head of the Directorate-General for Cultural Relations at the German Foreign Office, stated: Reliable information on the spread and usage of the German language in non-German-speaking countries constitutes an important planning basis for the intended expansion of language promotion for German native speakers and the descendants of German immigrants whose knowledge of German is still incomplete or no longer existent. (Inter Nationes, Bonn 1992)
UNESCO figures for 'total speakers' of the major languages show German as the 12th: the figures for 'real speakers' show German as ninth. German is, however, the native tongue of more Europeans than any other. Figures from the Goethe Institute show German as the mother tongue of 110 million people. An article in 1989 says: The question of the position German will assume as a foreign language, the opportunities which will accompany the German language into the twenty-first century, will be decided primarily in Europe, in the European Community and in the countries of eastern Central Europe and Eastern Europe which are now beginning to open up.
The end of the Soviet Union and of its dominance over Eastern Europe made thousands of teachers of compulsory Russian redundant: to fill the languageteaching vacuum, German and English have been the main contenders. The Hungarian government decided in 1989 that, of 2000 Russian-language teachers, 1000 should become German-language teachers. For this the Goethe Institute provided teacher-training staff and materials and the German government provided financial assistance for courses in the Federal Republic. Also the German Industrial and Trade Association (DIHT) invited hundreds of functionaries from industry and commerce in the former Soviet Union to Germany: for these meetings the guests required knowledge of German, for which purpose the Goethe Institute provided intensive courses in the Soviet Union. The Goethe Institute 'for the Cultivation of the German Language Abroad and the Promotion of International Cultural Cooperation' had a budget in 1989 of DM230 million from public funds, it had 149 branch offices in 69 countries. It provides over 1000 courses annually in German within Germany for 25000 persons (1989 figure). In the early 1990s the Institute established new offices in Warsaw, Cracow, Sofia, Bratislava, Prague, Budapest, and Moscow. The Institute's libraries around the world have developed from purely lending libraries to information centers providing books, magazines, and
Language Diffusion Policy audiovisual media. Video cassettes are provided for learning German. The Goethe Institute administers a broad range of examinations in the German language. Looking towards the removal of European trade barriers in the 1990s, courses in German business terminology were provided in European countries. In the late 1980s an examination in Business German was devised jointly by the Goethe Institute, the DIHT, and the CDG. The Institute's promotional literature, accepting that German was already a second language in the Eastern bloc and the former Soviet Union, points out that 'more surprisingly' it is a second language in South America too, and the third language in Canada. Justifying the learning of German, the Institute argues that one-sixth of all Americans are of German descent, that Germans have been the largest ethnic group among American immigrants, that every 10th book published in the world is in German; and that some important journals and papers, especially at research level, are not translated into English. Accepting that most young Germans have learnt English in school, the Institute says that German-speaking countries expect native speakers of English to learn German in order to establish trade—for others who seek to establish trade take that trouble. The Institute sets out to counter claims that German is either a difficult or a harsh and ugly language (as suggested, say, by films made in the UK and the USA in the years following World War II). Knowledge of German, the Institute says, helps towards an understanding of several other European languages; it helps the tourist in Europe appreciate the part played by German-speaking countries in much that is significant in European history and culture; not least important, the German language is one of the common features between East and West Europe, so it may provide a link that can draw the two sides closer. Deutsche Welle, the external broadcasting service of Germany, offers its listeners in Europe not only German-language programs but also 14 foreignlanguage programs. Since July 1990 the service has been broadcast via satellite as well as shortwave. Some other parts of the world are reached by satellite, all parts by shortwave—in a total of 34 languages. 1.2 France It is impossible to escape the question in everyone's mind: how to resist the Anglo-American steamroller? It is so powerful, in technology, business, and the audio-visual media. Ignorance of English is coming to be considered a sign of illiteracy. If Europe does not want to lose its soul, impoverish its culture, forget its history, it must take its plurilingualism on board.
The plea came from Alain Decaux, France's Minister for Francophonie (The Independent on Sunday October 21, 1990). He was speaking at a point when the
Table 1. Number of speakers of the world's major languages (UNESCO 1989; in '000s)
English French German
Potential speakers
Real speakers
Total speakers
137591.7 42759.1
456328.3 88658.3 88997.6
593920.1 131417.4 89 086.4
French government had been reviewing the standing of the French language not only in Europe but around the world. It was a time, too, when there was turmoil in Eastern Europe, where those concerned with the teaching of the French language had to face a challenge as much from the German language as from the English. The situation at world level was different as shown in Table 1. French government figures assembled about the same time as the UNESCO figures, show that around the world there were 253 schools, colleges, or lycees with French curricula aimed at serving 115000 students, of whom 3700 were French. Some of the schools operate under local French embassy direction, some in cooperation with a range of local or worldwide bodies, the latter including the French Alliance. The French government decided to fund a reinforcement of teacher supply to these schools, partly to enable an improved flow of students from the schools to foreign universities, also of able students to French universities. The Conseil pour l 'enseignement français à I 'étranger (Council for the Teaching of French Abroad—CEFE) contributes to the integration of relations with all those bodies and people working in partnership with the schools abroad. The French Ministry for Foreign Affairs works abroad along with institutes and centers, and with committees and affiliates of the French Alliance. There are 120 institutes and centers in 50 countries, all given the status of outside services to the Ministry, and all responsible for arranging conferences, exhibitions, concerts, films, etc. They provide language courses for around 180000 students every year and they cooperate in a variety of ways with foreign universities. From 1990 onwards the language teaching function was given new impetus, with extended publicity, intensive short courses (some giving special attention to scientific and business French), and to improved libraries. Every year 7000 French music discs are sent to nearly 500 foreign radio stations in 72 countries. French films are widely distributed by means of videocassettes. International coproduction of films and of TV series is encouraged. France offers, too, training courses in film production and in journalism. Assuming that around 100 million people outside Francophone areas have learned French as a foreign language, the Secretary of State for Foreign Cultural Relations works to enhance cooperation in all teach95
The Social Context ing of the French language. Embassies and consulates are required to serve and to stimulate local services engaged in the teaching of French. Special support is given in both developed and underdeveloped countries to university courses in French and to bringing students of French to study in France. The French Alliance has more than 1000 committees worldwide and serves more than 1600 localities. The network is particularly strong in Latin America. In the 1980s it expanded in Asia and in nonFrench speaking parts of Africa and it began to serve new areas in Japan, Fiji, Liberia, Morocco, Egypt, Korea, New Zealand, the Philippines, Sudan, and China. The French Association for Promoting the Arts (AFAA), funded by both government and private enterprise, ensures support for the presentation of French arts and artists abroad, also it welcomes such ventures from abroad to France. The French government gives renewed emphasis to the promotion abroad of French literature and publishing (in 1989, 45 million francs were allocated to this). Five thousand copies are distributed of a monthly bulletin reviewing French books; the English version of this, New French Books, has a circulation of 2500. The bi-monthly Rendez-vous en France (40000 copies) is aimed at the educated, French-speaking foreign audience and covers many aspects of French life. Translation of French books, ranging from the humanities to science, is promoted in South America, India, and North Africa. In 1989 new resources were provided for ensuring an increase in translation of French books into foreign languages. New funds were devoted to a joint venture with Quebec to provide scientific works in French. During the 1980s, looking beyond the academics, the better-educated, the literate, and the artistic in other countries, the French government accepted that in order to make contact with a truly international and sizeable world audience, France must establish a presence in radio (short, medium, and long-wave) and both large and small screen. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was charged with the responsibility of coordinating efforts to set up a network of image and sound that would eventually cover most of the globe. Radio France International greatly enlarged its sphere of coverage—in Asia, by agreements with China and Japan on frequency allocation; in Europe and the Middle East by collaborating in radio services that provided some programs in local languages and some in French. Also private enterprise was encouraged to provide French cultural programs to be relayed by stations around the world. A French initiative was launched in 1989 to strengthen and coordinate television services in Europe, and to ensure an open European market for programs. A Francophone channel was established, bringing together French, Belgian, Swiss, and Canadian compan96
ies, to reach more than 12 million people in Europe and, by cable, 1.3 million in Canada. Reception of French TV programs was extended to a large part of Italy and to Tunisia. News programs, mostly originating in French national channels, are distributed by satellite and by cassettes to Francophone Africa, the Near East, Asia, and Latin America: they are received by 71 countries and used by 200 national and regional stations. The French agency AITV was reported in 1990 to rate fourth worldwide as a film/TV agency. Canal France International provides 4 hours daily a 'bank' for satellite broadcasts to North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. France accepted the opportunity to use Olympus, the satellite for direct TV broadcasting, covering western Europe and offering program time to educational and cultural institutes. The French Secretary of State for International Cultural Relations, along with the Ministry of Education, initiated the development of audiovisual programs for cultural broadcasting, distance teaching, and support for the French language. 1.3 Canada In her introduction to Sharing Our Future (1987), a statement of the Canadian government's strategy for Canadian International Development Assistance (CIDA), the Honorable Monique Landry, Minister for External Relations and Industrial Development, stated that a country's foreign policy must be an expression of the mission of its citizens, of the country's character as a nation; that the message of Canada's strategy for development cooperation was, Canadians care; that the right Canadian resources should reach those most in need, when they need the help most; and that Canadians wished to create new partnerships, both domestically and internationally, in order to build a better world. Sharing Our Future reported the establishment in Canada of the International Francophone Center for Distance Learning. The report, like annual reports of CIDA, was printed within one volume in English and French, with French text on inverted pages so that each language had a front cover and text running from page 1. The statistics provided in the annual CIDA reports give information about a wide range of government support to many developing countries. Information about the support for Africa reflects the bilingual situation within Canada itself, in that Africa is referred to in terms of Anglophone Africa (Fig. 1) and Francophone Africa (Fig. 2), and CIDA reports use maps presenting CIDA's oversimplified view of the division. Many languages other than English and French are, of course, spoken in Africa. The flow and exchange of personnel, in numerous professions other than those concerned with education and language, are inevitably languageconscious and require specific language competence.
Language Diffusion Policy
Figure I. Anglophone Africa (courtesy the Ministry of Supply and Services, from CIDA Annual Report 1989-90).
Figure 2. Francophone Africa (courtesy of the Ministry of Supply and Services, from the CIDA Annual Report 198990).
For those developing countries, not only in Africa, where levels of literacy are low, the promise of aid from abroad poses challenging questions related to priorities in language learning and competence, especially at secondary and higher levels, not only in those sectors of the community required to know an official language which has been bequeathed by past imperial rule. In the year 1989, students and trainees supported by CIDA were categorized in 32 subject groups (from Accountancy to Transportation) and totaled 11021. Within that total, 272 were listed under Languages and Linguistics, 655 under Education, and 105 under Arts and Humanities. The three largest categories were Management and Administration 2175; Engineering and Technology 1339; and Computer Sciences 1182. CIDA works with Canada World Youth and Canada Crossroads International to involve young Canadians in international development. Each year these organizations arrange over 500 exchanges between young Canadians and young people from developing countries. Radio Canada International in 1991 relayed programs from the English and French networks of its parent company, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It provided newscasts in English to Asia and Europe, and in French to Africa and Latin America. It broadcast full programs to the Middle East in Arabic, to the former Soviet Union in Russian and
Ukrainian, to China in Standard Chinese, and to Latin America in Spanish.
1.4 USA The United States Information Agency (USIA), known abroad as the United States Information Service (USIS), operates as an independent foreign affairs agency within the executive branch of the US government. Its mandate is: 'to present abroad a true picture of the United States, to promote mutual understanding between America and other countries, and to counter attempts to distort US policies and objectives.' USIA programs have always been directed to overseas audiences. The US government's first large-scale entry into information activities abroad began during World War I, then dwindled to almost nothing until 1938 when steps were taken to counter German and Italian propaganda aimed at Latin America. In 1942 the Voice of America (VOA) was created to counter adverse foreign propaganda, and the Office of War Information was established. In the immediate postwar years the need was seen to replace arms with words ('This is a struggle, above all else, for the minds of men': President Harry Truman in a speech known as the Campaign of Truth). In 1953 President Dwight Eisenhower created the USIA, the name restored by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 for an organization by then incorporating overseas information programs, educational and cultural exchange 97
The Social Context programs, the Voice of America, and Television (Worldnet) and Film Services. You have informed us truthfully of events around the world and in our country as well, and in this way you helped us to bring about the peaceful revolution which has at long last taken place... You will have to inform us about how to create democracy, because we are now beginning to build it, to renew it after long decades, and we have a lot to learn. (President Vaclav Havel, of Czechoslovakia speaking to Voice of America February 20, 1990)
Of the US $1093 million appropriated for all USIA activities in 1992, educational and cultural exchange programs received 22.1 percent: these programs included performing and fine arts presentations, book and library programs, and English teaching. Library programs are funded in 111 binational centers (BNCs) in more than 20 countries. Binational centers are independent institutions dedicated to promoting mutual understanding between the host country and the USA: English teaching is often a major component of the binational center's cultural, educational, and information activities. USIA supports the development of English teaching curricula, textbooks, and training programs. This activity is intended to stimulate and reinforce academic exchange programs between the USA and other countries and to explain American life to audiences abroad. USIA promotes English language instruction at cultural and binational centers in 100 countries. More than 400000 foreign citizens attend English language classes at these facilities. USIA English teaching officers provide professional guidance on teaching methodologies and materials. The Agency publishes a professional quarterly for English teachers, English Teaching Forum, which is available in the US and abroad: over. 120000 copies of each issue are distributed in 133 countries. The Agency also publishes or supports 14 magazines in 21 languages. The quarterly journal Dialogue, first published in 1968 and distributed worldwide, contains articles selected from US magazines, the articles covering American society, politics, and the arts. Dialogue appears in 13 languages including English. The quarterly magazine Topic, distributed in over 40 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa is intended for young elites in the region and highlights USA commitment to African democracy and economic and social development. It is published in French and English. USIA exchange programs include International Visitor, Citizen, and Youth Exchanges, as well as an extensive range of academic fellowships. Many academics from most countries in the world go to study in the USA every year. USIA maintains links with or assists approximately 200 cultural centers and language institutes, approximately half of them binational centers, in nearly 100 countries. These centers conduct English classes, sem-
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inars on aspects of life in the USA, and arts and exhibition programs. Some centers are fully funded by USIA, while binational centers, autonomous institutions answerable to their own local boards of directors (local citizens and resident Americans), sometimes receive grants from USIA and may have staff supplied by USIA. Their English teaching programs are open to the public and generally attract large numbers of secondary school students. The direct English teaching programs are more targeted and cater to government and education officials, journalists, and USA Aid grantees but do allow others to enroll as space permits. In 1989, of 90 binational centers, 78 were in Central and South America and the Caribbean, three were in Indonesia, two in Pakistan, one in Thailand, and six in Europe. There were no binational centers in Africa but USIA supported 15 English language programs in the region. The Agency's English Language Programs Division has 17 English Teaching Officers and support staff in Washington, and 15 officers serving overseas as Country or Regional English Teaching Officers. Washington and field-based officers rotate regularly. All have advanced degrees in applied linguistics and/or TEFL, combined with experience as EFL teachers, teacher training, or academic administration. The English Teaching Fellows Program recruits recent MAs in TEFL to increase the American presence and to help improve academic standards at overseas institutions, including binational centers. In 1992, in an Eastern-European EFL Fellow Program, USIA was seeking applicants for posts as EFL teacher-trainers and ESP/EFL specialists to work with local EFL teachers in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. USIA and the Voice of America cooperate in promoting English Language Teaching by Broadcast, a multimedia product developed by a US publisher and USIA. 7.5 United Kingdom In the British Council annual report and accounts for 1990-91 the Director-General's review of the year reports that 'Demand for English teaching programmes and expertise, as a tool for communication, training and the transfer of technology, remained buoyant—and, in Eastern and Central Europe, insatiable.' The report quotes Professor Svetlana Ter Minasova, of Moscow State University, addressing a conference organized by the Council, the BBC, and the English Speaking Union: Teachers of English have never been so important and so wanted and so unable to satisfy the cry for help. For very many people, English is the standard-bearer of democracy.' Twenty-four English language projects for Eastern and Central Europe were prepared by the British
Language Diffusion Policy Council in the first few months of 1991 (up to March 31). The biggest of these projects were for Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, with smaller ones promised for Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the former Soviet Union. Many of the projects involved the development of English language teaching within national education systems 'reflecting the demand for English both as a vehicle for democratic values and as the point of access to expertise vital to the development of the region.' The projects concentrate on the key areas of teacher training and retraining, English for banking, government, finance, and tertiary education; British cultural studies; and resources and self-access centers for students and teachers of English. Almost 100 teaching posts and 30 resource centers were to be created using new funding from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Other innovations reported included a joint venture with the British Tourist Authority and Lille Chamber of Commerce to promote British schools of English and British ELT publishers and examination boards; a project jointly funded with the UK Overseas Development Administration (ODA) and the Mexican government for an English teaching program involving eight universities in central Mexico; arranging high-level training for 25 teachers in Japan, paid for by Monbusho, the Japanese Ministry of Education; a program of ELT support in Turkey; an ELT resource center in Hong Kong for the higher-education sector, while 70 primary school teachers of English were trained at language schools in Britain and 300 at the British Council English Language Centre in Hong Kong. Looking to the future the Council's annual report (1990-91) said: 'We have urgent priorities to extend our work in Eastern and Central Europe, the Middle East, Hong Kong and Southern Africa.' In 7 years the Council's budget grew from £204 million to a projected £395 million for 1991-92 and the Council's overseas presence extended from 133 towns and cities in 81 countries to 162 in 90 countries. The Council works in close collaboration with the UK FCO and UK ODA. In 1990-91 the Council's expenditure by regions in percentages was: Africa 28; Western Europe 19; Eastern and Central Europe 6; Asia Pacific 17; South Asia 14; Middle East and North Africa 8; Americas 8. In the same year the Council's expenditure by activity in percentages was: interchange of people 57; libraries, books and information 13; English language and literature 13; science and education 12; arts 5. The Council's total receipts for the year (1990-91) were £362 million. Its sources of funding in percentages were: government grants 35; ODA agency 35; FCO agency 6; other agency 7; revenue 17. Council work for the arts was supported in large part by sponsorship from a range of business companies.
Teaching of English by broadcasts from the UK is the responsibility of the BBC World Service, but the British Council works along with the BBC in language promotion and teaching. 1.6 Australia The International Development Program of Australian Universities and Colleges (IDP) has Australian Education Centers in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Seoul, Singapore, Suva, and Taipei. The centers offer guidance on Australian education, with information, counseling, and application processing to overseas students as well as promotion and recruitment activities of Australian educational institutions. IDP is joint sponsor with the Indonesian Directorate General of Higher Education in sponsoring the Basic Science Bridging Program (BSBP) for staff from Indonesian universities. The program upgrades and refreshes the scientific knowledge and skills of science teachers. Since many participants hope to undertake postgraduate work in Australia or other English-speaking countries, the study of the English language is an important part of BSBP. 'English is necessary for anyone seeking to become more qualified in science (even for those with no wish to travel or study overseas) since it is the most widely used language for scientific communication, and most scientific textbooks and journals are written in English.' Under IDP, staff of four universities in Java intending to apply for overseas study programs, may enrol in preparatory English courses conducted by Australian ELT advisors. The courses are provided in the Language Training Centers of the universities. The Indonesia-Australia Language Foundation (IALF) is a self-funding body subject to Indonesian laws, and operates throughout Indonesia. Created by the governments of Indonesia and Australia in 1988, it aims to contribute to economic, social, and cultural development in Indonesia, and 'to promote mutual respect and understanding, particularly through the medium of high-quality English language teaching and training services.' Its information on education, disseminated in the English language, lays emphasis on 'creating a bridge between two cultures' and on the learning of the English language. IALF clients are Indonesian government departments, nongovernment Indonesian organizations, universities and other educational institutions, staffs of banks, hotels, etc, and private individuals. The Foundation is funded from Australian government grants; through charges to Indonesian organizations, governmental and otherwise; and through a range of contracts and fees paid by individuals. IALF services include courses in English for students preparing to study in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, the UK, and other English-
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The Social Context speaking countries. English courses offer preparation for the workplace, academic bridging programs, specialized writing, travel, and 'working in committeesWestern style.' The Foundation provides consultancies, technical services, and testing on English as a foreign language. IALF courses on Indonesian language and culture are offered to people new to Indonesia. The English Language Center of Australia (ELCA), an affiliation between IDP and the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC) is located at UTCC Bangkok and serves those intending to study in Australia and other countries as well as those wishing to improve their English for business or personal reasons. Radio Australia, the international broadcasting service of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, broadcasts in eight languages to an estimated 50 million listeners in Asia and the Pacific. Its English service is broadcast 24 hours a day. (Other language services, broadcast regularly throughout the day 7 days a week are in Indonesian, Standard Chinese and Cantonese, French, Tok Pisin, Thai, and Vietnamese.) The English language training programs are broadcast as part of the regular shortwave services to Indonesia, Thailand, China, and Vietnam. The lessons, developed in collaboration with specialist educational institutions in Australia, concentrate on aural comprehension and are supported by reading material which aims to ensure understanding of spelling and grammar. In 1991 an initial series of 26 half-hour lessons was produced following a request from the Vietnamese government and the broadcasting organization Voice of Vietnam to provide support to their English language broadcasting efforts. Radio Australia's English lessons to China are supported by booklets and cassettes produced for distribution across China: these were launched in China in 1992 and sold in 18 branches of the foreign language bookstore in Beijing, the hope being that the service would be rebroadcast on domestic radio stations. In 1991 Radio Australia began a new series of programs, 'Study in Australia,' aimed at raising awareness in north and'southeast Asia of educational opportunities in Australia. The series is available on cassette.
of a Jewish people with a long history and heritage'; that Hebrew is the expression of 'the Jewish cultural revival'; that it plays an essential role in fusing Jewish exiles from 102 lands into one nation with one common language; that the Academy 'is the supreme authority in the most audacious linguistic experiment ever attempted: the adaptation to the computer age of a tongue unspoken for 1700 years.' Since the mid 1960s the Academy has supervized the Hebrew, including word use and pronunciation, used by Israel's Broadcasting Authority. For some years after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 the promotion of Hebrew was seen by some Jews to be in competition with a revival of interest in Yiddish. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, is reported to have said Yiddish sounded repugnant. While a more tolerant attitude has developed in Israel towards Yiddish Israeli resources of language teaching, both within Israel and in the diaspora, are concentrated on Hebrew. If a professional person, say in Russia or the UK, wishes to work in Israel, the Israeli government, assuming that the family will settle in Israel, pays for 6 months' support within Israel of both parents and family. This and a variety of other forms of support to immigrants have continued since the 1940s. The teaching of Hebrew has been a strong element in the process of initiation. As knowledge of the language of the country is essential to help integrate the many people constantly arriving from all over the world, the ulpan method was developed to aid the rapid learning of Hebrew. It consists of an intense course, usually of five months' duration, in which most newcomers acquire adequate proficiency for everyday communication. (Facts About Israel. Education. Israel Information Center 1991)
The term 'ulpan' (see Ulpan) is used in reference to a wide range of the teaching and learning of Hebrew outside Israel. In A Short History of the Hebrew Language (Jewish Agency Publishing Department, Jerusalem 1973) Chaim Rubin claimed that at the beginning of the 1970s there were signs of a tendency to equal a knowledge of modern 'living' Hebrew with personal commitment to the movement of Jewish awakening. This, he said, found its expression in the 1.7 Israel marked increase of the proportion of Hebrew speakers among young people, not only in the USA and The State of Israel and Jewish society in Israel espouse Canada, but also in South America and Western the Zionist position according to which every Jew, any- Europe. It found expression, too, in the growing interwhere in the world, is entitled, invited, and called upon, est of academic youth in Hebrew studies, and in presconstantly and unceasingly, to immigrate to and live in sure for the development of Hebrew studies in Israel. (Israel Government Year Book 1990) universities. It took its most dramatic form, he believed, in the awakening of the 'Silent Jewry' in The literature of the Academy of the Hebrew the former Soviet Union, among Jews who, at grave Language asserts that Hebrew is a cornerstone in the personal risk, set up private ulpanim for learning national and political rebirth of the Jewish people 'not Hebrew. Such enthusiasm has helped to ensure that only as citizens of a proud young state, but as members necessary resources are found. At times the Israeli 100
Language Education Policy—Africa government has made funding, resources, and personnel available for the teaching of Hebrew in the diaspora. The Jewish Agency, the World Zionist Organization, in the UK the Zionist Federation Educational Trust (ZFET), and the Israeli government have all done much to promote the study of Hebrew throughout the world. Specially trained teachers have been sent out from Israel for periods from two to five years. Young people from abroad have gone to Israel to be trained as teachers of Hebrew. Hebrew language
workshops have been formed, and crash courses provided for Jews wishing to visit Israel. A major difficulty has lain in securing a supply of qualified language teachers, this because of the growing demand for the teaching of Hebrew within Israel itself, where immigrants have outnumbered the native population. But the teaching of modern Hebrew is ensured in many parts of many countries. See also: Multilingual States; National Languages.
Language Education Policy—Africa S. G. M. Ridge
1. Contexts Africa exhibits a very complex language situation. Depending on one's definition of language, it has between 1000 and 2000 indigenous languages. Linguists engaged in field work are still identifying new speech communities. The most complex area is the language fragmentation belt running from east to west across the continent largely north of the equator. It includes all of West Africa and less developed areas to the east. In it, there is a very high density of languages with very little mutual intelligibility between contiguous speech communities. Often the speech communities are small. In Nigeria, for example, there are an estimated 440 languages, only three of which are spoken as mother tongue by more that 3 percent of the population. As those three account for 65 percent of the population, the size of some of the remaining speech communities will be plain. In Chad, there are 117 languages, with 18 having the status of national languages. In Zaire to the south, there are over 200 languages with four officially recognized lingua francos, the development of two of them, Swahili and Kikongo, being precipitated by contact with the non-African world. In Kenya to the east there are 54 indigenous languages with only one, Swahili, having any formal status. Only Somalia in the horn of Africa has a relatively simple situation, with Somali as the language of the large majority and the second language of the remaining small groups. To the south of the fragmentation belt, the situation is of varying complexity. Zambia has upward of 25 languages, but no ethnic group dominates in area or numbers. Mozambique has 18 indigenous languages, but there is no lingua franca among them, and they enjoy at best tangential recognition on regional radio.
Angola, by contrast, recognises 6 indigenous languages as national. The small state of Botswana has 25 indigenous languages, 19 of them the languages of 40,000 San. Lesotho and Swaziland are exceptions, like Somalia, in having linguistically homogeneous populations, with small minorities, all of whom have the national language as a second language. In South Africa there are nine substantial indigenous language groups with some degree of regional distribution, but very rapid urbanization in recent decades has led to polyglot cities. Three responses to city life are significant: the pressure for lingua francas; the development of urban varieties of the languages; and the emergence of new urban languages as signals of group identity. Standard varieties of all nine languages have official status. Afrikaans, developed locally from colonial Dutch in the wake of seventeenth century colonization at the Cape, and spoken by a racially heterogeneous speech community, has indigenized, much like Arabic in North Africa. Apart from the substantial group of first language English speakers in South Africa (over 9 percent), the groups which are mother tongue speakers of the languages of more recent colonization in African countries are small. To the north of the fragmentation belt, the situation is not as complex, but it is far from simple. As a result of Islamic conquest and colonization from the seventh century, Arabic is the dominant language. It has become indigenous. In most states it is the official language to the exclusion of other local language communities. The situation of such communities is often unresearched or politically obscured. In Algeria, for example, Arabic is the official language, French, the medium of a later colonization, is the de facto second language, and Berber is ignored. Under the ongoing process of arabization since independence from
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The Social Context France, Berbers have been counted as Arab, and estimates as to the current size of the Berber speech communities vary between 13 and 42 percent of the population. From a language in education perspective, it is also significant that across North Africa and the Middle East there are many local varieties of colloquial Arabic, often almost mutually unintelligible. This has led to the development of Modern Standard Arabic as the medium of education and public life. A further factor is the ongoing teaching of Classical Arabic as a religious language throughout the region. A child speaking Algerian colloquial Arabic at home moves into another language, Modern Standard Arabic, at school, and, if Moslem, will probably be expected to learn some Classical Arabic to read the Koran. The same child will learn French as a second language. Berber development depends on submission to this pattern. A key feature of the language situation in Africa is the role and status of languages of nineteenth century European colonization. Italian, German, and Spanish are not particularly significant. There is very little linguistic residue of Italian colonization, although a pidginized Italian is an option in restaurants and garages in urban areas of Ethiopia, and Italian is spoken by a growing minority in Tunisia. German colonization in East Africa and South West Africa was largely overlaid with British and South African influences after the First World War. However, there are still some German influences in Namibia, and the language is used by a small but racially heterogeneous group there. One can find a few traces of Spanish influence in Algeria, Morocco, and the Western Sahara. Its main areas of influence are in Spanish North Africa and Equatorial Guinea, where it is still the official language and lingua franca. The major ongoing linguistic influences are English, French, and Portuguese, the official languages of most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Given the complexity of Africa's linguistic makeup, the power relations of conqueror and conquered, and the changes to the economic order brought about by colonial modernization, it is no surprise that the languages of the colonizers were adopted by the colonial indigenous elites. Through these languages it was also possible to engage with a wider world. This process of building educated elites was helped on by missionaries, who in many areas continue to play an important role in education. Their position on language was, however, somewhat equivocal. They were often the first to describe the African languages and develop ways of writing them so that they could produce evangelical texts. But they also offered the most sophisticated schooling and training in the European language of their home base. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa after independence these European languages have continued to exert a considerable influence, and have generally been retained for official 102
purposes. In most countries, only a minority have access to them. This has not served the interests of democracy well, as the majority of the people have been excluded by language from participation in public life. Many of the languages of Africa have no written form as yet, and, of those which have, most are not used extensively as media of literacy. The process of developing written forms of languages has, in some cases, like Xhosa in South Africa, brought together dialects which might have been regarded as different languages, and which still, in their spoken form, range far from the written standard. Sometimes related languages or dialects with quite wide variations have been brought together deliberately, either for administrative convenience or to create a critical mass of users of the language to warrant publication of texts in it. Shona, in Zimbabwe, is an example of a cluster of mutually intelligible languages which were deliberately harmonized in written form in the late 1920s. Standard written Shona increasingly influences the spoken forms for higher sociolinguistic purposes, but it is still said that Shona is a language which people write but do not speak. Swahili is an earlier product of harmonization. Standard Swahili has taken on a regional role as a lingua franca in East Africa, and is spreading both by informal contact and, at a more sophisticated level, through education in much the same way as the ex-colonial languages. However, standardization is no panacea. With the spread of Swahili as a written language of education, there are increasing demands for local varieties (as in Kenya) to be affirmed within national borders. The implications of this kind of variety for education are profound. A child educated in standard Xhosa or Shona or Swahili may find that language considerably removed from the language with which it has been surrounded before entering school. To all intents and purposes, the standard language of education is not that child's mother tongue but a second language. Across Africa, responses to dominant languages have been varied. This serves as a warning against easy generalizations about language behavior. Some smaller language groups have abandoned their tongues and shifted to the dominant language of their region. Shift is by no means only towards the languages of the colonizers. In Burundi, for example, the pigmy Twa group has abandoned its own language and adopted the dominant Rundi language, albeit with a distinctive Twa cast. Other, equally vulnerable, groups have moved to widespread bilingualism, reserving their own language for dynamic, sociolinguistically low purposes, which are nevertheless vital as signals of group identity, and to using the other language as their own means of wider communication and formal participation in public life. The Waata and Boni of Kenya foster a stable bilingualism of this kind in their own languages and Swahili. Other groups such
Language Education Policy—Africa as the San in Southern Africa have retained their languages in the face of all threats, adopting other languages as lingua francas. A common result of the adoption of another language for any of these purposes is that, over time, it takes on distinctive characteristics as a mark of being owned by the community. This raises the question for educational language policy of which variety of Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, or Swahili to use in the classroom. The complexity of the language situation in Africa has led, over many centuries, to a need for lingua francas as empires have developed, populations have moved, cities have developed, and the demands of trade and industry have been felt. Kikongo, a widely used language in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, seems to have originated as an African language-based pidgin in the late fifteenth century so that speakers of various languages involved in trade down the Congo prompted by the Portuguese presence on the coast could understand one another. A pidgin of more recent vintage, widely used in West Africa, is the English-based Wes Cos. A Portuguesebased pidgin called Crioulo is a possible national language in the ex-Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau, but it is also a common second language in the country of negritude, Senegal. In the Ivory Coast, Popular French is a widely spoken French pidgin. And in the non-Arabic south of Sudan, an Arabic dominant country with 110 languages, Juba Arabic is a common pidgin. These and other pidgins are generally responses to unmanageable local diversity in situations where there are no regional or ex-colonial languages already serving such purposes. In other areas African or ex-colonial languages serve the purposes of general communication. Manding (Bambara, Jula, Maninka, Mandinka, Mandingo) has been a lingua franca through much of West Africa, originally as an imperial language, since medieval times. Hausa, a Nigerian language, is the lingua franca of the police and armed forces in Ghana and more generally in Benin. French is not only the official language in Gabon, but is also the lingua franca in the absence of a local language which is widely enough intelligible. At the other end of the spectrum, Mali has French as its official language although it is spoken by no more than 5 percent, while Bambara (Manding), spoken by 60 percent is the main lingua franca. Lingua francas generally emerge from popular use rather than political decisions, and they may serve for specific levels of interaction. In Nigeria, which has at least 440 languages and about a quarter of Africa's population, three indigenous languages serve as lingua francas in their regions: Hausa in the north, Yoruba in the west, and Igbo in the east. This status has been confirmed by policy. However, the three major indigenous languages are all ethnic signifiers at national level in a country of strong ethnic sensitivities. English is de facto the primary medium of communication among
the educated across ethnic boundaries. Nigerian pidgin plays a similar cross-ethnic role for lower functions, mainly in the south. 2. Language Policies and Practices in Africa Language policies in Africa may have any of four rationales. They may derive from or continue colonial policies through elite self-interest or a commitment to globalization and modernization. They may have their roots in a pan-Africanist or a pan-Arabist vision. They may seek to do justice to ethnic variety. Or they may be driven by national pride or the exigencies of nationalist politics. These ideological roots of policies have markedly different practical implications, not least for education. There is a tendency in politics, and even in some academic writing, to mix the rationales at a rhetorical level to gain more of the moral high ground. This confuses the issues and as often as not inhibits proper attention to them. Choice is unavoidable. The modernization-globalization argument favors an international European language for an elite as a prerequisite for high level development of the country. This priority is generally established at the expense of the majority, which in most countries can never be offered proper access to that language. In Mali, an estimated 5 percent of the population has a working command of French. The pan-Africanist vision favors an African language, usually a fairly well-developed lingua franca, at the expense both of developing the other indigenous languages and of subverting the status of the international European language. The implications of this are emerging in Tanzania. The liberal approach which would do justice to ethnic variety tends not to take account of the socioeconomic complexity of a modern state and downplays the implications of ethnicity for social stability and national unity. A relaxed unity in diversity is an elusive ideal. South Africa may be on the way to it, but unity in diversity has most often been imposed, at least in the initial decades. Finally, the nationalist imperative tends to imposition of a language without regard to its adequacy or its developed functions. The decision for Somali at all levels in Somalia is of this order. It takes inadequate account of the need for wider communication in Africa and internationally. Actual decisions are more complex than these examples may suggest, and countries tend to be pragmatic, and to trim (rather than alter) their course as implications become plain. At some point, also, theoretical or political decisions meet practical constraints. Three of these constraints deserve particular attention: resources, received practices, and developmental imperatives. The fact that none of them is absolute does not change their powerful impact on language practice. Africa is a largely impoverished continent in the developing world. It lacks both the finance and the human resources for ambitious language programs, and it
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The Social Context faces massive pressure for grassroots improvement of housing and services. Second, the long experienced demands of a multilingual environment and the pressures of urbanization have led to a great variety of linguistic practices becoming entrenched in various societies. These are not readily tractable to political decisions. Finally, developmental imperatives in the context of globalization tend to favor the ex-colonial languages. Decisions for the indigenous languages are not inherently decisions for economic stagnation. In theory, they should mobilize the population better. However, there is no example in Africa of a decision for indigenous languages leading to economic development. The evidence is indecisive either way. The problem may be one of time scale. The benefits of consistently promoting indigenous languages in education and public life may best be registered in one or two generations rather than within the life of a funded project or an electoral cycle. The converse may also be true. In sub-Saharan Africa, the language of the colonizer has as a rule been accepted as the official language of the independent state. -Sometimes, as in Cameroon and South Africa, two languages have been handed down as the linguistic heritage of two colonial powers. In a few states, an indigenous language was an official language from the start. In Tanzania, Swahili, a widely used lingua franca which was the first language of a very small part of the population, was made official, with English retained as an interim measure. Swahili was energetically developed and promoted from the time of independence. It is now a genuinely national language, and its use in East and Central Africa has grown markedly. At independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, many leaders of African countries spoke fervently of the indigenous languages and their cultural importance. At a rhetorical level this theme has often been revisited. However, the overwhelming majority of countries opted for the colonial power's language both as official and as the main language of education. For the better part of 20 years most countries made little progress in translating sentiment regarding indigenous languages into policy or practice. UNESCO has been instrumental in articulating the issues and their implications since the early 1950s, and many African states have, since the early 1980s, begun assessing the realities of their linguistic situation and acting on them. In 1986, The Organisation of African Unity passed The Language Plan of Action for Africa at its meeting in Addis Ababa. While the eclectic philosophy behind the plan derives in part from the nineteenth century European notion of language as coterminous with national identity ('language is at the heart of a people's culture'), and while it often rhetorically sidesteps difficult issues ('the promotion of African languages, especially those which transcend national frontiers, is a vital factor in the cause of African unity'), it provides both some
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impetus for review of policy, and a platform for reformers. A key recognition-is: 'That each sovereign state has the right to devise a language policy that reflects the cultural and socio-economic realities of its country, which is consonant or in close harmony with the needs and aspirations of its people.' Recognition of that right in South Africa would imply that African languages do not have to replace European languages in order to 'assume their rightful role': they can take their place alongside them. This is important in a country where a quarter of the permanent population has languages in the European family as home languages. Recognition of the right in Egypt might legitimate the requirement, designed to protect Arabic, that no one address a foreigner in English unless specifically licensed to do so, although all children learn some English in school. Trends in language policies towards acknowledging the realities of the language situation include: raising the formal status of certain African languages by giving them statutory recognition as national or as regional languages (Nigeria recognises Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo as national, and nine others as state languages); naming an African language or African languages as official alongside the long-established European official language (Zambia has seven indigenous official languages, South Africa has nine); providing substantial time on state radio and television for broadcasts in the African languages (Benin, Ghana, Guinea, Mauritania, Namibia, and many others); and establishing boards, institutes, and academies to see to the development and promotion of the languages (Institute for National Languages in Angola, the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo, Guinea's National Academy of Languages, and the Pan-South African Language Board). Attempting to do justice to African languages in education in contexts where such issues of status are not attended to must be a fruitless task. A further pressing need is for well-produced printed matter in the indigenous languages. The attractions of literacy are small when there is little of moment to read. 3. Language Policy in Education Language policy in education in North African countries has generally been 'Arabic only' in schools, to establish an identity within the Arab League. Modern Standard Arabic is prescribed in most cases. The Arabization policy generally affords some room for the European language of most contact or influence, but is usually marked by a complete occlusion of other local languages. This has proved highly controversial in the contact zones to the east and west of the Sahara. Mauritania which has a Moorish north and a mixed West African south, faced great hostility from the southern parts when it mooted dropping French and adopting the local dialect, Hassaniya Arabic, as the only language of schooling in 1966. As a result, the
Language Education Policy—Africa formal introduction of Arabic as the national and official language was delayed to 1988. Some education is still in French, and radio programs are aired in Arabic, French, Soninke, Toucouleur (Pulaar), and Wolof. In Sudan, when there was an attempt to Arabize in the mid-1950s, the southerners waged war to stop it. After 17 years of fighting, the Addis Ababa agreement of 1972 established Arabic as the national language and English as the 'working language,' designating nine other languages for development. Arabic predominates in education, with English as a subject for all pupils. However there are many schools still which use the English medium throughout. Sub-Saharan Africa has a different complex of possibilities. French and Portuguese colonial language policy in education was clear. If colonial subjects were to become full citizens of the metropolitan country they would need to master the metropolitan language. Education was, accordingly, to be in that language throughout. British policy was more pragmatic. There was no vision of an enlarged metropolis, so there was no need to prepare future citizens for it. Following a missionary model of teaching first in the mother tongue and moving to English at higher levels, transition policies were followed in British colonies. Early literacy was to be in the mother tongue, providing a larger corps of basically literate people, while the considerably smaller group to proceed to higher primary and secondary education would have English. The education systems, with their infrastructure, were taken over as a going concern at independence. Change could be considered, but it would be costly, and the need for it would have to be strong enough to counter the powerful forces of elite inertia. The nationalist movements which pressed for and gained independence were in an equivocal position. Their leadership was largely of the elite, educated in the metropolitan languages, and so able to communicate with one another about the politics of a modern state across ethnic divides. However, success in mobilizing popular support depended on the use of the indigenous languages. African languages were inescapably bound up with the nationalist thrust. Leaders like Senghor of Senegal Africanized the metropolitan language. Others created rhetorical space for policies concerning the indigenous languages. Politicians and people have cast about for solutions. In many countries with a French colonial heritage, a rather more British model of initial literacy in the mother tongue (or a national language, or the predominant local language) with gradual or sudden shift to French has been adopted and adapted. In countries with a British colonial background, many have maintained the inherited system, adapting it by extending the mother tongue period to all the primary school years. Others have either had a dalliance with English from the start, or have opted for an African lingua franca decidedly at the expense of English. In almost
all cases, French or English, it has been necessary to give attention to adult literacy programs. Except in urban areas for work-related purposes, these have largely been in an African language deemed to meet local needs. To suggest the ongoing dynamics of policy development and implementation, it is useful to look briefly at the cases of Cameroon, Guinea, Tanzania, and South Africa. Cameroon was formed at independence when British Cameroon opted to join forces with French Cameroon rather than with Nigeria. This political history, combined with the fact that there is no national language or lingua franca, led to the adoption of French and English as the exclusive languages of education at all levels. In some private schools in the formerly British part of the country, the widespread British colonial practice of starting in the indigenous languages is still sustained. However, in most urban areas there is a tendency to use the pidgin English Wes Cos in primary education without official recognition. Cameroon has probably the most conservative official language in education policy in Africa, but the case of Wes Cos shows that pressures from below will ultimately not be denied, regardless of political decisions. Guinea was one of the earliest 'francophone' African countries to recognize its linguistic resources. Its official language was and is French, but it named eight of its 25 indigenous languages national languages. In some countries, that title was given as a politically correct gesture and made little difference in practice. In Guinea, the change was material, and plans were thought through to use the national languages in the reconceptualized school system. An admirable feature was the extent to which what happened in the classroom engaged with practice in the society at large. Guinean languages were introduced as media of instruction in the first four years of primary school and were taught as subjects from the third year. Simultaneously, communication between state institutions and the public shifted towards the appropriate national language. Competence in one of the national languages became a requirement for any civil service post or for general advancement. Public documents were issued in French and the appropriate national language for the region. And radio programming was largely in the national languages. Literacy work in the languages also proceeded apace. Substantial progress was made in implementing the policy and there was some advance in using national languages beyond the fourth year. However, the project foundered through lack of funds to provide books and teachers, through its association with an increasingly autocratic government, and through growing parent and pupil resistance to the reform as French skills declined in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Lansana Conte, who succeeded Sékou Touré in 1984, restored French to its primary position. French is once 105
The Social Context again the language of instruction in schools and the language of government. Any policy which seems to deny the people access to a language which they perceive as important for their advancement is likely to fail. Tanzania's approach was unique. It adopted as a national and official language what had for a long time served as a lingua franca through much of the country. Swahili had similar advantages to a colonial language in that it was the mother tongue of very few Tanzanians and so was unlikely to trigger ethnic sentiment. On the other hand it had many of the advantages of a mother tongue in that it was widely used for lower level functions and so was in the environment of most learners. The disadvantage that it was relatively undeveloped for high level functions could be attended to by development. Tanzania consciously downgraded English to create space for Swahili's development. However, the projected move to Swahili as the sole medium of instruction at all school levels has not happened. English is still the main medium of secondary and higher education. That is problematic. The ideologically driven downgrading of English has been too successful, exposing anyone enthusiastic about English to being thought unpatriotic or neocolonialist. It has also drastically reduced the use of English in public, and the average person's exposure to the language. One major test of secondary school pupils conducted for the Tanzanian Ministry of Education in 1984 revealed that about half of the 2410 pupils tested had taken in little or no subject information in all their years in secondary school. It also showed that only about 10 percent of middle secondary school pupils were at a level of competence in English required for beginning English medium education. Several explanations have been offered. The status shift of English from second to foreign language makes it less accessible and attractive. The low competence of many teachers to teach through the medium of English leads to a furtive resort to Swahili and an end result which is the worst of both worlds. Finally, poor infrastructure would make real progress unlikely no matter what the medium of instruction.
South Africa is last because its language policy is recent and represents many ideals which have become current internationally as policy theory has developed. The democratic constitution, passed in 1996, embodies a very inclusive language policy with 11 official languages. It is officially understood to call for additive multilingualism, so that languages complement one another in the experience of the learner. Citizens have the constitutional right 'to receive education in the official language or languages of their choice in public educational institutions where that education is reasonably practicable.' This decision as to medium is unconstrained by ethnic obligation, and may include sign language. However, as in Guinea and Tanzania, the success, at least partly, will depend on the human and financial resources available. The outlook is not good. The teaching corps is being reduced severely while numbers of pupils are rising. There is a serious shortage of properly qualified teachers to meet the challenges. Most classrooms are manifestly too small for the increased class sizes. There are troubling shortages of books. And the development work on African languages is taking much longer than was anticipated. However, the policy seems to have provided creative space. For example, pupils of different language backgrounds are being used to enhance the language experience of their fellows. It is also evident that many African pupils use English unaffectedly in their own ways and for their own purposes alongside their mother tongues. Bibliography Bamgbose A 1991 Language and the Nation: The Language Question in Sub-Saharan Africa. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Herbert R K (ed.) 1992 Language and Society in Africa: The Theory and Practice of Sociolinguistics. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg Mansour G 1993 Multilingualism and Nation Building. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK National articles in the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Pergamon, Oxford Rubagumya C M (ed.) 1990 Language in Education in Africa. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Schmiedt J 1991 English in Africa. Longmans, London
Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries Y. Suleiman
Language education policies in the Arabic speaking countries are embedded in their overall educational policies. These policies have as their aim aiding the development of students intellectually, socially,
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emotionally, and physically. They also strive to instill in the learners the values of their society and culture to enable them to grow up into good citizens who can live in harmony in their environment.
Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries 1. Preliminaries The position of Arabic as the dominant language in the Arabic speaking world is enshrined in the existing constitutions of the countries which make up the Arab League (Jabbur 1976). The existence of coterritorial languages with sizeable numbers of speakers—particularly Berber in Algeria and Morocco, Kurdish in Iraq, and the plethora of African languages in Southern Sudan—does not challenge the overall validity of this characterization (Abu Bakr 1995; Abuhamdia 1995; Blau and Suleiman 1996; Bell 1989; Faiq 1999; Miller and Abu-Manga 1992; Qindil 1989; Rouchdy 1991; Tilmatine and Suleiman 1996; Zaborski 1997). Attention in this article will therefore be directed mainly towards describing language policy as it pertains to Arabic in its written form, utilizing for this purpose the two organizing categories of status planning and corpus planning. Foreign language policy will be dealt with under acquisition planning (Cooper 1989). In dealing with status planning, this article will be restricted to language policy in Arabic speaking countries in the second half of the twentieth century. This restriction coincides with events in modern Arab history which have had an impact on the functional allocation of languages, including (a) the formation of the Arab League (1945), (b) the independence from French colonial rule of the francophone countries of North Africa (Morocco 1956; Tunisia 1956; and Algeria 1962), (c) the independence of Sudan from Britain in 1956; and (d) the establishment of Israel in 1948, which led to a radical change in the status of Arabic in that part of mandatory Palestine on which the state was established. The discussion of corpus planning will have a wider time frame, covering much of the twentieth century. The position of Arabic outside the Arabic speaking world will not be considered here (Akinnaso and Ogunbiyi 1990; Ghaladant 1982; Kenny 1992; Sat! 1995; Sawaie 1992; Shohamy 1994; Spolsky and Shohamy 1997; Versteegh 1997; Waibridge 1992). Adult literacy policies will also be excluded, albeit Arabic is invariably the target language in status planning terms in this enterprise (AlSafT1989). Although a distinction is drawn in the literature between language planning and language policy, the two terms will be used interchangeably here to cover the 'deliberate efforts' (Cooper 1989: 45) of governmental organizations and 'nongovernmental innovators' (ibid: 148)—sometimes called 'language strategists'—to bring about changes in language use. The intention here being to influence the acquisition of foreign languages in a speech community (acquisition planning), the orthographic representation and grammatical structure of the national language (corpus planning), and the functional allocation of languages to communicative domains (status planning). The following discussion of these issues in the Arabic speak-
ing countries will be of a general nature owing to (a) the differences which exist between these countries in each of the areas of language education policy mentioned above; (b) the absence of coherent and fully worked out official language policies in these countries; (c) the difficulty of obtaining up-to-date information which can enable the researcher to draw firm conclusions from these policies, especially of the governmental type; and (d) the difficulty of separating the three types of planning from each other, since status planning decisions may have a direct impact on acquisition planning ones or corpus planning initiatives may be motivated by considerations stemming from status planning orientations. 2. Status Planning: General Considerations Discussions of status planning in the Arabic speaking countries are informed by a few considerations. First, planning of this type is motivated by extralinguistic or ideological concerns pertaining to national liberation and nation-building, the formation of new elites or the preservation of old ones, social and economic modernization and development, the maintenance of extraterritorial ties of religious solidarity, and the incorporation of non-Arab ethnic groups into the nascent nation-state project. Broadly speaking, status planning in the Arabic speaking countries is as much about inclusion as it is about exclusion in sociopolitical terms. Rarely, if ever, does status planning aim at solving purely linguistic problems. Second, discussions of status planning in the Arabic context are invariably embedded in the much wider debate about the roles of authenticity/tradition (al-asala) and modernity (al-mu'asaralal-hadatha) in modern Arabic sociopolitical thought and practice (Al-Hamzawi 1986). The former, authenticity, revolves around the role of the past and its set of symbolic values in setting a point of reference for national self-definition. Modernity, on the other hand, involves the injection of an external element of a Western origin into the project of generating or fine-tuning a new definition of the national self. Third, the colonial legacy and its projections of postindependence dependence sometimes play a decisive role in setting the parameters within which decisions about status planning are made. Fourth, the diglossic nature of the Arabic language situation (Ferguson 1959) invariably favors the written standard over the spoken colloquial or any approximation between the two, because of the functional role and symbolic significance of the former as the language or religion, high culture, and pannational unity conceptualizations. It is this attitude towards the written standard language, rather than linguistic behavior per se, that justifies the description of the speakers of the various Arabic colloquials as members of the same speech community and which, in turn, justifies treating the Arabic speaking countries as one area for language education policy purposes.
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The Social Context As a starting point in pursuing, the discussion of status planning in the Arabic speaking countries, we must distinguish between four concepts: national language (lugha wataniyya or qawmiyyd), official language (lugha rasmiyya), semiofficial language, which may or may not be an indigenous language, and working language. This classification overlaps with Cooper's classification of language functions into statutory, working, and symbolic (1989: 100), but differs from it in four ways. First, both the national and official language categories coincide with the statutory function in Cooper's classification. Although the distinction between national and official language may not be relevant in all cases of status planning in the Arabic context, the fact that this distinction is explicitly articulated in some cases underlies the decision to separate the two functions methodologically. Second, a semiofficial language in this framework is a working language in Cooper's classification, the only difference being that in the present framework the language concerned enjoys some constitutional backing. Third, a working language in the scheme proposed above is one which is widely used in the community, although it does not enjoy any constitutional backing. Fourth, Cooper's symbolic function is not methodologically recognized in the present framework because it may accrue to any of the above language types, albeit in differing ways and with different sociolinguistic connotations, rather than just to the national language (statutory language in Cooper's tripartite classification). To demonstrate the role of the above language categories in setting out the parameters for status planning in the Arabic speaking countries this article will consider those articles which impinge on this issue in the constitutions of Arab states (Jabbur 1976: 3136). Arabic is declared as an official language in the constitutions of all member states of the Arab League, including, by implication, Saudi Arabia in which the Qur'an functions as the ultimate source of legality in organizing the statutes of the state. Although the Palestinian National Charter is silent on the issue of the national and official language for any future Palestinian state, Arabic already functions in this capacity in the West Bank (including Arab East Jerusalem) and Gaza. The status of being official is attributed to other languages in some constitutions. In Iraq, Kurdish is given this status in the Kurdish speaking areas only. In Mauritania, French is established as an official language with Arabic, and is, in fact, listed before Arabic when referred to in this capacity only. The constitution of Mauritania additionally describes Arabic as the national language, to distinguish it from the other official language, French. The postindependence Algerian constitution described Arabic as the national language, but allowed the use of French temporarily as a semiofficial language. The 1943 Lebanese constitution establishes Arabic as the 108
national and official language. The same constitution describes French as an official language, but stipulates that a special law will be promulgated to define the domains in which it may be used. When the constitution was later amended, French ceased to be an official language of the state, and turned into a named semiofficial language whose use is to be regulated by a special law. In Sudan, Arabic is established as the sole official language, but the constitution leaves the possibility open for the use of other semiofficial languages—presumably southern Sudanese languages and/or English—provided that special permission is obtained for this purpose from the parliament. In Somalia, Arabic is a second official language after the Somali language. As a matter of fact the role played by Arabic in Somalia is largely symbolic, reflecting its membership in the Arab League, in which the official status of Arabic functions as the lowest common denominator between the member states. Although French is not specified in the constitutions of Tunisia and Morocco as an official or semiofficial language, nevertheless it is widely used in education, the media, the private and public sectors, and many walks of life to warrant being referred to as a working language in Cooper's sense (Gallagher 1968). In language planning terms, French has the status of official, semiofficial, and working language in the Arabic speaking countries. The following observations may be launched, based on the information in the preceding paragraph. First, the national language is always an official language, but not vice versa. Second, the distinction between national and official language is not sanctioned when Arabic serves exclusively in both capacities. Third, the concept of national language is posited to make possible the constitutional incorporation of another language as an official language alongside the national language. Fourth, the concept of national language is not used to refer to the dominant official language when the other official language is an indigenous language, as in the case of Kurdish in Iraq. Fifth, a semiofficial language is a constitutionally named language, or one whose establishment as such is constitutionally permissible, whether indigenous (as in Sudan) or not (as in Algeria and Lebanon). Although these observations may need some fine-tuning, because of the deliberate ambiguities which the articles of the various constitutions embody, they are sound in their broad outline. 2.1 Arabicization or Arabization? Broadly speaking, the promotion of Arabic as the primary language of communication in all spheres of life in the Arabic speaking countries is referred to as ta'rib in Arabic. This term is often rendered as Arabicization and Arabization in English, which, more often than not, are used interchangeably with little regard for the subtle difference in meaning
Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries between them in language education policy or the ethnolinguistic sphere. In Arabic the term ta'rib refers to two phenomena. One is more applicable to the Arabic speaking countries in Asia, Egypt, and Libya; the other is more, if not exclusively, applicable to the francophone countries of North Africa. The Sudan represents a special case which, while combining features of both situations, has its own specific character as will be explained below. In its first sense, ta'rib refers to two major phenomena: the incorporation of foreign terms or, preferably, their newly coined native equivalents, into the Arabic lexicon, which is a corpus planning issue (Khalifa 1987); and the use of Arabic in the delivery of higher education in the sciences, especially medical science (Dus 1997; Nu'ayami 1997; Al-Zayn 1997). In this sense, ta'rib has a linguistic and educational dimension which, directly or indirectly, is informed by the need to achieve non-linguistic ends. This sense of ta'rib is referred to as Arabicization to highlight the importance of promoting the language as the immediate target of status planning (Khasara 1994). Arabicization is underpinned by the work of the language academies (Abuhamdia 1984; Altoma 1974; Holes 1995; AlJaml'11983) in Damascus (1919), Cairo (1932), Baghdad (1947), and Amman (1976), as well as the Arab League sponsored Bureau of Arabicization in Rabat (1961) which, through its journal Al-Lisan al-lArabi, has done quite a lot to coin new terms in the sciences and technology using English and French as source languages. In its second sense ta'rib is more inclusive. Using the definition of this phenomenon which the Moroccan government proposed at the first education conference held in Rabat in 1961 (Ahmad 1986:43; Wannas 1995: 164-65), it is possible to isolate the following features of ta'rib: (a) using Arabic in place of foreign languages in education; (b) expanding the lexical resources of the Arabic language—which is a corpus-planning issue; (c) using Arabic exclusively in government administration; (d) promoting Arabic as the language of everyday communication and opposing all those who refuse to use it in this capacity; (e) the net result of these steps is to make Arabic suitable for articulating the emotional and intellectual life of its speakers in an age of technological advancement ('asr al-dharra wa-l-sawankh: the age of the atom and the rocket). This sense of ta'rib is referred to as Arabization to highlight its nonlinguistic ends. In this context, Arabization goes beyond the lexical revitalization of the language and its use in the educational process to its deployment as an instrument that can help create a new elite who, in turn, can fashion a new North African identity in which Arabism (al- 'uruba) acts as a major formative impulse. This linkage of ta'rib with an Arab-bound sense of national identity was opposed by members of the old elite and the indigenous Berber community in Algeria and, to
a lesser extent, Morocco (Faiq 1999; Tilmatine and Suleiman 1996). As explained earlier the situation in Sudan combines aspects of both senses of ta'rib set out above, but it has its own special features. In addition to Arabicization in its two dimensions above, Sudan exhibits a modulated sense of Arabization whose operational contours ebb and flow in a way which reflects the ever-changing political environment, and in a manner that is sometimes reminiscent of the language situation during the British colonial period (1889-1956) in its broad outline. A similar situation applies to Arabization in North Africa, especially in Tunisia, but the main difference between the two cases is that while the avowed objective of Arabization in North Africa is to replace a foreign language, French, by a national language, Arabic, the main challenge in the Sudan is twofold. On the one hand, Arabization is aimed at stemming the influence of English and replacing it by Arabic as a medium of education throughout the whole country—but especially in the South—although proficiency in English in the Sudan is most probably not at the same level, quantitatively and qualitatively, as proficiency in French in the countries of North Africa. On the other hand, Arabization in the Sudan is aimed at promoting Arabic as a medium of education and in government administration over the 100 or more indigenous languages, especially in the South, as the basis of a truly unified Sudan. This mode of bringing about national unity has been advocated by no less than the idealogue of the present Sudanese government, Hassan al-Turabi who, in an interview with the Jordanian newspaper al-Dustur on 7 April 1996, declared that The Arabic language is the [only] basis for building a united Sudan.' However, because of high illiteracy rates, religious and ethnic differences, physical isolation, political conflicts, and even war, the number of people who are competent in Arabic as a spoken or written language in Southern Sudan (Jernudd 1968; Miller and Abu-Manga 1992) is very small in comparison with the almost universal knowledge of Arabic, especially as a spoken language, in North Africa. This makes the implementation of Arabization in the Sudan a task of gargantuan proportions in comparison with the same project in North Africa. In addition, while Arabic is regarded as the major national language in North Africa and the language of the religion of the vast proportion of the population in that region, it is at best viewed with apathy by some Southern Sudanese elite and as a language of a different religion by others. Arabization is therefore resisted because it is taken to mean what its root meaning actually implies: transforming the population into Arabs culturally. The seeds of this situation were sown during the British colonial period, in which a policy of linguistically divide and rule was deliberately and openly espoused (Abu Bakr 1995; Bashir 1970; Al-Sayyid
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The Social Context 1975). The aims of this policy were to weaken Arabic in the South, and ultimately exclude it from schools and government administration; promote English as the language of education beyond the initial stages of primary schooling; and introduce selected local languages in the first 2 years of primary schooling. For the latter purpose, the British administration developed Roman alphabets for the languages concerned to distance them graphically from Arabic and to bring them closer to English. 2.2 Arabization in North Africa The French policy in North Africa had a strong linguistic dimension whose aim was to support the colonial administration in its endeavors to tighten its grip over the territories it controlled (Ahmad 1986; Bin Nu'man 1981; al-Jabiri 1990; Wannas l991, 1996, n.d.). This linguistic dimension revolved around the twin objectives of weakening Arabic in the schools and government administration, and supplanting it by French, within an overall policy of ethnically divide and rule. As a result, Arabization became a rallying cry in the struggle for independence, although its fortunes ebbed and flowed in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in the postindependence period. The intensity of this cry was particularly pronounced in Algeria, because of the length of colonial rule, the bloody nature of the war of independence, the fact that some prominent members of the counter elite were Arabophones who had no competence in French, and, finally, the fact that Arabic did not enjoy the protection of a traditional and prestigious seat of learning similar to al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco or al-Zaytuna in Tunisia. This latter factor led to the intense politicization of the language issue, as manifest in the most recently promulgated Algerian constitution (1997), in which Arabic is set out as the only official and national language, in spite of some Berber opposition. Arabization in North Africa was embedded in government policies which, additionally, aimed at the following: (a) unifying the educational system by bringing the different types of ethnic, traditional and modern schools into a single system; (b) promoting universal education; and (c) employing the nationals of each country only as teachers in schools. However, the lack of financial and human resources to implement these policies, the huge number of school age children whose educational needs had to be met more or less immediately after independence, resistance by the old elite, and the lack of will to pursue Arabization vigorously by the new elite meant that the progress of Arabization in postindependence North African countries fell short of the high expectations which the framers of those policies had in mind in the preindependence period. But these are not the only reasons for the variable success of Arabization in North Africa in the field of education and in government administration. The
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generally peaceful progress to independence in Morocco and Tunisia, compared with Algeria's bloody war of independence, meant that opposition to French in the former two countries in the preindependence and postindependence period was not imbued with the same connotations of domination and resistance it had in the latter country. In addition, the linking of French with economic development, labor migration to France, and modernity (Gill 1999) gave a new impetus to the calls by the new elite to preserve and, even, promote the language in the educational system. In Tunisia, the promotion of French, even when it was counter to the Arabization policy, was imbued with politicolinguistic meanings of resisting the encroachment of Arab nationalism during the period of bad relations between Bourguiba's Tunisia and Nasser's Egypt in the mid-1960s. One may even speak of de-Arabization in the education context of this period. In Algeria, Arabization faced enormous obstacles because of the resistance of the francophone elements of the new elite, who stressed the economic advantages of French and the need for the gradual implementation of Arabization to avoid the reduction in standards in schools and universities, and who, in pursuing their aims, were even able to thwart the implementation of presidential decrees on the implementation of Arabization. The lack of coordinated policies meant that Arabization did not work through the entire educational system up to university level. It was therefore not possible to ensure educational continuity for those schooled in Arabic across the range of subjects offered by institutes of higher education. This led to impoverished job opportunities for these graduates in comparison with French language educated ones. And, to cap it all, the ethnic connotations of Arabization did lead to some resistance from members of the Berber speaking community. The combined effect of these factors meant that Arabization in Algeria, although in some ways more advanced than Arabization in Tunisia and Morocco, did not achieve its stated objectives. The same is true of the Arabization of government administration in all three countries of North Africa (Ahmad 1986). Three models were used to implement Arabization in schools. The first, called the horizontal model, aimed at Arabizing the teaching year by year, starting from primary one upwards. When this proved difficult to implement throughout the whole school system, an alternative model was employed. This second model, called the vertical model, consisted of the staged Arabization of one or more areas of the curriculum, particularly in the humanities, leaving French as the language of instruction in the sciences. The third model aimed at the wholesale Arabization of the teaching in a particular school or set of schools whenever possible. While the first two models were implemented in all three countries of North Africa, the
Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries last model was implemented in Algeria only, which, as was pointed earlier, reflects the sociopolitical potency of Arabization in this country. 3. Corpus Planning
The discussion in this section will be organized around three topics: writing system, grammar, and lexicon. Unlike status planning, most of the initiatives in corpus planning are the work of individual innovators, or what has been referred to as 'strategic planners' earlier. These initiatives are part of what is generally referred to in Arabic discourse as the language reform movement (harakat al-islah al-lughawt) or, in the area of word derivation (Hamadi 1980), the language correction movement (harakat al-tashih al-lughawi). In this they answer to Cooper's concept of 'renovation' (1989: 154). A characteristic feature of these initiatives is that they rarely get implemented. Their value therefore is mainly in highlighting the kind of issues which corpus planning policy may choose to focus on if it were to be officially launched in the Arabic speaking countries. Corpus planning initiatives in the Arabic speaking countries share two major properties with similar plans elsewhere. On the one hand, they tend to be based on no more than an impressionistic assessment of the problems they are designed to solve. On the other hand, they cannot be divorced from the ideologically motivated nonlinguistic ends which constitute their ultimate, albeit often undeclared, goals. A bold statement of these ends is provided by the wellknown Egyptian writer Salama Moussa who declared that the Romanization of Arabic would 'mark a change in [the] psychological attitude [of the Arabs, who would, as a result] welcome modern industrial civilization, with its moral, cultural and spiritual values.' ( 1955: 44) 3.1 Writing System The reform of the Arabic writing system has been the subject of intense debate in the twentieth century (Altoma 1961, 1974; Makdesi 1955; Moussa 1955). The avowed aim of the large number of proposals to reform this system is to deal with the educational and economic problems caused by two perceived defects in the script. The first defect concerns the positionally determined multiplicity of letter shapes in the writing system which, according to one estimate, number over 400. The second defect concerns the reliance of this system on diacritical marks, which are usually not included in hand-written or printed materials. Two major types of reform were put forward in the literature. The first type calls for the use of a modified form of the Latin script in writing Arabic. A proposal to this effect was submitted to the Arab Language Academy in the 1940s by the once minister of education in Egypt, 'Abd al-'Aziz Fahmi. The Lebanese
linguist Frayha (1955) also supported Romanization. The second type consisted of developing a modified form of the Arabic script, either to address the problem of the high costs of producing printed materials, or to deal with perceived learning difficulties, or both. However, predictions that the Arabs will eventually opt for Romanization (Moussa 1955) have so far proved unwarranted, as have the hopes for the adoption of a modified form of the Arabic script which the Moroccan educationalist Ahmad Lakhdar devised, and for which he seems to have received semiofficial pan-Arab backing in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Altoma 1961). 3.2 Grammar The reform of Arabic grammar, called taysir al-nahw in Arabic (Dayf 1986a; Al-Jawari 1984; Khalifa 1986; Stetkevych 1970), is principally related to the role of diglossia in depressing the speakers' grammatical competence in the standard language; this is typically reflected in the problem of the incorrect manipulation (lahn) of the desinential inflections (i'rab). The complex and unwieldy nature of pedagogic grammars, which tend to be organized around the twin principles of form and grammatical governance rather than semantic or communicative function, is said to exacerbate this problem, as does the fact that these grammars tend to be filled with attested materials (shawahid) that are difficult to interpret and understand. The lack of qualified teachers who can use the language correctly in their teaching across the full range of the curriculum is said to make the above problem even more intractable. Broadly speaking, grammatical reforms fall into two types. One type has as its objective bridging the gap between the standard language and the colloquials in a two-directional movement of leveling down (standard to colloquial) and leveling up (colloquial to standard). This type of reform was supported by
Al-Husri
nationalism (Suleiman 1994, 1997), although his ideas remained at the level of theoretical articulation only. A similar position was advocated by Frayha. In a series of publications (1951, 1952, 1955, 1980), he called for simplifying the Arabic language by adopting a set of measures which, in addition to developing a middle language between the standard and the colloquial, also included as an interim step implementing radical changes in pedagogic grammars and the way the standard language is taught in schools (Al-Batal 1994). Most of Frayha's ideas, however, remained at the level of broad theoretical articulation. The second type of reform aims at recasting Arabic grammar, in the post-descriptive sense (Suleiman 1996), in a new way which eliminates most of the problems it is thought to generate at the pedagogic level. By far the best known proposal of this type was put forward in 1937 by the Egyptian linguist Ibrahim 111
The Social Context Mustafa in his book Ihya' al-nahw (1959). In this book, the author advocates a new scheme for dealing with the desinential inflections to give them grammatical coherence, based not on the concept of governance but on semantic considerations of a very general nature (Omran 1991). Although the book contains no direct reference to the fact, it is clearly inspired by the work of the twelfth century Andalusian linguist Al-Qurtubi (1982), which goes to show the historical depth of the notion of grammatical reform in the Arabic grammatical tradition. In recent times, this same work has served as the inspiration for a series of publications on the topic by Dayf (1986a, 1986b, 1990, 1994). However, none of these efforts succeeded in bringing about a radical change, if any at all, in pedagogic grammar by adopting grammatical categories and classificatory schemata in language teaching that are different from the ones they set out to replace. The same fate befell the proposal which the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo developed, in response to an invitation by the Ministry of Education in 1938. Conservatism, inertia and, later in 1956, opposition from the Syrian part of the United Arab Republic (whose other part was Egypt) put paid to any hope of implementing this proposal. 3.3 Lexicon Sustained contact with Europe, brought about by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt (1798-1801), had a major impact on Arabic in a variety of fields, but the intensity of this impact was no more apparent than in the lexical arena. The need to find new terms to designate new inventions and concepts was a driving force behind the efforts to modernize the language, at both the individual and official level through, in the latter case, the work of the academies and the Bureau of Arabicization which were set up only in the twentieth century. A major factor in this drive was the ideologically anchored commitment to preserve the purity of the language. In practical terms this meant a preference for native terms over borrowed ones wherever possible. The following overall strategy seems to underlie the work of individual innovators and the academies in coining new terms. Utilizing the lexical resources of the language is the preferred option. This usually involves applying one of the following measures: (a) creating a new term out of the existing root configurations of the language; (b) using an existing term which is not in common use to designate the new concept or invention; (c) extending the semantic scope of an existing word to designate the new concept or invention; (d) loan translation or paraphrase; (e) blending (naht), which involves forming composite words by coalescing parts of existing words; and (f) using the colloquials as a quarry from which words can be extracted and circulated after carrying out the necessary phonological and morphological modi-
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fications to make them conform to the standard. The second option is foreign language borrowing, mainly from English and French, which is more prevalent in scientific texts than in the humanities. Borrowed terminologies undergo a process of naturalization to bring them in line with the phonological and morphological patterns of the language. Approved new terminologies are published in the journals of the language academies, but there is no information as to the take-up rate of new terms whenever these are not already in circulation. Other methods of dissemination employed by the academies, which may involve utilizing the media or communicating their decisions directly to government departments and private businesses, are not known. The academies sometimes take the line of least resistance and approve borrowed terms whenever these have become established in the speech community. Here, they play a legitimizing role rather than a leading one in which they set the trend. Dictionary making is a major aspect of language planning in the lexical field. Most of the initiatives in this area originate with individuals, although the Arab League sponsored Bureau of Arabization in Morocco has been at the forefront of the attempts to provide Arabic language equivalents for scientific and technical terms in a number of fields. The fast expanding number of bilingual dictionaries in the Arabic speaking countries, especially in the sciences, is symptomatic of an acute awareness of the need to try to rejuvenate the lexicon of the language. The intensity of this activity mirrors that of compiling monolingual dictionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century (Ya'qub 1981), when the issue seems to have been one of codification in the face of what was sometimes projected as serious deviations from the strict norms of the language(HamadI 1980). Dictionary makers, in compiling these dictionaries, debated whether to arrange entries alphabetically or by following the traditional root arrangement system. Although dictionaries were compiled in both modes, nevertheless the latter system predominated, as in Al-Mu'jam al- Wasit (1972), which the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo sponsored and promoted for use in schools. 4. Acquisition Planning: Foreign Language Education Policy The aims of foreign language education policy are generally subsumed under the aims of educational policy as a whole in Arabic speaking countries (Isma'il 1989; Al-Jabiri 1990; Qindil 1989; Rida 1998). Special laws normally spell out the specific aims of foreign language education policy in terms of aiding intercultural communication, professional development, enhanced job opportunities in an increasingly competitive and globalized market place, scientific and
Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries technical progress, and economic development at the national level. To implement these aims foreign language education policy in Arabic speaking countries is operationalized by defining a set of stated objectives which relate to attainment levels in the four language skills. On the whole, these levels are of a general nature. As a result, it is often difficult to monitor and evaluate the policy in terms of institutional implementation and whether or not it has achieved its stated objectives. Six considerations of a general nature relate to foreign language education policy in Arabic speaking countries. The first concerns the absence of a fully worked out policy in this field in individual Arab countries, of the kind developed in Holland (van Els 1994) or Australia (Ingram 1994). Second, the choice of foreign languages in individual Arab countries is to a great extent determined by historical accident, defined in terms of the colonial legacy, although this cannot be divorced from the need factor. This explains the predominance of English as the primary foreign language in Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Palestine, Oman, Qatar, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. It also explains the predominance of French in Algeria, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. The same applies to the presence of Spanish in Morocco, although this is additionally aided by the imperatives of geographical proximity which makes Spain Morocco's gateway to Europe. Need is the second defining factor in the choice of foreign language. This explains the predominance of English in Saudi Arabia and Yemen which escaped Western colonial rule, as it explains the position of the same language in Lebanon as a result of missionary work in the nineteenth century and contact with migrant Lebanese communities in North America. The shift from French to English in Syria and the serious encroachments made by English in Morocco in recent years constitute a further expression of the role of need in shaping foreign language education policy, owing to the unrivaled position of this language as the foremost international language. The continued presence of French in Egypt springs from the cultural prestige of this language among Egyptians, which goes back to Napoleon's invasion of the country (1798-1801) and the longstanding cultural and scientific contact with France this short-lived event initiated. Third, the Eurocentric bias of foreign language education policy, which favors English and French as the main foreign languages in the Arabic speaking countries, reflects the positive image of these languages in sociocultural terms and the fact that they are spoken by high-prestige groups at the national level, be they the old colonial elite or the new elite (cf. Trim 1994). Fourth, foreign language education policy in the Arabic speaking countries of the Middle East is almost completely divorced from its regional context. This explains the little interest there is in Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish
in this part of the Arab world, although the exact reasons for this situation in each case are complex and varied. Fifth, in extreme and isolated cases foreign language education policy may be suddenly altered to suit the political imperatives of the moment, as happened in Libya when English was banned from schools in the late 1980s following the American air attacks on the country. Finally, foreign language proficiency is to a great extent dependent not so much on whether the foreign language is the target of instruction, but whether it is the language through which the instruction of parts of the curriculum is carried out. This is typically the case in the leading private schools, faculties of science and technology, and foreign universities in the Middle East. In North Africa the situation is different because of the almost universal use of French in teaching science subjects in state schools and the universities. 5. Language Education Policy: The Ethnic Dimension Lambert (1995) distinguishes three types of country from the perspective of the development of national language policy: (a) homogeneous countries (containing a small number of ethnolinguistic groups that are marginal in geographical and social terms); (b) dyadic countries (possessing a small number of two or more ethnolinguistic groups that are geographically and socially cohesive); and (c) mosaic countries (containing a substantial number of ethnolinguistic groups). As explained above (Sect. 2.1), Sudan is the only Arabic speaking country which belongs to the mosaic type. Most Arabic speaking countries belong to the homogeneous type, not withstanding the presence of such languages as Nubian in Egypt, Mahri and Baluchi in Oman, or Armenian in Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, to give just a few examples. It is, however, mainly in the context of Iraq and both Algeria and Morocco that we can legitimately speak of dyadic countries. In Iraq, Kurdish is declared as an official language, alongside Arabic, but only in the Kurdish speaking areas. This fact distinguishes Iraq from Iran and Turkey in which sizable Kurdish communities do exist, but in which the language is not recognized as official. In Iraq, Kurdish is, therefore, taught in schools and at the university level at the University of Sulaymaniyya in Northern Iraq. Kurdish is also present in the media, both press (using the Arabic script) and electronic. In Algeria and Morocco, the situation is different with respect to Berber, which is spoken by a sizable proportion of the population. Owing to the fact that Berber is not recognized as an official language in these two countries, only minimal concessions are made to its propagation, in spite of internal and external pressures (from Berberophones in France) to do so (Tilmatine and Suleiman 1986). This means that in
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The Social Context Al-Batal M 1994 The Lebanese linguist Anis Frayha (19021993) and his contribution to Arabic language reform. In: Rammuny R M, Parkinson D B (eds.). Investigating Arabic: Linguistic, Pedagogical and Literary Studies in Honor of Ernest N. McCarus. Greyden Press, Columbus, 6. Future Work OH, pp. 155-72 Much work is needed to establish the exact nature Bell H 1989 Language and ethnic identity in the Sudan and of the language situation in the Sudan, Mauritania, the Soviet Union: A comparative study. In: Hurreiz S H, Somalia, and Djibouti as well as in other Arab counAbdel Fatih S E A (eds.). Ethnicity Conflict and National tries where ethnolinguistic groups exist. Information Integration in the Sudan. Institute of African and Asian yielded from such research is necessary before any Studies, Khartoum, pp. 186-95 comprehensive picture of language education policy in Bin Nu'man A 1981 A[-Ta'rib bayna al-Mabda' wa-l- Tatbiq fi al-Jaza'ir wa-l-'Alam al-'Arabi. Al-Sharika Al-Watthe Arabic speaking countries can emerge. Empirical aniyya li-1-Nashr wa-l-Tawzi', Algiers studies are also needed to determine the validity or otherwise of some of the claims made in connection Blau J, Suleiman Y 1996 Language and ethnic identity in Kurdistan: An historical overview. In: Suleiman Y (ed.) with corpus planning initiatives in the Arabic speaking Language and Identity in the Middle East and North Africa. countries, especially in light of the success in introCurzon Press, Richmond, UK. pp. 153-64 ducing standard Arabic as a spoken language in chil- Cooper R L 1989 Language Planning and Social Change. dren's TV programs, most notably Iftah ya Simsim, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge the Arabic adaption of Sesame Street (Abu-Absi 1990, Dayf S 1986a Taysir al-Nahw al-Ta'limi Qadiman wa-Had1991; Palmer 1979). ithan ma'Nahj Tajdidih. Dar Al-Ma'arif, Cairo On the prescriptive side, better coordination in Dayf S 1986b Tajdid al-Nahw. Dar Al-Ma'arif, Cairo areas of common concern, particularly in the field of Dayf S 1994 Tahrifat al-'Amiyya li-l-Fusha fi al-Qawa'id wal-Binyat wa-1-Hurufwa-l-Harakat. Dar Al-Ma'arif, Cairo corpus planning, is needed between the Arabic speaking countries. A language education policy that is Dayf S 1990 Taysirat Lughawiyya. Dar Al-Ma'arif, Cairo in tune with its regional context is a developmental Dus M 1997 Ba'd al-mulahazat hawl tadris al-mawad al'ilmiyya bi-1-lugha al-ajnabiyya fi madaris al-ghat. Qadaya priority in the Arab world, as is the need to introduce Fikriyya: Lughatuna fi Ma'rakat al-Hadara 17 & 18: 99major foreign languages into the curriculum which 104 'buck the trend' of the North-South bias, in favor Faiq S 1999 The status of Berber: A permanent challenge to of a more balanced policy in which a South-South language policy in Morocco. In: Suleiman Y (ed.) Landimension is given due recognition, at least at uniguage and Society in the Middle East and North Africa: Studies in Variation and Identity. Curzon Press, Richversity level. mond, UK, pp. 137-53 Ferguson A 1959 Diglossia. Word 15: 325-40 Frayha A 1951 Tadris al-lugha al-'arabiyya min mashakil alBibliography lugha al-'arabiyya. Al-Abhath 4: 378-99 Abu-Absi S 1990 A characterization of the language of Iftah yd Simsim: Sociolinguistic and educational implications Frayha A 1952 Tabsit Qawa'id al-Lugha al-Arabiyya waTabwibuha 'ala Asas Manhaj Jadid. The American Unifor Arabic. Language Problems and Language Planning versity in Beirut, Beirut 14: 33-46 Abu-Absi S 1991 The 'simplified Arabic' of Iftah ya Simsim: Frayha A 1955 Nahwa 'Arabiyya Muyassara. The American University in Beirut, Beirut Pedagogical and sociolinguistic implications. Al-'ArFrayha A 1980 FT al-Lugha al-'Arabiyya wa-ba'd Mushabiyya 24: 111-21 kilatiha. Dar Al-Nahar, Beirut Aba Bakr Y 1995 Al-Siyasat al-lughawiyya ft al-sudan. DiraGallagher C F 1968 North African problems and prossat Ifriqiyya 12: 125-52 pects: Language and identity. In: Fishman J, Ferguson Abuhamadia Z 1984 The dilemma of academies of Arabic: C, Das Gupta J (eds.) Language Problems of Developing The case of the Jordan academy of Arabic. Muslim EduNations. Wiley, New York, pp. 129-50 cation Quarterly 1: 57-84 Abuhamadia Z 1995 Orthography policy-making by fiat: Ghaladant S A S 1982 Harakat al-Lugha al-'Arabiyya waAdabihafiNayjiria. Dar Al-Ma'arif, Cairo The policy to Romanize Somali. Journal of King Saud Gill H 1999 Language choice, language policy and the traUniversity 7: 49-69 dition-modernity debate in culturally mixed postcolonial Ahmad N M 1986 Al-Ta'rib wa-l-Qawmiyya al-'Arabiyya ft communities: France and the 'Francophone' Maghreb as al-Maghrib al-'Arabi. Markiz Dirasat Al-Wihda, Beirut a case study. In: Suleiman Y (ed.) Language and Society Akinnaso N, Ogunbiyi I A 1990 The place of Arabic in in the Middle East and North Africa: Studies in Variation education and language planning in Nigeria. Language and Identity. Curzon Press, Richmond, UK, pp. 122-36 Problems and Language Planning 14: 1-19 Altoma S J 1961 The Arabic writing system and proposals HamadT M D 1980 Harakat al-Tashlh al-Lughawl ft al-1 Asr al-Hadith. Dar Al-RashTd li-1-Nashr, Baghdad for its reform. The Middle East Journal 15: 403-15 Altoma S J 1974 Language education in Arab countries and Al-HamzawT M R 1986 Al-1 Arabiyya wa-l-Hadatha. Dar AlGharb Al-Islami, Beirut the role of the academies. In: Fishman J (ed.) Advances in Language Planning. Mouton, The Hague, pp. 279-313 Harrison W, Prator C, Tucker G R 1975 English-Language Bashir M 'U 1970 Tatawwur al-Ta'lim ft al-Sudan: 1898Policy Survey of Jordan: A Case Study in Language Plan1956. Dar Al-Thaqafa, Beirut ning. Center for Applied Linguistics, Arlington, VA these two countries there does not exist a Berber language education policy to speak of.
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Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries Holes C 1995 Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions and Varieties. Longman, London Al-Husri S 1985 FT al-Lugha wa-l-Adab wa-'Alaqatihima bil-Wawmiyya. Markiz Dirasat Al-Wihda Al-'Arabiyya, Beirut. First published as Ara' wa-Ahadith fi al-Lugha wal-Adab (1958) Isma'il S K 1989 Siyasat al-Talim fi al-Mashriq al-Arabi. Muntada Al-Fikr Al-'ArabT, Amman Ingram D E 1994 Language policy in Australia in the 1990s. In: Lambert R (ed.) Language Planning around the World: Contexts and Systemic Change. National Foreign Language Center, Washington, DC, pp. 69-109 Jabbur G 1976 Al-'Uruba wa-Mazahir al-Intima' al-Ukhra fi al-Dasatir al-Rahina li-l-Aqtar al-' Arabiyya. Manshurat Wazarat Al-Thaqafa wa-1-Irshad al-Qawml, Damascus Al-Jabiri M A 1990 Al-Siyasat al-Ta'limiyya ft Aqtar alMaghrib al-'ArabT: al-Maghrib, Tunis & al-Jaza'ir. Muntada Al-Fikr Al-'Arabi, Amman Al-Jami'i 'A 1983 Majma' al-Lugha al-'Arabiyya: Dirasa Tarikhiyya. Al-Hay'a Al-Misriyya Al-'Amma li-1-Kitab, Cairo Al-Jawari A 1984 Nahwu/a al-Taysir: Dirasa wa-NaqdManhajl. Al-Majma' Al-'Ilml Al-'Iraqi, Baghdad Jernudd B 1968 Linguistic integration and national development: A case study of the Jebel Marra area, Sudan. In: Fishman J, Ferguson C, Das Gupta J (eds.) Language Problems of Developing Nations. Wiley,New York, pp. 167-81 Kenny D 1992 Arab-Americans learning Arabic: Motivation and attitudes. In: Rouchdy A (ed.) The Arabic Language in America. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI, pp. 119-61 Khalifa 'A 1986 Taysir al-'Arabiyya bayn al-Qadim wa-lHadith. Majma' Al-Lugha Al-'Arabiyya Al-Urduni. Amman Khalifa 'A 1987 Al-Lugha al-'Arabiyya wa-l-Ta'rib fi al-'Asr al-Hadith_. Majma 'Al-Lugha Al-'Arabiyya Al-Urduni, Amman Khasara M 1994 Al-Ta'rib wa-l-Tanmiya al-Lughawiyya. AlAhalT, Damascus Lambert R D 1995 Language policy: An overview. Paper presented at the International Symposium on Language Policy. Language Policy Research Center, Bar-Ilan University Makdesi N 1955 Facts and figures: Arabic type simplified. Middle Eastern Affairs 6: 51-53 Miller C, Al-Amin A M 1992 Language Change and National Integration: Rural Migrants in Khartoum. Ithaca Press, Reading, UK Moussa S 1955 Arabic language problems. Middle Eastern Affairs 6: 41-44 Nu'aymi K 1997 Tajruba dhatiyya ft tadris al-tib bi-1-lugha al-'arabiyya. Qadaya Fikriyya: Lughatuna ft Ma'rakat aliiadara 17 & 18: 175-77 Omran E M H 1991 Arabic grammar: Problems and reform efforts. In: Kinga D K, Iványi T (eds.) Proceedings of the Coloquium on Arabic Grammar: The Arabist, Budapest Studies in Arabic 3-4: 297-311 Palmer E 1979 Linguistic innovation in the Arabic adaptation of 'Sesame Street.' In: Altais J, Tucker G (eds.) Language in Public Life. Washington, DC, pp. 287-94 QindTl A 1989 Siyasat al-Ta(lim ft Wadl al-Nll wa-l-Sumal wa-Jibuti. Muntada Al-Fikr Al-'ArabI, Amman Al-Qurtubi I M 1982 Kitab al-Radd 'ala Nuhat, edited by Dayf S. Dar Al-Ma'arif, Cairo
Rida, Muhammad Jawad 1998 Al-Siyasat al-Ta'llmiyya ft Duwalal-Khalij al-' Arabiyya. Muntada Al-Fikr Al-'ArabI, Amman Rouchdy A 1991 Nubians and the Nubian Language in Contemporary Egypt: A Case of Cultural and Linguistic Contact. E. J. Brill, Leiden Al-Saft H A Z 1989 Al-Ummiyya fi al- Watan al-'Arabi. Muntada Al-Fikr Al-'ArabI, Amman Sati M 1995 Al-Lugha al-'arabiyya wa-sira' al-thaqafat ft alSinighal. Dirasat I friqiyya 12: 169-85 Sawaie M 1992 Arabic in the melting pot: Will it survive? In: Rouchdy A (ed.) The Arabic Language in America. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI, pp. 83-99 Al-Sayyid N 1975 Al-Ta'lim ft al-Sudan. Dar Al-Quds, Beirut Shohamy E 1994 Issues of language planning in Israel. In: Lambert R (ed.) Language Planning around the World: Contexts and Systemic Change. National Foreign Language Center, Washington, DC, pp. 131-42 Spolsky B, Shohamy E 1997 Planning foreign-language education: An Israeli perspective. In: Bongaerts T, de Bot K (eds.) Perspectives on Foreign-Language Policy: Studies in Honour of Theo van Els. John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, pp. 99-111 Stetkeyvch J 1970 The Modern Arabic Literary Language: Lexical and Stylistic Developments. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Suleiman Y 1994 Nationalism and the Arabic language: An historical overview. In: Suleiman Y (ed.) Arabic Sociolinguistics: Issues and Perspectives. Curzon Press, Richmond, UK, pp. 3-24 Suleiman Y 1996 The simplification of Arabic grammar and the problematic nature of the sources. Journal of Semitic Studies XLl: 99-119 Suleiman Y 1997 The Arabic language in the fray: A sphere of contested identities. In: Jones A (ed.) University Lectures in Islamic Studies (Vol. 1). Al-Tajir World of Islam Trust, London, pp. 127~48 Tilmatine M, Suleiman Y 1996 Language and identity: The case of the Berber. In: Suleiman Y (ed.) Language and Identity in the Middle East and North Africa. Curzon Press, Richmond, UK, pp. 165-80 Trim J L M 1994 Some factors influencing national language policymaking in Europe. In: Lambert R (ed.) Language Planning around the World: Contexts and Systemic Change. National Foreign Language Center, Washington, DC, pp. 1-15 van Els T J M 1994 Foreign language planning in the Netherlands. In: Lambert R (ed.) Language Planning around the World: Contexts and Systemic Change. National Foreign Language Center, Washington, DC, pp. 47-68 Versteegh K 1997 The Arabic Language. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Walbridge L 1992 Arabic in the Dearborn mosques. In: Rouchdy A (ed.) The Arabic Language in America. Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI, pp. 184-204 Wannas A 1991 Al-Dawla wa-l-Mas' ala al-Thaqafiyya ft alMamlaka al-Maghribiyya. Bayt al-Hikma, Carthage Wannas A 1995 Al-Dawla wa-l-Mas'ala al-Thaqafiyya fl alMaghrib al-'Arabl. Ceres Editions, Tunis Wannas A nd Al-Dawla wa-l-Mas'ala al-Thaqafiyya ft alJaza'ir: Dirasa ft al- Taghylr al-Thaqaft wa-l-ijtima' i. Alif, Tunis
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The Social Context Ya' qub I 1981 Al-Ma ajim al-Lughawiyya al-'Arabiyya: Badawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdanskiego, Gdansk, pp. 38594 a'atuha wa-Tatawwuruha. Dar Al-'I1m li-1-Malayin, Beirut Zaborski A 1997 Minority languages in Arab countries. In: Al-Zayn N 1997 Ta'rib al-Ta'lim wa-Ta'allum al-Lughat alAjnabiyya: Madkhal ila Nahdat al-Watan. Sharikat alSynak S, Wicherkiewicz T (eds.) Language Minorities and Matbo'at li-1-TawzI' wa-1-Nashr, Beirut Minority Languages in the Changing Europe. Wyd-
Language Education Policy—Asia B. H. Jernudd
Historical legacies combine with realities of contemporary communication to motivate a typology of language education policy situations for Southeast and East Asian countries. 1. Differentiating Features of Language Education Policy Situations 1.1 The Degree of Use of English in the School System Singapore vigorously implements English as the first language. The Philippines, Brunei, and Hong Kong SAR have bilingual schools; Malaysia recently reintroduced English as a medium at university level, as did Myanmar for science subjects at senior high school level and at universities. Other states teach English as a foreign language, with some minor variations. 1.2 Development and Spread of a National Language All states in Asia now use their own languages in education in some manner or other. How vigorously they are developed and implemented differ. Malaysia and Brunei with Bahasa Malaysia, Indonesia with Bahasa Indonesia, the Philippines with Filipino, Thailand with Thai, and China with Putonghua (Mandarin) have for quite some time been actively engaged in vigorously spreading their national languages. Other languages may have considerable historicity, but language planning efforts are weak despite educational needs. Hong Kong SAR and Singapore actively pursue official language policies but rely on external validation of norms for their official languages (Chinese and English, for Singapore also Malay and Tamil). 1.3 The Degree to which a State Language Policy Explicitly Embraces the Use of Recognized Minorities' Languages This feature ranges from active encouragement of development and use of minority languages to active resistance. China exemplifies the former. Indonesia's constitution also respects regional languages. Singapore, the Philippines, and arguably Malaysia, also score positively on this feature.
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Negation of this feature characterizes many other Asian states. They implement a one-country one-language policy to create a unified and loyal citizenry (e.g., Thailand). Yet, minority languages need not be excluded from the curriculum and may be used transitionally in primary schools or taught to a limited extent as subjects (e.g., in Myanmar). 1.4 Management of the School System in a Restructuring Polity Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam are emerging from chaos, in its sadly different way perhaps also Myanmar. Schools are struggling to overcome abysmal conditions. Gradually, the state is regaining competence and control over the educational domain, to a significant extent helped by international agencies and foreign aid. These agencies bring with them international ideas, international languages, and an ideology that recognizes minorities' rights. 2. Some General Relationships Between the Features 2.1 A Relationship Between the Presence of English in Schools and National Language Development English is present (but does not have to be) when national languages are overtly managed. One explanation is that formerly Francophone dependencies fell into disarray, when formerly Anglophone or Allophone (Dutch, Spanish at one time, Portuguese) dependencies did not. The latter could therefore develop. Another is that when the national language has a strong position in the state, then the polity can afford English (as in Malaysia). In states with developing educational systems that have not yet consolidated its internal language affairs, strong demand for English motivates people to demand English medium education especially if university admission depends on English proficiency. This would block development of national languages and conflict with broader social and educational aims, draining resources away from expanding basic education that can be communicated to all.
Language Education Policy—Asia 2.2 A Relationship Between Support for Minorities' Languages in Schools and National Language Development A reciprocal relationship appears to hold between support for minorities' languages and vigorous national language development. Successful national language spread is only possible if ethnic-regional interests are accommodated, at least to some extent. Singapore is a case in point. A multiethnic, multilingual city state with a Chinese majority in the middle of a Malay sea, and with Indian and Eurasian (and, living outside domestic politics, expatriate) minorities, Singapore cannot afford ethnic strife. China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines illustrate accommodation of minorities within a national language framework. The relationship means that when minorities begin to participate actively in a developing national socioeconomic and political system, they are likely to demand equality of opportunity with the majority. Perceptions of unequal opportunities or uneven resource allocation or of imposition (e.g., of inmigrating ethnic others) engender protest which may mobilize according to communal, ethnic-linguistic lines of demarcation. An equitable language education policy may enhance equal opportunity and prevent conflict. 2.3 Demand for English is Universal In all countries, the high demand for English has brought about a large increase in the numbers of private schools that teach English. There are also private international schools in all capitals which teach in English and which may admit the local elite's children. Some international schools serve an expatriate ethnic group, for example, the German-Swiss school in Hong Kong, but may also have an English-language stream, admitting others. 3. Language-in-Education Situations 3.1 Singapore Appropriates English Singapore's English-as-a-first-language policy aims at societal multilingualism and individual bilingualism, in English and one of the designated mother-tongues. These are Mandarin Chinese for ethnic Chinese (regardless of the pupil's particular Chinese home language), Malay (identical with Bahasa Malaysia) for ethnic Malays, and Tamil for ethnic Indians. Pupils registered as ethnic Indians may also choose between Hindi, Malayalam, and Punjabi; ethnic others have a free choice. English dominates official and public communications, but not exclusive of other languages in the media, life events, etc. English is the medium of instruction (with only minor exceptions) in all schools at all levels and the official mother-tongues are taught as second languages. Due to state promotion of Mandarin and the
fact that Mandarin is offered at first-language level in some schools, that is, at a par with and in addition to English, many ethnic Chinese families have shifted from other Chinese languages to Mandarin at home. Progression through the streamed school system and entry to tertiary institutions depend on a pupil's results in first-language (English) and mother-tongue examinations. Promotion of English and Mandarin is motivated by an ever-present sense of crisis of economic and social survival to be overcome. 3.2 The Philippines has Bilingual English and Filipino Schools on a Vernacular Base The Philippines' 1987 Constitution states 'for purposes of communication and instruction, the official languages of the Philippines are Filipino, and until otherwise provided by law, English.The regional languages are the auxiliary official languages in the regions and shall serve as auxiliary media of instruction therein' (Article XIV, Section 7). The Philippines is a multilingual country with, besides Tagalog (practically the same as Filipino), eight major and some 141 minor Philippine languages. The major languages are Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Bicol, Waray, Pampango, Pangasinan, and Magindanao. A Policy on Bilingual Education was initiated in 1974 and reaffirmed in 1987, which aims at 'competence in both Filipino and English at the national level, through the teaching of both languages and their use as media of instruction at all levels'. It declares that the 'regional languages shall be used as auxiliary languages in grades I and II. Thereafter, English is the medium for mathematics and the natural science subjects, Filipino for the social and other subjects. While at the tertiary level the University of the Philippines is a Filipino stronghold, other universities aspire mainly to English. The Bilingual Education policy explicitly refers to 'the development of Filipino as a linguistic symbol of national unity and identity'; it also refers to 'the cultivation and elaboration of Filipino as a language of scholarly discourse ... its continuing intellectualization'. Herein lies the major hurdle for Filipino's success. Efforts on behalf of Filipino are blunted by English which dominates language use in the controlling domains of communication in national life. As long as higher education and the professions rely on English as the working language, and as long as Filipino is not developed (intellectualized) also for writing so that texts are available as alternatives to English texts, and as long as individuals do not cultivate the use of an intellectualized variety of Filipino, Filipino will remain in the shadow of English. Except among Cebuanos, Filipino does not compete with mobilization of competing vernaculars for a national role. The Philippines' bilingual compromise between indigenous languages and English maintains the
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The Social Context latter, perhaps not indefinitely but for the time being. Should the schools, however, steadily improve apace with expectations of socioeconomic development, and should the privileged elite meet populist-democratic resistance, support for English might wane. There are also madrasah schools. They teach and use Arabic, some as a main language. Many are located in southern Philippines which is strongly Islamic and ethnically-religiously secessionist. 3.3 The City States of Brunei, Darussalam, Macau, and the Hong Kong SAR Brunei, Darussalam, the Hong Kong SAR, and Macau differ from Singapore. Brunei and HK both have bilingual policies with English, Macau does not. 3.3.1 Brunei, Darussalam implements a Dwibahasa policy in Malay and English Brunei's population consists overwhelmingly of 'indigenous groups of the Malay race' and Chinese, with a significant presence of expatriate workers. Some Malay groups speak non-Malay languages which are referred to as 'Malay dialects'—and there are small groups of others. Bahasa Melayu is the official language, practically identical with Bahasa Malaysia. It is not used vernacularly in Brunei. Brunei Malay is the spoken language and the lingua franca. The two are sufficiently different so that while the latter is used, including in classrooms, the former is taught and is one of two mandated languages of instruction. The other is English which from Primary Four up is progressively used as a medium of instruction. The Dwibahasa (two languages) policy was declared in 1984, and means to ensure the leading role of Malay while at the same time recognizing the importance of English. Among other factors, schooling has led to more and more parents bringing their children up in Brunei Malay, not in their minority language. English may also be gaining among youth. The Religious Affairs Ministry runs a second education system. Many children voluntarily attend up to 6 years of religious school, where they learn the Jawi script and are brought into contact with Arabic. 3.3.2 The Hong Kong SAR tries to abandon English as a medium of instruction Hong Kong moved from British to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The use of English as a medium of instruction in secondary schools was sharply reduced in 1998. A fundamental revision of the philosophy and practice of its entire educational system was initiated in early 1999. Simultaneously the city, itself a population of families of immigrants, faces a new wave of immigration from the Chinese hinterland which would import more Putonghua (Mandarin) 118
speakers posing a challenge for the Cantonese- and English-medium schools. The language education policy aims at enabling all students to be biliterate (in written Chinese and English) and trilingual (in Cantonese, Putonghua, and English). Putonghua is rapidly becoming available as a school subject in most primary and secondary schools (including mastery of hanyu pinyin romanization). It is offered at universities. This may satisfy a requirement in the PRC's 1982 Constitution that the state shall popularize Putonghua to be current in the whole country. If so, the point is moot whether HK must implement this PRC requirement or not. The Basic Law which governs HK is silent on the matter. Putonghua is the spoken variety of Modern Standard Chinese which is the norm for written Chinese in HK schools. However, HK uses full-form ('traditional') character script. Simplified characters are optionally taught at senior secondary schools. Cantonese is the spoken variety in HK in a diglossic relationship to MSC. Article 9 of the Basic Law of the HK SAR does not refer to varieties of Chinese but addresses the relationship of Chinese to English: 'In addition to the Chinese language, English may also be used as an official language by the executive authorities, legislature and judiciary of the HK SAR.' On education, Article 136 rules that the HK Government 'shall, on its own, formulate policies regarding the educational system and ... the language of instruction'. Consequently, it has declared its intention to 'press forward with mother tongue teaching' so that students can learn both language and non-language subjects more effectively. Primary schools all use Cantonese; but from 1998 the number of secondary schools which are allowed to use English as a medium was radically lowered. This reform met opposition in the community but the mother-tongue policy stands firm. 3.3.3 Macau is laissez-faire Macau, which reverts to China in 1999, illustrates exclusive colonial self-interest since some 70 percent of government funds for education support Portuguesemedium schools for Portuguese or Portuguese descent citizens' children who number only 6-7 percent of all pupils. School leavers are expected to continue tertiary education in Portugal. Over 90 percent of pupils have to attend private Chinese medium schools which are not publicly regulated. 3.4 A More Stable Malaysia Returns to English The government's long-standing policy of developing and spreading the use of Bahasa Malaysia as the national and official language has achieved sufficient stability in the national education system and in government administration to allow a limited return to use of English in universities. English re-emerges to
Language Education Policy—Asia the common language) has to be taught as an additional language in many regions, just as in minorities' areas. The use of Putonghua, rather than the regionalect in mainstream Han schools (the overwhelming number of schools in China), is not enforced by law. However, in 1993, the State Council issued a directive that by the end of the twentieth century, Putonghua should be the language of instruction in Han areas from kindergarten to higher education. Since this directive refers to spoken language, it is likely to suffer delay given the present realities of language use. Especially in rural and less developed areas, teachers (have to) use the local dialect. China's minorities benefit from affirmative minorities' policies enshrined in the Constitution. In national minority area schools, language education policy has brought about a variety of bilingual education frameworks within which the minority languages are used as media and/or taught in various relationships to Putonghua. The Constitution promulgated in 1982 sets the direction for minorities policies in Article 4: 'All nationalities in the People's Republic of China are equal ... Regional autonomy is practised in areas where people of minority nationalities live in concentrated communities; in these areas organs of self-government are established ... All nationalities have the freedom to use and develop their own spoken and written languages and to preserve and reform their own folkways and customs.' Independent administration of education etc. is legislated in Article 119; freedom to use own languages in organs of self-government in Article 121. Article 45 of the Constitution also makes it a legal responsibility of the state to ensure acceptable working, living, and study conditions for the blind, hearing impaired, and mute. The Law of Regional Autonomy for Ethnic Minorities of 1984 emphatically repeats the constitutional provisions and also stipulates in Article 37 that 'In schools where the majority of students belong to an ethnic minority, the language of textbooks and instruction should be the language of that minority, if conditions permit. The Chinese language (Putonghua) 3.5 Long-term Policy Spreads the 'Common should be taught in the last two years of primary Language' in China but Guarantees Language-in- school and in middle school in order to promote the Education Minority Rights national language.' Significant reciprocity of relations China is a country with 56 nationalities. The Han is signaled by Article 49: 'The administration of (Chinese) form the overwhelming majority. National- autonomous regions should encourage the study of ities have their own languages except the Hui and ethnic languages. Chinese cadres should learn the Manchu who adopted Chinese. Some are multi- local language of the ethnic group, and the cadres of lingual. The written languages of some nationalities the ethnic minorities, while studying their own langsuch as the Mongolians, the Tibetans, the Uygurs, the uage, shall also learn to speak and write the standard Kazaks, and the Koreans have been used for centuries, national language.' (Such reciprocity applied also for others scripts and written varieties have been cre- between the major Chinese regionalects, Putonghua ated since the 1950s. The Han language, Chinese, has included.) Three major types of bilingual programs can be eight regionalects and many dialects. The diversity is such that the standard language, Putonghua (literally distinguished. In Type 1, primary importance is support Malaysia's Vision 2020 of a developed and industrialized country in two contexts. First, the Prime Minister announced in November 1993 that teachers in national universities may use English as a medium of instruction; second, legislative changes in 1996 allow private tertiary institutions and 'twinning' arrangements with established foreign universities. These expanding institutions use mainly English. The New Education Policy (NEP) has since 1970 made English (and Bahasa Malaysia) accessible to all, regardless of ethnic background, locality, or family income. NEP gradually replaced ethno-linguistically separate schools with a unified system. The 1996 Education Act affirms the policy. Secondary and tertiary instruction is now conducted in Bahasa Malaysia (including continuing strong encouragement for textbook production in Malay also for universities, to replace English-language texts). English is compulsorily taught as the 'second most important language' from primary one. The pupils' home language can, wisely, be used in primary schools. There are national primary schools which use only Bahasa Malaysia as the medium, and there are national-type primary schools which use principally Chinese and Tamil (in some few schools, Telegu or Panjabi) as their main languages of instruction and teach Malay and English (from the third year). Note, however, that pupils who enter Mandarin-medium etc. primary schools may speak other Chinese languages at home, or have an altogether different mother-tongue, for example, a variety of Thai (as happens in the northeastern state of Kelantan). It has been observed that if pupils in a class share a common language, the teacher will often use this as a means of transition to the endorsed medium of instruction. Thai and Iban (a language in Sarawak) may also be taken as subjects at upper primary level; and at secondary level Mandarin and Tamil are optional subjects. Similarly, dialects of Malay may differ significantly from the standard Malay of the schools. Pupils from the national-type schools who go on to secondary schools (which use Malay only) take an additional, seventh presecondary year of intensive Bahasa Malaysia.
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The Social Context attached to the mother tongue which is used as a medium up to and including tertiary levels. Putonghua is taught from late primary. Students are required to study it for one or two years before entering university; there, science and technology subjects are taught in Putonghua but other subjects in the nationality's language. This is the case for example in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. In theory, Uygurs can enter Xinjiang universities without Putonghua. In practice, Putonghua is essential for an administrative or cadre career, even to communicate with officialdom. In Type 2, Putonghua is introduced earlier, either as a subject from the second or third grades of primary school with the minority language remaining medium of instruction throughout or as medium of instruction at secondary school level with the minority language then remaining as a subject. The Liangshan Yi Autonomous Region and certain parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region are examples of this type, with the Yi and Zhuang languages, respectively. Type 3 is a type of various practices. Putonghua is introduced at some point in primary school after the first several grades have been taught in the minority language, with varying degrees of attention to the minority language thereafter. Variation includes the degree of reliance on ethnic or Chinese language textbooks, vis-a-vis the spoken language of instruction. Affirmative action guarantees minority nationality students access to higher education at preferential terms, partly to compensate for their language handicap. There is choice in the minorities' areas between minorities' schools and Han mainstream schools. The latter schools largely, but not exclusively, serve those Han who have migrated into minorities' areas. There are, however, no minority language schools for minorities' families who have migrated into the big cities or into Han areas. There is a network of institutions that support minority language development and educational development. At national level, the leading agencies are: The Committee for Nationality Affairs of the Central People's Government, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Culture, the Central Institute of Nationalities (with branches throughout China) and, for research and development, the Institute of Nationality Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Science. 3.6 In Indonesia, the National Language Dominates Education on a Foundation of Limited Use of Minority Languages National language policy mandates Bahasa Indonesia as the medium of instruction through tertiary levels and as a major subject in schools. While fostering patriotism and national communication, the state recognizes multiethnic and multilingual realities. The 120
nation's motto is Bhinneka Tunggal Ika—Unity in Diversity. The 1945 constitution states that 'the state language is Indonesian (Chapter XV, Article 36) and that the state shall respect and maintain those vernacular languages which are spoken and well nourished by their speakers. Those languages form a part of the living Indonesian culture'. The Education Act No. 30 of 1989 states that the vernacular language may be used as medium of instruction in the first two or three grades of primary school when Bahasa Indonesia is being taught. They may be taught as subjects 'to inculcate in [The pupil] the values of the vernacular culture.' A dozen regional languages are widely used and taught in schools, among them the designated transitional medium-of-instruction languages: Achehnese, Balinese, Batak, Buginese, Javanese, Madurese, Makassarese, and Sundanese. Chinese is an exception; Chinese-medium schools were closed after the events of 1966 (and sentiments reminiscent of 1966 sadly resurfaced in 1998). The use of Chinese written language in public was banned, to be lifted in 1994 for essentially very limited pragmatic uses in tourism, and fully removed in 1999. Besides regular schools, the Directorate of Nonformal Education is an important agent for teaching basic Indonesian (and other basic skills) to adults. Also outside mainstream education, Islamic madrasah and pesantren schools under the Ministry of Religion bring pupils into contact with Arabic. Indonesia never had an English-language infusion—the colonial masters were Dutch-speaking. Liberation began in the 1920s with Indonesian language declared a symbolic and communicative spearhead in the Youth Declaration of 1928, and the Japanese occupation during World War II favored Indonesian. Today, English is the first foreign language and is taught by the fourth year of primary school. Implementation suffers from many teachers' poor English and generally poor resources. Pedagogical difficulties are aggravated by current curricular adaptation to a demand for the teaching of listening and speaking skills, replacing a limitation of English teaching objectives to reading skills. 3.7 In Thailand the National Language Dominates Education Standard Thai is the language of instruction at all levels. Mainly middle- and upper-class children in Bangkok and children of educated parents come to school speaking or at least understanding standard Thai. Standard Thai is a public language acquired only through schools. In parts of the country, the children's Thai dialect is sufficiently close to the teacher's standard Thai for them to adjust reasonably quickly, elsewhere not. The teaching objective is to develop spoken and written standard Thai, in har-
Language Education Policy—Asia mony with the educational goals to bring up happy and productive citizens in the Thai monarchy. Thailand is also ethno-linguistically diverse. Besides a small number of experimental programs in northeastern Thailand, educational policy does not recognize other languages (such as Kammuang, Lao, Pattani Malay, Northern Khmer). Teachers can, officially, use the children's own language in class, otherwise little would be accomplished in the early grades. In the 1990s, as modern life reaches all parts of the country and in pace with Thailand's democratization, ethnic elites and intellectuals begin to challenge the official notion of 'Thainess', instead embracing and asserting diversity, for example, among the Isan in the northeast. This can be seen clearly among the Thai Chinese who now once more openly use Chinese surnames, privately relearn Chinese, and even conduct political campaigns in Chinese. In the southern provinces, many other mostly Muslim Malay-speaking rural populations continue to send their children to private part-time or after-hours Islamic schools where they learn Standard Malay in Arabic script. The medium of tertiary education is also Thai but the texts are in English. This creates a language gap, so lecture notes in Thai are commonly made available and may even be traded. English as a medium is rare, but applies to the odd individual program such as the MBA program that Chulalongkorn University conducts in cooperation with Northwestern University (of USA). In view of the recognition of the importance of English as an international language and the advancement of information technology, the policy of foreign languages changed in 1996. English now becomes a required subject starting from the Primary level. Thailand hosts the only institution in Southeast Asia dedicated to university education of deaf students, Ratchasuda College, Mahidol University, Salaya. 3.8 The Koreas Both Koreas require the use of Korean throughout their educational systems. They differ in that North Korea uses only Hangul, the uniquely Korean alphabetic script, whereas the Republic of Korea uses Hangul with 'Chinese' characters. These Chinese characters once wrote classical literary Chinese and came to be used also for Korean. Hangul was invented in the fifteenth century to replace the difficult Chinese characters. The South Korean government has oscillated between the use of Hangul only and the combined script. Again in 1999, the government came out in favor of reinforcing the use of Chinese characters and met with puristic protests. The issue is not merely ideological: newspapers, for example, use Chinese characters. If schools teach Hangul only, school-
leavers face a communication problem when they read newspapers. 3.9 Myanmar is a Union of Ethnicities but Burmese Dominates an Educational System That Few Complete Internal strife has been troubling the educational system in recent decades. From 1962 to 1988, the Program of the Burmese Way to Socialism authorized only Burmese as the language of instruction. This Burmese is literary Burmese which differs considerably from vernacular varieties. No concessions were made to the many minority languages (such as Karen, Kachin, Shan). English was taught at secondary level mainly for reading and writing. To support the country's reorientation towards a market economy, in 1988 English become a medium of instruction at tertiary level and in 1991 a medium of instruction for science, mathematics, and economics for the 2 years of high-school level education (i.e., after 9 years of schooling). Myanmar's is a sharply elitist system in which only some 5 percent of the cohort complete secondary school and some 30 percent primary school. 3.10 Laos and Cambodia are Renewing Their Educational Systems Ethnically diverse, underdeveloped, and very poorly resourced, a majority of the populations of Laos and Cambodia do not have access to schooling beyond the primary level. As from 1996, and with support from international organizations, especially the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, the Laotian government emphasizes development of nonformal education for disadvantaged populations and ethnic minorities and technical, vocational, and higher education. Implementation would have to include use of minority languages. The Cambodian government is also being advised by the Asian Development Bank. At present, Laos de facto uses Lao as medium of instruction at all levels, Cambodia Khmer. The French government links aid for higher education in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam to the use and acquisition of French. The Laotian university is reportedly using both Lao and French as media of instruction. Faculties of law, medicine, and economics in Cambodia teach in French and teach French. In return the French AUPELF-UREF aid agency seconds and trains faculty members and helps train students in French to understand their lectures. Students at the Cambodian Institute of Technology which formerly taught in Russian and Khmer have repeatedly resisted the French aid insisting instead on English, yet, now it teaches in Khmer and French. AUPELF has introduced courses teaching English as a foreign language. 121
The Social Context At the Cambodian Economic Science Institute (ESI), competition between Franco- and Anglophone orientations led to a split in 1993. A newly established Faculty of Business adopted a Khmer/English language policy for a practical business school and legal education curriculum, while the ESI retained the Khmer/French language and curriculum and transferred to a new location. The Faculty received support at first from the Asia Foundation, then Georgetown University and the University of San Francisco Law School. English is taught. Lectures that are delivered in English are interpreted into Khmer and teaching materials are translated. The development of use of Khmer at university level is in line with Asian Development Bank recommendations: 'to adopt Khmer as the sole language of instruction at all levels' which 'would add impetus to modernizing the language.' The Bank believes that a Khmer language education policy should be declared soonest because there is a danger of washback from even limited use of English in higher education to the secondary schools which could upset the use of Khmer. 3.11 Vietnam Foreign aid has helped Vietnam introduce both a new English (as a foreign language) curriculum and new textbooks in its schools beginning in 1998 and to overcome an English language barrier to join ASEAN. Singapore and Canada helped with the latter, a private consortium sponsored by American business corporations with the former. Acquisition of English has been a major preoccupation of huge numbers of Vietnamese since the early 1990s. There is a French AUPELF presence at universities (and French is also available as a subject in secondary schools) that has not stopped the advance of English. Vietnam has a functioning educational system which is now being adapted to, and by, the doi moi (renovation = perestroika) transition to a market economy on socialist principles. The national language is Vietnamese, tieng pho thong, which is the language of instruction at all levels. However, some schools in the Thai areas of Hoa Bihn and Son La use
Thai in lower grades. This is a local-district decision but allowed by the Ministry of Education. There exists a small effort to develop minority language texts. Such actions would appear in harmony with the application of the renovation policy to education (of January 1993) which includes attention to ethnic minorities. Note also that the Ministry of Education is sponsoring a project on sign language in Vietnam through its Center for Special Education. Bibliography Adamson B, Lai W A Y 1997 Language and the Curriculum in Hong Kong: Dilemmas of triglossia. Comparative Education 33: 233-46 Asian Development Bank 1992 Lao People's Democratic Republic. Education and Development in Asia and the Pacific Series, Vol. 1. Asian Development Bank, Manila Asian Development Bank 1996 Cambodia. Education Sector Strategy Study. Asian Development Bank, Manila Dardjowidjojo S 1998 Strategies for a successful national language policy: The Indonesian case. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 130: 35-47 Gaudart H 1992 Bilingual Education in Malaysia. James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville, Australia Gopinathan S et al. (eds.) 1994 Language, Society and Education in Singapore: Issues and Trends. Times Academic Press, Singapore Martin P W 1998 A sociolinguistic perspective on Brunei. Intemational Journal of the Sociology of Language 130: 5-22 Park N S 1989 Language purism in Korea today. In: Jernudd B, Shapiro M (eds.) The Politics of Language Purism. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, pp. 113-39 Sibayan B P 1994 The Role and Status of English vis-avis Filipino and Other Languages in the Philippines. In: Kandiah Th, Kwan-Terry J (eds.) English and Language Planning: A Southeast Asian Contribution. Times Academic Press, Singapore, pp. 218-41 Smalley W A 1994 Linguistic Diversity and National Unity: Language Ecology in Thailand. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London Sun H K, Coulmas F 1992 News from China: Minority languages in perspective. IntemationalJournal of the Sociology of Language 97 Yee A H 1990 A Comparative Study of Macau's Education System: Changing colonial patronage and native selfreliance. Comparative Education 26: 61-71
Language Education Policy—Europe J. L. M. Trim 1. The Diversity of Europe
It is by no means easy to form a clear and comprehensive picture across Europe. The continent is politically and linguistically fragmented and its boundaries are less easy to define than the simple 122
geographical boundaries traditionally accepted would suggest. The European Union (EU) currently comprises 15 states, whereas the Council for Cultural Cooperation (CDCC) covers the 40 member states of the Council of Europe (CE) as well as seven others and
Language Education Policy—Europe embraces the whole of the Russian Federation and Turkey, as well as three transcaucasian republics: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, though not Serbia and Montenegro. The European Region of UNESCO also includes Israel, which has observer status with CDCC, as have Canada and USA. 1.1 A Multiplicity of Languages The number of languages in use is also uncertain. The distinction between languages and dialects is blurred and often politically determined. Letzeburgisch is a recognized EU national language, whereas Catalan and Alsatian are not. Serbo-croat was the main language of Yugoslavia, whereas the independent Republic of Croatia insists that Croatian is its national language and emphasizes the lexical and phonological features as well as the use of the Roman alphabet which distinguishes it from Serbian usage. Some languages (e.g., Manx) have no native speakers and are on the verge of extinction. Others (e.g., Cornish), which were extinct, are now being revived by enthusiasts who claim their recognition as territorial minority languages. Many endangered minority languages have fewer speakers than settled urban communities composed of migrants, often of non-European origin and their families (e.g., Urdu and Bengali in UK, Arabic in France, Turkish in Germany, etc.). 1.2 A Multiplicity of Policymakers In every country, educational provision exists from the cradle to the grave, from preschool playgroups for 3-year-olds to such bodies as the University of the Third Age. Education is frequently divided into nursery or kindergarten, primary (infant and junior), secondary (lower and upper, itself often distinguishing general and vocational branches), further, higher, and adult education. However, different countries segment the continuum in different ways and at different ages. Thus, 'primary' education may begin between 3 and 6 years of age and end between 8 and 15. Generalizations about 'foreign language teaching in primary education' can then be very misleading. In most countries, public and private education co-exist. Their relative nature, status, and organization vary widely, as does the degree of control exercised over private education by the state. Within public (and sometimes private) education, policy decisions are made by authorities at different levels, by the class teacher, the school or college, local education authority, the state, and even (subject to the principle of subsidiarity) at international level. The nature of decisions taken at successive hierarchical levels varies widely. In some centralized states decisions are made by ministries in considerable detail. In others, as many decisions as possible are left to be made as close to the point of learning as possible, central decision-making aiming
simply to secure the public interest. Similarly, the nature and scope of systems of inspection vary. Rarely is language learning conceived as an organic unity. Different laws, ministries, and inspectorates may be concerned with the mainstream teaching of the state language to native speakers, its teaching to minority children as a second language, with the mother-tongue development of. such children, with foreign language teaching. Nor is there longitudinal unity, since responsibilities change with the transfer of children from one educational sector to another. Furthermore, different agencies, public or private, may be concerned with the setting of overall curricular guidelines, the detailed organization of language instruction in the classroom, the planning and design of textbooks and other teaching materials, the conduct of testing, assessment and examinations leading to the award of qualifications to learners and the higher education, professional training, and qualification of teachers. There are, thus, a very large number of agents, many of them acting independently under varying pressures: academic, social, economic and political, from colleagues, parents, employers, etc. and exposed to different intellectual and ideological arguments. It must also not be forgotten that the ultimate sanction lies in the hands of the language learners themselves, whose achievement determines whether policies pursued by other agents succeed or fail. In so complex a situation it is not to be expected that policy-making will be uniform across Europe. Indeed, if decision making is based on the needs of learners and the society of which they form part, on the motivations and characteristics of learners, teachers and providers, and the human and material resources available to them, provision will necessarily be highly diverse, perhaps even more so in areas which are open to the play of market forces. What is certainly desirable is for the policy decisions which bear upon the language learning of a particular individual to be coherent. If authorities, parents, and teachers are pulling in different directions, and textbooks and qualifying examinations are out of tune with each other and with national curricular guidelines, the resulting confusion can be very bad for effective learning. 2. Internal Multilingualism Despite the break-up of former multilingual and multicultural empires into a large number of independent nation-states, few European countries are in fact fully monolingual. Most contain sizeable linguistic minorities, both territorial minorities maintaining an inherited language and immigrant communities resulting from the large-scale work migrations of the postwar years. Policy decisions have to be made on the place of regional or minority languages in public life and administration and in the educational system.
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The Social Context Guiding principles are set down in a number of European conventions and recommendations: (a) The European Charter for Minority or Regional Languages which has so far been signed by some 20 member states of the CE and ratified by eight; (b) The CE Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities; (c) The Oslo Recommendations regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities within the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) region; and (d) The Hague Recommendations Regarding the Education Rights of National Minorities. Given the great variability of national situations, these instruments are of necessity highly flexible, exercising a strong moral pressure, as does the unofficial Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, adopted 'with the moral and technical support of UNESCO,' rather than establishing legally enforceable duties and obligations. In recent years, securely established nation-states (e.g., UK, France, Spain) have become much more tolerant and supportive of regional languages and cultures such as Welsh, Breton, Basque, Catalan, etc. In emergent states the need for national unity may be seen as paramount, with a real fear of separatism and irredentism associated with the assertion of regional identity. The position of the languages of about 15 million work immigrants and refugees in Europe is more problematic. Their political and economic position is generally weak and they are often dispersed in larger urban majority populations, though congregation may lead to some larger groups predominating in some localities. While limited provision may be made for adult immigrants to receive formal instruction in the host language, they are more commonly left to pick up a basic, often pidginized contact language, retaining their language of origin as home language and often, especially in larger immigrant settlements, in social and religious life. At first seen as a short-term measure during post-war reconstruction in the 1950s and 1960s, immigrants have become long-term residents with family dependants. At school, many countries give regional languages a place in the curriculum. The minority language may be the medium of instruction, in a few cases throughout education, more commonly in the first years of primary education as a transitional measure. In the majority of cases, later primary and secondary education are conducted exclusively in the state or majority language, though there are a number of experiments in the use of a second or foreign language as medium of instruction in one or more curricular subjects. This is illegal in Belgium, where the medium must be French or Dutch according to the region concerned. Few countries, even those with sizeable immigrant populations, will provide home language-medium instruction in
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schools, largely because of the heterogeneity and instability of pupil recruitment (181 languages in Inner London schools in 1981). Most will provide special teaching in the language of the school to non-native speakers. Some will include one or more home languages as curricular subjects, generally optional, to help develop oracy and literacy. A few, notably Sweden, recognise mother-tongue maintenance as a State responsibility, but experience difficulty in implementing the policy in isolated cases. Many countries organize out-of-school instruction for their expatriates, as do well-organized local communities for their members, often with a religious motivation (Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu).
3. Foreign Language Teaching
It is only in relatively recent times that modern foreign languages have gained a regular place in the school curriculum. In 1805, Lord Eldon ruled that the use of a school's trust funds to teach a language other than Latin, Greek, or Hebrew would be 'misappropriation.' With the growing stature of vernacular cultures (especially of French) as the languages of modernity, of rich cultures with their own high literary traditions and of German as the language of science and philosophical thought, modern languages came to be taught, but as the possession of a socio-cultural elite and with the same aims and methods as the classical languages—to discipline the young mind and to provide access to the European literary and philosophical cultural heritage. This tradition, still strong in more traditional selective upper secondary schools and universities, was only partly displaced by the Great Reform Movement of the 1880s and 1890s. In the wake of the neogrammarian revolution in linguistics, the reformers (Vietor, Jespersen, Sweet) argued for the replacement of classicism by a modernist emphasis on practical mastery of the spoken language of everyday life. The movement was highly successful in Scandinavia. In mainland Europe a hierarchy developed between 'academic' (Gymnasium) and less prestigious 'practical' (Realschule) streams, paralleled in England by the dichotomy of private 'public' schools and state 'grammar' schools. In the Mediterranean world, the Reform movement had little impact. In the first half of the twentieth century" foreign language teaching suffered from the disruption to international communication caused by two major European wars. Only in 1959 did the First Conference of European Ministers of Education call for the 'coordination of education plans and increase in each country of the teaching of foreign languages.' At the Second Conference in 1961, more detailed recommendations were set down and the CE was asked to promote meetings of experts to study the problems.
Language Education Policy—Europe 3.1 The Role of the Council of Europe In a series of projects from 1963 to the present day, a coherent long-term strategy has been followed, to facilitate the mutual information and cooperation of all decision-making agencies nationally and internationally, with the aim of: (a) making foreign language learning obligatory for all sections of the populations, (b) lowering the starting age and lengthening the period of study, (c) establishing a multifaceted communicative competence as the overarching objective for language learning, with explicitly specified, worthwhile, appropriate and flexible objectives based on the needs, motivations, and characteristics of learners and the mobilization of adequate human and material resources, (d) developing materials, methods, and forms of assessment and qualification geared directly to the achievement of these objectives, and (e) promoting plurilingualism, involving the development, on an increasingly independent basis, of a complex communicative competence involving a number of languages, as a lifelong process to which each stage of education makes its distinctive contribution. The 1960s were devoted to establishing patterns of cooperation between linguistic research and all educational sectors (foundation of AILA, the International Association for Applied Linguistics), and identifying lines of policy development, endorsed by the CE Committee of Ministers (CECM) in Resolution R(69)2. In the 1970s basic principles were formulated, the 'Threshold Level' model for specifying communicative competence was developed (now applied to more than 20 European languages), and the approach was piloted across member states in a 'schools' interactive network' and recommended to member governments in CECM Recommendation R(82)18. R(82)18 was a main guideline for the development of curricula, examinations, textbooks, and programs of teacher training (seen as the key to policy implementation) through the 1980s, first in the 24 states then constituting the Council for Cultural Cooperation (CDCC) and subsequently for the modernization and re-orientation of language teaching in its new member states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC and CIS) following the political changes around 1990. The 1990s have also seen the CE approach extended to the primary, upper secondary, and vocational sectors, with attention focussed on (a) an enriched model for specifying objectives (Threshold Level 1990, Common European Framework), (b) the use of information technology (IT), (c) the promotion of self-directed and cooperative learning through 'learning to learn,' (d) the use of a foreign language as medium of instruction, (e) the role of international educational links and exchanges, and (f) language testing and assessment. Corresponding policy recommendations to the 48 member states of CDCC were incorporated in CECM Recommendation R(98)6.
3.2 The European Union (EU) Paragraph 1 of Article 126 of the Treaty on European Unity, 1992, states: The Community shall contribute to the development of quality education by encouraging cooperation between Member States and, if necessary, by supporting their action, while fully respecting the responsibility of the Member States for the content of teaching and the organization of educational systems and their cultural diversity.' Paragraph 4 underlines the principle of 'subsidiarity,' stating that the Council 'shall adopt incentive measures, excluding any harmonisation of the laws and regulations of the Member States.' It may, however, 'acting by a qualified majority on a proposal from the Commission,' adopt recommendations. In 1995 the Commission published its White Paper: Teaching and learning: towards the learning society. Its fourth general objective: 'proficiency in three Community languages,' the need for 'everyone, irrespective of training and education routes chosen, to be able to acquire and keep up their ability to communicate in at least two community languages in addition to their mother tongue.' It advocated a start at preschool level, systematic teaching in primary education, with a second Community language starting in secondary school, including some subject teaching in a foreign language. In addition, 'vocational training—initial and continuing—must place great stress on language learning.' Support measures were proposed for (a) assessment systems and quality guarantee systems (b) the award of a 'European quality label' to schools meeting certain criteria (one FL at primary, 2 FLs at secondary; internationally recruited teaching staff; promotion of self-learning methods; participation in international links and exchanges), (c) languageteaching materials exchange, and (d) early teaching. Support is now organised within the programs: (a) SOCRATES, incorporating ERASMUS and LINGUA as well as the new COMENIUS, dealing with (a) school partnerships; (b) education of migrant workers, travellers, and gypsies as well as intercultural eduction; (c) in-service teacher training; and (d) awareness-raising activities and the work of relevant associations. (b) LEONARDO: transitional pilot projects and exchange programs in the vocational field, the sub-program Telematics for Education and Training within the Telematics Applications Program. (c) TEMPUS. This is a companion scheme to ERASMUS and LINGUA, designed specifically to promote the development of higher education systems in the CEEC countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It gives: (a) grants for Joint European Projects between universities in those countries and at least two in EU; (b) mobility grants for staff and students moving between Central/Eastern Europe and EU; and (c) 'complementary activities,' for 125
The Social Context example, associations, publications, surveys, studies, and youth exchanges. All these programs will be terminated before the year 2000, when the structure and content of support programs will be reviewed. It is to be expected that the EU will continue to pursue its White Paper objectives through the financial incentives which have so far proved efficacious in promoting European cooperation among educational institutions not subject to direction. 4. The Present Situation At the end of the twentieth century there is a strong consensus on the broad principles of FL teaching policy in Europe, though actual provision varies widely: (a) Except in Ireland, at least one FL is obligatory for all pupils from ages 10-11 to the end of compulsory education and often for all who continue into upper secondary education. (b) A second or third FL is widely taught, usually as a later addition and for fewer hours. Some 20 countries make two FLs obligatory. Otherwise, provision is optional or restricted. (c) A FL is increasingly present from the age of 8 and earlier. (d) A FL element is becoming more common, even compulsory, in higher education. Service-based Language Centers are expanding, but specialized modern language degrees, especially traditional language/literature courses are not expanding so much as those in which a language is associated with another discipline or professional qualification. 5. The Role of English A self-reinforcing spiral of study and use is giving English a unique position, no doubt in response to the predominance of English in the globalization of many aspects of life in the public, occupational,- and educational domains, especially in the technological, communications, leisure and travel industries, as well as in an emerging universal youth culture. In 1994, 89 percent of pupils in general secondary education in EU were learning English, which is now obligatory in almost all European countries. Inability to use English is now seen as a disability, felt especially keenly in the CEED and CIS countries and in Southern Europe, where fluency in English is around 50 percent compared with 75 percent in Central Europe and 90 percent or more in the North. In the light of these figures there is continued pressure for education authorities to concentrate FL teaching exclusively on English as the sole vehicle of global communication, so as to reach as high a degree of proficiency as possible and to make more space for other (less expensive) curricular developments. The question is no longer 'which FL should be chosen?' but rather 'is English enough?' However, 'English only' policies encounter strong resistance, not only from the language teaching pro-
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fession and from those who fear and resent the pressure of English on the national language. 6. Other Languages
Almost all EU, EFTA, CIS, and CEEC countries for which figures are available offer at least two languages on an obligatory or optional basis in secondary education. The most multilingual country is Luxembourg, where French and German are taught or used as medium of instruction to all pupils throughout their scolarity and English is taught to over 70 percent. Whilst national plurilingualism is essential to a small country, this policy is not without its critics, who see language as overweighted, leading to higher costs, excessive failure rates (especially among migrants), and lower achievement in other subjects. In officially multilingual countries (Belgium, Finland, Iceland, Switzerland), the alternative language is normally taught to all pupils, though in some cases English appears to be displacing the second language. In general, smaller countries are more likely to pursue multilingual FL policies and to devote more curricular time to FLs. The second FL is likely to be German in Northern Europe and French in Southern Europe. Only in France (30 percent) is Spanish widely taught. Many other languages appear in school curricula, though only on a small scale. In University language centers and in adult education, languages are popular and much more diverse. Interestingly, a recent Eurobarometer survey showed that young people in EU were keenly interested in learning further languages, particularly French, German, Italian, and Spanish (top of the poll). The policies of the European Institutions, are firmly in favor of plurilingualism. EU promotes three community languages for all and the CE European Language Portfolio (ELP) is designed to encourage plurilingualism in as many forms as possible as part of life-long learning, corresponding to intensifying European integration and mobility, which will bring increasing numbers of Europeans into close contact with the daily lives of their contemporaries in other countries. Bibliography Coste D, North B, Sheils J, Trim J L M 1998 Languages: learning, teaching, assessment. A common European framework of reference. Language Testing 31(3): 136-51 Dickson P, Cumming C 1996 Profiles of language education in 25 countries. NFER, Slough, UK van Ek J A, Trim J L M 1998 Threshold 1990 (rev and corrected edn.). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages Contact Bulletin. Dublin European Commission 1995 White paper on education and training: Teaching and learning—towards the learning society. EU, Luxembourg Eurydice 1997 Key data on eduction in the European Union. EU, Luxembourg 6 Riagain D 1998 Vade-Mecum, a guide to legal, political
Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union and other official international documents pertaining to the lesser used languages of Europe (2nd edn). European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages, Dublin
Trim J L M 1998 'A new Council of Europe Recommendation on modern languages' Language Teaching 31(4):206-14
Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union L.A. Grenoble
The Soviet Union was a truly multilingual, multiethnic nation-state: at its peak the population was just under 262 500 000 and encompassed over 200 different languages. One natural consequence of the highly centralized Soviet governmental system was that at any given time a single, relatively uniform language policy was implemented for all parts of the USSR. However, the sheer size of the Soviet Union (8 649 490 square miles) and the range of ethnic groups and languages meant that the effects of this policy varied greatly across regions. 1. Chronology of Soviet Language Policy The languages of the former USSR are typologically and genetically diverse, and can be divided into five large language families: Indo-European, Caucasian, Altaic (Mongolian, Tungusic, Turkic); Paleo-Siberian (Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut); Uralic (Finno-Ugric, Permic, Samoyedic, Volgaic); and some isolates (Ket, Nivkh, Yukagir). Determining the exact number of languages is difficult, as the boundaries between language and dialect are determined by a number of linguistic and nonlinguistic (i.e., sociopolitical) factors. Similarly, ethnicity is in part politically determined. Certain minority ethnic groups were not recognized by the State, as is the case of the Mingrelians in the Georgian Republic, who were required to declare their_ethnicity as Georgian, although Mingrelian and Georgian are, linguistically, two distinct languages. The reverse is also true: Evenki, Even, and Negidal were long considered to be dialects of one language, but have since been established as three separate languages. Accordingly, official Soviet statistics vary from year to year, with sudden jumps or gains in a given population group, and often diverge from estimates by linguists. The USSR was organized into 15 union republics (Soviet Socialist Republics, SSR), considered here in four regional categories: the Baltics; the Caucasus; Central Asia; and Slavic territory and the Far East. These are political, not ethnolinguistic boundaries. Ethnic Russians lived in all republics in varying numbers. The Russian Republic was the largest in terms of territory and also had the highest percentage of ethnic Russians. Russian is one of several Slavic lan-
guages spoken in the USSR, although by far the most widely used. Ukrainian was not recognized as a distinct language by the tsarist regime; its literary language found widespread use only after the creation of the Soviet Union and the Ukrainian SSR. The same is true of Belorussian in Belorussian SSR. 1.1 Leninism and Early Soviet Language Policy In 1917 at the beginning of the Soviet period, only 28.4 percent of the total population aged 9-49 was literate, and illiteracy rates were nearly 100 percent in some regions. One of the first goals of the new government was to raise literacy; by the time of the 1970 census, the literacy rate was officially 99.7 percent. While there is controversy as to whether Leninist language policies were the result of an adherence to Communist principles or were simply based on pragmatic considerations, the basic tenets of Lenin's language policies are unequivocally stated: Lenin believed that no one language should be given the status of a state language and promoted national equality and self-determinism. The Declaration of Rights of the People of Russia (November 2, 1971) proclaimed equality for all people, with 'the free development' of the national minorities and ethnic groups inhabiting the USSR. All Soviet citizens were guaranteed education in their native tongue. The declared equality of all languages was part of a larger policy of korenizacija 'nativization' (or, literally, 'rooting') which was intended to educate the indigenous peoples and move them into the workforce, especially into the Soviet administrative workforce. This program met with many obstacles, not least of which were the widespread illiteracy and low educational levels. The rate of korenizacija varied from region to region, with the incorporation of native Georgians and Armenians progressing relatively smoothly, due most certainly to their high levels of education. Both Central Asia and Siberia provide prime examples of some of the difficulties. In the 1920s, the indigenous population was largely illiterate and uneducated, and without education, the native peoples could not be brought into the workforce. Only the former bourgeoisie in Central Asia were educated, and they were suspect because of their class back-
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The Social Context ground. Education itself was very difficult: in many cases, there was a dearth of both pedagogical materials and .teachers trained in the native language, and in many instances there were no literary forms in the native language to begin with. The lack of trained native teachers and materials meant that many classes were conducted in Russian, which was incomprehensible to the majority of these students. Despite even serious efforts to educate native Uzbeks (in 193031 half of the places in Central Asia State University were reserved for native students), students were underprepared and ill-equipped for higher-level education. Similarly, an education program for indigenous Siberian groups targeted promising individuals and sent them to Leningrad to receive higher education. For the majority this was their first encounter with a Western-style city. The attrition rate in such programs was very high. The literacy campaign was a fundamental step in the larger nativization process, and in order for it to succeed, the majority of languages needed linguistic description and codification, and creation of a written form. Some regions in the new Soviet state had longstanding literary traditions, as did the Georgian and Armenian languages in the Caucasus and the Turkic languages in Central Asia. At the same time, many of the languages of the newly formed empire lacked written forms. It is estimated that at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, only 13 languages on Russian territory had a literary norm, and only 19 had any kind of written form at all. The creation of literary languages was a first priority; this entailed basic linguistic fieldwork and description, and the creation of writing systems and literary forms for many of the indigenous languages, in particular the Siberian languages. Widespread dialectical variation contributed to the difficulties of establishing a literary norm. Furthermore, there was a lack of clear linguistic boundaries, and the native peoples often did not identify themselves with one or another ethnolinguistic group. Instead, identities were formed more along religious or geographic lines. The Latin alphabet was initially chosen as the basis for all new writing systems and was also used for those languages using an Arabic script which were required to Romanize. A number of factors may have contributed to the choice of the Latin alphabet over Cyrillic. First, Russian was seen as the language of the tsarist oppressors, and there was a conscious effort to move away from that sense of oppression. Second, the Latin alphabet was seen as having practical and pedagogical advantages over Cyrillic. The linguistic theories of Nikolai Marr (1865-1934) almost certainly played a role. Marr was the single most influential linguist in the Soviet Union until long after his death. He believed that languages were correlated with social class, and that language change proceeded by sudden jumps (like class revolutions), rather than occurring 128
gradually. Marr argued that the development to socialism was linked to the adoption of the Latin alphabet. Marrist theories were influential in the formation of Soviet language policy until 1950 when Stalin himself renounced Marr's basic principles in an article published in the newspaper Pravda. After Lenin's death in 1924, language planners in the Stalin era (1924-53) initially continued as before. However, the 1930s saw a shift in policy and in Stalin's way of thinking. In 1934, in an address to the XVII Party Congress, Stalin effectively ended the nativization campaign. In March 1938 an official decree made the study of Russian compulsory. At this time, there was a growing campaign to switch from Latinbased writing systems to Cyrillic. The official explanation for the change was the direct request of the Soviet people, but it was almost certainly motivated more by economic and sociopolitical factors. Publication in at least two different scripts was costly and time-consuming. The switch to Cyrillic also facilitated the acquisition and use of Russian. Marr's followers now argued that Cyrillic was in fact at the pinnacle of language development. By the mid-1940s, the conversion to Cyrillic was complete. Those languages which had newly created literary standards using Latin script were converted to Cyrillic, as were languages with longer literary traditions, such as the Turkic languages of Central Asia, which had now undergone shifts from Arabic to Latin to Cyrillic in just over a decade. Alphabet creation was just one step in the literacy campaign. Equally important was the creation of a standardized literary form for each of the targeted languages. Originally emphasis was placed on phonetic spelling, which created problems due to vast dialectical differences for some languages, and due to the large influx of Russian borrowings as a result of the sociopolitical and economic upheavals. The creation of a new lexical inventory was an equally vital component of this larger campaign. Initially it was argued that each of the national languages should have a complete inventory of all technical terms, created using language-internal resources wherever possible. Ultimately this did not occur, as the spheres of usage of many of the national languages were quite limited, making this native technical terminology superfluous. Where loans were concerned, the early policy was to maintain the pronunciation of the lending language. This policy was changed by the 1950s, when all loanwords were written in the original Russian form. The majority of new technical, social, and political terms did in fact come from Russian. In the Baltic Republics alone, where the regions were relatively highly Westernized and technological, it has been estimated that 70-80 percent of all new terms were coined from Russian, not Baltic or Estonian, models. Russian influence was also particularly heavy in the Belorussian and Ukrainian Republics,
Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union where people often spoke a mixed form of the two languages. Despite the turmoil and contradictions, literacy results were rapidly achieved. Following the Soviet census, the literacy rate climbed dramatically from 44.1 percent in 1920 to 87.0 percent in 1939. The official literacy rate was 99.7 percent in 1979. Publication rates also soared: by 1924 textbooks were printed in 25 languages, and by 1934 they were printed in 104 different languages. By 1938, there were 22 languages of instruction in Uzbekistan, 17 in Ukraine, and 20 in Daghestan, to name just a few. Yet as time went on, these gains were diminished. In the 1940s, the ever-increasing governmental centralization entailed an increasing importance in the use of Russian in all spheres of life. Work on the development of the so-called young Soviet languages continued, but at a much slower pace. Furthermore, the heavy economic and social burdens of World War II and postwar reconstruction meant very limited resources for the development of minority languages. 1.2 Language Policy in the Post- WWII Era A major change in language policy began in the mid1950s. Prior to this period, the national languages were the focus of Soviet language planning. Although the nature of that focus shifted—from the early years where the focus was on creating literary languages and building education programs, to Stalin's more brutal methods of forced education—from the mid1950s there was a major shift whereby the goal was to establish Russian as the language of the Soviet Union. The Khruschev era (1953-64) introduced the vision of a new Soviet people, united not only politically, but also through the use of one language. Khruschev declared Russian to be 'the second national language.' On the one hand an open policy of bilingualism was promoted, but on the other the very need for national languages, that is, any language but Russian, was questioned. Whereas under Lenin all languages were guaranteed equal rights, under Khruschev the issue of the 'relative' importance of language was introduced into Soviet polemics. It became officially acceptable to view some languages as less viable than others; languages with few speakers were declared on the brink of extinction and unsuitable for development. At the same time, Lenin's policies of language equality were not officially repudiated, and could be invoked by the Communist Party to justify its own policies, even when practice contradicted policy. This was concomitant to a major change in education policy. Clause 19 of the Education Reforms of 1958-59 stated that education in the mother tongue was no longer compulsory and parents could choose the language of instruction for their children. By this time, instruction in the native language was offered for most languages with a written form at an elementary level, and at a secondary level for some. One
impact of the Education Reforms was pressure to begin instruction in Russian from the earliest grades, and the native language was replaced by Russian in many schools. In some cases this was an immediate change (in all Karelian schools, for example), whereas in others this took place more gradually (e.g., Chuvash schools). In all schools where education continued to be conducted in the indigenous language, Russian was a compulsory subject. The results of the Education Reforms varied throughout the country. Despite the shift in emphasis on Russian, languages spoken by larger populations may have actually gained some ground, in part due to the lessening of cultural restrictions under Khruschev. This was the case in Central Asia, for example. In contrast, minority languages became seriously threatened as they were no longer used in schools and publications in these languages were seriously cut back. The key change—regardless of the immediate local-level particulars—is that Russian became the official language of the USSR and occupied a central position in education and government. This process was only increased under Brezhnev (1964-82), in a greater move toward total Russification, with increasing pressure to make Russian the 'second mother tongue'. Statistics for this time period are unreliable and difficult to obtain. Officially at least, Russians continued to be largely monolingual (87 percent), while over 40 percent of the non-Russian population claimed itself to be bilingual, and by 1979, a total of 82 percent of the population claimed some knowledge of Russian. Translation work was primarily unidirectional as well, from Russian into the native language, with relatively few native literary works translated into Russian. The Brezhnev period is characterized by a continuous increase in both the sheer volume of instruction in Russian, which was steadily replacing the national languages in non-Russian schools, and a continuous increase in the number of institutions where Russian was the sole operative language. Party rhetoric proclaiming the importance of Russian was also on the rise. The official view of a single Soviet ethnic group, the result of 'the convergence and fusion of peoples' (sblizhenie i slijanie narodov), was becoming a reality. The sphere of Russian usage spread beyond education to many administrative levels, including local-level administration. It had become the lingua franca of the USSR. 1.3 Change under Gorbachev, Perestroika, and Glasnost Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, and his restructuring program, perestroika, focused governmental attention on economic and political problems. Until 1989, both language and nationality policies remained essentially unchanged from previous years; in fact they received little attention from the central government in Moscow. In many regions the linguistic
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The Social Context situation was essentially stable throughout this period, yet a number of republics began to change language policies within their own territories. For the first time the Soviet Union ceased to have a single, unified language policy for the entire nation. For example, in 1987, Moldova passed a law intended to widen the spheres of Moldovan usage, and in 1989, officially changed to the Latin alphabet, bringing Moldovan in line with Romanian orthography. In 1989, the Baltic Republics (first Estonia, then Latvia, then Lithuania) each passed laws granting their national languages the status of a state language. In April 1990, the central Soviet government reacted by enacting 'The law of the languages of the peoples of the USSR' which, for the first time, declared Russian to be the state language. This was more a reaction to what the Soviet government viewed as separatist-nationalist tendencies in the individual republics. Rather than a clear, focused language policy, the Soviet government maintained this reactive stance until its downfall in 1991.
had fallen out of use (e.g., Shor). Such endeavors face difficulties due to a general lack of resources, as well as the continuing social and economic prestige of Russian. In many schools the number of classroom hours devoted to minority indigenous language instruction has been cut back sharply, and the overall prognosis for the survival of most minority languages is not promising.
1.4 Changes in the aftermath of the Soviet Union In December 1991 the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and was replaced by 15 separate states. Yet even before this final break up, major changes in language policy had begun. Newly formed independent nations, such as the Baltic countries, reinstated their titular languages as the official state languages. On October 25,1991, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR ratified the 'Law of the languages of the peoples of the Russian Soviet Republic' which instated Russian as the official state language, and left the status of other languages to the discretion of the individual republics. This law was re-ratified with only minor changes in 1993 by the Russian Federation. Most of the republics which remained in the Russian Federation undertook measures to place the titular language, the language of the ethnic majority of that region, on an equal official footing with Russian. These laws guarantee the use of both Russian and the titular language in education and administration. The current language policies are reminiscent of the early years of the Soviet Union, when people were guaranteed education in their native languages. Yet there are significant differences: whereas in the 1920s and 1930s language policy was dictated by a centralized government aiming at unified results, now, in the aftermath of the USSR, these policies are currently implemented more by local-level governments, within individual republics, with variation from region to region. This is offset by a shift in the ethnic composition of Russia itself: while Russians constituted less than half the population of the USSR, they make up more than 80 percent of the population of Russia today. There have been some efforts at minority language revitalization (often headed by the Association of Minority Indigenous Peoples), even attempting to create literary languages in some cases (e.g., Negidal) or revitalizing literary languages which
2.1 The Baltic States The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), all part of tsarist Russian territory in pre-Soviet times, each declared their independence from Russia within a year of the Bolshevik Revolution. They maintained some degree of autonomy until August 1940, and officially became part of the USSR in 1944-45. Estonian is a Finno-Ugric (Uralic), and Latvian and Lithuanian both Baltic (Indo-European) languages; all are written in Latin script. A standard literary language for Estonian was established in the nineteenth century, but publication of books had begun much earlier, in the sixteenth century. Both Latvian and Lithuanian have had written forms since the sixteenth century. Of these three republics, Latvia was arguably the most Russianized, with only 54 percent of the population Latvian, and over 30 percent Russian; Russian bilingualism rates were also higher here than in the other Baltic Republics. This is compared to Estonia, where under 30 percent of the population was Russian, and 65 percent Estonian, or Lithuania, where less than 10 percent of the population was Russian, and a full 80 percent Lithuanian. Engaged in post-World War II reconstruction, the Soviet government had no time to develop a Russianbased educational program in the newly annexed Baltic States. The initial decision was to teach all subjects in the native languages, but an additional year was added to the secondary school timescale to provide extra time for Russian-language acquisition. One result of the Education Reforms of 1958-59, typical of all regions of the USSR, was an increase in the number of bilingual schools. By 1965, approximately all Latvian schools were bilingual. Even at the time the Reforms were instituted, the percentage of pupils taught in Russian was slightly higher than the percentage of the population which was ethnic Russians
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2. Regional Impact The Soviet government imposed a central, unified language policy which was intended to function in a homogenous manner regardless of the differences in geographic regions and basic demographics. The actual impact of Soviet language policy on a given territory was dependent upon a number of factors, including population and language density, language traditions, proportions of Russians to non-Russians, to name a few.
Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union (e.g., in 1959, 33 percent in Lativa, as opposed to a Russian native-speaker population of 27 percent). All the Baltics felt the impact of the intense Russification campaign of the Brezhnev era. These effects increased as a result of the 1978 nation-wide decree that Russian-language instruction be continued from preschool through university levels. Lithuania and Estonia were the last two holdouts of the Soviet Republics; study of Russian in the first grade was not introduced until 1980-81. As stated above, the Baltic Republics were also the first to declare their own languages to be state languages. Both Lithuania and Estonia declared their independence in 1990, although the Soviet government proclaimed their declarations invalid. 2.2 The Caucasus The Caucasus consisted of three republics: Armenia, Azerbajdzhan, and Georgia. Each of these has its own majority language which is genetically distinct from the other two majority languages: Armenian is IndoEuropean, Azeri is Turkic, and Georgian is Caucasian. In the Northern Caucasus, Chechen and Ingush are spoken in Chechnia, and over 25 languages are spoken in the small territory of Daghestan. The Caucasus is characterized by high language density, with a large number of indigenous and nonindigenous languages spoken in this region. Both Georgian and Armenian have long-standing literary traditions with literary languages dating back to the fourth and fifth centuries; each uses its own distinct script. Azeri was written in Arabic script until 1929, when the writing system was changed to a Latinbased script. In accordance with writing reforms going on throughout the USSR, this was changed to Cyrillic in 1939. Since independence, Azeri has again reverted to a Latin script. In 1938, despite the push for Latin-based scripts elsewhere in the USSR, Georgian-based scripts were developed for both Abkhaz and Ossetic (although North Ossete went directly to Cyrillic). These alphabets were changed in 1954 to a Cyrillic-based script, the official reason being that the Georgian-based alphabet was phonetically inconsistent for these languages. Fourteen characters were added to the Cyrillic used for these Caucasian languages, but even so, the script was still inconsistent in its marking of labialization and of the distinction between voiceless aspirates and voiceless ejectives, so consistency was not really the issue. Armenian and Georgian speakers are striking in that they resisted all efforts to change to Cyrillic. For example, in 1976, explicit instructions came from Moscow that all textbooks for higher educational institutions were to be written in Russian, and that all dissertations were to be written and defended in Russian. In 1978, the government recommendations that the constitution be changed from recognizing
Georgian as the official language of the Georgian Republic were met by angry student protests. As a result of these protects, Georgian was retained, and similar constitutional proposals in Armenia and Azerbaidzhan were dropped. 2.3 Central Asia The dominant language family throughout Central Asia is Turkic, with a Turkic language-dialect continuum running across the region. This continuum begins with Azeri, spoken in Azerbaidzhan in the Caucasus, and stretches across modern day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, and Tajikistan, all of which were individual Soviet Republics. The continuum is such that adjacent dialects are mutually intelligible, but any two groups relatively far apart on the continuum are not. Each former Republic had its own language, and thus language boundaries are in part political and in part linguistic. Uzbek has by far the largest number of speakers, with over 16500000 in Uzbekistan alone, and 873000 in Tajikistan, 555000 in Kyrghyzstan, and slightly smaller population in the other former Republics. Breaking up this Turkic continuum is Tajik, an Indo-European language (Indo-Iranian), with 3 344 720 speakers in 1991 in Tajikistan, and sizeable populations elsewhere, especially in Uzbekistan (934 000), as well as elsewhere. Uzbek-Tajik language contact is heavy in Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan, and many Tajik are trilingual (speaking Tajik, Uzbek, and Russian). In addition, the areas of this region are inhabited by minority groups speaking local varieties of Arabic, Farsi, and other indigenous languages. Nearly all the minority languages in this region lack a written form; instead, in most cases they use the majority language of the Republic, and in fewer cases, Russian. Populations are so large in this region that Russification did not proceed on the same scale as in Siberia, for example. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, literacy rates were very low for all of Central Asia; they are 99 percent in most regions today. In 1917, some form of Turkic written in Arabic orthography served as the literary language for most of Central Asia. Initially, there were attempts to adapt the Arabic script into a standardized orthography which would better reflect the phonetics of the local language. In 1926, the AllUnion Turcological Congress in Baku recommended a shift from Arabic to Latin orthography, although this shift had been discussed for several years at this point. At the very least, the shift had a direct impact on religious leaders and the intelligentsia, and it was probably specifically intended to lessen their influence and prestige. The difficulties faced in the codification of Uzbek are representative of those faced by other Central Asian languages. In Uzbek SSR, the orthography was introduced without a codified norm; given the vast 131
The Social Context dialectical differences, the result was utter confusion. In 1929 an official decree made Uzbek spelling, and hence the alphabet, be based on a group of dialects with vowel harmony; 9 vowel letters were retained to signify these different vowels. However, this posed problems for speakers of dialects without vowel harmony; these were primarily urban dwellers, and specifically those targeted by the korenizacija program to be educated and enter the workforce. 2.4 Siberia and the Far East Nowhere was this problem of literacy more acute that in the case of the languages of the North. Siberia is inhabited by a large number of linguistically and ethnically diverse populations, traditionally divided into 'large' (i.e., numerous) and 'small' (or minority) peoples. It is a vast territory (constituting 57 percent of the total territory of the USSR) with a sparsely distributed population (only 5.7 inhabitants per square mile in 1979; in Northern and Far Eastern regions, that figure is much lower). At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, many of these peoples were still nomads and had societies organized, around clan systems. Many indigenous groups lacked self-appellations, and people identified themselves with a clan group rather than a linguistic or ethnic group. With the exception of a very few languages (e.g., Yakut), the indigenous languages lacked written forms. The Siberian indigenous populations were almost exclusively illiterate, again with the exception of some individuals belonging to larger groups of people. One of the first tasks of the literacy movement in Siberian territory was basic language description, and then the creation of alphabets and literary norms. Changes brought about by the Revolution did not reach the northernmost parts of Siberia until the early 1920s. At that time, there was a lack of even the most basic information about the numbers and distribution of minority peoples. In 1924, the Committee of the North was established to provide aid in the development of the small peoples of the North. Eventually, these 'small peoples' officially included 26 linguisticethnic groups (the Khants, Mantsi, Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Sel'kup, Ket, Evenki, Even, Negidal, Dolgan, Nanai, Ul'ch, Udege, Oroch, Orok, Nivkh, Chukchi, Koryak, Itel'men, Yukagir, Chuvantsy, Eskimo, Aleut, Tofalar, and Soyots). A team of linguists was sent from Leningrad to document, record, and describe the indigenous languages. The original plan, the creation of a literary language for each of the languages of the North, proved to be overwhelming. It was decided that languages would be grouped according to linguistic similarity, and then a 'base' language could be selected. In this way, 9 language group 'base' languages emerged: Evenki, Nanai, Ul'ch, Nivkh, Chukchi, and four isolates: Eskimo, Ite'men, Aleut, and Ainu. Widespread dialectical variation coupled with very disperse populations made this a
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difficult task. Nonetheless, literary languages were created in the early 1930s, and textbooks and dictionaries were published in these languages. As elsewhere in the USSR, the initial alphabets were Latin based. By the 1940s, the conversion to Cyrillic was complete for the Siberian languages as well, making previous published materials obsolete. At the end of the Soviet era, there were approximately 170,000 people in the North from minority groups; about 50 percent of them considered their ethnic language to be their primary, first language (from the 1989 Soviet census). There is widespread multilingualism. Trilingualism is common among the many minorities. For example, some Evenki living in Sakha (Yakutia) and the Amur Basin and in Buriatia speak either Yakut or Buriat, Russian, and Evenki. Mixed marriages play a key role in the loss of minority languages, as the minority language almost always gives way to the majority; in fact, the number of mixed marriages has been on the rise. The 1960s to the 1980s saw a massive influx of Russians into the region, motivated by industrial development. By 1979, Russians made up only 52 percent of the total Soviet population, but 86 percent of the Siberian population. One result of this immigration is a dramatic increase of mixed marriages, with the indigenous language almost always giving way to Russian. The final years of Communism saw an increase in grass-roots movements for indigenous rights in the North. In 1990, the first Congress of Northern Minorities convened and called for a much larger voice in decisions about land-use and industrial projects in the regions occupied by minority groups. Further, they called for special measures to be undertaken to preserve and use their languages and cultures. 3. Summary It is difficult to assess the overall impact of Soviet language policy. Although the Russian-language instruction programs in the schools were costly to establish and maintain, there has been no research on their cost-effectiveness. While it is clear that knowledge of Russian throughout the Soviet population rose dramatically during the Soviet era, it is less clear that this knowledge was attained through the schools rather than as the direct result of the role of Russian in society, as the language of politics, of governmental administration and, in many areas, of prestige. The earlier literacy campaigns, which provided writing systems and did much to educate the populace, also created a sense of national pride among many ethnic groups. Yet these gains were later diminished, in particular where minority populations are concerned. As language policy developed under Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, it clearly spread the use of Russian at the expense of native languages, regardless of intentions. In 1994, it was estimated that 63 of the languages of Russia alone were endangered. Yet is can
Language Education Policy—Latin America also be argued that the tendency toward Russian is part of a larger pattern of global development toward monolingual nation-states, as seen in much of the world today. Bibliography Comrie B 1981 The Languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Fierman W 1991 Language Planning and National Development: The Uzbek Experience. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin
Forsyth J 1992 A History of the Peoples of Siberia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kirkwood M (ed.) 1991 Language Planning in the Soviet Union. St Martin's Press, New York Kreindler I (ed.) 1985 Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Soviet National Languages. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin Lenin V I 1960 Collected Works. Institut markszima-leninizma, Moscow Stalin J 1952 Works. Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow
Language Education Policy—Latin America N. H. Hornberger
Latin America, according to the dictionary, encompasses those countries in North, South, Central America, and the Caribbean where Spanish, Portuguese, and French are spoken—that is, all of the western hemisphere except for Dutch-speaking Suriname and English-speaking Canada, the United States, Guyana, Belize, Jamaica, Barbados, and the Falkland Islands. This definition, which signals colonial language heritage alone, is useful for delineating the scope of coverage of this article; nevertheless, it obscures the great linguistic diversity and complexity of this part of the world. In fact, the history and hegemony of the colonial languages, primarily Spanish and Portuguese, combined with the elusiveness and elitism of immigrant languages such as German, Italian, and English, the mixed and marginal nature of African-influenced pidgin and Creole languages, and the variety and vitality of indigenous languages, pose complex and ongoing challenges to language education policy and practice in Latin America. Language education policy, also known as language-in-education planning (Kaplan and Baldauf ' 1997) or acquisition planning (Cooper 1989), is here taken to be that branch of language planning and policy implemented through the formal educational system and adult literacy programs and addressed to the teaching and learning of languages as both subject and medium of instruction. In Latin America, as in most of the world, formal education has been a vehicle for the implementation of language policy. Indeed, as Hamel (1993 p. 25) notes, language policy in Latin America has been almost exclusively understood in terms of national educational policies, especially those directed at the indigenous populations. The predominant language policy throughout Latin America has long been an assimilationist one which seeks to impose the colonial languages on speakers of other languages, whether they be immigrant, slave, or indigenous peoples. The paradoxical role of schools as vehicles for both maintaining the prestige status of
the colonial (often official) language and simultaneously providing opportunities for its acquisition by a successful few, has long been recognized. The twin problems which are the current focus of language education policy in Latin America—promoting in the schools the standard official language, as distinct from regional or social dialects or from other languages, and ensuring the educational success of those who arrive at school speaking other languages—can be traced directly to this paradox. This article provides, first a geographic profile of the sociolinguistic diversity of Latin America, followed by several sections outlining recent overall trends in language education policy in this part of the world. Specifically, it takes up the rise of bilingual education and mother tongue literacy programs, the growing attention to nonstandard varieties of the former colonial languages, the potential role of 'glocal' (see Freeland 1996) institutions in language education policymaking, the increasing involvement of target communities in policy-making, and the recent recognition of classroom language education practices as a foundation for, window into, and venue of language education policy. 1. Sociolinguistic Diversity in Latin America
The spread of Spanish and Portuguese throughout the world accompanied the extension of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At the end of the twentieth century, Spanish, with 350 million speakers, is the fifth largest language of the world, while Portuguese, with 160 million speakers on three continents, is reckoned one of ten major world languages. In Latin America, Portuguese is the official language of Brazil, while Spanish is the official, national, or dominant language in Mexico; the Central American states of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama; and the South American states of Venezuela,
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The Social Context Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. The Caribbean has a more complex colonial linguistic heritage, including French Guiana on the South American continent, and among the Caribbean islands, French-speaking Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique in addition to Spanishspeaking Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Another linguistic vestige of the colonial period are the pidgin and Creole languages arising from the African slave trade which brought large and concentrated populations of Africans from diverse language backgrounds. This heritage is particularly strong in Brazil and in the islands and countries of the Caribbean. Immigrant languages, defined here as those languages brought by immigrants to post-independence Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are present as well. There is a significant heritage of speakers of various European and Asian languages in different parts of Latin America: for example, Italian speakers in Argentina, German speaking communities in Paraguay or Venezuela, Spanish immigrant speakers of Galician, Basque, or Catalan, and in the twentieth century, speakers of Chinese, Japanese, or other Asian languages (Mar-Molinero 1994 p. 2). In addition, in the capital cities of most Latin American nations, it is not uncommon to find at least one elite school devoted to bilingual instruction in Spanish alongside German, Italian, English, or French. These schools may often have had their origins in immigrant initiatives at the beginning of the century, but are maintained today through support of the international nonimmigrant community, as well. The role of English as a world language is increasingly evident in Latin America, its influence going back to the nineteenth century when the British controlled much of the economic power in Latin America (Mar-Molinero 1994 p. 2). Puerto Rico, as a commonwealth of the United States, and Mexico, as its immediate neighbor to the south, have experienced perhaps the most direct and enduring influence of English throughout the twentieth century; however, at the close of the century, as English becomes ever more influential and international in its reach, the implications for language education policy are felt throughout Latin America. Taking historical precedence over the colonial, pidgin, immigrant, and world languages described above are the indigenous Amerindian languages spoken throughout Latin America. The diversity and complexity of Latin America's indigenous languages elude definitive classification by linguists; this article uses the traditional geographic grouping into MesoAmerican (including Mayan and Nahuatl), Lowland Amazonian, Highland Andean (including Quechua and Aymara), and Southern Cone (of which Guarani is the best known) languages. At the national level, 134
the presence of indigenous language speakers as a percentage of the total population ranges from those nations with substantial proportions (in some cases over half) such as Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru to those where the proportion is minimal (e.g., Colombia, Chile, Nicaragua, or Brazil) to virtually nonexistent (e.g., Argentina or Cuba). 2. Bilingual Education and Mother Tongue Literacy Programs
It was in the context of the prevailing assimilationist language policy described above that initiatives in bilingual education began to appear in the twentieth century, at first sharing those assimilationist objectives and later evolving to embrace maintenance and revitalization goals. Among the earliest bilingual education efforts were those in Mexico in the 1930s (Hidalgo 1994 p. 193) and in the Amazonian region of Peru in the 1950s (Trudell 1993), but the real momentum for bilingual education began in the 1960s and 1970s, not only in Mexico and Peru but in other countries with significant proportions of indigenous language speakers such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Guatemala. Experimental initiatives in bilingual education proliferated through these decades and into the 1980s, carried out under bilateral agreements of national Ministries of Education with such entities as the United States Agency for International Development and Germany's Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit; there were also significant experimental efforts as well as regional seminars and workshops on bilingual education sponsored by international agencies such as UNESCO and the World Bank (see von Gleich 1987 for an overview of primary bilingual education initiatives in Latin America; and Hornberger 1988 for a detailed description of one experimental program in Puno, Peru). These efforts were aided and abetted by landmark language education policies such as Peru's 1975 Officialization of Quechua which called for the obligatory teaching of Quechua at all levels of education, Mexico's 1981 creation of the National Directorate of Indigenous Education as an independent organism affiliated to the Secretary of Public Education and directed by indigenous people, Guatemala's 1985 Constitution which proclaimed Spanish-Maya bilingual education the preferred mode of instruction in schools located in the predominantly Indian areas, Ecuador's 1988 establishment of the National Directorate of Intercultural Bilingual Education which put indigenous schools directly under indigenous leadership, and Bolivia's 1994 National Education Reform which sought to make all of Bolivian education fully intercultural and participatory. Meanwhile, countries with smaller indigenous populations were revising their language education policies, granting local indigenous communities the
Language Education Policy—Latin America right to specify standards, curricula, and instructional media for their own educational programs; national decrees and constitutional media for their own educational programs; national decrees and constitutional revisions to this effect were passed in Venezuela and Colombia in the late 1970s and in Brazil in the late 1980s (Mosonyi and Rengifo 1983; Walter and Ringenberg 1994 p. 357; Cavalcanti 1996 p. 176). Thanks to the increasing mobilization of indigenous political organizations in these countries and in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Guatemala, for example, indigenous populations had by the late 1980s and 1990s begun to play a more insistent and consistent role in implementing and directing their own bilingual education programs (see Hornberger and Lopez 1998 on Peru and Bolivia; Lopez 1995 on Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru; Richards 1989 and Richards and Richards in Hornberger 1996 on Guatemala). A similar impetus toward recognition of the rights of indigenous populations to education and literacy in their own languages characterized the development of mother tongue adult literacy programs sponsored by both governmental and nongovernmental organizations during the latter two decades of the twentieth century (cf. Archer and Costello 1990). Earlier government efforts such as the Nicaraguan Sandinista literacy campaign had sought to teach literacy through Spanish-only (Mar-Molinero 1994, p. 7), but the Miskitu demanded (and got) recognition for their language, a Miskitu supplement to the Literacy Crusade of 1980, and bilingual education (Freeland 1995 p. 245). In Bolivia in the 1980s, the National Literacy and Popular Education Service (Servicio National de Alfabetización y Education Popular, SENALEP) of the Ministry of Education and Culture published a series of five primers for use in adult literacy instruction in different regions of the country; one each in Quechua, Aymara, and three regional Spanish varieties (eastern Bolivia, the department of Tarija, and the city of La Paz). Guatemala's 1986 Literacy Law mandated initial literacy instruction for monolingual adults in the mother tongue, to be taught by bilingual personnel (Richards and Richards in Hornberger 1996). Nongovernmental organizations became increasingly involved in provision of mother tongue literacy education in the 1980s and 1990s as well. In Bolivia, the Andean Oral History Workshop, a group of native Aymara- or Quechua-speaking university-affiliated people who collect and publish oral history in Aymara communities of the Altiplano, extended their efforts into various educational and language corpus planning activities with the communities (Leavitt 1991). The Andean Center for Education and Promotion (CADEP), a nongovernmental organization headquartered in Cuzco, Peru, initiated Quechua literacy development "in cooperation with the Federation of
Peasant Women of Anta in 1990 (see Chirinos in Hornberger 1996). In Oaxaca, Mexico, the Editorial Center for Indigenous Literature (Centro Editorial de Literatura Indígena, Asociación Civil, CELIAC), a private not-for-profit organization which fosters desktop publication of literature in indigenous languages by indigenous authors, also got formally underway in the late 1980s (see Bernard, Gonzalez, and Salinas, all in Hornberger 1996). These latter efforts exemplify a move away from reliance on official, top-down, government-sponsored primary bilingual education as the only arena of indigenous language education policy. 3. Nonstandard Varieties of the Former Colonial Languages in Language Education
At the time of their independence from Spain and Portugal in the nineteenth century, the new Latin American nations adopted the colonial languages as national unifiers, even while claiming the right to differentiate their national varieties from the peninsular Spanish and Portuguese varieties and to participate in the bodies that controlled the languages, for example, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (Cifuentes 1992 p. 15 on Mexican Spanish; see also Heath 1972, 1976 on colonial language policy in Mexico and Peru; and Gifford 1989 on American Spanishes). The concern to impose and extend Spanish and Portuguese continues to the present day; for example, a recent graduate thesis in Venezuela proposes a 'Program for International Language Planning' to promote and improve the teaching of Spanish as a second language in the non-hispanic Caribbean (Serrón 1993). It is only in the latter quarter of the twentieth century, however, that attention of scholars and policy-makers has begun to turn to the regional and social varieties of Spanish and Portuguese within their national boundaries, varieties largely arising from contact with the various indigenous and African languages, past and present. There is also some recognition of 'portunhol' (Celada 1995), a mixed variety reflecting the mutual influence of Spanish and Portuguese on each other in regions of contact. With regard to regional and social varieties of Mexican Spanish, Hidalgo notes that the purist trend devoted to studying the norma culta (i.e., the standard variety) led to neglect of the contributions of indigenous languages and of Afro-Mestizo speakers to Mexican Spanish, and she includes two studies counteracting that trend in her edited volume (1994 pp. 181-2). Escobar (1978) discussed regional and social variation in Peruvian Spanish and Pozzi-Escot (1975) raised the implications of this for language education policy. She suggested that the existence in Peru of a regional standard Spanish (norma culta regional) that was different from Lima's standard Spanish (norma culta limeña) invited the question of which norm to 135
The Social Context teach in bilingual and indigenous monolingual regions of the country; she and others later emphasized the need for schools to provide the opportunity for monolingual and bilingual vernacular speakers and nonstandard Spanish speakers to learn standard Spanish as a second language or dialect, even while respecting their languages (Pozzi-Escot 1990; Lopez and Jung 1989). Similarly, Godenzzi, who has since gone on to become a language education policy-maker and implementer in Peru's Ministry of Education, recommended that educators make use of the existence of different socially and regionally accepted varieties to promote an attitude of tolerance among students toward languages different from their own and to help students build toward true mastery of their own particular variety (1987). Discussing literacy programs in Latin America as a whole, Ferreiro points out that the poorest sectors of the society do not speak the so-called 'standard dialect' and she argues that 'to accept the way of speaking of some of the children while rejecting the way of speaking of the others, as a pre-condition for becoming literate, is one of the biggest barriers we can build against literacy' (1994 p. 233). In Brazil, the question of linguistic uniformity versus diversity is raised with respect to the teaching of Portuguese. While Portugal reels from the December 1990 Orthographic Accord wherein the Governments of Portugal and Brazil (as well as Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde) opted for the Brazilian, rather than the Portuguese, variety of Portuguese as their standard (Riding 1991), in Brazil, scholars are calling for more tolerance of dialectal variation within the Brazilian standard itself. Lemle (1983) argues that, in order for all Brazilians to learn standard Portuguese well, dialectal variation must be understood, accepted, respected, and systematically treated in the schools; and Franchi (1983) suggests that schools' and teachers' linguistic repression of the age-based, regional, or social class dialects children bring with them to school contributes directly to the later lack of spontaneity and creativity in the children's writing that those same schools and teachers decry. In contrast, Maher (1996) documents the role of an indigenous variety of Portuguese (português índio), among other discursive practices, in indigenous teachers' construction of their ethnic and professional identities vis a vis the larger Brazilian society (Luykx 1996 provides similar documentation for a Bolivian case). It seems that perhaps local learners' ways of knowing, speaking, reading, and writing, which Brazilian Paulo Freire championed for 30 years until his death in 1997 (cf. Sanders 1968; Freire and Macedo 1987) are beginning to receive some attention in his own native country; Velho (1990) shows, however, that the dominant adult literacy program in Brazil from 1970 to 1985 (MOBRAL) was the philosophical antithesis of Freire's own 136
National Literacy Plan which immediately preceded it. 4. Glocal Institutions and Language Education Policy
The foregoing sections have concentrated primarily on national or local language education policies and programs (both governmental and nongovernmental), with the exception of the international UNESCOsponsored regional bilingual education workshops mentioned in Sect. 2. The 1990s, however, have seen a trend toward language education efforts which are neither national, international, nor local, but rather occupy intermediate levels between international and domestic, global, and local. The REFLECT adult literacy program (Regenerated Freirian Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques), piloted since 1994 by the British NGO Action Aid in El Salvador (also in Bangladesh and Uganda), combines local attention and global generalizability through the use of a 'mother' manual adapted to each local site (Archer and Cottingham 1996; Freeland 1998). Efforts such as this seek to strengthen local groups by means of global linkages, thereby making them 'glocal' (Freeland 1996, p. 187). In a similar vein, Mosonyi and Rengifo (1983 p. 214) included the principle of international cooperation in their early definition of bilingual intercultural education, arguing for the importance of free movement of indigenous groups across international boundaries which had in any case been arbitrarily imposed within their ancestral territories; this has in fact proven to be an important factor in the development of both Andean and Amazonian indigenous rights. One glocal Amazonian effort is an indigenous teacher education course sponsored by the NGO Comissao Pro-Indio do Acre (CPI) with funding from international sources such as the RainForest Foundation. Every year since 1983, the CPI has run a teacher education course in Rio Branco, Brazil, during the summer months (January-March) for indigenous teachers from different Amazonian ethnic groups whose languages are in varying stages of vitality, from those with about 150 speakers to those with several thousand. One of the striking features of the course is the 'language-as-resource' orientation (Ruiz 1984), which means not only that the indigenous languages are encouraged and used as medium and subject of instruction, but also that the indigenous teachers encourage and exchange among themselves across their different languages (Monte 1996; Hornberger 1998). Given that this program uses international funding to develop local language education efforts, carried out by and serving Amazonian groups whose ancestral lands fall within the national territories of not only Brazil but also Peru, it can be characterized as a glocal effort in Freeland's sense. An ambitious glocal effort is that of the Andean Program in Bilingual Intercultural Education (PRO-
Language Education Policy—Latin America EIB-Andes, Programa de Formation en Education Intercultural Bilingüe para los Paises Andinos), a regional M.A. program sponsored by a five-nation consortium (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru), with coordination between Ministries of Education, universities, and indigenous organizations, and directed by Luis Enrique Lopez, To the degree that this recently inaugurated program can foster truly local adaptions of the principles of bilingual intercultural education it provides, it will perhaps by an example of a global effort in the Andes. 5. Target Communities Education Policy
and Bottom-up Language
Glocal efforts such as those described above presuppose a strong local base actively involved in developing and implementing language education policy; that is, involvement of the target community in every step of policy-making, from needs assessment and goal formulation to implementation and evaluation. Reviewing changes over the past two decades in adult literacy programs as developed in Latin America, Ooijens (1994) describes the shift from a traditional to a functional approach. Two important strategies influencing this shift are Freire's 'conscientizaçao' and Maguerez' 'work oriented alphabetization,' both of which emphasize 'the importance of three elements: execution of a baseline study to understand local reality, target group participation and the use of local instructors' (Ooijens 1994 p. 446). He describes well the implications of this shift for the communities targeted by literacy (and language education) programs when he notes that adults in these programs 'should not be treated as objects of the program' but rather 'should be considered as active subjects; they should participate in planning, preliminary research, programming and program implementation' (Ooijens 1994 p. 450). Latin America has seen considerable development of such bottom-up, participatory language planning efforts in the last few decades. Several indigenous cases are documented in Hornberger (1996): for example, the boom in Mayan language materials production and Mayan language and culture programs in public and private schools in Guatemala (Richards and Richards in Hornberger 1996), the desktop publication efforts of speakers of Otomi, Mixtec, and other indigenous languages in Mexico through CELIAC (Bernard, Gonzalez, and Salinas in Hornberger 1996), the CADEP indigenous literacy project in Peru (Chirinos in Hornberger 1996),-the Bicultural Distance Radio Education Systems program initiated by the Shuar of Ecuador in 1972 (King in Hornberger 1996), and the Literacy and Guaranization Campaign carried out by Bolivian Guaranis in 1992 (Lopez in Hornberger 1996). Nor do such efforts necessarily involve literacy: recent dissertations by Aikman (1999), Chavarria (1996), and Tacelosky (1998) docu-
ment Amazonian indigenous groups who in one way or another implement maintenance of oral tradition rather than literacy as a symbol of their ethnic identity. The importance of the involvement of the target population in language education policy initiatives is also seen in nonindigenous communities: Valentim (1996) documents Black organizations' demands for inclusion of Afro-Brazilian issues in school curriculum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in the 1990s. The century-long struggle over the treatment of English and Spanish as medium and subject of instruction in Puerto Rico is a testament to the failure of policy which does not take target community involvement seriously (Morris 1996; Pousada 1996). Along these lines, it is worth noting that to address the Puerto Rican language education policy dilemma, Pousada recommends establishing an official, nonpartisan language commission which 'would consist of representatives from public and private schools, government agencies, private enterprises, and the media, as well as linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists, and would function independently of the government and electoral process' (Pousada 1996 p. 507). Such a commission would ensure participation of the target community in language education policy-making. 6. Classroom Language Education Language Education Policy
Practices
as
In pursuit of a 'functionally adequate and popularly acceptable language policy for Puerto Rico', Pousada also calls for teacher-generated studies in the classroom, studies which could 'take the linguistic pulse of the island's children' and 'elicit... students' views on ways to improve English teaching' (1996 p. 508). In a similar vein, Coronado (1992) emphasizes the enormous distance between bilingual education policy and practice in Mexico, where the latter is constrained by such factors as teacher professional development, materials development, standardization of the languages, and community attitudes. Indeed, there is increasing recognition among researchers and policy-makers throughout Latin America that very little is really known about actual language education practice in classrooms. In response to this recognized need, studies are beginning to appear which address actual classroom practice in indigenous, immigrant, or world language education settings: Hornberger (1988) on Quechua-Spanish bilingual education in Peru; Austin (1991) and Wasta (1993) on Guarani-Spanish bilingual education in Paraguay; Cavalcanti (1996) on Guarani teacher education in Brazil; Jung (1997) on German-Portuguese bilingual education in Missal, Parana, Brazil; Mejia (1994) and Kent de Ravetta (1996) on elite EnglishSpanish bilingual education in Cali, Colombia and Buenos Aires, Argentina, respectively.
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The Social Context Freeland J 1995 'Why go to school to learn Miskitu?': Changing constructs of bilingualism, education and literacy among the Miskitu of Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast. International Journal of Educational Development 15(3): 24561 Freeland J 1996 The global, the national and the local: Forces in the development of education for indigenous peoples— the case of Peru. Compare 26(2) 167-95 Freeland J 1998 An interesting absence: The gendered study of language and linguistic diversity in Latin America. International Journal of Educational Development 18(3): 161-80 Freire P, Macedo D 1987 Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Bergin and Garvey, Boston, MA Gifford D 1989 Latin American studies: Language (American Spanish). The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 50: 433-8 Godenzzi J C 1987 Variantes etno-sociales del castellano en Puno. Allpanchis 29/30: 133-50 Godenzzi Alegre J (ed.) 1996 Educacion e Interculturalidad en los Andes y la Amazonia. Centro 'Bartolomé de Las Casas,' Cusco, Peru Hamel R E 1993 Politicas del Lenguaje en America Latina. Iztapalapa 29 Heath S B 1972 Telling Tongues: Language Policy in Mexico: Bibliography Colony to Nation. Teachers' College Press, New York Aikman S 1994 Intercultural Education and Literacy: An Heath S B 1976 Colonial language status achievement: Ethnographic Study of Indigenous Knowledge and Learning Mexico, Peru and the US. In: Verdoodt A, Kjolseth R in the Peruvian Amazon. John Benjamins, Philadelphia, (eds.) Language and Sociology. Peeters, Louvain PA Heath S B 1982 Castilian colonization and indigenous lanArcher D, Costello P 1990 Literacy and Power: The Latin guages: The cases of Quechua and Aymara. In: Cooper R American Battleground. Earthscan (ed.) Language Spread: Studies in Diffusion and Social Archer D, Cottingham S 1996 The REFLECT Mother ManChange (pp. 118-47) Indiana University Press/Center for ual: A New Approach to Literacy. Action Aid, Somerset, Applied Linguistics, Bloomington, Washington DC UK Hidalgo M 1994 Mexico's language policy and diversity. Austin T Y 1991 Second language and literacy acquisition in Language Problems and Language Planning 18(3): whole rural Paraguay: A case study. Unpublished Ph.D., thesis issue University of California, Los Angeles, CA Hornberger N H 1988 Bilingual Education and Language Cavalcanti M 1996 Collusion, resistance, and reflexivity: Maintenance: A Southern Peruvian Quechua Case (Vol. 4). Indigenous teacher education in Brazil. Linguistics and Foris,' Dordrecht, Holland Education 8(2): 175-88 Hornberger N H 1989 Bilingual education and language Celada, M T 1995 Um programa de espanhol na TV braplanning in indigenous Latin America. International Joursileira: Série em tres capítulos. Alfa 39: 175-94 nal of the Sociology of Language 77: whole issue Chavarria Mendoza M C 1996 Identity and harmony in the Hornberger N H 1992 Literacy in South America. Annual Ese Eja oral tradition. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis UniReview of Applied Linguistics 12: 190-215 versity of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN Hornberger N H 1993 Language policy and planning in Cifuentes B 1992 Language policy in Mexico. International South America. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 14: Journal of the Sociology of Language 96: 9-17 220-39 Cooper R L 1989 Language Planning and Social Change. Hornberger N H (ed.) 1996 Indigenous Literacies in the AmerCambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK icas: Language Planning from the Bottom Up. Mouton, Coronado Suzán G 1992 Educación bilingiie en Mexico: Berlin. Propósitos y realidades. International journal of the Soci- Hornberger N H 1998 Language policy, language education, ology of Language 96: 53-70 language rights: Indigenous, immigrant, and international Coronel-Molina S M 1997 Language policy: Status planning perspectives. Language in Society 27(4): 439-58 for the Quechua language in Peru. Working Papers in Hornberger N H, Lopez L E 1998 Policy, possibility and Educational Linguistics 13(1): 31-48 paradox: Indigenous multilingualism and education in Escobar A 1978 Variaciones Sociolingiiisticas del Castellano Peru and Bolivia. In: Cenoz J, Genesee F (eds.) Beyond en el Peru. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima, Peru Bilingualism: Multilingualism and Multilingual Education Ferreiro E 1994 Problems and pseudo-problems in literacy (pp. 206-42). Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK development: Focus on Latin America. In: Verhoeven L Jung N M 1997 Eventos de letramento em uma escola mul(ed.) Functional Literacy: Theoretical Issues and Edutisseriada de uma comunidade rural bilingue (alecational Implications (pp. 223-35). John Benjamins, Phimaojportugues). Unpublished M.A. thesis, Universidade ladelphia de Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil Franchi E P 1983 A norma escolar e a linguagem da criança. Kaplan R B, Baldauf R B 1997 Language Planning: From Educaçao e Sociedade 16: 85-101 Practice to Theory. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Such studies respond to Hamel's call for a greater number of detailed studies on language policy in Latin America. They also begin to fill in the contours he sketched for a sound theoretical and methodological framework: (a) a sociolinguistic focus which includes variation within as well as across languages; (b) a sociopragmatic conception of language as social action through which actors transform the world; (c) a concept of language which includes dimensions of text, discourse, and interaction; (d) a micro- and macro-sociolinguistic scope; and (e) a view of policy as both institutional and noninstitutional, planned and unplanned, explicit and implicit, overt and covert (Hamel 1993 pp. 18-19, 26). As the field of language education policy studies in Latin America matures both theoretically and methodologically, it is to be hoped that language education policies themselves will benefit from and contribute to a greater recognition of the unique and valuable linguistic diversity of this part of the world.
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Language Education Policy—Pacific Kent de Ravetta M M 1996 A bilingual setting in Buenos Aires, Argentina: Biliteracy development in a second grade classroom. Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Arizona Leavitt R M 1991 Escuchando no mas: A report on sabbatical year activities in Bolivia. Unpublished report Lemle M 1983 Unidade ou multiplicidade linguistica para o ensino da lingua nacional? Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos 64(147): 70-6 Lopez L E 1995 La Educacion en Areas Indigenas de America Latina: Apreciaciones Comparativas desde la Educacion Bilingüe Inter cultural. Centro de Estudios de la Cultura Maya, Guatemala, Guatemala Lopez L E, Jung I 1989 El castellano del maestro y el castellano del libro. In: Lopez L E, Pozzi-Escot I, Ziiniga M (eds.) Temas de Lingüistica Aplicada (pp. 197-217). CONCYTEC/GTZ, Lima, Peru Lopez L E, Moya R (eds.) 1989 Pueblos Indios, Estados y Educacion. PEB-Puno/Proyecto EBI-MEC-GTZ/Programa ERA, Lima, Peru Luykx A 1996 From indios to profesionales: Stereotypes and student resistance in Bolivian teacher training. In: Levinson B, Foley D, Holland D (eds.) The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice (pp. 239-72). SUNY Press, Albany, NY Maher T 1996 Ser professor sendo indio: Questoes da linguagem e identidade. Unpublished Ph.D thesis, Universidade Federal de Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brasil Mar-Molinero C 1994 National identity and language in multi-ethnic Latin America (Occasional Papers 24). Centre for Language in Education, University of Southampton, UK Mejia A 1994 Bilingual Teaching/Learning Events in EarlyImmersion Classes: A Case Study in Call, Colombia. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK Monte N L 1996 Escolas da Floresta: Entre o Passado Oral e o Presente Letrado. Multiletra, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil Morris N 1996 Language and identity in twentieth century Puerto Rico. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 17(1): 17-32 Mosonyi E E, Rengifo F A 1983 Fundamentos teoricos y programaticos de la educacion bilingiie intercultural. In: Rodriguez N J, Masferrer E, Vega R V (eds.) Educacion, Etnias y Descolonizacion en America Latina: Una Guia para la Educacion Bilingue Intercultural. UNESCO-OREALC, Mexico Ooijens J 1994 Literacy for work programs. In: Verhoeven L (ed.) Functional Literacy: Theoretical Issues and Edu-
cational Implications (pp. 445-71). John Benjamins, Philadelphia Pousada A 1996 Puerto Rico: On the horns of a language planning dilemma. TESOL Quarterly 30(3): 499-510 Pozzi-Escot I 1975 Norma culta y normas regionales del castellano en relation con la enseñanza. Lingüistica e Indigenismo Moderno de America (pp. 321-30). Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima, Peru Pozzi-Escot I 1990 Reflexiones sobre el castellano como segunda lengua en el Peru. In: Ballon E, Cerron-Palomino R (eds.) Diglosia Linguo-literaria y Educacion en el Peru: Homenaje a Alberto Escobar (pp. 51-72). CONCYTEC/GTZ, Lima, Peru Richards J B 1989 Mayan language planning for bilingual education in Guatemala. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 77: 93-115 Riding A 1991 February 15. From the pure of tongue, catcalls in Portuguese. New York Times Ruiz R 1984 Orientations in language planning. NABE Journal 8(2): 15-34 Sanders T G 1968 The Paulo Freire Method: Literacy Training and Conscientizacion. American Universities Field Staff: West Coast South America Series 15(1) Serro S M 1993 Un problema de planificacion linguistica internacional: el español como lengua extranjera en el Caribe no hispanico. Letras 50: 193-215 Tacelosky K A 1998 A sociolinguistic survey of bilingual education among the Shipibo of Amazonian Peru. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas, Arlington, Texas Trudell B 1993 Beyond the Bilingual Classroom: Literacy Acquisition among Peruvian Amazon Communities (Vol. 117). Summer Institute of Linguistics/University of Texas, Arlington, TX Valentim S d S 1996 Black organizations' demands for the inclusion of Afro-Brazilian issues in the school curriculum: The dynamics of the movement for curriculum change in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in the early 1990s. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Michigan State University Velho M 1990 Literacy in Brazil: For what purpose? Unpublished manuscript von Gleich U 1987 Latin American Approaches to Bilingual/ Bicultural Primary Education—Theory and Practice (Education Report 35). Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit, Eschborn, Germany Walter S L, Ringenberg K R 1994 Language policy, literacy, and minority languages. Policy Studies Review 13(3/4): 341-66 Wasta S A 1993 Guarani and Spanish usage in two rural first-grade Paraguayan classrooms: A study in bilingualism. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Iowa.
Language Education Policy—Pacific R. B. Kaplan
The 'Pacific Region' is difficult to define; the term Pacific Rim is often used in such discussions, but that term suggests a limitation that tends to misrepresent
the region since it focuses only on the nations on the periphery of the Pacific Ocean—nations for the most part large, populous, monolingual, and more
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The Social Context developed. The term Pacific Basin, on the other hand, is inclusive but represents a large number of units, many of which have little in common beyond their status as political entities. 1. Geographic and Political Diversity Across the Basin
The Pacific Basic subsumes a vast area, covering more than a third of the world's surface, reaching from the Arctic to the Antarctic oceans on its north-south axis and from the edges of the American continents on the east to Asia on the west. Excluding the populous areas of Asia and the Americas (e.g., Russia, China, United States, Canada, Mexico, etc.), the Basin includes more than 25,000 islands (not counting the islands that constitute Japan, The Philippines, and Indonesia), and accommodates some 26.5 million people. The Basin includes at least the polities noted in Table 1. These 56 polities represent a wide variety of language policy efforts. Polities represented in this list range from what are termed developed polities (e.g., Canada) to developing or under developed polities (e.g., Papua/New Guinea), thus implicating rather different levels of governmental spending on education, on language-in-education planning, and on teacher training. Some of the polities have one or more de jure national or official languages (e.g., The Philippines, Singapore); others have one or more de facto national languages (e.g., United States), while still others are, for all practical purposes, monolingual (e.g., Japan, South Korea). Some have de jure 'first foreign languages' (e.g., Japan, South Korea) while others have implicit (rather than explicit) policies that essentially represent responses to market forces (e.g., Chile, Columbia). Some have strongly centralized authority in relation to education and educational language matters (e.g., Singapore), while others operate from highly decentralized authority (e.g., United States, with no national Ministry of Education, and educational language
decisions being made independently in each of the 50 states—in some cases even at the local school level). The relative histories of independent educational policy development vary from polities with a long-standing educational history (e.g., The People's Republic of China with a history going back over 1000 years) to polities only recently emerged into independent status having yet to develop education histories (e.g., The Federated States of Micronesia, which achieved independence only in 1986). Some polities are dependent on expatriate policy (e.g., American Samoa, Hawaii, Guam, Alaska) while others have policies interrupted by the events of World War II and other political upheavals (e.g., Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan). The definition of free compulsory education varies widely from 6 to 12 years. The polities of the Basin have been exposed to quite different religious influences (e.g., Brunei, the Maori people of New Zealand, Kiribati). The polities are vastly different in population, from megastates like China with 1.1 billion people to tiny polities like the Tokelau Islands with something like 2000 people. Furthermore, the best efforts of various polities are often frustrated by the linguistic behavior of diasporas (e.g., the Chinese Diaspora around the Basin). In sum, the diversity is great along every conceivable dimension, in part because language is no respector of political boundaries. 2. Terminological Difficulty
As the scope of the Pacific Basin is difficult to define, so too is the term Language Education Policy (or, in many contexts, Language-in-Education Policy). In the most general terms, language policy constitutes an attempt by someone to manipulate the linguistic behavior of some community for some reason. Language policy, an outgrowth of the positivist economic and social science paradigms dominant in the 1960s
Table 1. Polities of the Pacific Basin. Alaska Cambodia Colombia El Salvador Guam Indonesia Macao Mexico New Zealand Palau The Philippines (American) Samoa Tahiti Tonga
Aleutian Islands Canada Cook Islands Federated States of Micronesia Guatemala Japan Malaysia Nauru Nicaragua Panama Pitcairn Island Samoa Taiwan Tuvalu
Australia Chile Costa Rica Fiji Islands Hawaiian Islands Kiribati . The Mariana Islands New Caledonia Niue Papua/New Guinea Russia Singapore Thailand The United States
Bismark Islands The People's Republic of China Ecuador French Polynesia Hong Kong North Korea and South Korea The Marshal Islands The New Hebrides Okinawa Peru The Ryukyu Islands Solomon Islands The Tokelau Islands Vanuatu
Note: Polities because some of the entities are independent states, some are special territories of various kinds (e.g., possessions, parts of nations, etc.), and some are megastates.
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Language Education Policy—Pacific and 1970s, arose essentially in the years following World War II, as new nations emerged from the disintegration of colonial empires, and as those new polities were faced with the difficulty of identifying official languages to facilitate communication across often highly heterogeneous linguistic communities, to facilitate national unity, and to create the myth of a common history (e.g., Indonesia, The Philippines). More recently, it has been recognized that language policy is not the unique preserve of governments but rather that language policy is articulated at every level of society from official government to the local convenience store, from transnational corporations to local banks and hospitals. Because language policy has been largely perceived as a function of government, it has often been relegated to the education sector—not the most appropriate point of implementation because not everyone goes to school, because not everyone goes to school at the same time, and because the education sector does not have the authority to promote language diffusion in other governmental sectors. Language-in-education policy implementation has also been constrained by the practical limits both on the education sector budget and on the relative impermeability of the curriculum, which is time bound. The terms language policy and language planning are sometimes used, both in the laic and in the technical literature, as synonyms, or they cooccur as two closely related aspects of the same activity; they are, however, two quite different activities. It may be argued that language planning leads to, or is directed by, the promulgation of a language policy; a language policy, on the other hand, is a body of ideas, laws, regulations, rules, procedures, and practices intended to achieve the objectives of a policy. It follows that a language policy ought to be promulgated at the highest levels of authority and implemented by appropriate agencies at lower levels. Lower levels, however, have the option to postpone implementation or simply to ignore directives from above. The title of this article assumes that a language policy does in fact exist in the various polities of the Pacific Basin, but that is rarely the case. Rather, language planning is undertaken by the education sector often in the absence of any policy (or in the light of a policy so vaguely articulated as to be unimplementable). Thus, in the variety of the Pacific Basin, it is difficult to say with certainty whether language policies in fact exist and whether language-in-education planning occurs in the context of policy or rather in the context of immediate need and immediate constraints. Many of the polities of the region are among the poorest in the world; they simply do not have the resources to undertake significant language policy or language planning. Indeed, in a number of cases, more impoverished polities are entirely dependent on the development projects of wealthier polities (e.g., the
Tokelaus, the Cook Islands); development projects are driven by motivations which may be quite alien to the polity in which they are sited. 3. Some Commonalties: Literacy Despite the great diversity across the region, certain trends are discernible. In the Western (and Westerninfluenced) polities, the history of education tends to be synonymous with the history of literacy; that is, notions of societal literacy are tied to (sometimes naive) notions relating to the inculcation of certain values and moral principles—e.g., cogency, insightfulness, forcefulness, thoughtfulness (i.e., 'critical thinking'), even an instantiation of democratic principles. It is sometimes implied that literacy constitutes a state of grace, providing solutions to a multitude of societal problems (that are, in fact, only vaguely language-based) ranging from poverty to criminality to substance abuse to the spread of AIDs. On the other hand, it is held that illiteracy constitutes a disease-like state which can be stamped out by the application of an appropriate inoculation of literacy early in life. There is an underlying assumption that an emphasis on extensive reading will assure the ability to write, that the ability to write transcends language (i.e., if individuals can write in one language, then, ipso facto, they can write in another) and that, as a consequence, separate educational emphasis on writing is unnecessary. Thus, literacy has, historically, been defined in terms of what one can read and only incidentally in terms of what one can write. The kinds of writing that are taught in the educational system tend to focus on surface correctness and orthography rather than on communication. Indeed, in some of the cultures of the Basin, orthography is regarded primarily as an art form. As a consequence of literacy policy, it is widely held that anyone who can read and who has read widely will, ipso facto, be able to write in any language, in any genre, and on any topic within their experiential purview. Alternatively, in some Asian communities, oral discourse remains the dominant discourse of schooling. Although, in more recent times, reading has acquired greater centrality, oracy remains the pivotal activity of the educational structure. Here, the underlying assumption appears to be that anyone who can speak well will, ipso facto, be able to write well. This notion is not distantly removed from the Ancient Greek notion that speaking well in adulthood leads to the development of wisdom in old age. Associated with this syndrome of beliefs is the further assumption that what is verbally expressed and what is intended should be two quite different and separate matters; what is not verbalized counts most, and one is expected to know that content by intuition. This view is supportable in highly homogeneous cultures like those of China, Japan, and South Korea where a thick layer
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The Social Context of widely-shared common cultural knowledge may be assumed. 4. Some Commonalties: Standard Language Because language planning may be exclusively sited in the education sector, there is a wide-spread concern with standard language. If a language is to be disseminated through the education sector, it is necessary to have (or create) dictionaries, standard grammars, and (ideally) a standard corpus of canonical literature. But the standard language is no one's native language. A 'standard' language results, generally, from a complex set of historical processes intended precisely to produce standardization; indeed, a 'standard' language may be defined as a set of discursive, cultural, and historical practices—a set of widely accepted communal solutions to discourse problems. A 'standard' language is a potent symbol of national unity. The 'standard' language must be acquired through individual participation in the norms of usage, and these norms are commonly inculcated through the education sector (with the powerful assistance of canonical literatures and the electronic media). But the reality of most linguistic communities is marked by the normative use of a wide range of varieties in day to day communication—that is, the use of slang, of jargon, of nonstandard forms, of special codes, even of different languages (as in code-switching— e.g., Hong Kong). Consequently, a 'standard' language constitutes a purely ideological construct. The existence of such a construct creates an impression that linguistic unity exits, when reality reflects linguistic diversity. The notion of the existence and dispersion of a 'standard' variety through a community suggests that linguistic unity is the societal norm; it also suggests a level of socioeconomic and sociopolitical unity which may be contrary to the reality of linguistic diversity. The legal obligation to use a codified standard is likely to cause frustration among minority-language speakers, since the standardized language is for them nondominant; minority-language speakers probably use a contact variety, likely to be at considerable variance from the 'standard' variety. Language-in-education planning efforts in many polities in the Pacific Basin reflect the cultural views of the West. These views are collectively known as the 'plumbing,' or 'conduit,' or 'telegraphic' conception of communication—that is, the translation of messages which exist in the sender's mind into speech signals (coded in linguistic form) which are converted back into the original message by the receiver. Thus, there is a perceived need to identify a single, 'standard' code, to assure that this single code is optimally regular, simple, and 'modern', and to assure that there are optimal channels (postal services, road networks, telegraphs, newspapers, television, the world-wide web, etc.) along which the signal can flow. The problem is
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that this metaphor is not a reliable description of how human beings communicate. A number of the polities in the Pacific Basin are deeply concerned about the development of such a standard language, for example, Malaysia has been struggling, through its language agency, the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, to promulgate Bahasa Malaysia; Hong Kong has recently become concerned about standardizing Cantonese; The Philippines is involved in an effort to standardize Filipino (a variety of Tagalog) as its national language; Papua/New Guinea too is involved in an effort to standardize its national language—actually a pidgin (Tok Pisin—a pidgin rendering of 'talk pidgin'). There are many other examples. This effort toward standardization emerges from the necessity to teach the national language to a linguistically heterogeneous population, though basically monolingual polities are also concerned; there is discussion in Japan of standardizing Japanese. The effort is also an outcome of the existence across the region of a large number of pidgins and Creoles, often regarded locally as stigmatized mixed varieties inadequate to modernization and education.
5. Some Commonalties: English Across the broad reach of the Pacific Basin, English plays a major role in a large number of polities both as a de facto or de jure national language (e.g., Australia [Aboriginal Communities, Papua/New Guinea], Canada [First People Communities], New Zealand [Maori Communities, Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau Islands, Tonga], Singapore, the United States [Alaska, Guam, Hawaii, American Samoa, Native American Communities, 'Ebonics-speaking' communities]) and as a first foreign language (e.g., The Federated States of Micronesia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Papua/New Guinea, The Philippines, etc.). In many of the smaller polities, there is a significant concern over which variety of English (a polycentric language) to teach through the educational system. Not surprisingly, polities formerly part of the British Empire (e.g., Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong [although with the decline of British influence, both American and Australian English are playing a larger role]) prefer British English, while polities formerly affiliated with the United States (e.g., American Samoa, the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, The Philippines) prefer American English. But the concern is more widespread; in Japan, for example, serious attention is being given to the question of which variety ought to be considered 'standard'; American English has a slight edge at the present moment. To a significant extent, the concern lies in the identification of a 'standard' variety to be promulgated through the education sector—one which may be held up as a model of 'correctness.'
Language Education Policy—Pacific 6. Some Commonalties: National Assessment
The extent to which national assessments in various polities drive language-in-education policy (in, e.g., Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) is important. What appears to be desired is that students learn enough about any given language (and especially about writing, since oral proficiency is both difficult and expensive to evaluate) to be able to do well on the national assessment instruments. Since a number of assessment instruments used in the context of 'foreign' language instruction require the ability to translate from the foreign language into the indigenous language, the kind of instruction delivered in the educational system has little to do with proficiency. With respect to the teaching of indigenous languages, assessment instruments tend to focus on text genres reflective of schoolbased essayist forms. Even in polities relatively distantly removed from western influences, traditional classic rhetorical forms predominate, and Aristotelian logic and Galilean systemization are prevalent. In many instances, in the teaching of writing, instruction is confounded with the teaching of spelling, capitalization, hyphenation, punctuation, and orthography. Collectively, these constitute a default model, that is, learners are not rewarded for successful communication but rather are penalized for surface errors. This approach tends towards stilted production, since learners try to achieve surface accuracy without reference to content. Focus is placed on the paragraph rather than on the text and encourages the use of the three-paragraph (or five-paragraph) model, each opening with a clear topic sentence and ending with a marked conclusion—structures not common in English or in any other language. Curiously, many national syllabi also contain reduced forms, for example, telegrams, classified ads, limericks, which work against the insistence on grammatical accuracy.
7. Some Commonalties: Teacher Training
Very few teacher-training curricula anywhere include explicit instruction in language teaching, especially in the teaching of writing. It is often the case that the teacher has only rudimentary proficiency in any foreign language being taught (i.e., English), and with respect to the teaching of writing in any language— indigenous or foreign—a high proportion of teachers have extremely limited experience in writing themselves. It is not unusual for teachers to complete training curricula without ever having had to write an extended piece of discourse (as opposed to filling forms, writing notes and memos, writing invitations, writing reminders, and various brief social messages). Those teachers who are fortunate enough to have had an opportunity to develop proficiency in some foreign (or alternative) language are not encouraged to main-
tain proficiency through in-service training. Many teachers in linguistically heterogeneous polities must deliver instruction in languages which are not their first languages.
8. Future Work
Because the region is so vast and so greatly diverse, it is impossible to suggest more than a few commonalties. While language-in-education planning is widespread across the polities in the region, it seems clear: (a) that language-in-education policies are rarely anchored in national language policies, (b) that language-in-education policies are frequently ad hoc and sometimes driven by market forces, (c) that language-in-education policies are subject to sudden and radical changes in direction in accord with unstable political paradigms, and (d) that the general condition of language-ineducation policy is chaotic and frequently ineffective. There is a need for more extensive study of language-in-education policy in the several polities based on some common metric.
Bibliography Baldauf R B Jr., Luke A 1990 Language Planning and Education in Australasia and the South Pacific. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Coulmas F 1991 The economics of language in the Asian Pacific. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 2 (Special Issue) Herriman M, Burnaby B (eds.) 1996 Language Policies in English-Dominant Countries: Six Case Studies. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Kachru B B (ed.) 1992 The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures, 2nd ed. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL Kaplan R B 1987 English in the language policy of the Pacific Rim. World Englishes 6: 137-48 Kaplan R B (ed.) 1995 The teaching of writing in the Pacific Basin. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 6: 1-2 Kaplan R B, Baldauf R B Jr. 1997 Language Planning From Practice to Theory. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Kenny B, Savage W 1997 Language and Development: Teachers in a Changing World. Longman, London Ludi G (ed.) 1994 Sprachstandardisierung. Universitatsverlag Freiburg, Schweiz McKay S 1993 Sociocultural factors in teaching composition to Pacific Rim writers. In: Brock M, Walters L (eds.) Teaching Composition Around the Pacific Rim: Politics and Pedagogy. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK, pp. 1-14 Mulhausler P 1995 Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region. Routledge, London Wurm SA, Mulhausler P, Tyron D T 1996 Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin
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The Social Context
Maori Language Revitalization J. J. McCaffery
The issue of minority languages in New Zealand (Aotearoa) is dominated by the 150-year struggle of the indigenous Maori people to gain a place for their language and heritage in the education system and life of the nation. Other groups from Europe, Asia, and the Pacific exist in New Zealand in smaller numbers and they are beginning to look toward the education system to assist them in maintaining and passing on their heritage, language, and culture. In the case of the Maori though, the language is facing possible death and its revival has become a matter of urgency and national concern (see Language Loyalty).
1. Maori Language: Background In 1999 the Maori population is 450000, or 13.5 percent of the. total population of 3.8 million. Of these about 35 000, or 8 percent, are still fluent speakers of Maori. Virtually all are bilingual in Maori and English. These speakers are predominantly in the 60+ age group. By 1980 less than 2 percent of all young Maori were still Maori speaking and virtually no Maorispeaking children were entering schools. Many were predicting the death of Maori as a living language within 10 years. In 1979 Maori was recognized in a minor Act as the official language of the Maori people, but the next step of recognition as a national official language was never taken. The schools, media, courts, and other public institutions consistently refused to grant Maori people the right to use their language seriously in the day-to-day life of the nation. At first glance this decline in use appears to be no different from that experienced by many other minority languages. On closer investigation, however, the New Zealand situation seems unique. In the late 1990s the decline in the use of the language was being arrested by bilingual education which began at the preschool level, and a new generation of fluent speakers now seems highly likely. To understand the success of the revival movement it is necessary to look briefly into the past. There was a history of broken promises and an obsession by European New Zealanders (Pakeha) to turn Maori into brown-skinned Europeans (Pakeha). Beginning with the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 between the British Crown and the Maori, a sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle, but persuasive policy attempted to replace Maori identity, culture, and language with the more acceptable English values and norms. Token and sometimes well-meaning measures were taken at
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times, but assimilation then integration always remained the goal. This policy failed to wipe out Maori identity and culture but nearly succeeded with the language. In spite of a range of measures taken from the late 1960s onwards to find a place for the Maori language in universities and secondary and primary schools, the priorities, resources, and commitment given to Maori language have always reflected its low status in New Zealand society at large. Virtually every other possible measure to raise Maori educational achievement has been tried and has had only limited success. In general, these resources came too little, too late, and each had to be hard won from a system unwilling to move. In 1977 the first bilingual school at Ruatoki was established. Although two other rural schools followed in 1979, bilingual education did not become widespread until Kohanga Reo arrived on the scene.
2. Te Kohanga Reo (the 'Language Nest' Movement) 'Te Kohanga Reo,' a Maori-initiated preschool language nest movement changed all that. Starting from small beginnings (one Kohanga) in 1981, by 1999 there were over 700 Kohanga with more than 12000 children. This 'flax roots' people's movement surprised the education establishment and succeeded beyond most people's imaginations. It is restoring and reviving the use of Maori among young people and families. The concept is based on transmitting the language and associated customs and traditions from the still largely native-speaking grandparent generation directly to the grandchildren. It essentially bypasses the parents who are generally not native speakers and cannot therefore hand on the language to their children. All programs are based on traditional whanau (extended family) values and learning styles. Maori is the only language of instruction and communication to be used in the Kohanga.
3. Maori Language in Schools Early Kohanga Reo produced their first two-year 'graduates' in 1983 and this increasing tide of bilingual speakers challenged schools to provide for them. Most schools were very slow to respond. Initially most tried to integrate Kohanga children into normal infant classrooms and provide some support for Maori
Maori Language Revitalization language by individual withdrawal lessons or the employment of a Maori-speaking community person in the room for a limited time each week. The first urban bilingual class which grew into an autonomous specialist unit was established at Clydemore School, Otara, Auckland in 1981 by the Te Reo Maori Society at Otara. In 1985 an independent school at Hoani Waititi Marae, Henderson, Auckland was set up, and one other Te Reo Maori initiative, Te Kura o Ruamata, followed at Rotorua. The independent movement did not spread immediately due to the enormous financial costs to parents. The state bilingual schools and units did; with little official support they grew. By 1990 there were nearly 170 of these official dual-medium classes or units and 20 designated schools but they could still not cope with the numbers or language proficiency of children who had come through the Kohanga. All had been established by Maori communities with a minimum of resources from successive governments. In 1987, in response to such pressures, the Department of Education created the post of 'Kaiarahi i te Reo' (fluent Maori-speaking community language assistant) and attached one to each official unit or class. The scheme faced many challenges and has had mixed success, with many children still not being able to maintain their Maori language. In 1990 formal school-based training was offered to Kaiarahi Reo (language assistants) at the colleges of education leading to full teacher certification.
4. Kura Kaupapa Maori ('Maori Immersion Movement')
By 1985, Kohanga Reo parents' frustration with the system boiled over. To them it seemed as though the system was both unwilling and, even where willing, unable to provide for children's continued Maori language development. All over the country politically aware parents delayed sending children to school at age 5. Many were kept back at Te Kohanga until they turned six and were required by law to attend. In Auckland some of these parents established an independent school at Hoani Waititi Marae; in 1987, another was set up at the Auckland College of Education and articulated a philosophy of Maori immersion primary education to follow on from Te Kohanga Reo. 'Kura Kaupapa Maori' (KKM) was born. This Maori-planned, -inspired, and -led immersion resistance movement rapidly attracted academic and flax roots support and grew quickly to six schools within 3 years. The movement demanded state recognition and funding and skillfully used the political system to present their case. They rejected both the independent school model and the state-integrated model of the
Catholic schools. In 1990 the Minister of Education recognized the movement and established a trial project based on the six existing schools. By this time both Hoani Waititi and Ruamata had joined as two of the six. The movement's headquarters was based at Te Kura o Maungawhau, the KKM School at the Auckland College of Education (ACE). In 1991 this college also became the home of the first specialist teacher training course for KKM. By 1991 more communities were demanding recognition for their fledgling KKM schools but successive governments maintained funding for only six pilot schools, even though by then at least 12 were in operation. Unlike the state bilingual units and schools, KKM take only children from the Kohanga, and employ and train only fluent speakers of Maori. They also require full Maori immersion for at least the first 4-6 years and a major commitment from parents to use Maori in the home. These tough requirements for entry and operation and the limits on expansion mean few of the nation's Maori children will get access to KKM immersion education in the near future; three percent in 1998. It is now clear, however, that there will be another generation of Maori speakers and that the language will survive as a living language for some into the twenty-first century. Its future as a medium for the wider Maori community depends entirely on the rate of expansion of the range of successful bilingual education initiatives currently taking place. In 1992, the oldest children in this scheme entered secondary school; KKM are now planning to cater for their needs right through to the tertiary sector and by 1999 three secondary schools had been established with many more in the planning.
5. Other Minority Languages
There have been few serious attempts to include minority languages other than Maori in the classroom in New Zealand. Samoan, Tongan, Cook Island Maori, and Niucan; all Pacific languages were the only other languages of instruction in 1999. There are approximately 25 primary schools with Pacific bilingual classes or units in 1999. Most of these are Samoan; the largest Pacific group in New Zealand and most are in Auckland with a smaller number in Wellington. In 1999, Samoan was first offered as a public examination subject in secondary schools. Pacific Island bilingual education is likely to increase rapidly as many preschool language nests have been established since the early 1990s. Chinese languages of recent immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan are the next most likely candidates for inclusion at school and a Chinese community survey has indicated considerable support for this. 145
The Social Context 6. The Future In 1991 the government, after extensive pressure from ethnic communities and educators, announced a decision to develop a National Languages Policy which may see the role and place of minority languages in education and the wider society more fully explored, recognized, and planned for. Taking a leading role in this were staff from the Maori Language Commission, a government-sponsored initiative set up in 1987. The role of the Commission is similar to that of the Irish and Welsh language boards (see Wales: Language Education Policy; Irish Language Education Policy). The Commission has also been at the forefront of seeking official recognition and status for the Maori language in the wider society. In the mid 1990s the proposal for a National Language policy was abandoned by the government and instead assistance to each school to develop their own policy was offered. KKM, the immersion schools, are at the cutting edge of these demands for recognition and resources for Maori language. With their state funding and resources, their autonomy, and their Maori control they signal a new path ahead. No longer are Maori accepting the Pakeha (European) majority veto of their longstanding desire to provide for the revival of their language. However, the strict criteria that KKM developed leading to their success also led them down a path of exclusiveness. They are unlikely to be able to provide for more than a very small percentage of Maori children unless the political and financial restraints on their expansion are removed. The majority of Maori children's access to their own language and cultural heritage is therefore through dual-medium and immersion, bilingual schools and units, and depends on the ability and willingness of the state system to provide for them. In spite of enormous commitment by teachers and Maori communities, there is little evidence of any similar commitment by successive governments to this process. In spite of serious and widespread concerns about continuing underachievement, bilingual education has been largely ignored, as have been a whole raft of official reports and commissions on the matter. It is almost as if the Pakeha (European) majority are still saying after 150 years that they want young Maori people educated, and the Maori are entitled to their share but they do not believe speaking Maori is the solution; they will not actively discourage it but it is not one of their social or economic priorities. A Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal finding in 1986 condemned the failure of education to deliver the Maori a fair share of education's rewards but its findings were never accepted. Acknowledgment of the failure of earlier policies came as late as March 1991 in a
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Ministry of Education policy announcement. This new policy acknowledged the loss of language, the underachievement, and the disenchantment of many Maori people with education. It went on to commit education to support the urgent revival and development of the language through bilingual education provisions, including immersion education. It reluctantly recognized that an alternative Maori-controlled state-funded system will probably be required to achieve these goals adequately. (Few if any majoritycontrolled education systems have made such public policy admissions about their minorities.) There is strong Maori support for this policy. The Ministry of Education initiative, together with a policy initiative of the 1998 Minister of Maori Affairs, revived the Maori (Matawaia Declarations) proposal for a comprehensive Maori Education Authority to oversee and foster Maori initiatives in education. In 1998 and 1999 the Minister of Maori affairs released a series of major reports aimed at addressing Maori underachievement in mainstream schools and a new Maori Education Authority proposal. Whether there will be any serious Government support and funding for this policy remains to be seen. If New Zealand history is any guide, it too may be largely ignored and the Maori themselves will have to continue to fight for the revival of their language; if they succeed, it will constitute one of the great linguistic achievements of all time. In the words of one of the most respected Maori elders, Sir James Henare: 'Ko te reo te mauri o te mana Maori.' The language is the essential life force of being Maori. Every language is a temple in the soul of those who speak it. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his soul.
See also: Australian Indigenous Languages; Teaching Endangered Languages.
Bibliography Benton R A 1981 The Flight of the Amokura: Oceanic Languages and Formal Education in the Pacific. New Zealand Council for Educational Research, Wellington Benton R A 1986 Schools as agents for language revival in Ireland and New Zealand. In: Spolsky B (ed.) Language Education in Multilingual Settings. College Hill Press, San Diego, CA Hirsh W (ed.) 1987 Living Languages: Bilingualism and Community Languages in New Zealand. Heinemann, Auckland Smith G H 1990 Kura Kaupapa Maori: Contesting and reclaiming Maori education in Aotearoa. In: Ray D, Poonwassie D (eds.) Tomorrow Can be Better. Garland, New York
National Languages
National Languages C. M. Eastman
The term 'national language' refers to a language which serves the entire area of a nation rather than a regional or ethnic subdivision. As the language of a political, social, and cultural entity, a national language also functions as a national symbol (Garvin 1973: 71), recognized as the nation's own. The term may be used to refer to a language indigenous to an area as distinct from one 'brought in from outside' (Ferguson and Heath 1981: 531). The term is also often synonymous with 'standard language.' An 'official language' is a language used for the business of government, a language 'legally prescribed as the language of governmental operations of a given nation' (Ferguson and Heath 1981: 531). The terms 'national language' and 'official language' were included along with others in a 1951 UNESCO publication entitled The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education which outlined 10 language situations in the world which planners need to be aware of when making choices as to which languages might be most appropriate for specific purposes such as building nations, doing government business, conducting trade, teaching school, and the like. Generally, 'standardization' is involved when a language achieves national or official status (see Standardization). Standardization is a process 'whereby a particular social dialect comes to be elevated into what is often called a standard or even "national" language' (Fairclough 1989: 56). Standardization is part of the process of unification undertaken by a nationalizing political, cultural, economic entity. A dialect is chosen to be standardized and then it is 'codified' by being written down in a grammar, provided with a dictionary, and accompanied by rules of pronunciation and 'correct' usage so that there will be as little variation as possible in its form. Standard English, so codified in the late 1700s, was read mostly by industrialists and their families, leading one scholar to observe that There is an element of schizophrenia about standard English in the sense that it aspires to be (and is certainly portrayed as) a national language belonging to all classes and sections of the society, and yet remains in many respects a class dialect' (Fairclough 1989: 56). Standard English is a class dialect in that its dominance is associated with class interests and also because 'it is the dominant bloc that makes most use of it, and gains most from it as an asset—as a form of "cultural capital" analogous to capital in the economic sense' (Fairclough 1989: 58). Throughout the world, various legislative approaches have been taken with regard to making decisions about national and official languages. National languages are important as an aspect of
ethnicity as well as of nationality. Issues having to do with media of instruction are inextricably mixed up with what languages function nationally and officially. 1. National/Official Languages and Media of Instruction For the most part languages designated as 'media of instruction' tend to be those which have been designated as 'official.' It is less common for 'national languages' to also be used in education unless they are also 'languages of wider communication.' Generally, this is a matter of expedience since such languages have more than likely been 'standardized' and there are likely to be teaching materials available in them. Swahili and English are official languages in Kenya and Swahili is the sole national language there. Secondary and tertiary education is available so far only in English. All primary education in state schools is in the process of moving toward Swahili though there continues to be some very early level primary education in other regional languages. In increasing areas throughout the world English, as a language of wider communication, is gradually being 'nativized.' That is, a number of different world Englishes are developing which function both sentimentally and instrumentally and may well be the future 'national' and 'official' languages of the world. In essence these Englishes, despite curricular and grammatical prescriptions to the contrary, are the languages of postprimary education in a number of nations. Such 'nonnative' varieties of English occur, for example, in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, the Philippines, and the West Indies (Kachru 1983: 31). 2. People and National and Official Languages In 1968, Joshua Fishman introduced a distinction between 'nationism' and 'nationalism.' Nationalism is the 'organization of the beliefs, values and behaviors of a nationality with regard to its own self-awareness' (Fasold 1988: 180). It is a matter of group pride regardless of whether the group has political power or territorial strength. Nationism, on the other hand, recognizes that '[L]egislative bodies have to formulate and record laws in some language or languages, children need to be educated through the medium of one or more languages, military and police organizations must function in one or another language' in order for a nation to operate (Fasold 1988: 181). Here political and territorial integrity is paramount. Where this is the case, nationism is best served by an official language or official languages. The interests of
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The Social Context nationalism on the other hand are best served by a national language. To overstate the case a bit, a national language can be compared to the national flag. A country's flag functions almost entirely as a symbol. An official language is more like the trackage and rolling stock of a national railroad. Its purpose is more pragmatic than symbolic. (Fasold 1988: 181)
Essentially national languages are associated with sentimental attachments to a nation or a state while official languages make reference to instrumental attachments. That is, national languages are those which make people feel good about their country or their group while official languages are those which enable people to get things done, to do a job, to earn money, and achieve social status (Kelman 1971: 2425). Sentimental attachment is seen by some to be more properly a matter of primordial feelings referring to the attachments 'derived from place of birth, kinship relationships, religion, language and social practices' which are natural for them, are spiritual in character, and allow them to feel an affinity with those with whom they share a common background. People are sentimentally or primordially attached to a political entity when they see it as representative of themselves, they are instrumentally attached to it when they see it as a way to achieve what they want. A national language represents sentimental attachments by blending a need for unity with a need for having a unique language and culture, a national language is a language of the people. As the term is used in a nationbuilding context, it is 'often contrasted with the language of the former colonial overlord' (Garvin 1973:26). In Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia is a national language while Dutch is a colonial language. The term 'national language' is also used to distinguish a language serving the entire territory encompassed by a nation as distinct from a regional or ethnic subdivision (Garvin 1973: 25). In Latin America this sense is conveyed by the term ' lengua national' while 'lengua indigene? refers to languages used within the nation in certain regions or by various ethnic groups. In Mexico, Spanish is the lengua national while Nahuatl is a lengua indigena. An official language represents instrumental attachments by providing a way for people to achieve socioeconomic power, an official language is a language for the people. Garvin (1973: 25) points out that one defining feature of an official language is that it receives official recognition by a government authority. Further, a national language tends to be also an official language while the converse is not as often the case. In Kenya, for example, Swahili is the national language and an official language while English is another official language. When choices are made about what will be the national language in a particular nation, considerations regarding the 'need to satisfy these primordial/ 148
sentimental needs of unity and spiritual affinity' (Eastman 1983: 34) are paramount. Where there is a common language extending throughout a political entity sentimental and instrumental attachments may be to a single language. Where this is the case that language is usually a standard language. The real spread of a standard variety through a population and across domains of use is one aspect of standardization; rhetorical claims made on behalf of the standard variety—that it is the language of the whole people, that everyone uses it, that everyone holds it in high esteem, and so forth—are another. What these claims amount to is the transmutation of standard languages into mythical national languages. A political requirement for creating and sustaining a nation state is that its unifying institutions should have legitimacy among the mass of the people, and winning legitimacy often calls for such rhetoric. (Fairclough 1989: 22)
However where this is not the case language conflict may arise. In 1988, what is known as the Recife Declaration was put forward. In consideration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it focuses on the linguistic rights of groups and individuals and urges the United Nations 'to adopt and implement a Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, which would require a reformulation of national and international language policies.' Such a declaration asserts the need to promote the dignity and equity of all languages and an awareness of the need for 'legislation to eliminate linguistic prejudice and discrimination and all forms of linguistic domination, injustice and oppression, in such contexts as services to the public, the place of work, the educational system, the courtroom and the mass media.' 3. Language Legislation
At the same time that linguistic rights have become an issue, there are countervailing forces at work as well such as the adoption of English-only policies in various parts of the United States. Decisions resulting in naming specific languages as national or official have ramifications for such issues. What is known as the 'Muhlenberg legend' has perpetuated the idea that German almost became the national language of the United States in 1794 losing out by just one vote in the house of Representatives. What took place was that Germans from the state of Virginia asked for some laws to be issued in German as well as English. When it came to a vote this request was defeated 42-41 and it is thought that perhaps one Frederick August Muhlenberg cast the deciding negative ballot (Heath 1981: 9). The United States has long rejected choosing a national language yet Americans believe that they should be able to read and write a 'correct' form
National Languages of American English (Heath 1981: 6). It conies as a surprise to many people to learn that the United States does not have a national language in any legal sense of the term and that there are a number of languages which may be used officially in different places. For example both French and English are official in Louisiana and have been for a long time and Hawaiian is an official language in Hawaii. Only in recent years have states made laws about restricting official language use to English-only in an effort many see to be to stop the spread of Spanish. These people, such as the noted semanticist and former Senator from California, the late S. I. Hayakawa, feel that the motivation for working state-by-state toward making English eventually the national and only official language in the US is to ensure that the United States does not become another Canada. This is in reference to the bilingualism there which has a long and involved history of conflict associated with its having achieved legal status. Indeed, the very linguistic diversity that was a characteristic of the early days of the US and the bilingual tradition in schools, churches, banks, and newspapers through the nineteenth century only gave way to a tradition espousing monolingualism in English in the early twentieth century. The current push to revitalize bilingualism along with a simultaneous call for English-only seems 'to tug the future of English in the United States in different directions' (Heath 1981: 7). Various political entities have statutes specifying a national language and official language(s). Again, in the USA, there are a number of distinct enclaves where Spanish is the main language (Little Havana in Miami, Spanish Harlem in New York City, and barrios in East Los Angeles). Even though these areas are relatively small, 'such limited territoriality can be and has been used to obtain official bilingual status for an ethnic tongue' (Mackey 1983: 183). In 1973, Spanish became official in Miami. In some parts of the world, percentages of population define 'official minority' status with accompanying language rights. In Finland, if a group comprises 6 percent of the population its language may be accorded 'official status.' In the US constitution, all children of US citizens are granted the right to equal opportunity for public education— including those whose home language is other than English. This amounts to what is known as 'individual official bilingualism' in contrast to the Canadian situation of 'institutional and territorial official bilingualism'(Mackey 1983: 184). It is rather ironic that '[W]ithout either constitutional or subsequent legal declaration or requirement that English is the Official (let alone the National) Language, a complex web of customs, institutions, and programs has long fostered well-nigh exclusive reliance upon English in public life' (Heath 1981: 517) and a concomitant loss of ethnic languages by members of many groups.
In India, a number of Articles of the constitution (Articles 120, 343, and 344) have to do with official language matters. Articles 120,343, and 344 'deal with the use of Hindi as the official language of the Union in the parliament and for other official purposes' (Dua 1985: 200). These articles provide for a progressive increase in the use of Hindi and a restriction on English such that Hindi will replace English in 15 years as the sole language of the Union (i.e., as the 'national language' of India). Other constitutional provisions provide for a number of regional languages (including Hindi in its region) having official status in state legislatures. There is a provision whereby the President of India may recognize any language as an additional official language for specific purposes or in specific areas (Dua 1985: 201). Such recognition is not frequent given that all but 2.7 percent of the country's people have the language of their state as their primary language (Laitin 1989: 420). In the meantime, English is an associate official language according to the Indian constitution (Kachru 1981: 23). It has become apparent that the constitutional efforts to replace English with Hindi may well run into difficulties due to the practical necessity of the Indian High Court having sanctioned regional state policies. In India there is likely to continue to be many national and many official languages. If it were to happen that another language became official in the USA, such status would entail citizens' rights to use that language and to expect officials to use it in return in interaction with them. As Mackey observed, 'With more than a quarter-million faceless federal bureaucrats answering the public, someone's language rights are bound to be infringed upon sooner or later' (Mackey 1983: 202). In Canada, precisely to safeguard citizens versus the bureaucracy in exactly this situation, the Official Languages Act provides for a Commissioner of Official Languages who answers 'directly to the people through their representatives in Parliament' (Mackey 1983: 202). Part of this commissioner's ombudsman role is to issue annually a report of failures to enforce Canada's official bilingualism. Constitutionally, the USA has the power to create ethnic states which could have their own national as well as official languages so that there might be, for example, a Spanish state or a French state (Mackey 1983: 203). So far states have only opted for making these languages official—including states which have recenty passed English-only legislation. 4. The Struggle for Language Rights Just as the distinction between national and official language may be seen to parallel a distinction between symbolic and functional language attachments, and between nationist and nationalist goals, a parallel may also be seen when it comes to the use of language. The requirements of a national and an official language differ. The best choice of an official language is often
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The Social Context that of the former colonial rulers which most likely set up the polity's system of government in that language. Such a colonial linguistic legacy as a new nation is being forged from a colonial past allows for nationist tasks to be 'carried out with the least disruption' (Fasold 1988: 182). This same language, however, 'is an absolutely atrocious choice as a national language' for '.. .Nothing could be a worse symbol of a new nation's self-awareness than the language of a country from which it has just achieved independence' ((Fasold 1988: 182). However, if the national language of a newly independent nationality is the same language as that of the former colonialists, that language (newly nativized) would work well as both the national and official language of the new nation. The functional versus symbolic distinction between national and official languages may also be seen clearly when it comes to bi- and multilingualism. Functional bilingualism is served in the USA, for example, by having safety signs on airplanes in both Spanish and English—that is, they 'might actually save lives' (Mackey 1983:193). Symbolic bilingualism, on the other hand, is served, for example, by having all signs in both Spanish and English even where it makes little difference as on street signs or in monolingual areas. Functional bilingualism is a matter of official language use, while symbolic bilingualism is a matter of national language use. 5. National 'National' Languages Above, it was noted that national languages are often official as well while official languages are less often national languages. However, there is one sense of the term 'national' language that complicates matters. For some the term applies to what is often thought of as a 'vernacular' language. A vernacular is the first language of a group which has been socially or politically dominated by a group with a different language. For example, in Kenya a very well known author, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, has urged 'that the label national language be applied to the languages usually called vernacular to maintain the idea that ethnic groups in Kenya are all equal as political, social, and cultural entities and are not dominated by any one group with a different language' (Eastman 1983: 6). This usage is in keeping with the definition of 'national language' mentioned in the introduction above as being indigenous rather than imported. Similarly this usage of the term is in conformity with the situation in India where the Union has a national language (Hindi) and two official languages (English and Hindi) and the various states in India each have their own national (regional, indigenous, ethnic) language and various official languages. In fact in Kenya, opinions have long been expressed that the country needs its own national language
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based upon the Kimvita dialect of Swahili as spoken in Mombasa, Kenya, rather than adopt the standard form of Swahili based upon the Kiunguja dialect of Zanzibar in Tanzania. Some feel that the relative lack of success Swahili has achieved in Kenya as its national language compared to Tanzania is a matter of Kenyans feeling 'indisposed towards having to give continued preference to forms that are not their own' (Harries 1983: 128). However, instead it might be that the ideology associated with a national language disfavors indigenous languages in favor of developing localized, nativized, and nationalized versions of colonial official languages in recognition of the need to get the nation built as well as to develop nationalistic feelings. As should be clear from much of what has been said here, there are practical advantages to choosing former colonial languages to be used for official purposes including the fact that they are commonly languages of wider communication which have developed into international languages as well. In their postcolonial territories they often begin to express the new nationalities that have emerged by nativizing in that new setting. In such a manner: Indian English, Jamaican English, Philippine English, Singapore English, Nigerian English etc., have become firmly established on the linguistic map of the world; and like American English they are moving in the direction of becoming a powerful symbol of national identity, which in multilingual and multicultural countries such as India or the countries of Black Africa none of the native languages could ever be. (Coulmas 1988: 18)
Indeed in sub-Saharan Africa, the official language of most nations is the international language in which the nations were formerly governed; French in French and Belgian colonies; English in British territories; Portuguese in Mozambique and Angola. Yet in the nations where these international languages are official relatively few people outside of urban areas know the languages. Choice of an outside language as official has much to do with its neutrality with regard to internal conflicts and everyone, at least theoretically, has an even chance at access to it. However, it is more often the case that certain ethnic groups in an emerging nation will have had more training by missionaries or the military or even by governing officials prior to independence, and members of the traditional elite, as well, may have had a headstart. Indeed to some extent one may define 'elite' in such a context as 'the select speakers of the official language' (Myers-Scotton 1989: 9). This situation allows such people to maintain their status as members of the elite in opposition to others who may have a different power base and who may well argue for the development of national 'national' languages rather than localized, nativized, or nationalized forms of the international official language.
National Language Policy and Education As a symbol of their own legitimacy, these proto-elites do not seek to acquire the attributes of the elite, including their language use patterns. Thus, disparities in linguistic repertoire across groups can be seen as an indication of contemporary class conflict. An obvious place for conflict is between an education-based elite which controls the infra-structure of the public sector and those proto-elite with an economic base. (Myers-Scotton 1990: 111)
See also: National Language Policy and Education. Bibliography Coulmas F 1988 What is a national language good for? In: Coulmas F (ed.) With Forked Tongues. Karoma Publishers, Singapore Dua 1985 Language Planning in India. Harnam Publications, New Delhi Eastman C M 1983 Language Planning. Chandler and Sharp, Novato, CA Fairclough N 1989 Language and Power. Longman, London Fasold R 1988 What national languages are good for. In: Coulmas F (ed.) With Forked Tongues. Karoma Publishers, Singapore Ferguson C A, Heath S B (eds.) 1981 Glossary. In: Ferguson C A, Heath S B (eds.) Language in the USA. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Fishman J 1968 Nationality-nationalism and nation-nationism. In: Fishman J, Ferguson C A, Das Gupta J (eds.) Language Problems of Developing Nations. Wiley, New York Garvin P L 1973 Some comments on language planning. In: Rubin J, Shuy R (eds.) Language Planning: Current Issues
and Research. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Harries L 1983 The nationalisation of Swahili in Kenya. In: Kennedy C (ed.) Language Planning and Language Education. Allen and Unwin, Winchester, MA Heath S B 1981 English in our language heritage. In: Ferguson C A, Heath S B (eds.) Language in the USA. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kachru B 1981 American English and other Englishes. In: Ferguson C A, Heath S B (eds.) Language in the USA. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kachru B 1983 Models for non-native Englishes. In: Kachru B B (ed.) The Other Tongue. Pergamon Press, Oxford Kelman H C 1971 Language as an aid and barrier to involvement in the national system. In: Rubin, Jernudd (eds.) Can Language Be Planned? University Press of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI Lai tin D D 1989 Language policy and political strategy in India. Policy Sciences 22: 415-36 Le Page R B 1964 The National Language Question: Problems of Newly Independent States. Oxford University Press, London Mackey W F 1983 U.S. Language status policy and the Canadian experience. In: Cobarrubias J, Fishman J A (eds.) Progress in Language Planning. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin Myers-Scotton C 1989 Elite closure as a powerful language strategy: The African case. In: Paper Presented at the Colloquium on the Comparative Study of Ethnicity and Nationality, April 19. University of Washington UNESCO 1951 The use of vernacular languages in education: The report of the UNESCO meeting of specialists, 1951. In: Fishman J A (ed.) 1968 Readings in the Sociology of Language. Mouton, The Hague
National Language Policy and Education R. D. Lambert
Not all countries have codified national language policies, and when they do the subjects that are covered vary from one country to another. They also differ immensely in the centralization of planning and control, ranging from the dominance of planning at the national level in Japan and the Netherlands, to the locus of language policymaking at the state and canton level in Germany and Switzerland, to the completely decentralized language policymaking in the United States. 1. Language Policy Outside the Educational System
Many national policies deal with the role of language in the society at large, impacting the educational system indirectly. For instance, they designate which languages will be used in governmental affairs, the courts,
the military, the media, street signs, and so forth. They provide governmental support for the diffusion of a country's languages abroad. In developing countries the most important language policy concerns the spread of literacy, although the spread of universal primary education has moved the locus for literacy policy within the formal educational system. 1.1 Corpus Language Policy
Another aspect of language policy that is largely carried on outside the formal educational system is what is called 'corpus' language policy, that is, the specification of what is the proper form of a language. Sometimes this merely involves the standardization of the linguistic forms already in use among the public. Sometimes more proactive attempts are made to 151
The Social Context change the language in use through, for instance, deliberate distancing it from other languages: Hindi from Urdu, Macedonian from Bulgarian, Yiddish from German. Sometimes languages are to be purified by ridding them of borrowed forms. Sometimes a deliberate effort is made to make them more culturally authentic by tailoring them to be closer to indigenous folk origins as in the case of Estonian or Yiddish. Sometimes language policy will attempt to steer usage toward more classical forms of the language as in the Sanskritization of Hindi, the superimposition of classical Arabic throughout the Maghreb, or the deliberate introduction of classical Persian forms into Urdu. Sometimes national language policy will attempt to resurrect and encourage the use of languages whose use has decayed, as in the case of Irish, Gaelic, or Welsh. Sometimes they specify changes in orthography as in Turkey or China. 2. Language Choice in the Educational System Corpus language policy affects the education system by specifying what form of a language should be taught. Another major aspect of language educational policy is the specification of which languages should be taught, and to whom. In considering language choice, it is useful to distinguish between policy relating to domestic languages, that is, those languages spoken by the majority or a significant minority of a country's population, versus foreign languages whose primary base is outside the country. While this distinction is imprecise—French is both a foreign and a domestic language in Canada, or Belgium, or Switzerland—the rationale for teaching domestic and foreign languages and the way in which that instruction is delivered are quite different. 2.1 Choice Among Domestic Languages For most countries—Luxembourg is an interesting exception—instruction in domestic languages takes priority over foreign languages and absorbs the greatest proportion of curricular time devoted to language learning. The first issue facing language education within the formal education system is the choice of which languages to teach. How many and which domestic languages are to be taught is determined by the complexity of a country's ethnic composition. 2.1.1 Choice in ideologically homogeneous language countries The United States, Japan, and most of the countries of Western Europe and Latin America see themselves as linguistically homogeneous. By-and-large a single domestic language is taught throughout the school system. Even adult immigrants must learn the dominant language of their new country. Indeed, in several countries, the national government provides, indeed requires, a period of free education in the national
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language for new immigrants. Normally such education occurs outside the formal school system. Within the schools the home language of immigrant communities, where a residential cluster is large enough, may be used as a medium of instruction. Such instruction is normally limited to primary schools, and is intended to provide a transition period on the way to integration into the national language. However, as the number of immigrants rises, political pressures increase to raise the length of time that home languages are taught in the schools. Sometimes the notion of transition to the dominant language is abandoned entirely. For instance, the heavy influx of Spanish-speaking children into the United States has sharpened the debate about transition versus longterm maintenance as the primary goal of language education policy. In some countries that consider themselves to be linguistically homogeneous, in addition to the needs of immigrant groups, demands are made by the proponents of regional languages that they be given official status and be used throughout the educational system. Catalan, Galician, Basque, Breton, Gaelic, Welsh, and Frisian are examples of such regional languages. Similar demands are made by autochthonous groups such as the Sami in Finland and the Maori in New Zealand, groups whose leaders are resisting full cultural absorption into the larger society. The relative status of those languages is buttressed by the international movement for recognition of linguistic minority rights which appears in such international agreements as the Council of Europe's 'Recommendation 928 (1981) on the Educational and Cultural Protection of Minority Languages and Dialects in Europe'. However, except for the marginal accommodation of immigrants, territorial minorities, and autochthonous groups, only a single domestic language is taught in linguistically homogeneous countries. 2.7.2 Choice in linguistically dyadic or triadic countries For countries that are not linguistically homogeneous, and this refers to most of the countries of the world, the choice of which domestic languages to teach, for how long, and to whom becomes more complex. In countries like Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Switzerland, and Israel, which are composed of two or three relatively equally balanced, territorially separate language communities, each of the languages is used throughout the educational system within its territory. Characteristically, the other language(s) are taught as the first other language(s) to be studied. The effectiveness of this dual language policy is the subject of considerable scholarly and political debate, particularly when the relative status of the linguistic groups is unequal. In Cyprus, in Israel, and should Quebec separate from Canada, compulsory bilingual language education may disappear.
National Language Policy and Education 2.1.3 Choice in mosaic societies Most countries of the world are composed of five or more important distinct linguistic communities. Normally, although not exclusively, these communities have regional homelands. Language education policy may take a variety of forms. Often these languages are arranged in two tiers of relative importance. For instance, the Philippines has eight major languages and 156 officially recognized minor languages. India, immediately after independence, had 13 major languages, grouped into two primary language families, and several hundred minor languages and dialects, depending on how they are counted. The educational policy solution adopted by the two countries was quite different. The Philippines chose to adopt Filipino, which is an augmented Tagalog-based language, as the sole language of instruction. Other home languages may be used as 'auxiliary media of instruction' in the first grades of elementary school, but constitutionally, Filipino is the only domestic language to be used throughout the educational system. On the other hand, India has chosen to act like a binary or triadic country in that all 13 state languages serve as exclusive languages of instruction within their territory. Like the Philippines, the national government has fostered the development of a national language, Hindi, which is a regional language that has officially been established as the national language and a required second language for students living in nonHindi speaking areas. Third language choices are then directed to one of the other domestic languages of the country, hopefully across the linguistic divide between North and South India. Both countries, then, have in common the search for an educational lingua franca. Such a search is even more intense in many of the countries of Africa, where tribal differences make the linguistic composition of the country even more complex. In East Africa, Swahili has been designated to fill that role, with varying results in the different countries. Educational language policy encourages the use of local languages at the primary level, followed by a switch to the lingua franca at later stages in the educational system. In countries that were formerly colonies, the language of their former rulers, primarily English and French, have remained as de facto lingua francos, particularly among elites. While constitutions promise the eventual demise of these languages, they have preserved their official standing, and tend to be used exclusively in the upper levels of the educational system. Indeed, entry into elite status often depends on access to schools that use the excolonial languages as the medium of instruction at all levels of the educational system. 2.2 Choice Among Foreign Languages The survival of the excolonial languages illustrates the overlap between domestic and foreign languages. Their home base is in the metropolitan countries
where they originated, but they have become domestic languages in the former colonies, often taking on local forms quite distinct from the standard languages in the countries where the language is truly domestic. No matter what their origins, English and to a lesser extent French, do provide an external link to the world language community. Indeed, for most countries, including the noncolonial countries of Asia like Japan where 98 percent of the students choose to study English, it is the overwhelming choice of a first foreign language. It is estimated that there are 375 million people in the world for whom English is their first language, an equivalent number for whom it is their second language, and perhaps 750 million who study English as a foreign language. Most countries outside of the English-speaking world, if they require a foreign language to be taught in school, it is the study of English that is required. In the Netherlands, 100 percent of the students study English in primary schools and 88 percent in secondary schools; in Norway it is 99 percent and 69 percent, and in Sweden it is 99 percent and 100 percent. Even in France it is 78 percent in primary school and 94 percent in secondary school. There is some variation to this pattern in Eastern Europe, where German and formerly Russian have served as first foreign languages to be studied. Indeed, aside from English, most countries have a 'significant other' foreign language that takes priority of choice. In England, traditionally it has been French. In the United States, it has varied over time. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was the classical languages of Latin and Greek, then it shifted to German and French. Currently, Spanish is the predominant choice of students. Educational policymakers often try to direct language choice on one or another logical basis. Occasionally this decision is highly explicit as in the case of the Dutch National Plan that did so on the basis of surveys of the proportion of the population using particular languages and the need for fostering citizenship in the European community. Others have used more general national needs surveys. In recent years, there has been a general concern expressed that the foreign languages choices are too narrow. In the case of Europe they display a bias in terms of northern European countries, and they tend to ignore the languages of important parts of the world, particularly Asia. Accordingly, there has been a movement in favor of diversification. As language education policy, this drive toward language diversification is most noticeable in the United States where the national government funds an elaborate system of university centers to teach and to foster the teaching elsewhere of the languages of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. It should be noted that aside from the teaching of the excolonial languages, foreign language instruction is weakest in developing countries. To the extent to 153
The Social Context which language is prominent on the educational agenda in these countries, curricular time is primarily absorbed with the promotion of literacy and the teaching of domestic languages, including the excolonial languages, leaving little time or priority to be given to other foreign languages. Instruction in other languages is often left to universities, private schools, or adult-oriented teaching facilities. 3. Social Functions of Language Learning Either implicitly or explicitly educational language policy is determined by the social functions that language learning plays in the society. Countries differ immensely in the proportion of the educational system dedicated to language instruction. In general, this reflects the extent to which adults in the society are called on to use languages other than their own. In countries where internal communication among adults regularly requires an additional language competence, the system is less well-developed and given less importance. 3.1 Social Function of Domestic Languages In homogeneous societies, few students outside these communities learn the languages of immigrants, or linguistically distinct autochthonous groups. In the United States, where the study of Spanish has the highest enrollments, it is not because Hispanics comprise the largest immigrant group. Spanish is studied in fulfillment of the foreign language requirement. In dyadic or triadic societies, students are required or encouraged to study the other domestic language(s) as a contribution toward national integration. The evidence is at most spotty as to whether this encouragement of bi- or trilingualism is either effective or contributes to national harmony. In mosaic societies, some form of bilingualism is common among the populace, but the number of domestic languages makes it difficult to use the learning of languages of another region or community as a feasible device for social engineering. It will be interesting to watch India where a strategy of cross-regional language learning is encouraged, but in a setting in which there are a dozen or more other major domestic languages to be learned. 3.2 Social Function of Foreign Languages It is with respect to foreign languages that the social functions of language learning and the extent of adult use is most varied. As indicated earlier, in developing societies the social functions and adult use tend to be weakest. Except for the study of their excolonial languages and/or English, their foreign language educational systems are least extensive. Elsewhere, foreign language use and foreign language educational systems are most extensive in countries whose own language is little spoken outside of their borders and which have substantial external economic and pol-
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itical ties. The Netherlands and Luxembourg are extreme examples of this pattern. On the other end of the continuum, the United States and Great Britain are examples of limited use and instruction of foreign languages. A number of countries, such as the Netherlands, deliberately base the choice of which foreign languages to teach and the extensiveness of the system on surveys of actual adult use. Others project national need on the basis of optimal use, particularly the advantages of having a foreign language educated populace in an economically integrated world. In a number of countries, particularly England and Australia, the specific needs of international business are emphasized. Indeed, one of the most rapidly growing areas of foreign language educational policy is in the provision of occupationally-oriented foreign language skills. The development of such special-purpose language instruction is not only a priority within many countries, but it is a major area for development crossnationally through the efforts of the Council of Europe and the European Union. 4. Pedagogy In countries where adult use of foreign languages is extensive and occupational demand is greatest, the rationale for language education can be instrumental. That is, the student can expect to use a school learned language as an adult. Where adult use and the social function of language learning is much weaker, the motivation for foreign language learning has to be less instrumental. Emphasis has to be placed on indirect benefits such as cultural appreciation—usually through the study of literature—or general intellectual development which is presumed to flow from language learning. In such a setting, which language is learned or even the level of competence to be attained is difficult to specify. Moreover, the passive skills of reading and, to a lesser extent, writing a foreign language can be emphasized, rather than the active communication skills. The most important shift in pedagogical style since the 1940s has been the transformation from the passive skill dominated, noninstrumental approach to language learning to one focused on active communication. 4.1 Pedagogical Innovation in Europe In Europe the pedagogical transformation has been assisted by the efforts of the Council of Europe, particularly through the adoption of teaching materials and learning objectives geared to a minimal threshold level which a student would need to function in a country where the language is the mother tongue. This Threshold approach, allied with an emphasis on the production of communicative competence, has been adopted for 20 national, regional, and minority languages in Europe, and has now been extended to higher levels of language competence. In addition, a Waystage Level, half-way toward the Threshold
National Language Policy and Education Level, and an advanced level, called the Vantage Level, have been established. This step toward the development of a common pedagogical style has produced a remarkable international consensus in Europe leading to the development under the leadership of the Council of Europe of a Common European Framework which defines the possible range of choice with respect to objectives and methods of instruction. 4.2 Centralization of Pedagogical Planning Within this international paradigm shift from passive, reading-oriented language instruction to oral, communication-oriented language teaching there has been a great deal of country-specific innovation and pedagogical policy making. The governmental level and degree of centralization with which this takes place varies immensely. Countries differ in the extent to which pedagogical practice is specified in detail by the government, as in Japan, or left to the decisions of individual teachers as in the United States. The advantage of the American system of maximum dispersion of responsibility is to encourage experimentation, but it makes it difficult to effect changes in the system as a whole. The advantage of more centralized systems is that it is possible to set minimal performance levels, to effect changes throughout the system, and to make it relatively easy for students to move seamlessly through various stages of the educational system. 4.3 External Influences on Changing Pedagogy Another long-term change in pedagogical style is the increasing use of technology. The progression from teaching exclusively in teacher-centered classrooms, to the use of tape and visual materials in language laboratories, to the substitution of computer-interactive, self-paced instruction has produced major innovations in pedagogical style. In addition, the growth of distance language learning through the use of educational television has also changed pedagogical styles, as has the immense expansion of opportunities for students to study abroad. Similarly, the growth of occupationally-oriented language instruction has begun to affect more traditional pedagogy, but, as yet, its influence is felt primarily in the preprofessional sections of universities or in the adult language educational system. 5. The Architecture of the Instructional System While the specifics of pedagogical style tend to be left to textbook manufacturers or individual teachers, the organization of the school-based language instructional system tends to be more controlled by either national or the state governments. 5.1 Onset and Length of Language Study The patterns are fairly similar in most countries. Mother tongue instruction and to some extent instruction in the other domestic languages tends to start in
the earliest grades and often runs throughout the school years. The bulk of foreign language instruction takes place in the secondary schools, although there is a trend toward expansion of instruction, particularly in English, into the primary schools. Indeed, one of the objectives of the transnational efforts of the Council of Europe is the expansion of such instruction into the earlier grades. The starting age for students will vary by how important a country believes the learning of a foreign language is. Typically, students begin at age 10 or 11 and continue to age 15 or 16. Only in the United States does a substantial portion of language education take place at the university level, although upper secondary education in Europe often overlaps the age groups in early college and university education in the United States. Most European countries require their students to take more than one foreign language, usually making provision for three languages. Traditionally, European education systems separated students according to whether they are taking a vocational or academic track. Those heading for a vocation would expect to have an abbreviated education and be required to take fewer languages for a shorter period of time. With the spread of comprehensive educational systems that do not segregate students by their career objectives, the tendency has been both to expand the proportion of students who take a foreign language and to increase the amount of time students are required to study a foreign language. The median number of total clock hours required for first language study is 700; for a second language, 350; and, for a third language, where one is required, 250. It will be recalled that in developing countries, except for domestic languages and excolonial and world languages, instruction in foreign languages tends to be more limited. 5.2 Language Education Outside the School System In all countries, a varying portion of the foreign language instructional system lies outside of the formal school system. This includes proprietary schools primarily focused on adult education. It includes occupationally-oriented language instruction, some of it occurring within a company, or overseas. It includes heritage schools operated by members of an ethnic or minority community. It includes facilities that train for government service in, for instance, foreign diplomacy, the military, intelligence, the courts, etc. It includes the official and unofficial schools that educate immigrants in the mother tongue of their adopted country. In addition, language service providers such as interpreters and translators provide an important service as part of a country's capacity to dealt with foreign languages. The scale of this unorganized language sector and its contribution to national resources for dealing with foreign languages can be very substantial. In many countries it is their only capacity for providing instruction in the languages of distant
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The Social Context countries. However, only a few countries deliberately include it in their national language planning. 6. Assessment
Language competencies and the education that produces them are subject to a large number and wide variety of assessment strategies. Such strategies differ in the purpose that they serve, the point in the learning process that they occur, the agency that carries them out, and the form that they take. In all these respects, the language educational policies of different countries are quite different. In a few countries, for instance Germany, there is a process of on-going assessment of the instructional process itself, including classroom visits by outside inspectors. In other countries, the teaching skills and language competencies of individual teachers are also assessed, particularly at the time of initial certification. In some countries such as the Netherlands, teachers are assessed periodically throughout their teaching careers. Most commonly, however, it is the individual learner or user whose language competency is being measured. Some assessments are used for screening purposes and occur outside of the educational system per se, for instance, language competency certification devices for various occupations. In a few cases, as in Great Britain, vocational language standards are uniform and set by government agencies. In most countries, the assessment of language skills is left to employers or trade associations. Another example of language competency testing which is only directly related to the language instructional system is the language competency examinations given to overseas applicants who want to study in the United Kingdom, France, or Germany. Most assessment of individual language competency occurs within or at the end of an educational process. The mid-process testing is usually referred to as formative testing and the postprocess testing as summative testing. Formative testing is normally carried out by the teacher and tends to be specific to the particular classroom and teaching materials. In the United States, most tests are specific to a class or course, and are developed by the teacher who awards grades to mark the level of accomplishment. Ideally, formative testing can be used as a diagnostic tool as well, to measure both an individual learner's progress and the success of particular pedagogical strategies. In most countries formative language testing is not the responsibility of language educational policy makers, although Israel has developed the most extensive system of formative testing specifically designed to provide feedback at regular intervals both to teachers and to students. In formative, course-based assessment, the only measure of cumulative proficiency is the number of courses completed. Summative tests measure the student's proficiency at the end of a period of language study. Both the standards and the measure-
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ment of general competency are normally independent of the particular course taken and of the teacher. In many cases summative tests are given by independent government organizations as in the Netherlands, England, or the state of New York. The results of proficiency tests are evaluated either by reference to a set of independently stated criteria (criterion referenced) or to the relative performance of other test takers (norm referenced). In the latter case, performance is expressed in terms of percentile or decile rankings. In the former, a set of standard levels are established with agreed upon descriptors of those levels. Usually an attempt is made to make these levels correspond to steps in the natural progression to full language competence. Most common are ninepoint scales. In the United States, a five-point scale ranging from beginner to native-like fluency is most commonly-used. It is based on one that originated in the Foreign Service Institute and with the addition of pluses and minuses throughout the scale, it too extends to nine levels. The 1990s have seen major efforts underway led by the Council of Europe to create throughout Europe a single scale that will be applicable across languages and countries. Plans have been laid to calibrate this pan-European proficiency scale to the measures used within individual countries, and to the skill-specific scales that measure competency in, say, reading, writing, listening, or speaking. A common set of descriptors and recognizable reference points for the different levels will be adopted. Further, the Council of Europe is attempting to face one of the most debated issues in language testing: how much emphasis should be given to objective, directly quantifiable measures of proficiency versus more flexible demonstrations of individual language performance? To this end a system of calibrated language portfolios is being delivered to supplement the more objective tests. Most of the scales are weighted more heavily toward the bottom of the proficiency hierarchy where most of the learners are. Work at the top end of the scale for high levels of language proficiency for, say translators and interpreters, has just begun. 7. Conclusion
In the late 1990s there has been a great deal of deliberate change in educational language policy. The starting age for language study has been moving downward, and the amount of time spent on such study has increased. Teacher training has been improved, including both pre- and mid-career training, and more and more teachers are traveling abroad to improve their own language skills,. Adult and occupationallyoriented foreign language teaching have expanded. The use of foreign languages as media of instruction has become more widespread. And the use of technology both for teaching languages and for the administration of language tests has grown immensely. And
Wales: Language Education Policy above all, more countries are paying more and more attention to the development of a comprehensive language policy. See also: Language Education Policy—Africa; Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries; Language Education Policy—Pacific; Language Education Policy—Latin America; Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union. Bibliography Bongaerts T, de Bot K (eds.) 1997 Perspectives on Foreign Language Policy. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Dickson P, Cumming A (eds.) 1996 Profiles of Language
Policy in 25 Countries. National Foundation for Education Research, Upton Park, UK Lambert R (ed.) 1994 Foreign Language Policy: An Agenda for Change. American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia Lambert R (ed.) 1994 Language Planning Around the World: Contexts and Systemic Change. National Foreign Language Center, Washington, DC Moys A 1988 Where Are We Going with Languages? Nuffield Foundation, London Scharer R, North B 1992 Toward a Common European Framework for Reporting Language Competency. National Foreign Language Center, Washington, DC Spolsky B (ed.) 1996 Language and Education in Multilingual Settings. Multilingual Matters, London
Wales: Language Education Policy R. Morris Jones
Welsh figures in maintained (i.e., publicly funded) schools in Wales in two ways: as a subject on the curriculum and as a medium of instruction. Welsh is taught as a second language to non-Welsh speakers in the majority of schools, but provision is currently much lower in linguistically highly anglicized counties (e.g., Monmouthshire and Vale of Glamorgan). However, the Educational Reform Act 1988 (ERA) ruled that Welsh be taught as a second language at least, with possible exemptions. Many English-medium schools face organizational and attitudinal challenges in achieving the Act's provision (see School Language Policies). Welsh occurs as a medium of instruction in two ways. First, in mainly anglicized urban localities (particularly the north east and the south east), there are schools which, in response to parental demand, have been designated by the Welsh Office to teach through the medium of Welsh. In designated primary schools (approximately 70 out of 1681 overall), all subjects are taught through Welsh, and bilingual education commences from age 7 when English is gradually added as a subject and medium. In designated secondary schools (22 out of 229 overall), both languages are used but with different subjects variously throughout Wales—historically, English is favored for science subjects but some schools have extended the use of Welsh and even offer a choice of medium for certain subjects where resources allow. Designated bilingual schools generally exist alongside English-medium schools and provide families with a choice of school type. Dedicated to fostering bilingualism, such schools accept Welsh and non-Welsh speakers. In the case of the former, bilingual skills are also achieved outside
school. In the case of non-Welsh speakers, as well as educational development, the school must ensure bilingualism and often provides the only domain for their use of Welsh; for them, many aspects of the curriculum are experienced in a language not used outside school. Second, in Welsh-speaking areas, through decisions at county level of local government, Welsh-medium education occurs in nondesignated schools. Where the school's intake involves significant numbers of Welsh speakers, the medium of instruction is often similar to that found in designated schools and, for non-Welsh speakers, this means catering for both bilingual and educational development. Another possibility is that separate provision is made for Welsh and English speakers: in some schools, a choice of Welsh-medium and English-medium classes is provided, and within the Welsh stream the medium of instruction may be similar to designated schools; but where mixed classes occur, a bilingual teacher may use Welsh with Welsh speakers and English with English speakers. Both designated and nondesignated schools make up what the Welsh Office labels 'Welsh speaking' schools when Welsh-medium teaching reaches defined levels (as detailed in Welsh Office 1998: 89). For 1996-97, such schools numbered 449 out of 1681 primary schools and 49 out of 229 secondary schools—located predominantly in the northwestern county of Gwynedd and, to a lesser extent, in the counties of Ceredigion and Carmarthen). In other schools in Welsh-speaking areas (mixed and possibly streamed), the ERA effectively holds that non-Welsh speakers be taught Welsh as a second language. Schools can be categorized along a continuum
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The Social Context which stretches from Welsh-medium education in designated bilingual and 'Welsh-speaking' schools, to those which are English-medium and, at best, offer Welsh as a second language only. This is set in a time of increasing migration of English families into Welshspeaking communities. For smaller rural schools, this can mean a dramatic change in linguistic character over a short period. Welsh-medium education in this context faces conflicting parental response: some parents desire more use of English, others seek to maintain and strengthen Welsh. This may result in parents using the ERA to ensure the medium of education of their choice (see Ann Arbor Case). Welsh-speaking communities face an uncertain future but schools in Wales, as well as fulfilling standard educational commitments, make a vital but difficult sociolinguistic contribution to language maintenance and restoration
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(see Maori Language Revitalization; Australian Indigenous Languages). See also: Multilingualism; Canadian Language Education Policy; Irish Language Education Policy; Language Loyalty. Bibliography Baker C 1985 Aspects of Bilingualism in Wales. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Curriculum Council for Wales 1989 National Curriculum Welsh, CCW Advisory Paper 6. Curriculum Council for Wales, Cardiff Welsh Office 1989 Welsh for ages 5 to 16, Proposals of the Secretary of State for Wales. Welsh Office, Cathays Park, Cardiff Welsh Office 1998 Statistics of Education and Training in Wales: Schools 1998. Welsh Office, Cathays Park, Cardiff
Literacy and Oracy Literacy C. J. Daswani
The term literacy' has acquired connotations that go beyond its dictionary meaning of 'the state or condition of being literate'; the word 'literate' being used for a person who is able to read and write. In a very general sense this basic connotation of reading and writing remains, but in the contemporary context the additional connotations of the term derive from the changing demands made on literacy both in the industrialized and the developing world. In the industrialized countries more and more literate individuals are finding their literacy insufficient for the demands made on it both in the place of work and in civic life. In the developing countries, on the other hand, literacy derives its added connotation in the context of widespread illiteracy which continues to deprive a large number of people of the advantages that accrue through formal education. Strangely enough, the more recent specialized uses of literacy have led to newer coinages such as 'computer literacy' and 'legal literacy' which add further meaning connotations to the term. Imparting of literacy is no longer limited to the school and college curriculum. It is a concern in which the politician, the planner, the development economist, the social activist, and the social scientist all have a part to play. 1. No Single Definition The multiple connotations of literacy make it difficult, if not impossible, to find an acceptable definition of the term. Even the basic connotation of reading and writing does not help because there is no agreement on what abilities and knowledge would count as literacy. In other words, there is no agreement on the level(s) of literacy that need be achieved for a person to qualify as literate. This is because each society or culture determines specific levels of literacy competence which should be achieved by its members. To accommodate different cultural contexts and demands, the notion of 'functional literacy' has been introduced. A person is considered to be functionally
literate if s/he is able to carry out activities where a certain level of literacy is assumed to be necessary within the culture. However, the notion does not help in the measurement of literacy. No society requires uniform levels of literacy from all its members. Hence functional levels differ from one subgroup to another within the same culture, making it difficult for setting up norms of achievement. It is difficult enough to measure levels of literacy or functional literacy within one cultural context, it is impossible to establish norms that will provide comparative assessment across cultures. A part of the difficulty of definition comes from the fact that some scholars view literacy in the sociocultural perspective, while others view it as a measurable phenomenon in terms of specific skills and abilities. Although no single acceptable definition of literacy is available at present, there is clearly a need for a broad consensus on what literacy is. Only a clearer definition of the concept will ensure worldwide agreement and action. 2. Levels of Literacy There is very little empirical research on levels of literacy. In the area of adult literacy, in fact, there is no reliable study to indicate the levels of literacy that adults can or should achieve. There is, however, some theoretical literature, supported by limited research, in the area of reading levels achieved within the formal educational system in the school and college. It must be pointed out that even these studies relate to specific cultural contexts. Generally six reading levels or stages are identified which a child masters through the school and college, beginning with the prereading stage and ending with the mature and expert reading stage. Normally the formal school learner takes 12 years at school and several years at college to cover the entire range of reading abilities. The first three stages of reading coincide roughly with the first three grades in school. In these stages
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The Social Context the learner progresses from prereading to decoding through to fluency. At this level the reader is able to read what s/he already knows in terms of both language and knowledge. At the fourth stage of reading, which corresponds with school grades 4 to 8, the reader is able to use his reading ability to acquire new knowledge. Through this stage the reader is able to gradually cope with texts that are complicated and carry new information. During reading stage five, corresponding to high school grades 9 to 12, the reader acquires the ability to read a range of complex materials critically. In the final stage which begins at college and goes beyond, the reader becomes a mature reader, able to read for a variety of purposes—professional, personal, and civic.
It is therefore difficult to assess the direction and rate of progression in the case of adult readers. Another problem arises from the paucity of tests for measuring adult reading success. While many measurement tools exist for measuring school and college level reading abilities, scientifically devised tests for measuring adult reading achievements are almost nonexistent. Part of the reason for the lack of tests for adults stems from the reluctance to subject adult learners to formal achievement tests of any kind. However, there is general agreement that for durable reading abilities, adult learners need to achieve reading levels equivalent to grade 12 of the school reading grades. An adult reader who achieves reading abilities of grade 8 is perhaps functional but not a mature reader.
3. Childhood and Adult Literacy
Children normally require 12 years (of grade school) to master reading at a level where they are able to comprehend complex texts and to make inferences. The progression from prereading to grade 12 reading is slow. Children take up to 3 years to acquire reading abilities to read texts that are within their own vocabulary range. To be able to read texts using new words and knowledge takes much longer. In the early stages the child reader is able to read words that are common, familiar, concrete, and short. The sentences are simple and the ideas and concepts in the text are common and concrete. As the reader progresses to higher reading stages, the vocabulary becomes more difficult, unfamiliar, and abstract. The sentences become longer and complex, and the ideas and concepts more abstract. The beginning reader has limited world knowledge. As they progress through the reading stages they acquires newer knowledge which facilitates higher reading abilities. Does the adult reader progress through the same reading stages as a child does? There is no clear answer to this question. Some experts believe that the progression for the child and the adult reader is essentially the same. It is true that an adult reader has a larger vocabulary and more world knowledge. Yet the adult goes through the same stages of reading ability as the child. It has been argued that adults may achieve the initial reading stages of prereading, decoding, and fluency faster than children, but reading with critical comprehension takes much longer despite the knowledge base of the adult reader. Other experts believe that adults (and children) have to be imparted new knowledge and concepts before they can become fluent readers. One of the major problems arises from the fact that all adults who need to acquire reading (or literacy) skills do not begin at the same level. Some adults (in some cultures) may have acquired basic literacy skills which they have forgotten or which are no longer functional in their contexts. In other situations, the adult learners may have had no prior literacy training. 160
4. Reading and Writing
Although skills of reading and writing must be seen as equally significant in acquisition of literacy, most studies on literacy focus mainly on reading. Consequently, while a considerable amount of data is available on the acquisition of reading both by children and adults, not enough is known about the acquisition of writing skills. It is nevertheless the case that a large number of studies on reading provide some insights in the graphological aspects of writing systems. Such studies relate to the measurement of difficulties faced by beginning readers in recognition of written symbols. For instance, children's memorization of letters and their combinations in words is influenced by the shapes of letters. Such problems are relatable to the kind of script or writing system employed by a particular language. However, the problems of recognition of letters or characters are significantly different from those of reproduction when a beginning learner has to write the shapes of letters or characters. It is generally believed that children find it easier to recognize letters and characters but find it difficult to write them. Most researchers on acquisition of writing skills concentrate on the problems faced by children. There is very little information on how adults acquire writing skills. Some researchers working in this area have studied the compositional and rhetorical aspects of writing rather than the purely motor aspects of reproduction of letters or characters. There is some evidence that in addition to the motor act of producing a written text, a learner has to acquire a set of conventions and norms for discourse production; norms which are culturally determined and differ from one cultural group to another. Even these studies deal with writing skills of children and adolescents. In several adult literacy programs measurable goals of reading and writing are specified and an adult illiterate is declared to have become literate only when he demonstrates his ability to read and write according to the specified norms. However, there is no systematic
Literacy research on the problems an adult encounters in acquiring these skills.
that in some contexts the learners demand literacy in a second or foreign language for its prestige in the total communication network.
5. Literacy and Language
It is generally agreed that literacy levels are linked to language competence. At the same time there is some evidence to show that literacy practice leads to better language control and critical thinking. Most literacy programs begin with what the learner knows of their language. A child is said to know about 5000 words in its mother tongue before beginning to learn how to read. On becoming literate, they learn to recognize known words in print. Gradually, with the help of known words, they learn new and unknown words while reading at higher levels. In the process s/he also learns to comprehend more complex language structure used in higher level texts. It has been demonstrated that vocabulary range and reading abilities are interlinked. The adult learner may have the initial advantage, over the young learner, of a larger vocabulary and more complex grammatical structure. But the mutual advancement of literacy and language control operates equally in the case of the adult. Critical reasoning is enhanced with higher reading abilities. It is universally accepted that literacy is best imparted in the mother tongue. This is not difficult to appreciate because when literacy is in the mother tongue, the learner is merely acquiring the new skills of reading and writing without having to master new language structure and vocabulary. However, in many situations literacy is imparted in a language other than the mother tongue of the learner. This is especially so in the case of adults who have to acquire literacy skills in a language not their own, as in the case of immigrants. In many multilingual countries children often have to learn to read and write in a language that is not their mother tongue. In such cases the rate of literacy learning is impeded since the learners do not control the language of literacy. Similar problems may also arise in situations where children speak a nonstandard dialect at home and are taught to read and write in the school through the standard language. In Third World countries where large populations of adult illiterates have to be taught literacy, the choice of the language of literacy becomes very important. In most cases the adult illiterates may be speakers of unwritten languages and dialects which are used for limited in-group oral communication. The goal of literacy in such situations is to enable the adults to function effectively in the larger contexts of work and development. The language in such contexts is invariably the regional or national standard language which may not even be related to the mother tongue of the learner. The willingness to become literate in a second or foreign language correlates with the attitudes of the learner and the community. It is known
6. Literacy and Oracy
The relationship between the oral and literate modes of language is not easy to understand. Cognitively as well as pedagogically the oral mode is said to depend on the skills of listening and speaking, and the literate mode on the skills of reading and writing. But the skill correlation is not all. There are other complex relationships between the oral mode or oracy and the literate mode or literacy. It has been argued by some that development of oracy and literacy both follow universal laws of learning as well as universal principles of language learning. In such a view oracy and literacy are seen as varieties of language behavior and, hence, both are believed to share many patterns which should be evident in the processes in which oracy and literacy are acquired. The argument, that there are many speech communities without a written mode of communication, is not considered valid, for it is claimed that if they were to become literate the acquisition of literacy in such communities would follow the same path as in other literate cultures. There is also the opposite opinion that literacy is not a universal of human life. According to this view literacy is not governed by cognitive universals which develop naturally without any special environment. Even in literate communities, many individuals remain illiterate, which would point to literacy not being parallel to oracy. It is also noted that human beings acquire oracy during the initial stages of biological and cognitive development while literacy requires a special environment. However, it may also be mentioned that there are instances when children who have become removed from human language during their infancy have failed to acquire oracy. There is also a viewpoint that every language community determines the domains in which oracy and literacy may operate, either separately or in conjunction with each other. In fact, both oracy and literacy in themselves reflect a great deal of variety much like different language styles. In other words, in any given communication situation an individual not only has the choice between the oral or literate mode, but within each has several choices which are governed by the total communication setting. If oracy and literacy are interlinked, it is worth noting that as literacy has gained during the twentieth century, oracy has declined. Many cultures that had vibrant oral traditions have become marginalized in the face of increased value given to literacy. Strangely enough, limited oracy has never attracted as much attention as limited literacy has since World War II. The linguist has, unfortunately, not paid as much attention to literacy as they might have. For the lin161
The Social Context guist speech or oracy has remained the main focus. The psycholinguist, and in some measure the sociolinguist, have addressed the problem of literacy more than the linguist has. 7. Literacy and Illiteracy Many countries in the Third World have chosen to link economic development to literacy. Following the example of the industrialized countries many of these developing countries have opted for universal literacy as a goal in their effort to evolve egalitarian and industrialized societies. Many of these countries have traditional cultures where literacy has limited and specific functions, and literacy has been the domain of a small number of individuals in the community. To attain the goal of universal literacy in such cultures is not easy. Illiterate adults in such societies do not readily perceive the benefits of literacy. Nevertheless, the models of development adopted by these countries require some level of literacy. While many of these societies are slowly moving in the direction of increased childhood literacy, the adult population continues to make up the bulk of the illiterates. Unfortunately, in the absence of universal elementary and high school education, the number of illiterate adults has continually grown. In many of these countries the educated and political elites have sought to bring about a change in the literacy situation through what are known as literacy campaigns. Many of these countries perceive illiteracy as a disease which must be eradicated. Such campaigns are launched with a great deal of fervor and commitment. However, it is not clear how such campaigns can actually end illiteracy. Often the methodologies employed are more to engender motivation for literacy rather than ensure literacy skills amongst the illiterate learners. Also, functional literacy, rather than higher literacy, is the goal of such campaigns. There is very little research data to make any claims on behalf of such campaigns. It is not known how far such campaigns succeed, and more importantly, whether the newly literate adults are able to utilize their skills. Often, there is relapse into illiteracy since either the new literate does not find his skills of use in his cultural context, or the skills acquired have not been of the order where automaticity has been achieved. As with other kinds of skill learning, stable literacy is achieved only when the learners achieve levels beyond the basic levels. 8. World Literacy Literacy is a global issue. The Appendix to this article provides basic statistical information about world literacy, reproduced, with permission, from the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1991. The industrialized countries are concerned about their citizens who do not have enough literacy to cope with the increasing demands made on literacy by tech162
nology. The number of people who cannot advance in their careers for want of functional literacy is on the increase. In the developing countries, however, the literacy figures are far below those in the industrialized world. The concern in these countries is with universal elementary education. The illiteracy figures in some of these countries are above 50 percent. While the school literacy figures are slowly mounting in these countries, on account of rapid population growth the absolute number of illiterate adults is ever growing. According to estimates the total number of adult illiterates will touch the one billion mark by the end of the twentieth century. Most of these illiterates will be in the developing countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. The paradox the world faces is that while in the highly literate societies in the industrialized world the levels of literacy are not high enough, in the developing world not enough people have acquired even basic literacy levels. Identifiable sections of the society in these countries have traditionally been outside the pale of literacy and continue to be so. In many developing countries women do not receive formal education because their roles in society are not literacy-dependent. Developing countries have set themselves the goal of achieving universal literacy in their struggle for economic self-dependence. Yet, there is no evidence that literacy alone is a critical determinant in economic development. In the global context literacy should be seen as one of the factors in achieving a world order which ensures human rights to all. Literacy is a component in the movement of education for all. Most countries in the world are committed to ensuring that all children and adults should have access to education for better and effective participation in their chosen fields of activity in their cultures. 9. Future of Literacy
While both the industrialized and the developing countries strive for world literacy, the future of literacy continues to be full of paradoxes and contradictions. In the industrialized world the present concern is with coping with the high literacy demands of a technologically oriented society. At the same time, technology itself is likely to take on some of the demands on literacy, making it possible for people to function at lower levels of literacy. In the developing countries the goal of universal literacy entails increased outlays on education. At the same time the developing societies have not changed enough to accommodate the concommitant sociocultural impact of universal literacy. The question that arises is: will a fully literate world be without stratification? The chances are that even if all human beings are made literate, there will always
Literacy
Figure 1. Developing countries illiterate population aged 15 years and over (in millions).
be markers of individual and group differences. Language has always played a major role in the creation and maintenance of such distinctions. The impact of literacy in the near future can be very significant. The role of the educator, the social scientist and the policy-maker will become more crucial for finding common and acceptable solutions to problems of literacy. For the linguist literacy studies may provide meaningful insights into the structure of the human mind, language universals, and the relationship between oracy and literacy. APPENDIX (reproduced with kind permission from The UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1991. UNESCO, Paris)
Literacy: Trends and Prospects at the World and Regional Level 1. Significant Facts • Of the 4294 million inhabitants aged 15 and over living on our planet in 2000, almost 1 billion, or 21.8 percent will know neither how to read nor to write. • Between 1970 and 1985 the number of illiterates grew by approximately 59 million. Since 1985, the number has remained stable, and there should only be a slight decrease by 2000. • Relatively speaking, compared to the adult population, this stability in the number of illiteratesxmeans a decrease in the rate of illiteracy: 38.5 percent in 1970, 26.5 percent in 1990 and 21.8 percent in 2000. • Almost all the illiterate population is found, indeed, will continue to be found, in the developing countries: 917 million in 1990 or 34.9 percent of the adult population in these countries. • At least according to its simplest definition (the inability to read and write a simple text), the amount of illiteracy in developed countries can be considered as negligible: less than 5 percent of the adult population. It is therefore preferable, and more appropriate, in terms of numerical importance, to concentrate the analysis of illiteracy on developing countries. 2. The Developing Countries • In 1990 in the developing countries taken as a whole, 35 of every 100 adults are illiterate; this
Table I. Total and illiterate population aged 15 years and over (in millions).
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The Social Context Table 2. Illiteracy rates by sex (%).
proportion which was above 50 percent in 1970 could decrease to 28 percent in 2000. Taking the least developed countries on their own, the size of the illiteracy rate will not decrease very quickly and in 2000 one of every 2 adults will still be illiterate in these countries. The numerical predominance of Eastern Asian and Southern Asian developing countries is evident: 677 million illiterates in 1990, that is, 71 percent of the world's total, a relative figure which should last until the year 2000. If these two subregions are considered separately, Eastern Asian countries will experience a drop in the number of illiterates and in the rate of illiteracy, to 23.8 percent in 1990 and 17.2 percent by the year 2000. Of course, this evolution is mainly attributable to demographic trends and the development of schooling in China which, because of its size, is predominant in this subregion. In Southern Asia, where demographically important countries are also to be found, one adult out of two is illiterate; despite a significant decrease between 1985 and the year 2000, the illiteracy rate (45.9 percent) will still be higher than in all other regions. Sub-Saharan Africa in 1990 will have 139 million illiterate inhabitants, representing more than 14 percent of the world's total. Concerning the adult population, here as in Southern Asia, one adult out of two is illiterate. However, if the trends revealed by this assessment are confirmed, this 164
region's illiteracy rate will experience the largest decrease: 40.3 percent in the year 2000 as opposed to 59.2 percent in 1985. • Although the 61 million illiterates in the Arab States account for only 6 percent of the world total, they represent nearly 50 percent of the adult population of this group of countries. As in the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, this rate should drop sharply to 38 percent by the year 2000. • Lastly of the developing countries, the region of Latin America and the Caribbean has the smallest number of illiterates and the lowest illiteracy rate, that is, only 11.5 percent by the year 2000. • In terms of perspectives for the year 2000, these figures indicate that although the illiteracy rates will drop to a relatively low level in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in Eastern Asia, the magnitude of the problem will persist in other regions (Southern Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab States). 3. Illiteracy by Sex • Invariably women represent the largest share of the illiterate population and will continue to do so. As shown in Table 2, in 1990 for the developing countries taken as a whole, the female illiteracy rate is 45 percent compared with 25.1 percent for males. The disparities vary however, between the different groups of countries. • The smallest disparity occurs in Latin America and the Caribbean where the rate for females is gradually catching up with that for males.
Literacy
Figure 2. Developing countries' illiteracy rates by sex (%).
• Although the illiteracy rates in Eastern Asia are generally smaller than in the other regions the disparity between the sexes is higher than in any other region apart from Latin America and the Caribbean: the rate for females (33.6 percent) is more than twice that for males (14.3 percent). • In Sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab States and Southern Asia the female illiteracy rates are presently above 60 percent while the rate for males varies between 35 percent and 41 percent. If current trends continue, in 2000 one female adult out of two will still be illiterate in these three regions. In Southern Asia the projected female illiteracy rate for 2000 will still be higher than that observed for males 30 years earlier in 1970. 4. Illiteracy by Age The amount of illiteracy varies a great deal between the different generations. Table 3 attempts to illustrate this phenomenon by presenting illiteracy rates by age group in developing countries. The base data have been divided into four age groups of different sizes: 15 to 19 years, 20 to 24 years, 25 to 44 years, 45 years and over. • Of course the older generations have the highest illiteracy rates as they have not profited from the possibilities of schooling given only recently to the younger generations. Unless present trends are altered by an intensive effort to educate adults, the illiteracy rate of persons aged 45 and over risks to stay at a high level until 2000, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab States and Southern Asia: women in this age group will
be particularly affected by this situation with an illiteracy rate of around 80 percent in 2000. There have been important reductions (in some cases substantial) in the illiteracy rates for the age groups 15-19 years and 20-24 years over the last 20 years and this should continue until 2000. This is the result of the great efforts made since 1960 in most of the developing countries to enroll children in primary school. Fig. 3 clearly shows both the expected decrease in the illiteracy rates for the youngsters aged 15-19 years and the decrease in the disparity between the male and the female rates. The decreases are most important in the three regions which had very high illiteracy rates (especially for females) in 1970. For example, the illiteracy rate for females aged 15-19 years in the Arab States decreased by half between 1970 (70.5 percent) and 1990 (36.0 percent) and could decrease even further to 26.6 percent in 2000. The female illiteracy rate for the age group 1519 years in Eastern Asia (a region which still has large disparities between the sexes in the global rate aged 15 + ) has rapidly decreased and by 2000 should be at about the same level as Latin America and the Caribbean. As for males, the illiteracy rate for the age group 15-19 years has always been lower in Eastern Asia than in the other regions. In some regions (sub-Saharan Africa, Arab States, Southern Asia), the illiteracy rate for the age group 15-19 years projected for 2000 seems to be still very high and disturbing (over 20 percent). There is always the possibility that such trends could be changed following educational plans and policies decided as part of the program concerning education for all.
Figure 3. Illiteracy rates in the age group 15 to 19 years in the developing countries (%).
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The Social Context Table 3. Adult illiteracy rates by age group in developing countries (%).
Bibliography Bhola H S 1984 Campaigning for Literacy Eight National Experiences of the Twentieth Century, with a memorandum to decision makers. UNESCO, Paris Gray W S 1956 The Teaching of Reading and Writing. UNESCO, Paris
UNESCO 1985 The Current Literacy Situation in the World. UNESCO, Paris UNESCO 1991 The UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1991. UNESCO, Paris Wagner D 1987 The Future of Literacy in a Changing World. Pergamon, Oxford
Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness M. Herriman
Metalinguistic awareness is an awareness of language at the metalevel, which means being able to see language as a formal system complete in itself and separate from the world of events and objects it usually describes. Simple examples of metalinguistic awareness can be seen when a child recognizes that a word is an arbitrary complex of sounds not inherently related to its referent(s), or that one can actually talk about words and word properties. The metalinguistic level of discussion is often denoted by the use of single quotation marks, as in the expression; 'the word "word" has four letters.' Metalinguistic awareness emerges at a
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definable stage in the child's acquisition of language and appears to be causally implicated in learning to read and write (see Reading: Acquisition). Development of subsequent language skills and success at schooling is related to continued growth of metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic awareness may also enhance cognitive functioning via the means it provides of expressing thought and reflecting on its products. 1. Early Literacy The school is nowadays regarded as the main agency for teaching literacy. This is probably because uni-
Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness versal education, which previously meant elementary education, had as its goal the teaching of reading and writing. Research has shown that the home and the community are also important macrostructures in the acquisition of literacy (see Home and School Language). However, their role in supporting literacy may be confined to the early years of schooling. Yet even where school, home, and community play a role in early literacy acquisition there are many cases where students fail to achieve more than a basic level in reading and writing, and some fail altogether (see Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention). Research by Tunmer, et al. (1988) and Adams (1990) has indicated that certain abilities associated with metalinguistic awareness are a prerequisite for acquiring the skills necessary for the complex tasks involved in reading. These may include the ability to decode and recode phonemes and phoneme groups and to recognize their various possible representations in the written form (see Reading: Early). 2. Later Literacy
Schooling in the 1990s, especially in the higher grades, requires more than the basic decoding abilities associated with reading and writing, for its completion. The successful student must be able to comprehend and use a formal code of written expression in several different disciplines. This code is seldom explicitly taught or commented on. Moreover the attention paid to formal language instruction in high school is minimal; in most systems it is gradually reduced from about the third grade onwards (but see Language Awareness). Additionally much of the language found outside the classroom, especially in the dominant media, but also in literature itself, is characterized by forms of expression derived from the oral mode. The student thus encounters two codes; one speech-based (the transactional language of the classroom), the other text-based (the language of instruction and the school text) (see Textbooks; Language Across the Curriculum). For most students and many teachers this is a difference of which they are not explicitly aware. There are important educational consequences of the debate about the distinctiveness of formal or academic text. For some, text and speech are regarded as continuous, and a deliberate program of fostering speech-based (real-life) modes of communication in the classroom is encouraged. The argument for the continuity of text and speech is based on a sociolinguistic viewpoint which identifies language as primarily a social artifact. It has also gained considerable support from speech-act theory, which looks at the social function and intention of speech. Neither view provides grounds for denying the autonomy of academic text however. It is, of course, possible to make the transactional and the instructional language of the classroom continuous by simple adoption of oral
language conventions (see Classroom Language). However such a move would not only deny the student access to key texts in the disciplines, but also prevent the development of text styles required for the expression of knowledge in tests and examinations. 3. The Languages of Written Text and Spoken Utterance The question of the distinction between written text and speech-based language is therefore important. The strongest claim for the autonomy of text has been made by Olson (1977). Although his view has been modified (Olson 1991) by recognition of oral language structures which perform functions analogous to those identified for formal text, the argument for the distinctiveness of formal text in terms of the structures it engages, still stands. It relies on recognizing the historical development of English prose during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly in natural philosophy. Writers of the time developed an argumentative prose style based not on the English vernacular, but rather on the model of Latin—the language more familiar to scientific, legal, and metaphysical writings throughout Europe—which consequently formed the basis for the syntax and lexicon of formal prose. This formal style of text has been preserved in English, although some simplification has occurred. Academic text has also preserved a Latin and Greek derived vocabulary which marks it distinctively. This vocabulary can be seen in the technical terminology of this article, for example. Students's access to text forms is critical because it is the means by which society generates, structures, and justifies knowledge. 4. Formal Features of Written Academic English An examination of the academic text style of contemporary disciplines shows the formal features of text which reflect its logical purposes, a characteristic which Olson refers to as its argumentative capacity. The style embodies logical devices which enable inference, deduction, hypothesis formation, concept formation, and the expression of existentiality, conjunction, opposition, and qualification by means of modals, conditionals, counterfactuals, and quantifiers. Utterances exhibiting argumentative styles are of course possible in speech, which has specific conventions for direct exposition, but extended examples such as speeches and lectures are normally based on written language models. Most people required to give a formal speech would write it first. The properties of academic text—notably its tightness of syntax, nonrepetitiveness (nonredundancy), syntactic balance, linearity, thematic development, and relative freedom of context—contrast with the properties of utterance, which does not necessarily require any of the above and in some cases gains power from repetition, inventiveness, nonlinearity and looseness of syntax (i.e., 167
The Social Context violations which are semantically noncritical). A person aware of these distinctions and able to apply them to comprehension and production of academic text has a high level of metalinguistic awareness. 5. Metalinguistic Awareness and Metalinguistic Abilities
Metalinguistic awareness understood as the ability to make language an object of conscious reflection seems to emerge in early middle childhood (from 5 to 7 years). The use of the term first appears in the work of Cazden (1974). Its initial manifestation is usually in the child's awareness of the lexical and phonological components of speech itself (represented, for example, in remarks about puns and rhymes) and then in an awareness of its syntactic and pragmatic features. Though they lack the linguistic terminology, children exhibit the ability to apply linguistic strategies at these levels. Many of the tasks they are suddenly able to perform, such as phonemic segmentation or sorting well-formed from non-well-formed strings of words, appear analogous to tasks mastered at the Piagetian concrete operational stage (see Language Acquisition; Piaget, Jean). It is normally at this stage that elementary schooling begins and children become acquainted with reading, which requires recognition of the print-encoding of morphophonemic and morphosyntactic structures of speech (see Tunmer, et al. 1988). Reading probably has a reciprocal relationship with emerging metalinguistic abilities and in ideal situations the interaction may benefit the child for the rest of elementary school (see Literacy: Phonological Awareness). In most school systems however there is no deliberate program which would treat the child's language needs as an elaboration of the language-that he or she brings to school (but see School Language Policies). Rather, there has been a tendency in many systems to avoid prereading instruction in kindergarten. An exception to this was found in the former Soviet Union where there was recognition of the need for formal language study throughout schooling as a consequence of the research of Vygotsky and his followers. A carefully planned program introduced children to an awareness of speech, its verbal componential nature, and social purposes, and from there subsequently, to the nature and purposes of print into which speech can be encoded. Such a program which draws attention to linguistic strategies at the metalevel, should contribute to metalinguistic awareness. Much of present practice in early schooling shows an implicit acceptance of the view that the language the child comes to school with is not only that which is to become the object of literate knowledge, but is sufficient for that purpose. This view would be contested by the research findings of Karmiloff-Smith (1979). Contrary to the formerly held but untested assumption that most language development was 168
complete by the age of 5, it is seen that the more complex and subtle grammatical structures are not acquired until later in childhood. This mastery is not an accretional process, but rather proceeds by steps. Karmiloff-Smith also sees later language development as related to cognitive development. The later-mastered syntactic forms are precisely the linguistic forms which characterize academic text and the expression of argumenj; forms in most subject matter of schooling, yet little explicit instruction is given that would aid the child in understanding the metalinguistic basis of the cognitive and linguistic task confronted in later years of schooling. 6. Literacy as Developed Metalinguistic Awareness
It has been seen that the formal text-based nature of much of school learning necessitates the child's proficiency in handling text forms and recognizing situations which require the formal mode for their expression. The meta-awareness implicit in the notion of metalinguistic awareness will allow this proficiency to develop but it must still be asked what linguistic knowledge-base is appropriate to the manipulation of various text forms. Literacy has historically been associated with the notion of letters—in this case not simply the knowledge of alphabetic characters but rather the ability to find the appropriate combinations of them to formulate unique and revealing means of expression. A metaawareness of language will bring these forms to conscious attention, but additionally a set of structural descriptions is needed to talk about the forms. The traditional language of grammarians is probably unsuited to the task because it is based on superficial structural features of language. Advances in linguistics provide more suitable structural models for representing linguistic phenomena. There is no reason why children in elementary school should not be taught a technical vocabulary to identify those linguistic objects which are the focus of their metalinguistic awareness at any particular stage of learning. In fact it is only when children come to use some metalinguistic vocabulary (e.g., 'word,' 'letter,' 'sound,' etc.) that they can analyze their metalinguistic knowledge. Knowledge of the names of parts of speech and linguistic structures (use of terms such as 'phoneme,' 'morpheme,' 'phrase,' etc.) will enable them to discuss syntactic and stylistic aspects of language as well as reflect on their own written work. Acquaintance with metalinguistic vocabulary represents a more developed form of metalinguistic awareness. This is akin to the level of knowledge possessed by the bilingual person who at least has access to different representations of the same or equivalent forms (at the syntactic or lexical level) in each language even if the vocabulary to represent it abstractly is not known.
Literacy: Phonological Awareness Literacy then may be seen as developed metalinguistic awareness and although much of this awareness is natural in that it is part of an awareness or knowledge drawn from ordinary language experience, there are good reasons for adopting a specific program of teaching for its attainment. Knowledge of the structure and function of language may stand in the same relation to literacy that mathematics does to numeracy. It thus invites the same reasons for its teaching. The fact that many people never achieve the level of personal literacy that will allow them to succeed in study or careers suggests the need for a continued program of language teaching throughout schooling with an emphasis on metalinguistic awareness and its application to the language of formal text. That would require not simply a program of language use, but a program which encourages thought about language. The benefit of learning another language also cannot be overstated. Opposition in the late twentieth century to the idea of mother-tongue language teaching comes not from a rejection of the above ideas but from a view that language sufficient for educational success will be naturally acquired. The status of this claim is as dubious as the assumption that language learning is virtually complete by the time the child comes to school—neither has empirical support. 7. The Consequences of Literacy Possession of developed metalinguistic awareness will not only benefit a person's ability to comprehend and produce the language of the text forms encountered in schools, but will have consequences for the language of speech, and cognition. Knowledge of the language of various text forms can be used to develop the language of utterance and refine it in such a way as to increase its expressive power. Speech, being spontaneous and ephemeral, is less subject to the checks and rechecking that are applied to formal text. The ability to analyze one's written language and refine or modify it may be applied to oral language at the level of thought. Rhetoric traditionally taught this skill.
While cognition may not be directly the outcome of knowledge of language at the metalevel it is clear that the products of thought can be revealed by precise expression in language. Awareness of the varieties of language forms enables the expression of exact meaning or differentiation of fine shades of meaning. The text-aware reader will draw upon the formal devices of text in reading it, just as the writer with developed metalinguistic awareness will be able to represent a range of options of expression, perhaps writing each down, in order to choose the most appropriate one. Acquaintance with the various argument forms typical of academic text (see Sect. 4) will give access to the forms of thought embodied in those forms and in this way enhance cognition. See also: Literacy. Bibliography Adams M J 1990 Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Cazden C B 1974 Play with language and metalinguistic awareness: One dimension of language experience. The Urban Review 7:28-39 Herriman M L 1986 Metalinguistic awareness and the growth of literacy. In: de Castell S, Luke A, Egan K (eds.) Literacy, Society, and Schooling. Cambridge University Press, New York Karmiloff-Smith A 1979 Language development after five. In: Fletcher P, Garman M (eds.) Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Olson D R 1977 From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Education Review 47: 25781 Olson D R 1991 Literacy as metalinguistic activity. In: Olson D R, Torrance N (eds.) Literacy and Orality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA Tunmer W E, Herriman M L 1984 The development of metalinguistic awareness: A conceptual overview. In: Tunmer W E, Pratt C, Herriman M L (eds.) Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness in Children: Theory, Research and Implications. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Tunmer W E, Herriman M L, Nesdale A R 1988 Metalinguistic abilities and beginning reading. Reading Research Quarterly 23(2): 134-58
Literacy: Phonological Awareness P. E. Bryant
Most literate people (or at any rate people who read and write an alphabetic script) are well aware that words and syllables consist of smaller units of sound. This form of awareness is usually called 'phonological awareness,' and there is a strong possibility that it plays an essential role in learning to read. Alphabetic
letters typically represent phonemes, and it seems likely therefore that in order to be able to read and write words alphabetically children must understand how words consist of separate phonemes. The importance of phonological awareness has been questioned by some educationalists who advocate teaching
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The Social Context methods which are not phonological in nature (Chall 1967; Smith 1978) (see Reading Teaching: Methods), but evidence makes it clear that there is a strong connection between children's sensitivity to sounds and their success in reading and writing. This evidence takes five forms. First, it has been shown in many studies that there is a strong correlation between children's sensitivity to the sounds in words and their success in reading and writing. This relation holds even after stringent controls for differences in intelligence, vocabulary and social class, and it is specific to reading: children's phonological scores are not related in the same way to other educational skills such as arithmetical ones. In some studies, measures of children's sensitivity to sound taken some time before they begin to read predict their eventual success in reading very well (Goswami and Bryant 1990). Second, it was shown some time ago that it is possible to teach children to recognize the constituent sounds in words (Zhurova 1973) and it is now clear that extra teaching of this sort can cause children to read more successfully (Bryant and Bradley 1985; Lundberg et al. 1988). Third, many dyslexic people (people whose reading falls far behind their other intellectual attainments) are strikingly insensitive to phonological segments (Ellis 1984; Snowling 1987) (see Reading Difficulties). Fourth, people who have not had the chance to learn an alphabetic script also do very poorly in tests of phonological awareness: illiterate Portuguese peasants, Chinese adults who have learned only the logographic Chinese orthography and Japanese 8year-olds whose phonological experience in reading is with a syllabary (kana), all produce remarkably low scores in tasks in which they have to identify the phonemes in simple words (Read 1971; Mann 1986; Moraisetal. 1986). Fifth, beginners clearly use sound-letter rules when they write and often do so in a more literal way than older and more tutored children: a child who writes 'halpt' for 'helped' shows a rather precise awareness of the last phoneme in that word (see Spelling: Invented). The connection between phonological awareness and reading raises a controversial causal question. Some claim that children become aware of the constituent sounds in words before they learn to read and that the extent of their phonological awareness affects their progress in reading (Bryant and Bradley 1985). Others argue that children acquire the kind of phonological awareness that is involved in reading as a direct result of being taught to read (Content et al. 1982). The question is an important one because it directly affects educational policy. According to the first view, steps should be taken to encourage children's phonological awareness in the preschool years; according to the second, the formal teaching of reading should be concentrated on, which itself will produce the necessary awareness of sounds. 170
Both views receive some support from the evidence already mentioned. The predictive power of measures of phonological awareness taken before children begin to read is evidence for the first view. On the other hand the fact that people who have not learned an alphabetic script do badly in phonological tests shows that the experience of learning an alphabetic script does foster sensitivity to phonemes. The solution to this apparent conflict almost certainly lies in the size of the phonological unit involved. The preschool measures which predict children's success in reading consist mainly of tests of their ability to detect rhyme and alliteration. Such tests are relatively easy for preschool children. Alliteration and rhyme are phonological phenomena because alliterative words and words which rhyme share a phonological segment. But that segment often contains more than one phoneme: cat and hat have two sequential phonemes in common. In striking contrast, young children are usually completely at sea in tasks in which they have to detect single phonemes. It is therefore quite likely (a) that children are aware of rhyme and alliteration before they read and that this form of awareness affects their reading, presumably by helping them to understand that words which have sounds in common often have common spelling patterns as well (e.g., light, fight, night etc.); and (b) that the experience of being taught to read is one of the main reasons why children eventually acquire the ability to isolate single phonemes. Rhyming sounds are 'intrasyllabic' in that they are usually units somewhere between a syllable and a phoneme. For some time now linguists (Halle and Vergnaud 1980) have suggested that people naturally divide syllables into two main intrasyllabic speech units, the 'onset' which represents the opening consonant or consonant cluster and the 'rime' which consists of the vowel sound and any following consonant. Thus, c is the onset and at the rime of cat', str the onset and ing the rime of string. It has been established that young children (Treiman 1983, 1985; Kirtley et al. 1989) as well as adults find it easier to divide words into these units than in other ways. This evidence is particularly interesting given the strong connection between sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration and reading. Alliterative words share a common onset and rhyming words a common rime. These basic speech units almost certainly provide the basis for the child's first understanding of alphabetic spelling patterns. See also: Reading: Theories. Bibliography Bryant P E, Bradley L 1985 Children's Reading Problems. Blackwell, Oxford Chall J S 1967 Learning to Read: The Great Debate. McGrawHill, New York; updated edn. 1983 Content A, Morals J, Alegria J, Bertelson P 1982 Acceler-
Literacy: Research and Method ating the development of phonetic segmentation skills in kindergartners. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive 2:259-69 Ellis A W 1984 Reading, Writing and Dyslexia. Erlbaum, London Halle M, Vergnaud J 1980 Three-dimensional phonology. Journal of Linguistic Research 1: 83-105 Goswami U, Bryant P 1990 Phonological Skills and Learning to Read. Erlbaum, London Kirtley C, Bryant P, MacLean M, Bradley L 1989 Rhyme, rime and the onset of reading. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 48:224-45 Lundberg I, Frost J, Petersen O 1988 Effects of an extensive program for stimulating phonological awareness in preschool children. Reading Research Quarterly 23: 263-84 Mann V A 1986 Phonological awareness: The role of reading experience. Cognition 24: 65-92
Morais J, Bertelson P, Cary L, Alegria J 1986 Literacy training and speech segmentation. Cognition 24:45-64 Read C 1971 Pre-school children's knowledge of English phonology. Harvard Educational Review 41: 1-34 Smith F 1982 Understanding Reading. Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, London Snowling M 1987 Dyslexia: A Cognitive Developmental Perspective. Blackwell, Oxford Treiman R 1983 The structure of spoken syllables: Evidence from novel word games. Cognition 15:49-74 Treiman R 1985 Onsets and rimes as units of spoken syllables: Evidence from children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 39:161-81 Zhurova 1 Ye 1973 The development of analysis of words into their sounds by preschool children. In: Ferguson C A, Slobin D I (eds.) Studies of Child Language Development. Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, New York
Literacy: Research and Method D. Wagner
Research on the causes and consequences of literacy and illiteracy has grown dramatically since the 1980s, yet much more needs to be known. Since there exists a great variety of literacy programs for an even larger number of sociocultural contexts, it should come as no surprise that the effectiveness of literacy programs has come under question, not only among policymakers and specialists, but also among the larger public. How effective are literacy campaigns? What is the importance of political and ideological commitment? Should writing and reading be taught together or separately? Should literacy programs include numeracy as well? Is literacy retained following a limited number of years of primary schooling or shortterm campaigns? How important are literacy skills for the workplace? Is it important to teach literacy in the individual's mother tongue? These and similar questions—so central to the core of literacy work around the world—remain without definitive answers, in spite of the occasionally strong rhetoric in support of one position or another. Basic and applied research, along with effective program evaluation, are capable of providing critical information that will not only lead to greater efficiency in particular literacy programs, but will also lead to greater public support of literacy programs. Research on literacy can reveal key policy areas which need to be addressed, as well as methodologies for assessment and monitoring which will be crucial in the coming years. This entry summarizes some of
the major areas of literacy research and measurement, and offers some critical areas for future examination. 1. Literacy Research in Global Perspective There are three general domains in literacy work that are likely to be the subject of greater attention in the year 2000 and beyond and will determine to a large extent whether attempts at improving global literacy will be successful. Each of these is reviewed below. 1.1 Defining Literacy: Operationalization for Measurement With the multitude of experts and published books on the topic, one would suppose that there would be a fair amount of agreement as to how to define the term 'literacy.' On the one hand, most specialists would agree that the term connotes aspects of reading and writing; on the other hand, major debates continue to revolve around such issues as what specific abilities or knowledge count as literacy, and what 'levels' can and should be defined for measurement. The term 'functional literacy' has often been employed, as originally defined by Gray (1956: 19): 'A person is functionally literate when he has acquired the knowledge and skills in reading and writing which enable him to engage effectively in all those activities in which literacy is normally assumed in his culture or group.' While functional literacy has a great deal of appeal because of its implied adaptability to a given cultural
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The Social Context context, the term can be very awkward for research purposes. For example, it is unclear in an industrialized nation like the UK what level of literacy should be required of all citizens. Does a coal miner have different needs than a barrister? Similarly, in a Third World country, does an illiterate woman need to learn to read and write in order to take her prescribed medicine correctly, or is it more functional (and costeffective) to have her school-going child read the instructions to her? The use of the term 'functional,' based on norms of a given society, is inadequate precisely because adequate norms are so difficult to establish. An adequate, yet more fluid, definition of literacy is '... a characteristic acquired by individuals in varying degrees from just above none to an indeterminate upper level. Some individuals are more or less literate than others, but it is really not possible to speak of literate and illiterate persons as two distinct categories' (UNESCO 1957). Since there exists dozens of orthographies for hundreds of languages in which innumerable context-specific styles are in use every day, it would seem ill-advised to select a universal operational definition. Attempts to use newspaper reading skills as a baseline (as in certain national surveys) may seriously underestimate literacy if the emphasis is on comprehension of text (especially if the text is a national language not well understood by the individual). Such tests may overestimate literacy if the individual is asked simply to read aloud the passage, with little or no attempt at the measurement of comprehension. Surprisingly, there have been relatively few attempts to design a battery of tests from low literacy ability to high ability which would be applicable across the complete range of possible languages and literacies in any society, such that a continuum of measurement possibilities might be achieved. UNESCO, which provides world-wide statistical comparisons of literacy, relies almost entirely on data provided by its member countries, even though the measures are often unreliable indicators of literacy ability. However, there have been new attempts in the 1990s to undertake literacy surveys in a comparative and international framework in some industrialized nations (OECD/Statistics Canada, 1995). At least part of the controversy over the definition of literacy lies in how people have attempted to study literacy. The methodologies chosen, which span the social sciences, usually reflect the disciplinary training of the investigator. Anthropologists provide in-depth ethnographic accounts of single communities, while trying to understand how literacy is woven into the fabric of community cultural life. By contrast, psychologists and educators have typically chosen to study measurable literacy abilities using tests and questionnaires, usually ignoring contextual and linguistic factors. Both these approaches (as well as history, linguistics, sociology, and computer science)
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have value in achieving an understanding of literacy. There is no easy resolution to this problem, but it is clear that a broad-based conception of literacy is required not only for a valid understanding of the term, but also for developing appropriate policy actions (Venezky et al. 1990). Because literacy is a cultural phenomenon— adequately defined and understood only within each culture in which it exists—it is not surprising that definitions of literacy may never be permanently fixed. Whether literacy includes computer skills, mental arithmetic, or civic responsibility will depend on how public and political leaders of each society define the term and its use. Researchers can help in this effort by trying to be clear about which definition or definitions they choose to employ in their work. For overviews of literacy in international context, see Wagner and Puchner (1992) and Wagner (1992). 1.2 Acquisition of Literacy The study of literacy acquisition has been greatly influenced by research undertaken in the industrialized world. Much of this research might be better termed the acquisition of reading and writing skills, with an emphasis on the relationship between cognitive skills, such as perception and memory, and reading skills, such as decoding and comprehension. Further, most of this work has been carried out with school-aged children, rather than with adolescents or adults. Surprisingly little research on literacy acquisition has been undertaken in the Third World, where researchers have focused primarily on adult acquisition rather than on children's learning to read. This latter phenomenon appears to be a result of the emphasis to promote adult literacy in the developing world, while usually ignoring such problems, until quite recently, in industrialized societies. Despite these gaps in the research literature, certain general statements are relatively well established as to how literacy is acquired across different societies. In 1973 Downing published Comparative Reading, which surveyed the acquisition of reading skills across different languages and orthographies. He found that mastery of the spoken language is a typical prerequisite for fluent reading comprehension in that language, although there exist many exceptions. Another finding is that in many alphabets children first learn to read by sounding out words with a memorized set of letter-sound correspondences. It is now known that there are many exceptions to this generalization. There are, of course, languages which are not written in alphabets (e.g., Chinese and Japanese). There also appear to be large individual differences in learning styles within literacy communities. Finally, many individuals can read and write languages which they may not speak fluently. Some specialists have stressed the importance of class structure and ethnicity/race as explications of
Literacy: Research and Method differential achievement among literacy learners. Ogbu (1978), for example, claimed that many minority children in the United States are simply unmotivated to learn to read and write in the cultural structure of the school. This approach to understanding social and cultural differences in literacy learning has received increased attention in that it avoids blaming the individual for specific cognitive deficits (as still happens), while focusing intervention strategies more on changes in the social and political structure of schooling or the society. Finally, it has been assumed that learning to read in one's 'mother tongue' or first language is always the best educational policy for literacy provision, whether for children or adults. Based on some important research studies undertaken in the 1960s, it has generally been taken for granted that individuals who have had to learn to read in a second language are at a disadvantage relative to others who learn in their mother tongue. While this generalization may still be true in many of the world's multilingual societies, more recent research has shown that there may be important exceptions. In one such study, it was found that Berber-speaking children who had to learn to read in Standard Arabic in Moroccan schools were able to read in fifth grade just as well as children who were native speakers of Arabic (Wagner 1993). Adequate research on nonliterate adults who learn to read in a second versus a first language has yet to be undertaken. In sum, considerable progress has been made in understanding the acquisition of literacy in children and adults, but primarily in industrialized societies. Far less is known about literacy acquisition in a truly global perspective, and in multilingual societies. Since the majority of nonliterate people live in these areas of the world, much more needs to be known if literacy provision is to be improved in the coming decades. 1.3 Retention of Literacy The term 'educational wastage' is common in the literature on international and comparative education, particularly with respect to the Third World. This term typically refers to the loss, usually by dropping out, of children who do not finish what is thought to be the minimum educational curriculum of a given country (often 5 to 8 years of primary schooling). Most specialists who work within this area gather data on the number of children who enter school each year, the number who progress on to the next grade, those who repeat a given year (quite common in many Third World countries), and those who quit school altogether. The concept of wastage, then, refers to those children for whom an economic investment in educational resources has already been made, but who do not complete the appropriate level of studies.
The issue of literacy retention is crucial here, for it is not actually the number of school leavers or graduates that really matters for a society, but rather what they learn and retain from their school years, such as literacy skills. When students drop out of an educational program, a society is wasting its resources because those individuals (children or adults) will not reach some presumed threshold of minimum learning without losing what has been acquired. Thus, retention of learning (or literacy, in particular) is a key goal of educational planners around the world. There are as yet only a small number of research studies published on this question, and their results are highly contradictory. Some show that there is a 'relapse' into illiteracy for those who have not received sufficient instruction, while other demonstrate no serious loss (Wagner 1998a). 2. Literacy Measurement
2.1 Areas of Debate in Literacy Assessment In order to provide worldwide statistical comparisons, UNESCO (UNESCO 1996; Wagner 1998b) has relied almost entirely on data provided by its member countries. These countries, in turn, typically rely on national census information, which most often determines literacy ability by self-assessment questionnaires and/or by the proxy variable of years of primary schooling. Many specialists now agree that such measures are likely to be unreliable indicators of literacy ability. Nonetheless, through the 1990s, change in literacy measurement has been slow in coming, even though some initiatives have been undertaken. There is considerable diversity of opinion as to the usefulness of classifying individuals in the traditional manner of 'literate' versus 'illiterate.' Several decades ago, when developing countries began to enter the United Nations, it was common to find that the vast majority of the adult populations of these countries had never gone to school nor learned to read and write. It was relatively easy in those contexts to simply define all such individuals as 'illiterate.' The situation in the late 1990s is much more complex, as some contact with primary schooling, nonformal education programs, and the mass media is now made by the vast majority of families in the Third World. Thus, even though parents may be illiterate, it is not unusual for one or more of their children to be able to read and write to some degree. For this reason, it would seem that simple dichotomies—still in use by some international agencies and most national governments—ought to be avoided, since they tend to misrepresent the range or continuum of literacy abilities that are common to most contemporary societies. As noted earlier, work on adult literacy has frequently derived its methodologies from the study of reading development in children. This is true of assess-
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The Social Context ment as well, where the diagnosis of individual reading difficulties has held sway for many years, in both children and adults. This diagnostic model of assessment assumes that individuals who do not read well have some type of cognitive deficit which can (often) be remediated if properly diagnosed by a skilled professional. There is little doubt that this model does apply to many adults who have not learned to read, but who have attended school. However, the majority of the world's population of low literates and illiterates (located primarily in developing countries) have received little or no schooling, making the diagnostic method far less relevant. For this latter population, detailed diagnostic measures are unimportant relative to the need for better understanding of who goes to school, what is learned, and which particular social groups are most in need of basic skills. In such cases, as discussed below, low-cost household surveys may be a better assessment technique than diagnostic instruments. Most countries have formulated an explicit language policy which states which language or languages have official status. Often, the decision on national or official language(s) is based on such factors as major linguistic groups, colonial or post-colonial history, and the importance of a given language to the concerns of economic development. Official languages are also those commonly used in primary school, though there may be differences between languages used in beginning schooling and those used later on. The use of mother tongue instruction in both primary and adult education remains a topic of continuing debate (Dutcher 1982; Hornberger 1999). While there is usually general agreement that official language(s) ought to be assessed in a literacy survey, there may be disagreement over the assessment of literacy in nonofficial languages (where these have a recognized and functional orthography). In many countries, there exists numerous local languages which have varying status with respect to the official language; how these languages and literacies are included in such surveys is a matter of debate. For example, in certain predominantly Muslim countries in sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., Senegal or Ghana), the official language of literacy might be French or English, while Arabic— which is taught in Islamic schools and used by a sizable population for certain everyday and religious tasks— is usually excluded from official literacy censuses. Many specialists now agree that most (if not all) literacies should be surveyed; to ignore such abilities is to underestimate national human resources. Comparability of data—across time and countries—is a major concern for planning agencies. If definitions, categories, and classifications vary, it becomes difficult if not impossible to compare data collected from different surveys. On the other hand, if comparability is the primary goal, with little attention to the validity of the definitions, categories, and classi174
fications for the sample population, then the data become virtually meaningless. International and national needs, definitions, and research strategies may or may not come into conflict over the issue of comparability, depending on the particular problem addressed. For example, international agencies continue to utilize literacy rates that are measured in terms of the number of 'literates' and 'illiterates.' For most countries, this type of classification presents few problems at the level of census information, and it provides international agencies with a cross-national framework for considering literacy by geographic or economic regions of the world. On the other hand, national planners may want to know the effects of completion of certain grades of primary or secondary school, or of a literacy campaign, on levels of literacy attainment, so that a simple dichotomy would be insufficient. Household literacy surveys, because more time may be devoted to in-depth questioning, offer the opportunity to provide a much more detailed picture of literacy and its demographic correlates than has been previously available. 2.2 Household Literacy Surveys Assessment surveys have employed varying approaches to defining literacy skill levels in different countries. For example, some assessment surveys have focused on 'ability to read aloud' from a newspaper in the national language; some have included basic arithmetic (numeracy) skills; while still others have focused on being able to write one's name or read a bus schedule. Two main types of literacy survey methods—self-assessment and direct measurement— have been utilized within widely differing contexts. Most national literacy data collections in the world have utilized self-assessment techniques, which are operationalized by simply asking the individual one or more questions of the sort: 'Can you read and write?' Occasionally, census takers collect information on which language or languages pertain to the above question, but rarely have time or resources been invested beyond this point. Analysis of the relationship between self-assessment and direct measurement of literacy abilities has rarely been sought, so that the reliability of self-assessment methods is very problematic (Lavy et al. 1995). Direct measurement of literacy typically involves tests which are constructed with the aim of obtaining performance or behavioral criteria for determining literacy and/or numeracy abilities in the individual. The large number and variety of literacy and numeracy assessment instruments precludes a complete discussion in this brief review. Objective measures rely primarily on test items to elicit valid and reliable data from the individual, with rather strict controls on the context and structure of the test. An example would be a multiple choice test where the individual is presented with a short paragraph of text and is asked to choose,
Literacy: Research and Method among four items, the item which best describes some particular piece of information mentioned in the paragraph. These measures are usually quite reliable in school settings and for silent reading, where test-retest correlations and cross-test correlations may be highly significant. Their use in nonschool settings and with low-literate adults is less well-known, since these tests assume a certain equivalence in 'test-taking skill' across individuals tested. Such objective tests are particularly useful in settings where the interviewer has little prior experience in literacy assessment, since relatively little subjective interpretation of test performance is required. The direct measurement of literacy skills using assessment instruments provides information on more refined categories than available in self-assessment, which usually provides merely a dichotomous categorization. In industrialized countries, there have been a number of important household literacy surveys. The first two were completed in North America: the Young Adult Literacy Assessment (Kirsch and Jungeblut 1986) in the US, and the Canadian Literacy Survey (Statistics Canada 1988) in Canada. More recently, a major international survey was conducted in about a dozen OECD countries (OECD/Statistics Canada), using a methodology that overlapped rather substantially with the North American surveys, providing in depth individual assessments of reading, writing, and math skills in both abstract and functional contexts (Tuijnman et al. 1997). While the advantage of such in-depth information may be justifiable in the context of industrialized countries, these surveys clearly represent the 'high end' of both detailed analysis and cost in terms of household surveys. For contexts such as in developing countries or in low-literate ethnic communities in industrialized countries, it may be useful to choose a categorical breakdown which would provide just enough information for use by policymakers, and which could be more easily and simply constructed. This 'low-end' method of assessment is best exemplified in the model developed under the auspices of the United Nations National Household Survey Capability Program, and which has been undertaken in several countries, including Zimbabwe and Morocco (United Nations 1989, Wagner 1990). In this model, there are four main skill classifications which are proposed: (a) nonliterate for a person who cannot read a text with understanding and write a short text in a significant national language, and who cannot recognize words on signs and documents in everyday contexts, and cannot perform such specific tasks as signing their name or recognizing the meaning of public signs; (b) low-literate for a person who cannot read a text with understanding and write a short text in a significant national language, but who can recognize words on signs and documents in everyday contexts, and can
perform such specific tasks as signing their name or recognizing the meaning of public signs; (c) moderateliterate for a person who can, with some difficulty (i.e., makes numerous errors), read a text with understanding and write a short text in a significant national language; and (d) high-literate for a person who can, with little difficulty (i.e., makes few errors), read a text with understanding and write a short text in a significant national language. When these four categories are utilized in conjunction with other variables in the survey, it becomes possible to arrive at answers to questions often posed by policymakers, such as: How does literacy vary by age, grade, geographical region, language group, and so forth? 2.3 Measuring Literacy Levels Beyond the broad category labels of literacy levels, there is little agreement on how actually to assign such labels to individuals. Does scoring above 50 percent on a test of paragraph comprehension qualify an individual as literate, nonliterate or in-between? To a great extent, such labeling has been and continues to be arbitrary. In addition, while most assessment instruments utilize school-based and curriculum-based materials, there is increasing awareness among specialists of the importance of measuring 'everyday' or practical literacy abilities. One method for dealing with literacy assessment is to determine the intersection of both literacy skills and domains of literacy practice (Tuijnman et al. 1997). There are a great many types of literacy tests, and a great number of skills which specialists have thought were important not only for the measurement of actual literacy ability, but also in terms of the underlying processes involved in being a competent reader or writer. Drawing on recent survey work, as described above, it is useful to think of literacy ability as involving at least four basic types of skills: decoding, comprehension, locating information, and writing. Individuals who use literacy may perform literate functions on a wide array of materials; in addition, certain individuals may specialize in specific types of literate domains (e.g., lawyers, doctors, agricultural agents). Even individuals with low general levels of literacy skill may be able to cope successfully with written materials in a domain in which they have a great deal of practice (e.g., farm workers who often deal with insecticides). Since governments are generally interested in providing literacy for many categories of people, an assessment should sample across the material domains where literate functions are typically found, such as, single words, short phrases, tables and forms, and texts. The estimation of literacy skills by text domains involves the use of a matrix of the intersection of literacy skills with the text domains in which literacy skills can be applied. This provides a breakdown of 175
The Social Context types of component skills in literacy. It should be understood that there is rarely consensus on which specific skills to test in literacy, and that any such matrix is necessarily arbitrary. Nonetheless, a matrix of literacy skills by domain can provide a useful method for collecting the appropriate ('low-end') amount of information needed for policy decisions, and it can be considerably less expensive than some of the comprehensive methods employed in the North American surveys. 3. New Areas of Literacy Research Based on the growing concern about literacy levels across the globe, it seems clear that new domains of research will begin to open up, such as the topics described below. 3.1 Technology There are new and exciting ideas about the utility of technology for literacy provision to children and adults. Much of this work is still in the early development stages, such as efforts to utilize synthetic speech to teach reading, or the use of multimedia displays (interactive video, audio tapes, and computer displays) to provide more sophisticated instruction than has been heretofore available. Technological solutions to instruction—known as computer-based education (CBE) or computer-assisted instruction (CAI)—have been used, primarily in industrialized nations, since the early 1980s, and the presence of microcomputers in the classrooms of schools has continued to grow at a phenomenal rate, especially with the advent of the Internet (Anderson 1999; Wagner and Hopey 1999). Until the 1990s, the cost of educational technology was too high even for most industrial countries, and therefore far beyond the means of the developing countries. But the price-to-power ratio (the relative cost, for example, of a unit of computer memory or the speed of processing) continues to drop at an astounding rate. While the cost of the average microcomputer has remained constant or declined slightly for about a decade, the power of the 1999 computer is 10-100 times greater than that produced in 1990. If present trends continue, the capabilities for CAI and CBE literacy instruction are likely, by the year 2010, to go far beyond the elementary approaches of the late 1990s. 3.2 Multisectoral Approaches Literacy skills are utilized in many life contexts outside of academic settings. To date, most research and development has focused primarily on school-based settings. A major challenge rests in determining the ways that literacy can be fostered and utilized in everyday family and work settings. From a policy perspective, more needs to be known about how literacy
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education can be infused into the significant development work of other sectors, such as agriculture and health. In these two sectors, literacy is a major vehicle for innovation and knowledge dissemination, yet few studies have explored what levels of literacy determine the effectiveness of such dissemination. 3.3 Design of Materials In developing countries, increased textbook provision has been viewed by donors and ministries of education as a key strategy for the improvement of school instruction (Heyneman and Jamison 1980). However, very little is known about how the design of instructional materials influences comprehension and learning. There are also enormous subject matter and national variations in conventions of text design. Some important work on the relationship between characteristics of textbook discourse and comprehension is being carried out that has implications for improving school textbooks, as well as materials for other sectors. For example, there is a special need to improve instructions for pharmaceutical and agricultural chemicals, whose safe and effective use requires performing complex cognitive tasks with procedural information that is often difficult to comprehend (Eisemon 1988; Wright 1999). 3.4 Mother Tongue and Second Language Issues As previously discussed many learners enrolled in adult education programs are being taught literacy in a second language. In developing countries, a significant proportion of these students are either illiterate in their mother tongue or receive only a few years of mother tongue instruction before a second, usually foreign, language is introduced as a medium of instruction. Poor second language literacy proficiency is a cause of high repetition and wastage rates, and of low achievement in academic subjects in primary and secondary schools with profound consequences for employment and other externalities of schooling. Because of the significant debate on first and second language/literacy policy (often related to national issues of ethnicity and power), most government agencies worldwide have been reluctant to review such policies. However, there are a number of important areas of work which need to be addressed beyond the confines of this debate, such as: (a) Under what conditions should mother tongue literacy be a precondition for the introduction of second language literacy in school-based and nonformal settings? (b) How does the implementation of language-of-instruction policies affect literacy after schooling? (c) What are the effects of using second language literacy in school on wastage and grade repetition? (d) What are the implications of using the second language literacy for academic subjects like mathematics, science, health, nutrition, and agriculture? (e) What roles do
Literacy: Research and Method orthographic similarity and dissimilarity play in transfer between mother tongue and second literacy? These and similar questions will need to be addressed before major progress can be made in improving literacy levels in national and international contexts.
4. Conclusion The importance of research and measurement in literacy is that they can provide new paths to greater efficiency in literacy provision around the world. While no social program (including research) is without economic costs, such expenditures must be understood in the light of costs involved in not knowing how to carry out literacy programs practically and efficiently. Those who have argued that the literacy crisis is so great that the support of research is somehow wasteful are likely to be proven wrong. To invest resources fn implementation without developing the means to learn from such programs is to call into question any purported gains in literacy work. The year 2000 is a critical moment to reinforce literacy efforts, as global economic changes are requiring significant changes in worker skills and the heightened role of information exchange. In spite of the clear need for cultural sensitivities and specificities, there may be important economies of scale as more is learned about literacy. Methodologies for pilot programs, assessment and evaluation, and computerized textbook preparation, as examples, may be transferable with local adaptations to varying cultural contexts. The need for literacy and other basic skills has never been greater, and the gap between literate and nonliterate lifestyles is becoming ever larger, with parallel growth in income disparities. Literacy and learning are a part of the culture of every society. To produce major changes in literacy requires both a realistic understanding of the kinds of change which people and nations desire, and sustained support to provide appropriate instructional services. See also: Postliteracy.
Bibliography Anderson J 1999 Information technologies and literacy. In: Wagner D A, Venezky R L, Street B V (eds.) Downing J 1973 Comparative Reading. Macmillan, New York Dutcher N 1982 The Use of First and Second Languages in Primary Education: Selected Case Studies. World Bank Staff Working Paper, No. 504. World Bank, Washington, DC Eisemon T E 1988 Benefiting from Basic Education, School Quality and Functional Literacy in Kenya. Pergamon, New York Gray W S 1956 The Teaching of Reading and Writing: An International Survey. UNESCO, Paris
Heyneman S P, Jamison D T 1980 Student learning in Uganda: Textbook availability and other factors. Comp. Educ. Rev. 24(2):206-20 Hornberger N 1999 Language and literacy planning. In: Wagner D A, Venezky R L, Street B V (eds.) Kirsch I, Jungeblut A 1986 Literacy: Profiles of America's Young Adults. Final report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. ETS, Princeton, New Jersey Lavy V, Spratt J, Leboucher N 1995 Changing patterns of illiteracy in Morocco: Assessment methods compared. LSMS Paper 115. The World Bank, Washington, DC OECD/Statistics Canada 1995 Literacy, Economy and Society. OECD, Paris Ogbu J 1978 Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-cultural Perspective. Academic Press, New York Statistics Canada 1988 A National Literacy Skill Assessment Planning Report. Statistics Canada, Ottawa Tuijnman A, Kirsch I, Wagner D A (eds.) 1997 Adult Basic Skills: Innovations in Measurement and Policy Analysis. Hampton Press, Cresskill, New Jersey UNESCO 1957 World Illiteracy at Mid-century: A Statistical Study. UNESCO, Paris UNESCO 1996 Education For All: Mid-decade Report. UNESCO, Paris United Nations 1989 Measuring Literacy through Household Surveys: A Technical Study on Literacy Assessment and Related Topics through Household Surveys. National Household Survey Capability Programme. United Nations, New York Venezky R L, Osin L 1991 The Intelligent Design of Computer-assisted Instruction. Longman, New York Venezky R, Wagner D A, Ciliberti B (eds.) 1990 Towards Defining Literacy. International Reading Association, Newark, Delaware Wagner D A 1990 Literacy assessment in the Third World: An overview and proposed scheme for survey use. Comp. Educ. Rev. 34(1): 112-38 Wagner D A 1992 Literacy: Developing the Future. International Yearbook of Education, Vol. 43. UNESCO/ International Bureau of Education, Geneva Wagner D A 1993 Literacy, Culture and Development: Becoming literate in Morocco. Cambridge University Press, New York Wagner D A 1998a Literacy retention: Comparisons across age, time and culture. In: Wellman H, Scott G, Paris (eds.) Global Prospects for Education: Development, Culture and Schooling. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC: pp. 229-51 Wagner D A 1998b Literacy Assessment for Out-of-School Youth and Adults Concepts, Methods, and New Directions. ILI/UNESCO Technical Report. International Literacy Institute, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Wagner D A, Hopey C 1999 Adult literacy and the Internet: Problems and prospects. In: Wagner D A, Venezky R L, Street B V (eds.) Wagner D A, Puchner L (eds.) 1992 World Literacy in the Year 2000: Research and Policy Dimensions. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Newbury Park, California Wagner D A, Venezky R L, Street B V (eds.) 1999 Literacy: An International Handbook. Westview Press, Boulder, CO Wright P 1999 Comprehension of printed instructions. In: Wagner D A, Venezky R L, Street B V (eds.) 177
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Oracy A. M. Wilkinson
'Oracy' is a term for talking and listening, by analogy with 'literacy' for reading and writing. It was coined by Wilkinson (1965) in an English and Welsh Schools Council Project at Birmingham University. At that time literacy dominated the school curriculum as a means of learning. A term was needed to give equivalent status to oral/aural activities. Implications of the term were explored in this and a later project (Wilkinson, et al. 1974). Oracy was characterized as 'a condition of learning in all subjects'; as being not merely a skill but the 'essential instrument in the humanizing of the species'; as being a fit subject of educational 'awareness'; as being essentially interrelated with literacy: and as being susceptible of evaluation. Against the then preoccupation with 'speech training,' it was emphasized that oracy arose in response to the needs of the situation rather than from direct teaching. None of these propositions was part of accepted wisdom in education at that period. The tenacity of these ideas is indicated by their general currency today in curriculum movements in, for instance, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, as well as in the UK, where in the early 1990s the National Oracy Project involved over three-quarters of the English and Welsh Local Education Authorities (see National Oracy Project). The continuing influence of the ideas may be seen in the Kingman Report (DES 1988), which focuses on language awareness, and the Cox Report (DES 1989), where evaluation is a central concern, and which quotes the original research on the need to 'create circumstances to which both speaking and listening are the natural responses.'-The UK National Curriculum, compulsory in all state schools,
prescribes speaking and listening as one of the three Profile Components in English (see English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)). The original research team perceived oracy as having more than linguistic implications. The Crowther Report (HMSO 1959) had set out 'numeracy' and 'literacy' as marks of the educated person (see English Teaching in England and Wales). With graceful selfrestraint the team described this focus as 'academic.' Numeracy, literacy, and oracy they argued were the modern equivalent of the nineteenth century's 'three Rs,' that is, basic educational requirements. Thirty years later these three concepts were described by the English and Welsh National Curriculum Council as 'forming the basis of a proper and liberal education to the highest standards parents expect.' The term was first published in Wilkinson (1965); key passages are reprinted in Wilkinson et al. (1990), which presents aspects of recent thinking on the topic, as does MacLure et al. (1988). Bibliography MacLure M, Phillips T, Wilkinson A M 1988 Oracy Matters. Open University Press, Milton Keynes United Kingdom Department of Education and Science 1988 The Teaching of English Language (The Kingman Report'). HMSO, London United Kingdom Department of Education and Science 1989 English for Ages 5 to 16 (The Cox Report'). HMSO, London Wilkinson A M 1965 Spoken English. Educational Review, Birmingham University, Birmingham Wilkinson A M, Stratta L, Dudley P 1974 The Quality of Listening. Macmillan, London Wilkinson A, Davies A, Berrill D 1990 Spoken English Illuminated. Open University Press, Milton Keynes
Postliteracy L. Benton
Illiteracy is a problem not just in developing nations, but also in economically advanced countries. A significant proportion of working adults lack adequate skills in reading, writing, and numeracy, as various national assessment studies show. The problem has grave economic implications, particularly because economic restructuring since the mid-1970s has also altered jobs and increased skill requirements for some 178
workers. Reforms aimed at addressing the problem in new ways include more participation by both labor unions and learners in program design, greater integration of literacy and work training, and efforts to build learning into job structures. Constraints on policy effectiveness are evident in the fragmented structure of various national literacy campaigns. 'Postliteracy', if taken to mean achievement
Postliteracy of universal basic literacy levels, still lies in the future. In this article, the concept of postliteracy is discussed in relation to changes affecting the skill requirements of the labor force. Methodologies and issues in the measurement of functional illiteracy are presented, and postliteracy programs in different industrialized countries are described. Attention is also given to emerging trends and opportunities for the formation of a broad coalition to support the expansion of literacy training.
Related to both these issues is the question of how to alter government policies and programs. Surveying the efforts of national and local governments in some of the industrialized countries reveals a broad movement toward merging literacy concerns with economic goals. Although it is possible to point toward some particularly compelling experiments, no single strategy has gained a solid reputation for effectiveness. Even where government efforts share some similar features and are guided by similar concerns, differences in local and national politics tend to lead literacy policies across nations toward different outcomes.
1. The Meaning of Postliteracy
The term 'postliteracy' can be problematic if it is taken to imply the universal attainment of basic levels of literacy. Serious illiteracy problems persist even in the most advanced countries, and these problems affect not just populations that are perceived as 'marginal' (e.g., immigrants, the unemployed, or school dropouts) but also significant, and perhaps growing, numbers of adult workers. One can therefore understand 'literacy' to mean not a limited set of skills but a learned ability to interpret complex messages and codes of all kinds. 'Postliteracy' is better defined, then, as the condition of countries where very basic abilities in reading and writing are indeed widely held, but where many cannot perform the literacy-related tasks needed to function fully at home, at work, and in civic life. This condition is shared by most economically advanced countries and by some developing countries. Particularly in the former, overcoming the problem of adult illiteracy is increasingly tied to the goal of enhancing international economic competitiveness. This shift in the understanding of literacy is forcing policymakers to confront a series of new issues. One problem is how to assess the phenomenon of illiteracy in a meaningful way. Earlier measures of literacy, as discussed below, are at best crude indicators of the ability to complete various literacy-related tasks. New, more sophisticated methods of measurement have been developed, but they have not yet been widely used. The new approaches to measuring illiteracy inevitably call attention to other problems that have been poorly perceived in the past. Levels of literacy that are actually required for individuals to function effectively in different contexts have rarely been systematically studied. Of particular importance is understanding the literacy requirements of jobs, including entirely new categories of jobs. This problem ties literacy research to broader investigations into the nature of economic change since the mid 1970s, when the advanced economies began the shift to a 'postFordist' economy characterized by unstable markets, large-scale sectoral restructuring, and firm shake-ups. This process has involved the reorganization of many jobs and important shifts in the skill requirements for workers.
2. Measuring Functional Illiteracy
The current situation contrasts with that of the early 1980s, when literacy was typically defined in terms of grade attainment. One advantage of this method was that data on grade completion were widely available, and it was thus possible to compare literacy rates defined by grade attainment internationally and also over time within individual countries. The drawback, of course, is that there was little evidence that grade attainment was an accurate indicator of literacy skills. Rather than seeking to identify levels of basic literacy (the ability to write and/or decipher simple messages), most researchers now recognize the need to measure a more complex social construction, 'functional literacy', or the ability to perform a complex range of tasks. The dimensions of the problem of functional illiteracy are just becoming known. Several national efforts to arrive at a more precise measure of the problem deserve mention. A methodological approach developed in the 1975 Adult Performance Level (APL) survey in the United States was influential because it used performance tasks as indicators of literacy competency. A more complex method based on this approach was pioneered in the 1985 United States Department of Education survey of young adults (aged 21 to 25)—the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) (Kirsch and Jungeblut 1986). This survey assessed respondents' performance in three categories—prose literacy, document literacy, and quantitative literacy—and reported results by placing respondents' abilities along three scales corresponding to the different types of competencies. The authors of the study intended to shift the emphasis away from reporting flat rates of 'illiteracy' or 'functional illiteracy' and toward a more nuanced understanding of the problem. The NAEP study showed that patterns of economic inequality paralleled the distribution of literacy skills. Poor minority groups performed at levels significantly lower than those of young White adults. The study also confirmed that classically defined illiteracy—the inability to read—was indeed a relatively small problem (affecting only about 2 percent of the sample), while a significant proportion of young adults were
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The Social Context unable to complete many of the literacy-related tasks and only 10 to 40 percent could reliably complete the most complex, multistep tasks (Kirsch and Jungeblut 1986), The results of the NAEP survey encouraged the Department of Education to conduct a national adult literacy assessment for individuals aged 16 to 64 in 1992. In 1989, the Department of Labor also commissioned literacy assessment of three special populations of adults who were unemployed or in training. Other attempts to assess the literacy problem nationally have been influenced by these efforts. A very comprehensive project is a 1989 study in Canada called the Survey of Literacy Skills Used in Daily Activities (LSUDA). This study surveyed 9455 individuals between the ages of 16 and 69 with the goal of producing a separate test score for each respondent in reading, writing, and numeracy. The results confirmed that functional illiteracy is a significant problem even though the majority of Canadian adults can read and would be classified as literate by standard proxy measures (Neice et al. 1992). The study permitted a division of respondents into various categories of skill attainment and found that while relatively small proportions of respondents had no appreciable skills in reading, writing, and numeracy, significant proportions had skill levels that limited their abilities to complete daily functions. For example, 62 percent of Canadians were classified as reading at 'level 4' (i.e., with skills that enabled them to complete most tasks and also gain further knowledge from printed materials); 22 percent of adult Canadians were classified as being able 'to carry out simple reading tasks within familiar contexts with materials that are clearly laid out (level 3); and 16 percent of adults were found to have skills so limited that they could not understand most written material they would be likely to encounter in everyday life (Statistics Canada 1991). The study also found that reading, writing, and numeracy skills were closely linked to levels of schooling, to age, to region, and, for immigrants, to year of arrival in Canada. Other countries have moved toward producing similar national assessments of literacy. France also revised the definition of functional illiteracy to include 'individuals with difficulties in mastering basic skills' (personnes en difficulte de maitrise des savoirs de base). A large-scale assessment of key skills was conducted in 1990 and was administered to a sample of 1500 long-term unemployed individuals in five major cities: Paris, Marseilles, Lyon, Lille, and Toulouse. The skill areas analyzed were more extensive and were differently defined than in the studies in the United States and Canada. This survey, and other studies underway in France, promise to provide a much clearer profile of the functionally illiterate population in France than has been available to policymakers in the past. An important finding shared across these studies is that although disadvantaged populations—migrants,
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young adults, minorities—may suffer disproportionately from literacy problems, they are likely to be outnumbered among the ranks of functional illiterates by apparently 'mainstream' individuals, especially older, adult workers. This fact in turn suggests necessary revisions in the assessment of the effects of functional illiteracy on the economy and in the response to the problem through educational programs. 3. Literacy and Work
It has become commonplace to observe that workforce education problems in the advanced economies are related to the fact that such groups as women, young people, migrants, and minorities are growing quickly as a proportion of the workforce; because these groups have had a difficult time gaining equal access to education, the argument goes, they are less well-prepared for jobs. In fact, the sources of problems related to workforce preparedness are far more complex. Firm restructuring in response to widespread market instability has resulted in the reorganization of many jobs to entail a larger number and wider variety of tasks; it has also prompted the need to restructure the relationship of those tasks to others more frequently. These shifts have been documented most clearly in manufacturing. So-called 'Fordist' strategies of production for mass markets entailed the breakdown of jobs into easily performed tasks to which unskilled workers could be—at least in theory—indiscriminately assigned. Since the massive restructuring of those markets after the global crisis of the mid 1970s, firms have had to switch to strategies that emphasize production of short series, quick response to market shifts, and variability within product lines. One result has been a restructuring of jobs to allow for greater flexibility. Many unskilled jobs are disappearing, while skilled jobs \tend to entail the performance of more varied tasks and a conceptual rather than a routine mastery of those tasks (Piore and Sabel 1984; Bailey 1989; Benton et al. 1991). A similar transformation has also taken place in the services, where job creation in the advanced economies is the fastest. Although a rapid increase in the demand for low-level service workers is a feature shared by many of the advanced economies, this trend is part of a more complex story. Similar pressures as in manufacturing—to diversify product lines, to respond more quickly to market shifts, and to pursue specialized market niches—have led to a flattening of organizational structures. A larger percentage of the service workforce must have the communications skills necessary to participate directly in sales and customer/client service. As service firms work to distinguish themselves in the marketplace by developing proprietary technology and firm-specific procedures, workers must also learn to apply broad guidelines of
Postliteracy action to specific cases and, moreover, to prepare to learn new guidelines as market positioning shifts again (Noyelle 1990; Benton et al. 1991). These and other, related changes have meant that workers are being called on not only to arrive at work with a higher level of skills but also to be prepared to learn at work. Jobs for workers with very low literacy skills are disappearing. There is a noticeable trend within business toward providing in-house training to larger proportions of workers. This trend, in turn, feeds into a wider, growing movement in support of context-related instruction. Business interests, educators, and policy makers seem to be converging in support of a type of literacy training that promotes mastery of broad sets of skills by teaching their application to specific work-related tasks. This strategy contrasts with the more traditional approach of teaching basic skills as a step preparatory to, or at least separate from, job training. 4. Program Reforms Several trends in program development appear to be shared across a range of more advanced countries. They are union participation in instruction, curriculum reform, the restructuring of work as a training strategy, and learner-centered instruction (see Benton and Noyelle 1992). Taken together, these trends share an emphasis on context-specific (especially work-centered) instruction for adults already in the workforce. Although many firms and business leaders remain opposed to union participation in designing training, numerous ongoing experiments suggest that unions may be uniquely positioned to interpret training needs and encourage worker participation. In at least one country, Sweden, union participation in literacy training has been sweeping. The unions already had a strong tradition of participation in adult education, and they run high schools and other programs that target working adults. Union pressure prompted a 1985 policy requiring firms to set aside a portion of profits for a renewal fund partially dedicated to training. Although many firms have resisted using the funds to improve the skills of poorly educated workers, unions have pushed for such use. They have thus been important actors in creating and promoting programs that link basic skills and job skills training (Tuijnman 1989). In the United States, union participation has been less consistently important, although a few cases suggest the promise of joint union-management training efforts. In the automobile industry, the United Auto Workers (UAW) has reached agreements with the three big automobile makers to co-manage training centers, accessible to workers at all education levels, that are richly funded through a 'tax' on employee earnings. An example of even more direct union involvement is an innovative program in Ontario, Canada, run by the Ontario Federation of Labor. The Basic Edu-
cation for Skills Training Program (BEST) is run entirely by unions and structured to emphasize the linkage between learning and workplace experience. The program is worker-run and worker-designed, and its success depends on the ability of the union to recruit and retain learners. Curriculum trends in work-based, union-run programs are also apparent in other types of training. In many countries, traditional remedial adult training consists of standard high school equivalency training or basic skills instruction that varies little depending on the backgrounds or occupations of learners. But a trend toward developing customized curricula is clearly in place. In both North American and Western Europe, various programs can be identified that use materials borrowed directly from work or community settings. Some publishers have also begun developing printed curricula customized for particular sectors or populations. Such organizational and curricular changes are being complemented in a number of cases by strategies to restructure jobs themselves in ways that will encourage on-the-job learning. This trend is itself often simply an outcome of a more general strategy of firm competitiveness through increased flexibility and quick response to market shifts. In some places, though, the enhanced promise of learning on the job has become an explicit goal as well as an unintended outcome. Classic examples of such concerted efforts to increase worker participation as a means of enhancing competitiveness are manufacturing firms in the socalled 'Third Italy', where employers encourage flexible production through flexible job assignments (Capecchi 1989). Related to this trend toward structured learning on the job is a tendency to develop literacy programs that are 'learner-centred'. Community activists have been particularly outspoken in arguing that learners must play an active role in designing curricula and in devising methods of instruction. The BEST program described above, for example, works entirely with instructional materials provided by learners. In a community-based program run in Washington, DC, to take another example, learners identify practical, attainable goals (such as obtaining a driver's license) and gear learning specifically toward those goals. Such learner involvement is clearly tied to the other three trends of union participation, contextually structured curricula, and opportunities for learning at work. 5. Policy Responses Whether or not these and other efforts will be effective appears to depend much on the larger institutional framework in which they operate. The national commitment to literacy training has varied over time and across countries. Patterns of government authority can also constrain literacy efforts in important ways.
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The Social Context Consider the very different problems posed by the political contexts in the following cases. In the United States, responsibility for literacy programs rests mainly at the state level. Although the federal government has recently publicized the problem of functional illiteracy, its support for actual programs remains limited. At the same time, the pressure on states to improve literacy training is increasing. With the decline of traditional manufacturing in many states, local and state governments seek to draw services and high-tech industry with the claim that they can provide highly trained workforces. Yet state policy makers have discovered that efforts to increase and improve literacy and basic skills training are complicated by a highly fragmented funding and administrative structure that distributes responsibility for adult literacy training among a handful of programs (the two most important of these are the Job and Training Partnership Act, or JTPA, and Adult Basic Education, or ABE). Funding is also inadequate, with a total of US $l-$2 billion being spent each year by the federal government in all states (Chisman 1989). In Canada, which has no Department of Education at the federal level, there is little federal involvement in literacy programs (Thomas 1983). This has been both a strength and a weakness for the country's literacy movement. One problem has been the unevenness of resources for literacy instruction. A few provinces have provided services to low-literate learners for decades and have backed scores of community groups involved in training, while others have left the task to traditional providers and have committed few resources. Yet, lack of federal oversight has also given ambitious communities more room for experimenting with diverse providers and curricula. Thus, providers in British Columbia can target loggers in need of retraining, while in Quebec funds can be used to help level educational opportunities for French and English speakers. In Canada, as in the United States, there remains a clear need for systems of evaluation of programs, as well as for administrative structures that can serve to replicate successful local programs reliably over a wider area. In most European countries—with the possible exception of France and the United Kingdom—the perception until the late 1980s was that a major literacy problem did not exist. Yet, recent evidence from the Netherlands and Sweden suggests that the need for some literacy and basic skills training extends beyond the immigrant population (Fransson and Larsson 1989). Perhaps better than any other national system among the developed countries, the Swedish system of adult education should be able to respond to this challenge using institutional arrangements already in place. The country has a well-established, multifaceted adult education system, with both national and local support (Abrahamsson 1988). Still, the system has tended in the past to benefit mostly those 182
workers who already have average or above-average preparation, together with specially targeted populations such as immigrants or learning disabled students. In France, the problem of illiteracy also used to be most closely associated with immigrants, but recent studies have signaled a much wider problem. Because illiteracy was though of as a problem limited to special populations, programs have been separated from the rest of the education system. The result has been that literacy training programs of various kinds have remained fragmented. Some recent efforts promise to help. A national system of 'individualized training credits' (credit-formation individualise) will allow school dropouts and others with low levels of schooling to qualify easily for remedial training. These examples draw attention to some underlying constraints for expanding and improving literacy training. One constraint is the relationship of literacy initiatives to schooling in general. Where literacy training is considered an integral part of a system that serves citizens throughout their lives, as in Sweden, the necessary adjustments may be far easier to make. A second constraint is the relationship between national and local or regional politics. Local programs may be very innovative, but national support seems crucial to replicate successful strategies. 6. Conclusion
A valuable opportunity has emerged for the formation of a broad coalition to support the expansion of literacy training. Employers now recognize illiteracy as a problem they have to address directly, and many educators who once resisted emphasizing economic interests in the quest for universal literacy recognize that the best instructional methods often focus on skills needed by adults in the workplace. Local policy leaders also perceive that promoting literacy in the local workforce may be crucial to economic viability, given the new requirements of many firms. And learners, too, are becoming more active participants in planning the contents and goals of literacy and postliteracy programs. Whether or not effective action will result from this peculiar convergence of interests depends upon local and national political conditions and constraints. The opportunity, at least, clearly exists for building truly literate societies. Bibliography Abrahamsson K 1988 Adult Literacy, Technology and Culture—Policies, Programs and Problems in Sweden. Swedish National Board of Education, Stockholm Bailey T 1989 Changes in the Nature and Structure of Work, Implications for Employer-Sponsored Training. Columbia University, New York Benton L, Bailey T, Noyelle T, Stanback T 1991 Employee Training and US Competitiveness: Lessons for the 1990s. Westview Press, Boulder, CO Benton L, Noyelle T (eds.) 1992 Adult Illiteracy and Econ-
Traditional Religious Education and Literacy in Developing Countries omic Performance. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris Capecchi V 1989 The informal economy and the development of flexible specialization in Emilia Romagna. In: Portes et al. 1989 The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD Chisman F 1989 Jump Start: The Federal Role in Adult Literacy. Final Report of the Project of Adult Literacy. Southport Institute for Policy Analysis, Washington, DC Fransson A, Larsson S 1989 Who Takes a Second Chance? Implementing Education Equality in Adult Basic Education in a Swedish Context. Report No. 1989-02. Department of Education and Educational Research, Gothenburg University, Gothenburg Fuchs-Bruninghoff E, Kreft W, Kropp U 1986 Functional Illiteracy and Literacy Provision in Developed Countries: The Case of the Federal Republic of Germany, UNESCO Institute for Education, Hamburg Kirsch I, Jungeblut A 1986 Literacy: Profiles of America's Young Adults. Final Report. National Assessment of Educational Progress. Educational Testing Services, Princeton, New Jersey
Levine K 1986 The Social Context of Literacy. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Limage L 1987 Adult literacy policy in industrialized countries. In: Amove R, Graff H (eds.) 1987 National Literacy Campaigns. Plenum, New York Neice D, Adsett M, Rodney W 1992 Direct versus proxy measures of adult functional illiteracy: A preliminary reexamination. In: Benton L, Noyelle T (eds.) Noyelle T 1990 Skills, Wages, and Productivity in the Service Sector. Westview Press, Boulder, CO Piore M, Sabel C 1984 The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity. Basic Books, New York Skagen A 1986 Workplace Literacy. American Management Association, New York Statistics Canada 1991 Adult Literacy in Canada: Results of a National Study. Ministry of Industry, Science, and Technology, Ontario Thomas A 1983 Adult Illiteracy in Canada: A Challenge. Occasional paper No. 42, Canadian Commission for UNESCO, Ottawa Tuijnman A C 1989 Further Education and Training in Swedish Working Life: A Discussion of Trends and Issues. OECD, Paris
Traditional Religious Education and Literacy in Developing Countries D. A. Wagner
Global economic changes have led many developing countries to reassess their varied educational programs as well as the costs and benefits that pertain to them. Some specialists have focused their attention on the relationship between education and functional literacy as primary forces behind labor productivity and economic development, while others have sought to understand the internal efficiency of the entire educational system. Still others have argued that alternative educational programs—beyond those of the formal public sector—are the best way to reach those most in need of additional training and are the most cost-effective. Nonformal educational programs have achieved a certain amount of credibility in developing countries, but few of these programs have been based (at least in contemporary times) on traditional religious forms of schooling. This chapter reviews the scope and possibilities of such forms of schooling, with a particular focus on Islamic religious schools in Africa and the Middle East. Attention will also be given to how traditional religious schools can constitute a potentially cost-effective way of reaching more students and teaching basic skills. 1. Traditional Religious Forms of Education The introduction of government primary schools by the European colonial powers in Africa, the Middle
East, and elsewhere is sometimes seen as having occurred in an educational vacuum. While such colonial schools competed with, displaced, and even destroyed the precolonial systems of schooling, precolonial traditional religious schooling has survived into contemporary times in numerous parts of the world. Early European schooling, based on religious tradition, actually had much in common with current traditional religious schools, and made extensive use of traditional pedagogical methods. In Christian as well as Jewish schools, the focus of early European education was on memorizing sacred texts during lengthy periods of study with a single teacher. Early years of study emphasized rote learning, while later years included in-depth understanding of texts through the student's apprenticeship to a given master. Students were not age-graded as in modern primary school classrooms but, rather, learned a set of required texts through a tutorial process in which the teacher provided tasks as a function of each student's abilities and accomplishments (Wagner and Lotfi 1980; Street 1984). In addition, traditional schooling provided 'cultural capital' (Bourdieu 1973) or 'credentialing' in terms of a body of knowledge important for the child's successful functioning in the society as well as for future social status. In this latter
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The Social Context respect, traditional and modern forms of schooling share much in common. The origins of religious literacy, best known from the three 'religions of the book' (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), are beyond the scope of this review (see Kapitzke 1999, for a review). Yet, even as European religious-oriented education has declined over the centuries, traditional pedagogy and education continue to flourish in many parts of the world. Buddhist traditional pedagogy has been maintained in numerous Asian countries (Gurugé 1985), Talmudic Jewish schools have expanded in Israel, fundamentalist Christian schools in the United States (Kapitzke 1995), African bush schools are still common in West Africa (Erny 1972), and traditional indigenous literacies occasionally flourish where local economic and social needs develop (e.g., the Vai in Liberia; see Scribner and Cole 1981, and Wagner 1999). While there are numerous types of traditional religious schools, and considerable similarities amongst them, the most widespread contemporary example is almost certainly that of Islamic education. 2. Islamic Schooling in the Contemporary World Islamic (or Quranic) schools are among the least-studied educational institutions in today's world, even though millions of children in dozens of countries attend such schools for either part or all of their education. In a comparative study of Islamic schooling in Indonesia, North Yemen, Senegal, Morocco, and Egypt, substantial diversity was found in these schools, both across and within societies (Wagner 1989). In spite of a common emphasis on the study of Quranic texts, which provides a similar focus for Islamic schooling across the world, Islamic schools have adapted to a variety of cultural constraints within each society, leading to important differences in Quranic schooling across various societies. For example, Islamic schooling in Indonesia (which, with over 150 million Muslims, is the world's most populous Islamic society, and sends over 20 million children to Islamic schools each year) superseded an earlier Buddhist system, yet still maintains some of its features, including a long-term apprenticeship and the attribution of mystical powers to the religious teacher. By contrast, many children in Yemen go through only 3-5 years of Quranic schooling, and the Quranic teacher, beyond instructing children, often serves as a legal arbiter in his village because he is the single literate person who can read documents to adjudicate legal disputes. Also important is the fact that Quranic schools can vary greatly within societies, primarily as a function of the last several decades of modernization (Wagner 1985). In Morocco, where almost 80 percent of all children attend Quranic schools for some period of time, the traditional schools for older children are
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disappearing, while the 'modernized' Quranic preschools, which sometimes employ teachers with public high school diplomas, are attracting more young children than ever before. One important reason for this increase in attendance is the participation of girls, who were once excluded from such schools. In Senegal, where girls have often attended Quranic schools (in contrast to Yemen), modernization has led to significant changes in pedagogy and curriculum. Rather than emphasizing rote learning of Arabic texts, which are not understood by children who speak only Senegalese languages, many Quranic school teachers have been teaching, for several decades, spoken and written Arabic as a second language. Changes such as those found in Morocco and Senegal are taking place in many parts of the Islamic world, as people adapt to changing societal pressures. In addition, some international agencies and foundations have taken an interest in Islamic schools, such as the Aga Khan Foundation, which promotes Islamic preschools in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Contemporary Islamic education provides perhaps the most important example of indigenous education in today's world. The Islamic school system, which remained relatively static over many centuries, has now begun to undergo significant changes, which vary from society to society. The point to be emphasized here is that Islamic schools, like other traditional religious schools, continue to attract very large numbers of children, many of whom never attend governmental secular schools. Such schools may be seen as an important educational resource. This is so, at least in part, because the 'reach' of traditional schooling penetrates deeper and perhaps more effectively than many government systems into the poorest, most conservative, and least accessible regions of the countries concerned. However, access to traditional religious schooling would not be considered to be of much utility if one could assume that such schools provided little relevant instruction of skills thought to be important for national development. As it happens, many traditional religious schools provide (often as a by-product of religious training) important language, cognitive, and social skills of significant potential for meeting basic skills needs of poor and disadvantaged populations in many countries. 3. Learning and Pedagogy Literacy acquisition in traditional religious schools was first extensively explored by Goody and Watt (1968). Literacy instruction has been shown to be an important product of Quranic schooling, but, as noted earlier, literacy and other aspects of instruction are known to vary substantially across teachers, schools, and societies. Traditional instruction in Quranic schooling has included a number of key features: oral
Traditional Religious Education and Literacy in Developing Countries memorization of the Quran; emphasis on correct (i.e., accurate and aesthetic) oral recitation; training in the Arabic script; and strict authoritarian instruction. In contrast to primers used in virtually all modern secular schools, literacy instruction with the Quran as text provided no opportunity for age-graded vocabulary or grammatical structures. In addition, the illustrations that most primers use to facilitate reading are strictly prohibited for religious reasons in Islamic schools. Thus, it is hardly surprising that learning to read by using the Quran as a primer was and is not a trivial task for many children. Nonetheless, both the most traditional and somewhat modernized contemporary Quranic schools also share a number of common basic features with modern secular schools. Despite regional variation, Quranic schools can be said to teach children how to: learn in a structured setting; respect the teacher; use language and recite in unison; encode and decode an alphabet; become a moral person and a good citizen; and, more recently, do basic arithmetic. Of course, such features can be also found in most secular preschool and primary school settings in developing countries. However, the sacred quality of the text and the strong motivation of children and parents towards Quranic learning may provide an additional stimulus for learning that many secular school systems cannot match. Although we know that literacy acquisition and other forms of learning take place in Islamic schools, reliable statistics are generally unavailable on the actual degree of learning achievement among children in most societies where traditional religious schools still function. One exception is a 5-year longitudinal study carried out in Morocco. This project sought to explore the consequences of attendance in Quranic preschools for learning and subsequent public school achievement. One notable finding was that Quranic preschooling was a significant factor in promoting children's literacy during the early grades of public primary school (when compared with children with no preschooling); the influence was most apparent in the rural environment and for children whose native language was Berber (Wagner 1993). Also of interest was the fact that the cognitive (learning) impact of Quranic preschooling was basically equivalent to modern preschooling in the same Moroccan communities. One additional question concerns the use of Arabic literacy in Muslim societies in parts of North and sub-Saharan West Africa, where Arabic is not widely spoken or considered to be a national language. In most of these societies, there remains considerable skepticism about the possibility of teaching literacy skills in children's vernacular tongue on a large-scale basis. In contrast to the typical case of imposing a European language on a multilingual traditional society, Arabic literacy has the advantage of being
already firmly embedded in the cultural fabric of societies with significant Muslim populations, and hence is a popular language of choice. Nonetheless, decisions on the choice of the national language of literacy, and of public school instruction, remains a political one. In such societies the functions of literacy cannot be uniquely defined by governments or agencies, since many traditional religious literacies have histories that go back several centuries and are likely to continue well into the future. Rather than viewing traditional religious education and traditional religious literacies as impediments to or competitors with development policies, national planners would do well to consider such literacies as resources. The reality is that, for a real and substantial portion of the world's children, literacy skills are acquired in traditional religious schools. And, if literacy is thought to be a central development goal, then the question ought not be 'Should traditional religious literacy count?' but rather, 'How can we reinforce useful learning contexts already in place, and build them into a long-term plan for human resource development?' While sensitive political questions often arise with respect to religious schooling, it is important not to ignore the potential benefits for learning that might accrue to a policy of comprehensive educational inclusion. 4. Conclusions What may we conclude in the way of policy options from this overview of traditional religious schooling? First, the available evidence suggests that Islamic schools, as the primary contemporary example of traditional religious schooling, have made major changes in various countries where they remain active, such as in the nature of instruction, style of teaching, and in the teacher corps itself (Wagner and Lotfi 1982). In general, these changes have been made in response to social and economic demands, and thus may be thought of as supporting the overall process of development, though at the same time supporting the needs of the various Islamic communities where the schools are situated. Second, in terms of children's learning, the evidence available suggests that where such schools take the form of preschooling or after-school (parallel) classes, there is reason to believe that this additional education will be of substantial value to children who do not or cannot attend secular government primary schools, and would also be of value to children who may already attend some form of government primary schooling. Conversely, in spite of historical and anecdotal comments to the contrary, there is no solid empirical evidence to suggest that traditional religious school learning has a negative effect on secular school learning. Third, the fiscal base of traditional religious schooling varies as a function of the type of school and
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The Social Context local cultural context. With respect to Islamic schools, teachers and classrooms are most often supported by a combination of donations from individual parents and from the Muslim community. While exact figures are unavailable, there can be little question that traditional religious schools cost a small fraction of what a government school would cost for an equivalent number of hours of teaching on a per pupil basis. Fourth, although the development utility of traditional religious schools in their present form can be debated, few would doubt that substantial improvements could be made in these schools if an appropriate and sensitive investment strategy were established. In a few cases where modest interventions have occurred (such as in Morocco, with Unicef support; or in Tanzania with Aga Khan Foundation support), there have been major improvements in both quality of instruction and learning. In summation, traditional religious forms of schooling may be useful in support of literacy development, and as a complement to government primary school institutions in many countries. Traditional religious schooling and traditional religious forms of literacy are the norm rather than the exception in some of the poorest nations of the world. The continuing failure of most development agencies (as well as national ministries of education) to consider the importance of this network of traditional religious schools is surprising in light of the difficulties in achieving universal primary schooling that is effective for promoting basic literacy skills. It would seem that the time has come to consider the reinforcement of these traditional religious institutions which have stood the test of centuries of time, but which have largely been ignored. Acknowledgment This article is based in part on Wagner (1999).
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Bibliography Bourdieu P 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Erny P 1972 L 'enfant et son milieu en Afrique noire, essai sur l'education traditionnelle. Paypt, Paris Goody J, Watt I 1968 The consequences of literacy. In: Goody J (ed.) Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Guruge A 1985 Buddhist Education. In: Husen T, Postlethwaite T N (eds.) International Encyclopedia of Education: Research and Studies. Pergamon Press, New York Kapitzke C 1995 Literacy and Religion: The Textual Politics and Practice of Seventh-day Adventism. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Kapitzke C 1999 Literacy and religion: The word, the holy word, and the world. In: Wagner D A, Venezky R L, Street B V (eds.) Literacy: An International Handbook. Westview Press, Boulder, CO Scribner S, Cole M 1981 The Psychology of Literacy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Street B V 1984 Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press, London Wagner D A 1985 Islamic education: Traditional pedagogy and contemporary change. In: Husen T, Postelthwaite T N (eds.) International Encyclopedia of Education: Research and Studies. Pergamon Press, New York Wagner D A 1989 In support of primary schooling in developing countries: A new look at traditional indigenous schools. World Bank Background Paper Series, Doc. No. PHREE/89/23. World Bank, Washington, DC Wagner D A 1993 Literacy, Culture and Development: Becoming Literate in Morocco. Cambridge University Press, New York Wagner D A 1999 Indigenous education and literacy learning. In: Wagner D A, Venezky R L, Street B V (eds.) Literacy: An International Handbook. Westview Press, Boulder, CO Wagner D A, Lotfi A 1980 Traditional Islamic education in Morocco: Socio-historical and psychological perspectives. Comparative Education Review 24: 238-51
The Home-School Language Gap African American Vernacular English I. F. Hancock
Stimulated by the surge of Black consciousness in the 1960s, issues involving African American Vernacular English (sometimes called Black English or Ebonics) in the classroom came to be a prime focus of academic and administrative attention, an interest which saw the publication throughout the 1960s and 1970s of hundreds of works on the topic (Brasch and Brasch 1974). National concern was stimulated by a report published in the New York Times (December 3, 1968) which indicated that, by the ninth grade, Black students were on average 2 years behind other students in their level of academic attainment. A study published in the following year linked the reason for this firmly to language skills, concluding that 'Negro children read very poorly... and to all intents and purposes are not learning to read at all during the time they spend in school' (Labov 1969: 33; see also Educational Failure; Reading Difficulties; Reading: Acquisition). The situation became the concern of different sections of the establishment, in particular educators and educational counselors, and language specialists. Each had a stake in addressing the problem, and each approached it from a different perspective. Educators, working within a mainly prescriptive framework, were the least flexible in their stance; any deviance from the written norm (Standard English or 'Book English') was seen as wrong (see Standard English). Students unable to acquire skills in the standard dialect simply failed the course. The educational specialists to whom they turned for guidance did not involve themselves in the question of student evaluation, but attempted to provide an explanation for the poor classroom performance evident among African American students. As Dillard (1972:265-68) has documented, since the eighteenth century a persistent attitude on the part of the American establishment has been that Black pupils are inherently uneducable. In more sophisticated guise the same argument was proposed by some specialists as the deficiency hypothesis which, constructed in part upon the works of Basil Bernstein,
maintained that what were seen as impoverished language skills were a reflection of the speakers' culturally impoverished home environments; richness in one's speech could not be possible if one's life itself lacked richness (see Home and School Language). The works of educational psychologists Carl Bereiter and Siegfried Engelman in part promoted this approach, and were widely quoted. Other factors reflecting similar bias gradually came to light: indifference on the part of teachers to the educational welfare of their Black students, and culturally-slanted IQ testing. Linguists have generally approached the situation quite differently. Their principal argument has been that Black English constitutes a significantly different linguistic system from the standard dialect, and just as students with non-English mother-tongues have been shown to function below par as a result, so Black English speakers are faced with the double load of having to deal with linguistic differences in the classroom as well as with the course content. The classroom, from this perspective, was seen as a 'quasiforeign' linguistic environment for such students, according to Stewart (1964:11) (see Intercultural Discourse). Having demonstrated that the differences which distinguish Black English from the standard dialect are extensively paralleled in varieties of Black language spoken elsewhere in the world (particularly in the Caribbean and West Africa), it was logical to regard the identity and historical relationships of Black English differently from those of other varieties of English in America. This led on the one hand to a purely theoretical involvement with demonstrating the pidgin and Creole affiliations of Black English (and with Gullah in particular, proposed by some at that time as its Ur-form), and on the other with attempts to rectify the situation in the classroom by incorporating pedagogical methods based on methods used for other non-English-speaking students in American schools, that is, to teach English as though it were a foreign language. 187
The Social Context To this end bi-dialectal teaching materials were produced and incorporated in some school curricula, and appeared to be yielding positive results. But reaction to their implementation was fierce and generally negative, opponents charging that the institutionalizing of Black English in the schools succeeded only, as Stoller (1975:16) put it, in 'maintain[ing] race-class stratification'. After a period of quiescence, the issue flared up again in 1997, with a controversy over a decision of the Oakland School Board in California to recognize Ebonics as a language (for up-to-date information, see http://www.cal.org/ebonics or http://www. stanford.edu/ ~ rickford/ebonics). See also: Ann Arbor Case; School Language Policies. Bibliography Bereiter C, Engelman S 1966 Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Bernstein B 1970 A sociolinguistic approach to socialization, with some references to educability. In: Williams F (ed.) Language and Poverty: Perspectives on a Theme. Markham, Chicago, IL Brasch I W, Brasch W M 1974 A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of American Black English. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA Dillard J 1972 Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States. Random House, New York Harrison D S, Trabasso T (eds.) 1976 Black English: A Seminar. Erlbaum, New York Labov W 1969 The Study of Black English. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC Stewart W A (ed.) 1964 Non-Standard Speech and the Teaching of English. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC Spolsky B (ed.) 1972 The Language Education of Minority Children. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Stoller P (ed.) 1975 Black American English: Its Background and its Usage in the Schools and in Literature. Dell Publishing, New York
Ann Arbor Case I. F. Hancock
English-speaking African American pupils face special problems in schools; one particular court case in the USA highlighted such problems and the complex issues related to them. In 1977, four African American families living in the Green Road housing project in Ann Arbor, Michigan, filed a law suit on behalf of their altogether 15 children against the Martin Luther King Jr Elementary School which those children attended, and against the Ann Arbor School District and the State Board of Education for Michigan. The charge was that the school had, in the opinion of those parents, wrongly placed the children in remedial classes and had held them back from normal advancement into higher grades. They had also dealt with the children and disciplined them in a way which, those parents maintained, made no concession to their economic, cultural, ethnic, or linguistic background. These differences were such that they distanced the children from their fellow students, their teachers, and the school administrators. They further alleged that the school had not adequately dealt with the barriers these factors presented, by providing what was necessary to enable the children to acquire literacy skills in standard written English (see Literacy; Standard English). The school catered for a mainly White, middle- and upper-middle-class population, and was located in a similarly populated district of Ann Arbor. The Green Road children were doing poorly in all of their class-
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work, and their reading skills were all below grade level. Concerned parents who had previously approached the school had been given no encouragement, and the teachers had made no effort to deal with the children as students requiring a specialized curriculum (see Reading: Acquisition; Reading Difficulties). It was this inaction which prompted the litigation, and the demand that the school develop a literacy program specifically aimed at the children, in order to prevent their becoming functionally illiterate adults. This was supported by the Equal Educational Opportunity Act, passed by Congress in 1974, which ruled that no state could deny equal educational opportunity to an individual by failing to take into consideration that individual's language. At the pretrial, the magistrate dismissed one of the four families who had moved away from the district, leaving 11 of the original 15 children. He also dismissed consideration of any economic and social factors as being germane to the case. This ruling obliged the court to focus solely upon its linguistic aspects. Thus a case which had initially claimed mismanagement of the children ended up as a claim against mismanagement of their language within the school system. The case came to trial in 1979 and lasted 4 weeks. Officially it was entitled Martin Luther King Jr Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board 473 F. Supp. 1371 (1979). Its substance
Black English (UK) concerned the relationship between the dialect of the children and their access to the standard dialect. A major decision was made by presiding Judge Charles Joiner on July 12, 1979, to the effect that the school had failed in its duty to provide for all its children the language skills necessary to allow them to participate fully in society. It was also ruled that the Ann Arbor school officials would have to develop a curriculum tailored specifically to these children, which would allow them to acquire the same reading skills as the rest of the student body. On August 17,1979, a plan was submitted for review. It called for the establishment of training sessions for teachers in the district to enable them to understand and deal with the speech of African Americans, and to understand and deal appropriately with children who came from a cultural environment in which Black English was the ethnic vernacular (see African American Vernacular English). The proposal was divided into two parts, the first dealing with the actual procedure to be implemented, and the second the incorporation of in-class training and its application on the part of those teachers. In Judge Joiner's posttrial summary which appeared in Memorandum Opinion and Order (published in 473 F. Supp. 1324 (1979)), Black English is described as 'a distinct, definable version of English, different from standard English of the school and the general world of communications. It has definite language patterns, syntax, grammar and history.' The Ann Arbor case, sometimes referred to as the King Case or the Black English Case, attracted considerable media attention, and sharply polarized public opinion. One observer referred to the journalists' handling of the story as 'an act of betrayal by the mass media.' Despite protests to the contrary on the part of those most closely connected with the case, it was felt by very many people, members of the Black middle class in particular, that the purpose of the litigation was to force the teaching of Black English in the classroom, a move seen by some as a tactic, even a 'plot,' on the part of the educational establishment specifically designed to deny African Americans access
to the mainstream and from acquiring professional skills. Yet the case had nothing to do with the way people talk, or with linguistic registers, or with success in the adult world. Nor did it lay blame at the feet of the children or their teachers or their parents, despite the fact that each one of these groups was a target for the press. The fault was found to lie instead with the Ann Arbor Board of Education, for failing to provide its teachers with training which would prepare them to deal effectively with Black English-related issues in the classroom. The outcome of the case was only partly successful. It reaffirmed the obligation of the educational system to address the special problems which face Black English-speaking pupils, and drew considerable academic attention to the legitimacy of Black English and, as a result, stimulated an interest in Pidgin and Creole Studies in the USA, an area of study which has become central to contemporary language acquisition theory (see Language Acquisition). But a decade later the large-scale institutionalizing of curricular materials in American classrooms aimed at addressing the special needs of Black English-speaking students specifically had still not occurred. See also: School Language Policies; Educational Failure; African American Vernacular English. Bibliography Abrahams R D, Troike R C, (eds.) 1972 Language and Cultural Diversity in American Education. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Baugh J 1983 Black Street Speech. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX Bentley R H, Crawford S D (eds.) 1973 Black Language Reader. Scott, Foresman & Co, Glenview, IL Gage W W (ed.) 1974 Language in its Social Setting. The Anthropological Society, Washington, DC Haskins J, Butts H F 1973 The Psychology of Black Language. Barnes and Noble, New York Labov W 1970 The Study of Non-Standard English. National Council of Teachers of English, Washington, DC Smitherman G 1981 Black English and the Education of Black Children and Youth. Wayne State University Center for Black Studies, Detroit, MI
Black English (UK) M. Dalphinis
Although Black English has a longer history as a language of trade and initial contact between Africans and speakers of English on the West African coast from at least 1600, Black English in the UK is the result of the linguistic change from Creole languages
spoken by older Afro-Caribbean immigrants into the UK which, under the impact of English as the dominant language in the UK have become a more Englishlike means of communication for the UK-born descendants of these former immigrants. 189
The Social Context 1. Linguistic Changes Creole languages in the UK have undergone a process of linguistic change to become Black English: this is similar to the way in which Creoles have changed to Black American speech, in the USA (see African American Vernacular English). These changes have a number of phonological, grammatical, and syntactic features. Phonologically, Creoles are being replaced by largely white workingclass English linguistic features, as the latter are the group the Creole speakers have had most sustained contacts with in the UK. For example, the use of ?, in jit wo me? ('You what mate'), in Black English, represents a clear Cockney influence. Similarly, Jamaican Creole kya ('can't') is pronounced ka, under the influence of English 'can't,' by speakers of Black English. Creole grammatical features in Black English have been retained at a mainly unconscious level of linguistic control, for example, in saying 'John go to market,' when the speaker wants to say (at a conscious level) 'John goes to the market'; this reflects the Creole uninflected verb, John go makit. Similarly the phrase mi gwann mi ducks ('I'm on my way, ducks'), reflects a continuation of Creole grammatical structures but with the use of the working-class English loan word 'ducks' (meaning 'dear'). Other grammatical features include the use of Adjectival Verbs, for example, red in it red instead of English 'It is red.' A major grammatical feature of Black English is the mixed use of both English and Creole grammatical features, for example, di walls dem—'the walls' in which both the English plural and Black English plural forms are included. At the semantic level, Creole concepts have entered into English, for example, English 'wicked' has been extended to include the Creole meaning of 'very good.' The general trend is from Creole to Black English to English. However, Creoles of French vocabulary have not interfaced with English, and instead are involved in the general shift to Jamaican Creole by Black youth irrespective of island origin. 2. Creole Features and Black English To clarify the differences between Black English and Creole both in the Caribbean and in the UK there is the general recognition by linguists of a basilect of core Creole sentences which contrast with an acrolect/ mesolect of Black English sentences. In this acrolect the majority of the speaker's repertoire consists of English sentences, with an admixture of Creole core sentences. Some writers also point to degrees of fluency of the speakers in Creole/Black English as another distinguishing factor. Implicit in this factor is the view that Black English is a transitional position between Creole and English. Consequently, its speakers use Creole grammatical features, usually at an unconscious
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level, while at a conscious level, they use phonetic and semantic features of English, with Creole interjections for particular social effects. 3. Education The UK context has been one of initially deeply held racist views about Creole speakers and the type and amount of education needed by them. Within this social context, the following main historical trends can be identified in relation to Creole and Black English in UK education: (a) Eradicate Creole/Black English in the classroom (b) Assimilate Creole/Black English in the classroom (c) Tolerate Creole/Black English in the classroom (d) Accept linguistic pluralism within the overall uniformity of the UK National Curriculum (see English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)). These changes are often related to varying emphases in political thinking, as well as changes in the ideologies about teaching and learning. For example, teacher motivation to 'eradicate' Creole in the 1960s was tied up with the then popular learning theory based on the behaviorist stimulus/response ideas of Skinner. This view saw the Creoles as part of 'bad' linguistic behavior which had to be corrected or changed in order that English or 'good' linguistic behavior could emerge. This corrective view was also linked with many Afro-Caribbeans being put into schools for the educationally subnormal, because their linguistic performance was seen as an aspect of linguistic and cognitive inferiority. The eradication view was followed by assimilationist educational perspectives in the 1980s which were characterized by a wish to ensure that a great deal of English culture was 'soaked up' by the children of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. This, indeed, led to one or two local authorities bussing their AfroCaribbean pupils around the Local Education Authority so that they did not become too 'contaminated' by their own culture and languages. Later educational perspectives in the 1990s, when ideas of linguistic varieties and repertoires were popular, encouraged a greater tolerance of Creole and Black English, which were used in some London schools as part of linguistic and literacy studies. Within the National Curriculum documents, Creoles are mainly discussed under the English recommendations from the following perspectives, which would apply inter alia to Black English: (a) providing information on the spread of English internationally, (b) information about linguistic change, (c) information about comparing languages, (d) information about Creoles, (e) the use of Creole/Black English as part of class exemplification,
Black English (UK) (f) as part of a generally assimilationist process, from Creole to Black English to English. The Kingman Committee Report on English (see English Teaching in England and Wales), indeed, highlights Creole as a language which, amongst others, has enriched English. It highlights similarities between English, Black English and English Creole vocabulary while downplaying syntactic differences. Black parents have seen standard English, rightly, as the key to access to education in an Englishspeaking society and have, generally, had expectations of high educational achievement for their children. These expectations were well supported in the Caribbean by both the educational outcomes and the high expectations of Caribbean teachers with regards to their pupils. However, in the UK this traditional Caribbean expectation has been questioned by both the lower educational achievements of pupils of Caribbean origins and in the expectations of UK teachers, for example, as described by Stone (1981) and Coard (1971). 4. Accommodation in the National Curriculum Perspective
In order to accommodate demands by Black parents in addressing the cultural needs of their children, a number of educational texts by Black authors have become part of the National Curriculum, for example, stories by P. Breinberg in the book list for the National Curriculum reading profile component. The general theme of accommodation is one in which many aspects of Black English culture and language(s) can easily be investigated to fulfill a number of National Curriculum requirements in English, particularly in the area of speaking and listening. However, these are highly dependent upon the skill, interest, and cultural repertoires of the teacher. Similarly, with standardized assessments in relation to mathematics and science, there is no ruling against the use of mother tongues, including Black English, in the presentation of the mathematical and scientific skills of the pupils. However, in the same way that the Community Languages which can form part of the schedule of 'foreign' languages taught in the National Curriculum are prescribed (these include Greek and Chinese, but exclude Turkish), so too are the narrow terms within which Creole and Black English are considered in the UK National Curriculum. While it could be claimed that the National Curriculum implies that Creole/Black English is part of the general bilingual heritage of Afro-Caribbean pupils, it is clear that Creole is described as a 'dialect of English,' although with an 'apology': ... The term 'dialect of English' which we have just used is itself problematic. Whether Creole varieties are termed 'dialects of English or regarded as languages in their own right is a political and ideological question, which
concerns the social identity of groups of speakers in UK society. It is not a matter which has a simple linguistic definition. (Department of Education and Science 1989 4.9)
The issue is how to assimilate an ex-slave population within the wider 'English' family while forgetting that some Caribbean Creoles are derived from French vocabulary. Indeed while accepting linguistic variety, both the Kingman and the Cox Reports focus upon the centrality of English (as was their remit) and see Black English/Creole only as a means of illustrating the international dimensions of English within an overall assimilationist process. 5. Culture and Identity
Issues of identity and of attitudes towards Creole and Black English, remain the areas that lack the attention of educational researchers in the UK. Historical factors have had important influences on these issues. The identity of Creole speakers in the UK, for example, is tied up with UK nationalist attitudes, which do not foster the educational development of an AfroCaribbean identity, but which suggest that convergence towards a single 'UK' culture is desirable. Black English speakers, therefore, often relate to Creole/ Black English as a symbol of identity in the face of monolithic 'UK' racism, irrespective of any high degree of fluency in Creole by the speakers concerned. Attitudes to Black English by Black English speakers themselves have often been negative, particularly as far as older Creole speakers are concerned. The latter often saw Creole as a barrier to the economic advancement of their children. This has meant that discussing anything to do with Creole in the UK educational system has always begun on the difficult ground of negative parental attitudes towards any such discussion by teachers, who the parents thought were using another strategy to educationally oppress their children, as had been done in relation to issues of educational subnormality previously. Speakers of Black English, therefore, often have the ambivalent background of a negative stereotype of their parents, while wanting to preserve Black English as one of the few manifestations of their differences from a White UK society which they perceive as racist. Black English, therefore, becomes a retreat for Black English pupils who want to restrict contacts with a White society which has proved to be hostile. Oral literature in Creole remains a productive aspect of Black English and Creole culture, as many Afro-Caribbean poets in the UK use it as a medium, for example, L. K. Johnson and M. Collins. Closely related to the medium of such literary works is the strong African musical tradition which, in Reggae and other Afro-Caribbean music, uses Black English/ Creole as an essential cornerstone of its communication. Dub poetry and disc jockey verbal communication in more recent times are also a dimension
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The Social Context of African oral art which, although it may not use Creole in its surface structure, is very reliant on Black American speech, which like Black English, is itself on a continuum from a previous Black American Creole. The question which needs to be asked is what is to be the destiny of Black English in the UK, in the light of previous Black American Creole experiences. Given the much smaller size of the Afro-Caribbean population in the UK than in the USA, the trend of linguistic assimilation into native British varieties may be more profound. Racial difference will remain accentuated. Africans have, however, always changed the cultures they found themselves in, in order to express their own consciously and unconsciously held beliefs. That trend seems likely also to continue, not least in the area of language. 6. Conclusion
The English National Curriculum accommodates the possibility of Creole usage but politically implies that
the usage must be in an assimilationist cause, by relating the Black English/Creole mother tongue to UK English. The culture of young Afro-Caribbeans however, caught in the contradictions of racism, the search for sheer survival and maintenance of a sense of identity, is giving rise to other dimensions of Black English/Creole linguistic development in the UK. See also: Standard English; Ann Arbor Case; African American Vernacular English. Bibliography Department of Education and Science 1989 English for Ages 5 to 16. HMSO, London Coard B 1971 How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System. New Beacon Books, London Stone M 1981 The Education of the Black Child in Britain. Fontana, Glasgow
Educational Failure J. R. Edwards
It is a commonplace in education that some pupils fare more poorly than others. Why should this be? Why do some children seem to be at a disadvantage from firstschool entry and why should they continue to achieve less than others, in some cases falling further and further behind and dropping out of school at the earliest opportunity? There are, of course, any number of reasons for individual underachievement, but group disadvantage is, perhaps, a different matter. Certain varieties of class, race, and ethnicity which differ from majority or mainstream society (of which the school is generally representative) seem, unfortunately, to be associated with a broad area of failure. In other words, group disadvantage seems to reside, most basically, in social difference. The important issues here relate to the nature of that difference and its ramifications, and it is no overstatement to suggest that the school, as a point of contact between groups, is an arena of the greatest social and academic importance. While educational disadvantage should not simply be equated with material poverty, there is clearly a connection and, in some quarters, 'disadvantage' has often been a euphemism characterizing the poor. In 1970, Rainwater outlined the most important historical and contemporary perspectives on poverty, all of which continue in various guises. A 'moralizing' view depicts the poor as strong but lacking in virtue, somehow deserving of their deprived state and requiring control.
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However, where the poor are seen as weak, a 'medical' assessment may be made—what was once sin is now sickness and social remediation is at least theoretically possible. Poverty viewed as a combination of virtue and weakness forms the basis of a 'normalizing' theory; the poor are morally similar to others, but lack the resources to cope effectively. Suggested solutions to poverty would then involve providing opportunities for self-betterment. Another perspective, reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'noble savage,' holds that the poor are both strong and virtuous. In this 'apotheosizing' picture, the poor are the basic, uncorrupted, and 'natural' inheritors of the earth. Rainwater (1970) also supplies a different view, one which goes beyond descriptive value judgment and aims to explain poverty in objective ways: (his 'naturalizing' view stresses either some version of biological determinism or cultural differences which set the poor apart and explain their lifestyles and values. Unsurprisingly, it is within this last perspective that most social scientific attempts to come to grips with poverty and disadvantage are found. 1. The Nature of Group Difference
Biological determinism has historically been the most pervasive of 'scientific' accounts for group disadvantage, and the 'benign totalitarianism' (to cite Rainwater 1970) often associated with it has had racist and
Educational Failure eugenic aims (although it may be anachronistic simply to style Victorian scientists like Gallon as racist in the modern sense of the term). Strong connections were established between the widespread view that some groups were inherently less capable than others and the intelligence-testing movement begun in the last century by Binet, Terman, and others. Assessment of ability in ways that are now seen as clearly ethnocentric and biased in favor of social mainstreams had unfortunate implications in eugenic practice and theory, in the passage of sterilization laws, and in immigration control—the last two being particularly important in America. It surely comes as no surprise to learn that assessment procedures found mental deficiency especially prevalent among the Black population, nor that many Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants were classified as feeble-minded compared with their British and northern European counterparts. The ultimate excesses of the biological view were, of course, evident during World War II. The argument for innate genetic deficiency then languished until Arthur Jensen, beginning in 1969, proposed that American Blacks were indeed below the intelligence levels of normal Whites. While there was a simple and predictable charge of racism leveled against Jensen, his articles did prompt close analysis within the scientific community. Of greatest significance was the relationship between measured IQ and intelligence. Some tests are clearly biased towards particular groups. An instrument designed to measure knowledge associated with culture A would clearly be inappropriate for culture B, where intelligent behavior might take very different forms; nevertheless, tests have been used in this inappropriate way, with predictable results. Aware of this, Jensen restricted himself to so-called culture '-fair' or '-free' tests, tests supposedly tapping more general ability. However, all tests, however abstract or nonverbal their form, are devised by someone at sometime to measure something. A culturefree assessment is impossible. Some cultures are much more 'test-wise' than others and this factor, along with elements of the context within which a test is administered, clearly influences outcomes. There is a practical point to be made here. Jensen found, on average, a 10-15 IQ point difference between Black and White samples, and psychologists and educators have been virtually unanimous in saying that this is insufficient to warrant altered educational provision (Jensen himself had recommended different curricula for children with 'Level I' and 'Level II' ability). Nonetheless, intelligence testing and its presumed implications for pronouncements about group heritability continued to surface. The studies of identical twins, which began in the nineteenth century (and which are virtually all flawed), were of great interest to Jensen. The now discredited work of Burt was apparently formative and continues to figure in discussions by Eysenck, Kamin, and others (see Edwards
1989). The net result is that while inheritance clearly is a factor in human life, the heritability of intelligence has not been shown to be significant for crossgroup comparison nor can it be so shown until that Utopian day when differences attributable to environment and social prejudice have diminished. However, while wishing to discredit the genetic deficiency argument, one has to warn that it is not a dead letter, either in the popular imagination or in academic circles. A Canadian in the Jensen mold emerged in the 1980s, for example, in the person of Rushton, a psychologist who claimed Blacks to be inferior to Whites who, in turn, were inferior to Orientals. Environmental deficiency has also been seen as the cause of group disadvantage. Children are seen to do poorly at school because early physical, social, and psychological backgrounds are inadequate and stunting. The patterns of socialization found among some groups are believed to result in substantive deficit, hindering both inschool and afterschool success. Thus, low socioeconomic status, large family size, absence of books in the home, disdain for the life of the mind, and, particularly, poor communication between parents and children are all seen to contribute to disadvantage. The products of such homes are themselves said to be characterized by poor language skills, poorly developed 'conscience' and academic motivation, and inability to see intellectually beyond the here-and-now and the concrete. There are, again, real difficulties with this position. For example, the contexts which generated these observed 'deficits' are suspect and, in any event, the latter are usually discussed in facile and overly general ways. Not enough is known about the links between early environment and these supposedly disadvantageous characteristics, nor about those between characteristics and school success or failure. How could the environmental-deficiency argument account, for example, for those many pupils who succeed despite having such 'bad' backgrounds? The chief difficulty with the environmental position is that it is suffused with a middle-class bias. Many of the 'deficits,' for example, associated with disadvantaged children could be seen as strengths in the light of a sensitive awareness of their social situation; a poor 'conscience' might be a sensible adaptation to dangerous and unpredictable surroundings; similarly, an 'inability' to postpone rewards—as demonstrated in experiments in which lower-class children were much more likely than middle-class ones to take one bag of sweets now rather than accept the offer of three bags in a week's time—makes good sense if previous experience suggests that promises are not always fulfilled. No one would deny that backgrounds and lifestyles differ; what is at issue here is whether or not it makes sense to translate difference into deficit. If the environmental-deficit argument is weak, then it follows that educational innovation based upon it 193
The Social Context is flawed. This will include many varieties of compensatory education, head-start programs and other well-meaning interventions (including proposals completely to 'resocialize' children whose families are deemed inadequate). However, both inside and outside education, environmental deficiency continues to be seen as a strong argument to explain disadvantage. Recent studies have shown that teachers—to cite one obviously important group—are still very prone to accept it (again, see Edwards 1989 for a comprehensive review here). If disadvantaged groups' difficulties do not spring from innate inferiorities or intellectually stunting environments, to what can be ascribed their very real educational problems? Logic and the process of elimination lead to the position that disadvantage resides in group differences, rather than in basic cognitive deficiency. Because of social comparison, and because it is clear which groups are relatively powerful and which subordinate, differences essentially become deficits. These are real enough but it is important to realize that they are essentially social deficiencies. While the problems of the disadvantaged remain, their solution can now be seen to lie in the eradication of prejudice and ill-judged assessment. In some ways, this makes disadvantage even more disabling, since history suggests that problems whose existence rests upon social norms and values are among the most intractable. Even wide-ranging social revolutions and redistributions of power are unlikely to eliminate disadvantage. In the aftermath of such movements new players may adopt new roles and the characteristics of disadvantage may alter, but the phenomenon itself seems endemic in stratified societies. This is not to say, however, that nothing can be done. 2. The Language Dimension Language has a central and obvious position in social interaction and comparison. It is to be expected that 'different' language more accurately characterizes the disadvantaged than does 'deficient' language, and examining the linguistic dimension will flesh out the preceding generalities. Sociologists and educators who studied class dialects in the early part of the twentieth century generally held that lower-class speakers were both insufficiently exact and grammatically deficient, their speech being less complex in terms, for example, of phrase and clause usage. It is necessary to point out, however, that usage levels, or performance, need not relate to underlying competence (habitual performance is, of course, of some interest in its own right). The work of the British sociologist, Bernstein (1959, 1960, 1971-75) is significant in lower-class language analysis. In the 1950s he introduced the terms 'public' and 'formal' language. The former, emphasizing 'emotion' rather than 'logic,' is the lower-class variant,
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while the latter, rich in sentence complexity, is that of the middle class (which also, however, has access to 'public' forms). Public language is, above all, characterized by concrete and nonsymbolic expression in which syntactic and lexical usage is restricted. Formal language, by contrast, has great symbolic and abstract expressivity. In later writings Bernstein (1971-75) referred to these varieties as 'restricted' and 'elaborated' codes. While some of Bernstein's statements about the codes have a decidedly 'deficit' ring to them (e.g., 'the normal linguistic environment of the working class is one of relative deprivation'; Bernstein 1960:276), he noted some strengths associated with public language ('simplicity and directness of expression, emotionally virile [sic], pithy and powerful'; Bernstein 1959: 322). In the 1970s, Bernstein attempted to distance himself from any 'deficit' interpretation and any group comparison at the level of competence, and he specifically rejected the prevailing sentiments behind compensatory education programs for the disadvantaged. Indeed, despite some of his own rather ambiguous statements, Bernstein should probably be placed within the 'difference' camp. This does not alter the fact, however, that, whether correctly or wrongly interpreted, his work fueled the environmental-deficit argument on the linguistic contribution to educational underachievement. The results of Bernstein's experimental studies certainly showed differences of habitual usage between groups (e.g., groups of working-class messenger boys compared with senior public-school pupils). The question, of course, is what to make of them. Many deficit theorists have had no difficulty here. The intrafamily communication work done by Bernstein and his colleagues in the UK, work which reinforced the view that public language restrictions develop from inadequate mother-child patterns, was taken up in the USA. Lower-class interactions were said to be of an 'imperative-normative' kind, with direct and concrete language being used to maintain parental authority and control. Communication between middle-class mothers and children, however, was considered to be of a more rational and explanatory nature, setting the stage for such useful cognitive operations as generalization, logic, and planning. Indeed, in an elegant but vacuous phrase, one American research team noted that 'the meaning of deprivation [is] deprivation of meaning' (Hess and Shipman 1968:103). All of this work is suspect: the effects of being interviewed and providing language data generally may themselves differentiate social groups; it is difficult to generalize from such data to real home interactions; untested assumptions are made about links between variations in maternal behavior and children's developing cognitive abilities; and so on. Also, there is again in this work a strong sense of the correctness of middle-class standards and practices.
Educational Failure Verbal 'deprivation' was also, unsurprisingly, a powerful element in those programs of compensation underpinned by social deficit theory. One of the most notable here began from the assumption that the lower-class (Black) child was generally retarded. Specifically, his or her language was 'immature' and 'rudimentary,' and, because of this, language was seen as 'dispensable': thus, 'language for the disadvantaged child... is not of vital importance (Bereiter and Engelmann 1966:42). On this preposterous basis the authors—who had apparently never observed children from the orally-rich Black culture at play—outlined a program to compensate youngsters for things they were not lacking in the first place. None of these debatable observations about language was made by linguists, of whom virtually all have rejected the deficit philosophy from which they emerged. The famous anthropological linguist, Sapir, said many years ago that, 'when it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam' (Guy 1988:64) and, although we might not put things quite like that today, Sapir's thesis has proved convincing. Other linguists have rejected the idea of 'primitive' languages and, while languages are not necessarily equivalent in all forms of expression, and while some may be more useful in some contexts, such terms as 'better' or 'worse,' 'superior' or 'inferior,' are not applicable. More specifically, the same can be said for dialects and varieties within a language. All forms are adequate for the needs of speakers within their own speech communities; issues of 'correctness' need to be considered with reference to each variety's own grammar; and problems generally arise only when different varieties come into contact. In the 1960s and 1970s this matter was thoroughly dealt with by Labov (1973) and his associates. He was an American linguist who chose as his test case Black English (BE)—a very good test case, since BE was widely perceived as a deficient and 'illogical' approximation to 'proper' English (see African American Vernacular English). The work had four important strands. First, it was shown that the contexts in which 'verbal deprivation' was diagnosed were generally threatening and hence inappropriate. A small Black child questioned by a large White adult typically produced what Labov called 'defensive, monosyllabic behavior (Labov 1973:27). By simply relaxing somewhat the formalities associated with speech elicitation, the child's performance increased dramatically, coming more to resemble that linguistic richness reflected and valued in the Black speech community. Second, it proved possible to demonstrate that the 'restricted' speech of the lower class might well, if linguistic prejudices could be set aside, be viewed as more forceful and direct, and less redundant and verbose, than the 'elaborated' forms of the middle class.
Concrete and highly charged language usage (showing, indeed, that 'pithy' quality noted by Bernstein) contrasts favorably with a more educated verbosity which hedges basic ideas with a welter of qualification and hesitation. It can be argued that qualification and caution have a place, particularly in contexts in which difficult or abstract issues are under discussion; consequently, this second strand may be the weakest or the least completely developed. Nonetheless, it usefully challenges the received wisdom about the appropriateness of middle-class usage. The third point of importance touched upon the competence-performance distinction. Black children were found to repeat 'standard' English sentences in Black form. Given that the latter is a valid and rulegoverned dialect (see below), and given that these repetitions exactly captured the original meaning, Labov (1973) argued that there was no evidence here at all for any inadequacy in pronunciation, grammar, or, indeed, basic cognitive ability. Children comprehend the meaning of what they hear, then (unsurprisingly) reproduce it in the form most familiar to them. The point was further reinforced by studies showing that White children repeating sentences phrased in BE typically employed standard forms. The final, and most important, element in the overall argument dealt with specific aspects of BE grammar. The central and necessary point to be established here was that BE forms, though different (if not vastly different, incidentally) from standard ones, were adhered to as regularly as those of other varieties. Just two examples suffice here. One of the obvious features of BE is the deletion of the copula verb (in phrases like He gain' to the store or We on tape—where standard usage would produce He is going to the store and We are on tape). The copula verb does appear, however, in the past tense (I was small then). The regularity here is that in contexts where standard English permits contraction (He is going can become He's going), BE allows deletion (notice, by the way, that there is no loss in meaning, no ambiguity, in either case). Where standard usage prohibits contraction (for example, He's as nice as he says he is cannot become *He's as nice as he says he's), so BE rules ban deletion. A final point here: the copula deletion traditionally condemned as inaccurate usage does, in fact, exist in approved form in (informal) standard English too: That your car?, a strolling policeman might say to an illegally parked motorist. A second example concerns such constructions as She be standin' around or He be always fooling about— again, typically seen by White teachers and others as incorrect. Here, the be indicates habitual behavior and, were it absent, the BE speaker would be referring to a present action only. These and other demonstrations convincingly make the case that BE (and, by extension, other English dialects) is a system within which grammatical rules
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The Social Context are obeyed, not a haphazard assortment of utterances. Indeed, given what is known of human cognitive development, the 'rule-governed' hypothesis intrinsically makes much more sense than the 'haphazard' one, regardless of specific empirical observation (i.e., what group, wherever and however it lived, could maintain itself adequately with a basically flawed communication system?). Even so, a deficit conception of language continues in many quarters, and popular prejudices still exist towards disadvantaged forms, which are often seen as indicators of innate or acquired intellectual handicap. More worrying is that allegiance to a deficit philosophy is still evident in some academic circles. One line of argument in such circles is that, while interventions based upon language-deficit models have been of only limited success, the models themselves are not without value. Another related point is that deficit and difference theorists attended to different aspects of language, with the former being mainly concerned with semantics, the latter with grammar. In either case, the linguistically overwhelming evidence against a deficit philosophy is downplayed. Honey (1983), a British professor of education, succeeded in muddying the waters with a monograph in which linguistic arguments supporting a difference viewpoint are rejected. Honey disagrees with the central thesis that all varieties are valid systems, claiming that this undermines attempts to reintroduce 'standards' at school and pushes disadvantaged speakers into a 'language trap.' What these persons really need, according to Honey, is assistance with standard English but he complains that the contemporary linguistic stance, with its respect for all varieties, undercuts this and, in some cases, encourages the school to promote nonstandard forms. Detailed review of Honey's work is impossible here (though it has been undertaken by several prominent linguists, some of whom were attacked by name in the monograph), but the main points are easily summarized. First, the author has fallen prey to a confusion between concepts and the words to describe them: thus, so-called 'primitive' groups may lack words or terms current in more 'advanced' societies, but this tells us about their physical and psychological lifestyle, not about the validity of their language (the question of why different groups develop in different ways is, of course, an interesting one, but it need have no relationship to matters of linguistic relativity). Second, in important ways Honey misinterprets the sort of evidence adduced by Labov (1973) which bears upon the linguistic validity of BE. Third, there is a failure to understand that language differences become deficits through the medium of popular convention and prejudice. Finally, Honey mistakenly imagines that a school policy which tolerates and does not stigmatize the use of nonstandard varieties must necessarily lead to an active fostering of these varieties (and a concomitant de-
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emphasis on standard forms) (see Standard English; School Language Policies). Notwithstanding linguistic and other insights into the nature of language variation, it is important to remain vigilant and not imagine that older and less informed views will simply vanish. For a long time social psychology has shown that the more mental energy has been invested in a particular set of perceptions, the more unwilling people are to change them, even when faced with apparently unanswerable contradictions, preferring instead to engage in various forms of denial, distortion, and self-deception. 3. Language Attitudes It is important to understand the evidence supporting a difference interpretation of language variety. However, it may change little in a practical sense; it would be naive indeed to imagine that widespread diffusion of linguistic findings (assuming that were possible) would speedily eradicate incorrect perceptions. It is therefore necessary to consider in further detail those attitudes which translate language difference into language deficiency. These are matters with a long history; whether it is language, dialect, or accent that is discussed, preferences and prejudices tend to come to the fore. The sixteenth-century poet, Carew, felt that the Italian language was 'pleasant, but without sinews,' French 'delicate,' Spanish 'majestical but fulsome,' and Dutch 'manlike, but withal very harsh.' Dialect attitudes are most pertinent here, of course. While social comparison and unequal power in stratified societies lead to one dialect becoming standard (see Standardization), others are not substandard either linguistically or cognitively (although, if it can maintain nonpejorative status, 'nonstandard' seems acceptable for these)—a matter of primus inter pares, perhaps. However, works of reference have often unfortunately reinforced a 'substandard' interpretation. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for instance, has referred to dialect as a 'subordinate' form arising from 'local peculiarities'—a definition implicitly held by those for whom 'dialect' means some rustic or regional variety. Similarly, on accent, the OED notes 'peculiar' alterations of pitch, 'mispronunciation,' 'misplacing of stress,' and 'misinflection.' Little wonder, then, that it is still easy to find people who claim they have neither a dialect nor an accent, or to discover others eager to shed unwanted and socially stigmatized forms. If dialects cannot be distinguished linguistically as 'better' or 'worse,' could it be that some are aesthetically more pleasing than others? This has certainly been a feature of much popular prejudice and in his 1934 monograph, The Best English, Wyld claimed that any unbiased listener would find RP ('received pronunciation') the most pleasant, the most educated, and the variety best suited for formal
Educational Failure purposes. He touched upon the heart of the matter with the word 'unbiased'—how does one obtain such a listener? Work by Giles and his colleagues attempted to illuminate this. They began by noting two basic possibilities: either some forms were intrinsically more pleasing than others (the 'inherent value' hypothesis), or aesthetic judgments proceeded from assessments of the social standing of the speakers. To test this, judges unfamiliar with language varieties were asked to evaluate them on aesthetic grounds. In one study, Welsh adults with no knowledge of French were unable to differentiate European French, educated Canadian French, and working-class Canadian French on this basis (even though different levels of pleasantness were found by judges drawn from within the French speech community). In a second experiment, English speakers knowing no Greek were asked to rate Athenian and Cretan varieties which, in the Greek context itself, are clearly marked as high and low status, respectively. Again, no inherent aesthetic superiority was detected. This leaves what Giles termed an 'imposed norm' explanation, one which rests upon the power of social convention and belief. The comedic effect of having a stage duchess with Cockney speech reflects ingrained and widely shared speech-community standards. A further demonstration of the purely arbitrary nature of status judgments is provided by Trudgill. In England, speakers of the high-status RP do not pronounce the postvocalic r (in words like cart and mar), while in New York exactly the reverse holds— the higher a speaker's social standing, the more likely he or she is to sound the r. More fine-grained analysis of language attitudes followed upon the introduction of the 'matched-guise' technique by the Canadian psychologist, Lambert. Here, judges evaluate recorded speakers' personality traits after hearing them read the same passage in each of two or more 'guises.' Any rating differences can then be ascribed to language factors, since paralinguistic variables (pitch, tone of voice, etc.) are of course constant across samples. Two points are important here: first, judges must not realize they are rating the same person using different dialects or accents (and typically they do not); second, the reasonable assumption is made that attitudes towards speech are, in fact, attitudes towards speakers—the speech acts as a trigger for a social stereotype, from which flow specific judgments, preferences, and prejudices. Widespread use of this method in many different contexts revealed that dialect evaluation generally involved three personality dimensions. Some dimensions of evaluation (including traits like 'intelligence' and 'industriousness') reflect a speaker's perceived competence; some ('helpfulness,' 'trustworthiness') reflect personal integrity; and some ('friendliness,' 'sense of humor') underlie social attractiveness. While, as might be expected, high-status dialects generally
evoke high ratings of speaker competence, they do not elicit strong perceptions of integrity and attractiveness: on the contrary, these last two (sometimes collectively seen as representing a larger, group solidarity, dimension) are more associated with lowerclass and lower-status varieties. Experimental results are, in fact, more involved than this summary suggests, but a reasonably fair gloss might note that higherstatus speech forms are popularly associated (by both middle-class and lower-class judges, incidentally) with speaker intelligence, ambition, and drive, while the dialects of disadvantage connote trust, liking, and a general down-to-earth quality. The findings are not, then, entirely negative for the disadvantaged population by any means, but the great importance of personal competence (or the perception of it by others) remains central in educational and other settings. Teachers' attitudes are of particular significance here since there is no reason to assume that they will diverge greatly from those of society at large, and because their perceptions may be especially salient in the definition and maintenance of disadvantage. There is a large literature on teacher expectations and the effects they have upon pupils' self-regard and scholastic progress; specifically, it has been shown that the formation of these expectations rests upon existing knowledge (and ignorance) and early assessment of children's characteristics. A child whose speech is perceived as substandard, and whose cognitive capabilities are questioned in turn, will be categorized and stereotyped in specific ways. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong or unnatural with teachers' expectations; they proceed from a universal tendency to simplify and understand a complex world which, without classification, threatens to overwhelm. But the familiar dangers of stereotyping and prejudice involve inaccurate, irrational, or incomplete categorization, often with harmful effects. Educational misperceptions based upon incorrect language assessment may create difficulties where none need exist. There is, perhaps, a special element of tragedy here inasmuch as the disadvantaged children likely to be inadequately understood in this way are exactly those children whose lives are already burdened with more tangible and inescapable weights. Experience suggests that the phenomenon of the 'nonverbal' child (to give but one example) may often be one created by teachers insensitive to crosscultural (or crosssubcultural) differences in the domains of competition, response to authority figures, customary reaction to threat, and so on. It is perhaps unnecessary to state that teachers are not simply and generally being accused of malice, racism, or 'classism' (although these qualities exist among them, as in the general population). Teachers are more concerned than most with the promotion of tolerance and increased social mobility. However, once installed in the classroom, there is evidence that 197
The Social Context teachers are quickly socialized into the traditional ways of the school. In this way disadvantage is perpetuated. Studies in the 1980s in North America and Europe have confirmed this, and also confirmed that contemporary teachers, more tolerant of language variation than previously, still adhere in the main to a deficit view and still consider one of their major tasks to be the elimination of 'incorrect' speech patterns and the inculcation of 'proper' ones. For example, in a study of primary and secondary teachers in Nova Scotia, Edwards and McKinnon (1987) found that disadvantage-as-deficit maintained its appeal; while teachers stressed the importance of home background characteristics as contributors to disadvantage, they clearly viewed some environments as substantively deficient. With specific regard to language, teachers believed that disadvantaged children were incapable of properly articulating their thoughts, and generally placed little value on receptive and expressive skills (see Bereiter and Engelmann 1966; and Hess and Shipman 1968). Minority-group children (in this study, Blacks and Acadians) were particularly singled out, with Black pupils seen to have a 'slang language all their own.' A European review by Hagen (1987) indicates that some countries, like France, retain a centralist view of standard language, while others (the Netherlands, for example) have more liberal legislative perspectives on dialect variation— even if not always matched by school practice. Citing Dutch and Italian work, Hagen notes that nonstandard-speaking children's favorable attitudes to their own speech often decline dramatically as they grow up (see Standard English). 4. Educational Responses to Disadvantage
Language varieties associated with relatively subordinate groups are not inherently deficient, but they do possess negative connotations because of social stratification and comparisons which lead to denigration. Thus, social differences become deficits and nonstandard speech becomes substandard. While still waiting for an end to the unfair and inaccurate language perceptions which contribute to educational disadvantage and failure, it is not unreasonable to consider what schools might be doing. First, of course, schools and teachers must become more aware of the relevant psychological and linguistic evidence bearing upon disadvantage. The wider society is generally ignorant of this, so there is, then, a real limitation on schools. On the one hand, schools tend to reflect mainstream society more than they lead it; on the other, even were schools to become centers of linguistic enlightenment, their students would still emerge into somewhat darker settings. Given these limitations, it is still quite possible for schools and teachers to be linguistically educated; the essentials of the difference-deficit argument, for example, are not 198
difficult to grasp and do not require lengthy exposition or sophisticated prior knowledge. Second, given the practicalities of living in a society, it should be assumed that a standard language variety will continue to be important and particularly valued, and that increased mobility will be positively affected by facility with it. The recommendations made by some linguists that schools should actively encourage (in writing, as well as in speaking) nonstandard usage may seem somewhat naive. Indeed, a common accepted standard can be a levelling device rather than an exclusionary one, and a great asset in personal and group communicative efficiency. It would be a cruel irony if a rather innocent regard for all varieties resulted in a social babel where, it may be assumed, certain groups would again end up at the bottom of the heap. Does this not bring us back to the rejected position associated with Honey (in Sect. 2 above)? The difference is this: while it would be inappropriate and unjust for schools to neglect the standard (and while, incidentally, this would arouse great resentment on the part of disadvantaged groups themselves), a linguistically enlightened policy demands tolerance at school for all forms. Furthermore, the best available evidence indicates that this tolerance should accompany very clear messages that mother-tongue varieties of every kind are both valid and valuable. The aim should be language repertoire addition, not replacement: a policy of bidialectalism. Again, the evidence suggests that this is not at all an insuperable task to require of children (consider the bilingual facility), nor need it be solely a school-based imposition (see Multilingualism 1). When discussing disadvantage, groups existing in the same large society are being treated; in terms of language, this means that disadvantaged groups typically have a considerable, if somewhat passive, exposure to standard forms, forms which are clearly associated with desired social contexts and rewards. Findings concerning sentence repetition indicate this latent standard facility; other evidence supports the fact that disadvantaged children, from an early age, can comprehend standard forms and, indeed, will use them themselves if they judge this appropriate. Schools, then, should activate this knowledge and make it clear to children that a broadening of their performance skills makes sense. This is a matter of some delicacy, however, for children are being asked to accept two social facts which could easily be seen as contradictory. On the one hand, the message is that the mother-tongue variety is perfectly adequate within the home speech community, both for communicative purposes and as a vehicle of group solidarity. On the other, the child is to be made aware that a life beyond that community may require repertoire expansion. Transmission of these two messages requires tact and sensitivity based upon adequate knowledge of children's language and
Educational Failure culture but it will be assisted in many cases by a desire for mobility which is unsurprisingly strong in most disadvantaged communities. Indeed, one might note that the low regard for education supposedly characteristic of the lower class (in the deficit perspective) is much less common than a sometimes overoptimistic hope for mobility through education (see Standard English). Experience, including that derived from deficitinspired compensatory programs, suggests that formalized and drill-like language curricula make little sense. They run the risk, above all, of instilling a 'replacement' perspective which is both uncalled-for linguistically and potentially damaging psychologically. A more laissez-faire policy seems appropriate, in which teachers act as standard-speaking models (in other words, naturally) and in which children's own good sense will lead to the desired expansion. Anything more formal will be counterproductive and will, at the least, contribute to an unnecessary rift between the child's school life and his or her unselfconscious participation in the community. Moreover, it should be noted again that this apparently laissezfaire policy is not simply some default option, but a reasoned and aware reflection of all the evidence and insight presented here. Developments in fine-grained analysis of classroom communication hold out the hopes of refining awareness and improving practices. For example, the traditional assertions that disadvantaged children's 'restricted' usage leads to difficulties with the 'elaborated' language of school are undercut by real classroom patterns, which are very often delimited exercises in control—both particularistic and concrete. Indeed, the view of schools as middle-class institutions has itself been challenged on these grounds. In fact, this challenge cannot be sustained— schools are middle-class in the attitudes, skills, and values stressed there—but there is clearly more work to be done in ascertaining classroom dynamics (see Classroom Language; Observing Classroom Language). Ethnographic analyses of classroom language are now paying greater attention to such factors as the psychological context in which teacher-pupil interactions occur, a context in which postural configurations, direct and indirect verbal strategies, conversational rhythms, and prosody are important; these and other aspects clarify how impoverished traditional deficit-based and disembodied speech analyses are. Also central here is the interpretation of tacit school rules based upon teachers' needs for order. There is a more subtle treatment of the classroom as speech domain, where a whole cultural 'code' must be mastered for success. The implication is that disadvantage may be partly understood as an incomplete grasping of this code, which combines both knowledge and its 'appropriate' display (see Mehan 1984).
If traditional school practices required pupil adaptation in a sink-or-swim approach, while compensatory intervention programs were heavy-handed with insensitive alterations built upon insecure foundations, new approaches founded on subtle observation may help with both the school adaptation to classroom heterogeneity and a desired repertoire expansion on the part of children. Mehan's (1984) study demonstrated that detailed assessment of language styles between teachers and disadvantaged children allowed practical advice to be given to teachers about how best to adapt. This had the effect of lessening the passivity and 'nonverbality' of the pupils and, once greater participation was established, children were gradually and subtly introduced to 'school styles.' To reduce educational failure associated with group disadvantage, a combination of practical innovations and the transfer of existing psychological and linguistic information is needed. Ethnographic analysis of classroom discourse promises useful insights which can quickly be turned to the benefit of the disadvantaged (and their instructors). It is equally important, however, to provide teachers and others, such as speech therapists, with a much more detailed knowledge of language variation and its ramifications. While the mechanisms of disadvantage are outside the reach of school alone, there is no reason for classroom experiences to add unnecessarily to children's problems. A failure to try to ease these burdens is, in fact, a repudiation of the essence of education in a civilized society. 5. Developments in the 1990s Things have not changed greatly in the 1990s; the basic issues underlying educational failure, in the sense discussed here, remain. Thus, the informed, academic support for the different-but-not-deficient interpretation of scholastic and linguistic disadvantage must still contend with broader and more popular views which either perceive disadvantage as substantive deficit (in more or less direct fashion), or else effectively translate difference into deficiency (through the operation of language attitudes and stereotypes, for example). The calls made (in section 4, above) for greater general awareness of the nature of disadvantage, and for more sensitive treatment of language at school, in particular, must unfortunately be reiterated. Controversies surrounding Ebonics—as Black English has recently been styled in some quarters— provide a good example of the continuation of those heady intertwinings of knowledge and ignorance, prejudice and innocence, which we have so often seen before. One or two of the major players mentioned above have re-entered the fray; the general impact, however, has been more to reinforce original positions than to advance understanding. Bernstein (1997:47) discusses
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The Social Context the context within which his code theory was formulated and presented, and—rather disingenuously, perhaps—observes that the difference/deficit debate was 'of little theoretical significance' and 'obscured more than it revealed.' He also offers here an analysis of Labov's 1973 paper, but pays no attention to the grammatical aspects which were characterized (in Sect. 2, above) as 'the most important element in the overall argument.' An interesting defense of Bernstein and his work has also been mounted by Robinson (1998), who correctly points out that many of the views for which Bernstein was most vilified were not, in fact, his views at all. Robinson also maintains that academic criticism of Bernstein was essentially nonconstructive, not 'Popperian-based,' and often personalized; while such criticism certainly arose in some quarters, it would be a mistake to imagine that more measured treatments were absent (see Edwards 1989). In a book published in 1997, Honey has reemphasized his views (initially expressed in 1983) of standard and nonstandard language, views which have attracted considerable criticism for reasons already discussed here (see Sect. 2, above). More recently, Honey (1998) has suggested that academic criticism of his thesis is marred by false argument and innuendo. In general, then, it is fair to say that the social conditions and the social prejudices which produce and maintain the educational failure associated with group disadvantage are still very much with us. It is also fair to say that much of the discussion of the issue—within and without the academic cloister— continues to generate more heat than light. Consequently, while the sentiments expressed in the final paragraph of the preceding section are still valid, it must be admitted that the 1990s do not suggest much ground for optimism. See also: Black English (UK); School Language Policies. Bibliography Bereiter C, Engelmann S 1966 Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Pre-school. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Bernstein B 1959 A public language. British Journal of Sociology 10:311-26 Bernstein B 1960 Language and social class. British Journal of Sociology 11: 271-76 Bernstein B 1971-75 Class, Codes and Control, vols. 1-3. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Bernstein B 1997 Sociolinguistics: A personal view. In: Paulston C B, Tucker G R (eds.) The Early Days of Sociolinguistics: Memories and Reflections. Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, TX Edwards J 1983 Review of The Language Trap (Honey). Journal of Language and Social Psychology 2: 67-76 Edwards J 1985 Language, Society and Identity. Blackwell in association with Deutsch, Oxford Edwards J 1989 Language and Disadvantage, 2nd edn. Cole & Whurr, London Edwards J, McKinnon M 1987 The continuing appeal of disadvantage as deficit. Canadian Journal of Education 12: 330-49 Giles H, Powesland P F 1975 Speech Style and Social Evaluation. Academic Press, London Guy G R 1988 Language and social class. In: Newmeyer F J (ed.) Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, vol.4. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 37-63 Hagen A 1987 Dialect speaking and school education in western Europe. Sociolinguistica 1: 61-79 Hess R, Shipman V 1968 Maternal influences upon early learning. In: Hess R, Bear R (eds.) Early Education. Aldine, Chicago, IL Honey J 1983 The Language Trap. National Council for Educational Standards, Kenton Honey J 1997 Language is Power: The Story of Standard English and its Enemies. Faber & Faber, London Honey J 1998 The straw hippopotamus. English Today 14(3): Jensen A 1969 How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement? Harvard Educational Review 39: 1-123 Labov W 1973 The logic of nonstandard English. In: Keddie N (ed.) Tinker, Tailor... The Myth of Cultural Deprivation. Penguin, Harmondsworth Mehan H 1984 Language and schooling. Sociology of Education 57: 17 '4-83 Rainwater L 1970 Neutralizing the disinherited: Some psychological aspects of understanding the poor. In: Allen V L (ed.) Psychological Factors in Poverty. Markham, Chicago, IL Robinson W P 1998 Language and social psychology: An intersection of opportunities and significance. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 17: 276-301 Trudgill P 1975 Accent, Dialect and the School. Edward Arnold, London
Gender and Language J. Swann
From the 1970s there has been an increasing interest, particularly in the USA, UK, and Australia, in language and gender. Such work has had implications for
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language teaching and learning, and for education in a more general sense. This article considers two issues: gender and verbal ability; and gender and language use.
Gender and Language 1. Verbal Ability In many countries girls 'underachieve' academically (e.g., worldwide literacy rates are lower for females than for males). But in developed countries, where there has been a concern about girls' and boys' language in education, this tends not to be the case. Girls perform better than boys in tests of verbal ability; in school, they learn to read earlier, and there are fewer girls than boys in remedial reading programs; surveys of older children (e.g., the national monitoring of 11- and 15-year olds in the UK), have found that girls perform better on writing tasks. In reading, the trend is in the same direction, but differences between boys and girls have not always attained statistical significance. In oracy, overall differences between girls and boys are not statistically significant, but boys do better than girls on some tasks (see Oracy; Reading: Early). Interpreting such findings is not without problems. While there are general patterns, there are also differences between tests. Tests measure a variety of aspects of language: it is by no means clear that these can be bundled together into a single coherent category of 'verbal ability.' Also, changes to test items may produce different results. However, it is clear that girls do well in language-related subjects in school. For instance, girls in the UK achieve better pass rates than boys at 16+ examinations in English and modern foreign languages. Some explanations of differences between girls' and boys' performance on tests of verbal ability have been based on biological factors. For instance, it has been suggested that there are maturational differences between girls and boys; girls have an early verbal advantage, but boys eventually catch up. Other explanations have placed more emphasis on social factors: differences in the way adults interact with girls and boys encourage girls' early verbal proficiency; and many of the assumptions underlying reading and writing activities in school (i.e., these are quiet; they require neatness and application, etc.) are also associated with 'feminine' behavior. In practice, it is impossible to disentangle biological and social influences on girls' and boys' language abilities. However, the evidence clearly shows that girls and boys are treated differently from birth, and that differential treatment, and different expectations of girls and boys, continue throughout the school years. Boys' 'underachievement' in language areas (particularly in reading) has given rise to understandable concern. But there has also been concern about girls; namely that their subject choices are unnecessarily restricted to arts and humanities subjects, including language-related subjects, thus denying them the opportunity of qualifications and careers in science and technology. Yet even in careers involving language/communication skills, girls do not take
advantage of their abilities; it is still men who dominate in senior positions. 2. Language Use There is considerable evidence of gender differences (and, some would argue, inequalities) in the way female and male speakers use language. Much of this evidence comes from studies of adult speakers. Research with young children below the age of 10 shows similar but less consistent patterns of gender differentiation; for example: (a) Pitch and voice quality: for example, prepubertal boys tend to have lower speaking pitches than girls matched for size and weight. Differences in formant frequency have also been found in children before puberty. (b) Language variety: male speakers use more nonstandard accent and dialect features than female speakers from the same social background. (c) Language in interaction: male speakers tend to use features that give them a greater 'say' in interactions; more direct expressions; and fewer tentative expressions. Female speakers give more conversational support. Many 'interaction' studies have been carried out in classrooms. In this context, it is the teacher who controls, or at least sets the agenda for interactions, and such studies have focused on teacher-pupil talk as much as, if not more than, talk between pupils. Evidence from classrooms is consistent with that from other contexts: boys are among the more outspoken pupils; boys are generally more assertive than girls (e.g., they call out more frequently); some boys are openly disparaging towards girls. Gender differentiation is supported by teachers, who often make unnecessary distinctions between girls and boys; give more attention to boys than to girls; accept certain behavior (such as calling out) from boys but not from girls; and tend not to perceive disparities between the numbers of contributions from girls and boys (see Classroom Language). Use of 'gender-typed' language signals gender identity, but also other attributes of a speaker (e.g., that she appears tentative). 'Interaction' features also affect the management of an interaction and its outcome (e.g., who gets to talk, whose points are supported and followed up). 'Interaction' differences clearly have implications for classroom management in all subject areas. More evidence is needed on when and how children learn gender-appropriate language. While schools and teachers are likely to play an important part in this, the peer group and the family also provide powerful motivations for children to adopt 'appropriate' ways of speaking. Gender differences pose a dilemma for language teaching and learning and for the assessment of language. Encouraging gender-appropriate talk
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The Social Context necessarily restricts the range of ways of speaking available to pupils, but promoting a wider range of speaking styles for both sexes means that pupils are being asked to depart from social conventions. It is not clear, for instance, that girls' 'direct' speech would be perceived in the same way as boys', nor that it would have the same communicative effect. There is some limited evidence that 'feminine' conversational styles may disadvantage girls in oral assessment (Jenkins and Cheshire 1990; Cheshire and Jenkins 1991). In group discussion, girls' supportive styles may benefit the group as a whole, while girls themselves do not receive credit for their interpersonal skills. More research is needed in this area. Bibliography Cheshire J, Jenkins N 1991 Gender issues in the GCSE Oral English examination, Part II. Language and Education 5:19^0
Coates J 1986 Women, Men and Language. Longman, London Graddol D, Swann J 1989 Gender Voices. Blackwell, Oxford Halpern D F 1986 Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Jenkins N, Cheshire J 1990 Gender issues in the GCSE oral English examination, Part I. Language and Education 4: 261-92 Maccoby, E E, Jacklin C N 1974 The Psychology of Sex Differences. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Moss G 1989 Unpopular Fictions. Virago, London Romaine S 1984 The Language of Children and Adolescents. Blackwell, Oxford Swann J 1992 Girls, Boys and Language. Blackwell, Oxford Thorne B, Kramarae C, Henley N 1983 Language, Gender and Society. Newbury House, Rowley, MA White J 1986 The writing on the wall: Beginning or end of a girl's career? Women's Studies International Forum 9: 56174
Home and School Language M. MacLure
When children start school they are already experienced communicators. They are also experienced learners. These two accomplishments are not unconnected: in the preschool years, children learn through language in their interactions with other people. They learn by asking and answering questions, exploring ideas, playing with language through jokes and rhymes, testing out hunches, recalling the past and anticipating the future, sharing feelings and interests through stories, comparing qualities and attributes. Children bring knowledge and expertise to school with them, therefore; and most importantly, they know how to get more. Yet some continue to thrive as learners in school, and some do not. This has led researchers to ask whether children's experience of language at home might contribute to their success or failure at school. 1. 'Mismatch' Explanations of Educational Failure
The basic assumption has been that of a 'mismatch,' for some children, between the language they have become accustomed to at home, and the communicative norms of the classroom. Some children, it is argued, start school poorly equipped to cope with the language of the classroom, and consequently, poorly equipped to learn. There are two rather different versions of that assumption, which have been called 'deficit' and 'difference' approaches. 'Deficit' 202
theories locate the 'problem' in the home, suggesting that some children receive an impoverished range of communicative experiences, which leaves them at a disadvantage in school. 'Difference' theories speak of difference rather than deficit. Without making value judgments, they suggest that there is nonetheless a wider gap between home and school language for some children than for others (see Educational Failure). There may seem to be little difference between these two explanations, since both are based on the notion of a mismatch between children's existing experience of language and the unfamiliar practices of the school. But they tend to be associated with different practical outcomes. Deficit theories often inspire remedial programs designed to 'enrich' the experiences of those children who are felt to be 'linguistically deprived' at home. Difference theories tend to focus strategically on the language of the school, and to propose strategies for broadening its communicative norms so that they are accessible to a wider range of children. 2. What's the Problem? Dimensions of Difference between Home and School Language
Almost every conceivable aspect of language has been the focus, at one time or another, of research into home and school language. Early studies (now considered of limited interest), tended to concentrate on syntax, and to suggest that the language of some chil-
Home and School Language dren (usually lower- or working-class children: see below) was syntactically less complex than that of others. More recent work has tended to focus either upon the meanings that children are able to convey, or their understanding of the special rules that govern classroom interaction (see Classroom Language). 2.1 Abstractness and 'Higher-order' Thinking One recurring concern has been children's ability to use language which is not tied to the immediate physical context. When children first learn to communicate, they talk mainly about familiar people, objects and events. Gradually, they begin to use language in a more 'abstract' and decontextualized way: to reflect on the past, to anticipate the future, to contemplate the world from the viewpoint of other people, and to speculate about possible as well as actual worlds. These latter activities are highly valued in Western education systems, as are the reasoning skills that they involve, such as hypothesizing, interpreting, and evaluating. These are often referred to as 'higherorder' skills, and they are generally held to underpin learning. It has been suggested that some children do not experience much 'abstract' language of this kind at home, and that they therefore start from behind when they get to school. Some of the assumptions behind such suggestions have been challenged. It has been argued that classroom language is no less 'context bound' than any other kind of language, and that teachers and pupils have to work together, just as parents and their children do, to establish a shared context for their talk. Moreover, some would argue, the so-called 'higherorder' intellectual skills that are valued in school are also present—but often overlooked—in much of the 'informal' talk that goes on in most homes. 2.2 Classroom Discourse and Cultural Diversity Another strand of work takes a cultural perspective, looking at classroom language as a special kind of discourse, with its own rules about who talks to whom, about how communication should be organized, and about what counts as valid knowledge. Children are required to know, for instance, how (and when) to answer teachers' questions, what will count as a 'relevant' contribution to discussions, how to take part in story-telling sessions, etc. Failure, on this reading, stems from an inability (or unwillingness) to observe the norms of classroom talk. Cultural explanations often focus on the school, rather than the home, as the locus of failure: children fail because their cultural practices and values are not recognized by the monocultural, White, middle-class orientation of schools. 3. Social Dimensions of Success and Failure at School: Class, Ethnicity, and Gender Educational underachievement tends, in Western cultures, to be linked with sociological factors such as
class, race, or gender. It is not surprising, therefore, that such factors have also been prominent in the language-related research. 'Social class' has received by far the most attention. Bernstein (see Educational Failure) claimed that the language of working-class (English) families differs at all levels (phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) from that of the middle classes, because of their different culture, and hence the different values, beliefs, and purposes that each class encodes in its communicative practices. Bernstein claimed to be making no value judgments in describing working- and middle-class language in terms of two idealized 'codes'—'restricted' and 'elaborated' respectively. However, his work, which has been very influential amongst educationalists, has often been interpreted as a deficit theory of workingclass language, and his two codes have entered the language of teacher education. Tough's functional analysis (1973) is another example of a class-based deficit account. Heath (1983), on the other hand, offers a cultural, rather than a deficit, analysis of why working-class and Black children in the USA may be failing in school. Ethnicity has also been a focus for research. Here, the predominant trend has been towards cultural explanations which hold schools to account for their failure to value the linguistic practices of children from ethnic minority cultures (see African American Vernacular English; Ann Arbor Case). Gender, too, has been studied from a cultural perspective. Girls, it has been argued, face obstacles as learners because boys are allowed to dominate classroom interaction. If learning takes place through active participation in classroom talk, girls must be losing out, because they tend to get a smaller share of the interactional 'cake.' Some would go even further, and argue that the value attached to 'abstract' argument and 'impartial' judgment in the education system endorses a masculine orientation which devalues the more person-centered, affective tendencies of girls and women. 4. Reversing the Polarities: Should School be More Like Home? Parents of young children have been accorded a good deal of the blame—by deficit theorists at least—for failing to 'equip' their children for the demands of school-based learning. There is an alternative view, however, which holds that teachers could learn a good deal from parents, and that children learn most successfully under conditions which resemble those of the home. Parents, according to Bruner (1983), are expert providers of 'scaffolds' for their children's learning: they are able to tune in to their children's interests, willing to let their children take the lead in conversations, yet ready to provide support and guidance at critical moments. If teachers could be more like parents in this respect, it is suggested, learning through
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The Social Context language might be more effortless for all children (see Input and Interaction). 5. Future Work
There is no general agreement on the relationship between language and educational success or failure. The most urgent need is for more empirical studies both of home and school language. See also: School Language Policies; Standard English; Classroom Language; Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness.
Bibliography Bernstein B 1974 Class Codes and Control, vol. 1, 2nd edn. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Bruner J 1983 Child's Talk: Learning to Use Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford Heath S B 1983 Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Tough J 1973 Focus on Meaning. Allen and Unwin, London Wells G 1986 The Meaning Makers: Children Learning Language and Using Language to Learn. Hodder and Stoughton Educational, London
Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar C. Cullen
Linguistics involves both the writing of grammars and the specification of rules. Therefore it is important to distinguish between the descriptive grammars that linguists are interested in and the prescriptive grammars and grammar rules that people may be more familiar with. Many linguistics courses and elementary textbooks such as Fromkin and Rodman (1988) and Lyons (1981) present the distinction early on so that the nonprescriptive nature of linguistic rules can then be assumed. Linguists write rules and grammars to provide detailed and accurate descriptions of the knowledge that speakers have of their language. Linguists' rules are statements about what people do in the language, not regulations for what they should do. In this sense, the linguist's use of the word 'rule' is rather like the scientist's use of the word 'law.' The Law of Gravity does not say that objects should/must/ought to fall to the ground, but that objects do fall to the ground. As it happens, much of the time, the linguists' descriptive rules do not conflict with any prescriptive conventions. For instance, when a linguist says that an English Noun Phrase can be made up of a Determiner (such as 'the') followed by an adjective (such as 'red' or 'big') followed by a noun (such as 'bus' or 'book'), the description is both accurate—a good reflection of the knowledge of native speakers of the language— and inoffensive. Even the most opinionated prescriptivist will accept that all of the following phrases are grammatical in English: 'the big bus, the big book, the red bus, the red book.' But in other situations there may be a difference between descriptive output—rules that show the regular patterns of sentences in a language—and prescriptive conventions. In such cases, it is particularly
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important to realize that the linguist's interest is in description rather than prescription. For instance, in most dialects of English a normal and grammatical response to the question 'Who's that?' would be 'It's me,' and a 'descriptive' rule could be written by the linguist for the structure of 'It's me.' However, a common 'prescriptive' rule would say that 'It's me' is bad English (or ungrammatical, in a popular sense) and should be disallowed. The rule would further prescribe that the correct way in which to answer the question 'Who's that?' is to say 'It's I.' Prescriptive rules are sometimes taught to people in school, sometimes passed on by other speakers, and sometimes found in writers' manuals containing recommendations for clear expression or correct usage. The origins of prescriptive rules vary: some are based on misleading analogies between the grammar of, for example, English and the grammar of some other (often Classical) language or languages. The prescriptive rule forbidding the sentence 'It's me,' for instance, could be justified by the prescriptivist saying that copula 'is' should be followed by a nominative form, not by an accusative form such as 'me,' on analogy with a rule of Latin. No such rule seems to be genuinely operational in late twentieth-century English. Some prescriptive rules are rationalized on logical grounds. A common prescriptive rule forbids double negation, which linguists recognize as a grammatical structure in many dialects, and gives logic as the grounds for the prohibition. 'I didn't do nothing' would be described by a linguist's rule if it was grammatical in the variety being studied. It would be rejected by the prescriptivist, who would say that 'I didn't do nothing' could only be used to mean 'I did
Standard English something' because 'two negatives make a positive.' Now, it is true that in logic two negatives make a positive, but it is not true in most varieties of English that *I didn't do nothing' has always to mean 'I did something.' A linguistic description of English will be based on speakers' knowledge of their language, not on the knowledge of logicians. The descriptive rules that linguists produce reveal how language is, not just how—because of logic or analogy—it has been agreed it should be. Because the linguists' rules reflect speakers' knowledge, they will vary from the description of one regional or social variety to another. For instance, there will need to be a rule for some varieties of English that describes sequences of modal verbs, as in the sentence 'My daughter may can do that.' For other varieties, sequences of modals do not occur and the descriptive rule will be different. Similarly, 'ain't' will be the gram-
matical negative occurring in sentences like 'I ain't going home this week' in some varieties of English, while I'm not' will be the grammatical form in other varieties. Having descriptive rules provides recognition of the linguistic equality of all varieties: their shared regularity, their equivalence in patterning. The investigation of social factors which make some varieties better received or more widespread than others is a separate endeavor. See also: Standardization; Standard English. Bibliography Fromkin V, Rodman R 1992 An Introduction to Language, 5th edn. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York Lyons J 1981 Language and Linguistics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Standard English M. Farr and A. F. Ball
The term standard English generally refers to the variety of English used by the formally educated people who are socially, economically, and politically dominant in English-speaking countries. Although the term is widely used, it is difficult to define precisely because of the variation that exists within what is considered standard, even within one country. Standard English is that variant which is generally taught in schools and is regarded as the "prestigious" dialect in many English-speaking societies. Nonstandard English, on the other hand, is spoken by groups of people who have been isolated from the standard dialect, who have not had the opportunity to acquire the dialect of the social elites, or who see value in preserving their own group dialect. The term nonstandard English refers to any variety of English which does not conform in pronunciation, grammatical structure, idiomatic usage, or choice of words generally characteristic of formally educated native speakers of English. A distinction can be made between oral and written standard English, the latter varying less within countries, yet still varying somewhat from one English-speaking country to another. We can see that as the English language spreads to different societies in its oral form, it changes through contact with different cultures, so that there are different Englishes in different parts of the world (e.g., Indian English, Singapore English, Scots English, etc.). Written varieties of English, on the other hand, tend to become more stan-
dardized. A primary characteristic of any written standard English is the absence of socially-stigmatized features (e.g, multiple negation) which are associated with nonstandard English dialects. 1. Standard English in Multicultural Contexts Demographic changes worldwide increasingly have illuminated the multicultural nature of many Englishspeaking societies. Although the recognition of this multiculturalism has become particularly salient in recent decades, the reality of such pluralism no doubt has existed throughout human history. The identification of individuals with particular population groups (e.g., those based on socioeconomic class, gender, age, ethnic origin, or region of a country) is often reflected in their use of particular linguistic items (e.g., a particular pronunciation or lexical item) in their speech and, sometimes, in their writing. Such a variation has significant implications for educational policy (Farr and Daniels 1986). A few definitions will illuminate the following discussion. The term mainstream is used to refer to those people in societies around the world who are characterized as literate, school-oriented, aspiring to upward mobility through success in that society's dominant, formal institutions, and looking beyond the primary networks of family and community for behavioral models and value orientations (Heath 1983). In English-speaking countries, these are the
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The Social Context people who are generally associated with 'standard' English. Nonmainstream, then, refers to those groups who do not conform to the above characteristics, and who speak dialects or nonprestige varieties of English that are considered nonstandard. A dialect (see Sociolinguistics) is either a regional or a social variety of a language; it is distinguished by specific phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features. The latter area, pragmatics, involves the culturally-embedded uses of language that characterize a particular group, whether that group is mainstream or nonmainstream. Culture is defined here primarily as a system of knowledge shared by a group of people which both gives rise to behavior and is used to interpret experience. Thus, both dialect and culture involve cognition, that is, both linguistic and cultural competence, or what Hymes (1974) has termed communicative competence. 2. Differences in Communicative Competence All normal human beings, having been enculturated into one group or another, possess communicative competence, that is the knowledge to speak the language of their group in ways considered appropriate to that group. Communicative competence, however, can differ from group to group and, thus, problems may arise in intergroup communication (Gumperz 1982a, b; Kochman 1981; Tannen 1986,1990). School, of course, is a primary institutional setting for such intergroup communication. Even if students in a particular school are primarily from one population group, schooling itself, in Western English-speaking societies, is part of mainstream culture, and the communicative competence expected in schools closely resembles that of mainstream, middle-class groups. Students from nonmainstream groups enter school with their own set of linguistic and cultural resources; however, these resources may differ from—even conflict with—those of the mainstream school culture (Farr 1993). It is important to understand that such differences in communicative competence are simply differences, not deficits in either a linguistic or cognitive sense, since teacher expectations and attitudes can influence significantly the achievement of their students. A substantial body of sociolinguistic research has documented the linguistic characteristics (phonological, syntactic, and semantic) of a variety of nonmainstream English dialects in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia (Amstae and Elias-Olivares 1982; Ball 1998; Farr 1986; Ferguson and Heath 1981; Labov 1980; Zentella 1997). A primary finding of all this work is that such dialects are as complex and as regularly patterned as other varieties of English which are considered more standard. That is, contrary to the common belief among many mainstream groups, speakers of nonstandard dialects do not have linguistic deficits; rather, they often have linguistic
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rules in their grammars which simply differ from those of standard Englishes. Other sociolinguistic research has described the culturally-embedded aspects of language use, rather than grammatical characteristics, among nonmainstream groups. Such studies, carried out within Hymes' framework for the ethnography of communication, primarily have focused on the contrast between language use at school and in home/community contexts. These studies have noted that norms for language use, quite apart from the linguistic characteristics of the dialects involved, can differ considerably from one cultural group to another. For example, silence may be considered appropriate in certain contexts for one group, while speaking is the norm in those contexts for another group. Moreover, norms for particular styles of speaking, for example, with differing levels of directness or indirectness (often indicating degrees of politeness), can vary dramatically from group to group, even when those concerned are speaking the same language. In addition, research on the uses of written language among various groups has shown that different cognitive styles underlie different uses of literacy. Thus, there is considerable opportunity for miscommunication between speakers (and readers and writers) from different groups, based on differences in language structure, language use, and literacy practices. Schools, of course, as well as other formal institutional settings in modern societies, are a focal point for such crosscultural communication, especially in regard to the use of literacy. The standard written language, whether in textbooks or on institutional forms (e.g., from banks or government agencies), often reflects more closely the ways of speaking, writing, and thinking of the dominant institutions and groups of the society. Regarding the learning of literacy, many students from nonmainstream cultural groups are faced with a conflict between their own cultural and linguistic systems (and their identity as members of their home groups) and those of the standard written language. The difficulties inherent in resolving such conflicts provide one explanation for low literacy levels among these populations. Other explanations trace the low literacy levels to lack of access to excellent instruction which emphasizes higher order thinking processes, as opposed to lower order literacy skills. The focus of instruction, whether on critical literate thinking or on alphabetic skills, is, of course, guided by teacher preparation, teachers' attitudes toward students, and expectations for students on the part of educators and policymakers. 3. Educational Policy Recognizing the differences that exist between the sociolinguistic resources of students from nonmainstream groups and those that currently are needed for success in formal schooling leads to the
Standard English need for educational policy regarding the perspective that should be adopted concerning the teaching of oral and written language to multicultural student populations. Three positions can be assumed in this situation: eradication; biloquialism; and appreciation of dialect differences (Fasold and Shuy 1970). Eradication, the traditional policy in the English profession, assumes the undesirability of language patterns associated with nonmainstream groups and attempts to replace these patterns with more desirable mainstream ones. This, in fact, describes the current, although tacit, policy in most schools, a policy which, many would argue, has not succeeded. Biloquialism, often termed bidialectalism or biculturalism (as parallels to bilingualism or multilingualism), encourages the learning of mainstream language patterns without eliminating or denigrating nonmainstream ones. The goal of this kind of instruction is to enable students to switch from one linguistic style (or dialect or language) to another according to norms of appropriateness to the context in which the language is used. Since all speakers shift among more or less formal styles depending on context, this position is a natural one, and has, moreover, the advantage of providing a compromise position between the two other positions. Appreciation of dialect differences is the logical opposite of eradication. This position maintains that, since research clearly has shown all dialects to be linguistic and cognitive equals, it is unjust to insist on replacing nonstandard dialects with standard ones. Moreover, many have argued (Sledd 1988) that the time and effort spent on eradication (with remarkably unsuccessful results) would be better spent enlightening mainstream groups about the naturalness of variation in language and eliminating prejudices against nonmainstream groups. Although each of these positions has their advocates, the most pragmatic position seems to be that of biloquialism, which advocates the teaching of mainstream patterns as an expansion of students' linguistic repertoires, not as a replacement for their original ways of speaking. Since bilingualism and bidialectalism exist in societies around the world, such a policy clearly seems to be natural and attainable. Why, then, have nonmainstream students in English-speaking countries not become biloquial in the natural course of events? Research (Ogbu 1990) has shown that some nonmainstream groups maintain their indigenous language patterns as symbols supporting an oppositional identity which resists the mainstream forces which denigrate their vernacular culture. This argument, however, lacks explanatory power for those vernacular speaking minorities in modern urban industrial societies with strong, supportive, and collective ethnic identities who excel academically and who have no difficulty crossing cultural/language boundaries. Other research (Erickson 1984) locates
the problem in the micropolitical communicative processes between individuals from different groups. The implication here is that the micropolitical processes reflect more macro ones from the larger society; sociolinguistic differences either can be used to escalate conflict between differing individuals or can be put aside in the effort to communicate. For biloquialism to be an effective policy, then, it will have to be supported by a larger social context which respects rather than denigrates linguistic and cultural differences. Changing the status quo to one of tolerance toward such differences requires social change beyond the scope of English language arts teaching, but education can contribute to such social change by teaching both teachers and students that such differences are not deficits. Rather than using differences as resources for conflict, they can be used as a basis for improving instruction in standard language and literacy to multicultural student populations. 4. Instructional Approaches
Ethnographic studies of community uses of language and literacy have been used to improve instruction in two ways: by modifying instruction to be congruent with local ways of using language, and by involving students themselves in doing and writing up the results of ethnographic research in their own communities (Au 1980; Au and Jordon 1981; Heath 1983; Moll and Diaz 1987). Classroom studies have provided an understanding of principles underlying effective language arts instruction to nonmainstream students (Ball et al. 1997; Heath and Branscombe 1985; Lee 1993; Staton et al. 1988). The most important principle of effective instruction for such students is ethnosensitivity, rather than ethnocentrism, on the part of teachers and educational administrators. That is, because communication between student and teacher is central to learning, it is crucial for educators to understand the extent to which they are interpreting nonmainstream students' behavior according to their own cultural and linguistic patterns, which they see as more natural and logical than those that are alien to them. A second principle involves providing all current and future teachers with information that presents the results of sociolinguistic research on the differences in communicative competence among culturally and linguistically diverse groups in order to explode the myths of cultural and linguistic deficits and to provide a clearer understanding of the resources that diverse students bring into the classroom. A third principle involves structuring instructional activities that comprise functional and interactive communication; language that is intended as authentic communication, rather than as an artificial exercise, is more likely to call forth the full range of students' linguistic capabilities and to stimulate them to acquire new ones. 207
The Social Context A fourth principle concerns the provision of abundant experience with and exposure to standard oral and written English. Such experience provides.multiple examples of the linguistic patterns and the cultural assumptions of academic culture; it also provides opportunities for learning other ways of reasoning, those presumed to be necessary not only for schooling, but also for participating fully in modern societies. See also: African American Vernacular English; Black English (UK); Home and School Language; Standardization. Bibliography Amastae J, Elias-Olivares L 1982 Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic Aspects. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Au K 1980 Participation structures in a reading lesson with Hawaiian children. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 11:91-115 Au K, Jordon C 1981 Teaching reading to Hawaiian children: Finding a culturally appropriate solution. In Trueba H, Guthrie G, Au K (eds.) Culture and Bilingual Classroom. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Ball A F 1998 Evaluating the writing of culturally and linguistically diverse students: The case of the African American English speaker. In: Cooper C R, Odell L (eds.) Evaluating writing: The role of teachers' knowledge about text, learning, and culture (pp. 225-48). National Council of Teachers of English Press, Urbana, IL Ball A F, Williams J, Cooks J 1997 An Ebonics-based curriculum: The educational value. Thought & Action: The NBA Higher Education Journal 13(2): 39-50 Erickson F 1984 School literacy, reasoning, and civility: An anthropologist's perspective. Review of Educational Research 54: 525-46 Farr M 1986 Language, Culture, and Writing: Sociolinguistic Foundations for Research on Writing. In: Rothkopf E (ed.) Review of Research in Education 13. American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC Farr M 1993 Essayist literacy and other verbal performances. Written Communication 10(1): 4-38 Farr M, Daniels H 1986 Language Diversity and Writing Instruction. NCTE, Urbana, IL Fasold R, Shuy R 1970 Preface to Teaching Standard English
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in the Inner City. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC Ferguson C, Heath SB 1981 Language in the USA. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Gumperz J J 1982a Discourse in the Language Classroom Strategies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Gumperz J J (ed.) 1982b Language and Social Identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Heath S B, Branscombe A 1985 'Intelligent writing' in an audience community: Teacher, students, and researcher. In: Freedman S (ed.) The Acquisition of Written Language: Response and Revision. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Heath S B 1983 Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England Hymes D 1974 Foundations in Sociolinguistics. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA Kochman T 1981 Black and White Styles in Conflict. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Labov W 1972 Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA Labov W 1980 Locating Language in Time and Space. Academic Press, New York Lee C 1993 Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation: The Pedagogical Implications of an African American Discourse Genre. National Council of Teachers Of English, Urbana, IL Moll L, Diaz R 1987 Teaching writing as communication: The use of ethnographic findings in classroom practice. In: Bloome D (ed.) Literacy, Language and Schooling. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Ogbu J 1990 Minority status and literacy in comparative perspective. Daedalus 119(2): 141-68 Sledd J 1988 Product in process: From ambiguities of Standard English to issues that divide us. College English 50: 168-76 Staton J, Shuy R, Kreeft-Payton J, Reed L 1988 Dialogue Journal Communication: Classroom, Linguistic, Social, and Cognitive Views. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Tannen D 1986 That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversation Style Makes or Breaks Your Relations with Others. Morrow, New York Tannen D 1990 You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. Morrow, New York Zentella A C 1997 Growing up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Blackwell, Oxford
The Individual Learner Language Acquisition Becoming Bilingual C. Letts
The issue of language development in the global majority of individuals who will grow up to be bi- or multilingual is often ignored in discussions of child language acquisition. This is especially so where mechanisms of acquisition and explanatory models are the focus of study. The justification for this would seem to be that bilingualism adds unwanted complexity to consideration of the data, and that bilingualism can only be addressed when a satisfactory model of monolingual acquisition has been developed. Studies of bilingual language acquisition have then tended to be descriptive in nature, and to have focused on issues such as sequence of development, separation of the languages involved, and use and choice of languages. Related issues include language use within the individual's wider community, and in particular within education. Political and cultural factors influence the perceived status of the child's languages, and the desirability of maintaining these languages. In addition, there has been considerable debate concerning the effect of bilingual language development on the child's cognitive and academic abilities. 1. Types of Bilingualism Individuals commonly held to be bilingual may vary considerably in their skills and use of their languages. This variation results from wide differences in particular linguistic situations, and also in the way in which bilingualism is acquired. Individuals become bilingual for a wide range of reasons; they may have parents who speak different native languages, they may live in a community where two languages have long been in use as a result of political and historical factors (e.g., Wales in the UK), they may live in diglossic societies, where language is selected according to social convention, or they (or their forebears) may have migrated from one linguistic community to another. Within each of these situations, individuals will vary as to the time at which they are first exposed to each language, and the degree of exposure at any one stage of development.
While it can be argued that each bilingual individual is different, traditionally there has been a rather crude division into 'simultaneous' and 'sequential' bilingualism. These terms relate to the way in which bilingualism is acquired. With simultaneous acquisition the child is assumed to have more or less equal exposure to two languages from birth. Where acquisition is sequential, exposure to one language begins some time after the child has begun to acquire the other language (for convenience, these will be referred to as L2 and LI respectively). For the sequential bilingual, L2 acquisition, generally assumed to occur naturalistically, may overlap with 'learning,' if the child experiences some formal teaching to help with his or her L2. Bilingual individuals may also be grouped according to the degree of bilingualism they display in different sociolinguistic situations. Complete equal and native control of two languages is probably rather rarer than the skilled use of each language for particular situations, resulting in an individual who has appropriate linguistic skills for all social situations encountered (for example, students generally find it easiest to discuss a topic in the language that was used when they were first exposed to the subject area). At the other extreme, there are bilinguals who may use one of their languages only in very restricted circumstances, for example in the home and with older family members, and who may have no knowledge of its written form. 2. Bilingual Language Acquisition 2.1 Simultaneous Acquisition The most usual situation in which two languages are acquired simultaneously, is where the parents each have different native languages which they use with the child. There have been many diary-style studies of such children (e.g., the study reported by Leopold 1939-49 was so careful and detailed that it became a seminal work on child language acquisition in 209
The Individual Learner general), so it has been possible to describe some overall stages in the acquisition process. One of the clearest accounts is given by Volterra and Taeschner (1978), who collected data from two sisters, acquiring Italian and German simultaneously. They describe three principal stages. At stage one, corresponding rather to the single-word stage in monolingual children, the child appears to be operating with only one lexical system (see Vocabulary in Language Acquisition). Vocabulary is drawn from both languages, but only one word expresses one meaning; the child does not have a choice of lexical items for the same entity. At stage two, the child appears to be operating with two lexical systems, now producing multiword utterances, but with words in any one utterance tending to be selected from the same language. There is more confusion as regards syntax, however, the child tending to simplify and combine rules from both languages (the problem of the negative particle, for example, which comes before the verb in Italian, but after the verb in German, was solved by one of the sisters by always placing it at the end of the sentence) (see Grammar Acquisition). The final stage is characterized by growing separation of the two languages, at both lexical and syntactic levels. A common feature of this stage is that the child rigidly associates particular languages with particular people, and may become distressed if adults do not conform to this. It is hypothesized that this rigid association helps the child to keep the two linguistic systems apart, at a time when they are rapidly developing in complexity. Awareness that there are two languages also develops around this time; before this stage is reached, the child will find requests to translate incomprehensible. 2.2 Sequential Acquisition There are fewer studies of sequential bilingualism available, but generally it is thought that young children acquiring an L2 go through similar developmental stages to the monolingual child acquiring that same language. With older children, the developmental sequence may be influenced by formal second language teaching. There is growing evidence that L2 acquisition may be influenced by the child's personality, general approach to the problem, and particular language-learning strategies, just as it is in language-learning adults. Bates et al. (1988) provide a particularly striking example of a child who uses very different strategies to acquire a second language (admittedly on the basis of very limited exposure), than she previously used to acquire her first language. There has been much interest in the importance of age in determining a child's success in acquiring a second language. It is often thought that the young child acquires languages especially easily, with this ability declining as he or she approaches the end of the critical period (though when exactly this is, is 210
controversial). However there is some evidence that, while younger children are particularly adept at acquiring L2 phonology (segmental and nonsegmental), older teenaged children may be better at acquiring grammatical patterns. 2.3 Language Dominance and Attrition Bilingual language acquisition does not occur in a vacuum, and it is unlikely that the bilingual child will have equal input from both languages at any one time. For any individual at a given point in time, one of his or her languages will be dominant, used in more situations than the other one, and used more skillfully. Any form of testing or assessment in the nondominant language will lead to a false picture of the child's overall language development. It is also well documented that if input ceases for a language, knowledge of that language will quickly be lost by the child. This is known as language 'attrition.' 2.4 Interference A common source of interest regarding the bilingual child is the extent to which there is interference from one language to the other. Interference consists of elements of one language intruding into an utterance that is mainly in the other language. Parents and educators may become alarmed when this happens, as they may feel it is an indication of confusion between the two languages (although this will be perfectly normal in the early stages of simultaneous acquisition— see Sect. 2.1 above). However, interference is common and well-tolerated in many bilingual communities, where speakers may switch rapidly with little awareness that they are doing so. Also common in bilingual communities is code-switching, in which there is alternation between languages over longer stretches of discourse. Anecdotal evidence suggests that, providing the two languages are kept separate in input (i.e., if speakers are consistent in which language they use with the child, and do not code-switch or show features of interference themselves), the child is unlikely to show much evidence of interference once the initial stages of language acquisition are passed. Fantini (1985) in his study of his Spanish-English bilingual son Mario, notes limited interference at a number of linguistic levels. As regards phonology, Mario lacked control over some allophonic variants of English, tending to deploy phonemes according to Spanish phonological rules. As regards syntax and morphology, transfer of morphemes and grammatical relations from one language to the other was noted and some effects on word-order. Loanwords were sometimes transferred from one to the other, and given appropriate morphological endings. Lexical borrowing tended to occur when he did not have an equivalent word (expressing the same meaning) in the other language. Fantini also notes some confusion of cultural norms
Grammar Acquisition of behavior (e.g., shaking hands or kissing), and some interference affecting conversational and discourse convention. 3. Effects of Bilingualism on Cognitive and Academic Development
In the past, being bilingual was felt by many monolinguals to be profoundly detrimental to a child's psychological, social, and cognitive development. Hence in Wales in the UK, for example, strenuous efforts were at one time made to stamp out the use of the nondominant language, Welsh, in schools. Such attitudes have long been discredited. Early experimental work that claimed to show the detrimental effects of bilingualism has been shown to have a number of serious methodological weaknesses, including testing in the child's less dominant language, ignorance of cultural differences that would influence the child's response to testing, and prejudice on the part of experimenters. More recent research suggests that bilingual children may have some cognitive advantages over their monolingual peers, developing metalinguistic awareness earlier, and displaying more flexibility in cognitive tasks. Baker (1988) presents an excellent discussion of these issues. Continuing concern has been expressed however for the plight of some sequential bilinguals who are required to acquire an L2 rapidly upon commencing education, or following migration to a new country. Results of studies have been misleading. While some children cope well and have an enhanced quality of life and experience as a result of their bilingualism, other groups fail consistently to do well in school. The research centers around the work of Cummins and colleagues in Canada who set up and evaluated the highly successful 'immersion' programs for Englishspeaking school entrants acquiring French (see, for example, Cummins and Swain 1986). These children, who were taught by bilingual teachers entirely through
the medium of French for the first 2 years, did well. The conclusion was that this success resulted from careful planning, teachers who understood and accepted English from the child, and the fact that French was a new language for all the children. Less fortunate children who have to acquire an L2 rapidly in a sink-or-swim context may give the appearance of competence in L2 in day-to-day conversation. However, it is suggested that they may fail to acquire more academic (and less contextualized) language in the early days of formal education when this may be crucial for later academic development. They are still at this stage inexpert in the L2, and do not have opportunities to develop this style of language use in LI, since it is not used in school. These findings remain controversial, but the implications are that carefully planned introduction of the L2, and/or mother-tongue programs so that use of the LI can be maintained and extended into new areas, are desirable. Good bilingual education can then become a positive asset. See also: Language Acquisition; Multilingualism; Bilingualism, Individual. Bibliography Baker C 1988 Key Issues in Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon Bates B E, Bretherton I, Snyder L 1988 From First Words to Grammar. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Cummins J, Swain M 1986 Bilingualism in Education. Longman, New York Fantini A 1985 Language Acquisition of a Bilingual Child: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. College Hill Press, San Diego, CA Leopold W 1939-49 Speech Development of a Bilingual Child: A Linguist's Record, vols. 1-4. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL Volterra V, Taeschner T 1978 The acquisition and development of language by bilingual children. Journal of Child Languages: 311-26
Grammar Acquisition H. Tager-Flusberg
Within a few months of acquiring an initial vocabulary of about 50-100 words (see Vocabulary in Language Acquisition) young children, usually in the latter half of the second year, begin combining words together to form their first sentences. This new stage in language acquisition marks an important milestone
because even the simplest two-word utterances show evidence of early grammatical development. Research on children's grammatical development began with descriptive studies in the 1930s; however, it was not until the publication of Chomsky's seminal work that theoretically focused research began in earnest, with
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The Individual Learner an emphasis on studies of the acquisition of English, but also including since the 1980s some important crosslinguistic studies. The child's task in acquiring the grammar of their native language is complex. She must: be able to segment the stream of language heard into basic units such as words, morphemes, and phrases; discover the major parts of speech of noun, verb, article, etc. and map the appropriate lexical items into them; acquire the major phrase structure rules for organizing basic phrasal units like noun phrase and verb phrase, as well as for organizing basic sentence structures for declaratives, questions, and negation; and finally figure out the syntactic rules for complex sentences involving the coordination and imbedding of multiple clauses. Research has indicated that children use a variety of clues to facilitate the process of grammatical development. Prosodic cues may help the child break into the linguistic stream to help identify word and phrase boundaries, and later on children make use of semantic and pragmatic as well as syntactic and morphological information in developing the underlying grammatical knowledge that allows them to produce and understand the full range of unlimited and novel sentences in their native language. 1. Measuring Grammatical Development 1.1 Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) One of the most obvious ways in which children's sentences change over time is that they gradually grow longer. This fact is the basis of one of the most widely used measures of grammatical development: the MLU or mean length of utterance, which is the average length of a child's utterances as measured in morphemes, based on a sample of 100 utterances (Brown 1973). Thus it is a measure of production rather than comprehension. The basic assumption of this measure is that each newly acquired element of grammatical knowledge adds length to the child's utterances. Longitudinal studies of language acquisition have confirmed that children's MLU increases gradually over time, though at different rates for different children, and norms for MLU between the ages of 2 and 5 have been developed. Despite its widespread use in research and clinical studies, MLU has received some criticism; it is quite limited in use and only valid up to an average sentence length of 4.0 morphemes. To overcome some of these problems, other measures of grammatical development have been introduced which analyze more directly the grammatical content of a child's productive language. 1.2 Language Assessment, Remediation, and Screening Procedure (LARSP) The LARSP profile analysis, introduced by Crystal and his colleagues, provides a comprehensive measure
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of a child's phrases and clauses (Crystal, et al. 1976). On the basis of this analysis, the child is assigned to one of seven developmental stages: (a) one-word utterances; (b) two-word utterances; (c) three-word utterances; (d) four-word utterances; (e) complex sentence formation defined in terms of coordination or subordination; (f) consolidation of grammatical systems, including complex complementation and fewer error patterns; and (g) remaining structures such as connectivity between sentences, emphatic expression, etc. This sequence of stages reflects the order of emergence of these structural patterns identified in the general literature on language acquisition. This measure is widely used in clinical settings with diverse populations of children; it is useful both because of its hierarchical organization and because it allows one to identify specific problems at either the phrasal or clausal level. 1.3 Assigning Structural Stage (ASS) Another measure that assigns a child's productive language to a structural stage is the ASS (Miller 1981). The child's utterances are analyzed in five main categories: (a) noun phrase elaboration; (b) verb phrase elaboration; (c) negatives; (d) questions; and (e) complex sentences. On the basis of this categorization a child's language is assigned to a stage that is parallel to MLU ranges. The limitation of this approach is that the product of this measure is simply a stage assignment, and details about the structures used or those that are omitted are not taken into consideration. 1.4 Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) More recently, the ASS has been modified and adapted into a new measure, the IPSyn, which consists of 50 items divided into four subscales: (a) noun phrase; (b) verb phrase; (c) question/negation; and (d) sentence structure (Scarborough 1990). Within each subscale the items are sequenced developmentally based on current knowledge about patterns of language acquisition. A child is credited with a point system for the use of one or two different examples of each item; scores are summed within and across the subscales to yield a total IPSyn score (maximum 120), but there is no stage assignment. This is a reliable measure that correlates with MLU but is useful beyond an MLU of 4.0. Thus far, it has been used mainly in research studies with a variety of populations. 7.5 Tests of Comprehension Comprehension of grammatical structures is much more difficult to measure than production. Although in naturalistic contexts young children give the impression they understand more than they produce, this may reflect the child's use of nonlinguistic context rather than grammatical structure to figure out the
Grammar Acquisition underlying meaning relations of sentences. Methods to assess comprehension typically include: (a) the use of diary studies, which document the conditions and contexts in which a child does or does not understand a particular structure; (b) act-out procedures, in which the experimenter asks the child to act out a sentence or phrase using toys; (c) direction tasks, in which the child is asked to carry out a direction; (d) picturechoice tasks, in which the child is asked to select from a set, the picture that best represents the linguistic form presented; and (e) preferential-looking paradigm, in which the child is placed equidistant between two video-monitors on which different scenes are simultaneously presented. A linguistic message, which corresponds to one of the scenes, is played in synchrony with them and the amount of time the child spends watching each scene is recorded. If the child spends significantly longer watching the correct scene, then they are credited with understanding the linguistic form of the message. This paradigm is complex and lengthy but it avoids some of the limitations of other methods and can be used with infants as young as 9 months old (Golinkoff, et al. 1987). 2. Two-word Utterance Stage 2.1 Semantic Relations When children begin to combine words to form the simplest sentences most are limited in length to two words, although a few may be as long as three or four words. These early sentences are often unique and creative composed primarily of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. In English, function words and grammatical morphemes are usually omitted, making the child's productive speech sound 'telegraphic'; however, this is less true for children learning other languages that are rich in inflectional morphology. Crosslinguistic studies of children at this stage have shown that there is a universal small set of meanings or semantic relations that are expressed (Brown 1973). Table 1 lists the eight most prevalent semantic relations together with examples of each. These examples illustrate that children talk a lot about objects by naming them, and by discussing their
Table 1. Set of prevalent semantic relations expressed in two-word stage. Semantic relation Examples Agent -I- Action Mommy come. Daddy sit. Action + Object Push car. Eat cookie. Agent + Object Mommy sock. Dog book. Action + Location Go out. Sit floor. Entity + Location Cup table. Truck box. Possessor + Possession My bottle. Mommy shirt. Entity + Attribute Big book. Box shiny. Demonstrative + Entity Dot milk. Dis paper.
locations or attributes, who owns them, and who is doing things to them. They also talk about people, their actions, their locations, their actions on objects, and so forth. Objects, people, actions, and their interrelationships preoccupy the young child universally. These are precisely the concepts that the child has differentiated during the infancy period according to the developmental psychologist, Piaget (see Piaget, Jean). 2.2 Limited Scope Formulae Initial studies of utterances produced in the two-word stage found that children used highly consistent word order. Indeed, the semantic relations approach assumed that the child uses a productive word order rule which operates on broad semantic rather than syntactic categories. This research was limited by focussing primarily on languages that make extensive use of order to mark basic relations in sentences, and on a small number of subjects. It is now acknowledged that there is considerable individual variation among children learning different languages, and even for children learning English. Nevertheless, word order rules are used at this early stage of grammatical development, but they are more limited and more narrowly defined in semantic scope, than is suggested by the semantic relations approach and therefore have been called 'limited scope formulae' (Braine 1976). For some children ordered combinations of words may even be based on specific lexical items rather than on semantic categories. Over time, these more limited rules expand to encompass broader semantic and later syntactic categories, and begin to resemble the adult grammar. 2.3 Null Subjects One characteristic of children's two-word sentences is that they often omit the subject. This has been interpreted from the perspective of current linguistic theory, which proposes a parameter-setting approach. Hyams (1986) argues that all children begin with the subject parameter set in the null position (which holds for languages like Italian or Spanish) so that children learning English must eventually switch the parameter setting to the position marked for required subjects. Although this proposal is attractive because it connects early grammar to linguistic theory, there are several criticisms of this approach. While Englishspeaking children do omit subjects, in fact they include them significantly more often than Italian-speaking children, which suggests that they know that subjects need to be expressed. Subjects are probably omitted because young children have limited processing capacity, and for pragmatic reasons, subjects are more readily omitted than objects as they are often provided by the context.
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The Individual Learner 2.4 Comprehension of Word Order Studies of children's comprehension of grammar at this stage of development has focused on their ability to use word order to interpret the basic relations in a simple sentence. Studies using a variety of methods, including act-out and picture-choice tasks, have led to conflicting findings: some suggest that children can use word order in their productive speech before they can in comprehension, while others suggest the opposite. In a study using the preferential-looking paradigm, which makes less extraneous processing demands on the child, it was found that children aged 18 months, who were not yet producing two-word utterances, looked reliably longer at the correct scene corresponding to sentences like Cookie Monster is tickling Big Bird. Thus it appears that comprehension of word order does precede its production. 3. Development of Grammatical Morphology
3.1 Brown's 14-morpheme Study As children progress beyond the two-word stage, they gradually begin to fill in the inflectional morphology and function words that are omitted in their early language. The process of acquiring the major grammatical morphemes in English is gradual and lengthy and some are still not fully controlled until the child enters school, that is, at around 5 years. The most comprehensive study of morphological development was conducted by Brown (1973), using the longitudinal data collected from three children. Brown selected for his study a set of 14 English morphemes that are among the most frequently used. These included two prepositions (in, on), articles (a, the), noun inflections marking possessive ('s), and plural (-s), verb inflection marking third person singular present tense for regular (-s), and irregular verbs (e.g., does), past tense for regular (-ed) and irregular verbs (e.g., went), and the verb to be used as auxiliary and main verb (copula) in both contractible and uncontractible forms. Brown coded for each transcript the percentage of each morpheme supplied in its obligatory contexts, counting 90 percent as the point marking full acquisition. The most significant finding was that the order in which these morphemes was acquired was strikingly similar across the three children, and this has been confirmed in later studies including larger samples of children. The order of acquisition is not accounted for by frequency of use by the child or mother; instead it is related to measures of linguistic complexity—both semantic and syntactic (see Morphology). 3.2 Overgeneralization and Rule Productivity One striking error that children make in the process of acquiring grammatical morphemes is the overgeneralization of regular forms to irregular examples. For example, the plural -s is frequently added to nouns
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that take an irregular plural, such as mans instead of men, or mouses instead of mice; and the regular past tense ending -ed is sometimes used on verbs that are marked with an irregular form, such as failed, goed, or teached. These errors may not be frequent, but they can persist well into the school years and are quite resistant to feedback or correction. They are taken as evidence that the child is indeed acquiring a rulegoverned system, rather than learning these inflections on a word-by-word basis. Other evidence for the productive use of morphological rules comes from an elicited production task introduced by Berko (1958), called the 'Wug test.' The child is shown drawings depicting novel creatures, objects, and actions and asked to supply the appropriate description which would require the inclusion of noun or verb inflections. For example, a creature was labeled a wug, and then the child had to fill in the blank for there are two Preschool-aged children performed well on this task demonstrating their internalized knowledge of English morphological rules that can be applied productively. Children's knowledge of regular and irregular forms of English has been the focus of studies by Pinker and his associates (e.g., Pinker and Prince 1992). They find that overregularization errors are relatively rare, but persist well into middle childhood. Pinker (1991) argues that two different mechanisms are involved in acquiring regular and irregular forms. Regular forms involve an abstract rule-governed mechanism, while irregular forms are retrieved directly from the lexicon, and thus involve a memory storage system. In contrast, connectionist models (e.g., Plunkett 1995) claim that only one mechanism is needed to compute regular and irregular forms. 3.3 Cross-linguistic Data There is a growing literature on the acquisition of morphology in other languages. Overgeneralization errors have been recorded in children learning many different languages suggesting this is a universal pattern for this aspect of grammatical development. However, the slow and gradual development of English morphology does not hold for languages that have richer morphological systems. For example, children acquiring Turkish include case-marking suffixes on nouns at even the earliest stages of language development, and children learning Italian acquire verb inflections marking person, tense, and number very rapidly and in a less piecemeal fashion than has been found for English morphology. These crosslinguistic variations seem to reflect differences among languages in the amount of inflectional morphology within a language and the degree to which inflections are optional. For example, English marks verbs only for the past tense or third person singular present tense or progressive aspect, while Italian verbs are always marked in various ways. Children appear to be highly sensitive to
Grammar Acquisition these differences from the beginning stages of acquiring grammar (Slobin 1985). 4. Sentence Modalities 4.1 Simple Declaratives As children progress beyond the two-word stage, they begin combining words into three-, and then fourword sentences. In doing so, they link together two or more basic semantic relations that were prevalent early on. For example, agent + action and action + object may be linked to form agent+action + object. These simple declarative sentences include all the basic elements of adult sentences. Gradually these may get enriched with the addition of prepositional phrases, more complex noun phrases that include a variety of modifiers, and more complex verb phrases including auxiliary and modal verbs. All these additions add length to the declarative sentences of young children. 4.2 Negation Although children do express negation even at the one-word stage, for example, using the word no!, the acquisition of sentential negation is not fully acquired until much later. Bellugi (Klima and Bellugi 1966) identified three stages in the acquisition of negation in English: (a) the negative marker is placed outside the sentence, usually preceding it (e.g., not go movies; no Mommy do it); (b) the negative marker is sentence internal, placed adjacent to the main verb but without productive use of the auxiliary system (e.g., I no like it; don't go); (c) different auxiliaries are used productively and the child's negations approximate the adult forms, (e.g., you can't have it; I'm not happy). Although the existence of the first stage has been questioned by some researchers, there does appear to be crosslinguistic support for an initial period when negative markers are placed outside the main sentence. Negation is used by children to express a variety of meanings. These emerge in the following order, according to studies of children learning a wide range of languages: 'nonexistence'—to note the absence of something or someone (e.g., no cookie); 'rejection'— used to oppose something (e.g., no bath); and finally, 'denial'—to refute the truth of a statement (e.g., that not mine). Some children show consistent patterns of form-meaning relations in their negative sentences. For example, one child used external negation to express rejection, while at the same stage reserved sentence internal negation forms to express denial. These patterns may have had their source in the adult input. Studies of children's comprehension of negative sentences find that they are influenced by the pragmatic
context in which the sentence is presented. Thus sentences expressing denial are more easily understood in plausible rather than implausible nonlinguistic contexts. Together, these studies suggest that the development of negation is influenced by grammatical and semantic, as well as pragmatic factors. 4.3 Questions There are several different forms used to ask questions. These include rising intonation on a declarative sentence; yes-no questions, which involve subjectauxiliary verb inversion; wh-questions, which involve wh-movement and inversion; and tags, which are appended to declaratives and may be marked lexically (e.g., we'll go shopping, okay?) or syntactically (we'll go shopping, won't we?). Children begin at the one- or two-word stage by using rising intonation and one or two fixed wh-forms, such as what that? Gradually, over the next couple of years syntactic forms of questions develop with inversion rules acquired simultaneously for both yes-no and wh-questions. Some data suggested that for wh-questions, inversion rules are learned sequentially for individual wh-words such as what, where, who, why, and may be closely linked in time to the appearance of those words used as wh-complements. Thus syntactic rules for question formation may be wh-word specific in early child language. Several studies of English and other languages have investigated the order in which children acquire various wh-questions and the findings have been consistent. Children generally begin asking and understanding what and where questions, followed by who, then how, and finally when and why. One explanation for this developmental sequence is that it reflects the semantic and cognitive complexity of the concepts encoded in these different types of questions. Thus, questions about objects, locations, and people (i.e., what, where, who) involve less abstract concepts that those of manner, time, and causality (i.e., how, when, why). The early emerging wh-questions are also syntactically less complex in that they involve simple noun phrase replacement, whereas the later developing questions involve prepositional phrases or full sentence complements. Children use questions to express a range of functions. Most questions asked by 2- and 3-year-olds seek information or facilitate the conversation by asking for clarification or expressing agreement. Older children begin asking questions more to direct the behavior of others, especially to gain attention. Typically there are strong form-function relationships, that may reflect the input directed to children: wh-questions are used to seek information, while yes-no forms are used for conversational and directive functions. Thus, as for negation, the development of questions is determined not only by linguistic complexity, but also by semantic and pragmatic factors that interact with the acquisition of the requisite syntactic rules.
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The Individual Learner 4.4 Passives Despite the rarity of the passive construction in everyday conversations in English, a good deal of attention has been paid to how children use and understand passive sentences. Because the order of the agent and patient is reversed, this particular construction can reveal a great deal about how children acquire word order rules that play a major role in English syntax. Elicited production tasks have been used to study how children construct passive sentences, typically using sets of pictures that shift the focus to the patient. Younger children tend to produce primarily truncated passives (e.g., the window was broken) in which no agent is specified. These truncated passives generally have inanimate subjects, while full passives are produced by children when animate subjects are involved, suggesting that full and truncated passives may develop separately and be unrelated for the younger child. It has been suggested that truncated passives are really adjectival whereas the later appearing full forms are complete verbal passives. Numerous studies have used an act-out procedure to investigate children's comprehension of passive voice sentences. Typically these studies compare children's comprehension of passive sentences to active sentences that are either reversible—in which either noun could plausibly be the agent (e.g., the boy kisses the girl; the boy is kissed by the girl), or semantically biased—in which one noun is more plausibly the agent than the other (e.g., the girl feeds the baby; the girl is fed by the baby). Studies find that children correctly interpret the plausible passive sentences before they do the reversible sentences. Preschoolers acquiring English tend to make errors systematically on the reversible passive sentences, suggesting the use of a processing strategy, called the word-order strategy, whereby noun-verb-noun sequences are interpreted as agent-action-object. Children learning languages other than English may develop different processing strategies that closely reflect the canonical ways of organizing the basic relations in a sentence in their native language. For example, Japanese is a verb-final language that marks the agent with a suffix -ga, rather than with a fixed word order, although there is a preference for an agent-object-verb order. Preschoolaged Japanese children tend to use a strategy that takes the first noun marked with -ga as the agent of the sentence. Thus children's processing strategies are tailored to the kind of language they are acquiring and show that preschoolers have already worked out the primary ways their language marks the basic grammatical relations. Studies of the acquisition of other languages such as Sesotho, in which the passive construction is very frequent because subjects always mark sentence topic, find that children acquire the passive much earlier and use it much more productively than do Englishspeaking children. Again, this suggests that children
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are sensitive to the typology of their language and that these factors influence the timing of development for the passive. The semantic characteristics of the verb also influence the child's comprehension of passive sentences. While 5-year olds do correctly understand passive sentences which have action verbs, they find it more difficult to interpret passive sentences with nonaction verbs (e.g., Donald was liked by Goofy). Thus the acquisition of passive voice continues into the school years as the child's knowledge becomes less constrained by semantic aspects of the verb. 5. Complex Sentence Structures 5.1 Coordinations As early as 30 months of age, children begin combining sentences to express compound propositions. The simplest and most frequent method children use to combine sentences is to conjoin two propositions with and. One question that has been investigated in numerous studies is the order in which different forms of coordination develop. Both sentential (e.g., Mary went to school and Peter went to school) and phrasal coordinations (e.g., Mary and Peter went to school) tend to emerge at the same time in development suggesting that these forms develop independently and are not, for young children, derived from one another. Children form phrasal coordinations by directly conjoining phrases, not via deletion rules. From the beginning children are sensitive to the different contexts in which phrasal and sentential forms of coordination are used appropriately in both production and comprehension. Children use sentential forms to describe events that are separated in time or space or involve different referents, while phrasal forms are used when events occur at the same time, in the same place, or involve the same referents. Semantic factors also influence the course of development of coordination. Children use coordinations first to express additive meaning, where there is no dependency relation between conjoined clauses (e.g., maybe you can carry this and I can carry thai). Later temporal relations (e.g., Joey is going home and take her sweater off) and then causal relations (e.g., she put a bandaid on her shoe and it maked it feel better) are expressed, suggesting that children begin demonstrating greater semantic flexibility even while limiting themselves to the use of a single connective and. 5.2 Relative Clauses Sometime after children begin using coordination, relative clauses emerge in their spontaneous speech. Initially they are used to specify information exclusively about the object of a sentence (e.g., let's eat the cake what I baked), and often the relative pronoun is omitted or incorrect. The use of relative clauses in the spontaneous speech of young children is quite rare,
Grammar Acquisition perhaps because children avoid these syntactically complex constructions, or because they lack the occasion to use them when the context is shared by the speaker and listener. Elicited production techniques have been used successfully with preschoolers. These studies have also found that children find it easiest to add relative clauses to the ends of sentences rather than to embed them within the matrix clause. This suggests that some processing constraints operate on young children's productive capacities. Studies of children's comprehension of relative clause constructions, which typically involve act out procedures, confirm that object relatives are easier to process than subject relatives (which are usually embedded), though different theoretical interpretations have been offered for these findings. Some suggest this is related to processing limitations and the use of comprehension strategies, while others offer interpretations from linguistic theory. There is also evidence to suggest that children are sensitive to semantic and prosodic factors in tasks that require children to interpret sentences with various types of relative clauses. 5.3 Anaphoric Reference Children's knowledge of grammar continues to develop beyond the preschool years. One area that has received a good deal of attention from researchers is their knowledge of coreference relations within sentences; especially how anaphoric pronouns and reflexives link up with referents. This research has been conducted primarily within a Government-Binding theoretical framework, investigating children's knowledge of the main binding principles. Spontaneous productions of pronominal forms suggest that quite young children use them correctly in their productive speech; however, the limits of their knowledge cannot be accurately assessed in naturalistic contexts. More controlled studies have utilized a variety of methods including comprehension, picture-matching, and judgment tasks. Generally, children appear to develop knowledge of the main principles in the following order. By the age of 6 children know 'principle A,' which states that reflexives are bound to referents within the same clause (e.g., John watched Bill wash himself; himself must refer to Bill, not John). Sometime later, knowledge of 'principle B' emerges, which states that anaphoric pronouns cannot be bound to referents within the same clause (e.g., John asked Bill to hit him; him must refer to John in the ask-clause, not Bill in the hit-clause). The last principle to emerge sometime during middle childhood, is 'principle C,' which states that backward coreference is only allowed if the pronoun is in a subordinate clause to the main referent (e.g., when he came home, John made dinner). Some researchers have argued that the grammatical knowledge of these principles is acquired much earlier that
the research would suggest but that children's performance on tasks that tap this knowledge is limited by processing factors, pragmatic knowledge, or lexical knowledge. This debate continues in the developmental psycholinguistic literature. 6. Basic Theoretical Approaches 6.1 Semantic Bootstrapping Current theories in language acquisition attempt to address the central question of how the young child achieves the learnability task in acquiring the abstract and formal syntactic system of their language. In the 1970s and 1980s one idea that gained prominence in the literature was that children may use semantics or meaning to help them break into the grammar of their language. This approach was taken up by analyses of two-word utterances in the semantic relations approach, outlined in Sect. 2.1. Pinker (1984) has been the main proponent to argue that children may use semantics as a bootstrap into syntax, particularly to acquire the major syntactic categories on which grammatical rules operate. Thus children can use the correspondence that exists between names and things to map on to the syntactic category of noun, and physical attributes or changes of state to map on to the category of verb. At the initial stages of development all sentence subjects tend to be semantic agents, and so children use this syntactic-semantic correspondence to begin figuring out the abstract relations for more complex sentences that require the category of subject. 6.2 Functionalism A very different theoretical approach has been taken up by those who view the central task of the child as gaining communicative competence. Much of the research conducted within this framework has focused on the acquisition of pragmatic aspects of language, including the functions of utterances and their use in discourse and other communicative contexts. Within research on grammatical development the functional approach does not take formal syntactic theory as its primary model. Instead the structure of language is viewed £rom a functional, or processing perspective. One example is the competition model of language acquisition proposed by Bates and MacWhinney (MacWhinney 1987). On this model, the child begins by establishing the basic functional categories: topiccomment and agent. Different surface representations of these functional categories then compete for expression and initially the child may use a simple one form-one function mapping. Eventually children move toward the adult system of form-function mappings. 6.3 Distributional Learning At some point all theories of acquisition need to consider how the child learns the major syntactic cate-
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The Individual Learner gories, even if they begin with a simple lexically specific, functional, or semantic approach. One important approach to this learning problem is the distributional learning view, proposed by Maratsos and Chalkley (1980). According to this view children not only use semantic mappings to acquire a category like verb, they also use distributional factors, such as it takes an -ed ending to express pastness, or an -ing or s in present tense contexts, it occurs with auxiliary verbs and so forth. Gleitman (1990) has also suggested that children must use syntactic information to learn something about the meanings of terms, such as using the argument structure of a verb to learn something about its meaning. Other kinds of distributional learning, using morpho-phonological patterns may be central in acquiring aspects of morphology such as noun gender in languages other than English. This kind of approach argues that children are sensitive to all kinds of distributional patterns in the linguistic input to which they are exposed and some of the research summarized in previous sections supports this view. 6.4 Parameter-setting Models Linguists working within a Government-Binding framework who have taken an interest in the question of how children acquire the grammar of their language claim that the central task of acquisition is to set the parameters of universal grammar in the direction appropriate for the language that is being acquired. Some argue that the parameters start off set in one position, which may then have to be switched. One example of this is Hyams's proposal about the null subject parameter, presented in Sect. 2.3. An alternative view would hold that parameters start off neutrally, that is they are not set in any position. As the child is exposed to her native language she uses linguistic evidence present in the environment to set the parameters accordingly. This kind of approach to child language is still relatively new and awaits further refinements from linguistic theory. 6.5 Reorganizational Processes Numerous approaches have been proposed to explain how the child acquires the complex and abstract grammatical system of language. Children may indeed begin with functional or semantic categories, which may serve their needs during the early stages of acquisition, but these approaches are limited for the child. Eventually the child must come to employ abstract syntactic categories though these may still have correlates in meaning and function. Some theorists, taking a developmental approach, argue that the child must undergo some radical reorganization of their grammar at certain stages in development, rather than simply generalizing the categories they start off with. For example, the child may begin with categories that
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are defined semantically (e.g., agent, experiencer) that later become reorganized and restructured into syntactic categories (e.g., subject). These kinds of reorganizational processes are seen as central not only to grammatical development but also to the acquisition of lexical and phonological knowledge. In this way children piece together and reformulate through a series of stages using the same fundámental developmental processes an integrated foundation of knowledge of the language they are acquiring. See also: Language Acquisition; Vocabulary in Language Acquisition; Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability.
Bibliography Berko J 1958 The child's learning of English morphology. Word 14:150-77 Braine M D S 1976 Children's first word combinations. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 41. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Brown R 1973 A First Language. George Allen & Unwin, London Crystal D, Fletcher P, Garman M 1976 The Grammatical Analysis of Language Disability: A Procedure for Assessment and Remediation. Elsevier-North Holland, New York Gleitman L 1990 The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1: 3-56 Golinkoff R, Hirsh-Pasek K, Cauley K M, Gordon L 1987 The eyes have it: Lexical and syntactic comprehension in a new paradigm. JChL 14:23-45 Hyams N 1986 Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters. Reidel, Dordrecht Klima E, Bellugi U 1966 Syntactic regularities in the speech of children. In: Lyons J, Wales R (eds.) Psycholinguistic Papers. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh MacWhinney B (ed.) 1987 Mechanisms of Language Acquisition. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Maratsos M P, Chalkley M A 1980 The internal language of children's syntax: The ontogenesis and representation of syntactic categories In: Nelson K E (ed.) Children's Language, vol. 2. Gardner Press, New York Miller J F 1981 Assessing Language Production in Children. University Park Press, Baltimore, MD Pinker S 1984 Language Learnability and Language Development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Pinker S, Prince A 1992 Regular and irregular morphology and the psychological status of rules of grammar. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, CA Plunkett K 1995 Connectionist approaches to language acquisition. In: Fletcher P, MacWhinney, B (eds.) The Handbook of Child Language. Blackwell, Oxford Scarborough H 1990 The index of productive syntax. AP 11: 1-22 Slobin D I (ed.) 1985 A Cross-Linguistic Study of Language Acquisition. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ
Input and Interaction
Input and Interaction B. J. Richards and C. Gallaway
It is commonly recognized that, at least in middle-class western cultures, the language addressed to young children forms a distinct register. This register goes beyond obvious features such as particular vocabulary (doggy, tummy) and exaggerated intonation to include grammatical and conversational characteristics. Several terms have been used to refer to this phenomenon: baby talk (BT), motherese, caregiver speech, childdirected speech (CDS), and more specifically, infantdirected speech (IDS). Early research concentrated on the language addressed to the child. Subsequently, however, more emphasis has been placed on conversation as a cooperative activity in which the linguistic behavior of one partner cannot easily be considered in isolation. Much of the systematic research directed towards describing and explaining CDS began in the early 1970s, but more widespread interest can be dated back to the publication of Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition Snow and Ferguson (1977). This volume contained papers concerned primarily with description (e.g., by Ferguson), and others in which theoretical questions were addressed (e.g., by Newport et al.). A sequel to the Snow and Ferguson volume, edited by Gallaway and Richards, appeared in 1994 under the title Input and Interaction in Language Acquisition. Studies of CDS suggested that it was 'simple, wellformed, redundant' (Snow 1986:70), a characterization expected by many to provide an answer to Chomsky's claim that the language heard by the child was too 'deviant and anomalous' (Chomsky 1967:441) to provide an adequate database for language acquisition. However, the relationships between these features of the register and the acquisition process are complex, and this is an issue that continues to be debated (see Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability). 1. General Characteristics of CDS
Identifiable features of caregiver speech in western societies have been observed at the phonological, semantic, grammatical, and conversational levels. These are listed below. Sound features: slower rate of speech; more regular rhythm; repetition of intonation patterns; clearer pronunciation; pauses between utterances; exaggerated intonation; higher pitch; use of special words reflecting processes in child
phonology, for example, reduplication (wee-wee), fewer consonant clusters (tummy). Topics and content: a focus on objects and events in the child's immediate environment; frequent commentary on what the child is doing; management of the child's activity and behavior; social routines, naming games, peekaboo; object labeling; more limited range of vocabulary. Grammar: utterances are well formed; nouns rather than personal pronouns; diminutive suffixes (e.g., kinship terms); more content words, fewer grammatical words; fewer modifiers; shorter utterances; more single-word utterances; less preverb complexity; fewer multiclause utterances; more interrogatives and imperatives; greater redundancy. Conversational features: children are treated as conversational partners even at the prelinguistic stage; meaning and intention are attributed to early vocalizations; conversational modeling (parents answering their own questions); frequent acknowledgments (mm, uhuh); self-repetition; exact, partial, or expanded repetition of the child's utterance; utterances that repeat the child's meaning in a revised syntactic form (recasts); utterances that extend the child's topic; routinized exchanges in familiar settings.
Some or all of the features listed above are held to constitute a register that is used not only by mothers but also by others interacting with a linguistically less competent speaker. Similarities with the simplified language addressed to the elderly, 'elderspeak,' and to household pets have also been noted. 2. Variations in CDS
Different versions of the register occur according to the characteristics of both speakers and hearers and the nature of the activity. Book reading, for example, is likely to give rise to more frequent labeling and more complex language than free play or caregiving activities. 2.1 Changes over Time The development of the child is accompanied by changes in the quality and quantity of interactional and input features. During the first year, mothers gradu219
The Individual Learner ally demand more advanced behavior before treating it as a conversational turn, progressing from the acceptance of any vocalization or nonverbal contribution, through babbling, to the expectation of recognizable words. Adjustments in pitch, prosody and phonology, and rate of speech diminish as the child gets older. Research into the exact nature of infants' sensitivities to the prosodic features of speech addressed to them (IDS) (see Jusczyk 1997) support the phonological bootstrapping hypothesis, under which certain characteristics of IDS are thought to provide the infant with a way into breaking the language code (see Morgan and Demuth 1996). At the same time, topics focus less on the mother's own activities and feelings and more on objects and events believed to be within the child's focus of attention as it begins to take more interest in the physical environment. Generally speaking, the length of utterances steadily increases, both during the prelinguistic period and after the onset of speech. There may, however, be a temporary reduction in length in response to the production of the first recognizable words. Many features can be said to be tuned to the child in the sense that they gradually become less frequent or disappear as linguistic ability increases. Imperatives, for example, become less frequent as requests are realized more often by questions. Other developments, including the mother's clarification of consonants and vowels, appear to be responses to specific aspects of the child's vocabulary growth. Several studies suggest that the topics, semantic content, and discourse features, such as repetitions and expansions, are finely tuned to the child's level of comprehension and production, particularly comprehension. The mother's expectations concerning the child's potential as a conversational partner are also thought to play a part, so an increase in questions, for example, may be influenced by a belief in the child's ability to provide acceptable responses. What is more controversial is the extent to which CDS is syntactically finely tuned to the current stage of grammatical development. Newport et al. (1977) found that the proportion of declarative sentences increased as the children's grammar developed, which they took as an indication that input became less complex. Nevertheless, tuning of syntax does occur; during the period of most rapid emergence of auxiliary verbs in children, yes/no questions addressed to them increasingly retain the auxiliary in initial position (Richards 1990). An increase in the input frequency of certain grammatical forms, such as the past tense -ed morpheme, specific pronouns, or auxiliaries, has been shown to precede the emergence of the same forms in children's speech (e.g., Wells 1985). The possibility that the language addressed to young children was sufficiently tailored to their linguistic, especially syntactic, development, to provide something akin to a graded curriculum, has been referred to as the 'fine tuning hypothesis.' 220
2.2 Fathers and Others Fathers, other adults, and older children have also been observed to accommodate their speech to the communicative level of a younger speaker. Parents and nonparents are said to perform similarly, and mothers seem to be only slightly better at predicting their children's language needs than women without children. Variations in the register across speaker groups are apparent. Several studies have shown children between the 3 and 5 years of age to be capable of recognizing the need to adapt their speech when addressing younger children: they may use shorter sentences, fewer complex constructions, higher pitch, and more directives, self-repetitions and attention-getters. However, they are less consistent at adjusting, do not tune to age, and are less skilled with the conversation-maintaining devices used by mothers. When compared with those of mothers, fathers' communications with their children appear to proceed less smoothly. Fathers more often request clarification, and they acknowledge what the child has just said less frequently. In general, they talk less with their children, with fewer and shorter conversations and fewer turns, using more directives and more diverse and rarer vocabulary than mothers. These differences tend to relate to conversational characteristics rather than structural ones. It has been suggested that fathers' conversation, through being less finely adjusted to their children, offers a more challenging mode of communication, which prepares their children for interaction with more unfamiliar adults in the world outside; this notion is referred to as the 'bridge hypothesis' (see Barton and Tomasello et al. 1994). 2.3 The Language of the Classroom Attempts to characterize the linguistic environment provided for children in schools have attracted interest and controversy. Some researchers have used known features of CDS as a basis for comparing language experiences at home and in the classroom. Much of this research has been directly or indirectly concerned with the issue of working-class children's low achievements at school. The discontinuity between the language used at home and at school is said to pose problems for some children. Paradoxically, the view is also held that teachers, as trained professionals, are more skilled in facilitating children's language development than some mothers. However, the notion of the classroom as a rich linguistic environment has not been borne out by research; indeed, in some respects it has been held to be relatively impoverished in comparison with the home. In the classroom, 5-year old children speak less with adults, initiate fewer conversations, are engaged in fewer one-to-one interactions with adults, and ask adults fewer questions. Instead, they are expected to
Input and Interaction answer more questions, especially display questions, and respond to more requests. Teachers' utterances only rarely extend the topic of the pupil. The pupil's role tends, therefore, to be one of passive responding rather than active participation. Some reasons for this are as follows. First, children and their teachers, unlike children and their mothers, need to work at creating a shared base of knowledge for conversations. Second, the adult-child ratio in classrooms ensures that a substantial proportion of talk is concerned with managing and directing children's activities—a communication mode that is less likely to encourage children's use of language than a more responsive mode. However, the conclusions that can be drawn from this line of reasoning are limited because the usefulness of such comparisons decreases for older children. Also, little longitudinal evidence can be presented which relates children's eventual communicative skills to their classroom experiences. Finally, fostering conversational communication, does not necessarily develop language for more academic purposes in its explanatory, definitional, and reasoning functions. 2.4 Language Addressed to Atypical Learners Some conditions may result in delayed (or possibly deviant) language acquisition processes. These include language disorders, hearing loss, mental handicap, and, many would claim, visual impairment. Speech addressed to children suffering language delay resembles that addressed to younger, normal children. Some characteristics that have been observed for all these populations are more directives and repetition, simpler vocabulary and shorter utterances, fewer responses to the child's utterances, fewer expansions, fewer acknowledgments, and more corrections than are found in speech addressed to normally developing children of the same age. Numerous studies reported these differences and gave them a negative interpretation (see chapters in Gallaway and Richards 1994). Parents of such children were said to be controlling and overintrusive, adjusting their language insufficiently as the child progressed and offering too little encouragement. It was suggested that parents were adding to their children's problems by providing a linguistic environment unconducive to language acquisition. However, when the linguistic level of the child is taken into account, fewer differences remain between these populations and children developing normally. Additionally, failing to appreciate the dyadic nature of interaction can produce misleading results. Children who do not initiate a great deal offer their interlocutors a limited range of response possibilities, and, for such children, apparently controlling language may be supportive and facilitative. The issue of what type of adjustment is most appropriate in these cases, where there is often a mismatch between the child's cognitive and linguistic
levels, remains unresolved. At the time of writing, it appears that it is the child's language level that is the overriding factor in determining the nature of the interaction. 2.5 Foreigner Talk Similarities have been noted between child-directed speech and foreigner talk, the language addressed to second and foreign language learners (see Inter cultural Discourse). Adjustments occur in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, as well as in the frequency of conversational functions (see Wesche 1994). Features of this register are used both in classrooms and natural language-learning situations, but in informal settings they are generally addressed with greater frequency to children than to adults. In classrooms, the conversational functions frequently reflect the teacher's dominance of topic and discourse: frequent display questions, fewer clarification requests and comprehension checks. The most striking difference between child-directed speech and foreigner talk in informal contexts is the greater likelihood in the latter of ungrammatical forms, such as the omission of inflections and grammatical words. In general, foreigner talk also contains more statements, but fewer directives and questions. Simplified language in foreigner talk and adherence to topics of immediate relevance are held to facilitate acquisition by providing comprehensible input (see Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories). While this register is acknowledged to facilitate communication, its role in the acquisition process is less clear. Interaction and simplification may be less useful for the second language than for LI acquisition, depending on the learner's experience of the world and knowledge about the functions of language. Nevertheless, from a qualitative analysis of classroom second language learning and a review of first language acquisition research, Ellis (1986) lists interactional factors that are likely to contribute to rapid development. These include frequent directives, utterances that extend the child's topic, and a wide range of conversational functions. 3. How Universal is CDS? So far, no linguistic or cultural group has been documented in which CDS features are totally lacking. However, generalizations concerning the characteristics of CDS should be made with caution since not all, or even most, features occur across all speech communities. For example, in Guatemala, Quiche speech to children has only five of the most commonly observed features but makes use of an additional eight rarer features (Pye 1986). Some of the variation originates in culturally specific concepts of child-rearing. Most CDS studies have been concerned with the acquisition of English in literate societies. However, such western cultures (and
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The Individual Learner in particular their middle classes) may be exceptionally child-centered. In some communities, adults do not talk directly to children until the latter have attained a degree of linguistic maturity; their early vocalizations are not construed as having meaning, and immature utterances are not expanded; a highly directive style may be adopted in which children are expected to imitate model utterances; errors may be corrected by adults. Differing cultural values may also be reflected in the patterns of forms and functions which predominate in CDS. Additional variation may arise from different conventions in the techniques used to attract and maintain attention, and to indicate affection. For example, high pitch has not been found in Quiche. A study of speech addressed to infants acquiring six different languages (Fernald et al. 1989) has showed both crosslinguistic consistency as well as language-specific variations in parents' prosodic modifications. In visuo-spatial languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL), modifications specific to the modality have been observed. Deaf, signing mothers use particular techniques to gain their children's attention and to ensure that signs and their referents are experienced simultaneously. They may also alter signs by making component movements that are reduplicated and both larger and longer in duration than in normal adultadult signing. Although the crosscultural study of CDS is still in its infancy, it promises to provide clues and perhaps even solutions to some difficult theoretical problems; the nonuniversality of certain features places important constraints on claims made for their function in the language acquisition process (but see Lieven 1994). 4. Is CDS a Teaching Register? The literature on language acquisition frequently points out that children acquire their first language without explicit teaching. This does not mean that parents do not at times engage in instructional activities. However, it is generally acknowledged that the primary motivation of CDS is to communicate with a less proficient and less mature speaker rather than to teach. Whatever the influences of the register on the course of acquisition, these are most frequently fortuitous side effects rather than the conscious intention. Child-directed speech has many functions. It serves to obtain, direct, and sustain the child's attention, to facilitate mutual understanding, and to maintain linguistic interaction in a way which is rewarding for both partners. At the same time, it is influenced by the desire to express affection, regulate behavior and play, and manage caregiving activities. One determinant is the need to check and clarify the meaning of the child's utterances, and this is a function of many of the repetitions, expansions, and questions found in adult-child dialogues. Another is the continuous
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monitoring of the child's understanding, leading to simplifications of grammar, vocabulary, or phonology when communication breaks down, or if comprehension is not signaled. In this way, input that is conceptually too complex may be at least partially blocked by the child, leading to related syntactic fine tuning as described above. 4.1 Is CDS Simple? It has been pointed out that certain features of CDS are more complex than would be expected if the register were to resemble an ideal graded language teaching syllabus. For example, reduplication and the addition of diminutive suffixes can be said to increase phonological complexity. The prevalence of other simplified characteristics, such as the use of a slower speech rate and phonological clarification, has also been questioned. Intelligibility may therefore not always be improved. Similarly, it is not clear how CDS would make a system containing phonetic variants of a single form, such as initial auxiliaries in yes/no questions (e.g., can), any more accessible to the child, since there is no evidence that the range of variants in adult-child speech is less than in adult-adult speech (see Richards 1990). Newport et al. (1977:145) claim that 'Motherese is syntactically complex on most obvious definitions.' They base this on the observation of frequent transformations and deletions, especially of grammatical words, and it is certainly true that the pragmatic requirements of interacting with a less mature speaker lead to a higher frequency of imperatives and questions of all types, including elliptical tag questions (It's nice, isn't it?). In addition, a given function may not be realized consistently by a single syntactic form, so, for example, declaratives, questions, and imperatives all serve as directives. One problem is the lack of any adequate way of measuring complexity. It is not clear that 'deletions,' for example, of the auxiliary in certain yes/no questions addressed to children, or of the subject in imperatives, really do increase complexity for the child. This partially depends on what aspect of the utterance the child is attending to, or filtering out; what is simple in one linguistic or cognitive domain may be complex in another. Another issue is the extent to which simplicity is actually desirable. Clearly, if the child is to make any progress at all, the input must contain material of a complexity beyond the child's current level. It has further been argued that if negative evidence is unavailable to the child, input reflecting only a limited range of linguistic possibilities would lead to oversimplified grammatical rules, which would fail to preclude their overextension to inappropriate contexts (see Snow 1986). In fact, simplification occurs at many levels in comparison with adult-adult speech, but this does not preclude a high frequency of relatively complex
Input and Interaction conversation-eliciting versus directive, or accepting versus rejecting. The extensive variation in rate of language development during the preschool period has led to speculation that this can be accounted for by corresponding variation in parents' usage of certain features of CDS. This has been referred to as the 'motherese hypothesis' In its strongest form, this claims that at least some 4.2 The Issue of Negative Evidence features of CDS are a necessary condition for language Overt correction of grammar is extremely rare in the acquisition. However, a weaker and more widely held language addressed to young children in the cultures version claims certain interactional adjustments to be most frequently studied. In addition, attention is fre- facilitative rather than necessary. quently drawn to its general ineffectiveness when it It has been claimed that CDS provides an ideal does occur. Parental corrections generally concern language-learning environment, and there are many either the truth value of children's utterances or their ways in which recurring aspects of social and linguistic shortcomings in practicing social rituals (e.g., say bye- interaction might be predicted to support the child's bye). Lack of such negative feedback is said to pose a acquisition of language. Potentially, CDS could do this problem for nonnativist explanations of the acqui- by: sition process: that is, how children avoid making (a) providing a model of conversation and turntakovergeneralizations of grammatical rules, and how ing before the child can make a linguistic conthey retreat from those that they do make, if infortribution; mation about their errors is not available in the input. (b) improving intelligibility, increasing the salience There are a number of proposed answers to this of grammatical features that would otherwise question, some of them taking as a starting point the be unstressed, contracted, or phonologically possible innate constraints in the child's acquisition reduced; mechanism and an examination of the types of over(c) facilitating segmentation of the stream of generalization made by children (see Language Acquispeech by means of clearer word boundaries, sition: Formal Models and Learnability). It may be pauses, stress patterns, repeated sentence that the category of overt correction is too narrow, frames (Who is it? It's...), recasts of child and and that CDS indeed contains negative information in caregiver utterances, and repetition of words; more subtle forms. For example, children receive more (d) reducing the child's processing load through requests for clarification and repetition when they proprovision of scaffolding, memory priming, repduce grammatically incorrect forms, and such breaks etition, and routine, thus allowing the child to in the flow of communication may stimulate the child focus processing capacity on aspects of to reconsider the utterance responsible. However, two language currently being acquired; questions remain unanswered: first, whether such (e) obtaining attention and focusing it on aspects feedback is present in sufficient quantity and conof the context which constrain the range of sistency to serve this purpose with respect to specific possible meanings; grammatical features; and, second, whether or not the (f) increasing the child's contribution to conchild does in fact attend to and use such information versation through conversation-eliciting and by, for example, imitating recasts and expansions. A turn-ceding devices, and making conversation further development of this topic is the Contrast Thea rewarding experience; enabling the child to ory of Saxton (1997) which distinguishes 'negative continue to communicate on a previous topic; evidence' and 'negative feedback' and provides a rea(g) giving feedback about the acceptability of uttersoned explanation of the likely functions of corrective ances and providing correct models; input, (see Vocabulary in Language Acquisition; (h) the more explicit teaching of language that is Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnsocially appropriate (see also Richards and Galability). laway 1994). Considerable evidence from naturalistic studies, 4.3 Influences on the Learner comparisons between twins and singletons, and crosDespite the prevalence of parental adjustments, con- scultural comparisons suggest that quantity of linguissiderable variation exists in the style of interaction in tic input predicts variation in rate of children's which children are engaged. Clear differences exist language growth. This applies to early vocabulary as in the frequency with which children experience, for well as later aspects of syntactic development and example, types of question, object-labeling routines, comprehension. Furthermore, it appears that it is and directives. Moreover, contrasting material inter- the amount of language addressed to the child, action styles that are stable over time have been ident- rather than utterances overheard, that makes the ified. Some such styles have been described as difference. features. What is perhaps more revealing than gross frequency counts and measures of utterance length is the role that these features play in the dynamics of conversation between the child and its interlocutors, and what is salient for the child at particular stages of development.
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The Individual Learner There is also evidence that specific aspects of CDS are facilitative. Children's semantic and vocabulary development at various ages is related to the frequency of labeling, particularly if the object labeled is already the focus of the child's attention. Since the publication of Newport et al. (1977), a number of similar naturalistic studies have attempted to identify facilitative effects of CDS by relating the progress of children between two points in time to input frequencies at the first point. This research has produced conflicting results on the question of whether simpler input is more helpful. In fact, the number of statistically significant results obtained is rather small in comparison with the number of variables tested, leading to claims that significant results may have occurred by chance. In other areas, such as the usefulness of directives or 'wh-'questions, results are also directly contradictory. Nevertheless, certain findings emerge with a consistency that gives them greater credibility: yes-no questions addressed to children are associated with faster auxiliary verb growth (Richards 1990) and copula verb growth (Richards and Robinson 1993) utterances are facilitative that respond contingently to the child's meaning, in particular by extending the topic or by displaying the child's meaning in a different syntactic form (recasting). Unfortunately, interpreting research of this type poses many problems; correlational approaches do not demonstrate causation, and the effect of the child on its conversation partners cannot be discounted. For example, fast vocabulary learners may or may not elicit more object labels because they show more interest in objects, and it may or may not be their interest in objects that accounts for faster vocabulary learning. Similarly, the mechanisms by which the variables identified above facilitate development are poorly understood. For example, there is the issue of whether yes/no questions are helpful because they make auxiliary verbs more salient or because they engage the child in conversation. On the other hand, inconsistent or contradictory findings or the lack of significant relationships cannot be interpreted as showing that CDS has no influence. Effects may be related to specific stages of development, or there may have been insufficient variation in the input to the children studied. Similarly, investigations based on frequency counts may not be sensitive to threshold effects or the effect of a very small number of instances that happen to be encoded by the child (Nelson 1989). Finally, studies of heterogeneous groups of children may fail to identify differential effects on children with different (e.g., analytic versus holistic) styles of language development. One consistent finding which is also well supported by experimental evidence is the influence of recasts. Nelson and his colleagues have shown that recasting the child's meaning in a different form can be used to accelerate the development of the specific areas of
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syntax displayed in the recast. These areas include tag questions, passives, and relative clauses (Nelson 1989). In the past, the results of studies such as those described above have been interpreted as giving information about necessary conditions for the acquisition of language. In fact, they indicate nothing about universal processes, but identify areas of individual differences in children developing normally, which are related directly or indirectly to areas of individual differences in input. Further discussion can be found in Snow (1995). 5. Issues and Implications
Considerable optimism has been expressed that research into CDS could inform the work of practitioners, and its influence is plain to see in the literature addressed to kindergarten and elementary school teachers, second language teachers, and therapists. Clearly, an understanding of the role and facilitative effects of CDS can be beneficial in influencing approaches to intervention. However, information gleaned from normal acquisition is not necessarily transferable to atypical development, and evidence of reliable effects in intervention is hard to come by. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a degree of consensus on underlying principles of a very general nature, notably that parents and professionals are advised to provide plenty of language (but not too much), to listen to the child and be responsive, and not to dominate the conversation. The use of recasts is also frequently recommended. Little is known about the minimum requirements for language acquisition to occur. Evidence from children whose only source of linguistic input is the television, for example hearing children in deaf families, suggests that mere exposure to language, even when accompanied by a visual stimulus, may not always be sufficient. On the other hand, crosscultural studies show that CDS is not a necessary condition—nor, for many second language learners, is interaction within the family. In fact, many children acquire language normally despite circumstances that, to those brought up in child-centered families, might be regarded as relatively impoverished. All this implies that the human language-learning mechanism is sufficiently flexible to cope with linguistic environments that exhibit vast quantitative and qualitative differences. Whether CDS is a sufficient condition for language acquisition remains to be seen. See also: Language Acquisition; Vocabulary in Language Acquisition; Grammar Acquisition; Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability. Bibliography Barton M E, Tomasello M 1994 The rest of the family: The role of fathers and siblings in early language development.
Language Acquisition In: Galloway C, Richards B (eds.) Input and Interaction in Language acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Chomsky N 1967 The formal nature of language. In: Lenneberg E H Biological Foundations of Language. Wiley, New York Ellis R 1986 Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford University Press, Oxford Fernald A et al. 1989 A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants. JChL 16:477-501 Gallaway C, Richards B J 1994 Input and Interaction in Language Acquisiton. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Jusczyk P W 1997 The Discovery of Spoken Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Lieven E V M 1994 Crosslinguistic and crosscultural aspects of language addressed to children. In: Gallaway C, Richards B (eds.) Input and Interaction in Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Morgan J L, Demuth K (eds.) 1996 Signal to Syntax. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Nelson K E 1989 Strategies for first language teaching. In: Rice M L, Schiefelbusch R L (eds.) The Teachability of Language. Brookes, Baltimore, MD Newport E L, Gleitman H, Gleitman L R 1977 'Mother I'd rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects
of maternal speech style. In: Snow C E, Ferguson C A (eds.) Pye C 1986 Quiche Mayan speech to young children. JChL 13:85-100 Richards B J 1990 Language Development and Individual Differences: A Study of Auxiliary Verb Learning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Richards B J, Gallaway C 1994 Conclusions and directions. In: Gallaway C, Richards, B (eds.) Richards B J, Robinson W P 1993 Environmental correlates of child copula verb growth. JChL 20: 343-62 Sax ton M 1997 The contrast theory of negative input. JChL 24: 139-61 Snow C E 1986 Conversations with children. In: Fletcher P, Garman M (eds.) Language Acquisition, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Snow C E 1995 Issues in the study of input: Finetuning, universality, individual and developmental differences, and necessary causes. In: Fletcher P, MacWhinney B (eds.) The Handbook of Child Language. Blackwell, Oxford Snow C E, Ferguson C A (eds.) 1977 Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Wells C G 1985 Language Development in the Pre-school Years. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Wesche M B 1994 Input and interaction in second language acquisition. In: Gallaway C, Richards B (eds.)
Language Acquisition P. Fletcher
The major thrust of studies of children's language development from the perspective of linguistics has involved the grammatical analysis of spontaneous speech samples obtained from the child's conversations with their mothers and other interlocutors. Phonological, lexical and discourse issues have also been pursued, but it is at the grammatical level that much of the research energy has been directed, in the main because it is here that links between linguistic theory and language acquisition are most directly made. Also, spontaneous speech from children is relatively easy to collect, and furnishes extensive corpora of utterances in naturalistic settings. These samples are used to estimate a child's grammatical status at successive stages of the developmental process. Certain utterances by the child have proved of particular importance for researchers. These are often referred to as 'errors.' More accurately, they are non-adult forms which the child produces, and they often provide a window into the child's construction of grammar which would not otherwise be available. The most frequently cited example of this in English is overregularization of past tense. Productions by the child
of forms like corned, hitted, and buyed, in place of the irregular forms came, hit, and bought are evidence of grammatical immaturity, certainly, but they also indicate clearly that the child has mastered the rule for regular past tense formation. While the focus of enquiry has not changed over the 30 years or so of linguistic studies of language acquisition, methodological advances and theoretical reformulations have had significant effects on the field. The following sections will concentrate on the major trends in the methodology and theory of child language studies, so far as they relate to grammatical development. For information on the specifics of grammatical development, see Grammar Acquisition; for phonological development, see Phonology in Language Acquisition. 1. Methodology and Theory: The First Phase The modern history of the study of children's language development begins in the early 1960s. Not surprisingly, for any branch of linguistic research in the second half of the twentieth century, Chomsky (see Chomsky's Philosophy of Language; Generative Grammar: Principles) was a formative, though initially
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The Individual Learner indirect, influence. The first research project of the modern era was planned and directed by Brown at Harvard University from 1962, following a 5-year period he had spent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project, written up in Brown (1973) and numerous theses and research papers, was designed to determine the stages of grammatical acquisition in English-speaking children. In its concentration on the child's construction of grammar, independently of the context in which it was acquired, using as a database longitudinal samples of children's speech over the whole of the preschool period, Brown's project is a model which other researchers in the field have copied, modified, or reacted against. This section therefore begins by looking in more detail at the methodology of this important study, as a starting-point for a more general consideration of methodological and theoretical issues in the field. 1.1 Sampling the Data The study of children's development over time (hence 'longitudinal') was not new with Brown. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw a number of 'diary studies' on the acquisition of various languages (see Ingram 1989: for a review). Typically an interested parent would note the child's utterances, from the emergence of recognizable words onward, and provide a commentary on what appeared to them to be interesting features. The frequency of entries, the timespan of the child's development covered, and the features of interest noted, were somewhat unpredictable from diarist to diarist. A major handicap for the diarist, and later researchers who wanted to use the information contained in them, was the inevitable selectivity imposed by the method of handwritten records of increasing quantities of speech once the child passed the second birthday. In his study, which examines the preschool development of three children (code-named Adam, Eve, and Sarah) Brown had the inestimable advantage over his diarist predecessors of being able to tape-record spontaneous speech samples from his subjects. This technological advance made a major difference to the data available to researchers. A permanent record of what the child and their interlocutors said was now available, which could be used to provide reliable written records of conversations involving the child. Investigators were no longer limited by their own immediate memory of what the child said, but could collect lengthy samples, at regular sampling intervals, which could then be transcribed and analyzed at their convenience. Brown and his co-workers selected a sampling interval of 1 month for two of their subjects, and collected fortnightly samples for the third. It should be emphasized that the new methodology imposed costs. It has been estimated that 1 hour of conversation between mother and child can take up to 10 hours simply to transcribe. Adding in time for 226
analysis, and remembering that monthly sampling intervals will provide over 40 samples for a typical monitoring of a child's language development between 18 months and 5 years of age, it will be obvious that this type of research is extremely laborintensive. This tends to lead, as seen in other studies, to a trade-off between number of subjects and sampling interval. The most important longitudinal study of the 1970s, by Wells in Bristol (Wells 1985), involved 64 children from 15 months to 5 years of age, but selected a sampling interval of 3 months, and each sample was limited in time to about 25 minutes. The advantage of Brown's study, and others like it, with a comparatively large amount of data on each child, at frequent sampling intervals, is that it is feasible to observe the organic growth of grammatical systems and subsystems. The large subject sample with correspondingly less data on each child may lack for some linguistic detail. It does, however, permit the investigation of the relationship between independent variables such as age, sex, social class, interaction, style, etc. on the dependent variable, language development. The Brown and Wells studies, a decade apart in the planning, were also distinct in their data collection procedures. The differences are instructive in what they reveal of shifts in thinking within the child language research community as the initially close relationship between linguistic theory and language acquisition study cooled. Brown collected his data in the child's living room, with the tape-recorder on show and at least one observer present to make notes on the conversation that mother and child engaged in. Wells, sensitized to the possible effects of the social context on language, and more particularly, of the importance of 'naturalistic' observation of the language used not only by the child, but by the mother to the child, removed observers from the sampling situation. Children in the study wore a wireless microphone, which transmitted to a remote tape-recorder which switched on and off, on each day of recording, according to a predetermined program, of which the family were not aware. 1.2 Innateness and Environment The first influential statement of this linkage between language acquisition and linguistic theory came in Chomsky (1965), where his so-called 'innateness' hypothesis drew a parallel between the task of the linguist in characterizing a new language, and the child in learning the grammar of the language of his surroundings. Noting that an infant is biologically ready to learn any language, Chomsky exploited the ambiguity of the term 'grammar,' as both the product of the linguist's explicit description of the language he is describing, and the implicit mental representation that the child establishes as the basis for his speech and understanding. Chomsky's hypothesis was that the child came to the language acquisition task with
Language Acquisition essentially the same equipment that the linguist brought to his work, that is, a 'generative grammar'. In more recent terminology, the human infant is 'hardwired' for the acquisition task with prior expectations, in terms of linguistic universals about the language he will be exposed to. Given the obvious surface differences between languages, even those as closely related as, say, English and Dutch, such expectations will be at a rather abstract level of generality, for example, the availability of an autonomous syntax, categories such as Noun, Verb, and the form of rule statements within the syntax. This specification of the formal apparatus available to the child was accompanied by assertions concerning the speed with which the child accomplished the acquisition task, and the defective nature of the data with which the child was presented for language learning. It was difficult to see, Chomsky argued, how the child could learn language in the face of these disadvantages without an extensive 'preprogramming' for language learning. The initial Chomskyan hypothesis suffered under two handicaps. First, toward the end of the 1960s, linguistic theory became somewhat less monolithic, and so the exact nature of the formal apparatus assumed to be available to the language learner became rather uncertain. Second, and more seriously, it was not at all clear how to address data from children's language learning to the innateness hypothesis. Brown, himself no formalist, was concentrating in his project on topics such as semantic relations in early grammar, and the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes (see Grammar Acquisition, Sects. 2.1 and 3.1). Neither of these appeared directly relevant to the theoretical issues. A third problem was that one of Chomsky's buttressing arguments for the innateness hypothesis, the assumption of defective input, was becoming increasingly untenable. In its own version of the nature-nurture debate, language acquisition studies now polarized around a (temporarily) less influential Chomskyan view, and a body of research designed to characterize the input to children (child-directed speech—CDS), and (much more difficult) to test its role in the acquisition process (a review appears in Gallaway and Richards 1994; see also Input and Interaction). It had long been known that in the absence of input, children do not develop a language. Accounts of feral children—historical oddities such as The Wild Boy of Aveyron and others, who have been restored to normal human contact after a period of living wild—attest to this obvious point (Brown 1958:189). But the character of input language to children, and its role, had not been extensively studied. It quickly became clear that CDS, at least among middle-class English-speaking mothers, the usual subjects of enquiry, constitutes an identifiable language variety. It has phonological modifications, nonsegmental and segmental, and specific grammatical characteristics. So, for example,
fundamental frequency is higher than comparable speech to adults, and pitch range wider. Pronunciation is said to be more careful and precise than is usual in adult-to-adult conversation. Adults speak to children in short, grammatical sentences. It would be plausible to assume that such modifications would assist the child in the language learning task. It would be equally plausible, however, to interpret the modifications as ways adults have (or learn) to make themselves comprehensible to small children with limited language capacity. Studies which have attempted to resolve this issue by correlating the effects of variation in syntactic input on development, have had mixed success. One result which has been replicated, originally established by Newport et al. (1977), concerns the effect of utterance-initial auxiliaries on the child's development of this category. There does appear to be a positive correlation. The more a mother uses auxiliaries like can, will, shall, in her utterances to her 18-month-old child, the more likely she is to hear them from the child 6 months later. While similar examples of established effects of syntactic variation in CDS on language growth in the child are few, research on the effect of discourse modifications—expansions or extensions by the interlocutor which pick up on the child's topic and expand or extend it—suggests that these strategies by mothers may be effective in facilitating language development. What is not clear is how any feature of CDS which turns out to be facilitative in language development actually achieves its effect. It is still necessary to hypothesize a learning mechanism, or a component of it, which can use the relevant input to advance its learning. 2. Methodology and Theory: The Current Phase
The recording technology of the late 1950s allowed Brown to make permanent records of the speech of the children he was investigating. Apart from the major study by Wells that followed a decade after Brown, there have been dozens of other studies, initially on English and then on other languages, which have used tape-recorded language samples as the basis for the investigation of grammar construction. Some of these studies involve longitudinal sampling, where the same children serve as subjects at all stages of the research. Other studies have involved cross-sectional simulations of language development: groups of different children at different ages (e.g., a group of 3-year olds, one of 5-year olds, and a third of 7-year olds) provide the language samples. It is assumed that the linguistic changes one finds between, say, the members of the 3-and 5-year-old group are similar to those one would find if the same children were sampled at 3 and again 2 years later. 2.1 Data Archiving and Theoretical Debates By the end of the 1970s the field of child language was served by two academic journals, the Journal of Child
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The Individual Learner Language and First Language, entirely devoted to research in the area. It was (see below) about to resume its close relationship with linguistic theory. It was in one sense rich in data, with nearly 20 years of data collection behind it. Data was not, however, readily accessible to researchers other than those associated with the particular project that had generated it, and there seemed no obvious way of aggregating data from different projects. At this point, in a project funded by the MacArthur Foundation, Snow and MacWhinney founded the Child Language Data Exchange System (MacWhinney and Snow 1985; MacWhinney 1991). This is a computer archive of child language transcript data, with material from more than 20 projects on English (including the Brown and Wells data), and data in addition from Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Spanish, Tamil, and Turkish. The archive is available on request to any researcher and affords a facility to test hypotheses systematically against large bodies of naturalistic data. This methodological advance leads to new theoretical insights. So, for example, Marcus et al. (1992) were able to assess the validity of the assumption that the child's overregularization of past tense represents 'U-shaped' development. The reference is to learning which proceeds from initial correct forms (irregular pasts such as came, sang, hit) to a period in which, because of the acquisition of the regular past tense rule, the irregular past forms are substituted for by regularized forms (corned, singed, hitted). After this period of uncertainty, the child establishes essentially the adult system, with regulars and irregulars correctly differentiated. Marcus et al. review an extensive range of data from the CHILDES database, and establish that, while overregularization rates do vary across children, these forms are in a relatively small minority—usually under 10 percent of all forms. So in reality there is no period of marked U-shaped development. (The U is to be imagined as a graph, with the first tail representing correct performance on irregulars, the trough representing a large number of errors, and then the second tail showing the child's recovery to correct performance on both regulars and irregulars). Marcus et al. interpret the new data as indicating a process of development which advances from rote learning to the discovery of the regular rule. Once the regular rule is discovered, it applies to all verbs unless there is an irregular past tense form available in the child's lexicon, causing blocking of the general rule. Overregularization is attributed to a lack of memory strength for a 'blocking' irregular form. When an irregular form is unavailable, the regular past tense rule is applied to the irregular stem as a default. The Marcus et al. study is a contribution to the debate about the acquisition of morphology, and ultimately about acquisition generally. It represents a perspective on learning which, in common with the
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majority of studies, assumes that the child's language development depends on the organization and reorganization of rules and representations. The alternative view, often referred to as 'connectionism,' sees statements such as the rule for past tense formation as merely descriptions of features of the language. The connectionist view sets out to demonstrate how a model of language acquisition could avoid reliance on mechanisms using rules that manipulate discrete symbols, but still account for what happens in the child's language learning. The battleground for the competing theories has been past tense formation in English, and the connectionists' hypothesis testing has implemented computer simulations of learning, using parallel distributed processing (PDP) models (Plunkett and Marchman 1991; Elman et al. 1996). Such models are constructed in the form of networks (claimed to be analogous to neural networks) which are 'trained' on sets of past tense forms from the language, and which 'learn' from successive sweeps through the input. Successive outputs from the network can then be checked for their approximation to what is known of successive stages of the child's development. In the rather restricted area of the development of past tense, the simulations have been relatively successful, though they are still the subject of extensive debate. 2.2 Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition As seen above, linguistic theory was a major influence on language acquisition studies at the outset. After a period of estrangement, the relationship was renewed during the 1980s as the reformulation of Chomskyan theory (which is referred to as 'Principles and Parameters Theory'—PPT) offered the prospect of testing predictions against language acquisition data, in a way that had not been possible before. It is obviously not feasible to deal with the full complexity of PPT here (see Atkinson 1992 for a book-length treatment). However, one of its crucial dimensions, parameterization, can be introduced via a specific example. The original linkage between linguistic theory and language acquisition depended on commonalities between languages at a rather abstract level. PPT maintains this view that there are universal features of language but also acknowledges cross-linguistic differences by specifying, within modules of the grammar, 'parameters'—dimensions of variation from which languages select possible values. The most widely discussed such dimension in the child language literature is the 'null subject parameter.' One of the differences between English and a Romance language like Italian is that in the latter subjects of sentences do not need to be explicitly realized by a noun phrase or a pronoun, as verb paradigms are inflected for person and number, as well as indicating tense. So an Italian hearing a sentence which consists only of a verb and an object noun will be able to identify the subject of the sentence from the verb form. In English,
Language Acquisition by contrast, subjects must be expressed. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are limited to certain well-defined contexts such as responses to questions, for example, Q. what did you do? A. finished my drink and left.
Faced with the problem of learning their language, Italian and English children have to determine which way the null subject parameter is set, on the basis of the input evidence they hear. More generally, for each parameter that is made available within the theory to account for linguistic variation, the child has to determine which setting his particular language selects. The PPT theory is still very much an innateness hypothesis. As before, the child is seen as coming to the task of acquisition 'hard-wired' with the principles of the theory, and with the parameters. Input (earlier called CDS) is more significant, in this view of the linguistic theory-language acquisition relationship, but only to provide just enough evidence to set the relevant parameters. And input to the child is restricted to what is called 'positive evidence.' An important part of the argumentation for the new innateness hypothesis is that the child does not receive any overt evidence about the structure of the language. In particular, he receives no 'negative evidence' when he makes errors (such as overregularizations). This view does seem to be borne out by studies of CDS, at least so far as clearly explicit parental correction of syntactic or morphological error is concerned. Mothers and fathers do not generally take any notice of grammatical errors on the part of their preschool children. They seem to regard them, rightly, as a normal part of development, which the child will grow out of. Furthermore, even if an adult does try to correct overtly a child's error, the attempt is unlikely to be successful, unless the child is ready to make the change to the more adult-like form. As a consequence, any incorrect hypotheses about the structure of the language which are made by the child have to be eliminated by his own efforts, without any direct intervention by adults. This can only be achieved, it is argued, if the 'hypothesis space' for language learning is heavily constrained from the outset. The principles and parameters of linguistic theory are offered as the constraining influences. The child has certain degrees of freedom available, in making suppositions about the constituent structure of his language, but these are limited by the potential allowed by the parameters and the settings which they specify. How does this new version of the innateness hypothesis fare when subjected to empirical test? Hyams (1992) uses data from the CHILDES database to explore a child's setting of the null subject parameter for English. It is assumed that the child's original setting will be null. If the language he hears fails to have morphological paradigms of the Italian type,
and has a high proportion of expressed subjects, this will trigger the resetting of the parameter to nonnull. Hyams finds a rapid increase in the realization of subjects (from 10 to 70 percent) in a 5-month period from 2 years 7 months to 3 years, and interprets this as the child realizing that English is not a null subject language. Not surprisingly the opening up of the innateness hypothesis to empirical test has led to attempts to provide alternative explanations of language development. Bloom (1990), for example, presents data to buttress his view that children acquiring English represent the correct grammars from the start, on the basis of input data, but omit subjects because of performance factors. 3. Conclusion
The exploration of the alternative models for language learning afforded by linguistic theory and connectionism will be central to research. Important information for both frameworks will be provided by crosslinguistic studies. A major program of research on the acquisition of languages other than English has been coordinated by Slobin at the University of California, Berkeley for over 20 years (see Slobin 1985, 1992, 1997). Some of these languages, for example, Hungarian, K'iche' Mayan (Guatemala), Walpiri (Australia), Western Samoan, are typologically very different from English (and each other). They provide new testing grounds for hypotheses concerning language acquisition. They may also, in turn, cause researchers to look afresh at the acquisition of English. See also: Phonology in Language Acquisition; Vocabulary in Language Acquisition; Language Acquisition: Grammar Acquisition; Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability; Reading: Acquisition; Input and Interaction; Becoming Bilingual. Bibliography Atkinson M 1992 Children's Syntax: An Introduction to Principles and Parameters Theory. Blackwell, Oxford Bloom P 1990 Subjectless sentences in child language. Linguistic Inquiry 21: 491-504 Brown R 1958 Words and Things. Free Press, New York Brown R 1973 A First Language: The Early Stages. Allen and Unwin, London Chomsky N 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Elman J, Bates E, Johnson M, Karmiloff-Smith A, Parisi D, Plunkett K 1996 Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Gallaway C, Richards B 1994 Input and Interaction in Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hyams N 1992 A reanalysis of null subjects. In: Weissenborn J, Goodluck H, Roeper T (eds) Theoretical Issues in Language Acquisition: Continuity and Change in Development. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ
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The Individual Learner Ingram D 1989 First Language Acquisition: Method, Description and Explanation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MacWhinney B 1991 The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ MacWhinney B, Snow C 1985 The child language data exchange system. Journal of Child Language 12: 271-96 Marcus G F, Pinker S, Ullman M, Hollander M, Rosen T J, Xu F 1992 Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Language Development. Stanford, CA Newport E, Gleitman H, Gleitman L 1977 Mother, I'd rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In: Snow C, Ferguson C (eds.) Talking to
Children: Language Input and Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Plunkett K, Marchman V 1991 U-shaped learning and frequency effects in a multi-layered perceptron: Implications for child language acquisition. Cognition 38: 43102 Slobin D (ed.) 1985 The Cross-linguistic Study of language Acquisition, vols. 1 and 2. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Slobin D (ed.) 1992 The Cross-linguistic Study of Language Acquisition, vol. 3. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Slobin D (ed.) 1997 The Cross-linguistic Study of Language Acquisition, vols. 4 and 5. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ Wells C G 1985 Language Development in the Pre-school Years. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability M. Atkinson
One way to approach an understanding of first language acquisition is to adopt a view on a small set of fundamental questions. First, it is necessary to characterize the child's initial state, and this amounts to taking a stance on what the child brings to the acquisition task in the form of a priori knowledge. Such knowledge can be seen as delimiting a set of hypotheses which is available to the child regarding the nature of the ambient language. Second, the nature of the data to which the child is exposed is in need of clarification. The importance of a child's linguistic environment is demonstrated by the fact that children come to speak a language L (and not L') when they are surrounded by L, but what exactly this environment consists of is not determined—for example, whether it contains only wellformed sentences from L or whether there are also occurrences of ill-formed strings. Is there any explicit or implicit information for the child about what is illformed? Is there any information about ambiguity? Third, it is important to have a view on the interaction between the data and the procedures the child implements in sorting through the options available. What determines the rejection of an option and how does the child select an alternative? Finally, this way of looking at things requires taking a position on just what it means to have acquired a language. Is some absolute notion appropriate, whereby all mature speakers of a language L can be said to have identified exactly the same option, or is some approximate or probabilistic notion of identification to be preferred? To formulate a reasonably explicit stance on these four issues is to offer a formal model of language acquisition. To pursue the consequences of this stance 230
in precise mathematical terms is the concern of learnability theory. Both of these activities are to be contrasted with traditional approaches to the study of first language acquisition in which the emphasis has been on data collection and the search for inductive generalizations emerging from these data (see Language Acquisition). This article is concerned with what is sometimes termed the logical problem of language acquisition, that is, how to account for the fact of language acquisition, rather than the real-time, descriptive issues. 1. Learnability Theory
In accordance with the above outline, a theory of first language acquisition which falls within the bounds of learnability theory will have four components. These consist of: (a) a set of hypotheses which is definitive of the learner's initial state; (b) an assumption about the data available to the learner; (c) a proposal for how the learner maintains, selects, and rejects hypotheses in the light of data; and (d) a criterion for acquisition. Within this framework, a large number of options have been pursued and a number of important formal results obtained. These can be seen as minimally establishing the feasibility of studying learnability within a formally precise framework and, more importantly, as determining certain boundary conditions for acquisition. 1.1 Identification in the Limit The notion of 'identification in the limit,' introduced by Gold (1967), is a criterion of acquisition and forms the basis of one of the most important learning-the-
Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability oretic paradigms. Its intuitive content is that acquisition is equated with a situation where a learner selects (identifies) the correct ambient language from a set of possibilities after some finite time (in the limit) and subsequently retains this selection. If a learner can achieve this for a language L on the basis of exposure to any legitimate set of data (see below), L is said to be identifiable in the limit. If L is a class of languages, each of which is identifiable in the limit, then L is itself identifiable in the limit, and it is easy to see the attraction of taking L as the class of possible human languages and manipulating other aspects of the framework to try to ensure that L has this property. This course has not been pursued for reasons which are easy to comprehend. The formal properties of human languages are not sufficiently well understood to enable them to be studied as mathematical objects. However, there are well-known classes of languages which are appropriately formalized, viz. recursively enumerable languages (L0), context-sensitive languages (L,), context-free languages (L2), and finite state (or regular) languages (L3), these collectively constituting the Chomsky Hierarchy. Each of these classes properly contains those lower on the Hierarchy (i.e., L0 c: L, c: L2 c L3) and, at the time of Gold's work, there was debate as to the position the class of possible human languages might occupy in the Hierarchy. It was therefore significant to consider the problem of identifying (in the limit) these classes of languages. Regarding data, two obvious assumptions can be investigated. The first (text presentation) has the learner presented with sentences from the target language in no particular order, the only constraint being that for any sentence in the language, there should be some finite time at which it appears. The second (informant presentation) presents the learner with sentences and nonsentences along with information as to which is which; again, the only constraint on a data-sequence is that for any sentence or nonsentence, there should be a finite time at which it has been presented. The notion of a legitimate set of data is thus fixed in two ways. Finally, it can be assumed that the candidate languages are enumerated for the learner and that the procedure for selecting a new language is based on this enumeration. Thus, the learner adopts the first language in the enumeration as his initial hypothesis. For text presentation, if the first datum is a sentence in this language, the language is maintained as the learner's guess; if not, the learner moves through the enumeration, adopting the first language which does contain this sentence. At any subsequent point, a shift from the current guess is occasioned by error and the learner continues to move through the enumeration until a language is found containing the new sentence and all previously presented sentences. This procedure is generalizable to informant presentation in an obvious way.
It is easy to demonstrate a class of languages which cannot be identified from text on these assumptions. Consider the class L = {L0, L,, L 2 ,...} where L0 = {a, aa, aaa,...} (i.e., the language consisting of all strings on the single 'word' a), L{ = {a}, L 2 ={a, aa}, etc. Assume an enumeration of these languages. L0 occupies a position in this enumeration and there are two possibilities to consider: (a) there is a finite language Ln after L0 in the enumeration; (b) there is no finite language which is ordered after L0. Consider (a) when Ln is the target language. Because L0 occurs before Ln and is consistent with any legitimate data set from Ln, it will be selected at some point and not subsequently rejected, that is, Ln will be incorrectly identified as L0 and L will not be identifiable. So consider (b) when L0 is the target. Now, the learner will continue to modify his guess as longer strings are presented, but there will be no finite time at which guesses stabilize on L0, that is, in this case, no language will be identified and again L will not be identifiable. But (a) and (b) exhaust the possibilities, so L is not identifiable. This example might be thought of marginal interest, but its significance becomes apparent if one notes that each of the languages in L is a finite state language. Thus, L is properly contained in L3, the smallest class in the Chomsky Hierarchy. It is provable, but intuitively obvious, that any superset of a set of unidentifiable languages is itself unidentifiable, from which it follows that each of the classes of languages in the Chomsky Hierarchy is unidentifiable on these assumptions. Responses to the above conclusions can take a number of forms. Most obviously, their significance for natural language acquisition can be denied by not accepting the desirability of locating human languages on the Chomsky Hierarchy. Justification for such a response is provided by the observation that the classes in the hierarchy all contain the class of finite languages, and there is every reason to believe that no possible human language is finite. In short, the class of human languages is de-limited by linguistic (ultimately biological) and not mathematical criteria. Alternatively, it is easy to see that the conclusions do not follow if one moves to informant presentation—L0 appears first in the enumeration and remains the learner's guess until a nonsentence is presented with the ordering of the finite languages being inconsequential. In fact, Gold proved that with informant presentation, a class properly containing the class of context-sensitive languages is identifiable, but the significance of this within the context of actual language acquisition is dubious, as there is considerable evidence that children do not receive systematic information about nonsentences (see Language Acquisition). 1.2 Modifications to Identifiability in the Limit Gold's work initiated an abstract, formal approach to the problem of first language acquisition and dem231
The Individual Learner onstrated the feasibility of obtaining results. However, it only begins to explore the consequences of modifying assumptions in the four components of a learnability model, and systematic investigation of a wide range of such modifications has been undertaken by Osherson and his colleagues (see, particularly, Osherson et al. 1986). These enquiries construe a learner as a function, in the mathematical sense, from data sets to hypotheses, and one aspect of the work has been to explore the consequences of constraining this function in certain ways. The crucial question is whether membership of the classes of identifiable languages is affected by such manipulations as other aspects of the learnability model are held constant. Exactly the same question can be raised if the nature of the learner (as a particular type of function) is constant and modifications are introduced into other components of the model. Here attention is restricted to a small sample of the results of this research. Consider first the function which the learner is assumed to embody. It seems plausible that such a function will be computable, since there is considerable support in cognitive science for the view that human mental operations are simulable by computational devices. The set of computable functions is a subset of the set of all functions, and it can be proved (other aspects of the learnability model being fixed in some way) that there are classes of languages which are identifiable by unrestricted functions but not by any computable function. Thus, restricting the learning function in this way constitutes a genuine constraint on the classes of identifiable languages. Somewhat more surprising is the fact that computable learning functions which are constrained so as not to include finite languages in their values (equivalent to restricting the learner's set of hypotheses to exclude finite languages) cannot identify certain classes of infinite languages that can be identified by computable functions which lack this constraint. Thus, for a learner to be equipped with the information that no possible language is finite is restrictive in a way which goes beyond the obvious nonidentification of finite languages. Turning to considerations of data, the empirical implausibility of informant presentation was noted above; what seems to be a much more likely situation is one in which the child is confronted by (perhaps small) numbers of ungrammatical intrusions which are not labeled as such. If this is so, one might expect it to make learning more difficult in some sense, so it is noteworthy that it is provable that there are classes of languages which are not identifiable by any computable learning function when data can include such intrusions despite being identifiable in this way when data consist entirely of grammatical sentences. Perhaps the most surprising conclusion demonstrated within this approach is that a specific set of
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empirically plausible assumptions requires the class of identifiable languages to be finite. The spirit of these assumptions is: (a) ungrammatical intrusions do characterize the learner's data; (b) the learning function is 'local' in the sense that it does not have access to the full range of previously presented data; and (c) the learning function is 'conservative' in that it is reluctant to produce a new value if new data can be accommodated by the current guess (note that the framework of Sect. 1.1 is strictly conservative in this sense). If these assumptions are realistic in the context of actual first language acquisition, it follows that the class of possible human languages is itself finite, an interesting conclusion in the light of the claims of the Principles and Parameters model discussed in Sect. 2.2. 1.3 The Learnability of Transformational Grammars The research summarized in Sects. 1.1 and 1.2 has taken place outside the development of mainstream theoretical syntax. Within the Chomskian approach to syntactic theory, a continued focus has been on grammars which have a number of components, and an immediate question to raise is whether such grammars and the languages generated by them are amenable to learnability considerations. In a series of important studies, Wexler and his colleagues have investigated this issue. These studies culminate in Wexler and Culicover (1980), where it is proved that a class of transformational components is learnable on a set of specific assumptions. Note first that it is easy to establish negative results in this domain. If one considers the class of languages generated by transformational grammars on a context-free base with text presentation, it is immediately apparent that this class is a superset of the class of context-free languages; any context-free language will fall within this class, as it will be generated by a context-free grammar with an empty transformational component or with a transformational component comprised solely of the identity mapping. So the class of transformational languages generated by such grammars will properly contain the class of contextfree languages, and the unlearnability of the former follows from the unlearnability of the latter. Because of this, it is perhaps appropriate to put aside questions concerning the learnability of the base and to concentrate on the transformational component itself. Thus, the learner's hypotheses are to be possible transformational components. Here, if it is assumed that transformational components are functions, it is easy to achieve a positive learnability result on the basis of the notion of function learnability. Assume that the learner is confronted with determining the identity of a function drawn from a given set which can be enumerated and that he has access to the enumeration. Data consist of argument-value pairs for the target function. The learner takes the first
Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability function in the enumeration, applies it to the argument in the first datum and checks whether the function yields the presented value. If it does, the function is retained and the learner moves on to the second datum; if it does not, the learner tries the second function in the enumeration and so on. At any point, a function will be rejected if it leads to error and the learner will move through the enumeration until he finds a function which will give the right result for the current datum and for all previous data. On the assumption that the correct function is in the enumeration, the learner will eventually select it and retain it from thereon. Given certain assumptions about the nature of transformations, the class of possible transformational components can be enumerated and the positive result follows. There are a number of reasons for being cautious about the significance of this result. The requirement that the learner retains information about all previous data is empirically implausible, but is necessary in order for the procedure outlined above to work. A related point is that on this account the learner accepts and rejects whole transformational components as he moves through the enumeration, and this is inconsistent with the intuition that the acquisition of a grammar involves gradual modifications as the child approximates to the target. In obtaining a more significant result, Wexler and Culicover retain the assumption that the child's data are argument-value pairs; more specifically, a datum is a (b, s) pair, where b is a base structure and s is a surface string, the mapping between b and s being achieved by the target transformational component. But enumeration is rejected as a procedure for selecting hypotheses and is replaced by a gradual, hence empirically more plausible, notion. The essence of this is that if a learner applies his current transformational component to a base structure from the current datum and derives a surface string distinct from that in the datum, this is a detectable error which constitutes a signal that modification of the transformational component is necessary. This modification can take one of two forms: dropping a transformation from the current component or selecting a transformation not currently included in the component. Both of these maneuvers involve selection from finite sets so there is a nonzero probability that the move will be correct from the adult perspective. This introduction of probabilistic considerations necessitates a change in the criterion of learnability away from identification in the limit, and Wexler and Culicover adopt a definition of learnability which identifies it with there being a finite time at which the probability of the learner being correct is arbitrarily close to 1. There is one further important consideration which underlies the proof. Since learning (hypothesis modification) only takes place in the light of detectable errors, if the child is to converge on the correct hypoth-
esis, it is necessary to ensure that such errors will occur with some appropriate probability. If errors only become detectable on data which are so complex that they are extremely unlikely to form part of the input, there will be no guarantee that convergence will occur. To this end, it is useful to contemplate some upper bound on the complexity of the data on which an error will be revealed. An important feature of Wexler and Culicover's proof is that this upper bound is set at two degrees of embedding. It is important to be clear that the strategies outlined above weaken the components of the system in two ways: first, the rejection of enumeration as a learning mechanism requires the adoption of a 'weaker,' if empirically more plausible, method for selecting hypotheses; second, in insisting on an upper bound for the detection of errors, the system must function on only a subset of the possible range of data. As might be anticipated, the positive result obtained for function learnability can no longer be established on these assumptions. What Wexler and Culicover have to do to ensure learnability is restrict the set of possible transformational components. The form of these restrictions enabled their work to make contact with work in theoretical syntax. Thus, they found it necessary to impose what they refer to as the Binary Principle on the functioning of transformations. To all intents and purposes, this is a locality condition restricting the operation of transformations to the current and immediately preceding cycles and, as such, it bears a striking resemblance to Subjacency, a principle formulated independently in theoretical syntax. With this principle and a number of others (these having various degrees of independent linguistic motivation), Wexler and Culicover were able to prove that transformational components were learnable on the basis of data which displayed no more than two degrees of embedding. This is referred to as Degree-2 Learnability. That the Degree-2 result required the learner to have access to (b, s) pairs is a controversial aspect of the proof, and Wexler and Culicover's justification for the accessibility of base-structures in terms of the child being able to work out the meanings of a significant number of utterances and somehow project these into base-structures is not compelling. On the other hand, the suggestion that the child has access to surface strings may be too weak, and Morgan (1986) documents observations which argue for the availability of unlabeled surface bracketings. According to this view, a datum will consist of a (b, sb) pair, where the sb is the surface bracketing arising from b by application of the target transformational component. Intuitively, this is a strengthening of one component of the framework: there is now more information available to the learner in the data, and one might expect that this will have implications for learnability. Indeed, this is so and Morgan shows that Degree-1 Learnability can be
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The Individual Learner established within this model. Of course, Degree-1 Learnability requires the learner to converge on data involving no more than one degree of embedding, so the richer information in the data via the surface bracketing assumption allows for a corresponding reduction in the recursive complexity of the data required to ensure learnability. Substantial modifications to Wexler and Culicover's set of constraints on transformations are also involved in producing this result. The general research strategy which emerges from the above considerations is clear. On the one hand, there are purely logical considerations whereby modifications in one of the components of a learnability model are likely to have implications for the other components. On the other hand, the modifications made are subject to empirical considerations if they are to be of more than purely formal interest. The positive result for function learnability is empirically uninteresting, since it is implausible to assume that a child has access to all previous data; the Morgan result is of empirical interest, since it is plausible that children are not exposed to many tokens of sentences involving even two degrees of embedding. 2. Formal Modeling of Language Acquisition
It is possible to pursue theoretical questions in first language acquisition outside the rigorous framework of learnability theory by investigating in a more notional way the consequences of taking a view on the way in which the learner's hypotheses are constrained, the data available to the learner, etc. and such an activity has been a constant backdrop to the development of one variety of generative grammar. Certainly since the 1960s Chomsky and his associates have consistently claimed that the fact of language acquisition can only be accounted for by assuming that the child brings to the task a set of constraints on possible grammars, these constraints comprising the contents of Universal Grammar (UG). Typically, such assertions are supported by alluding to the limited nature of the data available to the child, and are often referred to as arguments from the poverty of the stimulus. 2.1 Learning Grammatical Rules In the 'Standard Theory of Transformational Grammar,' UG is viewed as largely comprising a set of constraints on rules. A grammar for a possible human language comprises a number of components, each made up of rules that satisfy certain constraints. For example, such a grammar contains a base comprising a set of context-free phrase structure rules which generate a set of deep structures. Operating on these deep structures is a transformational component, made up of transformational rules, which converts deep structures to surface structures. The notion of what is a
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legitimate rule of a particular type is supplied by UG, and the child's task is that of hypothesizing specific tokens of these types which make up the grammar of his language on the basis of exposure to data. While the details of this process were not discussed in detail, it is clear that some version of a hypothesis selection and testing mechanism was centrally involved (see the discussion of Wexler and Culicover's model, Sect. 1.3). A number of difficulties for this perspective have become apparent. First, from a descriptive viewpoint, the constraints imposed by UG were sufficiently coarse-grained to admit a range of possibilities which were not attested in the world's languages. Furthermore, there was reason to believe that they never would be attested. Second, children acquiring their first language, while making a range of errors, fail to produce many errors which a hypothesis selection and testing procedure operating with relatively unconstrained hypotheses would predict as likely. Finally, those who attempted to chart grammatical development in terms of these assumptions found themselves having to indulge in theoretically ad hoc manipulations to deal with their data; the ensuing descriptive accounts were unattractive and lacking in insight. Starting in the early 1970s, there was a shift in the linguistic orthodoxy towards the Principles and Parameters account which informs a great deal of current work, both in theoretical syntax and in acquisition. 2.2 Principles and Parameters Theory The theory of principles and parameters differs from the Standard Theory in a number of ways. Most notably, the emphasis on rule types and instantiations of these disappears, and it is often claimed that this approach to linguistic theory does not recognize rules except derivatively. Instead, the theory recognizes a number of linguistic levels (D-structure, S-structure, Logical Form, and Phonetic Form), each subject to well-formedness constraints. These are stated in terms of principles which belong to modules of grammar. Some modules with their associated principles are specific to particular levels; others operate at all levels. The intention is that the principles should be universal, simple, and relatively small in number. Complexities which were handled by language- and construction-specific rules in the Standard Theory are accounted for by the interactions between principles from different modules. Consider, for example, the passive in English. In the Standard Theory, a passive transformation had the effect of promoting the direct object to subject position, relegating the subject to object of by, introducing an auxiliary and adjusting the verbal morphology. This rule was construction-specific and not generalizable in detail to other languages which have passives similar in certain respects to English. In
Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability Principles and Parameters Theory, the idiosyncracies of the English passive are seen as largely following from the 6 criterion (operative at all levels), the Extended Projection Principle (again operative at all levels), and the Case Filter (operative at S-structure). Given these principles, the properties of the English passive are not only appropriately described, but become necessary. The passive emerges as the consequence of a set of general, abstract principles, and it is these, playing a part in the understanding of a wide range of different structures in English and other languages, which form the proper subject matter of grammatical investigation rather than the constructions themselves. This approach accommodates linguistic variation by the recognition of a set of parameters, each with a small number of values. For example, consider the Xbar module which is concerned with the projection of information in lexical entries into syntactic configurations. Like other modules, this contains a set of universal principles, for example, all phrases are endocentric with NPs being headed by Ns, VPs by Vs, etc. However, the relative order of heads and their complements within a phrase is not universal, so here there is a locus of parameterization. Oversimplifying for purposes of illustration, in a language like English, this parameter will be specified so that heads precede their complements, whereas in Japanese the opposite situation obtains. During the 1980s, a number of parameters in different modules of the theory were proposed and investigated. These have included direction of θ-role assignment (for the θ-module), direction of Case assignment (for the Case module), the identity of bounding nodes (for the Bounding module), the values for a in the single principle of movement, Move a, the definition of governing category (for the Binding module) and properties of agreement systems (for the distribution of certain phonetically null elements). In general, the postulation of a parameter of this type has been seen as legitimate if it has proved possible to identify a small range of values for the parameter and the consequences of setting the parameter one way or another have been reasonably extensive. Returning now to first-language acquisition, in .the Principles and Parameters account, the learner is assumed to come to the process equipped with the set of universal principles and knowledge of where parametric variation is possible. This a priori knowledge constrains the hypotheses available to the child in the familiar way. Notably, a finite set of principles and a finite set of parameters each with a finite number of possible values allows for only a finite number of possible grammars, and from this perspective, the acquisition of a grammar for L amounts to setting the parameters appropriately. It is further assumed that the data available in this parameter-setting process are restricted so as to include neither negative instances
labeled as such nor complex constructions which are unlikely to be heard and processed by the child. A large number of questions which are stimulating research arise within this framework. First, the process of parameter setting is often presented as being distinct from hypothesis selection and testing (i.e., learning). Recall that one of the motivations for the move away from the Standard Theory was the nonoccurrence of a range of errors in child speech that inductive mechanisms might lead one to expect. Now parameter setting is sometimes likened to the setting of a switch. The idea is that a simple choice at one point in the grammar can have proliferating and deterministic consequences over a wide range of phenomena, these consequences being forced by the complex interactions between the modules sanctioned by UG. Of course, deterministic consequences rule out other possibilities (those which are not so determined), and the result is that the child will never be tempted by these possibilities. However, it does not seem appropriate to rule out an attenuated role for learning in this sort of account, since the notion of parameter resetting appears to be taken for granted by most authors, that is, it is generally acknowledged that children may make mistakes in their initial parameter settings. It is difficult to see the setting and subsequent resetting of a parameter as qualitatively distinct from the selection and rejection of hypotheses in the light of available data. Second, one might wonder whether the situation illustrated by the simple example in Sect. 1.1 arises within this paradigm, that is, one in which hypothesization of a language (or grammar) which is too general leads to circumstances in which the learner would not receive data enabling him to retreat from this hypothesis. More concretely, are there parameter values which yield set-theoretically nested languages? And if there are, how are they to be handled in this framework? A positive answer to the first question has been suggested in connection with parametric variation in Binding Theory, that module which deals with the distribution of anaphors (such as himself in English), pronouns (such as him), and names (such as John). Restricting attention to anaphors, they must have their antecedent within some local domain. Thus, in John believes that Bill hates himself, himself cannot have John as antecedent because it is 'too far away.' This local domain is referred to as the Governing Category of the anaphor, and one principle of the Binding Theory states that an anaphor must be bound within its governing category. Consideration of other languages shows that while anaphors universally have to be bound in some domain or other, the identity of this domain can vary; there are languages in which the equivalent of himself in the above example could be coreferential with the equivalent of John (or, of course, Bill). This sort of
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The Individual Learner observation leads to the conclusion that the notion of Governing Category is parameterized, and it is easy to see that a language with a 'liberal' setting of this parameter will be a superset (for the relevant structures) of a language with a more restricted setting. Now, assume that a learner is in fact confronted with a language for which the restricted setting is correct, but chooses the liberal one. For such a learner, in the absence of negative information, no subsequent data will disconfirm this guess, and he will be stuck with the wrong hypothesis. How can this predicament be avoided? If the learner's hypothesis selection mechanism is constrained to choose the most restrictive value for a parameter consistent with presented data, the liberal setting will only be adopted when positive data justify it. This constraint on the operation of the learning mechanism is an informal statement of the Subset Principle of Manzini and Wexler (1987), and an interesting question concerns the extent of parametric variation which necessitates a mechanism of this kind. A third question of interest is whether it is appropriate to assume that all principles and parameters of UG are available at the onset of acquisition or that some of them only enter the system at some later stage. To adopt the former position is to subscribe to the Continuity Hypothesis and leads to a dilemma. This is that language acquisition is not instantaneous and appears to follow a fixed course. If all principles and parameters are available at the onset and furthermore the child's linguistic environment contains the information necessary to set parameters, why is acquisition not instantaneous or at any rate compressed into a very short time span with individual differences in development being referred directly to chance encounters with linguistic stimuli? Attempts to answer this question take a number of forms. For example, it might be maintained that the child's representation of his linguistic environment changes significantly due to general cognitive factors such as increased memory span. Thus, while principles and parameters are all available immediately, they are not immediately effective because the data to engage them, while present in the distal environment, are not available as proximal stimuli for the child. Alternatively, if the Continuity Hypothesis is abandoned one is faced with giving an account of the mechanism whereby the newly available principles emerge at some stage in development. It is fashionable in the 1990s to speculate that maturation may have a role to play here. After all, once a subscription is taken out on extensive genetic endowment, and all contemporary approaches concede that this much is necessary, it becomes plausible to suggest that aspects of this become available according to a maturational schedule. This perspective, which is adopted by Borer and Wexler (1987) in connection with the development of passives and causatives and by Radford (1990) for
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inflectional elements, complementizers, and determiners, also provides a genuine alternative to learning as a developmental mechanism. Finally, it is increasingly recognized that it is important to constrain the locus of parametric variation if descriptive profligacy is to be avoided. A provocative idea which is being investigated in some detail is that parametric variation may be restricted to the properties of functional categories. Functional categories bear some resemblance to the closed classes of traditional grammar and include various inflectional classes, complementizers, determiners, and some prepositions. As an example, the pro-drop parameter (see Hyams 1986, for an influential discussion in the context of language acquisition) was investigated in some detail during the 1980s. Roughly, languages can be partitioned into those that do or do not allow phonetically empty subjects in tensed clauses. English does not (*saw that film), but Spanish does (vio ese film). The standard view on this variation has been that its source can be located in the properties of agreement inflections in languages, with English having relatively impoverished subject-verb agreement and the Spanish system being much richer. This difference allows the identification of an empty subject in Spanish where this is not possible in English, and a number of other grammatical phenomena follow from the same difference. Naturally, such an example does not establish the general proposition and there remain formidable obstacles to overcome in this enterprise, but there are several other examples that could be cited, and collectively these do lend an element of plausibility to the claim that linguistic variation is restricted to properties of functional categories. This claim takes on additional perspectives when account is taken of two further contexts. First, congenitally deaf children creating their own signing systems appear not to create the equivalent of functional categories. Second, there is some evidence to suggest that it is the development of functional category systems and not what might be referred to as 'basic predicate-argument structure' which is sensitive to variations in maternal speech style (see Input and Interaction). If linguistic variation is restricted to the properties of functional categories, it follows that these properties must be fixed by a linguistic environment. In the absence of such an environment (the deaf children) no such categories will appear; variations in linguistic environments in the relevant respects will lead to variations in developmental rate. See also: Language Acquisition; Grammar Acquisition. Bibliography Atkinson M 1992 Children's Syntax: An Introduction to Principles and Parameters Theory. Blackwell, Oxford
Language and the Brain Borer H, Wexler K 1987 The maturation of syntax. In: Roeper T, Williams E (eds.) Parameter Setting. Reidel, Dordrecht Gold E M 1967 Language identification in the limit. Information and Control 10:447-74 Hyams N M 1986 Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters. Reidel, Dordrecht Lightfoot D 1989 The child's trigger experience: Degree-0 learnability. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12: 321-75 Manzini M R, Wexler K 1987 Parameters, binding theory, and learnability. Lin 18:413-44 Morgan J L 1986 From Simple Input to Complex Grammar. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Osherson D N, Stob M, Weinstein S 1984 Learning theory and natural language. Cognition 17:1-28 Osherson D N, Stob M, Weinstein S 1986 Systems that Learn. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Radford A 1990 Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax: The Nature of Early Child Grammars of English. Blackwell, Oxford Roca I M (ed.) 1991 Logical Issues in Language Acquisition. Foris, Dordrecht Wexler K, Culicover P W 1980 Formal Principles of Language Acquisition. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Language and the Brain J. M. Gurd and J. C. Marshall
Although the study of language and the brain has a long 'prehistory,' modern concern with the topic is usually held to begin with Paul Broca's observation that there is a reliable association between (relatively) focal damage to left frontal cortex and severe dysfluency in spontaneous and repetitive speech (Broca 1865). He accordingly argued that, in adults, one aspect of the language faculty was typically 'localized' in the third frontal convolution of the left hemisphere of the brain. Broca coined the motto 'One speaks with the left hemisphere,' and he held that the clinicoanatomical correlation he observed enabled one to localize The memory of the procedure that is employed to articulate language.' The phrasing is important in that Broca sought thereby to distinguish a purely motoric impairment of the speech organs (dysarthria) from more 'central' disorder of language per se (aphasia). 1. Brain-Language Relationships and the Aphasias
The early (modern) history of brain/language relationships is accordingly the study of how different types of language impairment (the 'aphasias') are correlated with injury to different loci within the brain. Until the advent of in vivo neuroradiology (such as Computerized Axial Tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)), the demonstration of the locus of pathology was dependent upon histology at autopsy. 'Aphasia' refers then to the loss or impairment of language skills consequent upon acquired brain damage. Since the loss is rarely if ever total, British and European (but not North American) writers often employ the term 'dysphasia.' Nothing of consequence follows, although users of computerized searchfacilities should be aware that 'dysphasia' in the USA
may refer to a congenital or developmental impairment of language. Without further qualification, 'aphasia' is a diagnostic label applied to adult patients whose linguistic development and mature skill was within normal limits prior to the brain lesion (or lesions) that provoked the language disorder. Such brain injury can, of course, be sustained at any age, but the interpretation of post-natal damage to a developing system is fraught with difficulties that make the acquired aphasias of childhood a topic unto itself. Nonetheless, the term 'aphasia' carries no intrinsic reference to the nature of the brain damage that is its proximate cause. Relatively isolated disorder of language can be provoked by such distinct pathologies as cerebro-vascular accident (stroke), spaceoccupying lesion (neoplasm), penetrating missile injury, and closed-head injury. Language impairment can also be seen (although usually in conjunction with other disorders of cognitive functioning) after central nervous system infections (herpes simplex encephalitis, for example), in multiple sclerosis, in Parkinson's disease, and in such degenerative 'dementing' illnesses as Alzheimer's disease and Pick's disease. Similarly, the term 'aphasia' carries no intrinsic reference to the locus of the responsible brain damage. Nonetheless, in the vast majority of right-handed individuals (and a clear majority of left-handers), the left hemisphere is the neuronal substrate for core language skills. The most compelling evidence for this claim continues to come from the differential incidence of acquired aphasias consequent upon unilateral lesions of the left and the right cerebral hemispheres in adults. So called 'crossed aphasias,' where a right-hemisphere lesion provokes frank disorder of language in righthanded patients can be seen in clinical practice, but are extremely rare (Coppens and Robey 1992). Within
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The Individual Learner the left hemisphere, it is lesions of the perisylvian region that are most typically associated with aphasic symptomatology, lesions, that is, centered upon the frontal convolutions (Broca's aphasia), upon the superior temporal gyrus (Wernicke's aphasia), and the arcuate fasciculus (Conduction aphasia); lesions within restricted temporal, parietal, and frontal borderzones of the perisylvian region may be associated with transcortical sensory and transcortical motor aphasias. Language disorders have also been reported consequent upon damage to the left supplementary motor area (Jonas, 1981) and a number of subcortical structures, including the left thalamus and putamen, and the left basal ganglia and internal capsule. The extent to which subcortical structures are directly implicated in language processing remains controversial; while it is possible that lesions to these areas exert remote effects upon language-committed cortex (Crosson, 1992; Vallar et al. 1992), there is little doubt that such subcortical regions participate in the cortical circuits essential to language. The linguistic impairments that follow brain damage to these varied left hemisphere sites include peturbation of segmental phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and lexical structure or functions. The sole component of language that seems to be fairly reliably impaired after right hemisphere lesion is prosody, and especially prosody in the service of affective tone. There is also converging evidence from many sources that lexical semantics is at least partially represented in the right hemisphere, although the left hemisphere lexicon contains a more detailed representation of word-meanings (Code 1987). In short, the traditional enterprise of seeking correlations between aphasic syndromes and their responsible gross lesion sites has proved remarkably successful, although there are admittedly many anomalies and mysteries when one considers a finer grain of analysis and even worse problems when one moves from symptom localization to function localization (Caplan, 1981).
the temporal magnopyramidal region, uniquely endowed 'with specialized pyramids which elsewhere do not occur in the temporal lobe' forms a crucial part of Wernicke's area (Braak 1980). Furthermore, there are strong lateral asymmetries in the size of both the temporal speech region and the anterior speech region in the majority of normal, right-handed individuals; there is some prima facie evidence that these anatomic asymmetries, favoring the left hemisphere, are correlated with cerebral dominance for speech and language functions (Gurd and Marshall 1992); similar asymmetries are found in language-related regions of the human thalamus. Differences in the distribution of grey and white matter (the ratio of grey to white is greater in the left hemisphere) have likewise been discovered. It is also known that there are significant differences in the concentration of various chemical neurotransmitter substances in both cortical and subcortical regions of the human brain. A number of the anatomic asymmetries that characterize the adult brain are present at birth, and can even be observed as early as thirty-one weeks of gestation. It is likely that individual differences in brain asymmetry may be associated with differential rate (and extent) of recovery from aphasia and with predispositions to developmental language disorder in children (Plante et al. 1991). Although we are far from understanding how these anatomical and chemical asymmetries are responsible for functional differences between and within the cerebral hemispheres, there seems little doubt that the language faculty does inhabit a biologically distinct architecture. In the discussion so far, however, the aphasiological evidence considered has been drawn solely from studies of spoken language. It is logically possible that the underlying lateral specialization of the brain is concerned with auditory versus visuospatial processing. If this were so, one might expect that written or signed languages would find their neuronal locus in the right hemisphere.
2. Neuronal Architecture In terms of discovering a specialized neuronal architecture that subserves the language faculty, it is encouraging to find that the architectonic structure of the human cortex appears to map reasonably well onto many of the classical speech and language areas postulated in clinical neurology. The microscopic neuronal structure of cortex differs considerably from area to area, from layer to layer, and in terms of the pattern of connectivity between different regions. Thus, Braak (1980) reports that lesion studies of Broca's aphasia 'are in concert with the location and expansion of the inferofrontal region'; likewise, the histologically distinct superofrontal magnopyramidal region contains the supplementary motor area, which lesion studies implicate in the control of speech; and
3. Written Language Skills With respect to written language skills, the evidence from pathology unambiguously shows that this is not so. With the exception of reading disability consequent upon left visuo-spatial neglect, the acquired dyslexias are strongly associated with left hemisphere lesions in all orthographic systems (Patterson 1990). A substantial majority of aphasic subjects experience associated reading and writing difficulties (Webb and Love 1983), and it is typically, but not invariably, the case that the qualitative form of the aphasia is mirrored by the disorder of reading and writing (Langmore and Canter 1983; Marshall 1987) (see also Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention). It might be argued that the correlation follows from claims that written language is 'parasitic' upon spoken
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Language and the Brain language. Orthographies typically map (more or less regularly) onto a level (or levels) of representation (phonological, syllabic, or morphological) of their respective spoken forms; reading and writing skills are typically acquired after spoken language and using the latter as a means of instruction. Nineteenth-century neurologists accordingly formulated models of reading in which the visual stimulus was mapped onto an abstract phonological representation of the spoken language and all subsequent processing was common to reading and the comprehension of speech (Lichtheim 1985); similarly, it was claimed that spontaneous writing drew upon the processing machinery of spoken language up to phonological encoding of the message which constituted the access code for the retrieval of graphic form (Wernicke 1874). These theories predict that dissociated disorders of spoken and written language will only be found when the qualitative form of the disorder can be interpreted as an impairment of relatively peripheral mechanisms of input analysis (auditory or visual) or output execution (the vocal tract or the 'graphic tract'). It is now known that these predictions are false. For example: both global aphasia and severe Wernicke's aphasia can co-exist with relatively well-preserved reading. In some cases of Wernicke's aphasia (with total destruction of Wernicke's area), the qualitative form of relatively preserved oral reading and reading comprehension suggests that the patients can access phonological form directly from print, thus casting doubt upon a right-hemisphere interpretation of their reading performance (Sevush et al. 1983). Similarly, there are cases of 'auditory analogue to deep dyslexia' (in which the patient makes semantic substitutions in single-word oral repetition) in which fairly good written language skills (expression and comprehension) co-exist with massive deficits for both the expression and comprehension of spoken language (Michel and Andreewsky 1983). It is likely that the operation of a right-hemisphere lexicon, which has a distinctive non-phonological mode of speech processing, is implicated in these pathologies. Contrariwise, deep dyslexia (Marshall and Newcombe, 1973), in which patients make numerous semantic paralexias on single word-reading (ill— 'sick'), can be seen in the context of well-preserved spontaneous speech (Low 1931); high-level modalityspecific word comprehension deficits are likewise seen in deep dyslexia (Assal et al. (1981) have reported a patient whose disorder of written language was most akin to Wernicke's aphasia but with a disorder of oral language that resembled Broca's aphasia. The conclusion from these patterns of impaired and preserved performance is that the left hemisphere is indeed specialized for language per se, rather than for language as physically expressed in any particular sensory-motor mode. Nonetheless, it would seem that the existence of dissociated disorders of written and
spoken language implies that the detailed neuronal representation of language in different modalities may be distinct even for relatively 'central' aspects of syntactic and semantic form. 4. Signed Languages Are these conclusions also true for what is known of the biological instantiation of signed languages? Although early case reports of sign language aphasias tend to be inadequately reported with respect to neurological status and, especially, the nature of disordered signing, there is no doubt that the vast majority of the patients have left hemisphere pathology. In the first report of sign aphasia consequent upon a right hemisphere cerebro-vascular accident, the patient was left-handed. Reports, in which neurological and linguistic data are better documented, concur in finding frank sign aphasias after left-hemisphere damage. By contrast, Kimura, et al. (1982) have described a native signer who, consequent upon righthemisphere stroke, showed no disturbance of sign language or finger-spelling. In a similar case of righthemisphere pathology, mild disturbance of sign expression and comprehension had a purely visuospatial interpretation and there was no aphasic involvement; by contrast, three cases of deaf signers with left-hemisphere pathology showed fairly severe aphasic symptomatology which appeared to parallel (in a typologically quite distinct language) the form of Broca's, Wernicke's, and anomic aphasias seen in hearing patients. 5. Motor Skills It is known that, in hearing subjects, the left hemisphere is specialized for the formulation, control, and execution of skilled motor acts. Various types of praxic impairment involving non-repetitive movement (including ideational and ideomotor apraxia) are thus consequent upon left-hemisphere damage (in righthanded subjects). The expression and comprehension of conventional gestures and pantomime are frequently observed to be impaired in (hearing) aphasic patients and there is a strong correlation between aphasic and apraxic disorder in hearing subjects (see Marshall 1980, for review). These associations have led Kimura (1981) to conjecture that 'a common system in the left perisylvian area of the brain' is the neuronal locus for language and, more generally, for skilled motor control. For Kimura, then, the aphasias are simply a subset of apraxic disorders of complex motor sequencing. It would seem, however, that this hypothesis is false. Although there is a statistical association between aphasia and apraxia, the correlation between the severity of the two impairments is not particularly high. Furthermore, there are many single-case reports of striking dissociation between the two functions. Thus, Seines et al. (1982) have reported transient 239
The Individual Learner aphasia with persistent apraxia after left-hemisphere stroke; Assal (1973) has described a light-music pianist who presented with Wernicke's aphasia and word deafness consequent upon left-hemisphere embolism. When first examined, there was severe aphasia across all sensory modalities but no apraxic disorder, either bucco-lingual, ideomotor, ideational or constructional. Three months later the aphasia had regressed only slightly, but the patient's musical abilities were (.with the exception of writing melodies to dictation, reading scores aloud, and naming melodies) totally intact. Musical perception showed no impairment. Not only could he play melodies without difficulty but he could compose them at the piano and write them down accurately. This is rather obviously not a picture of generalized movement disorder, and it would appear that the association of aphasic and apraxic disorder is rather due to the contiguity of the anatomical substrates that underlie language and praxis. By virtue of this contiguity one would expect some statistical association between aphasia and apraxia in large groups of deaf signers with left-hemisphere pathology. Available case reports, however, show that, as in hearing patients, the two functions are dissociable. Furthermore, the nature of the error patterns of aphasic signers are clearly related to the linguistic structure of the language and not to any general motor disorder. 6. Specialization for Language
The sign aphasias thus provide further evidence that the underlying specialization of the left hemisphere is indeed for language irrespective of the sensory-motor modality that instantiates the physical expression of a language. Whether 'central' linguistic aspects of sign language draw upon a neuronal substrate that is strictly identical to the substrate that represents spoken language is unknown. It would be reasonable to expect subtle differences. Nonetheless, it is no longer in doubt that the basic specialization of the left hemisphere is for linguistic structure per se; there now seems little point in attempting to 'reduce' language capacity and skill to the interaction of more 'basic' cognitive functions. For human beings, language is a basic cognitive ability. 7. Conclusion
It is, however, worth stressing how little is known about human neuroanatomy (Crick and Jones 1993); the structure of the brain of the macaque monkey is known in some detail, but this information about a species that is conspicuously lacking any language faculty is of dubious relevance to the current topic. Likewise, the lesion studies (in humans) that have provided the basic information about the biology of language have often seemed to rely upon dubious inferences from pathological symptoms to normal functions; it is, after all, the remaining (relatively)
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intact areas of the brain that mediate aphasic output, not the tissue brain damage has destroyed. Advances in nuclear medicine do, however, now allow the mapping of those areas of the brain that are differentially active when normal people are engaged in different cognitive tasks. The precision of current techniques is still poor (in terms of spatial, and especially temporal resolution) but is rapidly improving (Posner and Carr 1992). In essence, such techniques as positron-emission tomography (PET scanning) measure (on-line) the metabolic rate of different brain areas by imaging differential regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF). The assumption is that, in the normal brain, the areas engaged in the performance of particular tasks will show an increased metabolic rate, indicative of the 'work-load' imposed upon those regions when the task is carried out. Although many investigations are somewhat crude, it is encouraging that, on the whole, the results of such studies provide good converging evidence for the localization of speech and language centers and circuits derived from lesion studies. For example, Howard et al. (1993) have reported convincing rCBF evidence for 'the localization of a lexicon for spoken word recognition in the middle part of the left superior and middle temporal gyri, and a lexicon for written word recognition in the posterior part of the left middle temporal gyrus.' Leblanc et al. (1992) have associated processes of word production with increased activation of the left posterior third frontal convolution (Broca's area) and the left inferior and midtemporal gyri (Wernicke's area). Tasks involving phonetic discrimination have also shown increased activity in Broca's area. Tasks involving the internal generation (and then production) of sequences of words from predesignated categories have likewise implicated left temporal regions, where significantly reduced activation is found (Shedlack et al. 1991), modulated by selectional processes associated with high levels of activation in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. It is reasonable to hope that the next decade will see significant advances in the understanding of how the human brain represents language. Bibliography Assal G 1973 Aphasie de Wernicke sans amusie chez un pianiste. Revue Neurologique 129: 251-55 Assal G, Buttet J, Jolivet R 1981 Dissociations in aphasia: A case report. Brain and Language 13: 223-40 Braak H 1980 Architectonics of the Human Telencephalic Cortex. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Broca P 1865 Sur le siege de la faculte du langage articule. Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropologie 6: 377-93 Caplan D 1981 On the cerebral localization of linguistic functions: Logical and empirical issues surrounding deficit analysis and functional localization. Brain and Language 14: 120-37 Code C 1987 Language, Aphasia and the Right Hemisphere. Wiley, New York
Phonology in Language Acquisition Coppens P, Robey R R 1992 Crossed aphasia: New perspectives. Aphasiology. 6: 558-96 Crick F, Jones E 1993 Backwardness of human neuroanatomy. Nature. 361: 109-10 Crosson B 1992 Subcortical Functions in Language and Memory. Guilford Press, New York Gurd J M, Marshall J C 1992 A gene for language? Current Biology 2: 447-49 Howard D, Patterson K, Wise R, Brown W D, Friston K, Weiller C, Frackowiak R 1993 The cortical localization of the lexicons. Brain Jonas S 1981 The supplemantary motor region and speech emission. Journal of Communication Disorders 14: 349-73 Kimura D 1981 Neural mechanisms in manual signing. Sign Language Studies 33: 291-312 Kimura D, Davidson W, McCormick W 1982 No impairment in sign language after right-hemisphere stroke. Brain and Language 17: 359-62 Langmore S E, Canter G J 1983 Written spelling deficit of Broca's aphasics. Brain and Language 18: 293-314 Leblanc R, Meyer E, Bub D, Zattore R J, Evans A C 1992 Language localization with activation positron emission tomography scanning. Neurosurgery 31: 369-73 Lichtheim L 1985 On aphasia. Brain 7: 433-84 Low A A 1931 A case of agrammatism in the English language. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 25: 55697 Marshall J C 1980 Clues from neurological deficits. In: Bellugi U, Studdert-Kennedy M (eds.) Signed and Spoken Language: Biological Constraints on Linguistic Form. Verlag Chemie, Weinheim Marshall J C 1987 Routes and representations in the processing of written language. In: Keller E, Gopnik M (eds.) Motor and Sensory Processes of Language. Erlbaum, London Marshall J C, Newcombe F 1973 Patterns of paralexia: A psycho-linguistic approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research!: 175-99 Michel F, Andreewsky E 1983 Deep dysphasia: An analogue of deep dyslexia in the auditory modality. Brain and Language 18: 212-23 Patterson K E 1990 Basic processes of reading: Do they differ in Japanese and English? Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology 6: 4-14 Peterson L N, Kirshner H S 1981 Gestural impairment and gestural ability in aphasia: A review. Brain and Language 14: 333-48 Plante E, Swisher L, Vance R, Rapcsak S 1991 MRI findings
in boys with specific language impairment. Brain and Language 41: 52-66 Poizner H, Battison R 1980 Cerebral asymmetry for sign language: Clinical and experimental evidence. In: Lane H, Grosjean F (eds.) Recent Perspectives on American Sign Language. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Poizner H, Bellugi U, Iraqui V 1984 Apraxia and aphasia in a visuo-gestural language. American Journal of Physiology 246: 868-83 Poizner H, Klima E S, Bellugi U 1987 What the Hands Reveal about the Brain. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Posner M I, Carr T H 1992 Lexical access and the brain: Anatomical constraints on cognitive models of word recognition. American Journal of Psychology 105: 1-26 Ratcliff G, Dila C, Taylor L, Milner B 1980 The morphological asymmetry of the hemispheres and cerebral dominance for speech: A possible relationship. Brain and Language 11: 87-98 Ryding E, Bradvic B, Ingvar D H 1987 Changes in regional cerebral blood flow measured simultaneously in the right and left hemisphere during automatic speech and humming. Brain 110: 1345-58 Seines O A, Rubens A B, Risse G L, and Levy R S 1982 Transient aphasia with persistent apraxia: Uncommon sequelae of massive left-hemisphere stroke. Archives of Neurology 39: 122-6 Sevush S, Roeltgen D P, Campanella D J, Heilman K M 1983 Preserved oral reading in Wernicke's aphasia. Neurology 33: 916-20 Shallice T, Coughlin A K 1980 Modality specific word comprehension deficits in deep dyslexia. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 43: 866-72 Shedlack K J, Hunter R, Wyper D, McLuskie R, Fink G, Goodwin G M 1991 The pattern of cerebral activity underlying verbal fluency shown by split-dose single photon emission tomography (SPET or SPECT) in normal volunteers. Psychological Medicine 21: 687-96 Teszner D, Tzavaras A, Gruner J, Hecaen H 1972 L'asymmetrie droite-gauche du planum temporale: A propos de 1'étude anatomique de 100 cerveaux. Revue Neurologique 126: 444-49 Vallar G, Cappa S F, Wallesch C-W (eds.) 1992 Neuropsychological Disorders Associated with Subcortical Lesions. Oxford University Press, Oxford Webb W G, Love R J 1983 Reading problems in chronic aphasia. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 48: 16471 Wernicke C 1874 Der aphasiche Symptomenkomplex. Cohn and Weigart, Breslau
Phonology in Language Acquisition M. L. Edwards
Since the early 1970s, many studies of phonological acquisition have been based, at least in part, on the concept of 'phonological processes.' In addition,
phonological processes have formed the basis for numerous investigations of disordered phonology in children. In fact, phonological analysis of disordered
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The Individual Learner speech has become increasingly popular since the late 1970s, and has remained the predominant approach throughout the 1990s, although other approaches have also been developed (e.g., see Bernhardt and Steel-Gammon 1994). Numerous process-based assessment procedures have been published (e.g., Bankson and Bernthal 1990; Grunwell 1985; Hodson 1986; Khan and Lewis 1986), as well as programs for computer-assisted phonological analysis (e.g., Long and Fey 1988; Oiler and Delgado 1990; Shriberg 1986).
1. Definitions and Uses of Phonological Processes There is no single definition of 'phonological process' used by all (or even most) child and clinical phonologists. Stampe (1979) described phonological processes as being 'phonetically motivated,' that is, due to articulatory, perceptual, or acoustic factors. He further defined them as 'innate mental operations' that apply in speech to substitute a less difficult class of sounds or sound sequence for one that is more difficult. These processes operate on the child's 'mental representations' of adult speech, which Stampe sees as being basically equivalent to the adult surface forms, 'minus the predictable phonetic detail.' Stampe makes a distinction between 'processes,' which are innate and natural, and 'rules,' which are 'imposed by the language' and which have to be learned. Ingram (1974,1976), who was more directly responsible for the application of phonological processes in the field of speech-language pathology, referred to 'general simplifying processes' that affect classes of sounds. In his 1976 book, he discussed three general categories of processes, including 'syllable structure processes,' such as cluster reduction (e.g., [bik] for brick); 'assimilatory processes,' such as velar harmony (e.g., [geik] for gate)', and 'substitution processes,' such as fronting (e.g., [tau] for cow). He showed how processes like these could be used to describe the speech patterns of children with phonological disorders, that is, children with many speech sound errors and low intelligibility. Unlike Stampe, Ingram did not make a distinction between process and rule. For instance, in a 1974 paper he discussed several 'general phonological rules' that operate in normal language acquisition, including weak syllable deletion (e.g., [naens] for banana), cluster reduction, voicing (e.g., [bin] for pin), and assimilation, which are more typically referred to as processes. Edwards and Shriberg (1983) defined processes as 'systematic sound changes that affect classes of sounds or sound sequences,' and they used the term 'rule' for the more or less formal statement of a sound change (see also Edwards 1992, 1994). Although exact definitions differ, most child and clinical phonologists refer to phonological processes
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as 'general simplifying tendencies' or 'systematic sound changes.' They are generally not talked about as being 'innate,' and the term 'natural' is rarely used. (See, however, Shriberg 1986; Shriberg and Kwiatkowski 1980.) It is commonplace to hear both child and clinical phonologists talk about 'process suppression' (cf. Stampe 1979), and a number of studies (e.g., see Grunwell 1987) have been devoted to discovering ages for the suppression of particular processes. Not only do general definitions differ, but in some cases different terms are used for the same type of sound change. For example, Hodson (1986) uses 'vowelization' for productions such as [bau] for ball and [kau] for car, which are much more commonly referred to as 'vocalization.' In other cases, the same process term may be used in more than one way. To give an example, 'deaffrication' is typically used for instances in which affricates are replaced by fricatives (e.g., [fip] for chip), but Hodson (1986) extended this category to include examples in which affricates are replaced by stops (e.g., [tip] for chip, generally included under stopping). Inconsistencies like these sometimes make it difficult to compare results across research studies and/or clinical procedures.
2. Limitations of the Concept Phonological processes have been found to be very useful in describing the systematic productions of children with typical phonological development, as well as those with phonological disorders. However, there are still some questions and unresolved issues concerning their use. For example: (a) Do phonological processes have 'psychological reality'? That is, are they 'real' for the children who use them, or are they simply descriptive devices imposed on the data by researchers/ clinicians? Child/clinical phonologists do not agree on this issue. (b) Phonological processes are generally said to affect classes of sounds or to represent systematic sound changes. In practice, however, there is lack of agreement regarding questions such as the following. If just a few sounds in a class undergo a specific change, does it still qualify as a process? How many examples must there be, and how many different words must be affected? Although this issue is not usually addressed directly, it is an important one which may affect the outcome of any process analysis (see McReynolds and Elbert 1981). (c) Another controversial issue concerns the nature of the child's 'underlying representations' (URS) on which processes operate. It is generally assumed that the child's URS are equivalent to the broad adult surface forms, as claimed by
Phonology in Language Acquisition Stampe. However, a number of child phonologists have questioned this assumption (e.g., Ingram 1974), and in recent years, specific proposals have been made for determining the URS of children with disordered phonology for example Elbert and Gierut (1986). (For a more detailed discussion, see Edwards 1995). (d) Ingram (1976) stated that phonological processes predominate between the ages of about 1 year 6 months and 4 years, and in fact, many studies have dealt with children in this age range. Phonological processes have not been found to be as useful in describing the productions of younger children, specifically those in 'the first 50-word stage.' This is problematic for Stampe's theory, for if phonological processes are innate, they should apply from the earliest stages of acquisition. Perhaps, as suggested by Leonard, et al. (1980), children at first learn individual words, with general 'simplification processes' appearing only later, when two-word utterances emerge and the child's lexicon is growing rapidly. These processes may be based on regularities in the phonemic composition of words and may be motivated by production and perception factors. (e) It is well known that children with disordered phonology sometimes exhibit 'atypical' sound changes. For instance, instead of using front sounds in place of back sounds (velar fronting), as normally developing children often do (e.g., [tau] for cow), phonologically disordered children may exhibit 'backing' or 'velarization,' as in [ku] for two or Sue. One challenging task for clinical phonologists is to try to determine the origins of such atypical sound changes. (f) Phonological process analysis focuses on describing a child's error patterns and does not address the hierarchical relationships among phonological units, such as syllables and segments, as do approaches based on nonlinear theories (see Bernhardt and Stoel-Gammon 1994). Thus, it should be supplemented by other analyses that describe the child's phonetic/phonemic inventories and syllable/word shapes and relationships among them in order to provide a more comprehensive picture of the child's phonological system. To conclude, phonological processes have been used extensively since the early 1970s in analyzing children's phonological systems. They have been particularly useful in clinical phonology, where they have provided a straightforward way for speech-language pathologists to discover and describe relationships among separate sound errors. Although several unresolved issues remain, phonological processes have
been found to be useful descriptive devices, and they continue to be applied widely in analyses of both normally developing children and those with phonological disorders. See also: Language Acquisition.
Bibliography Bankson N W, Bernthal J E 1990 Bankson-Bernthal Test of Phonology. Riverside Press, Chicago, IL Bernhardt B H, Stoel-Gammon C 1994 Nonlinear phonology: Introduction and clinical application. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 37: 123-43 Edwards M L, Shriberg L D 1983 Phonology: Applications in Communicative Disorders. College-Hill, San Diego, CA Edwards M L 1992 In support of phonological processes. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 23: 233-40 Edwards M L 1994 Phonological process analysis. In: Williams E J, Langsam J (eds.) Children's Phonology Disorders: Pathways and Patterns, 2nd edn., pp. 43-65. American Speech, Language, Hearing Association, Rockville, MD Edwards M L 1995 Developmental phonology. In: Winitz H (ed.) Human Communication and its Disorders: A Review— Volume IV. York, Timonium, MD Elbert M, Gierut J 1986 Handbook of Clinical Phonology: Approaches to Assessment and Treatment. College-Hill, San Diego, CA Grunwell P 1985 Phonological Assessment of Child Speech (PACS). NFER-Nelson, Windsor, UK Grunwell P 1987 Clinical Phonology, 2nd edn. Croom Helm, London Hodson B W 1986 Assessment of Phonological ProcessesRevised (APP-R). Pro-Ed, Austin, TX Ingram D 1974 Phonological rules in young children. JChL 1:49-64 Ingram D 1976 Phonological Disability in Children. Elsevier, New York Khan L M L, Lewis N 1986 Khan-Lewis Phonological Analysis (KLPA). American Guidance Service, Circle Pines, MN Leonard L B, Newhoff M, Mesalam L 1980 Individual differences in early child phonology. AP 1:7-30 Long S, Fey M 1993 Computerized Profiling: Version 7.0 (MS-DOS Computer Program). The Psychological Corporation, San Antonio, TX McReynolds L, Elbert M 1981 Criteria for phonological process analysis. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 46: 197-204 Oiler D K, Delgado R 1990 Logical International Phonetic Programs (LIPP): Version 1.03 (MS-DOS Computer Program). Intelligent Hearing Systems, Miami, FL Shriberg L D, Kwiatkowski J 1980 Natural Process Analysis (NPA): A Procedure for Phonological Analysis of Continuous Speech Samples. Wiley, New York Shriberg L D 1986 PEPPER: Programs to Examine Phonetic and Phonologic Evaluation Records, Version 4.0 (MS-DOS Computer Program). Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Stampe D 1979 A Dissertation on Natural Phonology. Garland Publishing, New York
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The Individual Learner
Vocabulary in Language Acquisition M. D. Barrett
Children usually acquire their first word at about 1 year of age; it has been estimated that the vocabulary of an educated 20-year old contains between 50 000 and 250000 words. Taking the mid-figure of 150000 words, this means that children must be capable of acquiring words at an overall average rate of more than 20 words per day. These words which children acquire are of many different kinds, including words for referring to people, objects, actions, attributes, relationships, places, mental states, mental processes, abstract concepts, etc.; words which are used to fulfil specific pragmatic functions within the context of particular interactional exchanges (such as thanks, please, and hello); and words which are used to fulfil particular syntactic functions (such as and, the, and to). It can be seen from these basic facts that vocabulary development is an extraordinary process, entailing the acquisition of a vast number of words from a large variety of different categories. 1. Early Vocabulary Development Studies documenting the rate of vocabulary growth through the second year of life have typically relied upon counts of the number of different words which young children spontaneously produce. These studies suggest that the first word is usually acquired somewhere between 8 and 16 months of age, and that in the months immediately following, vocabulary development proceeds at a very slow rate, with only one or two new words being acquired each week. But as children approach the 50-word level, there is often a sudden spurt in the rate at which new words appear in the child's productive vocabulary, and within 2 to 3 weeks, this rate may increase to eight or more new words per week. However, studies relying upon children's spontaneous production of words probably underestimate the rate of early vocabulary growth. If measures are made of young children's word comprehension rather than production, it is found that, on average, children are able to comprehend 50 words before they can produce 10 words, and the rate of acquisition between the 10-word and 50-word level in comprehension is twice as fast as the rate which is revealed by the use of production measures. The words which are acquired during the second year of life are of many different kinds. Some early words are used as direct expressions of the child's internal affect states; these words are often nonconventional and idiosyncratic (e.g., [ae::] as an expression of pleasure, [ubiba] as an expression of frustration). Other early words are entirely context-
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bound; that is, they are produced by the child only in very limited and specific situations or contexts in which particular actions or events occur (e.g., a child might use the word choo-choo only while pushing a toy train along the floor, or bye only when another person leaves the room). However, some words are used in a variety of different behavioral contexts right from the outset, either as the names of objects (e.g., teddy, ball, doggy), as proper names for individual people or animals (e.g., mummy, Adam, Spot), or to refer to actions (e.g., wash, kick, tickle). In addition, children usually acquire some words during the second year of life for referring to the properties or qualities of objects or events, such as the disappearance of objects (e.g., gone), the recurrence of objects and actions (e.g., more), the spatial location of objects (e.g., in, on, up, down), and the attributes and states of objects or people (e.g., big, dirty, nice). And finally, social-pragmatic words are also often acquired during this period (e.g., no to oppose the actions of agents, please to request objects from other people, look to direct the attention of people). It seems likely that these various types of words are acquired during this early period of vocabulary development because these are the words which are the most pertinent to the child's current cognitive activities. For example, it is precisely at this time of life that children are building up an extensive knowledge of object categories, and consolidating their understanding that objects occupy specific locations in space, and can disappear and recur. It is also during this early period that they are consolidating their understanding that people are agents who can perform actions on objects, and building up a knowledge of recurrent interpersonal routines and activities. It is therefore not surprising to find that the words which are acquired during the second year of life are precisely those which serve to encode notions concerning objects, spatial locations, disappearance, recurrence, the actions of agents, and interpersonal transactions. Once acquired, early words are not always used by young children in an unchanging manner through the second year of life; instead, words can exhibit some marked developmental changes during this period. For example, after their initial acquisition, contextbound words often exhibit decontextualization; that is, their production becomes dissociated from the single context within which they were initially used, and they begin to be used much more widely in a variety of different behavioral contexts (e.g., choo-choo might eventually come to be used as a nominal for referring to trains in a variety of different situations, and bye might eventually become a more flexible social-prag-
Vocabulary in Language Acquisition matic word which is used in a variety of situations involving departure). Some of the most interesting changes in word use which occur during this early period of development are those which are commonly exhibited by object names. When object names are first acquired, they are often underextended; that is, they are often used to name only a subset of the full range of objects which are properly labeled with those words in the adult language (e.g., duck may be used to refer only to toy ducks, and not to refer to real ducks). The extension of an underextended word usually broadens at a subsequent point in time (e.g., duck would normally come to be used to refer to real ducks as well). Occasionally such words become overextended at this stage (e.g., duck may eventually be used to refer not only to ducks but also to swans and geese). These overextensions are subsequently rescinded. The process of rescission may occur in conjunction with the acquisition of a new word which takes over the labeling of the overextended referents (e.g., the child may stop using duck to refer to swans in conjunction with the acquisition of the word swan); sometimes, there is a short transitional period during which the overextended referents are variably referred to by means of either word before the overextension is fully rescinded (i.e., for a short period of time, swans may be referred to by means of either swan or duck before the overextension of duck is finally rescinded). These changes in word use have been interpreted by researchers in this field as evidence for the progressive modification and reorganization of the information which is stored in the vocabulary entry for an object name (see, for example, the articles in Seiler and Wannenmacher 1983; Kuczaj and Barrett 1986). For example, it has been argued that the child acquires the meaning of an object name in the following way (see Barrett 1995). The child begins by acquiring a mental representation of a prototypical referential exemplar for the object name, by observing the type of object in connection with which other people most commonly use the word. This prototypical referent then functions for the child as a specification of the type of object which can be labeled with that word; at this point, the child only uses the word to refer to objects which closely resemble the prototype (i.e., the word is underextended). Subsequently, the child identifies some of the more salient features of the prototype, and begins to extend the word to other objects which display just some of the same features (i.e., the word's extension is broadened, and the word may become overextended, but only to objects which have features in common with the prototypical referent). Finally, if another competing name for a particular object is acquired, the prototypical referents of the two competing names are compared with one another, and the contrasting features which differentiate these prototypical referents from one another are eventually
identified and used to determine a boundary between the extensions of the two words (i.e., the overextension is rescinded). Thus, the changes which occur in young children's uses of object names have been interpreted by some researchers as indicating that, by about 2 years of age, children's vocabulary entries for object names must contain information about prototypical referents, prototypical features, and contrasting features which differentiate prototypical referents from one another. There has also been considerable discussion among researchers of the notion that, midway through the second year of life, there is a sharp discontinuity in children's vocabulary development, and that this discontinuity is responsible for the sudden spurt in the rate of acquisition of new words which typically occurs as children approach the 50-word level. It has been argued that, prior to the vocabulary spurt, the child does not yet understand that words can be used referentially as the names of particular objects; as a consequence, the child acquires mainly context-bound and social-pragmatic words during this initial stage. But midway through the second year, it is suggested, children suddenly acquire a fundamental insight into the symbolic properties of words: that words can be used in order to name particular objects. And as a consequence of this realization, many existing context-bound words are decontextualized into object names and many new object names are suddenly acquired; hence the occurrence of the vocabulary spurt. This view draws support primarily from the fact that the spurt itself consists of a sudden upturn in the rate of acquisition of object names (rather than of any other type of word). However, there are certain other facts which serve to cast some doubt upon this explanation of the vocabulary spurt. For example, it has become clear from certain studies that, although some children do indeed show this classic pattern of an initial slow acquisition of context-bound and social-pragmatic words followed by the sudden and rapid acquisition of large numbers of object names, there are other children who instead acquire object names among their very first words, well before their vocabulary spurt has occurred. This implies that these particular children have already acquired the naming insight, right at the outset of their vocabulary development. In addition, it has been found that not all children exhibit a sudden spurt in the rate of their early vocabulary growth; as many as a quarter of all children do not exhibit this phenomenon. This substantial minority of children instead acquire words at a much steadier rate throughout the second year of life, and this rate is only occasionally punctuated by small upward and downward fluctuations and plateaus. Furthermore, these children give no evidence of acquiring a sudden naming insight, and object names never come to predominate over other types of words in their early vocabularies. 245
The Individual Learner Consequently, it is now appreciated to a much greater extent than previously that there are considerable individual differences between children in their early vocabulary development, and that theoretical interpretations of the phenomena which characterize vocabulary development during the second year of life need to pay much closer attention to these differences than they have hitherto. 2. Later Vocabulary Development
Estimates of the rate of vocabulary growth after about two-and-a-half years of age vary considerably, with the vocabulary size of a 6-year old having been estimated to be anywhere between 2500 and 13 000 words. Despite the uncertainty which surrounds all such estimates of later vocabulary sizes, it can nevertheless be seen from the magnitude of these figures that children must be highly efficient word learners. One reason for this efficiency is that children are able to acquire a new word on the basis of just a single exposure to that word, as long as the situation in which that exposure occurs contains a suitably clear referent for that word. Such a single exposure can be quite sufficient for the child to acquire an initial prototypical referential exemplar for the word, and to assign the word to the appropriate lexical field. However, this initial fast mapping is then usually followed by a more extended period of learning in which the precise details of the word's meaning in relationship to the meanings of the other words in the same lexical field are only slowly worked out. This pattern of fast mapping followed by a more extended period of semantic fine-tuning has been observed for both object names (e.g., animal names) and attribute names (e.g., color terms and shape terms) in children aged over 2 years old. A second reason for children's efficiency at word learning is that they become very adept at picking up information about the meaning of a word simply from the verbal context in which the word is produced by another person (this applies even in the absence of any clear referent for the word in the immediate situation). This ability increases through childhood. With an object name or an action name, for example, 4- and 5year old children are able to extract some information from the verbal context of the word about the properties of the object or action to which the word refers (even though these children cannot then formulate explicit definitions of such a word at this age). By 11 years of age, not only can children begin to acquire the meaning of an abstract word (such as courage, justice, etc.) from just a single presentation of that word in a verbal context; from four or five such presentations, they are able to derive the full meaning of such a word, for which they can then offer an explicit definition. Furthermore, children are able to deploy this ability both on unknown words produced by
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interlocuters, and on unknown words encountered during reading (see McKeown and Curtis 1987). However, despite children's undoubted efficiency at word learning, the meanings of some particular types of words still seem to give them considerable difficulty in acquisition. Words which refer to mental states and processes are an interesting example. Words such as know, guess, and think usually begin to appear in children's speech at about 2 years of age. However, at this early stage, these words are used as pragmaticconversational devices rather than to refer to mental states and processes; for example, you know might be used as a pause-filler, / guess as a reluctant version of yes, I think to weaken an assertion (as in / think it's gone), etc. Use of these words to refer to mental states and processes only seems to emerge in the second half of the third year of life. However, although 3 year olds use words like remember, know, and guess appropriately in distinctive situations, even 4 and some 5 year olds still confuse the meanings of these three words when their knowledge is tested under controlled conditions, revealing that the meanings of these three words are not yet properly differentiated from one another. Indeed, it is typically not until children are 6 years old that they finally begin to use these three words in ways which indicate that the definitive distinctions between the meanings of the words have been properly mastered. Perhaps rather surprisingly, however, young children do not seem to have very great difficulty acquiring personal pronouns such as /, you, he, she, we, etc. This is curious, because these words differ from many other types of word in that their referents shift depending upon who is doing the speaking. For example, / refers to the self when it is the self who is speaking, but refers to the other person when it is the other person who is speaking; thus, the reference of / differs in production and in comprehension (referring to myself in production but referring to the other person in comprehension). However, these complexities appear to be mastered by young children with comparative ease. They usually begin (before 2 years of age) by understanding you and your when these words are spoken to them by other people, and by producing / and my themselves; that is, both first and second person pronouns are first mastered in relationship to themselves as the referent. The inanimate third person singular pronoun it also usually begins to appear in children's speech at this early stage, although this word usually appears only in the postverbal position in the child's sentences at this stage. Shortly thereafter, children begin to comprehend I when it is spoken to them by another person, and to produce you to refer to the addressee. The remaining personal pronouns (e.g., he, she, his, her, we, our, etc.) are subsequently acquired, and the full set of pronouns is often mastered by the age of 3 years 3 months; these remaining pronouns are not acquired
Vocabulary in Language Acquisition in any clear-cut or consistent order. Despite the complexities concerning the shifting referents of pronouns, children rarely confuse the different pronouns, and make comparatively few errors in their use of these words (see Chiat 1986). Relational words have received a great deal of attention from researchers into children's vocabulary development. These are words which serve to express relationships between two or more objects or events. They often occur in antonymous pairs: for example, big/little, tall/short, thick/thin, more/less, before/after, etc. One reason why these words have attracted so much attention from researchers is because the dimensional adjectives (big/little, tall/short, and thick/thin) are often acquired in the same consistent order by different children. Big and little are usually the first pair to be acquired, and even children as old as 4 and 5 years still tend to use these two terms irrespective of whether they are referring to the overall size, to the height, or to the width of an object. Children subsequently acquire tall and short for referring to the dimension of height, and they finally acquire thick and thin for referring to the dimension of width. It has been argued that this order of acquisition occurs because big and little are the most general of all these terms in that they serve to specify extent in any or all of the three dimensions, and so they are the simplest of these various word pairs for children to learn. Height is then argued to be the most perceptually salient dimension of an object, and so tall and short are learnt next. Finally, width or thickness is the least salient dimension, and so thick and thin are the last of these three word pairs to be learnt by children. In addition, it has been claimed by some researchers that, within many pairs of relational words, one of the two words is normally acquired before the other word: tall before short, thick before thin, more before less, and before before after. This claim has been made most strongly in connection with the words more and less (the evidence concerning the other word pairs is much more equivocal). The word more is often acquired initially in the second year of life, although it is normally only used at this early stage to comment upon, or to demand, a recurrence of an object or action that has gone before (as in more biscuit, more cuddle, etc.); it is usually not for another year or two that more starts to be used in its relational or comparative sense (as in you've got more than me, there's more here than there, etc.). However, it has been found that, up until the age of about 5 years, children tend not to use the word less in their spontaneous speech at all. Furthermore, when children aged under 5 are tested for their understanding of the word less, they often respond as if less meant the same as more (e.g., if they are shown two toy apple trees which have different numbers of apples on them, and they are asked to indicate which tree has less apples on it, they typically choose the tree which has more apples on it).
However, this response seems to occur, not because young children actually believe that less means the same as more (they do differentiate between the two words under certain tightly controlled conditions), but because they seem to have a nonlinguistic response bias towards choosing the larger of two sets in forcedchoice tasks of this nature which usually overrides their lexical knowledge (see Clark 1990). Finally, it should be noted here that researchers into children's later vocabulary development have become increasingly aware of the extent to which children rely upon learning strategies to aid their lexical acquisitions. For example, when hearing a new word with which they are unfamiliar, young children often rely upon a strategy of simply mapping the unfamiliar word onto an unfamiliar referent. Consequently, if they are exposed to an unfamiliar color word, say, in a situation which contains several objects of familiar colors and one object of a novel color, then they typically assume that the unfamiliar word refers to the novel color (the same finding has also been obtained with object names and shape terms). This strategy often assists the correct fast mapping of new words onto the appropriate concepts, although it can also lead the child into making mapping errors under certain circumstances (e.g., if the novel word referred not to the unfamiliar color but to a particular shade of one of the known colors). Another strategy upon which children often rely when making lexical acquisitions is to assume that the meaning of a new word must contrast in some way with the meanings of other known words. Consequently, when children acquire a second word (e.g., toy) for referring to an object for which they already have a name (e.g., doll), they typically search for differences in the meanings between the two words; this strategy usually leads them to infer that the new word designates either a subkind, a superordinate, or a part of that object, and to avoid the conclusion that the new word has the same meaning as the old word. Thus, the overall picture which emerges from studies of children's later vocabulary development is one in which the child is viewed as an extremely efficient word learner, able to map words to meanings very rapidly and with minimal exposure by relying upon important facilitative learning strategies, but with certain lexical domains (e.g., words referring to mental states and processes) presenting the child with particular difficulties in acquisition. 3. Norms of Vocabulary Development As noted earlier, there are widespread individual differences in vocabulary development. These individual differences have been documented in a major norming study of 1803 children aged between 8 and 30 months of age (Fenson et al. 1993). This study utilized the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories, an assessment tool which contains two 247
The Individual Learner parental report instruments, the CDI: Infants (for children aged 8-16 months) and the CDI: Toddlers (for children aged 16-30 months). These two instruments contain vocabulary checklists, and parents are asked to indicate which of the words in these lists the child either uses or understands. Because of the large sample size involved, this study arguably provides the most authoritative vocabulary development norms which are currently available. This study found that, at 8 months of age, the children produced one or two words on average (with 80 percent of the children producing between zero and three words at this age). At 12 months, the mean productive vocabulary size was four words (with 80 percent of the 12-month-olds producing between one and 19 words); at 16 months of age, the mean was 25 words (with 80 percent of the 16-month olds producing between four and 118 words); while at 20 months of age, the mean was 150 words (with 80 percent of the 20-month-olds producing between 45 and 360 words). At 2 years of age, the mean vocabulary size was 320 words (with 80 percent of the 2-year-olds producing between 95 and 540 words), and at 30 months, the mean vocabulary size was 565 words (with 80 percent of 30-month olds producing between 305 and 650 words). It should be noted that the figures for 30-month olds are probably underestimates, as by this point in their development, children almost certainly know more words than those that are included in the CDI: Toddlers checklist. The figures for vocabulary comprehension (which is only assessed by the CDI: Infants, not by the CDI: Toddlers), were as follows. At 8 months of age, the children could comprehend about 14 words on average (with 80 percent of the children understanding between five and 57 words): at 12 months of age, the mean number.of words understood was 55 words (with 80 percent of the children understanding between 20 and 170 words); and at 16 months of age, the mean number of words understood was 165 words (with 80 percent of the children understanding between 70 and 290 words). However, it is possible that these figures for word comprehension are over-
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estimates, as parents using the CDI: Infants word comprehension checklist might be rather liberal in their attributions of word comprehension to their children; studies in the laboratory, where gestural and contextual cues to the meanings of words can be more tightly controlled, suggest that parents tend to overattribute word comprehension to their children in naturalistic settings. The above norms represent total vocabulary sizes in production and in comprehension as estimated by the CDI. For more detailed information on the proportions of particular types of words (including common nouns, verbs, and adjectives) in children's vocabularies at different ages as estimated by the CDI, the interested reader should consult the CDI User's Guide (Fenson et al. 1993). From a clinical perspective, it should be noted that children who fall outside the 80 percent range for their age on the CDI are either developmentally advanced or developmentally delayed compared to the majority of their peer group. For children falling into the latter category, further investigation and intervention may be advisable. Bibliography Barrett M D 1995 Early lexical development. In: Fletcher P, MacWhinney B (eds.) The Handbook of Child Language. Blackwell, Oxford. Chiat S 1986 Personal pronouns. In: Fletcher P, Garman M (eds.) Language Acquisition, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Clark E V 1990 Children's language. In: Grieve R, Hughes M (eds.) Understanding Children. Blackwell, Oxford Fenson L, Dale P S, Renznick J S, Thai D, Bates E, Hartung J, Pethickm S, Reilly J 1993 The Mac Arthur Communicative Development Inventories: User's Guide and Technical Manual. Singular Publishing Group, San Diego Kuczaj S A, Barrett M D (eds.) 1986 The Development of Word Meaning. Springer-Verlag, New York McKeown M G, Curtis M E (eds.) 1987 The Nature of Vocabulary Acquisition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ Seiler T B, Wannenmacher W (eds.) 1983 Concept Development and the Development of Word Meaning. SpringerVerlag, Berlin
Challenged Learners Deafness and Sign Language Instruction S. Wilcox
Deafness poses unique language challenges and possibilities for educators and linguists. Deaf people the world over are members of minority language communities. Linguists have only recently begun to study and describe the world's signed languages. The education of deaf children, teaching signed languages as second languages to adults, compilation of signed language dictionaries, and the preparation of signed language interpreters are rapidly developing fields within educational linguistics.
1. Deafness and Deaf People Traditionally, deaf people have been identified as a group by their common disability or handicap. Within this pathological perspective deaf people have been regarded as having a medical condition, the inability to hear. The task for the educator working with deaf children and adults is considered to be one of overcoming or remediating this medical problem, typically by means of interventions ranging from therapies such as auditory training, to the fitting and training in the use of hearing aids, to such invasive procedures as cochlear implants. The pathological perspective is not the only way to understand deafness or the educational and linguistic challenges faced by deaf people. We may also understand deaf people as members of a cultural and linguistic minority. This linguistic-cultural perspective view recognizes that many deaf adults form a language community whose members share a common signed language and a common set of cultural beliefs and practices (Padden and Humphries 1988). It also recognizes that the deaf community is a multilingual community, and that the languages of these communities are without exception minority languages. The educator's job is to meet the linguistic needs of deaf people by developing competency in the multiple languages of the deaf community.
2. Signed Languages 2.1 The World's Signed Languages Signed languages are natural human languages used by deaf people throughout the world as their native or primary language. Although no formal survey of the world's signed languages has ever been conducted, it is generally recognized by linguists that they number in the hundreds (the 13th edition of the Summer Institute of Linguistics Ethnologue of the world's languages lists 103 signed languages (Grimes 1996)). Like spoken languages, signed languages may be classified into genetic or family groups. These genetic relations follow the historical development of signed languages, and so do not reflect the same relations as may exist for spoken languages in the same areas. For example, French Sign Language is a parent language of both American Sign Language (ASL) and Russian Sign Language. ASL is the primary language—in other words, the language used by members of the deaf community in face-to-face communication, learned as the first language or a second and preferred language—of an estimated 100000-500000 Americans, including deaf people, hearing children of ASL-using deaf adults, and adult deaf signers who have learned ASL as their second language. 2.2 Language and Modality In order to understand the relation between signed and spoken languages, it is necessary to understand the difference between language and its mode of expression. Every language must be expressed in some modality. The most common modality is the spoken modality. The spoken modality is so ubiquitous that for most people, language is synonymous with speech. Another common modality for the expression of language is the written modality. Many, thought not all, of the world's spoken languages also have standardized orthographies or writing systems.
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The Individual Learner It is important to recognize the distinction between languages and their modes of expression because there is a third modality for the expression of language: the signed modality. Natural signed languages such as ASL, French Sign Language, British Sign Language, Catalan Sign Language, and others are examples of languages which are expressed in the signed modality. A common misunderstanding is that signed languages are merely representations of spoken languages—that ASL, for example, is a signed representation of spoken English. Signed languages are not representations of spoken languages. They are independent languages with their own lexicons and grammars. This misunderstanding arises because of the familiarity most speakers have with spoken and written forms of their native language. Speakers of English know that written English is not a different language but simply a representation of spoken English. It is therefore natural to assume that when deaf people use the signed modality to express language, that they are using a representation of whatever spoken language is used in the community. That is, for speakers of English it is natural to assume that because English is both spoken and written yet remains the same language across these two modalities, that the signed language used by deaf people is also English. The fact that these deaf people either do not use the spoken modality or, if they do, speak English, and that they also write English, only serves to strengthen this assumption. This is an incorrect assumption. The fact that deaf people use spoken or written English to interact with hearing speakers of English means that deaf people are, by and large, bilingual. In America deaf people are typically bilingual in ASL and English. In countries where multilingualism is common, deaf people are also multilingual, not just in the spoken and written languages of their communities, but also in the signed language indigenous to their deaf community. Within their own communities, deaf people rely on an indigenous signed language (ASL in America). When deaf people interact with hearing people, they rely on the majority language or languages in which they are proficient and the two modalities which they know are familiar to hearing people: speech and writing.
only requirement is that the translator be fluent in both languages. Deaf people commonly rely on signed language interpreters for their interactions with hearing people. In the past, interpreters were usually untrained volunteers, often children of deaf adults. Interpreters generally are now trained, paid professionals. Universities and other educational institutes in many countries have formal educational programs which offer specialized training in signed language interpretation. Most of these programs in the US are housed in 2year community colleges. There is growing consensus, however, that preparation of signed language interpreters requires at least an undergraduate education; many professionals advocate for graduate level preparation of interpreters. Signed language interpreter preparation now relies on models of interpreter education derived from spoken language interpreting. Well-designed programs include a sequence of courses starting with translation (video recordings of signed language source texts are translated to target language texts), then consecutive interpreting (large chunks of the source language are given, followed by an interpretation into the target language), and finally simultaneous interpreting (the target language interpretation is given at the same time as the source language with only a slight time lag or decalage). Specialized courses typically include comparative linguistic analysis; specialized vocabulary classes; courses dealing with the business practice of interpreting and with professional and ethical issues. Most programs culminate in a practicum course in which students obtain actual practice in the community under the supervision of a professional interpreter. Follow-up services often include mentoring by more experienced master interpreters and continuing education. Signed language interpreters work in a variety of settings, including community-based situations, educational, medical, legal, and the performing arts. Organizations of interpreters, such as the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (US) or the Association of Visual Language Interpreters of Canada, have been established to promote professionalism in the field and to develop standardized certification procedures for signed language interpreters (Frishberg 1990).
2.3 Signed Language Interpreting A signed language may be interpreted into any other language. ASL, for example, may be translated directly into spoken or written English, but it also may be translated directly into Spanish, French, Russian, or into any other signed language such as British Sign Language, Thai Sign Language, or Japanese Sign Language. Signed languages are languages, and to the extent that languages may be translated into other languages, signed languages such as ASL may be translated into any other language. The
2.4 Linguistic Research on Signed Languages Linguists examine languages and describe their structural characteristics, focusing on areas such as phonology (the study of the structure of the minimal units of language which combine to form words), morphology (the study of the meaningful units of language), syntax (the patterns of words which form phrases and sentences), semantics (the study of linguistic meaning), pragmatics (the study of contextualized speaker meaning), and so forth. Since the 1950s, linguists have demonstrated that
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Deafness and Sign Language Instruction signed languages such as ASL may be analyzed and described using the same units as spoken language. While differences in structure attributable to modality (spoken versus signed) have been noted, the overwhelming conclusion is that signed languages share all important characteristics with spoken languages. The modern era of linguistic research on signed language began in the late 1960s with the pioneering work of the American linguist William C. Stokoe who was a professor of English at Gallaudet College in Washington, DC. Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University), established by Abraham Lincoln in 1884, is the only liberal arts university for deaf people. Stokoe began to apply linguistic techniques borrowed from the structuralist tradition prevalent at the time to study the language that he saw deaf students using in his classroom—ASL. Although shunned by his colleagues and ignored by linguists for several years, Stokoe's research eventually led to a broad interest in the structure of ASL by linguists and initiated research worldwide on many other of the world's signed languages. 2.4.1 Phonology One of the pioneering discoveries made by Stokoe was that ASL can be described phonologically. Before this, it was assumed that the signs—that is, the words—of a signed language were unanalyzable. Stokoe claimed that a sign consists of analyzable units of structure. These units are called phonemes for spoken languages. Stokoe coined the term chereme for the equivalent unit in signed languages, but today most linguists simply call them phonemes. Stokoe analyzed the phonology of signs into three major classes: handshape (the configuration that the hand makes when producing the sign), location (the place where the sign is produced, for example on the head, or in the neutral space in front of the signer's body), and movement (the movement made by the signer in producing the sign, for example upward or towards the signer's body). Stokoe called these three aspects of a sign. Later linguists called these aspects the parameters of a sign and added a fourth parameter: orientation (the direction which the hand faces when producing the sign). The psychological reality of parameters is demonstrated by the existence of minimal pairs, signs differing only in one parameter which have different meanings (Klima and Bellugi 1979). 2.4.2 Morphology Languages may be classified morphologically in terms of how they combine minimal units of meaning (called morphemes) to form words. Some languages assign each morpheme to its own word; these languages are called isolating languages. Other languages allow several morphemes to combine to form a word; languages such as English or German are such synthetic lang-
uages, differing primarily in how many morphemes may be combined. Some languages allow a remarkable number of morphemes to be combined. Many Native American languages, such as Navajo, are examples of polysynthetic languages. Most of the natural signed languages in the world which have been studied by linguists appear to fall towards the polysynthetic end of the spectrum in terms of their morphology. ASL, for example, allows morphemes indicating action ('give to'), person agreement (first person does the action, third person is the recipient of the action), aspect (the temporal profile of the action, for example, 'over and over again'), and adverbial information (e.g., 'carefully') to be combined into a single, multimorphemic ASL word meaning / very carefully gave (it) to him/her over and over again. 2.4.3 Syntax Research on the syntax of signed languages has examined issues of word class, word order, and relations among constituents such as relative clauses; question formation; topic-comment structure and the flow of information in discourse; and the grammatical use of space. 2.4.4 Metaphor Metaphor plays a role at multiple levels in signed languages, including phonological, morphological, and discourse. For example, ASL clearly relies on the metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS because the sign meaning 'to learn' is derived from components which are also used to indicate the grasping of a physical object. Metaphor, metonymy and other tropes are used in signed language poetry. 2.4.5 Grammaticization Grammaticization is the linguistic process by which grammatical material (e.g., grammatical morphemes such as future markers or modal auxiliaries) develops historically out of lexical material (Bybee et al. 1994). Grammaticization operates much the same in signed languages such as ASL as in spoken languages. For example, modals in ASL (indicators of obligation, necessity, or markers or the speaker's degree of commitment to the truth of a proposition) develop historically out of lexical material with concrete, embodied meanings. Thus, the ASL modal auxiliary meaning can, even when used for mental ability (as in He can read), developed historically from the ASL sign strong 'having physical strength.' A similar example comes from the development of the agentive suffix (similar to the English -er) in ASL. Historically, this suffix originated as a full lexical form meaning body. Over time, the orientation and location parameters changed and the movement became greatly reduced. Semantically, the sign changed from meaning strictly body to become one who does some-
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The Individual Learner thing (as specified by the verb). It also became a bound form obligatorily attached to a free morpheme. The current sign teacher 'teacher' is, thus, the free lexical form teach 'teach' and the reduced suffix -er which developed from the sign for body. 2.5 Finger spelling Fingerspelling is a system of manually representing written letters of the majority language. ASL, for example, uses fingerspelling to represent the 26 letters of the English alphabet. Fingerspelling is often used for proper names or technical terms, and is a source of loan words in signed languages; for example, in ASL, of, all, sure, and several other English words have been borrowed through fingerspelling. A wide variety of fingerspelling systems exist among the world's signed languages. ASL and many other signed languages use a one-handed system; British Sign Language (BSL) and languages which are genetically related to BSL use a two-handed fingerspelling system. The amount of fingerspelling incorporated into a signed language varies greatly. ASL and BSL rely extensively on fingerspelling; the occurrence of fingerspelling in most other signed languages is much more restricted. 2.6 Writing Signed Languages Writing systems are inventions. Writing systems may be developed for previously unwritten spoken languages. Writing systems may also be developed for signed languages. Several attempts have been made to develop writing systems for signed languages. Three such attempts are Hamburg Notation System for Sign Languages (HamNoSys); Sutton Sign Writing, based on an elaboration of a system designed to notate dance movements; and SignFont. HamNoSys is a detailed, phonetic system of notation intended to be used primarily by linguists as a research tool. As such, HamNoSys may be seen as analogous to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Sutton Sign Writing has acquired a small but loyal group of supporters in America and a few other countries as a way of introducing literacy to young deaf students. SignFont is an alphabetic writing system designed to write ASL. Its graphical symbols represent the standard major classes of handshape, location, and movement. In addition, a SignFont writing system includes a fourth class of formation, called 'Action Area.' Literacy materials such as dictionaries, newspapers, stories, crossword puzzles, recipes, and cartoons have been developed in each of these -systems. Although some deaf educators advocate that deaf children should be exposed to writing in their native signed languages—in other words, should be taught literacy not only in the written language of the hearing community but also in the language used in the. deaf community—the general consensus within deaf
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communities seems not to favor writing signed languages. For this reason, native literature in signed languages remains a face-to-face literature. Notwithstanding the lack of written literature in signed languages, there exists a rich body of folk literature by deaf poets, authors, playwrights, story-tellers, and other artists. The use of this literature, primarily by means of videotapes, is a critical component in the teaching of signed languages. 2.7 Signed Language Dictionaries Dictionaries and glossaries of signed languages have been compiled and published since at least the nineteenth century. A classic early dictionary of ASL is Long (1918). Stokoe's dictionary (Stokoe et al. 1965) contributed to the modern era of linguistic research of signed languages. Dictionaries and lexical databases now exist or are being developed for many of the world's signed languages. In 1998, the European Science Foundation hosted a conference on signed language dictionary development in Hamburg, Germany. Researchers from countries such as America, Australia, Britain, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and The Netherlands assembled to share information about dictionary projects in their host countries. Many of these projects culminate in print dictionaries in which the signed entries are represented by photographs or drawings. Signed language lexicographers are beginning to realize the great potential of computer technologies such as multimedia databases and the World Wide Web, which can display digital video of signs, for the collection and distribution of signed language dictionaries. 3. Signed Language Instruction 3.1 Signed Languages in Deaf Education The history of deaf education worldwide has seen four approaches to how deaf children should be taught language: the manual approach, oralism, total communication, and the bilingual-bicultural approach. 3.1.1 The manual approach The manual approach, which supports the use of signed language, traces its history to the first school for the deaf which explicitly incorporated signed language into the curriculum, the Paris Institute founded by the Abbe de 1'Epee in the late eighteenth century. A large deaf community existed in Paris at the time which used a natural signed language in their daily interactions. Describing a typical deaf youth in eighteenth century Paris, Pierre Desloges, a deaf Parisian, wrote that: He meets deaf-mutes more knowledgeable than himself, he learns to combine and perfect his
Deafness and Sign Language Instruction signs ... he quickly acquires, in interactions with his comrades,... the art of expressing and painting one's thoughts, even the most abstract, by means of natural signs and with as much order and precision as if he knew all the rules of grammar (Moody 1987: 301). While visiting the home of a local family, Abbe de 1'Epee saw two young deaf children signing to each other. Though Abbe de 1'Epee realized that this signed language could be used to teach deaf children, he apparently did not realize that it was a fully developed language in its own right. Instead, he set about modifying the language. He devised signs to represent all the verb endings, articles prepositions, and auxiliary verbs present in spoken French and applied these to the stock of lexical signs which he took from the natural sign language. This system of instructional signs became known as methodical signs. The American Thomas Gallaudet went to Europe in search of a method of educating deaf children. Gallaudet eventually found his way to the Paris Institute, where he met a former deaf pupil who later became a teacher at the institute, Laurent Clerc. Gallaudet brought back Clerc and his method of instruction; together they established the first school for the deaf in America, in Hartford, Connecticut in 1817. Gallaudet and Clerc modified the French methodical signs to represent English words. Once they brought together a community of deaf children from the area, however, the modified methodical signs came into contact with the language that was used in the deaf community. No one knows for sure what this language (or, more likely, set of related languages and dialects) looked like, but the contact between this socalled 'Old ASL' and French-based methodical signs produced what has become modern day ASL. Gallaudet and other deaf educators in America soon realized that methodical signs were not achieving the desired goal of educating deaf children. Only two years after establishing the Hartford school, Gallaudet (1819, quoted in Lane 1980) wrote that: A successful teacher of the deaf and dumb should be thoroughly acquainted both with their own peculiar mode of expressing their ideas by signs and with that of expressing the same ideas by those methodical signs that in their arrangement correspond to the structure of written language. For the natural language of this singular class of beings has its appropriate style and structure. (The use of the expression 'deaf and dumb' was common in early literature on deafness. Deaf people also often referred to themselves as 'deaf mutes' during this time. In modern usage, neither is acceptable. Deaf people prefer to be called simply 'deaf.')
Thus, educators in early nineteenth century America and elsewhere began to realize that although the manual approach, which relied on the signed modality as the primary method of teaching deaf children, was the preferred approach, the question of which language was signed (a natural signed language such as ASL or a contrived language intended to represent the spoken language of the majority, which is what methodical signs were) became paramount. Over 150 years ago, Gallaudet came to favor bilingualism. 3.7.2 Oralism and the suppression of signed languages The oral approach can also trace its history to the earliest beginnings of deaf education. The oral approach was already prevalent in England and several countries on the European continent when Gallaudet made his trip. Proponents of the oral approach believe that deaf children must learn to speak—that is, they are more concerned with modality than with language—and that if deaf children are allowed to use a signed language, they will never learn to speak. The oral method spread across all of Europe during the nineteenth century, culminating in the Milan Conference of 1880, where attendees declared that the pure oral method—requiring that only speech be used in deaf schools—was the only method capable of 'restoring the deaf mute to society.' Alexander Graham Bell, a staunch supporter of the oral method, advocated banning sign language and deaf teachers from American schools and even supported laws outlawing marriage among deaf people. Oralism continued its spread into American schools. By the turn of the twentieth century, every school for the deaf on the continent of Europe and in America had converted to the oral approach. Deaf leaders feared that the oral method would bring about the death of their native signed languages. In 1913, the National Association of the Deaf in America established a fund to begin filming old masters of ASL in an effort to preserve sign language. One film of the American educator George Veditz entitled 'The Preservation of Sign Language' contains a moving plea to deaf people to preserve and protect their natural sign languages 'as the noblest gift God has given to the deaf.' 3.1.3 Total communication The oral method retained control of schools for the deaf well into the twentieth century. Only in the 1960s did a new approach, called total communication, begin to break into the curriculum. Total communication proponents advocated an eclectic approach to language instruction: teachers should use whatever means necessary to teach language. In practice, the total communication approach soon became a policy of simultaneous communication: signing and speaking at the same time. Of necessity, this meant that the language used in the classroom was English
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The Individual Learner (or the majority spoken language), since it is not possible to speak one language and sign another one at the same time. 3.1.4 Bilingual-bicultural approaches The total communication approach reintroduced signing into the deaf education curriculum, but did so in a way reminiscent of the methodical sign approach which had been rejected by educators more than 100 years earlier. In response to this, a new approach has begun to appear, called the bilingual-bicultural approach. This approach recognizes the sociolinguistic fact that deaf adults live and work in a multilingual, multicultural community, and that deaf children therefore are members of a linguistic minority attempting to learn two or more languages. Within the deaf community, a signed language such as ASL is the preferred language for members to interact with each other. When deaf people come into contact with hearing people and hearing society, however, they rely on their second language. Proponents of the bilingualbicultural approach propose that deaf education should reflect this linguistic reality. Within the bilingual-bicultural approach, deaf students are taught both a natural signed language such as ASL, and a form of English, usually written English. 3.2 Teaching Signed Languages as Second Languages In America, a recent phenomenon which is spreading throughout postsecondary education is the teaching and acceptance of ASL as a second or foreign language (Wilcox and Wilcox 1997). Many colleges and universities are beginning to recognize the study of ASL and deaf culture as legitimate academic pursuits and are starting to accept ASL in fulfillment of foreign language entrance and exit requirements. In several states, ASL is mandated by law as acceptable in fulfillment of high school foreign language graduation requirements. Although teaching of signed languages in Europe and elsewhere is not as widespread as in America, recognition of indigenous signed languages has begun. In 1988, the parliament of the European Community, noting that there are 500 000 profoundly deaf people in member states whose first language is their national signed language and not the dominant spoken language of their country, recognized as legitimate languages the indigenous signed languages of the 12 member states. Teaching and acceptance of ASL as a foreign language in American universities likely is the result of two factors: increased understanding of the status of ASL as a true language, and increased visibility of ASL and demand for people fluent in ASL brought about by federal legislation which mandated accommodations and services, including the provision of signed language interpreters, for deaf people.
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3.2.1 Curriculum design and materials As ASL began to be taught more as a foreign language to hearing students in higlier education, there came increasing demand for curricula, materials, and training of teachers. Initially, instructors of ASL were simply people who knew the language—or, unfortunately, merely professed to know the language. Curricula were designed by individual instructors, many of whom had little if any background in second language pedagogy. Textbooks and other resources were limited. Many so-called ASL textbooks included only word lists or presented the false notion that ASL was merely 'idiomatic' English. In the 1980s ASL instructors began to incorporate research and techniques from second language instruction into their curricula and their classrooms. Several books specifically written to teach ASL as a second language appeared. A team of ASL language instructors at Vista Community College in California developed the Vista Curriculum, a functionalnotional approach to teaching ASL as a second language to hearing students. Programs which teach signed languages as second languages now are designed along much the same lines as traditional second language curricula. Students acquire productive and receptive competence in the language through a series of courses which emphasize vocabulary and grammar development within meaningful contexts. Well-designed signed language courses incorporate signed language literature such as poetry at all levels, as well as develop an appreciation of, and respect for, the values of deaf people and their culture (Wilcox 1989). Programs which can offer a more comprehensive curriculum typically offer multiple levels of language courses in addition to specialized classes on literature and deaf culture. 3.2.2 New technologies In addition to textbooks and curricula, other resources have become available to ASL instructors. Videotapes designed to teach ASL and to bring ASL literature to second language learners are now readily available from publishers such as Sign Media/Linstok Press, Dawn Sign Press, Sign Enhancers, and Gallaudet University Press. Materials based on new technologies such as CD-ROM and DVD are beginning to appear. Computer technology is also beginning to be used by second language programs. Computer-based language learning facilities which use videoconferencing and the internet will likely become the norm in universities with signed language programs in the future. 3.2.3 Teacher qualifications Teacher qualifications is an important issue in signed language program development. Few programs exist which specifically prepare signed language teachers. Nevertheless, programs should strive to employ tea-
Language Disorders chers who have native competence in the signed language that they are teaching; who have formally studied the language; who have backgrounds in second language teaching theory and methodology; and who are able to model respect for the language and its users to their students. See also: Language.
Second
Language Acquisition: Sign
Bibliography Bybee J, Perkins R, Pagliuca W 1994 The Evolution of Grammar: Tense Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Frishberg N 1990 Interpreting: An Introduction. Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf Publications, Silver Spring, MD Grimes B 1996 Ethnologue. Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, TX Klima E, Bellugi U 1979 The Signs of Language. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Lane H 1980 A Chronology of the Oppression of Sign Language in France and the United States. In: Lane H, Grosjean F (eds.) Recent Perspectives on American Sign Language. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Long J S (1918) The Sign Language: A Manual of Signs (being a descriptive vocabulary of signs used by the Deaf of the United States and Canada). Athens Press, Iowa City, IA Moody W 1987 Pierre Desloges. In: Cleve J V Van (ed.) Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness. McGraw-Hill, New York Padden C, Humphries T 1988 Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Stokoe W C, Croneberg C, Casterline D 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles. Gallaudet College Press, Washington, DC Wilcox S (ed.) 1989 American Deaf Culture. Linstok Press, Burtonsville, MA Wilcox S, Wilcox P 1997 Learning to See: Teaching American Sign Language as a Second Language. Gallaudet University Press, Washington, DC
Language Disorders S. L. James
Most children learn to talk and to understand language with no apparent difficulty. Around 12 months of age, they begin producing their first words. By the time they begin school at 5 or 6 years of age, they have large vocabularies, understand and produce a wide variety of sentences, and are able to participate in extended conversations. For some children, however, the process of language development is difficult and does not follow the normal developmental pattern. These children have a developmental language disorder. In general, a child can be considered language disordered when their use or understanding of language is below that expected for their chronological age and level of functioning. Although this is a very broad definition, it suggests that at least three pieces of information are required in order to make an initial diagnosis of language disorder: (a) information about the child's language production (use), (b) information about the child's language comprehension (understanding), and (c) information about language production and comprehension in normally developing children. The following exploration of the population of children with language disorders will move beyond this general definition to look at more specific behaviors and aspects of development: the potential impact of language disorders on some other aspects of development or performance; the patterns of development
found in language disordered children; the components of language that may be disordered; and some groups of children who are at high risk for language disorders. 1. Language Disorders and Performance in Other Areas A child who has difficulty understanding or producing language is likely to have problems in other areas of performance in which language plays an important role. Two areas frequently affected are social interactions and academic performance. /./ Language Disorders and Social Interactions Language is a social tool that allows interaction among people. Even before they have any words, infants use sounds and gestures to initiate and maintain interactions with the adults in their environment. A language/communication disorder can adversely affect the parent-child interaction from infancy on. It is suggested that infants who are at high risk for language disorders, such as those who are mentally retarded, hearing impaired, or brain damaged, use communication behaviors that are less predictable and more difficult to interpret than do normally developing infants. As a result, these infants' parents have more difficulty deciding what the child wants
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The Individual Learner or needs. The infant may feel helpless because it is ineffective in influencing the environment and getting their wants or needs met. The parent may feel frustrated because they are unable to figure out what an appropriate response might be to the child's communicative attempts. Communicative interactions are not rewarding for either the child or the parent, and the motivation to communicate declines. It has been reported that language-disordered children and their parents engage in significantly fewer interactions than do normally developing children and their parents. In those interactions that do occur, parents of children with language disorders tend to be more directive and controlling. The parent initiates almost all interactions, constantly tries to elicit a response from the child, and uses a large number of commands or directives. Although parents of normally developing children also use a large number of directives when their children are very young, the directiveness of their language decreases as the children develop the ability to use language for self-regulation. Language-disordered children may not develop the ability to use language for self-regulation because of their language problems, and their parents may continue to use directive or controlling language in interacting with the children. Because of the overall reduction in interactions and the one-sided nature of the communicative interactions between language-disordered children and their parents, language-disordered children have less opportunity to use their language as a tool to initiate and maintain social interactions. The difficulty in using language as a social tool appears to have adverse affects on language-disordered children's interactions with their peers. Studies of language/learning disabled adolescents have revealed that they have trouble making friends and interacting with classmates. Van Kleeck and Richardson (1988) suggest that youngsters with language disorders lack many of the communication abilities that affect children hitting it off with each other in the first steps of friendship building. These include the ability to communicate clearly, to exchange information successfully, to explore interpersonal similarities and differences, to establish joint play activities, to resolve conflicts, and to share private thoughts and information. Consequently, languagedisordered children may grow even more socially isolated as they grow older. 1.2 Language Disorders and Academic Performance Just as language plays a crucial role in social development, it also plays a crucial role in learning and academic performance. Much of academic success depends on learning to read and write. Oral language skills are the basis for reading and writing skills, and a problem in oral language development is likely to have a negative impact on the child's reading and 256
writing development. Because language is the primary medium for teaching and learning, deficits in oral and written language skills can have a profound effect not only on performance in the language arts but also in other content areas such as mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences. Thus, academic success depends to a large extent on oral and written language skills, and children with language disorders are at high risk for academic difficulties. Children who are identified as language disordered in the preschool years often have language problems that persist into the school years. From about 30 to 75 percent of the children with preschool language disorders continue to exhibit problems in oral language in later childhood and adolescence and between 50 and 95 percent demonstrate significant reading disorders during the school years and beyond (Scarborough and Dobrich 1990). Even when their receptive and expressive language skills reach normal or nearly normal levels in the late preschool years, these children may continue to have reading problems or to demonstrate other learning problems (see Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention). It should not be surprising that children with developmental language disorders have academic problems when the linguistic demands inherent in the classroom situation are considered. As Wallach (1989) points out, the language faced by children in school is quite different from the language faced by children at home and in other casual language situations. In casual conversations, there usually are a number of cues from the nonverbal context that facilitate understanding of the linguistic message. For example, when a child is faced with a command such as Please throw the banana peel in the garbage, the child's ability to understand and respond appropriately is helped by the fact that s/he is holding a banana peel and that something needs to be done with it. In addition, the person giving the command may accompany the command with a gesture such as pointing toward the garbage can. In contrast, the language in instruction has been described as decontextualized, suggesting that less of the meaning or content can be obtained from the nonverbal context. Wallach suggests that reading is a perfect example of decontextualized language because the meaning is entirely encoded in words and sentence structures on the page. In the very early grades, the language used in the classroom more closely resembles the casual language used at home in its reliance on nonverbal context to facilitate understanding. As children move through the grades, however, they must rely more and more on their linguistic knowledge to obtain the relevant information. The increased emphasis on decontextualized language in the later grades would help explain why children with language disorders exhibit more frequent and more severe academic problems as they move through the grades. In addition, the
Language Disorders language used by teachers increases in grammatical complexity in the later grades. Nelson (1984) points out that Grade 6 teachers speak more rapidly and use longer and more complex sentences than do teachers in Grades 1, 2, and 3. Furthermore, most of the content to be learned is presented in print by grade 4. All of these factors— greater use of decontextualized language, greater grammatical complexity of the teacher's language, and increased use of written materials—place greater linguistic demands on children in the classroom. Children with normal language abilities can handle these increased demands. However, children with developmental language disorders are likely to have increasing difficulty as they progress through school and their academic performance is likely to suffer. 2. Patterns of Development in Language-disordered Children
One way of describing children with developmental language disorders is by the way that their language differs from the pattern demonstrated by normally developing children. Generally, these differences can be characterized by the rate at which language forms and structures are acquired or by the sequence of development for certain forms and structures. Differences in the rate of development are more common than differences in the sequence of development. Below is a description of some of the patterns found among language-disordered children. 2.1 Disorders of Rate Some language-disordered children have been found to exhibit an overall delay in the development of various language forms and structures. A child exhibiting this pattern follows the normal sequence of development, but at a slower rate of acquisition. In addition, the rate of development tends to be very similar across all forms/structures. Depending on the severity of the delay, children exhibiting this pattern of development may eventually 'catch up' with their normal peers. For example, a child who is one year behind in language production at age 3 years may produce age-appropriate forms/structures by the time she or he enters school. Other children who exhibit delays in the rate of language development will never reach the level of children with normal language development. These children reach a plateau in their development of language and they continue to show a delay, which becomes more severe over time as their normal peers continue to acquire increasingly sophisticated language abilities. This pattern of language development is often associated with mental retardation. Another, more common, pattern of disordered rate is one in which the delay is not equal across all forms and structures. The child with this pattern exhibits the same sequence of development with a slow rate of
development; however, some forms or structures are only slightly delayed, while others are considerably delayed. Thus, this pattern is characterized by a slow, but uneven rate of development for different language forms and structures. The majority of the children identified as having a developmental language disorder show this pattern. Like some children with a general overall delay across all language forms/structures, children showing this pattern may exhibit near normal oral language skills by the time they enter school. 2.2 Disorders of Sequence Disordered patterns of language development that are characterized by deviations from the normal sequence of development are not common. However, there are instances where a child acquires later developing forms or structures before they learn some of the earlier developing ones. This pattern is sometimes seen in children who have suffered from a serious illness for a number of months. Due to the illness, the child's language learning may have been interrupted and they may have failed to acquire some forms or structures that would have been learned during the period of illness. Those forms/structures may then develop after the child has acquired other forms that typically develop later. 2.3 Other Disordered Patterns Leonard (1986) describes two other less common patterns of development that may be found in the population of children with developmental language disorders. These two patterns cannot be categorized as disorders in either rate or sequence per se. In one pattern, the child uses a language form or structure that appears in the language of normally developing children; however, the frequency with which they use that form or structure is deviant. For example, normally developing children have been observed to produce sentences that are best described as 'topiccomment' in which the topic of the sentence is named and a comment about it follows (e.g., 'Cookies, I like them'}. The writer knows of one case of a languagedisordered child whose predominant sentence structure was 'topic-comment.' Although rare, the extreme overuse of a normal form/structure may characterize the language of some language-disordered children. The second pattern is one in which a languagedisordered child uses a form or structure that has never been reported for normally developing children. Leonard cites the case of an English-speaking child who substituted a non-English consonant for the fricatives /s/, /f/, and /z/. 3. Components of Language that may be Disordered
Another way of describing the language development of children with language disorders focuses on the particular components of their language that are dis-
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3.1 Disorders of Phonology Although part of phonological acquisition involves learning the motor speech movements necessary to produce the phonemes of one's native language, it also involves learning linguistic units and rules. Children with developmental language disorders can have difficulty in any or all of these aspects. For example, they may have difficulty learning the phonemes that make up their native language. They also may have problems in learning the rules for combining phonemes into acceptable sequences of sounds. Finally, they may exhibit impairments in the use and understanding of the suprasegmental features of the language, including intonation, stress, and rhythm.
morphemes in sentences. For example, a languagedisordered child may omit the noun plural and produce the following sentence '/ want two cookie—,' or might leave off" the verb tense marker and say ' Yesterday, she walk—home.' In addition to the morphemes studied by Brown, language-disordered children may have difficulty with a number of other morphological forms, including various prepositions (e.g., to, from, beside, behind, over), modal verbs (e.g., can, will, could, should), and comparative and superlative suffixes (e.g., smaller, smallest). Children with developmental language disorders may have trouble understanding as well as producing morphological forms. For example, a language-disordered child who is asked to point to the picture of 'cars' may point to the picture showing only one car rather than the one showing several cars. Problems in comprehending grammatical morphemes can result in considerable confusion and misunderstanding on the part of the child.
3.2 Disorders of Morphology The morphological component of the language consists of rules for combining morphemes (meaningful units). The acquisition of knowledge about grammatical morphemes, including noun plurals and possessives, auxiliary verbs, verb tense markers, and a number of other prefixes and suffixes, is part of morphological development. Morphological forms allow speakers to provide much greater specificity in their use of language. For example, through the addition of verb tense markers, a speaker is able to tell a listener whether an event occurred in the past, present, or future. Morphological markers are used to indicate whether the speaker is talking about one or more than one object (noun plurals), to indicate ownership (noun possessive), to provide information about case, gender, and number (personal pronouns), and to make a comparison (comparative and superlative markers). The grammatical morphemes that have received the most attention in studies of language development are those originally studied by Brown (1973). These include the present progressive (going), the prepositions in and on, noun plurals (dogs), noun possessives (mommy's), articles (a, the), irregular past tense (threw, ran), regular past tense (opened), uncontractible copula (This is big), contractible copula (It's big), regular third person singular (It runs), irregular third person singular (He has it), uncontractible auxiliary (Is she coming?), and contractible auxiliary (She's going). Most language-disordered children have some difficulty acquiring these 14 morphemes. Although they are likely to acquire them in the same sequence as normally developing children, their rate of development typically is much slower. Like younger normally developing children, they frequently omit the
3.3 Disorders of Syntax Children with language disorders often have problems in acquiring various aspects of syntax. These problems are reflected in a significantly reduced mean-lengthof-utterance (MLU) compared to peers of the same age. Part of this reduced MLU is due to their tendency to omit grammatical morphemes. However, they also may have trouble acquiring rules for grammatically complete simple sentences containing a subject, verb, and object (S-V-O). For example, a 3-year-old child with a language disorder produced the following utterance to describe a picture of a boy riding a horse: 'Boy a horse.' Although he included the subject (boy) and the object (horse) and even expanded the object noun phrase by using the article a (a later developing grammatical morpheme), he failed to include a main verb. Most normal children in an early stage of language development would be likely to say 'Boy ride,"1 'Ride horse,' or 'Boy ride horse.' Another area of syntactic development that is problematic for many language-disordered children is learning rules for different sentence types, such as negative sentences and questions. They may produce primitive forms of these sentences, such as those used by younger normally developing children. For example, the negative sentence 'I don't want to do that' may be produced as 'I not wanna do that.' In this case, the failure to produce the negative contraction don't is not due to the absence of do from the child's repertoire. Rather, the child seems to lack the syntactic rule for forming the negative. Yes/no questions may consist of a statement produced with a rising intonation pattern, for example, 'That my book?' WH questions will begin with the WH word, but like yes/no questions will have the copula or auxiliary verb omitted: 'Where my bookT
ordered. Impairments can and do occur in all five components of language: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The kind of disorders that may be found in each of these components will be explored briefly.
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Language Disorders The acquisition of later developing structures such as passive and complex sentences is likely to be very delayed among children with developmental language disorders. They especially seem to have problems with sentence forms in which the agent-action-object relationship is reversed or interrupted. This is true in passive sentences and in some complex sentences. For example, in the passive sentence ' The girl was chased by the boy,' the agent of the action is in the object rather than the subject position of the sentence. In the sentence 'The dress that I tore was new,' the relative clause 'that I tore' interrupts the subject-verb relationship. Even older adolescents with language disorders rarely use these kinds of sentences in their spoken or written language. They also are likely to have difficulty comprehending them in either spoken or written form. 3.4 Disorders of Semantics Most children with developmental language disorders are delayed in vocabulary development. They are likely to be slow in acquiring their first words and the rate at which they add new words to their vocabulary is slower than normal. This delay is present in both production and comprehension. Children diagnosed as language disordered in the preschool years may continue to exhibit deficits in vocabulary comprehension into the school years, even when their other oral language skills have reached near normal levels. The performance of older language-disordered youngsters on certain kinds of vocabulary comprehension tests may be misleading. They often score within the normal range on vocabulary tests, such as the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn and Dunn 1981), which requires choosing a single meaning for each word. However, when faced with a word with more than one meaning, they are likely to have problems selecting alternate meanings. For example, they might be unable to provide two interpretations for a sentence such as 'The glasses were very dirty.' Children with developmental language disorders also tend to have difficulty with more abstract words, such as relational terms used to talk about time, space, and size dimensions. These kinds of words require an understanding of the relationship among entities or events. For example, understanding words like 'before' and 'after' requires an understanding of the temporal relationship between two or more events. In order to comprehend prepositions such as 'under' and 'over,' a child must have some knowledge of the spatial relationship between two objects. Comprehension of dimensional adjectives such as 'tall' and 'short' involves comparing an object to some standard. Another area of semantics that may be disordered is the use and understanding of figurative language. Figurative language includes forms such as idioms ('She broke the news'), metaphors ('He's as happy as a lark'), proverbs ('Don't count your chickens before
they're hatched'), and jokes and riddles. The ability to handle these figurative forms requires the individual to disregard the literal meaning of the words or sentence and recognize the generalized, more abstract meaning. Figurative language is especially difficult, even for older language-disordered adolescents. In addition to the difficulties in acquiring word and sentence meaning, a number of language-disordered children have word-finding problems. They are unable to produce a presumably known word when it is needed. Although this inability to retrieve words does not seem to reflect a deficit in vocabulary knowledge per se, it affects the child's ability to express meaning clearly and effectively. Children who have word-finding problems may use circumlocutions in which they 'talk around' the desired word. For example, they may describe the object for which they cannot recall the name, such as referring to an elephant as 'a big animal with a trunk.' They also may substitute a word that is similar in meaning or sound to the target word. For example, one language-disordered child called a bus 'a truck,' while another referred to a television as a 'telephone.' 3.5 Disorders of Pragmatics Pragmatic knowledge encompasses such diverse aspects as the use of language for different communicative intents or functions, rules governing conversational and narrative discourse, and rules for the use of different speech styles in different communicative situations. Children with developmental language disorders may exhibit deficits in any or all of these aspects. Language-disordered children may express fewer communicative intents than normal children at the same age. Even in the preschool years, normally developing children use their language for a variety of intents, including to request, to respond, to describe, to express attitudes and feelings, to regulate conversations, and to tease and joke. Preschool languagedisordered children may use only a few of these communicative intents. They also may be limited in the diversity of the syntactic structures or forms used to express different communicative intents. However, it should be noted that language-disordered children's use of communicative intents has been reported to be very similar to normal children at the same MLU level. In other words, their ability to use communicative intents seems to be commensurate with their morphological and syntactic abilities. Another aspect of pragmatics that may be disordered is the ability to engage in conversational discourse. Deficits may be seen in the ability to initiate or end conversations, to take turns talking, and to maintain the topic. Generally, studies of languagedisordered children's conversational abilities have suggested that they are able to engage in conversational interactions, but that they tend to be some259
The Individual Learner what passive. They take turns and maintain the topic, but they rarely initiate conversations or contribute new information to the topic under discussion. However, when the conversational behaviors required are limited primarily to single-word responses and do not demand syntactic skills, language-disordered children have been found to demonstrate conversational skills as good or better than normal children at the same language level. In addition to problems in conversational discourse, language-disordered children may also show deficits in their narrative discourse abilities. The ability to produce narratives, such as stories, shows significant development during the school-age years. Results of studies suggest that school-age children with language disorders have difficulty producing organized, cohesive narratives. In addition, their comprehension of narratives may be deficient in comparison to their normal peers. Finally, children with language disorders may have difficulty making appropriate speech style adjustments for different listeners and different communicative situations. Speech style adjustments may include changes in length and complexity of utterances, the amount of information provided, and politeness. Available evidence suggests that languagedisordered children are aware of the need to change their speech style for different listeners and situations and do make a number of adjustments in their speech to different listeners. For example, they have been found to use more self-repetitions when speaking to younger versus older children. However, the limited syntactic abilities of language-disordered children may interfere with their ability to make certain kinds of adjustments. For example, they are less likely than peers of the same age to adjust the length of utterances addressed to younger versus older listeners. 3.6 Metalinguistic Abilities in Language-disordered Children Another area of language knowledge that may be problematic for children with developmental language disorders is metalinguistics. Metalinguistic abilities involve conscious awareness of the units and rules of the native language system. They differ from linguistic abilities, in that they require additional optional processing. Linguistic abilities—knowledge of phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics—allow the production and understanding of language in an almost automatic way, without thinking about the units and rules being used. In contrast to linguistic abilities, individuals' metalinguistic abilities involve conscious thought; use of them is optional, and generally invoked only when needed. If presented with a sentence such as 'The clothes that he chose was expensive' and asked if it was acceptable, the hearer would call on their knowledge of syntax to make a judgment. They would con-
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sciously think about the syntactic rule that is violated in the sentence, would recognize that the subject 'clothes' is plural and the verb 'was' is singular and, therefore, that the problem is in the lack of agreement between the subject and the verb. Although they might not describe the rule violation in exactly that way, conscious awareness of syntax would allow it to be identified. In addition, the hearer would be able to correct the sentence so that it was grammatically acceptable. Clearly, this kind of additional conscious processing goes far beyond what people do when they produce and understand language in normal conversational interactions. Metalinguistic abilities are dependent on linguistic knowledge; however, it is possible to have normal linguistic skills and lack metalinguistic abilities. This is the case with young children who are able to produce and understand utterances, but do not seem to be able to reflect consciously on the units and rules underlying their comprehension and production. Metalinguistic abilities do not show significant development until the early school years, and they continue to develop throughout adolescence. They appear to be related to reading development. Because metalinguistic development is dependent on linguistic development, children with developmental language disorders might be expected to show metalinguistic deficits. This assumption is supported by the results of studies indicating that language-disordered children perform poorly on tasks requiring phonological, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic awareness. 4. Language Disorders in Specific Populations Normal language development is related to development in a number of other areas, including intellectual, emotional, auditory (hearing), and neurological development. Children with deficits in these areas are at risk for language disorders. For example, children who have noticeable deficits in intellectual development (i.e., mentally retarded children) generally show significant delays in all components of language. Children who exhibit emotional disorders are likely to have some problems in language, especially in the pragmatic component. Because children learn language by hearing other people use it, a child who has a hearing impairment will have considerable difficulty developing language normally. Blind children also might be expected to exhibit developmental language disorders because of their difficulty in making the connection between language and the objects and events represented by the language. Finally, children who demonstrate problems in learning also tend to exhibit language deficits. Learningdisabled children are likely to have difficulty producing and understanding both oral and written language.
Language Disorders There is another group of children who seem to exhibit normal intellectual, emotional, auditory, and visual development during the early years, but whose language development is impaired. They may have disorders in one or more of the components of language, and their language problems may persist into adulthood. Because these children seem to demonstrate problems only in the language area, they have been referred to as 'specifically language impaired.' In the following sections, the language development of children in the various populations mentioned above will be explored. 4.1 Mentally Retarded Children Mental retardation is defined by the American Association on Mental Deficiency as 'significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive behavior and manifested during the developmental period' (Grossman 1983:1). Significant subaverage intellectual functioning generally refers to an IQ two or more standard deviations below the mean on a standardized test of intelligence. Deficits in adaptive behavior refer to limitations in self-help skills, speech and language development, social development, and, in older children, in academic and reasoning skills. Thus, language abilities are one of the adaptive behaviors that are assessed in diagnosing a child as mentally retarded. Studies of retarded children's language production and comprehension have revealed that they are likely to exhibit difficulties in all of the language components. Their phonological development is delayed, and they tend to use the same phonological rules or processes as those used by younger normally developing children. Their morphological and syntactic development tends to follow the same sequence as that found in normal children, but the rate of development is slower. For example, grammatical morphemes and different sentence types are acquired in the same developmental order as in normal children, but at a much later age. Retarded children's morphological and syntactic development is delayed in relation to their mental age also. They do not use the same level of morphological and syntactic structures used by normal children at the same mental age. For example, their sentences are shorter and less complex and contain fewer later developing morphemes. The vocabularies of retarded children contain more concrete words than the vocabularies of their normal peers. They tend to talk about observable objects, people, and events. They have difficulty understanding and using prepositions, time words, and dimensional adjectives. Words with multiple meanings are difficult for them, and they rarely comprehend or use figurative language. However, their vocabulary development appears to be less delayed in comparison to mental-
age matched peers than their morphological and syntactic development. The pragmatic development of retarded children is similar in sequence, but slower in rate, in some aspects. For example, they express the same communicative intentions as those used by younger normal peers. However, their conversational development does not seem to follow the normal sequence. As they get older, normally developing children become more competent conversational partners who are able not only to maintain topic, but to take control of the conversation. Even as adults, retarded individuals rarely assume conversational control, even when their conversational partner is a younger child. It should be noted that the language deficits observed in retarded children do not seem to be explained simply by the mental retardation. If their language development were simply a function of their intellectual development, their level of language development would be expected to be consistent with their mental age. As noted previously, however, the morphological and syntactic development of some retarded children seems to be delayed in relation to their cognitive abilities or mental age. The presence of a language delay that is greater than would be predicted on the basis of mental age alone is especially prevalent in the Downs Syndrome population. It has been suggested that these delays may be due to deficits in adaptive and motivational behaviors rather than linguistic or cognitive deficits. Regardless of the relationship between mental age and language abilities, children with mental retardation are likely to exhibit deficits in some of the components of language. In general, retarded children acquire language forms and structures in the same sequence as the normally developing child, but at a slower rate. Thus, the differences in retarded children's language development tend to be quantitative rather than qualitative. 4.2 Emotionally Disturbed Children Children who exhibit emotional problems frequently demonstrate disprders in language production and/or comprehension as well. Although autism is the emotional disorder that has received the most attention in the years up to the early 1990s, it is not the only one that affects children's language development. Almost any disturbance in emotional development may have a language problem associated with it. In very severe cases of emotional disturbance, a child may not talk at all. Although these children are capable of speaking, they do not do so. They may make sounds, such as screeching, but they produce no intelligible speech. Other emotionally disturbed children imitate or repeat almost everything that is said to them. The exact repetition of another's speech is referred to as 'echolalia,' and is a behavior that is rare among normally developing children. If one were
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The Individual Learner to say to an echolalic child, 'Would you like a drink of water?,' the child would be likely to repeat the question word for word. Echolalia is especially common among children with autism, but may be found in other emotional disorders also. Children with emotional disorders may exhibit deficits in any or all of the components of language. However, the component that is most likely to be impaired is pragmatics. Because pragmatics involves the use of language in context to communicate with others, it is not surprising that emotionally disturbed children have problems in this aspect. There is some evidence that children with severe emotional disturbances use their language for different communicative intentions, but that they may not use the full range of intentions expressed by normally developing children. For example, one 4-year-old child, who was observed over a number of months at a school for emotionally disturbed children, used his gestures and vocalizations to call the listener's attention to objects or events; however, he never used these communication acts to get something that he wanted (e.g., an out-of-reach toy or food item). He would cry until an adult figured out what he wanted and gave it to him, but he would not point to the desired object. In contrast, normally developing preverbal children use their gestures to request objects. Emotionally disturbed children generally have considerable difficulty carrying on conversations. This difficulty is especially evident in the area of topic maintenance. They often produce utterances that seem to be completely unrelated to the previous speaker's utterance. Examples (1) and (2) from a couple of older children observed at a school for emotionally disturbed children will help demonstrate these problems: John and his teacher were looking at a picture of a barn and animals that he had painted. The teacher said, 'This is a really good pictureof a farm, John. Would you like to share it with the rest of the class?' John responded, The next batter stepped up to the plate and hit a home run.'
(1)
As Jenny walked into the room, her speechlanguage pathologist said, 'Hi, Jenny. How are you today?' Jenny looked around the room and said, 'Chair, chair, chair. Lots of chairs.' The therapist said, 'Yes, there do seem to be a lot of chairs in here today. Shall we sit on chairs or shall we sit on the floor?' Jenny said, 'I forgot to eat my lunch.'
(2)
These examples were not isolated instances in which the child was momentarily distracted and, therefore, gave an inappropriate response. They illustrate a rather consistent failure to maintain the topic. The children's utterances simply are unrelated to the content of the other speaker's preceding utterance. Another aspect of pragmatics that is especially 262
problematic for many emotionally disturbed children is in using the appropriate forms in conversational interactions. One 12-year-old, upon seeing the author appear in his classroom for the first time, came over and asked in rapid succession: 'What are you doing here?' 'How old are you?' 'Do you have a husband?' Although the questions might have been appropriate under other circumstances, they were not appropriate questions to address to a strange adult. He also did not follow up on any of the responses, but simply asked the next question as soon as the previous one had been answered. He was attempting to initiate and maintain a conversation, but he did not use the appropriate forms to do so. Some children seem to have a stereotyped form that they use in certain situations. For example, one 9year-old's usual greeting upon seeing someone was 'Welcome to our school. Let me kiss your hand.' As these examples suggest, some emotionally disturbed children exhibit relatively normal morphological, syntactic, and vocabulary production, but have difficulty using their language to communicate effectively with others. Other children with emotional disorders demonstrate noticeable delays in their development of morphology, syntax, and semantics. 4.3 Hearing-impaired Children In this section, the focus will be on children whose hearing impairment is sensorineural as opposed to conductive. A sensorineural hearing loss is one that results from damage to the cochlea (sensory organ in the inner ear) or the auditory nerve, and generally is irreversible. Conductive losses occur from a condition in the outer or middle ear and usually can be reversed or improved through medical treatment. Although the development of cochlear implants holds great promise for treatment of sensorineural hearing loss, the resulting hearing is far from normal and not all hearing impaired persons are candidates for this treatment. The language development of children with impaired hearing depends on a number of factors. Among the most important are: (a) the degree of the hearing loss, (b) the age at which the child acquired the loss, (c) the age at which the hearing loss was identified, and (d) the amount and type of habilitation. Usually one thinks of hearing impaired children as having a severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss—the so-called 'deaf child.' Certainly, those children will have great difficulty acquiring oral language and may be taught language through manual communication. However, there is some evidence suggesting that children with mild and moderate sensorineural hearing losses may demonstrate significant delays in language development. A child whose hearing loss is present at birth or occurs sometime before speech and language is
Language Disorders acquired will have a much more difficult time acquiring oral language than a child whose onset of loss occurs later. Many experts refer to the child whose hearing loss occurs anytime prior to 3 years of age as prelingually hearing impaired. If the onset is after age 3 years, the child is considered postlingually hearing impaired. It should be recognized, however, that the child who has even 1 or 2 years of exposure to spoken language has a base on which to build and may have an easier time acquiring oral language than the child who was born with a hearing loss. The importance of the age at which the hearing loss is identified is related to early treatment. The earlier the loss is identified, the sooner the child can be provided with amplification and placed in an appropriate language and communication program. There is considerable evidence that children who receive early intervention develop better language skills. There has been considerable controversy over the mode in which hearing impaired children should receive language input. Some experts argue for the oral-aural method in which input is received through speechreading and amplification of residual hearing. Manual communication, such as sign language, is prohibited because the oral-aural proponents argue that the auditory modality is the most important for speech and language development. Other experts believe that some form of manual communication should be part of the child's language input. Manual communication includes both fingerspelling and various sign language systems, such as American Sign Language, Seeing Essential English, Signing Exact English, and Signed English. An approach that is used in many schools for the deaf is Total Communication, which includes sign language, fingerspelling, speech, and speechreading. No one approach is appropriate for all hearing impaired children. Some children do well with an oral-aural approach, while others do better in a program incorporating manual communication. Children with severe to profound hearing losses are likely to exhibit significant delays in acquiring the morphological, syntactic, and semantic components of the language system. However, the sequence in which they acquire forms and structures is similar to that followed by hearing children. Their pragmatic development, at least in the area of communicative intentions, has been found to be similar in both rate and sequence to that of hearing children in the early preschool years. While it is recognized that even a mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss may result in a language delay, less attention has been given to the impact of a fluctuating conductive impairment on children's language development. Studies of infants and young children with recurrent middle ear infections (otitis media) suggest that these children are likely to exhibit language disorders beginning in the preschool years, even as early as 1 year of age. Clearly, hearing loss in
any form and of any degree can interfere with a child's speech and language development. 4.4 Blind Children Vision would seem to play an important role in language acquisition, because children rely so much on context in the early stages of language development. They seem to learn to relate words to objects and events by seeing the objects and actions that are being labeled or described. Their early comprehension of language is very dependent on contextual cues. Furthermore, a crucial part of the early adult-child communicative interaction involves eye contact and looking at the same objects. Therefore, it would seem that a child who was born without sight or who lost sight at a very early age would have difficulty acquiring language. Few studies have focused on the language development of blind children. The few investigations that have been done suggest that there is little difference between the language development of blind children and their sighted peers. For example, blind children have been reported to reach early language milestones, such as producing two-word sentences, at about the same time as sighted children and to use language to talk about things in the same way as sighted children at the same linguistic level. The one area in which blind children have been found to have difficulty is in the acquisition of pronouns, especially of the 1-you distinction. A more recent longitudinal study of three blind children and one sighted child suggests that there may be some other important differences between blind and sighted children's semantic and pragmatic development (Anderson et al. 1984). The blind children's acquisition and use of early words differed in subtle ways from that of the sighted child. For example, the blind children in this study used action words only to refer to self-actions in contrast to the sighted child who used them to refer to actions of others as well as his own actions. The blind children overextended very few of their early words to other referents (8 to 13 percent), while the sighted child overextended 41 percent of his words which is a similar percentage to that reported in other studies of sighted children. The blind children's conversations also seemed to reflect difficulty in establishing the appropriate perspective. This was especially evident in their use of pronouns. They used third person pronouns (e.g., she and her) to refer to themselves, and they frequently used the second person you when / or me would have been correct. However, this problem in perspectivetaking also showed up in other ways. In one example, the child opened a conversation by saying 'Did you go see Nicole?' As the conversation progressed, it was clear that what the child wanted to communicate was that he saw Nicole. A temporary misunderstanding resulted because the child not only used the inap263
The Individual Learner propriate pronoun (you for /), but he also introduced the topic by asking a question when a statement would have been more appropriate. Although blind children acquire language at about the same rate and in the same sequence as sighted children, it appears that they may differ in subtle aspects of semantic and pragmatic development and use. Future studies may reveal other kinds of subtle differences in blind children's language development. 4.5 Learning-disabled Children The most commonly accepted definition of learning disability was developed by the USA National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities: Learning disability is a generic term that refers to a heterogeneous group of disorders manifested by significant difficulties in the acquisition and use of listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, or mathematical abilities. These disorders are intrinsic to the individual and are presumed to be due to central nervous system dysfunction. Even though a learning disability may occur concomitantly with other handicapping conditions (e.g., sensory impairment, mental retardation, social and emotional disturbance) or environmental influences (e.g., cultural differences, insufficient/inappropriate instruction, psychogenic factors), it is not the direct result of those conditions or influences. (Hammill et al. 1981:337)
This definition suggests that children with learning disabilities will exhibit problems in the acquisition of oral language and of reading and writing skills. The label of learning disability usually is applied when a child exhibits significant learning problems that cannot be explained through other causes such as emotional disturbance, mental retardation, hearing loss, or environmental or cultural disadvantage. A learning disability is not usually diagnosed until the school years. However, many learning disabled children have a history of speech and language difficulties in the preschool years. This is not to suggest that all children with preschool language deficits are learning disabled; however, a preschool language disorder may be an early signal of learning disability. Learning-disabled children are likely to exhibit comprehension and production problems in all components of the language system. They typically acquire language forms and structures in the same order as their normally developing peers, but their rate of development may be delayed. Their phonological production is likely to be inconsistent. They may produce sounds correctly in syntactically simple sentences and incorrectly when the sentence increases in complexity. They exhibit difficulties in both morphological and syntactic development. They have problems using and comprehending grammatical morphemes, such as noun plurals and possessives, articles, verb tense markers, and auxiliary verbs. Their acquisition of the rules for 264
forming different sentence types, such as questions, negatives, passives, and complex sentences, will be delayed. Even adolescent and adult learning-disabled individuals have problems in producing and comprehending complex sentences. Semantic deficits include difficulties in understanding words and sentences that have more than one meaning. For example, a learning-disabled child would have trouble interpreting the two possible meanings of the sentence 'The duck is ready to eat' (i.e., 'the duck is ready to eat some food' or 'the duck is prepared for consumption by others'). Most of these children are delayed in producing and understanding terms that express relationships in time (soon, later, before, after), space (above, beside, behind), and quantity (more, less, none, all). Their use and understanding of figurative language is relatively delayed. Many children with learning disabilities have wordfinding difficulties. The pragmatic deficits of learning-disabled children include difficulty in initiating and maintaining conversations, providing cohesive narratives, and making appropriate adjustments in speech style for different listeners. These pragmatic problems are likely to interfere with social interactions with peers. In addition to linguistic deficits, most learning-disabled children exhibit deficiencies in metalinguistic abilities. They have considerable difficulty with tasks that require the ability to reflect consciously on and manipulate the units and rules of the language system. It has been suggested that these metalinguistic problems may be related to the difficulty in reading and writing development demonstrated by many learningdisabled youngsters. 4.6 Specifically Language-impaired Children As mentioned earlier in this section, some children have trouble acquiring the language system even though their early development in other areas appears to be normal. They have no identifiable intellectual, emotional, or hearing impairments. Their problems seem to be limited to the development of language and may involve production and comprehension of all components of the language system. They are likely to exhibit delays in phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic development. Although their rate of language development is slower, they appear to acquire language forms and structures in the same sequence as normally developing children. Some of these children may later be diagnosed as learning disabled. A number of labels have been used to refer to these children, including 'childhood aphasic' and 'developmentally aphasic.' These terms suggest that the language difficulties are a result of brain dysfunction. In contrast to children with 'acquired aphasia,' however, there is little evidence to support the existence of neurological problems in children with spec-
Language Disorders ific language impairment. Acquired aphasia in both adults and children results from identifiable injury to the brain, usually as a result of serious illness or trauma to the head (see Aphasia). The language development of children with acquired aphasia differs from that of children with specific language impairment in at least two ways. First, the language development of children with acquired aphasia is normal up until the time of the brain injury. Children with specific language impairment typically demonstrate delays and deficits in very early childhood. Second, aphasic children who suffer brain injury at a young age are likely to exhibit few residual language problems in later childhood and adolescence. In contrast, specifically language-impaired children often demonstrate language deficits that continue well into the school years. Studies in the 1980s and early 1990s focused on some cognitive abilities of children with specific language impairment. The results of the studies suggest that language-disordered children have subtle conceptual and processing deficits that appear when the demands on the child's ability to process and use information are high. For example, language-disordered children have more difficulty with problems that require size judgments than those that require color judgments due to the greater conceptual complexity of size relations. Children with specific language impairments also have been reported to differ from their normal peers in their performance on tasks based on Piaget's theory of cognitive development. In particular, they differ in their symbolic play behaviors. In comparison to agematched normal peers, they have been found to engage in more concrete, less complex play behaviors with objects. These findings suggest that in addition to difficulties in language development, children with specific language impairments also exhibit less obvious impairments in some cognitive abilities. Additional research is needed to determine how children's language impairments and specific cognitive delays or deficits are related. There is evidence that the families of children with specific language impairments have a significantly higher incidence of developmental language disorders than families of normally developing children (Tallal et al. 1989). There is a higher rate of language disorders among mothers, fathers, and siblings of language-disordered children. These results suggest that one of the factors contributing to developmental language disorders is the family unit. Whether this relationship is due to genetic or environmental influences has yet to be determined. 5. Conclusions
Language-disordered children may have difficulty in producing and comprehending any or all of the com-
ponents of the language system, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, or pragmatics. They also may have problems in acquiring the ability to think consciously about and reflect on language units and rules (metalinguistic abilities). Most languagedisordered children will exhibit varying degrees of delay in the acquisition of different forms or structures. Their language development typically is slower in rate, but is similar in sequence to that found in normally developing children. The language problems found among language-disordered children are likely to impact on their development and/or performance in other areas. In particular, they tend to exhibit problems in social interactions and in academic performance. Their early communicative and social interactions with parents may be impaired. When they enter school, they may have difficulty interacting with peers, resulting in increasing social isolation. Their academic performance is likely to surfer because of their deficits in' oral and written language. Their academic difficulties may become more severe as they progress through the grades because of the increasing linguistic demands inherent in the classroom situation. Developmental language disorders are prevalent among children who have intellectual, emotional, auditory, visual, and learning deficits. These populations are likely to exhibit delays in some or all components of the language system. In addition, there is a group of children who appear to develop normally in all aspects except language. They are not mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, or hearing or visually impaired. Although learning problems may show up in some of these children during the school years, they are not all learning disabled. These children are referred to as specifically language-impaired. Results of studies suggest that these children not only demonstrate problems in language, but that they also may have subtle deficits in some cognitive abilities. In addition, there is evidence supporting familial aggregation of developmental language disorders. Future research should focus on the specific nature of the relationship among developmental language disorders and cognitive deficits and the role that genetics and environment may play in language disorders. See also: Pathology: Intervention; Pathology: Overview; The Blind Child. Bibliography Anderson E, Dunlea A, Kekelis L 1984 Blind children's language: Resolving some differences. Journal of Child Language 11: 645-64 Bernstein D, Tiegerman E 1989 Language and Communication Disorders in Children, 2nd edn. Merrill, Columbus, OH Brown R 1973 A First Language: The Early Stages. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Davis J, Elfenbein J, Schum R, Bentler R 1986 Effects of 265
The Individual Learner mild and moderate hearing impairments on language, educational, and psychosocial behavior of children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 51:53-62 Dunn L, Dunn L 1981 Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test— Revised. American Guidance Service, Circle Pines, MN Grossman H 1983 Classification in Mental Retardation. America Association on Mental Deficiency, Washington, DC Hammill D, Leiger J, McNutt G, Larsen T 1981 A new definition of learning disabilities. Learning Disabilities Quarterly 4:336-42 James S 1988 The development of oral language and reading. In: Hedley C, Hicks J (eds.) Reading and the Special Learner. Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, NJ Kleeck A van, Richardson A 1988 Language delay in children. In: Lass N, McReynolds L, Northern J, Yoder D (eds.) Handbook of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology. B. C. Decker, Toronto
Leonard L 1986 Early language development and language disorders. In: Shames G, Wiig E (eds.) Human Communication Disorders, 2nd edn. Merrill, Columbus, OH Nelson N 1984 Beyond information processing: The language of teachers and textbooks. In: Wallach G, Butler K (eds.) Language Learning Disabilities in School-Age Children. Williams and Wilkins Scarborough H, Dobrich W 1990 Development of children with early language delay. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 33:70-83 Tallal P, Ross R, Curtiss S 1989 Familial aggregation in specific language impairment. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 54:167-73 Wallach G 1989 Current research as a map for language intervention in the school years. Seminars in Speech and Language 10:205-71
Pathology: Intervention B. Byers Brown†
Intervention is the preferred term for action which is to be taken to bring about change or to alter the course of pathology. It has largely supplanted the earlier terms 'treatment' and 'therapy' in the literature although both alternatives remain in common use. 1. Pre-intervention Concerns
A number of issues have to be resolved before intervention is undertaken and these are discussed below (Sects. 1.1-1.5). 1.1 Motivation Is the client sufficiently motivated to persevere with a course of therapy? With young children the onus is upon the therapist to provide the motivation but parental motivation and cooperation are essential. With the older child, or an adult, responsibility for maintaining motivation is shared between therapist and client and it may be lacking if the social penalties incurred by the language difficulty are not strong enough to compel change. 1.2 Span famous Improvement If there is every likelihood of spontaneous improvement then periodic reassessment will be favored rather than specific intervention. 1.3 Realistic Expectations It is important to establish from the outset the extent to which intervention can bring about an improvement; for example, some parents find it hard to accept that their child is a slow developer and place all their
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hopes upon language improvement, and some adult stutterers wish to free themselves from every trace of nonfluency although most normal speakers are occasionally nonfluent. Intervention must not be founded upon unrealistic expectations. 1.4 Cost-effectiveness The gains to be expected also need to be justified when balanced against the cost in time, money, and effort. Some protection for both parties is provided by those statements which have to be agreed between parents, and professional and education authorities, if children are to receive special help through the USA and UK school systems. These statements set out the goals of intervention and the means by which they are to be met within the estimated time period. Such statements have some disadvantages, however, because if they are adhered to too rigidly they leave little room for the flexibility and creativity which are essential components of language therapy. Nevertheless, they do provide a check upon unrealistic goals and protracted treatment. 7.5 Site of Treatment A good working relationship needs to be established between client and therapist. Although the ability to establish such relationships is essential in any of the therapy professions, there will be cases where there is a lack of sympathy between therapist and client. Little benefit can therefore be expected from the association and the client should be free to transfer to another clinician.
Pathology: Intervention 2. Modes of Therapeutic Intervention By mode of intervention is meant the way that intervention takes place and the method by which it is carried out. Intervention may take place in a number of different ways. The principal, though not the sole, responsibility for intervention lies with the therapist. 2.1 The Ways in Which Intervention Takes Place Individual therapy, as the term implies, is treatment carried out in a one-to-one situation. The therapist is responsible for promoting change as the result of methods specifically designed for the client. A parent or spouse may be present to reinforce and extend procedures worked out in the clinic. 2.1.1 Group therapy Here the group constitutes the agent of change. The therapist selects the group members and then conducts meetings and offers guidance. Group therapy is the preferred method for those who could become isolated because of language or mobility restrictions. Group meetings provide company and stimulus to communicate, practical tips may be exchanged, and mutual support given. If the members of the group are aphasic the emphasis will be upon language building skills whereas, if the group is for stutterers, emphasis will be upon techniques of fluency and social interaction. A combination of group and individual therapy allows for general stimulation and support, and individual help with specific difficulties. 2.7.2 Multidisciplinary treatment Intervention is in the hands of a number of different professionals who combine their skills to produce treatment programs. This approach is particularly suitable for multihandicapped people or for those whose conditions are too complex to rely upon the insight of only one professional group. The merging of the different professional viewpoints may well constitute an interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary method which can then be administered by any one of the team. Illustrations can be found in the USA, for example, of early intervention programs for children with developmental disabilities and of cognitive rehabilitation programs for cases of head injury. 2.1.3 Special class placement The emphasis in all educationally developed countries is upon the integration of handicapped children into normal schools. Nevertheless, there is still provision for special class or unit placement for those children who require a period of concentrated help with protection from too much demand being made upon them. Children with language disorders may receive such placement in order to benefit from the combined attention of teachers and therapists. If necessary, a period of residential schooling will be recommended,
placement being decided by the school district or local education authority acting upon the advice of a special assessment team. 2.2 Methods by Which Intervention is Carried Out 2.2.1 Behavior modification and control Since change and relearning are so often required, intervention strategies may be based upon learning theory. Many of them depend upon cognition or the direct involvement of the thinking processes. Conscious changes in behavior must be associated with an accompanying change in the client's concept of self. For example, a young male may retain his high-pitched voice long after physical changes in his body make a deeper pitch more appropriate. He must learn not only to produce deeper male notes but must consciously reconstruct his self concept from that of an immature boy to that of a mature man. The change will be assisted by steady reinforcement of his use of the baritone, first in easy nonthreatening situations and then in those which he finds more difficult to control. Relearning may also involve a period of desensitization during which the new habit is consciously attempted in the most feared situation until familiarity has robbed it of some of its terror. A stutterer might stutter deliberately in a crowded place instead of trying to conceal his disability. 2.2.2 Contingent reinforcement This is also associated with learning theory and may be used, among other instances, to assist the development of severely handicapped infants. Such infants will not be able to influence their environments by means of movement, crying, and later vocalizing. Thus they can remain passive and their parents will be at a loss as to how to stimulate them. Some small movement or vocalization will need to be found and this must be strongly reinforced each time the baby produces it. For example, an electronic device such as a teddy bear beating a drum. Each time the infant vocalizes, the teddy bear performs. Later, it may be reprogramed to do so only when a more sustained vocalization is produced. Once the connection is made between vocalizing and something interesting happening, the baby is likely to continue. These attempts may then be reinforced by the parents through kisses, food, and other more normal means. 2.2.3 Programed instruction This is a strategy which aims to reduce the learning load. A complex task is broken down into a series of simple steps which can be mastered one at a time. For example, a mentally handicapped patient might be given instructions as to how to prepare a meal in a series of short recorded statements accompanied by pictures on a screen. The patient may respond to each instruction in turn until the sequence has been mas-
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The Individual Learner tered and may then be practiced in its entirety. The reward is the successful completion of the task. Such programs improve both verbal comprehension and self-help. The following procedures constitute essential elements of the repertoire of language intervention. 2.2.4 Auditory stimulation This is the means by which the auditory function can be improved. It aims to promote awareness of the small sound changes which provide the basis to language systems and covers the mastery of auditory sequences necessary for spoken language. 2.2.5 Movement control Movement control for language involves the positioning of individual speech organs and also the mastery of complex sequences of movements which underpin articulate speech. In developmentally disabled infants movement training may need to start with head control and the action of breathing for speech. 2.2.6 Language building Language building is an integral part of most language programs and an accessory component in others. Its object is to increase the linguistic repertoire of sounds and words, and to promote their combination in a variety of language functions. 2.2.7 Developmental stimulation This combines several of the above procedures and attempts to emulate the process through which language is acquired by the normal child. It involves drawing up a developmental profile and the establishment of goals in the form of small developmental milestones which the child can attain with help. 3. Counseling Counseling for those with language pathology makes use of the same coordinated medical, psychological, and psychiatric services as are employed in social and behavioral disorders. Its object is the better adjustment of individuals to the conditions in which they find themselves. Practical advice may be given but the emphasis is upon helping people to understand their feelings as well as their circumstances. The counselor will take heed both of the messages contained in the client's utterances and those conveyed by posture, vocal tone, and overall demeanor. Frequently the two sets of messages are contradictory, optimism being expressed in speech but depression in the body language. The role of the language pathologist remains a crucial one because of the complex relationship between people's communication problems and their feelings. This relationship may be seen at its most vulnerable when sudden language loss induces depression and deep feelings of personal inadequacy. It is also found in persons whose fear and mistrust of
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personal relationships is so strong that it interferes with fluency and control of speech, the agent through which human relationships is normally pursued. The use of counseling as a sole or a supportive measure depends upon the extent to which negative feelings are preventing communication or are being induced by communication difficulty. The total population of any language clinic can be divided into three main groups. First, there are children and adults with transient and remediable difficulties which cause frustration, embarrassment, or anger. The adults may be encouraged to express their feelings and to try to understand how they might affect their progress. Children may also be helped to express and understand the negative feelings which accompany lack of intelligibility or fluency but counseling must also be given to their parents and other members of the family and this helps to reduce guilt and embarrassment. The second group consists of those whose handicaps appear in infancy and go on to constitute chronic disabilities, for example, cerebral palsy, profound hearing loss, mental handicap, and autism. In the first instance, parents will need counseling to come to terms with their feelings of anger, guilt, anxiety, and grief for the normal child they have lost. Later, the disabled person himself will receive help of the same kind. Since the language disability is part of a multihandicapping condition, the counseling will be undertaken by the professional most appropriate to the need. Finally, there is the group of people, usually adults, who have lost their power to communicate. Many of these will be so overwhelmed by their feelings that they are unable to work systematically to improve their sta-te. Feelings include grief for the loss of a skill or way of life; depression, first acute and then associated with chronic loneliness and isolation; anger directed towards the person seen as responsible, or a more generalized sense of injustice and betrayal. Such feelings are appropriate and legitimate and counseling will try to help the person to accept and tolerate them so that they do not impede recovery. 4. Surgery The association between surgery and language pathology is both causative and remedial. The removal of malignant tumors from the organs of speech, hearing, and the central nervous system may result in severe limitations of communication, for example, complete or partial laryngectomy, glossectomy, and removal of part of the jaw. These necessitate adaptive measures in voice production and articulation, frequently involving a prosthetic appliance, but since surgery is carried out to save life, the patient's subsequent communication skills cannot be a first consideration. However, bearing in mind the importance of quality of life, the surgeon will do everything possible to ensure that some kind of communication may be achieved.
Pathology: Intervention Surgery to the brain will give rise to aphasia if the cortical or subcortical areas subserving language are involved, and to dysarthria if cranial nerves are affected. Hearing loss will follow damage to the auditory nerve. 4.1 Remedial Surgery This aims to relieve a pathological condition which is causing distress or impairing function. Common examples are tonsillectomy, adenoidectomy, and myringotomy, but fashions change and the prevailing attitude to the removal of tonsils and adenoids is conservative and surgery will not be carried out unless the child's health is being seriously undermined. Nevertheless, language pathologists may ask for a surgical opinion if there is interference with the movement of the back of tongue and chronic mouthbreathing. These conditions lead to impaired resonance and articulation as well as affecting the child's appearance. Myringotomy is carried out to relieve pressure in the middle ear owing to the build-up of fluid or sticky secretions referred to as 'glue.' Some infants and small children are particularly susceptible to ear infections and, if unchecked, hearing loss may develop. Opinions vary as to how severe the condition needs to be before the drainage procedure of myringotomy is carried out. It requires the insertion of small tubes ('grommets') to keep the area drained. There is also dispute over the possible long-term effects of early hearing loss of this type. However, sufficient evidence exists as to its adverse effects upon language learning to ensure that the condition is always taken seriously. Tongue tie is another condition causing dispute among professionals. Strong statements both for and against surgery seem to be ill advised since results may or may not be helpful. In tongue tie, the tip of the tongue is tethered by a particularly short frenulum or fold of tissue which normally acts to limit the excursions of the tongue. When early feeding is affected the frenulum will be surgically divided. If there are no feeding problems but speech fails to develop clearly, surgery may be carried out at a later time. Considerable care must be taken to ensure that the speech difficulty is attributable to tongue tie and not to impaired innervation or control. It should be noted that the condition accounts for a very small percentage of children with problems of speech production. Nodules and other benign growths may be removed surgically from the vocal folds. Modern techniques have reduced the risk of scarring which impedes clear vocal production in much the same way as the nodule, and reduces flexibility. If scarring leads to impairment of vocal fold closure, breathiness will result. The decision as to whether to operate or to retrain the voice is determined by the estimated importance of the misuse factor. Both laryngeal and nasal polyps
may be removed surgically but only in the case of laryngeal polyps is misuse considered to be a factor. Neurosurgery may be the treatment of choice in conditions such as Parkinson's disease where all motor activities, including speech, are affected. Reduction of interference with cortical control is likely to result in improved articulation and vocal power. Reconstructive surgery is carried out to repair some of the consequences of lifesaving surgery and also as a first measure to create an adequate mechanism for the production and reception of speech. The best known of these are repairs of congenital clefts of the palate and lip. Primary surgery produces a union of the tissues which leaves them flexible enough to function in feeding and speech. Secondary surgery is carried out to improve speech potential and for cosmetic reasons. The use of prosthetic appliances is also common in palatal reconstruction and orthodontia. Surgery to improve speech potential is usually directed toward the soft palate and nasopharynx to ensure that good palatopharyngeal closure is possible. This will eliminate the nasal escape so characteristic of cleft palate speech. Operations to improve palatopharyngeal closure are sometimes carried out when neurological impairment has caused swallowing difficulties. Surgical reconstruction may be performed following laryngectomy to redirect the pulmonary air back into the pharynx for the production of sound. Not all cases are suitable for this type of reconstruction which involves the construction of a small fistula tract and the insertion of a soft prosthesis containing a valve which serves to redivert the air flow. Surgical reconstruction of the inner ear may be employed in cases where the auditory apparatus is no longer capable of conducting sound, as in osteosclerosis. There have recently been dramatic advances in the use of surgery to alleviate sensorineural deafness through cochlear implants. In one such implant, a device is implanted into the opening of the inner ear containing an electrode which is connected to an external microphone. This transmits the auditory stimulus, thereby substituting for the nerve endings in the cochlear which have this function in the normal ear. The technique is highly successful in cases of profound, acquired deafness where amplification cannot help and its use in cases of congenital deafness is now being explored. Cochlear implants for young children have lagged behind those for adults because of the ethical, as well as the practical, difficulties of carrying out such surgery on those who cannot give their own consent and whose future development cannot be guaranteed, but, as the techniques of implantation are perfected and their long-term results known, this position is likely to change. 5. Technologically Aided Intervention Technological devices are increasingly employed to aid communication. They are used to compensate for
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The Individual Learner abnormalities of the speech and hearing mechanisms and where there is neurological impairment affecting speech control and regulation. Technological aids fall roughly into three groups: (a) prostheses, (b) amplifiers, and (c) feedback devices. Prostheses are appliances which act as artificial substitutes for the damaged part of the mechanism, for example, the cochlear implant. They are used extensively in cleft palate reconstruction and orthodontia. A rigid prosthesis can replace the hard palate and a flexible one can substitute for the soft. Orthodontic prostheses serve to mold the dental arch thereby creating a basis for more acceptable dentition and articulation. They are employed to curb a forward thrust of the tongue which can lead to abnormal production of the s/z phoneme known to the layperson as a 'lisp.' In this respect, however, their success rate is variable. Another example of a prosthetic replacement is that of the artificial larynx which is used by some laryngectomized patients. It consists of a battery-operated vibrator which can be held against the throat while words are shaped. It produces a monotonous, mechanical sound but one that can be used effectively for communication. However it is not suitable for patients with extensive tissue damage and has the disadvantage of needing to be held in place throughout speech. Individually constructed vibrators can also be built into dental prostheses and can be used effectively by strongly motivated people. Amplifiers are used to extend the residual hearing of the deaf and partially hearing. They can be monaural or binaural and need to be fitted to individually molded earpieces which must be kept scrupulously clean. This can be difficult in the case of young children who must also have their earmolds changed as they grow. Amplifiers are also used to give carrying power to voices weakened by palsy. Feedback devices are used to give speakers more information about their performance. Auditory, visual, and biofeedback can be given as with electrolaryngography. Two electrodes are attached, one on either side, to the thyroid cartilage which contains the vocal folds and connected to a measuring device which records the degree of tension in the muscles controlling the vocal folds. The measuring device, which could be a needle on a scale, is visible to the client who can use it to regulate the amount of effort being put into vocalization. A more elaborate visual display giving more finely detailed information can be mounted on a screen to guide hearing-impaired people in the regulation of pitch and timbre. Vowel duration can also be regulated in this way. The electropalatograph also involves the use of electrodes communicating with a display screen. Contacts between tongue and palate in the production of consonants are reflected by a visual pattern which can be matched against that of the instructor. Auditory feedback is sometimes manipulated in
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stuttering therapy in order to change the speed at which the stutterer hears his speech, or the feedback may be masked entirely by the introduction of white noise into the ear during speech. These changes in feedback can lead to changes in the stuttering behavior which can then be incorporated into the remedial program. Stuttering therapy also makes use of biofeedback combined with techniques of relaxation. Information relayed from the muscles is presented in visual form so that the degree of relaxation can be judged. This technique is also effective with certain types of dysarthria and vocal misuse. 6. Alternative Communication
Alternative communication means an alternative to the most popular and conventional medium which is spoken language. This may not be a realistic medium for those whose severe intellectual or physical problems place limits upon their movement and planning. The same limitations preclude the use of writing. Alternative forms of communication may also be preferred by those with profound deafness and/or comprehension difficulties. Alternative communication systems fall into two main groups—manual signing systems and aided symbol systems. Some alternatives can be combined with spoken language in order to clarify it and extend its meaning. When used in this way it is called augmentative or assistive communication since it does not carry the whole communicative burden. 6.1 Manual Signing Systems The deaf community has long employed manual signing systems for communication between members. However, the teaching of such systems has been fiercely opposed by advocates of the oral approach to language and oralists maintain that, with modern hearing aids, even the severely deaf can gain useful speech. The combination of amplified speech and lipreading enables the child to lay down linguistic patterns common both to normally hearing and hearing impaired. Consequently, fuller integration into the community should be possible than if a minority system is used. The opposing view, vehemently propagated by deaf people, is that sign is a naturally expressive and communicative outlet for the deaf and one which they can use with grace and competence. By being forced to join in a majority language which they cannot use with ease, they are unable to make their own cultural contribution and are at a perpetual disadvantage. However, more flexible approaches are now being advocated especially bearing in mind that the guiding principle is that the communication system should be maximally useful to the individual and to the family. The manual systems evolved by the deaf are natural languages. Both American Sign Language and British Sign Language have developed independently of
Pathology: Overview spoken English. Unfortunately they have also developed independently of each other and cannot be used interchangeably. Neither have they spread to other non-aural communities. The manual systems that are taught are contrived languages giving an accurate manual representation of spoken or written English. One in widespread use is the Paget-Gorman system designed by Sir Richard Paget and subsequently developed by Pierre Gorman, himself profoundly deaf. The complexity and precision of this system renders it unsuitable for those with additional learning problems or motor handicap. For these people, the Makaton Vocabulary, devised by a British speech therapist Margaret Walker, has much to offer. Makaton signs share a common base with Signed English, a system designed by both deaf and hearing educators. This system uses conventional English word order with added, complementary signs. Thus children may start to communicate using Makaton and move on to Signed English, with or without speech, as interest and ability are developed. Basic vocabulary items can be thoroughly mastered because of the reduced learning load but able pupils have access to systems which allow for conceptual development and more complex syntax. A number of educators prefer their hearing-impaired pupils to combine speech and sign even in the early stages of language development. Cued Speech and Total Communication are methods which rely upon such a combination. The combined approach must be a matter for individual selection since some authorities argue that the double representation causes confusion. 6.2 Aided Symbol Systems People who are able to give consistent signals but not to perform movements at speed, employ communication systems which rely entirely upon visual representation. A well-known system designed to bridge the gap between pictures and conventional orthography is Blissymbolics which is a semantically based system, graphic, and nonalphabetical. A major strength is the incorporation of components which can refer to concepts rather than specific word equivalents. Thus ideas can be expressed and received. Another
system, Rebus, uses ideographic symbols in order to develop prereading skills. Successful communication by any system depends upon the disabled person being able to use it with ease or at least with confidence. Equally important is the availability of people who are prepared to spend time upon communicative exchanges. Aided symbol displays can be simply presented upon a tray (i.e., a communication board) or can make use of either computer or television screens. Identification of the symbol is by any means over which the individual can establish control, for example, eye pointing or the direction of a light beam from a source mounted on the head. In addition to alternative systems of communication there are technological aids which allow the user to generate messages. The simplest of these is the board containing pictures of people and objects of primary importance to the speaker. These are invaluable in the early stages of recovery from language loss but they can only be used to indicate needs and not to convey sophisticated messages. Sophistication is associated with the electronic devices used by intelligent persons with chronic or progressive neuromotor disabilities. Devices which have storage and memory capacity allow the user to assemble a whole directive or argument before generating and transmitting it. They thus act not only to communicate ideas but to stimulate thought processes. Some devices have output through television or computer screens, or through built-in strip printers; others employ simulated or recorded speech. The extent of the material to be expressed is only limited by the intelligence of the user and the amount of money that can be spent on the device. See also: Language Disorders; Deafness and Sign Language Instruction; Pathology: Overview. Bibliography Lass N J, McReynolds L V, Northern J, Yoder D E (eds.) 1988 Handbook of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology. B C Decker, Toronto, ON Leahy M M (ed.) 1989 Disorders of Communication The Science of Intervention. Progress in Clinical Studies Series. Taylor and Francis, London
Pathology: Overview J. M. Cooper
In a comprehensive work on language and linguistics it is important to consider how language may fail to develop, or, having developed, later break down—what
effects this may have, and what might be done to help restore this function. This overview is intended to familiarize the reader with the scope of the pathology of language.
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The Individual Learner 1. Defining Language Pathology
The term 'language pathology' is a complex concept that requires definition. As used in this encyclopedia, it covers all the disorders of linguistic communication, including those of speech, hearing, reading, writing, and signing. It refers not only to the breakdown of the 'symbolic' aspects of communication, involving problems in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, but also to the breakdown of the 'nonsymbolic' aspects, that is, problems of voice, fluency, and articulation. Historically, the terms 'speech' and 'language' have often been confused. In much of the literature the term 'language disorders' is frequently used in a restricted way, referring only to the symbolic aspects of disorders of communication, that is, those concerned with the formulation and structure of meaning. The term 'speech disorders' is used in reference to the nonsymbolic disorders, that is, those concerned with the motor act of uttering speech sounds. To separate language and speech in this way, however, causes problems when considering, for example, phonological disorders.The term 'speech' is also ambiguous as it is often used in a broad sense, referring to any aspect of oral communication that is spoken language which must include syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. 'Communication disorder' is now an accepted term used to refer to a number of clinical entities and includes all the disorders that arise, either in the encoding of messages to stimulate meaning in the mind of another and/or the decoding of the intended meaning received from others. It thus embraces any disturbance (i.e., disorder) in the exchange of ideas and intentions between communicating parties. Language pathology can therefore be defined as the field of study concerned with disorders of communication. It is an interdisciplinary study embracing knowledge from the behavioral, biological, linguistic, and physical sciences. There are several ways in which such disorders can be explored and it is helpful to consider various theoretical models or approaches to the subject which have developed from the fields of medicine, psychology, and linguistics. Communication disorders have been characterized more by divisiveness than by synthesis. Difficulties in defining the conditions, discovering their causes, establishing accurate techniques of evaluation, and arriving at universally acceptable and successful patterns of management account in part for the wide variation in prevalence estimates. The continuing difficulty in gathering accurate epidemiological data must be stressed, and that which is available in the 1990s should be viewed with caution when used in planning service needs for these disorders. 2. The Effects of Communication Disorders Communication disorders must be viewed within the context of expected behavior and not just as eti272
ological categories. If the ability to listen, speak, read, write, or sign has not developed to a level where it can be meaningfully used, or has developed but then became impaired, then the individual can be said to be communicatively disordered. This may in turn affect educational achievement, interpersonal relationships, social adjustment, employment success, indeed, most human endeavors and the quality of life. However, it is important to recognize genuine difficulties and not to confuse them with perceived difficulties which can arise from cultural prejudice or intolerance. For example, regional accents in some circumstances are considered socially unacceptable, and a very weak voice or hesitant response may irritate. These do not come within the province of language pathology but rather of elocution which aims to foster the art of clear speaking, the development of the aesthetic quality of the voice, and of rhetorical excellence. 3. Terminology and Classification of Communication Disorders
Although since the 1970s there has been a considerable growth of knowledge in the field of language pathology, terminological difficulties still beset this area of study. The increase in knowledge has been stimulated by many different disciplines and this has generated many terms, some of which are interchangeable. Some terms hold different meanings for different people and for different cultures, and some are now rarely used or are obsolete, for example, 'dyslalia,' 'logorrhea,' 'idioglossia,' 'rhinolalia,' etc. There are other terms which are gaining popularity and still others which have shifted in meaning. An example of the latter category is the term 'palilalia,' which was originally used to refer to involuntary repetition of words and phrases. In the 1990s it is gaining popularity as a term to describe more specifically a condition of neurological deterioration characterized by acceleration of speech rate and disruption of rhythm, viz., neurogenic stuttering. Some inconsistencies in regard to the terminology are unavoidable in the articles on language pathology contained in this encyclopedia, but this is due to the state of knowledge in the 1990s. For the same reason no definitive lists of 'cause and cure' will be found— language pathology is a field with vast areas still to be explored, and answers that are popular today may be outmoded by tomorrow. A terminological compromise has therefore been adopted and the articles referring to language pathology have been selected to provide information based upon the long-established categories of voice, articulation, language, and fluency in relation to spoken language, and reading and writing disorders in relation to written language. Descriptions of specific clinical entities such as, for example, deafness, cleft palate, or mental retardation have for the most part been rejected in favor of viewing
Pathology: Overview communication disorders within the context of their language characteristics and not as etiological labels. Little relevant information is conveyed by such labels because those sharing the same label often exhibit very different communicative abilities and difficulties. This does not, however, deny the extreme importance of exploring etiology. 4. Language Pathology as a Clinically Applied Science Language pathology is responsible not only for obtaining knowledge about communication disorders, but also for the management of them, that is, the prevention, identification, evaluation, and intervention of such disorders. It must be acknowledged that the prevention of disorders of communication is still in the early stages. An expansion of knowledge is needed about conditions which cause these disorders and with which they are associated. Although professional practice has focused on identification, evaluation, and intervention, obviously prevention should be the prime objective. The early identification of a communication disorder in children and adults is very important and will affect the outcome of any intervention measures that may follow. Identification includes routine developmental screening procedures and/or systematic observation in young children and examination of 'at risk' indicators in both children and adults. The 'at risk' indicators are biological, genetic, and perinatal events as well as adventitious disease, degeneration, or trauma affecting the nervous system and severe emotional or environmental deprivation. In the selection, use, and interpretation of screening tests their reliability and validity must be carefully considered. If evidence of language pathology is identified, referral for a full and comprehensive evaluation of the communication disorder should follow. This may involve a variety of professional personnel and a wide range of assessment procedures. This detailed evaluation of the problem forms the database from which decisions about future management and intervention strategies can be formulated. For the intervention process to take place satisfactorily the knowledge obtained must be useful and it must be accurate. The problems must be analyzed to determine important variables, relationships between them described, and crucial questions asked so that definitive answers can be arrived at. However, it will be appreciated that analyzing any form of human behavior is necessarily problematic; the possibility always remains that an unknown condition may come between suspected cause and observable effect. The ultimate objective of language intervention is effective communication and any intervention can only be justified if it is reasonably calculated to achieve this objective. It cannot always remove the problem
but it should enable the person to communicate more efficiently. The strategies employed in achieving this will vary. Intervention is experimental because of the complex interaction of numerous variables and it therefore has to be approached tentatively. The nature of the undertaking and the emphasis upon results cannot always be approached in the same manner as a laboratory experiment and no single theoretical system can be applied. It is essential that the practitioner should have freedom to design, observe, implement, and then to interpret the results in order to adapt and modify the intervention process to suit the individual patient. The knowledge gained from clinical management research leads in turn to additional perspectives and insights on theories of language acquisition and use. It can be seen that the management aspect of language pathology calls for attempts to change or modify language function and thus the dynamic features of this work enter the domain of clinical practice and education. 5. Language Pathology as a Clinical Profession The professionals who undertake the investigative and therapeutic tasks are variously named throughout the world—speech pathologists, speech and language pathologists, speech therapists, speech and language therapists, logopedists, orthophonists, phoniatrists, etc. This profusion of titles continues to be the subject of much discussion, particularly in the USA and UK. The issues that are raised in selecting an appropriate label are not trivial, as they are about professional status and rewards, academic orientation, and financial remuneration. There would be merit in achieving consistency of terminology, not only of the professional label but of classification (see Sect. 3). Certainly within the European Union, such harmony of the nomenclature would be advantageous. However, it is not just these terminological disparities but the variation of more fundamental issues which needs to be understood and addressed. The range of professional skills and the depth of study undertaken in preparation to carry out this work also varies from country to country. In some countries there are limitations on the range of communication disorders studied and treated; in others the work with communication disorders in children may be separated from those of adults. In some countries where the study of language pathology has developed to a high degree of academic endeavor this has resulted in specialism and this is reflected in the use of such terms, for example, as 'voice therapist' and 'aphasiologist.' For the purpose of the articles contained in this work the terms 'language pathologist,' 'speech and language pathologist,' 'clinician,' and 'therapist' have usually been adopted and used interchangeably. The term 'voice therapist' has also been used with specific reference to clinical management of disorders of voice.
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The Individual Learner The study of language pathology and the preparation of the professional personnel is usually conducted in universities or institutions of higher education which can provide the necessary exposure to relevant teaching, research, and clinical experience. The emphasis of the education and preparation of these professional personnel has shifted in recent years from lists of subjects studied, the number of hours of study undertaken, and the number of hours of clinical practice that have been completed, to what knowledge the potential professional should possess and what skills should have been mastered. These must include an understanding of the following: (a) the anatomical, physiological, acoustic, psychological, linguistic, and phonetic bases of communication disorders; (b) the etiological bases of communication disorders; (c) the nature of research methodology relevant to the study of communication disorders; (d) the wide variety of handicapping conditions in which a communication disorder is a concomitant condition; (e) the diversity of social and cultural patterns that affect language; (f) the nature of prevention of communication disorders. Professional training must also include the ability to: (a) identify children and adults with communication disorders by the use of appropriate screening and assessment procedures; (b) assess the nature and severity of the communication disorders by the use of diagnostic procedures which assumes competence in behavioral assessment techniques, both formal and informal; (c) plan and conduct programs of intervention for adults and children with communication disorders including the interpretation of diagnostic data, case selection and prioritization, therapeutic approaches, data recording, and consultation with other professionals and with relatives; (d) critically evaluate intervention strategies and modify accordingly; (e) apply the assessment and intervention procedures to a variety of appropriate settings including, for example, hospitals, community clinics, schools, homes, and private offices; (f) participate in planning and conducting programs directed towards prevention of communication disorders. 6. Transferring Knowledge and Clinical Skills
In the second half of the twentieth century, considerable academic and professional advances have been made in the field of language pathology. Tech274
niques of evaluation and intervention have become extremely sophisticated in certain parts of the world. The countries in which extensive advances have occurred have a considerable influence on practice in the less developed nations. Where specific management techniques have proved to be effective, then it may be justifiable to consider transferring them to countries which are just starting to develop services for children and adults with communication disorders but this should not preclude the careful examination of alternative methods which might be more suitable to the social and cultural patterns of those countries. The relativity and universality of conditions and procedures must continue to be explored. 7. Interprofessional Practice
The language pathologist is not alone in caring for those with communication disorders. There are many elements in the management of them which will involve a number of other professionals and, most importantly, parents and relatives. It is important therefore that language pathology is recognized not only as a field of interdisciplinary study but that its clinical application is recognized as an area of interprofessional practice. However, it is normally the language pathologist who assumes the primary responsibility for the management of communication disorders in both children and adults and for coordinating the interprofessional input so that it focuses on the whole person rather than on separate aspects of the communication disorder. The language pathologist will synthesise information and, in consultation with the relevant health, education, and social services, plan for and expedite appropriate service provision for the communication disordered population and, equally importantly, take an active role in planning programs of prevention of these diseases. 8. Future Study and Application
Language pathology is made up of different types of knowledge, it is an epistemological hybrid and therefore any future advance of knowledge in this field must continue to be through the development and investigation of a variety of theoretical concepts and methods involving many different disciplines. This approach must apply to the future study and application of knowledge about epidemiology, etiology, classification, and management of communication disorders. A discipline and its professional exponents continue to develop over time and are influenced from many sources and by the environmental and economic climate of the time. The rapid development of technology, for example, is having, and will continue to have, a profound effect. In the future, in addition to the disciplines already contributing information, more can be anticipated from the computer sciences, the
Reading and Writing Disorders neurosciences, and the biochemical sciences and this input will in turn be reflected at best in the prevention, but certainly in the alleviation of communication disorders.
See also: Reading and Writing Disorders; Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention; Language Disorders; Deafness and Sign Language Instruction; The Blind Child.
Reading and Writing Disorders B. Byers Brownf
This article is concerned with intervention procedures which are applicable to those whose disorders of written language are associated with visual-linguistic rather than visual-perceptive impairment (see Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention). 1. Developmental Disorders of Reading and Writing Intervention starts at the prereading stage with children who are at risk because they have difficulty in acquiring spoken language. Parents are shown how to give these children a richer language base through reading to them, teaching them rhymes and rhyming games and awakening their interest in how words sound as well as in what they mean. In addition, the children may be encouraged to take an interest in writing by making squiggles on a sheet of paper. This is a step towards appreciating that such squiggles have meaning for other people. Where there are persisting problems of verbal language, the teaching of reading and writing will be incorporated in the intervention program. Most language-delayed and language-disordered children have difficulty in remembering words and this affects their spoken and written language since the learning of words in context, with plenty of opportunity to practice them, will be a continuing feature. It is important to emphasize context because words are not only understood better in context, they are recalled more easily. Children with disorders of the dyspraxic and the phonological-syntactic type require considerable work on word segmentation. They lack the ability to break words into their component parts and rebuild them. Work on this skill makes use of both auditory and visual avenues. The word is said in its entirety by the instructor and then written in segmented fashion. The child copies the segments saying them aloud. Finally, the whole word is presented and said and the child attempts to copy it. The number of stages in the process and the number of times it is repeated depend on the amount of difficulty experienced by the child.
The same groups of children also need auditory training particularly focused on rhyming words. As their ability to appreciate sound components of words improves, they are taught how to break down and reassemble sound clusters or blends and they are then some way to being prepared for alphabet use. Children who are hyperlexic need help on the same lines as autistic children focusing on meaningful communication and comprehension. It is important that the child's precocious reading skills are not emphasized to the detriment of spoken language although some therapists use the strengths of word recognition or sentence recognition as a step forward to the development of verbal comprehension. Learning disabled children show reading and writing deficits either as the most conspicuous feature of the disability or as part of their general lack of linguistic competence. In the latter case, written work will concentrate on extracting and conveying a number of different meanings using the same kind of strategies as for spoken language. In other instances the teacher must take the child back to the point of written language acquisition where deviation occurs. This may be in visual-perceptual skills or impaired segmentation or lack of phoneme-grapheme correspondence. The strategies developed at that point have apparently proved unsuccessful and must be exchanged for more useful ones as indicated above. 2. Acquired Disorders of Reading and Writing Reading disorders are associated with almost every form of aphasia as are writing disorders. They are related to the kind of aphasia and are usually treated concurrently with spoken language. The patient's ability to recall the alphabet, to copy words and sentences, and to read aloud or silently, are part of the assessment. In addition to linguistic disturbances, the patient may have suffered paralysis of the right hand and arm. If this is not too severe he may prefer to use it for writing. In either case, printing may be immediately easier than cursive writing but the latter should be used as soon as possible.
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The Individual Learner Early rehabilitation is devoted towards reestablishing the individual components of the written code, letters, numbers, words, and sentences. This involves matching, copying, writing a simple sequence such as the alphabet or the days of the week or spontaneous writing of familiar material and dictation. If the condition is one of global aphasia, the therapist may prefer to concentrate first on comprehension of spoken language and then teach word identification at a simple level. Comprehension of reading may be affected through disorder at the semantic or the syntactic level and must be tackled differently. Strategies employed will be associated with those for verbal language following language loss in adulthood. Continuous practice is necessary and patients are required to read and write at some level every day. A first step towards narrative may be diary keeping, first in note form then with full sentences. Written material
may be read aloud or silently. Unfortunately, the selection of reading material is difficult since simple stories tend to be infantile and thus insulting, but it may be possible to make use of material compiled for use in teaching English as a foreign language. As with spoken language, the amount of importance the individual attaches to the reading skill varies with occupation and interest. The same kind of sensitivity,and understanding is therefore required from the therapist as for intervention in spoken language. See also: Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention; Pathology: Intervention. Bibliography Snowling M (ed.) 1985 Children's Written Language Difficulties. NFER-Nelson, Windsor Wallach G, Butler K (eds.) 1984 Language Learning Disabilities in School Age Children. Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore, MD
The Blind Child M. Garman
1. Introduction
The question of how blind children acquire language may reasonably provoke three phases of response in the person coming to the issue for the first time. Initially, there may be the feeling of puzzlement that there is such an issue, since there is a much less obvious connection between vision and oral language development in the preschool period, compared, say, with the obvious handicapping condition of deafness. Next, comes the realization that visual input may actually be crucial in various ways—from the reinforcement of auditory perception of speech sounds, to the cognitive representation of the world we inhabit and the repertoire of what we can talk about; thus, one wonders how blind children cope (Preisler 1995). The final phase is puzzlement again, concerning how we may interpret the observations that have been made concerning the real, and not-so-real, problems that blind children may have, and relating these interpretations to what we know of language and general cognitive development in normally-sighted children. To this field of enquiry have come researchers from education, medicine, linguistics, and psychology. For obvious reasons, researchers have sought to investigate children who are congenitally and functionally blind, that is, so that no prior or partial visual input may be available to the process of language
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acquisition. This is the sense in which the term ' blind' is used in what follows. There has also been a natural tendency to look for blindness in isolation from other conditions such as deafness, mental handicap, and so on; however, the attendant danger is that it may lead to a 'purity' of approach at the expense of conclusions being drawn on the basis of small, highly-selected, and unrepresentative samples of children. 2. The Evidence on Language Acquisition in the Blind Child
2.1 The General Picture A fairly traditional view has built up, which may be illustrated by the following quote from Fraiberg (1977: 282-3; emphasis added) We were able to facilitate the blind infant's development in every sphere ... but the impediment of blindness could be discerned at every point in development at which representational intelligence would lead the sighted child into the organisation of the object world. We could facilitate the affective ties to human partners, but the constitution of those partners as objects was delayed by comparison with sighted child norms. We could facilitate the coordination of hand and ear, but this coordination was still dependent upon the blind
The Blind Child child's ability to attribute substantiality to persons and things when only one of their attributes, sound, was given. We facilitated locomotion but we could still discern the impediment to locomotion, the absence of the distant lure usually provided by vision, the reach for 'something out there.' We saw that blindness was not a major impediment to the acquisition of language in the first two years of life when we were able to maximise the experience of the blind child and his language environment. But the impediment of blindness revealed itself in an impoverished dialogue and in the protracted delay in the constitution of a stable concept of /. The blind child does not see and react to its carer's facial expressions, or the simultaneous nature of visual and auditory events, including speech sounds with lip movements. The sighted adult does not know how to interpret the blind infant's blank facial expression, and may fail to initiate a speech routine which would be natural to engage in with a more 'responsive' child. From the child's point of view, individuals' voices may be distinguished, but they come and go unpredictably, and the blind child remains dependent on the initiatives of others. Conceptual development studies among blind young school children have reported difficulties with spatial activities or relationships, and an impaired ability to identify objects presented to them. For the blind child who is not otherwise handicapped, the period of greatest development is between 18 months and 5 years, showing particular characteristics in imitating speech sounds, which may actually lead to 'echolalia'—the meaningless, repetitive use of language; and their limited conceptual experience may lead to 'verbalism'—the use of language forms in a seemingly empty fashion (Tobin 1993). In line with such observations, reports have been made of between a third and half of all institutionalized young blind children having 'language disorders'; and it has been claimed that the contrast between this situation and that which finds only mildly delayed language development arises from the presence versus absence of other handicaps, and optimal (see the quotation above) versus indifferent environmental factors (Mills 1983). 2.2 Linguistic Investigations More recent, and more linguistically sophisticated, studies have been able to document aspects of the problem more precisely. 2.2.7 Speech sounds There is evidence that sighted children can learn the articulatory movements that they can see (e.g., in words beginning with /b/, /p/, and /m/) with fewer errors than those they can't (e.g., /t/, /d/, and /n/). The blind child's substitudon errors cross the visiblenonvisible boundary more than do the sighted children's, and are less amenable to statement in terms of
rule application. The question arises as to how far such tendencies might lead to difficulties in the area of speech sound system development (Mills 1983). 2.2.2 Morphology I syntax Dunlea and Andersen (1992) have documented that blind children acquire time morphology before space morphology, contrary to what is found in sighted children; they suggest this reveals the operation of adaptive strategies and saliency of information, and the sort of relationship between cognition and language where either may influence the other. Mills (1993) found evidence for delayed acquisition of morphology and syntax, and rather distinct acquisition of semantics in some areas; but concludes that there are no serious problems in these areas. 2.2.3 Vocabulary development Landau and Gleitman (1985) have tried to address the issue of blind children's early vocabulary of objects and events, and their later object-event (predicateargument) structures; they have particularly focused on what might be referred to as 'visual terminology' as illustrated in the use of colour terms, or verbs such as look and see. The main issue is whether such usages by blind children are 'verbalisms,' as the tradition states. They report that from the earliest stage, see was used as a haptic perception verb, involving the touching of an object. But if see was synonymous with touch, meaning 'contact [object] with hands,' look was treated as 'explore [object] with hands'. They have also documented that a blind child comes to know that sighted people must have objects 'held up' in order to see them, that they cannot see when it is dark, or through walls, etc., ... in short that they have a nonhaptic mode of perception whose constraints can be known (by the blind observer) by various kinds of knowledge, transmitted through contexts of language use. If this is right, the blind child acquires two sorts of representation for such words; a personal, haptic version, and a more skeletal, abstract version of what the representation must be for a sighted person. Bigelow (1987) has found the early vocabulary of blind children to parallel that of sighted children, in age and rate of acquisition, and in terms of what the children chose to lexicalize. Earlier, Marmor (1978) was able to determine that congenitally blind college students had been able to develop a two-dimensional color space with an order of terms within it that approximated the color spectrum. 2.2.4 Reference But what of the blind child's abilities to determine the referential function of language—to identify the object or event being talked about, if it is not literally to hand at the time? Mulford (in Mills 1983) concludes that by the age of five, blind children have acquired sufficient linguistic and non-linguistic skills to establish listener 277
The Individual Learner attention and reference, at least when interacting with sympathetic adult listeners, and in a known environment. She suggests that blind children can learn to use that and there without prior use of their corresponding nonverbal gestures (which act as precursors in the case of the sighted child), but that their development follows a different course, through use of unconventional gestures or routines, and possibly at a lower rate than in the case of sighted children. 2.2.5 Input and interactions Rowland (in Mills 1983: 131) suggests that Just as in motor development the blind child often goes directly from sitting to walking, unable to explore the distal environment at all until posturally mature enough to walk, so she seems to make a leap in communicative development, going directly to language as the first means of distal reference. Coordinating an unseen and unreachable adult with an unseen and unreachable object would be difficult without at least primitive referencing strategies. With neither conventional indicating gestures nor visual regard as an early means of distal reference, it becomes even more critical that early vocalizations be consistently reinforced and shaped—first into conversational patterns and eventually into language. This prompts the study of blind children's development of conversational exchanges, in terms of their content and their turn-taking characteristics. In a study of twins, one blind and the other sighted, between 2-5-3-5 years of age, Perez-Pereira and Castro (1992) found the blind twin actually had a slightly higher mean length of utterance (MLU), but with more routines, calls, and repetitions; Perez-Pereira (1994) confirmed that the blind twin used modified imitations, repetitions, and routines more frequently and over a more prolonged period, than her sighted twin sister, raising the possibility that the blind child specially relied on these as part of a holistic acquisition strategy, especially for appropriate pragmatic functions. Kekelis and Prinz (1996) have documented that blind children's turns were shorter than their mothers', contrary to their sighted child controls. Mills (1993, 1996) has argued that, by contrast with the areas of morphology/syntax, conversational rules may be hard for blind children to acquire, leading to a pattern of some delay, but eventual successful acquisition; and that blind children cannot make use of their interlocutors' nonverbal reactions to infelicitous utterances, a significant factor in the acquisition of the pragmatics of ellipsis. 3. Interpreting the Role of Vision in Normal Language Development
3,1 The Testing Ground Approach Language acquisition by blind children might be treated as a testing-ground, particularly for cognition-
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language relationships in early language development. For example: if reciprocal gaze between infant and caregiver is a basis for the establishment of (proto-) conversational interchange, and if conversational units are the building-blocks of language acquisition in the preschool period, then blind children might be at a disadvantage in language acquisition, other things being equal. Andersen et al. (1993) conclude that the effect of blindness on child language acquisition cannot be wholly attributed to either restricted experience in the absence of visual input, or to differences in the language input to the child; rather, experiential input may affect some areas whereas linguistic input more strongly affects others, with a complex interaction between them. Independent adaptive strategies used by the child suggest plasticity in the acquisition process itself. There is considerable evidence that suggests that there are indeed some disadvantages in the language acquisition process with blind children; but also that there are many similarities with their sighted peers. If the disadvantages are supposed to result from the blindness, what may be concluded regarding the similarities? Either that what was thought to be crucial to language acquisition is not, after all; or that indeed it is crucial, but that blind children may compensate for it in some way. This in turn may lead to consideration of the view of language acquisition (and language abilities generally) that, given intact prerequisites, certain strategies will regularly be followed, but, in the absence of them, certain alternative (and ultimately specifiable) strategies are available. According to this view, it would be wrong to say that, because blind child X and sighted child Y progress in different ways towards their ultimate language abilities, that child X is language-impaired. (It would also be wrong to say that child Y's strategies are not basic, in some way.) 3.2 The Search for Suitable Norms What sort of norms should be applied to the language abilities of the blind child? It has been usual to compare blind and sighted children. This is perfectly reasonable, but leads to problems of interpretation, as suggested above. It is hard to know how to compare like with like. If blind and sighted children are matched on age, some 'development delay' might be found, but it might be suspected nevertheless that this is actually a grossly misleading characterization of what the blind children are achieving in their own terms. If matched by language abilities, difficult decisions may be faced regarding which similarities to use and which differences to ignore, for the purpose. It may also be felt that, after all, not so much is known as was thought about langauge acquisition in the sighted child; not enough, at any rate, to illuminate the case of the blind child. Perhaps blind children should be considered in relation to specifically language impaired children,
The Blind Child then? This might seem to be a way of answering the question whether blind children's language development is impaired. However, given the heterogeneity of language impairments, and our ignorance concerning the sorts of basic and compensatory strategies that such children employ, turning to this source of evidence may seem simply to compound our problems. However, it is worth mentioning, if only to underline the point that 'language impairment' must be a discoverable phenomenon independently of whether it occurs in a blind child, a deaf child, a child with mental handicap, or, indeed, a child with no discernible 'predisposing' condition at all (the most common situation). A third source of normative information may be sought in the language abilities of the linguistically mature adult who is blind (i.e., functionally and congenitally blind—the sort of adult who has passed through the blind langauge acquisition process). This is worth considering seriously if there is concern to separate out developmental from visual factors in language abilities; but it immediately raises the question as to how far such blind adult language abilities are distinct from those of our ultimate norm-reference, the sighted linguistically mature adult. If, say, the way is documented in which blind adults handle dialogue in a situation where their blindness leads to, for example, difficulty or ambiguity of reference, or indeterminacy of the addressee's attention, then the question arises: Does this difficulty reflect what we call language impairment? If the answer is negative, then the blind child's language acquisition process may be better interpreted. 3.3 Language as Problem versus Language as Solution Initially the blind child may be thought of as at a disadvantage in the acquisition of language: not vocalizing too much, not getting the normal sort of input, not being able to see distal objects and events at a time when locomotion is restricted, etc. But there is evidence that, beyond a certain point in development, aspects of the linguistic communicative system may themselves serve as compensating elements in the overall communicative abilities of the blind child. The development of dialogue enabled [Suzanne] to discover new functions for language, such as requesting objects, and played a major role in extending her access to the surrounding context, including the activities and independent perspectives of other people, (from the summary of Urwin, in Mills 1983) It is perhaps because of this that blind adults are thought of as inhabiting the same world as their sigh-
ted conversational partners, even though it is known that some of their perceptions must be different. This in turn suggests another comparison to be studied: that of the blind linguistically mature adult with the blind language impaired. A question to be asked here is whether language is the best, or the only, source of compensatory strategies in the development and maintenance of a mature representation of one's environment. See also: Language Acquisition; Input and Interaction; Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability; Vocabulary in Language Acquisition Bibliography Andersen E S, Dunlea A, Kekelis L 1993 The impact of input: Language acquisition in the visually impaired. First Language 13: 23-49 Bigelow A 1987 Early words of blind children. J. Ch. L. 6: 46-56 Dunlea A, Andersen E S 1992 The emergence process: Conceptual and linguistic influences on morphological development. First Language 12: 95-115 Fraiberg S 1977 Insights from the Blind: Comparative Studies of Blind and Sighted Infants. Basic Books, New York Kekelis L S, Prinz P M 1996 Blind and sighted children with their mothers: The development of discourse skills. Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 90: 423-36 Landau B S, Gleitman L R 1985 Language and Experience— Evidence from the Blind Child. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Marmor G S 1978 Age at onset of blindness and the development of the semantics of colour names. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 25: 267-78 Mills A 1983 Language Acquisition in the Blind Child: Normal and Deficient. Croom Helm, Beckenham, pp. 46-56 Mills A 1993 Language acquisition and development with sensory impairment: Blind children. In: Blanken G, Dittmann J, Grimm H, Marshall J C, Wallesch C (eds.) Linguistic Disorders and Pathologies: An International Handbook. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 679-87 Mills A 1996 Language problems in older blind children: Syntax or pragmatics? In: Ehlich K (ed.) Kindliche Sprachentwicklung: Konzepte und Empiric. Westdeuscher Verlag, Opladen, pp. 173-85 Perez-Pereira M 1994 Imitations, repetitions, routines and the child's analysis of language: Insights from the blind. J.Ch.L. 21:317-37 Perez-Pereira M, Castro J 1992 Pragmatic functions of blind and sighted children's language: A twin case study. First Language 12: 17-37 Preisler G M 1995 The development of communication in blind and deaf infants: Similarities and differences. Journal of Child Health Care and Development 21: 79-110 Tobin M J 1993 The language of blind children: Communication, words and meanings. In: Beveridge M C, Reddiford G (eds.) Language, Culture and Education. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK, pp. 96-101
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Second Language Processing Age in Second Language Learning T. Scovel
When it comes to age and learning a new language, most people have the strong and abiding belief that youth is served best—the younger you are, the better. Equally pervasive is the perception that aging has such a negative effect on language acquisition that older people are widely viewed as rather poor language learners. Popular as these notions are, they are not consistently supported by research. On reflection, it should not be too surprising that most of the studies in second language acquisition (SLA) which have focused on this issue of age have garnered mixed conclusions. There are so many factors which swirl within and around any foreign language learning situation that it is nearly impossible to assume that one single variable, such as the age of the learner, will emerge as the salient predictor of a learner's success (or failure) to master a new tongue. What proficiency level are we expecting from the learners—the ability to converse over coffee or the skill needed to translate a technical document? What aspects of language learning are we looking at—clear and accurate pronunciation or the ability to write an expository essay? And what about other variables such as the learner's motivation or the linguistic differences between the learner's mother tongue and the target language? When these and many other factors are considered, it becomes more apparent why it is difficult to endorse sweeping generalizations such as 'the younger, the better.' 1. Child First Language Acquisition The ability of infants (from Latin, 'without speech') to pick up their mother tongue quickly and accurately is so universal that the complexity of this undertaking often escapes our appreciation. It is only in those very rare and unfortunate circumstances when an infant does not acquire language because of an innate pathology (such as autism), or because of severe social isolation (as with 'feral children'), that we recognize the enormity of the task which every normal child accomplishes with such apparent ease. Regardless of the infant's socioeconomic circumstances and irres-
pective of the linguistic complexity of the child's mother tongue, virtually all children progress through the same stages of language acquisition and acquire their first language fluently by about the age of six. Of course, there is much to learn about the language after this age—literacy, style shifting, more complex grammatical expressions, and perhaps even a second or third language. But children in any culture master all the sounds of their mother tongue, amass a productive vocabulary of several thousand words, learn the majority of the morphological and syntactic structures, and acquire a great deal of knowledge about the pragmatics, discourse patterns, and sociolinguistic uses of their new language at an early age. Adults, who have often struggled to learn a foreign language in school, marvel at the fluency of the little children they happen to encounter who speak that foreign language as their mother tongue. How then can we explain this apparent age advantage of the young? Why is it that first language acquisition among children seems so simple and, in apparent contrast, foreign language learning among adults appears to be so laborious? Studies initiated by psycholinguists in the 1960s have revealed one explanation to this puzzle. Through clever experiments with infants, these researchers used a variety of techniques ranging from counting sucking responses and number of heartbeats to measuring an infant's EEG waves, and correlated these physiological measures with the babies' reactions to subtle acoustic changes in speech sounds. For example, using these techniques, experiments have revealed that neonates who are only a few weeks old appear to immediately notice the difference between the sounds /b/ and /p/. Because this ability is revealed very early in an infant's life, and because it is based upon phonetic contrasts and not upon actual words that babies might have heard in their mother tongue, this evidence points strongly to the conclusion that they are born with an intrinsic ability to attend to these kinds of linguistic contrasts and did not learn them after birth.
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The Individual Learner Another argument for language innateness in children is made in a different way by linguists, who base their argument on a very different kind of evidence. Rather than examine the acquisition of sounds under experimental conditions, these linguists have based their evidence on the overall ability of children to pick up the grammatical rules of their mother tongue. They contend that if you examine all the linguistic input children receive in their first language during their first six or so years of life and then contrast this with any 6-year-old's ability to string together complex syntactic patterns, it seems logical to deduce that children must be born with an innate and abstract set of rules or expectations about what is plausible or implausible in any natural human language. To illustrate, almost all 6-year-old English-speaking children can produce sentences like (a) but they never come out with sentences like (b) (""indicates the sentence is ungrammatical). (a) I won't eat any of that stuff at all! (b) *I won't at all eat any of that stuff! Even if a child has memorized every utterance ever heard during the first 6 years of life, let us assume they have rarely, if ever, heard their parents or adult caretakers say (a) and, for the sake of argument, let us also assume there are no siblings who have modeled this sentence for the child. Sentence (a) does not seem to be unusually complex, but the ungrammatical counterpart (b) reveals that the child has actually acquired a complicated piece of English grammar. The seemingly innocuous phrase at all has two grammatical constraints. It must be used as a modifier of not (or n't); hence, the ungrammaticality of (c). Secondly, at all is a discontinuous structure: it can never be used next to not (or n 't) but must be separated from the negative by an indeterminate number of words from the verb phrase. How do children (c) *I will eat some of that stuff at all! 'learn' these rules? Surely their parents never taught them these two constraints. Obviously, they model their sentences on similar (but not identical) patterns they have heard countless times before in their many encounters with English; nevertheless, how do they develop the expectation that English contains discontinuous structures—phrases like either ...or and not... at all? Many linguists believe that expectations like these are genetically programmed in the human brain, and because patterns like this particular example are universal (i.e., all languages have discontinuous grammatical structures), linguists call this preprogrammed set of expectations about language 'universal grammar.' So children have at least two things going for them when they spend their early years grappling with the task of picking up their first language. They seem to 282
be born with an awareness of which sounds in their environment are particularly significant for speech, and they appear to have tacit, and obviously nonconscious, expectations about which grammatical patterns are possible in a human language. There is also intriguing support for language innateness from a very different kind of research. The vast majority of linguists and psycholinguists find the evidence reputedly supporting the ability of chimps or gorillas to acquire human language severely wanting. The failure of these primates to learn any form of human language seems to stem not from their lack of intelligence, nor from the lack of support on the part of their human experimenters, but from the absence of a genetically specified awareness of human language. Without the universal grammar every human child is born with, it appears impossible to teach even very clever animals the rudiments of human language. Obviously, innateness provides only the skeletal foundations for language acquisition. Linguistic competence cannot be developed without language; it must be fleshed out during a long period of immersion in the mother tongue. From birth through early schooling, children are bathed in a sea of social intercourse. In most cultures and in most situations, a young child is constantly inundated by a steady stream of commands, suggestions, compliments, and questions, and the caretakers who surround the infant intuitively adjust their speech so that the first language input is almost always appropriate for the age level of the growing learner. And young children are constantly responding, not only to the speech they hear, but to the myriad of environmental clues which are being talked about or manipulated around them. Obviously, social interaction also plays a crucial role in ensuring the success of child language learners. Given the innate propensity with which they are born, the incessant and appropriate language in which they are bathed, the continual and clear presence of relevant contexts, and the some 20000 hours of linguistic contact the typical learner receives during childhood, it is no wonder that children acquire their mother tongue so successfully. Indeed, given all these conditions, it is almost impossible to conceive of language learning not taking place! 2. Adult Language Acquisition
The natural tendency is to contrast a child's ability to pick up a first language with an adult's apparent lack of talent for acquiring a foreign tongue. When it comes to language learning, the effort of most adults does not appear to be so much childlike as it does childish! Note, incidentally, that in most discussions involving age differences in language acquisition, SLA researchers tend to define 'adults' as teenagers and older, with puberty usually taken as the chronological demarcation between younger and older language learners. There are many reasons, however, why this
Age in Second Language Learning natural proclivity to make a direct comparison between adults and children is unfair. (a) Although there is the possibility that the innate capacities for language which infants intuitively mobilize in the early stages of mother tongue learning are just as strong in adults, many SLA researchers believe that adults do not have ready access to these innate abilities. Because older learners are cognitively and perceptually so much more fully developed, it is likely that their mental maturity either largely obscures or completely overrides the intrinsic language awareness that young children can tap into. Therefore, adult learners have, at best, only indirect access to universal grammar and, at worse, no recourse to it at all. (b) Somewhat related to their inability to mobilize innate language faculties is the fact that adults have learned how to learn. Their cognitive maturity allows them to think about thinking or talk about talking, and this metalinguistic competence may actually be an impediment to language acquisition. Learning to speak is not just a mental ability, but, like learning to swim or learning to sing on pitch, is a complex physical skill that depends on intuition as well as intelligence. Because children are cognitively immature, their acquisition of physical skills is completely intuitive and reflexive, and they acquire speech skills quite automatically. Older learners, on the other hand, commonly analyze what they are learning, and this slows down the acquisition of language and prevents it from being spontaneous. (c) Most young children acquire their mother tongue as a first language, and even in those homes where more than one language is spoken, sequential bilingualism is more common than the simultaneous acquisition of two languages at once. Younger learners, thus, learn a language for the first time. In stark contrast, however, every adult learns a new tongue the second time around, and millions of older learners around the world acquire even a third or fourth language in the course of their lifetime. Invariably then, the first language an adult has already learned so successfully and so completely will interfere with the acquisition of the second. Naturally, there are benefits of having already learned one language, so the transfer of a mother tongue to the new language can be positive (e.g., a speaker of English learning French already possesses a rich 'French' vocabulary). But old habits die hard, and negative transfer is especially pervasive in the pronunciation and grammar of adult foreign language learners (e.g., even adults who speak French fluently as a foreign language have traces of English in their pronunciation and make subtle errors in their grammar). And when the mother tongue
differs a great deal from the language to be learned, negative transfer delays and complicates adult language acquisition demonstrably (e.g., English-speaking adults exhibit considerable interference in their attempts to learn a language like Japanese). (d) Yet another explanation for the apparent linguistic superiority of children concerns the expectations we harbor about the verbal fluency of adults compared to those we nurture for young learners. Take, for example, an Arabic-speaking family with no knowledge of English and which immigrates to the UK. After a month, all members in that family have picked up a little English, but the expectations their English-speaking neighbors entertain about the proficiency level of the children differ dramatically from the proficiency level they expect of the parents. If the 4-year-old daughter points to the mail carrier and says, rather indistinctly, Postman, she is praised for being so quick and clever. Conversely and also unfairly, what if the child's mother happens to ask, *Is postman come yet? Her obviously much higher level of English proficiency is either overlooked or is judged deficient because of its ungrammaticality. In other words, an adult's attempt to use a fairly complex grammatical pattern is seen as unremarkable, whereas a little child's ability to utter just one word in the target language is counted as clear evidence of success. 3. Research on Age and Acquisition
In contrast to the popular notion that children outdo older learners when it comes to the business of learning a new language, several SLA studies have indicated that if we are fair in our assessment, and quantify the proficiency levels of learners rigorously, adolescents and adults acquire higher proficiency levels in a target language than young children, and they generally achieve these levels more rapidly. Older learners are faster and more efficient language learners for a variety of fairly transparent reasons. As already mentioned, because of their cognitive and perceptual maturity, they are able to make generalizations and observations about the language they are learning which are unobtainable by children because of their relative immaturity. This is an advantage in vocabulary learning, to cite one example, where older learners actively look for relationships among the new words they acquire (e.g., they expect to find synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms). Older learners also have much more social experience than children and because so much of speech deals with social relationships, adolescents and adults expect to learn different ways of saying the same thing to different people. For instance, they expect to encounter different ways of saying 'thank you' depending on whom they are talking to. And almost every adult is literate and thus enjoys a 283
The Individual Learner huge advantage over children, whose literacy is limited at best. Irrespective of the differences in orthography between the mother tongue and the target language, knowing how to read and write in any language is of enormous benefit in the ability to become literate in a second tongue. Older learners enjoy other advantages. Contrast a 4-year-old with a 14-year-old adolescent or a 40-year-old adult in terms of experiential knowledge, attention span, or sense of social propriety, all relevant to the appropriate use of linguistic discourse. Again, the youngest learner is at a distinct disadvantage. For all of these reasons then, it is not surprising why SLA research indicates that age is an advantage in foreign language learning, at least in terms of rate and efficiency of acquisition of all aspects of linguistic performance (i.e., speaking, writing, grammar, social appropriateness, etc.). The perceived advantage of children is clearly not in their learning rate, but in their ultimate attainment, although even the support for this is quite limited. There is clear evidence that under ideal conditions, young learners can acquire any language with native-like pronunciation if they have prolonged contact with that language (or those languages) before puberty. There is also evidence that unless learners enjoy this ideal exposure at a young age, they will never be able to achieve native-like ability in making certain linguistic judgements about a language (e.g., identifying the grammaticality of certain sentences). These are the only ways in which younger learners can end up with ultimately higher levels of achievement in foreign language acquisition. Finally, what about the other side of the age question: is there an upper limit after which learning a new language is either difficult or impossible? Psychological experiments on the effects of aging on memory support the widespread notion that declarative memory (our recollection of names, dates, facts, etc.) does tend to diminish with the decades, although this loss
is relatively minimal as long as individuals remain healthy. There is also evidence for a concomitant loss in perceptual abilities, specifically in visual and auditory acuity. These general findings have a somewhat debilitating effect on the attempts of older learners to acquire a new language. The few SLA studies that have examined the effects of old age on foreign language learning have found great variation among learners and certainly no support that language acquisition is uniquely and adversely affected by old age. In summary, despite the popular perceptions people entertain about the relationship between youth and foreign language learning, the effects of age are difficult to attest and appear to be limited to relatively few aspects of linguistic performance. All things being equal, foreign language learning is most efficient and effective after childhood. Given the diversity of languages around the globe and the pervasiveness of bilingualism and foreign language learning in virtually every nation, it is not surprising to conclude that humans are effective language learners at any age. See also: Starting Early. Bibliography Bialystok E, Hakuta K 1994 In Other Words. Basic Books, New York Harley B 1986 Age in Second Language Learning in Second Language Acquisition. College Hill Press, San Diego, CA Scovel T 1988 A Time to Speak: A Psycholinguistic Inquiry into the Critical Period for Human Speech. Heinle & Heinle, Boston, MA Singleton D, Lengyel Z (eds.) 1995 The Age Factor in Second Language Acquisition. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Skehan P 1998 A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford University Press, Oxford Spolsky B 1989 Conditions for Second Language Learning. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Bilingualism, Individual F. Grosjean
Few areas of linguistics are surrounded by as many misconceptions as is bilingualism. Most people think that bilingualism is a rare phenomenon found only in such countries as Canada, Switzerland, and Belgium and that bilinguals have equal speaking and writing fluency in their languages, have accentless speech, and can interpret and translate without any prior training. The reality is in fact quite different: bilingualism is present in practically every country of the world, in
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all classes of society and in all age groups; in fact, it has been estimated that half the world's population is bilingual. As for bilinguals themselves, the majority acquired their languages at various times during their lives and are rarely equally fluent in them; many speak one of their languages less well than the other (and often with an accent) and many can only read or write one of the languages they speak. Furthermore, few bilinguals are proficient interpreters and translators.
Bilingualism, Individual In this article many facets of the bilingual individual will be discussed; concentration will be on the adult and will focus on the stable bilingual, that is the person who is no longer in the process of acquiring a second or third language. First the bilingual person in terms of language knowledge and use will be described. Then, the bilingual's linguistic behavior when communicating with monolinguals and with other bilinguals will be examined. A certain number of issues in the psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics of bilingualism will be discussed, and the article will end with a brief overview of the attitudes, behaviors, and personality of the bilingual individual. 1. Describing the Bilingual
Although a few researchers have defined bilinguals as those who have native-like control of two or more languages, most others agree that this position is not realistic. If one were to count as bilingual only those people who pass as monolinguals in each of their languages, one would be left with no label for the vast majority of peo'ple who use two or more languages regularly but who do not have native-like fluency in each. This has led researchers to propose other definitions of bilingualism, such as: the ability to produce meaningful utterances in two (or more) languages, the command of at least one language skill (reading, writing, speaking, listening) in another language, the alternate use of several languages, etc. This article will define as bilingual those people who use two (or more) languages (or dialects) in their everyday lives. (Throughout this entry, dialects are subsumed under the term 'language.') Thus, this definition includes people ranging from the migrant worker who speaks with some difficulty the host country's language (and who cannot read and write it) all the way to the professional interpreter who is totally fluent in two languages. In between is found the foreign spouse who interacts with friends in his first language, the scientist who reads and writes articles in a second language (but who rarely speaks it), the member of a linguistic minority who uses the minority language at home only and the majority language in all other domains of life, the deaf person who uses sign language with her friends but a signed form of the spoken language with a hearing person, etc. Despite the great diversity that exists between these people, all share a common feature: they lead their lives with two (or more) languages. (Bilinguals who are no longer using their different languages but who have retained knowledge of them will be termed 'dormant bilinguals.') The reasons that bring languages into contact and hence foster bilingualism are many: migrations of various kinds (economic, educational, political, religious), nationalism and federalism, education and culture, trade and commerce, intermarriage, etc. These factors create various linguistic needs in people who are in contact with two or more languages and
who develop competencies in their languages to the extent required by these needs. In contact situations it is rare that all facets of life require the same language (people would not be bilingual if that were so) or that they always demand two languages (language A and B at work, at home, with friends, etc.). In fact, bilinguals acquire and use their languages for different purposes, in different domains of life, with different people. It is precisely because the needs and uses of the languages are usually quite different that bilinguals rarely develop equal fluency in their languages. The level of fluency attained in a language (more precisely, in a language skill) will depend on the need for that language and will be domain specific. It is thus perfectly normal to find bilinguals who can only read and write one of their languages, who have reduced speaking fluency in a language they only use with a limited number of people, or who can only speak about a particular subject in one of their languages. This explains in part why bilinguals are usually poor interpreters and translators. Not only are specific skills required, but interpretation and translation entail that one has identical lexical knowledge in the two languages, something that most bilinguals do not have. Certain domains and topics are covered by the lexicon of one language, others by the lexicon of the other language, and some few by the two. Interpreting and translating when one lacks the appropriate vocabulary and the necessary skills is thus something that bilinguals find difficult. The failure to understand that bilinguals normally use their languages for different purposes, with different people, and in different domains of life has been a major obstacle to obtaining a clear picture of bilinguals and has had many negative consequences: bilinguals have been described and evaluated in terms of the fluency and balance they have in their two languages; language skills in bilinguals have almost always been appraised in terms of monolingual standards; research on bilingualism has in large part been conducted in terms of the bilingual's individual and separate languages; and, finally, many bilinguals evaluate their language competencies as inadequate. Some criticize their mastery of language skills, others strive their hardest to reach monolingual norms, others hide their knowledge of their 'weaker' language, and most simply do not perceive themselves as being bilingual even though they use two (or more) languages in their everyday lives. Researchers are now starting to view the bilingual not so much as the sum of two (or more) complete or incomplete monolinguals but rather as a specific and fully competent speaker-hearer who has developed a communicative competence that is equal, but different in nature, to that of the monolingual. This competence makes use of one language, of the other, or of the two together (in the form of mixed speech; see below) depending on the situation, the topic, the interlocutor,
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The Individual Learner etc. This in turn has led to a redefinition of the procedure used to evaluate the bilingual's competencies. Bilinguals are now being studied in terms of their total language repertoire, and the domains of use and the functions of the bilingual's various languages are being taken into account. It should be noted finally that as the environment changes and the needs for particular language skills also change, so will the bilingual's competence in his or her various language skills. New situations, new interlocutors, and new language functions will involve new linguistic needs and will therefore change the language configuration of the person involved. Extreme cases of restructuring are language forgetting and a return to functional monolingualism, be it in the person's first, second, or third language. 2. The Bilingual's Linguistic Behavior
One of the most interesting aspects of bilingualism is the fact that two (or more) languages are in contact within the same person. This phenomenon, which has led to a vast body of research, can best be understood if one examines the bilingual's various language modes. In their everyday lives, bilinguals find themselves at various points along a situational continuum which induce different language modes. At one end of the continuum, bilinguals are in a totally monolingual mode in that they are communicating with monolinguals of one—or the other—of the languages that they know. At the other end of the continuum, bilinguals find themselves in a bilingual language mode in that they are communicating with bilinguals who share their two languages and with whom they normally mix languages (i.e., code-switch and borrow; see below). For convenience, this article refers to the two end points of the continuum when speaking of the monolingual or bilingual language modes, but it should be kept in mind that these are end points and that intermediary modes do exist. This is the case, for example, when a bilingual is speaking to another bilingual who never mixes languages, or when a bilingual is interacting with a person who has limited knowledge of the other language. It should also be noted that bilinguals differ among themselves as to the extent they travel along the continuum; some rarely find themselves at the bilingual end whereas others rarely leave this end (for example, bilinguals who live in tight-knit bilingual communities where the language norm is mixed language). 2.1 The Monolingual Language Mode In this mode, bilinguals adopt the language of the monolingual interlocutor(s) and deactivate their other language(s) as completely as possible. Bilinguals who manage to do this totally and, in addition, who speak the other language fluently and have no foreign accent in it, will often 'pass' as monolinguals. Although such cases are relatively rare, it is precisely these that have
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led people to think that bilinguals are (or should be) two monolinguals in one person. In fact, deactivation of the other language is rarely total as is clearly seen in the interferences bilinguals produce (these are also known as between-language deviations). An interference is a speaker-specific deviation from the language being spoken due to the influence of the other 'deactivated' language. Interferences can occur at all levels of language (phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) and in all modalities (spoken, written, or sign). They are of two kinds: static interferences which reflect permanent traces of one language on the other (such as a permanent accent, the meaning extensions of particular words, specific syntactic structures, etc.) and dynamic interferences which are the ephemeral intrusions of the other language (as in the case of the accidental slip on the stress pattern of a word due to the stress rules of the other language, the momentary use of a syntactic structure taken from the language not being spoken, etc.) Examples of interferences produced by a French person speaking English are as follows. At the phonetic level, pronouncing Sank evven for dees instead of Thank heaven for this; at the lexical level, using corns (from French comes) instead of horns in Look at the corns on that animal!; at the syntactic level, saying / saw this on the page five (instead of on page five), and in writing, misspelling adress or appartment (based on the French adresse and appartement). In addition, if one of the bilingual's languages is mastered only to a certain level of proficiency, deviations due to the person's interlanguage (also known as within-language deviations) will also occur. These include overgeneralizations (e.g., taking irregular verbs and treating them as if they were regular), simplifications (dropping pluralization and tense markers, omitting functions words, simplifying the syntax, etc.) as well as hypercorrections and the avoidance of certain words and expressions. Between- and withinlanguage deviations are clearly observable when bilinguals are in a monolingual language mode but they also occur in the bilingual language mode (see below). It should be noted finally that both types of deviations, although sometimes quite apparent (such as a foreign accent), usually do not interfere with communication. This is because bilinguals develop their languages to the level of fluency required by the environment. Deviations in bilingual speech are thus of the same nature as slips of the tongue and hesitation phenomena. They are present but do not usually affect communication. 2.2 The Bilingual Language Mode In this mode, bilinguals interact with one another. First they adopt a language to use together, what is known as the 'base language' (also the 'host' or 'matrix' language). This process is called 'language choice' and is governed by a number of factors: the
Bilingualism, Individual interlocutors involved (i.e., their usual language of interaction, their language proficiency, language preference, socioeconomic status, age, sex, occupation, education, kinship relation, attitude toward the languages, etc.); the situation of the interaction (location, presence of monolinguals, degree of formality and of intimacy), the content of the discourse (topic, type of vocabulary needed), and the function of the interaction (to communicate information, to create a social distance between the speakers, to raise the status of one of the interlocutors, to exclude someone, to request something, etc.). Language choice is a well-learned behavior (a bilingual rarely asks the conscious question, 'Which language should I be using with this person?') but it is also a very complex phenomenon which only becomes apparent when it breaks down. Usually, bilinguals go through their daily interactions with other bilinguals quite unaware of the many psychological and sociolinguistic factors that interact to help choose one language over another. The base language can change several times during a single conversation if the situation, topic, interlocutor, etc. require it. Once a base language has been chosen, bilinguals can bring in the other language (the 'guest' or 'embedded' language) in various ways. One of these ways is to code-switch, that is to shift completely to the other language for a word, a phrase, a sentence. (For example, Va chercher Marc and bribe him avec un chocolat chaud with cream on top (Go get Marc and bribe him with a hot chocolate with cream on top)). Code-switching has long been stigmatized, and has been given a number of pejorative names such as Franglais (the switching between French and English) or Tex-Mex (the switching between English and Spanish in the southwestern part of the USA). The consequence of this has been that some bilinguals never switch while others restrict it to situations in which they will not be stigmatized for doing so. During the late 1980s and the 1990s code-switching has received considerable attention from researchers. For example, sociolinguists have concentrated on when and why switching takes place in the social context. Reasons that have been put forward are: to fill a linguistic need, to continue the last language used, to quote someone, to specify the addressee, to exclude someone from the conversation, to qualify a message, to specify speaker involvement, to mark group identity, to convey emotion, to change the role of the speaker, etc. Linguists, on the other hand, have sought to study the types of code-switches that occur (single words, phrases, clauses, sentences, etc.) as well as the linguistic constraints that govern their appearance. Although there is still considerable controversy over this latter aspect (are constraints universal or language specific? how broad can a constraint be?) it is now clear that switching is not simply a haphazard behavior due to some form of 'semilingualism' but that it is, instead,
a well-governed process used as a communicative strategy to convey linguistic and social information. The other way bilinguals can bring in the other, less activated, language is to borrow a word or short expression from that language and to adapt it morphologically (and often phonologically) into the base language. Thus, unlike code-switching which is the juxtaposition of two languages, borrowing is the integration of one language into another. Most often both the form and the content of a word are borrowed (to produce what has been called a loanword or more simply a borrowing) as in the following examples taken from French-English bilinguals: 'Ca m'etonnerait qu'on ait code-switche autant que ça' (I can't believe we code-switched as often as that) and 'Maman, tu peux me tier/taje/mes chassures?' (Mummy, can you tie my shoes?). In these examples, the English words 'code-switch' and 'tie' have been brought in and integrated into the French sentence. A second type of borrowing, called a loanshift, consists in either taking a word in the base language and extending its meaning to correspond to that of a word in the other language, or rearranging words in the base language along a pattern provided by the other language and thus creating a new meaning. An example of the first kind of loanshift would be the use of humoroso by Portuguese-Americans to mean 'humorous' when the original meaning is 'capricious.' An example of the second kind is the use of idiomatic expressions that are translated literally from the other language, such as 'I put myself to think about if said by a SpanishEnglish bilingual, based on 'Me puse a pensarlo.' It is important to distinguish idiosyncratic loans (also called 'speech borrowings' or 'nonce borrowings') from words which have become part of a language community's vocabulary and which monolinguals also use (called 'language borrowings' or 'established loans'). Thus, in the following text, every third or fourth word is an established loan from French which has now become part of the English language: "The poet lived in the duke's manor. That day, he painted, played music and wrote poems with his companions? Research in the late twentieth century is examining, among other things, the differences and similarities that exist between code-switches and borrowings (and within the latter, between idiosyncratic borrowings and established borrowings), as well as the impact of the two on language itself, such as first- and secondlanguage restructuring. 3. The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism The psycholinguistics of bilingualism is aimed at studying the processes involved in the production, perception, comprehension, and memorization of the bilingual's languages (spoken, written or signed) when used in a monolingual or a bilingual language mode. The emphasis has, until the early 1990s been put on the independence of the bilingual's languages (how 287
The Individual Learner does the bilingual keep the two languages separate? does the bilingual have one or two lexicons?) to the detriment of issues such as the on-line processing of language, be it in a monolingual or in a bilingual language mode. Much research was conducted, for example, on the coordinate-compound-subordinate distinction. According to it, there are three types of bilinguals: coordinate bilinguals who have two sets of meaning units and two modes of expression, one for each language (this means that the words of the two languages are totally separate entities); compound bilinguals who have one set of meaning units and two modes of expression ('equivalent' words in different languages have the same meaning); and subordinate bilinguals who have the meaning units of the first language and two modes of expression: that of the first language and that of the second, learned by means of the first (here the bilingual interprets words of the weaker language through the words of the stronger language). Despite the inherent appeal of this distinction, no amount of experimentation has brought conclusive evidence that bilinguals can be classified as coordinate, compound, or subordinate. Another area of considerable investigation has been whether bilinguals possess one or two internal lexicons. Proponents of the one-lexicon view (also referred to as interdependent storage) state that linguistic information is stored in a single semantic system. Words from both languages are organized in one large lexicon, but each word is 'tagged' to indicate the language it belongs to. Other researchers have claimed that bilinguals have two lexicons (the independent storage view), and that the information acquired in one language is available in the other only through a translation process. Again, despite a large number of studies, no clear-cut results have been found. In fact, it has been proposed that bilinguals have three stores, one conceptual store corresponding to the bilingual's knowledge of the world and two language stores, one for each language. A third issue of interest has been the ability of bilinguals to keep their two languages separate in the monolingual mode. Researchers have postulated the existence of a language switch which allows bilinguals to block out the other language, and experimental studies have been conducted to find evidence for this proposal. The results obtained have been inconclusive or, at the very least, questionable, and currently it is felt that no switch, be it psycholinguistic or neurolinguistic, exists in bilinguals. Rather, it has been proposed that bilinguals are probably using various activation and deactivation procedures to maintain their languages separate in the monolingual mode and to make them interact in the bilingual mode. It is more generally accepted in the late twentieth century that the bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person, but a unique speaker-hearer using one language, the other language, or both together
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depending on the interlocutor, situation, topic, etc. (see above). Current psycholinguistic research is trying to understand the processing of language in the bilingual's different language modes. Researchers are studying how bilinguals in the monolingual mode differ from monolinguals in terms of perception and production processes, and they are investigating the actual interaction of the two languages during processing in the bilingual mode. This latter issue has produced some interesting findings. For example, in the recognition of 'guest' words (borrowings and code-switches) the phonotactics of the word (whether it is marked clearly as belonging to one or the other lexicon), the presence or absence of a base language homophone, the language phonetics of the word (the pronunciation of the guest word in one language or in the other), and the language that precedes the word (the base language context), all play a role in the recognition process. Actual models of bilingual processing are now being proposed to account for the data obtained. Thus, an interactive activation model appears to accommodate the word recognition results just presented. In the production domain, researchers are attempting to explain the underlying processes involved in the on-line production of code-switches and borrowings and a number of models are also being proposed. 4. The Neurolinguistics of Bilingualism Neurolinguists have long been interested in describing how language is organized in the 'bilingual brain' and how this organization differs from that of the monolingual. One approach has been to observe and test bilingual aphasics in order to better understand which languages have been affected by brain injury and which factors best account for the different patterns of recovery of the languages. Another approach has been to study normal bilinguals to ascertain whether language processing occurs mainly in the left hemisphere of the brain (as it appears to do in monolinguals) or in both hemispheres. As concerns aphasia, researchers have observed various recovery patterns of the bilingual's two or more languages after injury (they have been labeled parallel, differential, successive, antagonistic, selective, mixed) and they have tried to account for the factors that seem to play a role in nonparallel recovery (that is, when the languages are not all recovered together at the same rate). Currently, no single factor has emerged to explain the different types of recovery patterns, and it is not known whether recovery significantly differs following therapy in one language, in the other or in both. It would appear, though, that if a language is not recovered, it is not that it is lost, but simply that it is inhibited, temporarily or permanently. On the topic of language lateralization, it is now a well-known fact that the left hemisphere of the brain
Bilingualism, Individual in monolinguals is dominant for language. The question has been whether bilinguals also show strong lefthemisphere dominance for language. Until a few years ago, and based on case studies of bilingual aphasics and on experimental results, some researchers proposed that bilinguals use the right hemisphere in language processing more than monolinguals. However, after further studies that were better controlled, there appears to be clear evidence that monolinguals and bilinguals do not differ at all in hemispheric involvement during language processing. As concerns language organization in the bilingual brain, most researchers agree that the bilingual's languages are not stored in completely different locations. In addition, it would appear that bilinguals have two subsets of neural connections, one for each language (each can be activated or inhibited independently) while at the same time possessing one larger set from which they are able to draw elements of either language at any time. This said, the bilingual brain is still very much terra incognita, and only further experimental and clinical research will tell how similar it is to the monolingual brain and in what ways it may be different. 5. The Bilingual Person This last section will discuss the attitudes and feelings bilinguals and monolinguals have towards bilingualism, various mental activities in bilinguals, the interaction of language and emotion, and the personality of bilinguals. 5.7 Attitudes and Feelings about Bilingualism It would appear from various surveys that have been conducted that either bilinguals have no strong feelings about their bilingualism (it is simply a fact of life!) or that they see more advantages than inconveniences in having to live with two (or more) languages. Most appreciate being able to communicate with people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, others feel that bilingualism gives them a different perspective on life, that it fosters open-mindedness, allows one to read and often write in a different language, makes learning other languages easier, gives more job opportunities, etc. As for inconveniences, these are less numerous and involve such aspects as mixing languages involuntarily, having to adjust to different cultures, feeling one is losing one of the languages one possesses (usually a minority language) or having to act as a translator on various occasions. It is interesting to compare these reactions to the attitudes and feelings that monolinguals have towards bilingualism. These are extremely varied, ranging from very positive attitudes (such as wonder at the fact that some bilinguals can speak and write two or more languages fluently) to very negative attitudes (such as surprise that many bilinguals do not master their two languages perfectly,
that they cannot translate automatically from one language to another, etc.). It should be noted that most of the views that monolinguals have about bilinguals are usually based on socioeconomic and cultural considerations rather than on linguistic factors. 5.2 Mental Activities, Emotion, and Stress Little is known about the languages used by bilinguals in their mental activities or how bilinguals react when under stress or in an emotional situation. It does seem to be the case that many mental operations are language specific. Thus, bilinguals usually count and pray in the language in which they learned these behaviors. Thinking or dreaming also seem to be language specific and depend on the person, the situation, and the topic involved (see above). When tired, angry, or excited, bilinguals will often revert back to their mother tongue or to whatever language they usually express their emotions in. Stress may also cause more interference, problems in finding the appropriate words, and unintentional switching. In addition, it has been reported that bilinguals wish that the monolinguals closest to them (spouse, companion, friends) were also bilingual. 5.3 Personality and Bilingualism Some bilinguals report that when they change language they change attitudes and behaviors. This has been alluded to quite frequently in the literature: some bilinguals seem to hold slightly different views depending on the language they are speaking; some others are more authoritarian in one of their languages; others still are more reserved or gentle, etc. Is it possible to conclude from this that there is some truth to the Czech proverb, 'Learn a new language and get a new soul?' Some would answer in the affirmative and go as far as to say that the bilingual has a split personality. In fact, there appears to be no real evidence that bilinguals surfer any more from mental disorders than monolinguals. In fact, what is seen as a change in personality is simply a shift in attitudes and behaviors corresponding to a shift in situation or context, independent of language. As was seen above, bilinguals will choose a language according to the situation, the interlocutor, the topic, and the intent of the conversations. These factors trigger different attitudes, impressions, and behaviors (just as they do in monolinguals who modify the content and form of their discourse depending on the context), and thus what is seen as a personality change due to language shift may really be a shift in the situation and interlocutor. In a word, it is the environment as a whole that causes the bilingual to change languages, along with attitudes, feelings, and behaviors—and not language as such. The main difference between monolinguals and bilinguals in this respect is that bilinguals often shift languages (and hence appear to be different
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The Individual Learner people) whereas monolinguals do not. In addition, bilinguals are often switching from one culture to another in their interactions (many are bicultural) whereas monolinguals usually remain within the same culture. 6. Research in the Twenty-first Century Despite what is already known about the bilingual individual, much more research needs to be conducted on the topic. The emergence of a holistic view of bilingualism is encouraging researchers to move away from the monolingual yardstick and develop a true linguistics of bilingualism. However, many issues require further study: the structure and organization of the bilingual's different languages; the various processing operations involved in the perception, production, and memorization of language when the bilingual is in the monolingual or the bilingual language modes; the linguistic and psycholinguistic differences (and similarities) between code-switches, borrowings and interferences; the organization of the bilingual brain; and finally, the psychology of the bilingual and bicultural person. See also: Multilingualism; Bilingualism, Societal.
Bibliography Baetens-Beardsmore H 1986 Bilingualism: Basic Principles. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Baker C, Prys Jones S 1998 Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK de Groot A, Kroll J (eds.) 1997 Tutorials in Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Perspectives. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ Grosjean F 1982 Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Hakuta K 1986 Mirror of Language: The Debate of Bilingualism. Basic Books, New York Haugen E 1969 The Norwegian Language in America: A Study in Bilingual Behavior, 2nd edn. University of Indiana Press, Bloomington, IN Heller M (ed.) 1988 Code-switching. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin Paradis M 1989 Bilingual and polyglot aphasia. In: Boiler F and Grafman J (eds.) Handbook of Neuropsychology, vol. 2. Elsevier, Amsterdam Poplack S 1980 Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPANOL: Toward a typology of codeswitching. Linguistics 18: 581-618 Romaine S 1995 Bilingualism. Blackwell, London Vaid J (ed.) 1986 Language Processing in Bilinguals. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Weinreich U 1968 Languages in Contact. Mouton, The Hague
Listening in a Second Language M. Rost
Listening is commonly referred to in discussions of language, generally to denote the process of deriving meaning from sound. 'Language processing,' which is a more specialized term, is used in the cognitive sciences, including linguistics, to refer to a wide range of interactions between sensory perception (hearing and seeing) and memory systems when spoken or written language is used. 'Listening' is a term used in language studies and language education to refer, more narrowly, to a set of cognitive interactions involved in oral language processing. As a critical element in oral language development, listening has received considerable attention in second language acquisition studies and also in second language pedagogy. 1. Listening as a Process Listening is accomplished through overlapping and interdependent cognitive operations of phonological perception, word recognition, grammatical parsing, and contextual inferencing. These processes are lar-
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gely automatic, occurring efficiently and without conscious awareness, except in cases where problems of comprehension and interpretation arise. Both first language (LI) listening and second language or foreign language (L2) listening are assumed to entail the same cognitive operations. However, both efficiency of processing and cognitive affect (the user's sense of ease in processing) differ in LI and L2 listening. The main paradigms for the description and examination of L2 listening are drawn from LI psycholinguistics, including the development of LI competence with spoken language. 1.1 Comprehension, Interpretation, and Understanding A key distinction when characterizing listener goals in normal (nonpedagogical) language use is that between comprehension and interpretation. It is now generally accepted that the goal of deriving relevant meaning from spoken language cannot be defined solely in terms of objective, measurable information content of the language spoken to the listener, as was commonly
Listening in a Second Language supposed in early information processing paradigms of communication. It is now accepted that the goal must be referenced to the listener's transactional (information seeking) requirements and interpersonal (relationship maintaining) goals in the language-use situation. Both transactional and interpersonal objectives will guide the listener's attention to the input and to other salient features of the situational context. In most LI and L2 settings, the listener's goal involves a degree of comprehension, driven by the purpose of perceiving accurately the sense and 'illocutionary force' (communicative intentions) of the speaker and also a degree of interpretation, driven by the purpose of constructing a plausible arrangement of information in the event which is consistent with the listener's world knowledge and expectations. 'Understanding' denotes an optimal interaction between comprehension of the oral input and interpretation of that input in the situational context. An additional term, 'intake,' is often used in second language acquisition research to refer to input which is understood. 2. Parallels Between First Language and Second Language Listening
L2 listening is assumed to parallel LI listening in terms of processing procedures, strategies (plans for understanding), and heuristics (problem-solving routines), except to the extent that it is influenced by processes of knowledge transfer from the L1 or by developmental capacity limitations. The chief sources of knowledge transfer in L2 listening will be phonological, lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic. Phonological transfer occurs when the listener utilizes his or her LI knowledge of identical or similar sounds to identify sounds from the L2. Lexical transfer occurs when the listener utilizes his or her L1 knowledge (e.g. of cognates, of similar sounding words, or of L2 words mentally associated with L1 words) to identify word references. Grammatical transfer occurs when the listener utilizes knowledge of L1 grammatical rules (e.g., word order) to derive meaning from L2 input. Pragmatic transfer occurs when the listener utilizes experience with speakers in L1 speech situations (e.g., how shop attendants treat customers) to infer meanings in L2 settings. Transfer of all types is likely to occur to some degree in any instance of L2 listening; this transfer may be termed 'positive' to the extent that it promotes efficiency of comprehension and ease of interpretation, or 'negative,' to the extent that it detracts from such efficiency or ease. Capacity limitations may occur in any of the cognitive processes involved in listening: sound perception, word recognition, grammatical parsing, or inferencing, thus leading to instances of 'nonunderstanding,' in which the listener does not possess sufficient knowledge to construct a viable meaning.
Instances of second language nonunderstanding are persistent among most L2 users, but are often relative, rather than absolute, and can typically be repaired either through compensatory strategies to infer a plausible meaning, by way of clarification requests to the speaker to simplify the input, or through subsequent learning of linguistic information. 3. Listening in L2 Acquisition
In virtually all theoretical perspectives of L2 development, listening plays a crucial role, and often a leading one, given the apparent causal relationship between intake of spoken language and language acquisition. These perspectives are divided into complementary psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic orientations. 3.1 Psycholinguistic Orientations One line of second language acquisition (SLA) research has suggested a causative link between amount and type of spoken language intake to L2 development. The focus on this research, which is best summarized in the work of Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991), was initially a description of the features of language input that tended to make language comprehensible, and therefore available to a language acquisition mechanism. The central tenet is that comprehensible input triggers a language acquisition mechanism which allows the L2 learner to understand (and therefore acquire) increasingly complex (and more authentic, native-like) spoken language. The tangible outcomes of this research were largely in detailing aspects of linguistic, paralinguistic (intonational), and nonlinguistic (contextual) simplification which led to measurable comprehension of language by the L2 user. A critical theoretical development in this line of research has been in isolating interactional routines initiated by the listener in trying to understand spoken language that was not understood initially. This development has highlighted the role of learner strategy (e.g., requesting clarification, rephrasing the speaker's contribution) in making the speaker's language more understandable, as well as on the role of speaker adjustments in interactional features (e.g., asking for confirmation, building upon the listener's question). This approach aims to identify key interactional features which lead to efficient language acquisition. The fundamental reasoning behind this approach to research was that: if it can be shown that in general comprehensible language and manageable interaction promotes language acquisition, then it can be deduced that those specific linguistic and conversational (interactional) adjustments promote language acquisition. The pedagogic implications are immediate: language instruction should focus on engaging learners in tasks which allow for and encourage such interactional and 291
The Individual Learner linguistic adjustment (see Second Language Acquisition: Conversation). A related development is the increasing focus on what the learner (the L2 user) 'notices' of the formal features of language structure (phonological, lexical, and syntactic) in the spoken language input, once the language is understood. While to some extent the . order of the features of language that can be noticed is determined by universal cognitive 'developmental constraints,' to some extent the order of features that will be noticed is variational and will be subject to individual motivation, interest, and access to appropriate input. Thus, while the underlying theme in the psycholinguistic orientations is an emphasis on exposure to spoken input as a required condition for acquisition, they differ in how they view the means by which input is understood, and thereby converted to 'intake' in order to trigger language development. The developmental paradigm used in a psycholinguistic approach is one of gaining 'receptive competence' to process increasingly complex language. This competence entails combined abilities in phonological perception, word recognition, grammatical parsing, and contextual inferencing (see Listening: Second Language Pedagogy). 3.2 Sociolinguistic Orientations A second line of SLA research has posited a causative link between a listener's social performance in L2 settings and L2 development. This type of SLA research, which provides a critical focus on the role of the listener in language understanding, is known as the 'interpretive' or sociolinguistic approach. Listening research derived from this approach has focused on how the user's knowledge (or lack of knowledge) of social norms and conventions for language use influences comprehension and interpretation. Sociolinguistically oriented acquisition research, best typified by the work of the European Science Foundation's project on 'language understanding,' under the direction of Perdue and Candlin, has helped define specific listener strategies and behaviors that are developed in the course of language development. Chief among these listener behaviors are: participating in turn taking; providing back-channeling comprehension cues to the speaker; providing queries and initiating repairs; and checking one's own understanding. This line of research has also focused on cognitive strategies (sometimes called 'interpretive procedures') used by listeners to help them to comprehend the speaker's intent, through the use of visual and vocal cues and the activation and utilization of relevant background assumptions. The pedagogical implications here are immediate as well: language instruction should focus on authentic discourse and language contact experiences which allow the learners to investigate these listener activities
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and to develop a suitable repertoire of their own. The developmental paradigm used in sociolinguistic approaches is one of gaining pragmatic competence: the learner comes to respond to salience in speech situations; utilize speech input to complete a sociallymotivated task; seek repair and clarification when necessary; and employ compensatory strategies when listening skills are insufficient for understanding (see Second Language Acquisition: Conversation). 4. Phonological Perception and Word Recognition Phonological perception and word recognition are closely interrelated in listening. Phonological perception begins with the reception of sound waves (produced by speech signals) in the inner ear (delicate hair-like fibers inside the cochlea which are highly specialized to hear speech wave frequencies), where physical sound waves are differentiated in terms of minute variations in quality (e.g., friction or stridency), loudness (intensity), pitch (frequency), and duration (time). (These latter three dimensions can be displayed visually on a spectrogram, which is often used to demonstrate these variations between speech sounds.) There is no known physical limitation in humans to prevent our learning to perceive hundreds of phonemic sounds in human languages, many times more than those of any one language. The goal of phonological perception is word recognition. The process of lexical search leading to word recognition begins once incoming speech sounds are separated auditorily and passed along, instantaneously, to the auditory cortex of the brain, where they are available to be converted to a code. Various models of word recognition have been proposed in psycholinguistics, but all consist of a central operation of matching incoming sound to 'lexical templates,' which are idealized forms of words the user knows. 4.1 Word Recognition in L2 Word recognition is a memory retrieval process which is achieved when the listener has located a suitable reference in his or her mental lexicon, one which suitably matches the speaker's signal. There is some evidence that bilingual listeners utilize a kind of 'switch mechanism' which allows them to suppress phonological and lexical knowledge of the LI when the L2 is in use, although the more prevalent view is that the bilingual listener must analyze all features of the input regardless of the language being used. If the bilingual cannot 'switch off' L1 knowledge during L2 listening, then disambiguating sounds and words (which may be similar in the L1 and L2) must be part of a more general inferencing process in which context, both phonological and pragmatic (situational), assists the listener in comprehension of the speech signal. In either case, whether by use of a switch mechanism or through use of contextual inferencing, the L2 listener must accomplish matching of sound to
Listening in a Second Language correct code. This matching process is fundamentally 'bottom up,' that is, dependent on accurate coding of the input. But, as with other cognitive processes, it depends critically on 'top down' predictive processes as well, in order to make sense of distorted signals and to compensate for the inability of the perceptual mechanism to detect distinctly the large number of phonemic segments given in normal, fluent speech. 4.2 Processing Speed Specifically, in fluent speech there may be up to 25 mechanically distinguishable speech segments per second. (One syllable, for example [bam], may consist of only three phonemes, but each phoneme may consist of more than one segment.) Since the human hearing mechanism cannot reliably differentiate this many segments in real time, auditory perception must also be an inferential process based on samples of the speech signal, rather than on a continuous decoding. It is assumed that, as a heuristic (problem-solving) device to compensate for this perceptual limitation, successful listeners depend on accurate perception of stable segments in the speech stream—those most clearly articulated, typically (in the case of most varieties of English) the stressed syllables—and infer the presence of the less clearly articulated forms (weak forms) and less certainly perceived signals. L2 listeners commonly report L2 speech as being 'too fast,' which is a reflection of affective discomfort in managing the uncertainty of phonological perception. 4.3 Mishearings L2 auditory perception will tend to be additionally problematical because of LI transfer, leading to numerous auditory mistakes, or 'mishearings.' Mishearings may have one or more origins: phonemic segment confusions (e.g., over the gate for over to Kate); stress pattern misassignments (e.g., that snow doll for that's not all); or pitch misplacements (e.g., You're not going! for You're not going). Many such mishearings occur when the L2 listener is not familiar with the speech simplification patterns that occur in the target language. Specifically, in all varieties of English, several phonological phenomena are problem-posing to L2 users: consonant assimilation (handbag becomes ham-bag); vowel reduction (unstressed vowels tend toward a central schwa sound, as in the); elision (omission of a sound, as in the elision of /h/ in give it to him); and free variation (/t/ in butter may be flapped, to sound more like /d/). In addition, for L2 listeners who have learned one variety of English (e.g., general American English), there may be additional problem-posing phonological changes when they are first exposed to other varieties of English (e.g., a regional British English). Such mishearings are brought about by lexical effects and schematic effects of language processing known to operate in both L1 and L2 listening. Influ-
enced by 'lexical effects,' the listener tends to 'hear' words that he or she already knows, even if the input contains unknown words. Influenced by 'schematic effects,' the listener tends to 'hear' words that are more common or expected in a given context, even when less common or less expected words are actually spoken. 5. Grammatical Parsing Grammatical parsing is the process of assigning recognized words to grammatical classes (noun, verb, adjective), representing the semantic interrelationship between words (agents of actions, objects of actions, attributes of objects, etc.), and, further, linking this new interrelationship to already understood parts of the discourse. The goal of grammatical parsing is to construct a 'prepositional representation' of incoming discourse which can be used for making inferences and for constructing a relevant meaning. As with other listening processes, grammatical parsing is interdependent in its functioning. Just as word recognition (lexical search) provides top-down (predictive) information needed in phonological processing, grammatical knowledge provides top-down information to assist in word recognition. As an illustration of the first component of grammatical parsing, suppose a listener hears: We need to rent a room. Rent is to be understood as a verb meaning 'take financial action to secure use of the room' versus a noun meaning 'the money required.' As a first step in grammatical parsing, such assignments for all content words are necessary, or at least, promote efficiency in processing. As an illustration of the second component process, suppose a listener hears: She's holding a club. The listener may assign 'club' to the appropriate grammatical category, but would further need to know the semantic relationship between she, hold, and club. If club is an instrument which she intends to use to beat something, the representation the listener forms is different than if club is the name of a suit in a card game which she is now playing. As an illustration of the third component step, suppose a listener hears: I saw Tom and his 3-year old son. He had ice cream all over his face. The listener must decide whether he refers to Tom or Tom's son in order to understand the utterance and form a mental representation of what was heard. 5.1 Lexis First Principle In many cases, grammatical parsing is not dependent on syntactic information from the speaker; syntactic processing can often be bypassed and propositional representation can be constructed from recognized words alone. This is known as the 'lexis first principle.' This principle is particularly evident in discourse which is marked by ellipsis, in which already known elements are not reiterated:
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The Individual Learner Speaker 1: Are we going to the party on Friday? Speaker 2: Yes. My carl In this excerpt, Speaker 1 most probably will understand my carl to be an ellipted form of 'Are we going to the party on Friday in my car?' While it is unnecessary to assume that speakers reconstruct full propositional representations as they parse incoming speech, it is evident that some type of linking of new information to given information is required. 5.2 Understanding 'Given' and 'New' Information Understanding spoken language in large part requires integrating 'new' information with 'old' (and often unstated) information at a rapid pace. A commonly reported difficulty in L2 listening (particularly in native speaker/non-native speaker conversation) is managing the large amount of new information. In the following extract, there is evidence that the nonnative speaker (NNS) has difficulty separating 'new' information from what the native speaker (NS) assumes to be 'given': NS: NNS: NS: NNS:
So when I was living in Australia, I had a very nice flat. Live! Yes, when I was living in Australia. Australia]
The L2 listener in this case needs more processing time, in part due to difficulties with word recognition, in order to integrate new information. The speaker's assumptions about what the listener already knows and can recognize, as evidenced by the rapid pace of the speaker, are unwarranted. As a result, the conversation takes on a disjointed pace, with the listener not able to process the language at the 'normal' speed of the speaker. 5.3 Misunderstandings Misunderstandings can occur during grammatical parsing, if words are assigned to the wrong grammatical class, if insufficient syntactic information is given or recognized, if semantic relationships between lexical items are not properly computed, or if the underlying representation of the discourse is inaccurate. At present, there is no clearly denned system for predicting or interpreting misunderstandings due to grammatical parsing errors, as there is with phonological perception and word recognition, since grammatical parsing is closely informed by the more 'open' cognitive systems involved in contextual inferencing. 6. Contextual Inferencing Sound perception, word recognition, and grammatical parsing of speech are fundamental operations in listening which are often considered bottom-up processes in that they depend upon the speech signal as a
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primary information source. By themselves, however, these operations form only the basis of listening. They must be supplemented with inferential processes derived from the listener's background knowledge. These inferential processes are sometimes referred to as top-down processes since they impose order on the incoming speech signal. Once incoming speech has undergone word recognition and grammatical parsing, the propositional representation is available for contextual inferencing. Contextual inferencing is a goal-driven cognitive process of utilizing speech (linguistic) representations, other paralinguistic information (intonation, pausing, loudness), nonlinguistic information (facial gestures, physical setting), and crucially, relevant background knowledge to make sense of an event. For example, if someone walks into a shop and the shopkeeper says, Good morning. What can I do for you!, the customer can utilize paralinguistic information to understand the intention of the speaker (cheerful, welcoming, helpful?), nonlinguistic information to understand the appropriacy of the utterance (specifically, there is one person [7] asking the question to an addressee [you]; the time of day [morning]), and background information (it is customary and expected for shopkeepers to make some kind of greeting and query to customers). This same linguistic input (Good morning. What can I do for you!') would, by contrast, be rather difficult to process if uttered by a stranger, in the evening, in a crowded elevator. Contextual inferencing may be usefully divided into two types of interrelated reasoning processes: deductive inferencing and inductive inferencing. 6.1 Deductive Inferencing Deductive inferencing is the process of recalling a known information paradigm, sometimes called a 'schema' or 'schematic frame,' in order to supply missing information points when forming a mental representation of a text. For instance, upon hearing an utterance He cut himself shaving, the listener may infer some specific information, though it is technically missing: that the actor (he) cut himself with a razor blade (rather than a knife) and that he cut part of his face (rather than his chest). This deduced information then becomes part of the listener's discourse representation, and cannot be readily separated from the listener's memory of the text (what was actually said). It is obvious that 1 anguage understanding depends upon deductive inferencing of this kind, the success of which in turn depends both on the listener's having previously acquired (learned) the relevant schemata and on the listener's ability to bring the relevant schema or schemata into working memory. The L2 listener is faced with the added difficulty of knowing which schemata are universal (e.g., the face-shaving routine apparently is universal) and which are culture-
Reading in a Second Language specific (e.g., the steps in making a purchase in a shop apparently vary from culture to culture). 6.2 Inductive Inferencing Inductive inferencing refers to the process of supplying relational links (for example, causal links) for features of events and supplying implications (entailments) of events. For instance, when hearing He cut himself shaving, the listener can infer a causative link (the actor may have been careless, in a hurry, etc.) and an unlimited number of logical entailments (there probably was not much bleeding, the actor probably did something to take care of it, and probably did not need emergency treatment). The actual inferences that the listener does form depend in part upon his or her intellectual capacity, but more critically on the listener's determination of relevance: the listener will make all and only the inferences necessary to achieve understanding in a given context. Contextual inferencing, both deductive and inductive, is of importance in L2 listening for two main reasons. First, as a linguistic understanding process, contextual inferencing draws upon general cognitive reasoning, and hence is subject to influence from the L2 user's nonlinguistic knowledge. As a result, any utterance to an L2 listener, whether a presumably simple and unambiguous utterance (This food is good} or an assertion obviously laden with cultural overtones (The people in this country are free), may receive a different interpretation from the expected or normal LI interpretations. Indeed, part of L2 competence is said to consist of a sociolinguistic dimension, in which LI cultural interpretations are learned and applied in listening. Research on schematic understanding processes, dating back to Bartlett's seminal recall studies in the 1930s, have verified this point. Frames for virtually every commonly occurring event in a society (from restaurant going to tribal initiation rites) are schematized in memory in order to become readily avail-
able for interpretation of new events. All of these schemata can be said to be culturally specific, and in that sense arbitrary (see Intercultural Discourse). The second reason that inferencing is important in L2 listening is related to information availability. Because all inferencing is generally based on incomplete information (or on information that is judged to be less than fully reliable), the efficiency of this process is based upon one's sense of certainty of the information that is available. In L2 listening, the listener is often basing inferences on linguistic information which itself is incomplete or uncertain: unclearly perceived sounds, unfamiliar words, and approximate grammatical parsings will be part of the information base. As a result, the L2 listener must seemingly depend more (than the LI listener) on inductive inferencing in order to understand spoken language. See also: Listening: Second Language Pedagogy; Phonology in Language Acquisition; Phonology m Second Language Acquisition. Bibliography Anderson A, Lynch T 1988 Listening. Oxford University Press, Oxford Bremer K, Breeder P, Roberts C, Simonot M, Vasseur M 1988 Procedures Used to Achieve Understanding in a Second Language. European Science Foundation, Strasbourg Brown G 1990 Listening to Spoken English, 2nd edn. Longman, London Faerch C, Kasper G 1986 The role of comprehension in second language learning. Applied Linguistics 7(3): 257-74 Hamers J F, Blanc M H A 1989 Bilinguality and Bilingualism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Kellerman E, Sharwood-Smith M (eds.) 1986 Crosslinguistic Influences in Second Language Acquisition. Pergamon, Oxford Larsen-Freeman D, Long M H 1991 An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research. Longman, London Rest M 1990 Listening in Language Learning. Longman, London
Reading in a Second Language A. H. Urquhart
A commonsense view of the process of reading in a second language (L2) could be stated as follows: first the would-be readers must learn the language, its vocabulary, and grammar. Then, given that they are already literate in their first language (LI), and given
that both LI and L2 are written in the same or similar scripts, the reading process can proceed with very little hindrance. Thus, reading is seen as a skill separate from, though to some extent parasitical on, language. It is
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The Individual Learner seen as more or less the same activity regardless of the language being read, and is independent of any particular language. If one accepts this view, then reading in an L2 can be seen as a process of transfer of reading skills from the LI. There are really only two variables to take into account: the readers' knowledge of the L2, and their reading skill, initially in the LI. For this reason, the transfer approach to L2 reading has seen the problem as one of distinguishing between these variables, reading as either a reading problem or a language problem (Alderson 1984). The commonsense view outlined above is not the only approach to reading in an L2. It is possible, indeed legitimate, to view reading as one manifestation of language in use, similar to listening. From this point of view, L2 reading is likely, at least in part, to be language specific, and can no more be considered as independent of the language in question than listening. Seen from this point of view, L2 readers are likely to come across features of the L2 in their reading which conflict with expectations based on their experience with the LI. This approach to L2 reading looks at different components of texts, and examines the effect of such variables on the reading process. Both approaches involve the notion of transfer between the LI and L2 situations. But whereas in the first approach, there are only two variables, in the second there are likely to be many—some language specific, some relating to particular groups of readers. 1. Reading as a Language Activity In all societies, people begin to acquire their mother tongue (LI) orally, by speaking and listening. However, in modern literate societies, children are taught to read, starting from about the age of five, and from then on have access to the language in two mediums, the oral and the written one. Because of the typical sequence of events, it is easy to think of reading as a skill, or set of skills, 'added on' to an already complete grasp of the LI, and hence to view reading as somehow separate from language use, written texts as representations of spoken language. This view, carried over into L2 pedagogy, is probably responsible for the quite widespread belief that before one can read in a foreign language, it is necessary first to acquire a grasp of the spoken form. However, the view is, at least in part, a misconception. To begin with, it is very unlikely that a child's command of the LI is complete in any sense at the age of five. It has long been recognized that vocabulary is built up gradually, and that much of one's store of lexical items has been acquired through the written medium. According to Menyuk (1984), it is increasingly being recognized that one's grasp of the more complex syntax of LI is acquired much later than the opening years of primary education. Menyuk appears to believe that structures must still be encountered
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orally before they can be recognized in the written medium, but there seems little reason for this belief. It is quite likely that one acquires a significant amount of structural knowledge by means of reading. And the same is probably true of familiarity with the conventions of more extended texts, narrative, exposition, etc., and their organization. Thus reading is not a skill acquired once LI has been mastered; it is likely that a great deal of knowledge of the LI is acquired through reading. As far as L2 pedagogy is concerned, since written texts are as much a manifestation of the language as oral ones, there is no absolute requirement for the learner to go through an oral stage: learners for centuries have been learning languages by means of reading. The point is being stressed here because of a tendency in the L2 reading research discussed below to view reading as separate from language knowledge. In estimating learners' knowledge of an L2, tests of grammar, for example, are taken as valid measures, while learners' ability to deal with written texts are viewed as evidence of something else, a transferable reading skill. But while it is perfectly legitimate to describe reading skills which may be independent of any particular language, it should be kept in mind that at certain levels, reading the language involves knowing and using the language. The dichotomy between L2 reading as a language problem or a reading problem is in part a false one. 2. Who is the Typical L2 Reader? Reference has been made above to variables in the L2 reading process. It is worthwhile at this point stressing how many variables may have to be taken into account, some related to specific languages and scripts, others not. It is at least arguable that any one of the following variables may affect the L2 reading process: (a) The relationship between LI and L2. English and French, for example, are comparatively similar in many respects: English and Kiswahili seem markedly less so. (b) The script of LI and L2. English and Kiswahili are both written using the same alphabet; English and Greek are both written in alphabetic scripts, but the alphabets are different; Chinese is not usually written in an alphabetic script at all, but in a script in which symbols represent morphemes, with no attempt to 'spell' sounds alphabetically. (c) The presence of previously acquired L2s. Some LI speakers of Arabic may approach English as an L2; others may already be highly literate in another language, for example, French, so that English becomes the L3. (d) Literacy in the LI. Some readers of English as a foreign or second language may be illiterate in their LI.
Reading in a Second Language (e) Proficiency in the L2. L2 readers are not all at the same level of proficiency; some may be beginners, others very advanced. It is often asserted in the literature that advanced L2 readers behave in more or less the same way as literate natives, though this assumption may not always be safe. If reading is assumed to be more or less the same activity in all languages, then it might seem that the differences listed above will not matter much. If, however, the view is taken that reading is a language process, which in any particular situation will involve the processing of a large number of elements specific to one language, then these differences will seem to be very important indeed. Their existence should at least make one cautious about generalizing about 'L2 reading processes.' 3. Approaches to the Reading Process
Approaches to describing the reading process, initially in the LI, have been characterized as 'bottom-up,' 'top-down,' and 'interactive.' In 'bottom-up' approaches, the reader is seen as moving from the smallest textual elements, letters, sequentially upwards to higher elements. In 'top-down' approaches, readers are seen as approaching texts with their own preconceptions, motivations, and as sampling the text to confirm predictions. In 'interactive' approaches, the reader is seen as moving between 'levels,' not always in the same direction, for example, moving from words to syntax then back to words again. In 'interactive compensatory' approaches (see Stanovich 1980), strengths at one level may compensate for weaknesses at another level. The last two approaches are complicated by the fact that they may or may not incorporate 'schema' theory, in which knowledge is seen as 'packaged' into structures (schemata) with components and interrelationships between components. For most of the 1980s, L2 reading research was dominated by topdown approaches incorporating, at least to some extent, schema theory. Such approaches, emphasizing psycholinguistic aspects of the reading process, tend to focus on the transfer of reading skills from one language to another. For a discussion of different 'models' see Urquhart and Weir (1998). 4. L2 Research: Reading Skill versus Language Proficiency
Considerable research has been devoted to examining whether such transfer does, in fact, occur. The research can be seen as a debate about the relative importance of language-independent reading skills as opposed to language skills. Alderson (1984) provides a critical review, and there is another discussion in Devine (1988).
Some of the research has been carried out with bilinguals, or presumed bilinguals, where it might be assumed that language proficiency was not a factor, and where a reading improvement in one language could be expected to be transferred to reading in the other language. The data reviewed by Alderson suggests that this is sometimes the case but by no means always. However, as Alderson makes clear, bilingualism is a very complex phenomenon, and it is often very difficult to compare one bilingual group with another. Other research has investigated subjects reading English as an L2. Here the hypothesis is that, given comparable proficiency in the L2, those subjects who are good readers in their LI will perform better on L2 reading tasks than subjects whose reading proficiency in the LI is inferior. Alderson himself investigated Spanish speakers learning English, but the results suggested that proficiency in the L2, measured by general language tests, was a better predictor of L2 reading success than reading proficiency in the LI. In other words, reading proficiency did not seem to transfer. Clarke (1979) also investigated Spanish speakers, again divided into good and poor readers in Spanish. He found that the good readers did perform better on an English reading test than the poor readers, although the English language proficiency of the two groups was considered to be the same. However, an analysis of some of the data led Clarke to believe that limited language proficiency prevented the good readers from transferring their reading skills. He presented this as the 'short circuit hypothesis,' which suggests that potentially transferable reading skills are blocked because of inadequate mastery of the L2. This suggestion, also known as the 'threshold limit' has received wide acceptance, and can be seen as a compromise between the two extreme positions. Eskey and Grabe (1988) refer to a critical mass point which must be reached in the acquisition of the L2 before 'effective' L2 reading can begin (the reader may note the suspiciously large number of metaphors used in this research area). Alderson has pointed out that the threshold will vary depending on reader and task, and it may be doubted whether the concept has any practical value in research. Interactive approaches to reading are likely to incorporate both generalizable reading skills and specific language knowledge, and therefore do not present the issues in the same confrontational form as some of the suggestions from researchers or teachers devoted to top-down approaches. The extreme form of the transfer view, that language skills could be transfered regardless of L2 language proficiency is totally implausible; as one writer has said, if you know no Chinese, not even the script, it is unlikely that you will initially be able to read a Chinese text. However, the notion that someone literate in their LI will transfer some 'skills' or even attitudes to written language
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The Individual Learner in the L2 is an attractive one. In order to be examined empirically, issues perhaps should be denned more precisely than they have been in the past. 4.1 Flaws in the Research The question as to whether transfer of skills does or does not occur is still in many ways unresolved, partly as a result of flaws in the research. (a) Few of the studies define what they mean by 'reading,' although the tasks or activities subsumed under the term vary widely. Nor is there much discussion as to what defines the 'good reader.' In the absence of definition, 'good reading' is defined by default in terms of the tasks employed in experiments, for example, the ability to fill in missing words in texts. (b) Related to this, there is little realization that reading is task-driven, and that performance may depend on the particular task being attempted. Alderson rightly points out that the 'threshold level' will vary, not just with different individuals but also with the reading tasks they are attempting. 'Find all the proper names in the following passage' would seem to require far less L2 proficiency than 'Provide a summary of the following text.' (c) 'Language proficiency' is often described separately from reading ability (in fact the transfer approach requires this to be done). But it cannot be assumed that performance on a multiple-choice grammar test is necessarily a better indicator of language ability than performance on a reading test. If someone performs poorly on the first, and well on the second, this cannot be taken as evidence that, for example, it is possible to read well in the L2 without 'knowing the language'; it merely indicates that the reader is successful on at least one occasion in using the written language, but not very proficient at a different language-related task. (d) When researchers investigate the transfer of skills from the LI to the L2, there is little precision as to precisely what skills are being transferred. There is even a lot of variation in the terms used: 'skills,' 'strategies,' 'processes,' even 'knowledge.' (e) Few writers distinguish between reading skills and reading acquisition skills. The discussion often seems to assume that there must be a period of 'language acquisition' before the reading begins. This, as has already been argued, is not necessary: the acquisition of the L2 can take place at least partly through the reading process. But it is highly likely that the processes dominant during the acquisition phase may differ markedly from those of the linguistically more advanced reader, and this may complicate any transfer of skills. It is even possible that
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language acquisition skills may have to be relearned: for example, guessing unfamiliar vocabulary is often mentioned as a reading skill, but it is one that skilled adult readers probably use fairly rarely in their LI reading. In later research some of these flaws have been avoided. Bernhardt's model (Bernhardt 199la) includes a 'literacy' component which can be taken as consisting of reading skills at least partly divorced from specifically linguistic skills. The emphasis in the 1980s on reading 'strategies' also led to rather greater precision in defining reading skills. Sarig (1987), for example, analyzed the behavior of her subjects into 'moves,' equatable with 'strategies,' and concluded that they used the same moves in LI (Hebrew) and the L2 (English). This can be taken as evidence that transfer is taking place. 5. Research into Components of the L2 Reading Process Another line of research lays less emphasis on transfer between LI and L2, and concentrates on the effect of different variables, often linguistic, in the L2 reading situation. From the point of view of an interactive model of the reading process, this can be seen as investigation of the effects of different components of a model of the L2 reading process. What now follows is a brief account of research into some areas, mainly linguistic, widely thought to be relevant. 5.7 Background Knowledge Background knowledge is often discussed in terms of schema theory. However, in much of the L2 research, the schemata involved are seldom described with sufficient precision to justify the use of the term. In consequence, the more neutral term 'background knowledge' is used here. The research is ably surveyed in Bernhardt (1991b). In studies done by Alderson and Urquhart (1983), it seemed clear that students with a low level of proficiency in English but a background in engineering were able to read engineering texts at least as well as liberal arts students with a higher level of English proficiency. That is, the engineers appeared to be able to compensate for their gaps in linguistic knowledge by referring the text to their existing knowledge. A similar situation seems to have been found by Mohammed and Swales (1984). Faced with the task of reading instructions in order to set the time on a digital alarm clock, subjects performed in the following order of proficiency: (1) native speakers (NS) scientists; (2) non-NS scientists; (3) NS arts; and (4) non-NS arts. In other words, background knowledge was more important than linguistic ability. In neither of the above cases does it seem useful to refer to schema theory, since the 'schemata' involved may be both very general and very particular, and
Reading in a Second Language possibly very large in number. Whether schemata can ever be defined with sufficient precision to be useful is a moot point (see Urquhart and Weir (1998). 5.2 Text Organization There have been two areas of activity here. One has investigated whether orthodox organization of English texts has an effect on L2 readers, for example, by making the text easier, in contrast to a text where the organization has been 'mutilated' in some way. Studies tend to show that relatively advanced readers behave the same as LI readers in response to organization. The interaction of organization with, for example, lower linguistic proficiency and greater content knowledge, has not yet been investigated. There has also for some time been an interest in 'contrastive rhetorics,' the notion that different languages display typical and contrasting rhetorical organizations of text, and that this should have an effect on L2 readers and writers. There are a number of indications that this is the case, although it is difficult to establish. If true, the effect on L2 readers would be similar to •the postulated effect of L2 syntax, but at a 'higher' level. 5.3 Inter sentential Relationships Comparatively little empirical work has been done on the effect of implicit relationships between sentences, termed 'intersentential' or 'interclausal.' Cooper (1984) studied two groups of Malaysian readers of English as an L2, a 'practiced' group and an 'unpracticed' group. He correlated the scores of the groups on various language tasks with a test of reading comprehension to see which skills contributed most to reading success. A test in which the subjects read one sentence, then chose from alternatives the sentence which best completed the text, correlated very highly with the comprehension test and discriminated very well between the two groups. Presumably this indicates that the good readers were using a top-down approach; success with intersentential relations will also involve the readers using their background knowledge. 5.4 Cohesion Rather more attention has been given to cohesion, overt signaling of relationships across sentence boundaries, and sometimes, by extension, to the same or similar relationships across clause boundaries. Cohesion is a cover term for a number of language systems, each of which is best treated separately. Writers may choose to repeat lexical items, or use lexical variations such as synonyms, across sentences. This repetition produces what Berman (1984) refers to as 'transparent' texts. On the other hand they may use pronominal reference, grammatical substitution and ellipsis, producing 'opaque' texts. Berman reports a study where substituting lexical repetition for ref-
erence and ellipsis had the effect of making an English text more accessible than the original for Hebrewspeaking readers. This may be because of one or other of two factors: first, lexical repetition may be more acceptable in Hebrew than in English; hence, the reliance of English on referential pronouns, ellipsis, etc., may run counter to the Hebrew readers' textual expectations. Second, in the L2, the presence of ellipsis, etc., may simply put more strain on a system already struggling with an unfamiliar syntax. Cooper's subjects had little problem with reference and ellipsis. The difference in the findings may be due to a method effect; Cooper used short texts with multiple-choice alternatives. Such a method may reduce readers' difficulties by focusing their attention on the cohesive referents. 5.4.1 Conjunctives Conjunctives, or 'logical connectors' such as/or example, and moreover, by signaling intersentential relationships, might be expected to make recognition of the relationships easier. Cooper's findings provide no support for this; his practiced group were at least as successful with the implicit relationships. On the other hand, Cohen, et al. (1988) found that with a reasonable extended text, native speakers of English structured their understanding in part by depending on conjunctives, whereas the nonnatives failed to appreciate the relationships signaled by the conjunctives. Cohen, et al. suggest that this is because the nonnatives were processing the text 'locally,' not seeing wider relationships. In other words, they may have been operating more of a bottom-up approach. Cohen et al. report that in some cases their subjects simply did not know the meaning of conjunctives such as 'thus.' 5.5 Syntactic Processing One view of the effect of syntax is that it is comparatively unimportant. Ulijn and Kempen (1976) conducted an experiment in which the L2 was Dutch or French, and the subjects French or Dutch LI speakers. Strother and Ulijn (1987) experimented with speakers of Dutch and other languages reading English, and compared them with LI readers. Ulijn and Kempen (1976) concluded that syntax had little or no effect on L2 reading, and that lexical knowledge and knowledge of the world were much more important. This does not seem altogether plausible as a general statement. In the experiment by Ulijn and Kempen, the texts seem to have been fairly simple and French and Dutch, the two languages involved, are both western European languages and both relatively closely related. In the later experiment, the focus was on simplification, that is, whether some syntactic forms are easier than others. The fact that altering the syntactic forms in very limited parts of a text had little or no effect on readers, most of whom were linguistically
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The Individual Learner very proficient in English, hardly seems enough evidence for the claim that readers adopted 'a conceptual strategy aiming at content words,' and that 'a thorough syntactic analysis is unnecessary.' In studies conducted by Herman (1984) and by Cohen et al. (1988), Hebrew-speaking subjects with a relatively high level of proficiency in English reported difficulties in comprehending sentences like: Thus, it was conjectured that such treatments as holding cells in buffer after irradiation before placing them on nutrient agar plates might function by inhibiting normal growth processes while repair systems completed their task.
Here the syntax is undeniably complex. Also Hebrew (the students' LI) and English are syntactically very dissimilar languages and this may have had an effect. Finally, one of the major study methods of both Berman and Cohen et al. involved the students in reporting on their problems in reading, and it is possible that this form of self-monitoring may have been more successful in detecting syntactic problems than conventional testing devices like yes/no questions. The study conducted by Cooper in Malaysia seems to throw doubt again on the importance of syntax, and support the position of Ulijn and Kempen. Cooper's syntax subtest correlated very poorly with the comprehension test, and also failed to distinguish between good (practiced) and poor readers. There are, however, two problems with Cooper's study. It seems likely that the kind of syntactic processing activities required in reading may be very different from the activities involved in completing multiple-choice, discrete point, grammar items. The readers interviewed by Berman and by Cohen et al. reported difficulty in 'parsing' sentences, that is, in finding major syntactic constituents such as subjects and verb phrases. Secondly, the actual grammar features selected by Cooper for testing, for example, modality and tense, may not have been relevant for reading. Whether or not this is true, Alderson (1993) found high correlations between grammar and reading tests. 5.6 Vocabulary Vocabulary is one of the features which the lay person and the learner would probably mention in connection with reading in an L2. However, though the literature is full of pedagogical advice on what to do about unknown vocabulary, there is comparatively little empirical evidence as to what L2 readers actually do. Research has generally found that good readers operate with bigger stores of vocabulary than poor readers. Also that they decode items too fast for predicting strategies to be involved. Eskey in fact remarks that frequent use of top-down strategies at word level suggests a simple failure to decode properly (Eskey and Grabe 1988). However, Cooper's practiced read300
ers did significantly better on tests of guessing the meaning of nonsense words, or selecting the correct meaning for a multiple-meaning word than his unpracticed group. The poor readers tended to be too influenced by irrelevant previous knowledge and by known collocations. What is not clear is how good readers acquire and store their larger stocks of vocabulary. It would seem reasonable to suggest that they have found ways of grouping words and word relationships in some organized way in their lexicon. The subjects studied by Cohen et al. reported problems with nontechnical or semi technical terms, apparently because they had stored only one meaning of the item. They also had difficulty with recognizing contextual paraphrases, forcing them, as Cohen et al. suggest, to store items separately. 5.7 The Effect of Orthography It has already been suggested that orthography of the LI may have an effect on processing of the L2. Some orthographies, that is, English, are sound-based; others, that is, Chinese, are not. If readers carry over to the L2 strategies developed for handling the LI orthography, one might expect this to have an effect. Koda (1987) found that in the case of Japanese reading English script, a group faced with a text containing phonologically unpronounceable words (e.g., 'pnotdu') actually read the text faster than an equivalent group faced with pronounceable words (e.g., 'pontdud'). The behavior of these subjects contrasted with a group of LI English speakers in an earlier experiment, who performed better with the pronounceable items. Randall and Meara (1988) compared the strategies of English and Arabic speakers. Faced with recognizing previously seen target letters in a word-like array of letters, Arabic speakers behaved in identical fashion with both Arabic and roman script, being fastest at recognizing the target when in the middle of the array. English readers performed similarly with letter-like shapes. However, with arrays of roman letters, they behaved differently, being fastest with targets at the beginnings and ends of 'words.' Suarez and Meara hypothesized that speakers of Spanish, which has a highly regular orthography, will operate with a phonological word recognition strategy, as opposed to English readers, who, it is suggested, operate with a phonological approach together with a direct visual approach. The experimental evidence, however, was inconclusive. Finally, Ryan and Meara (1992) conducted experiments which suggest that the lexical structure of Arabic, in which roots are typically composed of three consonants, plus the Arabic orthography, which represents consonants and only occasionally vowels, should make Arabic speakers reliant on consonant structure when recognizing English words. Ryan and
Reading in a Second Language Meara conclude that Arab learners of English may be faced with particular word-processing problems, and speculate as to whether other LI orthographies produce similar psycholinguistic difficulties. 6. Conclusion The literature is scattered with pleas for further research, and in this case this is no mere academic convention. The question is where research can most profitably be focused. It has been suggested that highly proficient L2 readers are likely to behave like LI readers. Their problems can then be left to those people working in the LI area. It has also been suggested, by Grabe and others, that it is at the lower levels of the reading model (word recognition, syntax, etc.) that interesting differences between readers with different Lls are likely to emerge. Certainly there is scope for research here. Another interesting research focus is on the way that an otherwise nonproficient reader may compensate for weaknesses, e.g., by using superior topic knowledge to make up for lack of syntactic expertise. Interactive models allow for this, but so far little empirical evidence has been obtained to support
it. Many of the reported findings from empirical research in this article appear to be contradictory. Some of this seems to be the result of the differences among L2 readers described earlier, and will thus have to be accepted. Researchers would help if they were very explicit about the nature of the readers being investigated—the relevant characteristics of the LI, the readers' level of L2 proficiency, etc. But valid comparison across groups is often prevented by experimenters using radically different methods. There is now wide acceptance of an interactive model. If researchers could agree informally to use similar methodologies, and even repeat previous experiments with different L2 groups, then we should begin to gather some really worthwhile knowledge about L2 reading processes. See also: Reading: Second Language. Bibliography Alderson, J C 1984 Reading in a foreign language: A reading problem or a language problem? In: Alderson J C, Urquhart A H (eds.) Reading in a Foreign Language. Longman, London Alderson J C 1993 The relationship between grammar and reading in an English for academic purposes test battery. In: Douglas D, Chappelle C (eds.) A New Decade of Language Testing Research. TESOL, Washington, DC Alderson J C, Urquhart AH 1983 The effect of student background discipline on comprehension: A pilot study. In: Hughes A, Porter D (eds.) Current Developments in Language Testing. Academic Press, London Berman R A 1984 Syntactic components of the foreign language reading process. In: Alderson J C, Urquhart
A H (eds.) Reading in a Foreign Language. Longman, London Bernhardt E B 199la A psycholinguistic perspective on second language literacy. In: Hulstijn J H, Matter J F (eds.) Reading in Two Languages. AILA Review, Amsterdam Bernhardt E B 1991b Reading Development in Second Language: Theoretical, Empirical and Classroom Perspectives. Ablex, NJ Carrell P L, Devine J, Eskey D E 1988 Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Clarke M A 1979 Reading in Spanish and English: Evidence from adult ESL students. Language Learning 29: 121-50 Cohen A, Glasman H, Rosenbaum-Cohen P R, Ferrara J, Fine J 1988 Reading English for specialized purposes: Discourse analysis and the use of student informants. In: Carrell P L, Devine J, Eskey D E (eds.)Cooper M 1984 Linguistic competence of practised and unpractised nonnative readers of English. In: Alderson J C, Urquhart A H (eds.) Reading in a Foreign Language. Longman, London Devine J 1988 The relationship between general language competence and second language reading proficiency: Implications for teaching. In: Carrell P L, Devine J, Eskey D E (eds.) Eskey D E, Grabe W 1988 Interactive models for second language reading: Perspectives on instruction. In: Carrell P L, Devine J, Eskey D E (eds.) Grabe W 1988 Reassessing the term 'interactive.' In: Carrell P L, Devine J, Eskey D E (eds.) Koda K 1987 Cognitive strategy transfer in second language reading. In: Devine J, Carrell P L, Eskey D (eds.) Research in Reading in a Foreign Language. TESOL, Washington, DC Menyuk P 1984 Language Development and Reading. In: Flood J (ed.) Understanding Reading Comprehension. IRA, Newark, NJ Mohammed M, Swales J 1984 Factors affecting the successful reading of technical instructions. Reading in a Foreign Language 2(2): 206-17 Randall M, Meara P 1988 How Arabs read Roman letters. Reading in a Foreign Language 4(2): 133-45 Ryan A, Meara P 1992 The case of the invisible vowels: Arabs reading English words. Reading in a Foreign Language 7: 1 Sarig G 1987 High-level reading in the first and in the foreign language: Some comparative process data. In: Devine J, Carrell P, Eskey D E (eds.) Research in Reading in English as a Foreign Language. TESOL, Washington, DC Steffensen M S, Joag-Dev C, Anderson R C 1979 A crosscultural perspective on reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly 15: 10-29 Strother J B, Ulijn J M 1987 Does syntactic rewriting affect EST text comprehension. In: Devine J, Carrell P L, Eskey D (eds.) Research in Reading in a Foreign Language. TESOL, Washington, DC Ulijn J M, Kempen G A M 1976 The role of the first language in second language reading comprehension: Some experimental evidence. In: Nickel G (ed.) Proceedings of the 4th International Congress of Applied Linguistics, vol. 1. Hochschulverlag, Stuttgart Urquhart S, Weir C 1998 Reading in a Second Language: Process, Product and Practice. Longman, London
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The Individual Learner
Speaking in a Second Language G. Yule
Speech processing at a normal rate is only possible if virtually all the necessary procedures function automatically. For most people speaking a second language, those procedures seem to require more conscious effort and attention and, in general, the more attention devoted to the task, the less fluent the performance. The key to fluent second-language speech seems to be the conversion of attended or consciously controlled procedures into unconscious, automatic processes. How that is accomplished remains largely a mystery, but there are a few clues. 1. Basic Characteristics In a consideration of the special properties of speech processing in a second language, the operating features of the basic human speech production system have to be assumed. Anyone attempting to speak, with communicative intent, must have a general conceptualization of what is to be communicated, a means of converting that conceptualization into a message structure suitable to the recipient and the social context, then into a linguistic form which can be articulated, all subject to some general monitoring and repair procedures. However, the unconscious ease with which that basic system functions in the normal production of utterances in the first language is not typically matched in second-language speech production. Even in the speech of highly proficient second-language speakers, there inevitably remain traces of foreign accent, occasional difficulties with precise vocabulary, some unusual ordering of constituents, and phrasings which seem inappropriate to the general context of the utterance. For the less proficient second-language speaker, and typically for those still in the process of learning the second language in an instructional setting, the number and frequency of nonnative-like features in their speech is much more noticeable. In order to understand how some of the characteristic features of second-language speech come about, a number of constraining influences on the basic psycholinguistic processing model of human speech production must be taken into account. Since the most generally recognized characteristics of second-language speaking are typically identified in pronunciation, an obvious starting point is the effect of articulatory constraints on secondlanguage speech processing. 2. Pronunciation It is generally believed that for an adult to achieve native-like pronunciation in a second language is the rare exception rather than the rule. This general fact 302
has been labeled the 'Joseph Conrad phenomenon' after the renowned author whose literary ability in the English language was beyond question, but whose spoken English retained the strong Polish accent of his first language. If adults find second-language pronunciation so difficult, what specific processes are to blame? One answer is that the key to second-language pronunciation is not initially a production issue at all, it is a matter of perception. Sound distinctions that are important in the pronunciation of the second language may not have an important function in the first language and, because of the powerful influence of the first language system, those second-language sound distinctions may not even be perceived by the learner. The inability of Arabic speakers, in the early stages of learning English, to perceive the distinction between a pair of English words like pack and back can be traced to the fact that the English distinction between the /p/ and /b/ sounds is simply not a distinction made in Arabic and hence relatively difficult for Arabic speakers to perceive. In terms of perception, this process essentially leads to an inaccurate categorization of new phonemes in the second language as varieties of familiar phonemes in the first language, and is described by some as 'phonemic false evaluation' and, by others, as 'equivalence classification.' In terms of production, if the speaker uses the first-language sounds as equivalents for the second-language sounds, the process is described as 'transfer' (see Phonology in Second Language Acquisition). 3. Transfer When there is a close match between the transferred first-language sounds and their perceived secondlanguage equivalents, the speaker will typically benefit from 'positive transfer' and be able to produce accurate pronunciation features with little processing effort. The obvious problems arise through 'negative transfer,' when the equivalence is misperceived, and inaccurate second-language sounds are produced. For many Japanese speakers in the early stages of learning English, the English sounds /!/ and /r/ are identified as equivalent to a single sound in Japanese and the pronunciation of that single sound is transferred into English. The effect is one of processing ease for the speaker, yet substantial processing difficulty for the English-speaking listener who does not recognize the unfamiliar sound. Making matters more complex is the fact that some second-language sound distinctions may be misperceived by learners in some linguistic contexts, but
Speaking in a Second Language not in others. The most obvious basis for this effect is the availability of a sound type in the first language that seems close enough to what is heard as the secondlanguage sound and hence can be used in certain word positions requiring that sound. The tendency of German speakers of English to pronounce back and bag as virtually identical is not a result of the Germans failing to perceive a distinction between /k/ and /g/. Such a distinction, between a voiceless (/k/) and a voiced (/g/) sound, is common in German. However, this distinction is never made in word-final position and so, among German speakers, English word-final voiced consonants tend to be pronounced as voiceless. This process is technically known as 'devoicing.' For other second-language speakers of English, this type of pronunciation problem may have a different solution. If a voiced consonant sound is required at the end of a word like bag, the tendency to devoicing can be limited by the inclusion of a final vowel sound such as schwa /a/. This solution is a common feature among Chinese speakers of English and produces the appropriate voiced consonant, yet followed by an inappropriate schwa sound /baega/. Mandarin speakers learning English will also use this final schwa sound to cope with the unfamiliar articulation problems of final consonant clusters. Instead of being pronounced as a single syllable ending in two consonants (i.e., a cluster), a word like test may be converted to two syllables tes + te by the addition of a final schwa sound. Indeed, if this process interacts with a very general simplification process in second-language speech toward 'open syllables' (i.e., one consonant plus one vowel), the resulting pronunciation may be closer to te + se + te. When the vowel sound is added at the end of a word, it is technically known as 'schwa paragoge' and, more generally, when it is inserted within the word to create an open syllable, it is described as 'epenthesis.' A similar process used to cope with initial consonant clusters can be observed among those Spanish speakers of English who, using a pattern more familiar in their first language, pronounce words like skill and state with an initial /£/ sound or, sometimes, with that sound inserted between the first two consonants (see Contrastive and Error Analysis). 4. Temporal Variables
Second-language speaking also exhibits a number of features which affect fluency and which are often taken to be evidence of planning and processing difficulties. These features are collectively known as 'temporal variables' because they have to do with the timing, particularly the rhythm, of utterances. As secondlanguage speakers implement their speaking plans, they have a tendency to make greater use of pauses, filled pauses (e.g., er, em), lengthened vowels, and the repetition of words or parts of phrases. Such features are typically associated with processing difficulty and
represent attempts to gain more time while trying to find appropriate forms and structures. The general effect is that the 'speaking rate' (i.e., syllables per minute) becomes measurably different, typically slower than the native-speaking norm. This description seems to fit lower proficiency speakers and also those whose learning experiences have led them to devote processing time to achieving accuracy in the form of second-language utterances (see Learning Strategies). It does capture the speaking style of many Korean learners of English, for example, who often exhibit a slow speaking rate and substantial repetition and self-correction. Some Spanish learners of English, however, exhibit quite different features, with substantially fewer repetitions, corrections, and pauses, and many more 'lexical substitutions' (words from Spanish), so that the actual speaking rate may seem faster than the native speaker norm. One source of that impression is the effect of length of 'speaking runs' (i.e., number of syllables between pauses) which can, on average, be substantially different from one language to the next. It has been noted that first-language characteristics of speaking rate, such as the length and placement of pauses, can actually become more noticeable in second-language speaking when the learner becomes more proficient, because that proficiency may obviate the need to manipulate temporal variables to gain additional processing time (see Applied Linguistics). 5. Interlanguage Processes
In the preceding discussion, some attention has been given to the transfer of features from the first language into second-language speaking as a means of increasing fluency through already existing automatic processes. While the first language exists as an obvious influence on second-language processing, that influence may be quite indirect or even subverted by more powerful forces. If, for example, there is a sound in the second language which is perceived to be particularly difficult, learners may simply avoid using words containing that sound. Alternatively, the learner may produce a version of some targetted second-language sound, particularly a vowel sound, and overgeneralize the use of that same vowel to other contexts where a qualitatively different vowel would be required in the second language. The resulting phenomenon is a sound regularly and generally used by the learner in speaking the second language which is neither an identifiable first-language sound nor an appropriate second-language sound in that context. These two processes of 'avoidance' and 'overgeneralization' are often appealed to in discussions of an underlying system of second-language processing known as the speaker's 'interlanguage.' This system certainly has some features transferred from the first language and also has some identifiable features of the target language, but it is quite distinct from both.
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The Individual Learner As a processing system, an interlanguage is typically subject to a great deal of variability, both internally, as some aspects of pronunciation accommodate to new patterns, and externally, according to the communicative demands of the situation. When an individual second-language speaker fixes on a particular interlanguage pronunciation pattern and does not exhibit any further variability, the result is described as 'fossilization.' In processing terms, fossilization would represent a fixed, nontarget-like routine for producing second-language sounds and combinations of sounds. This would enable the second-language speaker to make certain processes automatic and potentially increase speaking rate, thereby achieving greater fluency. Such fluency will be purchased at the expense of accuracy in the second language and, although the speaking rate may increase, the communication rate (i.e., being easily understood by native speakers) may show no increase at all. While fossilized pronunciation is often attributed to adult second-language speakers, there is, in fact, more evidence to support the concepts of instability and variability as typical characteristics of second-language speaking, rather than the fixed invariant properties associated with fossilization. 6. Variability There are two main sources which interact to create variability in the process of second-language speaking. Most of the features described so far will give rise to variability in the speaker's performance as a result of processes internal to the speaker. Moreover, as speakers develop greater proficiency in using the second language, or perhaps lose some of their proficiency through periods in which there are no opportunities to use the second language, their level of performance will change. These observable differences give rise to what is called 'intraspeaker variability' and they can occur independently of the speaking context. The second main source of variability is the nature of the speaking task which can change the processing demands on the speaker's second-language resources and result in different levels of speaking performance. Accuracy in second-language pronunciation, for example, is generally better in reading a text aloud than in free conversation and even better when reading single words aloud from a list. One reason for these differences may be that there is a substantially reduced processing load when the message structure is already organized, with syntactic and lexical choices determined, as in the read-aloud task, and hence processing energy can be more fully devoted to articulation. In free-speaking tasks, with a larger number of processing decisions to be made, less attention can be devoted to pronunciation alone and hence the speaker may appear less accurate and potentially less fluent (see Applied Linguistics). 304
7. Communicative Stress The speaking task can also become more demanding because of factors external to the speaker within the speaking context, particularly in interaction with other speakers, where messages have to be constructed and articulated on-line and in response to immediately preceding utterances by other speakers. Variation in this respect can be tied to levels of 'communicative stress'.' Second-language speaking may not be very stressful in a comfortable situation, for example, talking to friends on a familiar topic. It is more stressful for a second-language speaker to attempt to talk on an unfamiliar topic, in new surroundings, to strangers. Unfamiliar topics make it less likely that the speaker can rely on some of the more automatic message structures, and the 'prefabricated patterns' of syntax and vocabulary used to encode them, that have been used in the past with familiar topics. New surroundings and unfamiliar interlocutors also make it difficult for the speaker to decide what is known information and what is new for a particular occasion and hence make the organization of message structure problematic. Decisions about the degree of formality versus informality, the relative status relationship between interlocutors, and a variety of other social factors will all serve to create additional stress on the processing capacity of the speaker (see Applied Linguistics). In some cases this will give rise to more hesitations, more repairs, and a general disfluency in performance as the speaker experiences difficulty executing all complex processing plans simultaneously within the limited time constraints of interactive speaking. In other cases, it may lead to topic abandonment and an unwillingness to use the second language at all in situations associated with communicative stress (see Intercultural Discourse). 8. Strategies Faced with processing difficulties in the second language, many speakers will employ a range of strategies which either reduce the processing load in some way or make use of other available resources to make the communicative task more manageable for the available processing capacity. The first type of solution has generally been described in terms of 'message adjustment' and is characterized by secondlanguage speakers replacing the message they want to communicate with another message that they feel they have the means to communicate. It may be this process that occasions the frequent number of topic shifts observed in interactions involving lower proficiency second-language speakers. This may also provide an explanation for the higher incidence of planning pauses, hesitation markers, and self-repairs which characterize some second-language speech and give it a very disrupted rhythm.
Speaking in a Second Language The second general solution has been described as 'resource expansion' and is realized in a number of different ways. The second-language speaker, wanting to refer to an object, but not knowing or not remembering an appropriate second-language expression, may use gestures or mime, a term borrowed from the first language, a made-up word, or a paraphrase, and various other strategies that essentially invite the listeners to add their active processing abilities to help the speaker overcome some temporary processing difficulty. Clearly, such strategies depend on a cooperative interlocutor and are more likely to be used by a second-language speaker who is willing to take more risks in an attempt to communicate than one who avoids or abandons topics when difficulties are encountered. Risky or not, any strategy that seeks to involve the interlocutor in the joint construction of meaning is likely to be more beneficial for the secondlanguage speaker, both in terms of the immediate interaction and in terms of developing better secondlanguage skills in the longer term (see Communication Strategies). 9. Communicative Effectiveness
The role of the interlocutor in studies of secondlanguage speaking has generally been neglected. As much of the preceding discussion has indicated, second-language speakers experience a substantial processing challenge, and much of the training that is normally provided in instructional environments tends to focus on the production processes and how to increase fluency and accuracy. There is some evidence, however, that an overemphasis on the linguistic features of speaking, particularly in terms of formal accuracy, will lead to an excess of self-monitoring and a corresponding reduction in both fluency and attention to the interactive expectations of the interlocutor. Moreover, an emphasis on fluency, or just developing the speaking rate in the second language, will tend to reduce the level of accuracy, without necessarily proving beneficial for the communicative demands of the interaction. Emphasizing either accuracy or fluency, or even both, will tend to create second-language speakers who concentrate most of their processing energy on their own spoken performance. They become more proficient monologue speakers in the second language. When faced with an interactive speaking situation in which their interlocutor indicates a communication problem, such speakers will tend to concentrate on themselves, their perspective, and their expression of that perspective, rather than attempt to take the other's perspective into account. In most interactive communication, however, there is an inherent requirement that communicative problems are to be negotiated and resolved jointly, with each speaker accommodating to the other's expressed per-
spective. When second-language speakers are sensitized to the nature of an interlocutor's requirements, they tend to develop more effective spoken communication skills and can use their fluency, not just to express their own perspectives, but to discover their interlocutors' perspectives. The development of such skills is usually marked by an increase in a number of interactive moves, such as monitoring the other's world of reference, checking for comprehension, anticipating potential problems, and seeking confirmation whether some basic information is shared or not. These aspects of speaking are typically identified as 'clarification requests,' 'confirmation checks,' and 'confirmation responses.' What these aspects of second-language processing appear to indicate is that, as the interaction proceeds, the second-language speaker is jointly constructing, with the interlocutor, a mutually understood world of reference. Operating in this way, the second-language speaker will be concentrating processing energy at the conceptualization and message structure levels in order to tailor spoken contributions to what is known, or needs to be known, about the interlocutor's world, rather than focusing on structuring and articulating a message that is already formulated in terms of the speaker's world alone. In general, previous work on second-language speech processing, both in research and teaching, has tended to pay most attention to formal aspects of the speaker's articulation and little attention to ways in which interactive language use demands that spoken contributions should be 'recipient designed.' As the goal of second-language speaking becomes less tied to the articulatory level, dominated by concepts such as fluency and accuracy, and begins to be more closely associated with communicative effectiveness in particular contexts, involving concepts like negotiated meanings and information exchange, there will likely be a change in the amount of attention devoted to the different components in the standard model of speech production. Instead of a linear progression from speaker's conceptualization through message structuring to an instantiation in linguistic form, there will be a more elaborate role for checking and monitoring procedures which interact between speaker's conceptualizations and perceived listener's conceptualizations before message structures are formulated. See also: Fluency and Accuracy; Communication Strategies; Intercultural Discourse.
Bibliography Brown G, Yule G 1983 Teaching the Spoken Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Dechert H W, Raupach M (eds.) 1987 Psycholinguistic Models of Production. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Dornyei Z, Kormos J 1998 Problem-solving mechanisms in
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The Individual Learner L2 communication. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 20(3): 349-85 Flege J, Munro M, MacKay I 1995 Effects of age of secondlanguage learning on the production of English consonants. Speech Communication 16: 1-26 Kasper G, Kellerman, E (eds.) 1997 Communication Strategies. Addison Wesley Longman, Harlow, Essex
Levelt W J M 1989 Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Major R (ed.) 1998 Interlanguage Phonetics and Phonology. Special Issue of Studies in Second Language Acquisition 20(2) Yule G 1997 Referential Communication Tasks. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ
Writing in a Second Language U. Connor
Writing in a second language is a complex phenomenon obviously involving an interaction between writer and reader that is less obviously a cognitive activity. The resulting process of composition has been the focus of students of contrastive rhetoric and, more recently, students of cultural and cross-cultural secondlanguage processing. This survey of the field begins with what second-language (L2) writers bring into the writing situation: cultural models of what 'good' coherent writing is. Such models are formed from semantic and syntactic knowledge, and include as well knowledge of text structures, of acceptable topics, and of appropriate compositional procedures. Although these LI cultural models can often be transferred successfully into L2 writing, the potential for negative transfer is obvious. To study LI and L2 writing, researchers—applied linguists and rhetoriciansexamine both writing processes and the written products using a variety of communicative, cognitive, and linguistic analyses. 1. Current Theories of Writing 1.1 Writing as Communication In current theories of writing, writing is considered an act of communication between writer and reader(s). It is recognized that in a genuinely communicative social interaction, a writer pays careful attention to the audience and its needs in order to make sure that the text is comprehensible, persuasive, or memorable— that is, fulfills whatever demands the specific writing situation requires. Therefore, texts are not seen as overt, concretely describable entities. Instead, linguists admit that 'the interpretability [of texts] is the dependence of situational context and the knowledge of the world shared by the producer and the receptor of discourse' (Enkvist 1990:26). Many models of writing which address this mutual dependence have been developed by rhetoricians interested in considering the purposes of writing (e.g., Britton 1975; Kinneavy 1971). As has frequently been
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noted, these models resemble Jakobson's (1960) wellknown schema of the functions of language. Jakobson identifies six factors: addresser, addressee, context, message, contact, and code. Each determines a different function of language: 'emotive' or 'expressive' (expressing the addresser's feelings and experiences); 'conative' (focusing on changing the addressee's behavior, thinking, or action); 'referential' or 'epistemic' (focusing on the context and informing the addressee of topics outside* the addresser and the addressee); 'poetic' (focusing on the self-referentiality of the message); 'phatic' or 'associational' (emphasizing the relationship between the addresser and the addressee); and 'metalingual' (focusing on the lexical or syntactic code of language). The similarity with Jakobson's model of the functions of language and the rhetorical models of writing is illustrated by Kinneavy's widely accepted 'theory of discourse.' Kinneavy's theory is based on four components as contrasted to Jakobson's six: encoder, decoder, reality, and signal. Depending on the situation, language (the signal) stresses the persons (encoder or decoder), or the reality to which the reference is made, or the product (the text produced). Consequently, discourse can be 'expressive' (focused on the encoder, Jakobson's addresser), 'persuasive' (focused on the decoder, the addressee), 'informative' (focused on reality or the context), and 'literary' (focused on the text—Jakobson's 'poetic' function). Kinneavy's model has been useful in explicating reader-audience relationships in writing because, more clearly than the Jakobsonean model, it distinguishes the aims or purposes of discourse from the modes or means of discourse, for example, classification and description. 1.2 Writing as a Cognitive Activity Clearly, as an act of communication between the reader and the writer, writing is a complex cognitive skill requiring appropriate processes and strategies. In
Writing in a Second Language the 1970s and 1980s, a great deal was learned about these processes. Both LI and L2 researchers have examined the mental states of writers, their problemsolving strategies and decisions about focus, audience, and language use, and their stylistic decisions and composing processes—planning, decisions during writing, and revising—in order to determine what is involved in the act of writing and what skills are required. For example, researchers have studied student writers at work. In first-language writing, Emig's (1971) pioneering research, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, was the first to shift emphasis from product to process and to establish a case study approach using audiotaped think-aloud protocols of writers as data. Emig analyzed the writing processes of eight high school seniors, audiotaping their composing aloud, observing the students while they wrote, and interviewing them afterwards. One of the most powerful models of composing is that developed by Flower and Hayes (1981), from their studies of thinking-aloud protocols collected from mature, college-level writers while in the act of writing. Flower and Hayes's cognitive process model represents writing as consisting of four interactive components—task, environment, the writer's longterm memory, and the composing processes themselves. The task environment consists of the writing topic, the audience, the degree of urgency of the task, and the text produced so far. The writer's long-term memory retains definitions of the topic, identity of the audience, and possible writing plans. The writing processes include planning, translating, and reviewing. Planning involves generating ideas, goals, and procedures. Translating involves expressing ideas and goals in verbal forms, while reviewing includes evaluating and revising. Using this theoretical model to explain data from numerous empirical studies. Flower and Hayes have identified composing as an exceedingly complex problem-solving activity responding to a rhetorical situation in a form of a text. Most importantly, their research has determined that writing ordinarily is not a linear process where a writer moves from planning to translating and to reviewing in an orderly sequence. Instead, writers have been found to write recursively, not knowing what the written outcome will be when they start. Research on writers' composing processes shows that composing involves a variety of plans and processes which the writer brings to bear throughout the writing process. Research on the composing process contradicts previous composition pedagogy which has required that students find a topic, construct an outline, and then write in an orderly, linear sequence. It has also discovered differences between the strategies of skilled and novice writers. Skilled writers pay greater attention to matters of content and organization while
weaker writers are preoccupied with mechanics (see Hillocks 1986 for a comprehensive review of LI writing process research). 2. Theories of Writing and Composing in L2 2.1 Research on Composing Processes Second-language writing research reflects a keen awareness of LI writing process research (see Krapels 1990 for a review of the ESL writing process research). Raimes's (1987) case study is a good example; it includes only one writing task, and data are gathered from both process- and product-oriented sources. Think-alouds are analyzed with regard to processing model components: students' planning, translating, and reviewing are charted; strategies to address the audience are assessed; and procedures to address the writing task in general are explained. With regard to product-oriented data, students' written essays are analyzed and evaluated according to their length, use of various syntactic measures, coherence, development, and other features contributing to essay quality. However, the findings from the 100 or so studies on L2 composing are contradictory. In a review of these studies, Krapels (1990) found that the findings tendio show the following: (a) Composing competence is more important in ESL writing than language competence. (b) The composing processes of expert L2 writers are similar to the composing processes of expert LI writers; likewise the composing processes of novice L2 writers are similar to the composing processes of novice LI writers. (c) Composing processes in LI are transferable to L2. (d) Composing processes in L2 are somewhat different from those in LI (a contradiction of (b), Krapels points out). At this time, it seems too early to generalize about L2 writing processes because the studies have been conducted with few students in different settings. Students have typically written an essay on a prescribed topic. The research has focused on one aspect—composing processes—and has not considered other variables that enter into the writing situation according to the communicative model, for example, knowledge of the audience, the context, and the purpose. 2.2 Contrastive Rhetoric: Cross-cultural Differences in the Organization of Texts Since the 1960s, after observing problems in L2 writing of international students, second-language acquisition researchers have tested theories about differing writing patterns in students' LI cultures and their effect on L2 writing. Kaplan's (1966) research was the first major study that analyzed how LI thinking and discourse structures are manifested in L2 writing. His 307
The Individual Learner research was influenced by the work of sociologists and anthropologists who believed that logic is a cultural phenomenon, and who were influenced by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the structure of one's native language strongly influences one's view of the world. Kaplan's major thesis was that different linguistic and cultural interpretations lead to different rhetorics, or modes of communication. This causes difficulties for nonnative speakers writing in the target language. Such students need to be taught the appropriate target language patterns and their associated logics. Kaplan's was the first attempt in ESL to consider the rhetoric of writing rather than the purely linguistic features emphasized by traditional sentence-based analyses such as 'transformational generative grammar.' In order to contrast English rhetorical patterns with other rhetorics, Kaplan analyzed some 500 essays written by ESL students with heterogeneous LI backgrounds. He found that Arabic students' essays were characterized by the use of repetitions and parallel expressions; Chinese students' writing was marked by what Kaplan called an approach of indirection—writing in a circular pattern which takes a long time to come to the point; while students with Romance and Russian backgrounds frequently tended to digress. Coined as 'contrastive rhetoric,' Kaplan's research has encouraged numerous other ESL researchers to account for certain patterns in the writing of ESL students as interference from LI. (Contrastive discourse analyses between English and several languages—American Indian languages, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Marathi— are included in the 1983 volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Kaplan 1983).) However, the emphasis of other ESL researchers has been on the development of contrastive rhetoric as a .more comprehensive discipline that draws on theories of cultural and linguistic relativity, discourse analysis, translation theory, rhetoric studies, and teaching and learning theory. Two anthologies (Connor and Kaplan 1987; Purves 1988), for example, focus on the contributions of discourse analysis alone in contrastive rhetoric. Because of the growing emphasis on processes of writing, contrastive rhetoric came under intense criticism during the 1980s and early 1990s. It had been criticized for focusing on products or finished essays rather than on the processes involved in writing. To expand Kaplan's original work, significant changes have taken place in contrastive rhetoric since the late 1960s. A 1996 book by Connor surveys the field and suggests that contrastive rhetoric has taken new directions in the following four domains: (1) contrastive text linguistics, (2) the study of writing as a cultural and educational activity, (3) classroom based studies of writing, and (4) contrastive genre-specific studies, 308
including a variety of genres for a variety of purposes such as journal articles, business reports, letters of application, grant proposals, editorials, etc. 2.3 Writing as a Cultural Activity Important contributions to knowledge about language, writing, and culture have emerged from the International Study of Written Composition as part of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) (Gorman et al. 1988). The IEA study has examined the written achievement of students and instructional practices of writing in 14 different countries: Chile, England, Finland, the Federal Republic of Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Sweden, Thailand, the United States, and Wales. Thousands of school-age students have written essays on a variety of topics ranging from reflection to persuasion. Working from the vast empirical data resulting from this project, Purves (1988) has proposed that there are both an 'international interpretative community' and 'national communities.' Although the countries were able to agree on common tasks and scoring procedures, differences were found in the style, content, and pragmatics of the essays across cultures. Purves concluded that good writing is culturally determined. In addition to evaluating the quality and characteristics of student essays across languages and cultures, the IEA study revealed cultural differences in 'writing activity.' It was observed that in some cultures greater emphasis appears to be placed on criteria for editing while in others there appears to be a greater emphasis on criteria for planning and drafting. Purves and Hawisher (1990:190), for example, comment that 'there are strong national differences in perception ... such as the relatively low emphasis on "organization" in Chile and on "style and tone" in the Netherlands. In New Zealand and Sweden, teachers appear to emphasize "process" more than in other countries, but in Sweden more of this emphasis concerns choice of topic than is the case in New Zealand.' In another landmark article describing the IEA study, Purves and Purves (1986) claim that guidelines or rules for 'good' or 'appropriate' writing determine cultural models for finished texts as well as cultural models for good writing in specific contexts. They list three basic forms of required knowledge: 'semantic knowledge,' 'knowledge of text models,' and 'knowledge of social and cultural rules governing both when it is appropriate to write and when it is obligatory to write as well as knowledge of the appropriate procedures to use in the activity of writing' (1986:179). The work conducted in the IEA study and the theoretical implications discussed by Purves and his colleagues are significant in expanding contrastive
Writing in a Second Language rhetoric in three directions. First, the sample writing in the IEA study was in the students' mother tongues, allowing for a more direct discussion of cross-cultural differences. Second, the sample sizes were large enough to allow statistical inferences and generalizations. Third, the study recognized the importance of going beyond static linguistic and discourse analyses for learning about cross-cultural conventions of writing. It should be noted that the IEA study examined writing solely in LI and in LI cultural contexts, a limitation which does not directly lend itself to generalizing for L2 contexts. But when the study is considered in light of what is known through contrastive rhetoric studies about the transfer of LI writing patterns into L2 writing, one can easily speculate that cultural models learned in LI context—related to purposes of writing, audience, topics, and discourse genres—transfer into L2 situations to some degree. 2.4 Cross-cultural Differences in Text Coherence Coherence is the most important aspect in the interpretability and comprehensibility of a text. L2 researchers around the world have examined features that make texts coherent. Two competing theories have dominated: one that emphasizes the reader's interaction with the text, and the other that focuses on the text itself. Although the latter is important in that a certain number of surface signals in discourse are necessary for ease of processing (e.g., overt cohesive links like transitional conjunctions), more researchers now consider coherence as part of a process of comprehension that is 'sensitive to situation and context including the world knowledge of the communication partners' (Enkvist 1990:26)—in other words, crossculturally intelligible. Accepting the view of coherence that emphasizes the situation, context, and the world knowledge of the encoder and the decoder, helps one to understand the inherent difficulties of L2 writers. Thus, for example, it is not enough to know the covert textual signals of cohesion in the target language— itself a formidable task. In addition, L2 writers have to structure their discourse so that their L2 readers are able to make the right inferences. Clearly, to use text structures that in the target language are viewed as achieving coherence helps the reader make the right inference. But textual patterns used to express coherence vary among languages and across cultures. Hinds, for example, has shown that writing in Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Korean favors an inductive rather than a deductive style of presentation, or what Hinds calls 'delayed introduction of purpose' (1990:98). The specifics lead up to what appears to be, and often is, the conclusion. This delayed introduction of purposes makes the writing appear incoherent to the English-speaking reader (although not to the native reader), especially since the concluding paragraph does not always constitute
a conclusion in the English sense. English-speaking readers expect most essays to be organized deductively, from the general to the particular, at least in appearance. In addition to achieving coherence through textual structures such as the inductive, writers need to be sensitive to the different expectations of reader/writer responsibilities across cultures. In proposing a new typology of language based on 'speaker and/or writer responsibility as opposed to listener and/or reader responsibility,' Hinds has shown that, with respect to coherence, for example, Japanese writing demands more of the reader, while the inference-based rhetorical form preferred in the West places the expository burden chiefly on the writer (1987:143,146). Hinds's extensive research on English and Japanese expository prose shows that English readers expect and require landmarks of coherence and unity as they read. The writer needs to provide the transitional statements. In Japanese, on the other hand, transitions may be lacking. The reader is expected to piece together sections to make a coherent text. Hinds's findings are consistent with analyses of persuasive essays written for the IEA study, which show that the Western tradition favors the rational, logical aspects of argument. The burden in the Western tradition is clearly on the writer, for the writer is expected to make obvious the steps in the argument and the pertinence of the evidence. 2.5 New Directions in Future Research for L2 Writing Acknowledging that writing is a cognitive and communicative activity, L2 research continues to explore processes in L2 writing as well as to examine products L2 writers produce. Yet, L2 writing research in the 1980s and 1990s has added genres to study. Increasing numbers of ESL and EFL learners are writing academic articles, business reports, letters of job application, and other academic and professional types of writing. Research on these English for specific purposes writings provides a new, popular dimension of EFL writing research (Belcher and Braine 1995; Connor et al. 1995; Swales 1990). See also: Writing: Second Language Pedagogy. Bibliography Belcher D, Braine G (eds.) 1995 Academic Writing in a Second Language: Essays on Research and Pedagogy. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Britton J 1975 The Development of Writing Abilities. Macmillan Education, London Connor U 1987 Research frontiers in writing analysis. TESOL Quarterly 21: 677-96 Connor U 1996 Contrastive Rhetoric: Crosscultural Aspects of Second Language Writing. Cambridge University Press, New York Connor U, Johns A M (eds.) 1990 Coherence in Writing:
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The Individual Learner Research and Pedagogical Perspectives. TESOL Publications, Arlington, VA Connor U, Kaplan R B 1987 Writing Across Languages: Analysis of L2 Text. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA Emig J 1971 The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL Enkvist N E 1990 Seven problems in the study of coherence and interpretability. In: Connor U, Johns A (eds.) Flower L S, Hayes J R 1981 A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication 32: 36587 Gorman T P, Purves A C, Degenhart R E 1988 The IEA Study of Written Composition Vol. I: The International Writing Tasks and Scoring Scales. Pergamon Press, New York Hillocks G Jr 1986 Research on Written Composition: New Directions for Teaching. ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills and the National Conference on Research in English, Urbana, IL Hinds J 1987 Reader versus writer responsibility: A new typology. In: Connor U, Kaplan R B (eds.) Hinds J 1990 Inductive, deductive, quasi-inductive: Expository writing in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Thai. In: Connor U, Johns A M (eds.) Jakobson R 1960 Linguistics and poetics. In: Sebeok T A (ed.) Style in Language. Wiley, New York
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Kaplan R B 1966 Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education. Language Learning 16:1-20 Kaplan R B (ed.) 1983 Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, vol. 3. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Kinneavy J 1971 A Theory, of Discourse. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Krapels A R 1990 An overview of second language writing process research. In: Kroll B (ed.) Second Language Writing: Research Insights for the Classroom. Cambridge University Press, New York Purves A C (ed.) 1988 Writing Across Languages and Cultures. Sage, Beverly Hills, CA Purves A C, Hawisher G 1990 Writers, judges, and text models. In: Beach R, Hynds S (eds.) Developing Discourse Practices in Adolescence and Adulthood. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Purves A C, Purves W C 1986 Viewpoints: Cultures, text models, and the activity of writing. Research in the Teaching of English 20:175-97 Raimes A 1987 Language proficiency, writing ability, and composing strategies: A study of ESL college student writers. Language Learning 37:439-67 Swales J 1990 Genre Analysis. English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge University Press, New York
The School Context School and Classroom Bilingual Education M. E. Brisk
Bilingual education, using two or more languages as a medium of instruction, dates from 3000 BC when scribes in the Mesopotamia were taught in both Sumerian and Akkadian. Most countries in the world offer bilingual programs in government funded and/or private schools. One of the languages is usually the national or official language (see National Languages) while the other language of instruction can be indigenous (Quechua in Peru), another official language (Arabic in Israel), regional (French in Canada), the language of immigrants (Finnish in Sweden), the language of guest workers (Moroccan in The Netherlands), an international language (English in Argentina), or the language of sojourners (Japanese in the United States). The scope of bilingual education varies throughout the world. In a few countries bilingual education is universal in all schools. In Brunei, education takes place for all in both Standard Malay and in English. In most countries, however, bilingual education serves only a limited number of students. Such programs are the result of efforts of individual or experimental schools. The Foyer project administers five Dutch schools in Brussels serving immigrant children from Morocco, Italy, and Turkey. Students receive instruction in their native language and in Dutch. The use of Dutch increases as they move up the grades. They also take French which is compulsory for all students in Dutch schools. Some bilingual programs address needs of multilingual student populations. In the United States, national and local legislation support bilingual education for diverse linguistic populations. Such programs serve only about a quarter of the students with limited proficiency in English and are designed to serve students for only a limited number of years. Changes in the political history of a country are reflected in education policies. As a crown colony, Hong Kong traditionally had a dual-system school, English schools and Chinese schools where Chinese and English were taught as subjects respectively. Since
1997 all schools use Chinese as a medium of instruction in the elementary grades with English taught as a subject. English is the medium of instruction in high schools while Chinese language and history are subjects taught in Chinese. When a language does not have a written form, bilingual education requires development of a writing system and materials in that language. In Africa, communities and linguists have teamed to promote experimental bilingual programs for the elementary grades using the community language. An alternative is the monoliterate approach to bilingual education in which students are taught orally in the home language while they acquire literacy in the other language. 1. Goals The five major purposes of bilingual education are enrichment, maintenance, educational assistance, language revival, and serving transient populations. The acquisition of a second language is considered an educational asset. Bilingual education is designed to achieve second language fluency. Students in the Kato Gakuen elementary school in Japan receive instruction in English and Japanese beginning in kindergarten. Each language is employed equally through grade six. Bilingual schooling is instrumental in language preservation. In a school in northern Arizona, Hualapai children are instructed in English and Hualapai throughout their elementary schooling. At the secondary level most of the instruction is in English with certain subjects taught in Hualapai. Throughout the world children are socialized in languages other than the major language of education of the country. Bilingual education programs instruct students in their home language while they acquire the major or official language of the country. Eventually, students are integrated into the educational system in the national language. In Guatemala, the Programa Nacional de Educacion Bilingtie (PRONEBI) provides
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The School Context bilingual education to Mayan populations in their home language and in Spanish. Bilingual education also is employed to revive languages. Such is the case of Basque in Spain. Since the 1970s the promotion of Basque through education has helped not only strengthen Basque among Basque people but has made Spanish speakers living in the Basque region conversant in Basque. Parents in this area of Spain may opt to send children to Spanish, Basque, or bilingual Spanish/Basque schools. Since families of government or multinational employees move frequently, bilingual schools are created to facilitate their language needs and provide some continuity in the education. The central schools in India for families employed by the central government who move around the country offer instruction in the sciences in English and in the humanities in Hindu. Students' mother tongues are taught as a subject. There are a number of European schools created to serve civil servants working with the European Union organizations. Where there is space, local or immigrant students are also included. These schools have subsections for several of the languages of the member states where instruction takes place in the native language of the subgroup of students and another of the member state languages. Third or fourth languages are commonly taught as subjects. 2. Program Models
There are four major types of bilingual programs: dual language; language switch; Canadian Immersion; and transitional bilingual education. Dual language programs use two languages throughout schooling. In language-switch models instruction takes place in one language for some grades, while a different language is used for the remainder of the grades. Canadian Immersion (see Immersion) programs start schooling in the children's second language, introducing the home language gradually although instruction continues in the second language. Transitional programs use the native language of the students for a short period as a bridge to learn the second language. Programs differ greatly depending on their language outcomes, target population, and use of the two languages. Unplanned variation results from teachers beliefs and level of language proficiency. Although a model may call for the use of one language, some teachers instruct mostly in the other because they believe it is more important or because they are more fluent and comfortable in it. In dual-language models, which aim at additive bilingualism, students develop two languages. Duallanguage programs vary depending on the type of population they serve. Usually students begin school knowing at least one of the languages of instruction. Occasionally a small percentage of students are native speakers of a different language. Private schools cater312
ing to elites often feature a bilingual curriculum as in Argentina where the Spanish curriculum meets requirements of the Ministry of Eduction while instruction in English, French, or German conforms to standard curricula of those countries. An increasing number of programs in the United States attract English speakers as well as speakers of other languages. Two-way programs, as they are called, instruct students in both English and in the other language. The presence of native speakers of both languages is considered an asset for second language development. Language maintenance is another type of dual-language program where language minority populations are schooled in their home and national languages. Navajo students in selected reservation schools in the United States receive instruction in Navajo and English throughout their elementary school. At the secondary level, subjects related to the Navajo culture are taught in that language. Some ethnic schools, initiated by ethnic communities or religious organizations, feature bilingual curricula. Such schools fulfill education requirements of the country as well as the community's need to maintain their language and culture. The distribution of the two languages in the curriculum of the various types of dual-language programs varies. Languages may be equally balanced by teaching half a day in each language or alternating days or weeks in each language. In some schools languages are used for specific subjects. In bilingual schools for the deaf both languages are used all the time since the sign language serves face-to-face communication and another is used for reading and writing. Some countries promote bilingualism by switching the language of instruction after a few grades. To prepare students for the switch, the language is first taught as a subject. In Luxembourg the language is switched not once but twice. Most children arrive in school monolingual in Luxemburger, the language of initial schooling. Instruction gradually changes to German with French taught as a subject and by high school it gradually changes to French. French immersion programs were developed in Canada to promote bilingualism among English speakers. In the early immersion version of the model, students are introduced to schooling in French, their second language. French remains the only language of instruction for about three years. English, the home language, is then slowly introduced until it occupies 70 percent of instruction time by the secondary grades. Late immersion models start students in English with French taught as a subject. Towards the end of elementary school, French becomes the only language of instruction for two years. English is gradually reintroduced. The early immersion model has been adopted by other countries using other languages for immersion, always aiming at the dominant language population (see also Immersion).
Bilingual Education Transitional programs prevail where bilingual education aims at assisting students who do not speak the official or national language in which most schooling occurs. The language outcome is subtractive bilingualism because students learn a second language but lose or do not develop their home language. Students are instructed in their home language for a limited time while they develop proficiency in the official language. In England, programs for Punjabi students last one year, Turkish and Moroccan students can attend transitional programs in The Netherlands for two years, while Sweden offers four-year programs. These programs are directed to some of the students who are in special classes until they are ready to join students whose entire instruction is in the official or national language. Some schools attempt to integrate students. In Norway, bilingual instruction directed to Turkish, Urdu, and Vietnamese speakers takes place in classrooms that include Norwegian speaking students. A team-teaching approach is used where one teacher instructs both groups in Norwegian and the other teacher helps immigrant students in the content areas using their native language. 3. Other Education Models for Language Development
Programs that seek to develop fluency in two languages, a second language, or the students' home language are often labeled bilingual education. They are not strictly speaking bilingual since instruction takes place in one language while the other is taught as a subject. In other cases instruction takes place in students' second language. The students become bilingual but the program is monolingual. Yet other programs offer special classes in the mother tongue of language minority students. Communities seek to maintain their children's bilingualism by creating ethnic schools or programs that run on weekends or after school where the home language is taught. Local governments, religious institutions, or foreign governments support these programs. The attendance is voluntary for as long as parents wish to send their children to these programs. Language programs emanate from a desire for bilingualism, the need to recognize various linguistic groups, educational assistance, language revival, and service to transient populations. Bilingualism is a necessity in Brussels where Dutch schools require French classes for Flemish students and French schools have compulsory Dutch classes. Several linguistic groups may overlap in one country. While each group uses its language for instruction in the school, the language of the other group is offered as a compulsory or elective subject. In Finland parents may choose to send their children to schools that instruct either in Finnish with Swedish taught as a subject or schools that instruct in Swedish with Finnish as a subject. Many countries offer special second language classes to assist students who do not speak
the school language. Throughout the United States, school districts offer English as a Second Language to large numbers of immigrant and other home language students. Rather than bilingual schools, some movements to revitalize languages have called for total immersion in the language. Such is the case of Catalan immersion schools in Spain where instruction takes place in Catalan and Spanish is taught as a subject. The same approach is followed in the Gaelscoils in Ireland where instruction takes place in Irish with English taught as a subject. In international schools which serve transient populations, English is usually the language of instruction while the language of the country as well as other languages are taught as subjects. In the Vienna International School, German is a compulsory subject and a third language is optional. Mother tongue instruction is encouraged but the parents must pay for it. 4. Debate Over Language Use in Education
The paradox of bilingual education is that when it is employed in private schools for the children of elites it is accepted as educationally valid. But, when it becomes a matter of public policy, bilingual education stirs controversy. This debate over choice of language for instruction is the result of universal education. In the past, education was the perquisite of a few. Knowledge of several languages was an important component of education. With the advent of education for all, language use in schools became associated with rights of native speakers of those languages. The use of languages in education became an issue connected with political, economic, and social agendas far removed from the simple notion that bilingualism is the mark of an educated individual. The need to consider language in education emerges from the presence of indigenous groups that speak diverse languages, the influx of people of other languages and cultures who enter a country as immigrants, guest workers, or refugees and/or the changes in political boundaries. African countries that adopted European languages after independence as their official language confronted a dilemma: how to educate a population that speaks a variety of languages which often do not include the official language. Similar concerns are present in Australia, the United States, and certain countries in Latin America, such as Mexico and Peru, toward their indigenous populations. Many European countries, Australia, and the United States are destinations of immigrant, guest workers, or refugee populations. These countries have crafted educational policies to address the presence of a multilingual population in their schools. Changes in the language of education have followed historical events such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the retreat of colonial powers in Asia. The rise in power of local groups has created drastic 313
The School Context changes in language choice for schooling. Upon the formation of the federation of Malaysia in 1957, the educational policy allowed for Malay, Tamil, Chinese, and English medium schools for the elementary level and Malay and English for the secondary level. The increase in power of local people has translated into eduction being principally in Malay with some concessions for other languages. A pioneering study conducted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1953 revealed that children educated in their second language experienced difficulties in school. The report of experts from around the world, sponsored by UNESCO, declares that the home language is the best initial medium of instruction because it relates to the child's culture, facilitates literacy development and learning of different subjects, and promotes understanding between the home and the school. The report also underscores the importance of teaching language minority students their national language as a second language by gradually introducing it in elementary schools to prepare students for further education. Many educators and linguists today echo UNESCO'S recommendations. Yet others still adamantly oppose instruction through the native languages and believe that intense instruction in the national or official language is the best route to educational success. Emotional and pragmatic reasons abound in these debates on choice of language for education. Arguments often ignore educational principles due to political, economic, social, cultural, linguistic, and psychological pressures. Support for specific languages for instruction derives from notions of national identity and recognition of ethnic groups. The cost of implementing such programs and the practicality of teaching certain languages concern many politicians and administrators while the economic advantages of knowing certain languages persuades others. The social status of languages influences the desirability of including them in schooling. Cultural and linguistic diversity appeals to some and concerns others. The formation of identity and the development of positive attitudes toward languages and their speakers are considered essential by some while others do not believe it is the task of schools but the duty of families and community organizations. Many nations have developed educational plans to address the role of languages in education. The scope of these policies varies. Australia's 1987 National Policy on Languages strives for language maintenance of immigrant and aborigine languages. In contrast, Danish official guidelines for teaching language minorities (Undervisningsministeriet 1984) focus on providing for rapid adjustment to instruction in Danish. Regardless of how progressive or limited the policies are, governments have been slow in implementing such plans. In order to succeed, measures that require
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use of minority languages in education must include support for materials development and teacher preparation. The government of Nepal, pressured by minority language groups and linguistic human rights activists, retreated from its Nepali-only educational policy to allow language minority communities to establish native language primary schools. There has been no visible effort from the government to implement such measures. In Nepal, as in many other nations with other pressing concerns, the preservation or utilization of minority languages in education is not a high priority. Much of the rhetoric about use of languages in education eludes the principal goal of schools which is to develop knowledgable, thoughtful, and well adjusted individuals. Use of the home language and culture of children has a role in such development. In the present world, knowledge of more than one language is also an educational asset. To achieve such goals it is more important to focus on the quality of schools and instruction that to protect particular languages. Bilingual education research illustrates the features of schools, curricula, instruction, and assessment instrumental in successful education. Knowledge of this research supported by the will to implement its recommendations is a promising formula for quality bilingual schooling. See also: Minority Languages; Multilingualism; National Language Policy and Education; Immersion; School Language Policies. Bibliography Brisk M E 1998 Bilingual Education: From Compensatory to Quality Schooling. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ Durgunoglu A Y, Verhoeven L (eds.) 1998 Literacy Development in a Multilingual Context: Cross-cultural Perspectives. Lawrence Earlbaum, Mahwah, NJ European Language Council Homepage (http//www.fuberlin.de/elc/) Faltis C J, Hudelson S J 1998 Bilingual Education in Elementary and Secondary School Communities. Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA Fardon R, Furniss G (eds.) 1994 Aftrican Languages, Development and the State. Routledge, New York Glenn C L, de Jong E J 1996 Educating Immigrant Children. Garland Publishing, New York Johnson R K, Swain M (eds.) 1997 Immersion Education: International Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Jones G M, Ozóg A C K (eds.) 1993 Bilingualism and national development. Special Issue. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development Krashen S 1999 Condemned Without a Trial: Bogus Arguments Against Bilingual Education. Heinemann Publishing, Portsmouth, NH Lewis E G 1977 Bilingualism and bilingual education: The ancient world to the Renaissance. In: Spolsky B, Cooper R L (eds.) Frontiers of Bilingual Education. Newbury House, Rowley, MA, pp. 22-93 Mahshie S N 1995 Educating Deaf Students Bilingually: With Insights and Applications from Sweden and Denmark. Gal-
Classroom Language laudet University Pre-College Programs, Washington, DC McCarty T L, Zepeda O (eds.) 1995 Indigenous Language Education and Literacy. Special Issue. Bilingual Research Journal. National Association for Bilingual Education, Washington, DC New Language Planning Newsletter. Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India Skutnabb-Kangas T (ed.) 1995 Multilingualism for All: Eur-
opean Studies on Multilingualism. Swets and Zeitlinger, The Netherlands The World Bank Group 1995 Costs and Benefits of Bilingual Education in Guatemala (http://www.worldbank.org/ html/extdr/educ/edu econ/biling g.htm) United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization 1953 The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education. UNESCO, Paris
Classroom Language N. Mercer
The term 'classroom language' is usually taken to mean the language used by teachers and children doing educational activities in schools. It is rarely used with reference to adult education. It is also more usually used to refer to the spoken language of the classroom rather than to what is read or written (though of course written language has a very significant role in school education), and so it is spoken language which is considered here (see Oracy). 1. Functions of Spoken Language in the Classroom Starting with the language of the teacher, its most obvious function is to inform or instruct. Teachers may tell children what they are to do, how they are to do it, when to start, and when to stop. They also assess children's learning through talk, and use talk as a way of providing children with certain kinds of educational experiences which would be hard to provide by any other means (e.g., telling stories, reading poetry, describing objects). One very important function of talk for teachers is to control the behavior of children; indeed, with the demise of corporal punishment in many countries, talk is the main tool of control in the classroom. Schoolchildren might be expected to use talk primarily to request information and guidance from teachers. However, observational research in classrooms has shown that, as they progress through their school careers, the frequency with which children make spontaneous requests for information from teachers decreases. In secondary schools, most of children's talk in class is in the form of responses to teachers' questions, while requests for information they lack are more often covertly addressed to their peers (see Observing Classroom Language). In schools in many parts of the English-speaking world (notably the UK and Australia), teaching methods have increasingly come to favor the organization of children into pairs and groups for some learning activities, and this may increase the pro-
portion of both 'on task' and 'off task' talk between children. The level of talk in a classroom is, of course, a contentious educational issue. Traditional educational values associate a low level of talk with effective classroom control (success at 'keeping 'em quiet' is a traditional measure of a teacher's effectiveness), but modern methods often place strong emphasis on activities which encourage children to share knowledge with their peers and to develop their oral communication skills (see School Language Policies). The functions of 'off task' talk have been given little attention by researchers, but for children, such talk may on some occasions in school represent the most significant communications which take place. Talk between children working together which seems superficially off-task may be important for developing the working relationship of a pair or group. And, less welcome from a teacher's point of view, children can effectively employ off-task talk to subvert the official social order. A more general and important function of talk in the classroom, whether between a teacher and one or more pupils or between pupils working together, is as a means for developing shared understanding. Through joint action and talk, participants in the process of teaching and learning build a body of common knowledge which provides a contextual basis for further educational activity. The extent to which educational knowledge is made common through classroom discourse is one measure of the effectiveness of the educational process.
2. The Structure of Classroom Language The spoken language of the classroom has some interesting and distinctive discourse features (see Discourse in the Language Classroom). (They can be called 'discourse features' because they are aspects of the continuous linguistic text created by the interchanges between teachers and pupils, rather than of discrete 315
The School Context Pupil: Trying to say something R Teacher: Er, right Rosita— F what's he actually I trying to say Pupil: Trying to get a word R elicitation 2 out of his mouth Teacher: And what's the word (F)I elicitation 3 he's trying to get out R Pupil: Mm daddy (adapted from Graddol et al. 1994) Figure 1. The hierarchical organization of classroom talk (from Sinclair and Coulthard 1975).
utterances.) Consider, for example, the following piece of classroom talk (1): Teacher: Where is Argentina ? Pupil: In America. Teacher: Well, yes, in South America.
(1)
What happens here is that the teacher 'initiates' an exchange with a pupil the pupil 'responds' and the teacher then provides 'evaluative feedback' on that response. This three-part sequence of 'InitiationResponse-Feedback' (usually summarized by researchers as IRF or IRE) can be described as a minimal episode of teaching-and-learning. It is the frequency of such sequences (called 'exchanges' in the terminology of discourse analysis—see Sect. 2.1) which gives classroom talk its distinctive structure. 2.1 Analysis of Classroom Discourse The structural analysis of talk can be extended to include larger and smaller units than exchanges. Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) were the first to offer a hierarchical scheme for analyzing classroom talk, shown diagramatically in Fig. 1. A lesson is first divided into a series of topically coherent units, called 'transactions.' These are then further broken down into 'exchanges,' which in turn can be subdivided into 'moves.' Thus the teaching exchange described consists of three moves, an 'Initiation' (I), a 'Response' (R), and an 'Evaluation' or 'Feedback' (F). Finally, moves are themselves broken down into basic functional units called 'acts': Sinclair and Coulthard identified four main types of exchanges initiated by teachers: 'directives,' 'checks,' 'informatives,' and 'elicitations.' They also identified 22 acts, which they claimed were sufficient to describe all classroom discourse. The following is an example of a transaction analyzed into exchanges and moves: Teacher: What do you notice there—what's special about that particular section of tape— what's that child doing—anybody
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Moves Exchanges (2) I elicitation 1
The first of the three exchanges above begins with the teacher producing a string of acts which make up one move (an initiation). The second exchange can be considered to have no feedback move, or the initiation for the third exchange can be considered to be functioning simultaneously as feedback (indicated by the coding (F)I). One valuable application of this kind of analysis of classroom talk is to indicate ways in which teachers control the agenda of lessons through discourse. It also shows how being a pupil requires children to talk in certain ways which are complementary to those of the teacher. Research suggests that, on entry to school, most children very quickly learn to take on this aspect of the pupil role (see Home and School Language). Some educationalists see such rapid adaptation to the rules of classroom discourse as a necessary and valuable beginning to children's academic career, while others believe that it demonstrates how schools impose unnecessarily rigid constraints on young children's opportunities for talk and learning (e.g., Willes 1983). 3. Teacher-talk Observational research in the USA (Flanders 1970) revealed a characteristic of classroom talk which subsequently proved to be a common feature across a wide range of teachers, classrooms, and even countries. It is known as the 'two-thirds rule,' because it has been observed that: (a) for about two-thirds of the time someone is talking; (b) about two-thirds of this talk is the teacher's; (c) about two-thirds of the teacher's talk consists of lecturing or asking questions. Some teachers and educational theorists have used this discovery as an indictment of teachers' excessive dominance over classroom life and children's opportunities for self-expression and exploration through talk: but such judgments can only safely be made if based on a proper understanding of what teachers are trying to achieve through talking to children in class. 3.1 Teachers' Questions Teachers are sometimes not only accused of asking too many questions, they are also seen as behaving oddly because it is clear that for the great majority of questions they ask they already know the answers. This seems, on first consideration, to be a rather pec-
Classroom Language uliar kind of language behavior. (There are even jokes about it: Teacher: 'How many millimeters in a centimeter?' Pupil: 'If you don't know you should be in a different job!') But asking questions of this kind only seems odd if teachers' behavior is judged against some general and abstract standard of language use, whereby the only acceptable function of a question is to provide information requested by the ignorant enquirer. Such standards cannot be appropriately applied, because—as with all situational varieties of language—the nature and function of teacher-talk needs to be considered in context. To understand teachers' unusual use of questions, one needs to know why they ask them. In order to plan and evaluate their teaching and to assess the learning of their pupils, teachers need constantly to monitor children's knowledge and understanding. Most of the questions they ask are meant to serve this purpose, and on the whole probably do so quite effectively. Teachers and pupils are usually perfectly familiar with this convention (the humor of the joke above depends on the hearer being so), and so few misunderstandings are likely to arise about why they are being asked. However, misunderstandings do sometimes arise because teachers may not choose to ask the most direct, explicit questions. They may want to avoid putting words into children's mouths because that would not test children's real understanding, or they may feel that children should be required to put some mental effort into making connections between the work they have done and what they are being asked. Consider the following sequence from a science lesson in a UK secondary school classroom, in which the pupils have been doing a series of practical activities about air pressure (3): Teacher:
Well we blew into it and what (3) happened ? Pupil F: All the water came out of the straw. Pupil P: The water came out of the s—top. Teacher: All came out! Now why? Come on! This one's easy. Pupil F: 'Cos when you were blowing bubbles in, all the... air came up the straw... and the water with it. Teacher: Ooh no! I don't think that's quite right. When we blew air through here... where did it go? Pupils (together): Into the bottle. Teacher: Into the bottle! So was there more air in here or less air? Pupils (together): More. Teacher: More air, wasn't there? There was a lot more air in here. Now this air... wanted to do what? Pupils (clash of voices): Get out. Push water... push water outside to get room for itself. Teacher: Yes, ah. That's a very good answer. (Barnes 1976:73-74)
In this extract the teacher uses questions in a kind of guessing game to draw out from the children some key ideas of the lesson. The questions thus are not merely assessment, but are part of the teaching. 3.2 Teachers' Control over Knowledge Content Teachers use talk not only to control children's behavior and to monitor their understanding, but also to guide children's learning. Through talk, teachers mark some knowledge and experience as significant. They also attempt to create continuities between past, present, and future events in children's classroom experience. Knowledge and experience which is not considered educationally significant or valuable by a teacher will normally be marked as such in their talk, either by simply ignoring it or by dismissing it more explicitly. One of the most obvious ways in which teachers mark knowledge as significant or otherwise is in their evaluative feedback to children's responses to questions in the IRF exchanges described above. For example, wrong answers to a teacher's question are commonly followed by one of the following events: (a) the teacher says the answer is wrong, or (b) the teacher ignores the wrong answer. The teacher is likely then to ask the question again, either in the same words or in a paraphrased form. Teachers also mark the significance of elements of knowledge and experience in other, more subtle ways. Three features of teachers' discourse which illustrate this are 'cued elicitations,' 'joint knowledge markers,' and 'reconstructive recaps.' 3.2.1 Cued elicitations These are IRF exchanges in which the teacher asks questions while simultaneously providing heavy clues to the information required. Cued elicitation may be achieved merely by the wording of the question, but it is often accomplished by some other communicative means such as intonation, pausing, gestures or physical demonstrations. The extract below, from a primary school lesson, provides a good example of this (nonverbal features of the discourse are shown in italics, and emphatic speech is in bold type). The teacher is talking to the children about Galileo's studies of pendulums: Teacher: Now he didn't have a watch but he had on him something that was a very good timekeeper that he could use to hand straight away
(4)
Teacher snaps fingers on 'straight away,' and looks directly at pupils as if inviting a response.
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The School Context You've got it. I've got it. What is it? What could we use to count beats? What have you got? You can feel it here Pupils:
Pulse
Teacher: A pulse. Everybody see if you can find it.
Teacher points on ' You 've' and 7 've,' then beats her hand slowly on the table, looking around at the pupils who smile and shrug. She put her fingers on her wrist pulse. Speaking in near unison. All copy the teacher, feeling for wrist pulses.
(adapted from Edwards and Mercer 1989: 142)
3.2.2 Joint knowledge markers These are statements in which a teacher indicates that some shared experience is important and, often, that it is particularly relevant to the present task. One common way of doing so is to use we in recalling an event, as in 'Last week, we saw that French nouns can be either masculine or feminine. So what I want you to do now is —' Another way is to point out emphatically to the class that one of them has given a 'very good answer' to a question. 3.2.3 Reconstructive recaps These are accounts by teachers of past activities or events shared with the children, in which what went on is selectively reported to highlight aspects seen by the teacher as being educationally significant (and, concomitantly, to play down aspects seen as irrelevant or confusing). For example, in summarizing discussions in class, teachers typically leave out all the 'red herrings' which were raised. To give a more extreme, but real, example: although a series of mishaps had thwarted all but one of many attempts to create a vacuum in a bell-jar, the teacher of the secondary class involved subsequently referred to this occasion as simply 'the lesson in which you made a vacuum.' 4. Technical Language in the Classroom
One of the aims of education is to give children access to important parts of the cultural heritage of their society. A further aim is to enable them to become active participants in the continuing development of that cultural heritage. The pursuit of both of these aims entails children becoming familiar with the technical language of the subjects they study. Used effectively, the technical vocabularies of science, mathematics, art, or any other subject provide clear and economical ways of describing and discussing complex and abstract issues. A shared understanding of musical terminology, for instance—terms like octave, bar, key, and so on—makes it possible for two people to discuss, in the abstract, phenomena which otherwise would have to be concretely demonstrated. The discourse of educated people talking about their 318
specialism is explicit only to the initiated. Becoming familiar with the language of a subject is thus an important requirement for entering the intellectual community of scientists, mathematicians, artists, or whatever. Some technical words which are used rarely in the wider world may be familiar and well-understood by young children because they represent concepts commonly and easily demonstrated in the classroom. (A good example is 'alliteration.') However, the use of technical language in the classroom often causes much confusion and misunderstanding. One reason is that classroom discussions may leave children unsure about what words really mean: teachers may often assume that the meaning of a word is obvious, while children are reluctant to ask questions which reveal their ignorance. Moreover, even the best teacher will find it hard to relate the meaning of some terms to children's concrete experience (concepts like atomic weight and feudalism can only be read about or discussed, not demonstrated, in class). A consequence may be that many technical words become for children mere jargon, and as such represent an obstacle to their developing understanding. (Educational research has provided many bizarre and salutory examples of how technical terms may be misunderstood, and most teachers will have their own collections. Two such examples are of a twelve-year old who thought that quandary meant a four-sided figure, and a school leaver who, after professing no knowledge of subtractions, demonstrated that he could nevertheless do take-aways (see Textbooks).} 5. Conclusion
The analysis of the spoken language of classrooms has made a practical contribution to education by clarifying some of the ways that teachers and children use talk in the pursuit of learning. With a clearer picture of what is said and done, it is more possible to evaluate the processes of teaching and learning in school, and so perhaps plan for more effective communication in the schools of the future. By identifying some typical and distinctive features of language use in one kind of social setting (the classroom), the research which provided this analysis has also made a very significant contribution to the study of language in society, and to language as text, in general. See also: Observing Classroom Language. Bibliography Barnes D 1976 From Communication to Curriculum. Penguin, Harmondsworth Barnes D, Todd F 1995 Communication and Learning Revisited. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH Edwards A D, Westgate D P G 1994 Investigating classroom Talk, 2nd edn. Falmer Press, London Edwards D, Mercer N 1989 Common Knowledge: The Devel-
Discourse in the Language Classroom opment of Understanding in the Classroom, 2nd edn. Routledge, London Flanders N A 1970 Analyzing Teaching Behavior. AddisonWesley, Reading, MA Graddol D, Cheshire J, Swann J 1987 Describing Language, 2nd edn. Open University Press, Milton Keynes Hull R 1985 The Language Gap. Methuen, London Mehan H 1979 Learning Lessons: Social Organization in the Classroom. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Mercer N 1995 The Guided Construction of Knowedge: Talk
Amongst Teachers and Learners. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Sinclair J, Coulthard M 1975 Towards an Analysis of Discourse, The English of Teachers and Pupils. Oxford University Press, London Stubbs M 1983 Language, Schools and Classrooms, 2nd edn. Methuen, London Willes M J 1983 Children into Pupils. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
Discourse in the Language Classroom D. Allwright
1. Introduction 1.1 The Key Terms The term 'the language classroom' will be used here to refer to classrooms in which the primary concern (from the teacher's point of view at least) is the development of a language that is not the first language of the learners. The term 'discourse,' when studied in such settings, is most commonly used to refer to oral interaction alone, although in other settings the term may be applied to both oral and to written uses of language. 'Discourse in the language classroom' is thus a matter of the oral use of language in classrooms devoted to the development of any language other than the learners's first (for an overview of classroom discourse in general see Cazden 1986). 1.2 The Educational Interest of the Topic The use of language in any classroom is interesting from an educational point of view because education itself is conducted fundamentally through the medium of language. It is for this reason that it is possible to claim, with some evident justification, that every classroom is a language classroom—since a major issue in the learning of any subject matter is learning the appropriate language with which to talk and to write about that subject matter. Even skill learning typically involves developing a parallel mastery of the appropriate ways of talking about the skill itself (can a person be considered a fully skilled carpenter without any knowledge of the names of the tools involved, or of the verbs used to refer to the processes involved?). The use of language in a classroom devoted to language pedagogy is therefore doubly interesting, because there language is not only the medium of instruction, it is also the object of it. And
there is also the intriguing irony that many language teachers, unlike teachers of other subjects or other skills (language being held to be a mixture of both) would maintain that there is no reason why a skilled learner of a language should be able to talk about that language—since not even the most articulate of native speakers of a language can necessarily talk about it. 1.3 Language and Behavior Since language use in the classroom, any classroom, is seen as so central, it is perhaps understandable that classroom behavior in general has been studied largely through the analysis of the ways in which language is used. That is to say, classroom language is typically seen as the prime source of evidence for what is happening in classrooms. In Flanders's pioneering work, for example, all classroom behavior was categorized in one of ten ways, but nine of the ten were defined in terms of teacher or learner talk, and even the tenth could be so described, since it was defined as 'silence or confusion'—the absence of talk or the existence of uninterpretable talk (Flanders 1960). For present purposes, therefore, the study of 'language classroom discourse' will be taken to include the study of language classroom behavior through the analysis of classroom language. 1.4 The Key Issue for Language Pedagogy The key theoretical question for the language classroom, a question with obvious and obviously important pedagogic implications, is what uses of language, or in other words what forms of classroom discourse, are most conducive to linguistic development itself. 1.5 Brief Overview Before dealing with that major issue, however, it would probably be useful to provide some general
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The School Context background to the study of discourse in the language classroom. The discussion will therefore begin with a brief account of the variety of purposes for which, and ways in which, language classroom discourse has been studied, and only then move to the central issue of what one can now claim to know about language classroom discourse, and how it may be related to language development. Finally the future of language classroom discourse studies will be briefly considered. 2. The Purposes and Means of Studying Language Classroom Discourse Six identifiably distinct purposes are evident in the literature on language classroom discourse, and three very different approaches to the methodological issues involved. 2.1 Directly Improving Classroom Pedagogic Practice Through Interaction Feedback This practical focus is already evident in work in the late 1960s, which was largely based on Flanders's pioneering work on his system of interaction analysis already discussed briefly in Sect. 1.3 above. In his work, the ten categories of his system of interaction analysis were applied across the curriculum, and his analytic system had eventually to be adapted considerably to achieve a better fit to the peculiarities of language classroom discourse, in which language is both medium and message. The obvious field of application was language teacher training, in which systematic observation could serve as a feedback tool by means of which a trainee could analyze his or her own teaching performance, determine desirable changes in classroom discourse, and then, by means of subsequently analyzing future classroom performance, measure whether or not the desired changes had in fact taken place. Such a procedure could be applied to both preservice and in-service trainees. 2.2 Providing Information about Current Classroom Practice A far less common but still noteworthy use of the systematic observation and analysis of classroom discourse is for the purpose of providing detailed information about current language teaching practices. The best-known example of this work is no doubt Mitchell, et al.'s 1981 study (see also Mitchell 1988) of language teaching in Scottish secondary schools, which also constituted a measure of the extent to which a particular methodological innovation ('communicative' language teaching) had been adopted, and so fell also into the next category. Their work is also an example of a behavioral study taking language evidence as primary data. There is relatively little interest shown in the detail of what was said by participants, compared to the strong interest
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in what was being done by what was being said, and in which language (native or target) it was being done. 2.3 Monitoring and Investigating Educational Experiments and/or Innovations It was evident in the late 1960s (though only thanks to a conspicuous failure to do so adequately; see Clark 1969) that in order to properly understand the outcome of any research involving the introduction of new classroom practices it would be necessary to monitor how those new practices actually influenced what happened in the classroom. This monitoring could be done in terms of classroom behavior, but again studied fundamentally through an analysis of classroom talk (i.e., using what was said as the prime evidence for what was 'happening'). This was the rationale behind the work of Mitchell et al., referred to above, and also behind the Canadian work of Allen et al. (1984), whose system of analysis was developed for the express purpose of providing a tool for the measurement (again through an analysis of classroom talk) of classroom behavior related to communicative methodology, a point captured in the system's name— COLT, Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching. 2.4 Developing a General Theory of Discourse Language classroom discourse has also been studied, in pioneering work by Sinclair and Coulthard most notably (1975), for the purpose of developing a theory of discourse in general. The language classroom was chosen as the setting for this early research on the now somewhat surprising assumption that it represented a relatively uncomplicated situation, at least when compared to naturally occurring conversation. Unlike the procedures involved in the work described above, in which classroom discourse was systematically categorized via a preestablished set of analytic categories, Sinclair and Coulthard were using naturally occurring classroom discourse as their source for deriving the categories they felt it necessary to include in a theory of discourse. 2.5 Investigating Second Language Acquisition In strong contrast to the first three lines of enquiry, and quite separately from the fourth, there has been a fifth focus concentrating very much on the microlinguistic aspects of classroom discourse. People investigating the processes of second language acquisition have typically wanted to throw light on the 'natural' acquisition process of people not receiving instruction, but some, particularly those studying the role of linguistic input to acquisition processes, have nevertheless turned to the language classroom for detailed data on the language made available to learners during language lessons (for an overview see Larsen-Freeman 1985). In this sort of work classroom discourse has not typically been exhaustively cat-
Discourse in the Language Classroom egorized but has instead been searched for particular linguistic features (aspects of negation, for example). 2.6 Investigating Instructed Second Language Learning Other investigators, working more in an educational rather than a psycholinguistic context, have studied language classroom discourse in order to throw light on the role of instruction in linguistic development. In contrast to the first purpose noted above, that of directly improving pedagogy through interaction feedback, these investigators are primarily concerned with developing an understanding of instructional processes and their relationship to language learning (increasingly, after many years of relative 'teachercenteredness,' taking 'instructional processes' to refer to the behavior of all participants, not just to that of the ostensible 'teacher'). Valuable surveys are provided by Mitchell 1985, under the heading of 'process research,' and by Chaudron 1988 (for an overall history of the use of observation as an investigatory approach, see Allwright 1988). This general line of enquiry has typically led investigators towards a more ethnographic approach to research method, in which naturally occurring classroom discourse has been 'interpreted' rather than either exhaustively categorized via a preestablished system of analysis or searched for particular linguistic features. Van Lier (1988) provides an extended argument for the use of an ethnographic approach to language classroom discourse research. 3. Language Classroom Discourse: The Situation in the 1990s It first of all needs to be said that none of what has been learned so far could be claimed to apply to all language classrooms everywhere and at all times. Given the very rich diversity of ways in which language classes have been, are being, and will no doubt be, conducted there must at any time be very many classrooms in which the discourse is radically different from the overall picture that will be presented below. In any case, studies of language classroom discourse have been largely conducted in the context of relatively privileged educational systems (for example, in Europe and the USA). Little is known about language classroom discourse in other, possibly less favored, settings. It must also be said, therefore, that relatively little is also known about cross-cultural differences in language classroom discourse. 3.1 Teacher Domination of Talk in Quantitative Terms The most reliable finding of decades of research has been that typically teachers dominate classroom discourse, and that language classroom discourse, despite the obvious potential interest in and value of promoting learner talk, is typically not substantially
different from classroom discourse in general in this respect. A common finding is that teachers contribute about two-thirds of all classroom talk. 3.2 Teacher Domination of Talk in Functional Terms It is also commonly observed that the function of controlling classroom discourse is firmly in the teacher's hands. Teachers can be expected to take responsibility upon themselves for attempting to determine who talks, to whom, on what topic, in what language, and for how long. 3.3 The Role of Feedback A further finding that does not distinguish between language classroom discourse and discourse in other classrooms, but, like the others, is held to distinguish pedagogic from nonpedagogic settings, is that typically the non-pedagogic pattern of initiation and response in discourse is supplemented in the classroom by a feedback move. Typically, also, it is the teachers who most commonly initiate, the learners who most commonly respond, and then of course the teachers again who give the feedback, typically in the form of evaluative comments on the learners's contributions to the classroom talk. 3.4 Classroom Discourse as 'Unequal Encounter' Enough will already have been said to establish language classroom discourse (again like discourse in any other classroom) as a strong example of an 'unequal encounter,' and therefore as a fruitful arena for the study of social relationships and their relationship to learning. In the language classroom there is the additional feature that, by definition almost, the dominant participant has access to a means of communication (the language that is being taught) that is not yet fully available to the 'dominated,' thus potentially reinforcing all the other sources of inequality. This must go alongside the irony that the dominant participant's task is precisely to equip the 'dominated' with this new means of communication. It is not yet clear, however, how such power relationships in the language classroom, and the social pressures they appear to generate in addition to the central pedagogic pressures of classroom life, influence the classroom language learning process. 5.5 Gender Distinctions Gender bias has been found in some language classrooms, as no doubt is to be expected given its prevalence elsewhere. What is not yet clear is in what way the usual finding, that female learners tend to be less prolific participants in classroom discourse than male learners, can be related to achievement, given the traditional perception of languages as a school subject in which female learners tend to predominate numerically, and to outperform their male classmates. One possible interpretation is that female supportive
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The School Context behavior in discourse elicits from male classmates just the sort of input that is most productive for the listener (see Sect. 3.6.1 below). 3.6 Classroom Discourse: Forms Conducive to Linguistic Development 3.6.1 Classroom discourse as input to the learning process There is evidence that teachers can and do increase the linguistic complexity of their talk when dealing with more advanced learners. There is also evidence that teachers' attempts to explain linguistic phenomena, specifically vocabulary items, can result in extra complexity rather than the intended simplification. There is now some evidence that learner talk can be reliably manipulated through task design—such that, for example, tasks providing for a two-way information flow can be expected to result in different patterns of learner talk from tasks involving only a one-way flow of information. The power of teaching points as input is not yet entirely clear, there being evidence that what learners learn cannot be adequately predicted from inspection of what has been explicitly taught and that what they do in fact learn may be more predictable from considerations of individual learner mental processing (although earlier hopes that a predictable 'natural order' could be identified have retreated far from center-stage). It seems now to be generally accepted that classroom input needs normally to be comprehensible for it to be useful to the learner, but that it is the learner's negotiating of the input to make it comprehensible that is the productive process. It is not yet clear, however, whether the benefit of explicitly negotiating input is general or specific. That is to say, should one expect learners to learn the specific language item whose comprehensibility they have negotiated, or should one expect the negotiating process to be itself of more general benefit, with the benefit spreading beyond the specific item centrally involved? Meanwhile, the point has been well made that negotiating for comprehensibility could in any case be subject to the law of diminishing returns, since there might well come a point at which the need to constantly negotiate effectively destroys the appeal of the whole communication situation. 3.6.2 Classroom discourse as output An alternative interpretation has suggested that learner output in classroom discourse may constitute an important factor in linguistic development, such that the value of negotiating for the comprehensibility of input would reside more in the linguistic work done by the learner to produce his or her contributions to the negotiating process. In this connection it should be added that there remain conflicting views on the
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issue of whether or not there is a direct relationship between the quantity of learner participation in classroom discourse and learner progress. There is at least some evidence to suggest that the relatively more proficient learners in a language class may be more likely to participate verbally because they are more proficient, rather than be more likely to become more proficient because they participate verbally. Also in connection with the above interpretations of the roles of output and input in classroom discourse it is worth noting that research conducted to investigate the accuracy of learner talk during interaction in small groups has failed to confirm teachers's suspicions that the linguistic quality of learner talk is bound to deteriorate when it is not being directly monitored by the teacher. 4. The Future of Language Classroom Discourse Studies It will already be clear from the above section that many important practical and theoretical questions about language classroom discourse remain unanswered. It seems most likely that future work will in turn increasingly question the possibility of responding productively to these questions by any approach which relies exclusively on studying the classroom discourse itself. Increasingly various forms of ethnographic study are already being employed, and these take the interpretations of the participants themselves as central to any attempt to understand the phenomena involved. Increasingly also, it is being accepted that the major questions are not susceptible to straightforward answering. It can be hoped that future research will make possible a useful understanding of the phenomena involved, but developing understanding seems most likely to have to accept the enormous complexity of learning and teaching in language classrooms, a level of complexity that will defeat any attempt to provide 'rule of thumb' conclusions about the conditions under which classroom language learning is best fostered. Central to trie debate is likely to be the already discernible shift in focus (Breen 1985) from an exclusive consideration for the learner as a psycholinguistic individual to a concern for the learner as a social individual, a person in a social group—the class—with all that that implies. See also: Classroom Language. Bibliography Allen P, Frolich M, Spada N 1984 The communicative orientation of language teaching. In: Handscombe J, Orem R A, Taylor B P (eds.) On Tesol '83: The Question of Control. TESOL, Washington, DC
Allwright D 1988 Observation in the Language Classroom. Longman, London
Language Across the Curriculum Breen M P 1985 The social context for language learning: A neglected situation? Studies in Second Language Acquisition 7(2): 135-58 Cazden C B 1986 Classroom discourse. In: Wittrock M C (ed.) Handbook of Research on Teaching. Macmillan, New York Chaudron C 1988 Second Language Classrooms: Research on Teaching and Learning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Clark J L D 1969 The Pennsylvania Project and the audiolingual vs traditional question. Modern Language Journal 53: 388-96 Flanders N A 1960 Teacher Influence, Pupil Attitudes and Achievement, US Office of Education Co-operative Research Project No. 397. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN Larsen-Freeman D 1985 State of the art on input in second
language acquisition. In: Gass S M, Madden C G (eds.) Input in Second Language Acquisition. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Mitchell R 1985 Process research in second-language classrooms. Language Teaching 18(4): 330-52 Mitchell R 1988 Communicative Language Teaching in Practice. Centre for Information on Language Teaching, London Mitchell R, Parkinson B, Johnstone R 1981 The Foreign Language Classroom: An Observational Study, Stirling Educational Monographs No 9. Department of Education, University of Stirling, Stirling Sinclair J McH, Coulthard R M 1975 Towards an Analysis of Discourse. Oxford University Press, London van Lier L 1988 The Classroom and the Language Learner: Ethnography and Second-Language Classroom Research. Longman, London
Language Across the Curriculum D. J. Corson
The term 'Language Across the Curriculum' (LAC) refers to a major educational concept that is widely discussed and applied in English-speaking countries. LAC highlights the key role that language has in all learning across the curriculum of educational institutions. LAC urges all teachers in schools and colleges to exploit students' language, especially their informal talk and writing, as the key learning resource in the classroom; to create an environment that encourages a wide range of expressive language uses as a medium for learning; and to promote students' active rather than passive engagement with the subject matter of the curriculum. 1. Origins and Early Development Moffett's book Teaching the Universe of Discourse (1968) suggested a new priority for language and learning in the school curriculum. His key idea was that our ability to think depends on the many previous dialogues that we have taken part in. Members of the London Association for the Teaching of English were already alert to this relationship between language and thought, and were concerned to extend debate about the role of language in learning to subjects other than English. They began to look closely at the language of children in various contexts and roles. A discussion document prepared before and after the Association's conference in 1968 presented a view of language in learning that was relevant to teachers of subjects other than English (Barnes et al. 1969). This view complemented and coincided with radical changes
in the conception of schools and schooling that were being advanced in the late 1960s. A range of research studies, conducted under the aegis of the Schools Council for England and Wales, provided theoretical support for the LAC movement (Martin et al. 1976; Schools Council 1980). Formal recognition for the idea came in 1975 in A Language for Life (The Bullock Report) especially in its fourth chapter (see English Teaching in England and Wales). 2. LAC'S Meaning and Place Although there are still misunderstandings about LAC (see Sect. 4 below), it is possible to identify three chief tenets of the doctrine that curriculum and language theorists in general would support. 2.1 Language Develops Mainly through its Purposeful Use This commonsense view of how language acquisition and development occurs is widely supported: we learn to use language by using language. Yet the conventional practices of schools and schooling are often in conflict with this first tenet of LAC. Some of the modes of language, especially talk, still receive relatively little purposeful use in formal education. As a result student language proficiency in these modes may not be available to support high level learning across the curriculum. Even those modes of language that traditionally attract priority in schooling, such as reading and writing, are unfavorably affected by the low emphasis placed on the purposeful use of student talk before,
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The School Context during and after work in these other modes. However, the situation is changing. A 1989 document, English for Ages 5-16 (The Cox Report), recommended that oral language activities should receive equal priority with reading and writing in schools in England and Wales. The document's view was endorsed and implemented at an official level (see English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales), National Oracy Project). 2.2 Learning Often Involves and Occurs through Talking and Writing Language plays a central role in learning. By engaging in purposeful talking and writing in curriculum areas, students assimilate new concepts. When they listen, talk, read, and write about what they are learning, they relate this to what they already know. Through talking and writing, language is linked to the thinking process. Language in use becomes a manifestation of the thinking that is taking place. As a result, by explaining and expressing their own interpretations of new items of learning across the curriculum, students clarify and increase their knowledge of the specialist concepts; they improve their understanding of the different forms of discourse used in each curriculum area. It follows that schools need to provide an environment in which students are encouraged to use language to explore concepts, to solve problems, to organize information, to share discoveries, to formulate hypotheses, and to explain personal ideas. 2.3 Language Use Contributes to Cognitive Development The psychological thinkers of the twentieth century who have been most interested in student learning, such as Piaget, Vygotsky, Langer, Luria, and Bruner, have regularly found strong support in their work for this third tenet of LAC. Also philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Popper have developed strong arguments to link language use with high level cognitive development. They share the psychologists' conclusions about the importance of verbalization in making consciousness possible and the importance of using language to assimilate new information and make it meaningful (Corson 1998). Finally those same curriculum theorists who lent initial impetus to the LAC movement, such as Britton et al., have also shown in their own work that this third tenet of LAC is an accurate claim (e.g., Barnes 1976; Britton 1970; Torbe and Medway 1981; Marland 1977). Because the central aim of schooling is to promote learning and cognitive growth, and since language use is so important for intellectual development, then a widespread and purposeful use of student language becomes the chief pedagogical means for reaching towards the goals of schooling.
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3. Extension of the LAC Concept The LAC idea has a commonsense attractiveness for progressive teachers working in mother tongue education. Its range of influence has quickly extended beyond the UK to British Commonwealth countries and to the USA. LAC is also conceptually linked with a related idea: the view that school language policies represent an integral and necessary part of the administration and curriculum practice of modern schools (see School Language Policies). These 'language policies across the curriculum' provide a rational vehicle for extending the idea of LAC far beyond its original conceptual boundaries (Corson 1998). In addition, the fields of language awareness and critical language awareness draw their impetus from ideas much influenced by the LAC movement (van Lier and Corson 1997). 3.1 From First Language to Second Language Learning Beyond first language education, the ideas of LAC have great applied value for second language, bilingual, and foreign language education. For example, in teaching English as a second language the importance of supporting and using that second language in learning across the curriculum receives regular attention in courses of training for ESL and TESOL teachers. Again in quality approaches to bilingual schooling, where the aim is to maintain the mother tongue from the earliest days of schooling while supplementing it with a second language, the importance of supporting both the target languages across curriculum subjects and across language modes, functions and styles is now recognized. Finally in foreign language teaching rich contacts with the foreign language in a carefully planned immersion setting, where learning in various school or university subjects is experienced through the medium of the foreign language itself, are now recommended as a near-ideal component of foreign language learning in academic areas (see Tucker and Corson 1997; Cummins and Corson 1997). 3.2 From Four to Eight Communicative Modes In the 1980s increased attention was given in research and in educational practice to nonverbal modes of communication. As a result it is suggested that the concept of LAC should now extend to include more than the original four modes of language: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Language (in the sense of communication) can be seen in a much wider sense to include at least four additional modes of human activity: moving, watching, shaping, and viewing. Contrasting influences are at work here: On the one hand the advent of new technologies and modern media, with their associated 'literacies,' insists that language is viewed in a wider way. On the other hand the older more limited view of language may be discriminatory if the language of schooling is restricted
Observing Classroom Language to the original four modes, since clearly people from many cultures are talented users of the additional modes and rely on them for important aspects of communication. At the same time the language user whose communicative competence is confined to the original four modes may be at a disadvantage in many settings where multi-modal communicative proficiency is needed.
the responsibility of the school executive as perhaps their central curricular concern in schools. See also: School Language Policies.
Bibliography Barnes D 1976 From Communication to Curriculum. Penguin Education, Harmondsworth Barnes D, Britton J, Rosen H 1969 Language, the Learner and the School. Penguin Education, Harmondsworth 4. Problems and Difficulties for LAC Britton J 1970 Language and Learning. Allen Lane, London The problems and difficulties of putting LAC to work Corson D 1998 Language Policy in Schools. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon in schools can be overcome partly by becoming clearer about what it means. First, for example, the fact that Cummins J, Corson D (eds.) 1997 Bilingual Education. Kluwer, Boston, MA LAC is about promoting learning, an activity which is B, Corson D (eds.) 1997 Oral Discourse in Education. the responsibility of teachers at every level across the Davies Kluwer, Boston, MA curriculum, counters the frequent and false perception Marland M 1977 Language Across the Curriculum. that LAC is mainly the responsibility of the first Heinemann Educational Books, London language teacher (i.e., the teacher of English). Second, Martin N, D'Arcy P, Newton B, Parker R 1976 Writing and the fact that LAC'S focus is on language as a process Learning Across the Curriculum. Ward Lock, London of learning counters the mistaken view that LAC is Moffett J 1968 Teaching the Universe of Discourse. HoughtonMifflin, London overly concerned with language as the 'product' of schooling or with language as something to be Schools Council Working Paper No. 67 1980 Language Across the Curriculum: Four Case Studies. Methuen, assessed. It is true that major changes are needed in London teacher attitudes to their task and in their choice of Torbe M, Medway P 1981 Language and the Climate for pedagogy if LAC is to succeed in schools. Rigorous Learning. Ward Lock, London professional development work may be needed. More- Tucker R, Corson D (eds.) 1997 Second Language Education. over because LAC'S implementation is beyond the conKluwer, Boston, MA trol of single teachers in single classrooms or van Lier L, Corson D (eds.) 1997 Knowledge About Language. curriculum areas, by necessity its oversight becomes Kluwer, Boston, MA
Observing Classroom Language A. D. Edwards and D. P. G. Westgate
Although talk constitutes such a large part of what goes on in classrooms, its live recording and detailed analysis have only developed since the late 1960s. This article illustrates the wide range of research approaches which are now clustered under the heading of classroom language. Although the boundaries between them should not be marked too rigidly, there are substantial differences in the comprehensiveness and detail of what is recorded and transcribed. These differences are not a matter of pure versus applied research. They reflect the extent to which the primary interest is in what the patterning of communication reveals about the relationship of teacher and students and the communication of classroom knowledge, and how far the analysis is informed by linguistic theory and shaped by a predominant interest in linguistic structure.
1. Research Traditions
Toward one end of that research continuum, studies using what has been called 'insightful observation' seek to heighten practitioners' awareness of the scope and quality of their exchanges with students without engaging in any linguistically sophisticated analysis. However valuable as a stimulus to reflective practice, such studies raise difficult questions about how immediately and directly open to interpretation those exchanges are. If spoken language is not treated as a transparent medium, something to be looked through rather than looked at, then how far is it possible to apply methods of 'looking' without extensive knowledge of the specialized academic areas from which they derive? From a linguistic perspective, it can be argued that researchers only scratch the surface of classroom language if they merely select as evidence
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The School Context whatever features appear to be pedagogically interesting; 'principled' analysis of linguistic forms is a necessary condition for revealing their functions. Different ways of investigating classroom talk will now be outlined to emphasize how the researcher's purposes shape the methods which are used and reflect certain assumptions about the phenomena being observed (see also Edwards and Westgate 1994). 1.1 Systematic Classroom Observation Practitioners of this approach certainly 'look through' the language being exchanged. The decision is made to code what is said by teacher and students using a schedule which preselects those features of their interaction which are judged to be relevant to the inquiry. This practice of 'systematically' coding classroom events as they happen, depends on a certain positivist confidence in their 'transparency.' Most obviously, it assumes that the words being exchanged can be treated as conventional tokens of a shared situational understanding and their functions appropriately categorized (see Croll 1997). This makes it possible to gather evidence from a large number of classrooms in a fairly short time: an hour's observation yields an hour's data immediately available for analysis. 1.2 Ethnographic Approaches Those who make audio or audiovisual recordings of classroom talk perceive teacher and students as developing and revising their meanings as the talk proceeds, drawing as they do so on background knowledge of which the observer may be unaware. Transcription of the talk makes it possible to examine these subtleties retrospectively. There are large differences in how this is done, notably in how the 'context' of the talk is understood and used in the analysis, how comprehensively the talk is recorded and transcribed, and how much information (for example, about pausing or intonation) is contained in the transcript. 1.3 Insightful Observation The approach which Stubbs describes as 'insightful observation' might also be termed unsystematic ethnography. For while it usually requires that the researcher spends enough time in that classroom to gain an understanding of its culture, it rarely involves detailed structural analysis of the discourse. The focus is usually on what 'the patterning of communication' (Barnes and Todd 1977:1) reveals about the simultaneous managing of relationships and meanings in conditions where it is usual for the boundaries between the teacher's knowledge and the students' ignorance to be regularly and sharply marked. This approach has been widely used to identify styles of teaching and learning or, more specifically, to describe the verbal 'scaffolding' through which the teacher enables students to extend their understanding
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(Edwards and Mercer 1987). Apparently limited demands on the researcher's linguistic expertise partly explain why this approach has been widely used by teachers investigating the opportunities provided in their own classrooms for students to develop skills in talking and listening. It is a form of action research especially valued by those taking a constructivist view of the central role played by those skills in the learning process (see Norman 1992; also Language Across the Curriculum; School Language Policies; National Oracy Project). 1.4 Linguistic Ethnography Teachers' control over classroom knowledge is especially evident in the frequency of their questions, and in the frequency with which the consequent exchanges make it evident that the answers are already known to the questioner. Although both the counting of questions and the assessment of their cognitive difficulty (or level) have been commonplace in classroom research, Dillon (1988) has drawn attention to alternative and possibly more effective ways of eliciting student contributions and promoting discussion. There are also methodological objections to taking questions out of context. In what has variously been called 'linguistic' or 'constitutive' ethnography, the whole structure of classroom discourse is systematically described. Although questioning is still treated as giving rise to 'the essential teaching exchange' of teacher-initiation, student-response, and teacher-evaluation, such regularly occurring sequences are embedded in a comprehensive analysis covering every item of turn-taking and all those methods by which teacher and students secure cohesive and coherent discourse (see Mehan 1979; Cazden 1988). By seeking to derive from the participants' ordering of that discourse the rules from which their situationally appropriate participation is generated, such analysis has drawn attention to possibilities of serious misunderstanding, even of more or less overt cultural conflict, where the rules governing normal communication in home and school settings are at variance (see Heath 1983; also Educational Failure; Home and School Language). 1.5 The Linguistic Structure of Classroom Discourse From a predominantly linguistic perspective, classrooms have had the empirical attraction that clearly structured relationships are likely to produce linguistically distinctive forms of discourse (see Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). Much of the resulting research has drawn heavily on speech act theory—the investigation of what is done with words, and how it is done, in circumstances where words and meanings are tied together in ways which are familiar to the participants and characteristic of that setting. A common classroom example is the likelihood that Will you please turn to page 14, if said by the teacher, will be
Observing Classroom Language heard as a directive and not as a polite request admitting the possibility of refusal. Such 'mitigating devices' are used by teachers to soften the edges of their control and make it more indirect. But that control remains pervasively evident in those particular ways of eliciting, displaying, and confirming (or disconfirming) knowledge which are characteristic of classrooms. 2. Phases of Research Activity All research traditions carry within them a range of theoretical assumptions about language as social behavior. Before examining the variety of practices which give these assumptions life, it should be made clear that most researchers reject any notion of a single 'right' approach or set of approved procedures. While all research requires hard choices to be made about how data are to be defined and collected, the guiding principle remains one of matching techniques to aims and purposes. This is itself a difficult task, given the range of alternatives and the problem of compatibility which may arise from mixing them. The search for appropriate techniques can usefully be considered under four phases of activity which are common to all approaches where the language used comes under close scrutiny. Initially, the choices focus upon methods of observing and recording what is said. Varying widely in technological sophistication, these usually result in recordings stored on tape. A second phase makes these accessible to detailed analysis by transcribing them according to conventions and criteria determined by the researcher's particular purposes. The act of transcription is inseparable from that next phase because what is included in the transcript, and how this material is organized, constitutes the data to be analyzed and interpreted. But in contrast to the instant coding of verbal interaction, it is possible to return to the recording and to constitute the data differently—for example, by including features of intonation or pausing which seem retrospectively to be significant. Finally, an analysis grounded in the data has to be made public and warranted, decisions having been made about the amount and type of evidence to be displayed. These phases are now considered in greater detail. 3. Recording Classroom Talk 3.1 Naturalistic Recording and Its Problems Classrooms are busy, noisy places with a great deal of movement and simultaneous talk. Some researchers have sought to reduce the technical problems of recording by interviewing individual students as they work, or by removing small groups to a quieter setting (see, for example, Barnes and Todd 1977). Readily audible recordings may then reveal important dimensions of individual performance without having much predictive power about normal classroom interaction. Technical developments have eased this problem. A radiomicrophone may be too costly to give to more
than one participant, usually the teacher, while a single static microphone misses too much of the action. Pocket-size individual recorders and affordable camcorders can allow the researcher to focus upon several individuals at once and on the evolving contexts of their talk. It is likely that researchers with predominantly sociolinguistic or pedagogic interests will want to record normally occurring talk. And at least in comparison with such daunting alternatives as the playground, classrooms have seemed a manageable setting because so much of the talk is under the strategic direction of its most powerful participant. Where talk occurs without the teacher being present (e.g., in a smallgroup setting), it can still be stopped or redirected by the teacher, and its course is usually set or constrained by the teacher's agenda for the class. Moreover, where the teaching is of a more traditionally transmissional style, or where any teacher is conducting whole-class teaching, even temporarily so, the resulting talk presents a somewhat simplified aspect for analysis as well as for recording. Indeed, it is possible that the greater ease with which recordings can be made in such circumstances may partly explain the common researchers' view that classroom talk is excessively teacher-dominated. While the persistent pedagogical difficulties of affording students more communicative space, or of encouraging their exploratory talk, continue to exercise the minds of researchers and teachers alike, it may be that forms of classroom talk which are not teacher-led are simply underrepresented in the literature because of the relative difficulty of recording them. 3.2 The 'Observer's Paradox' A major problem of validity has been acknowledged by sociolinguists since the outset of their endeavors, namely the effects of observation on the activity being observed. Since eavesdropping is unethical, the problem can never be more than partially solved. Researchers must therefore do their ingenious best to limit the interference caused by their presence, whether by becoming accepted as a familiar nonparticipating observer or by adopting some appropriate auxiliary role where this does not distort the 'natural' situation unduly. The size and obtrusiveness of the recording equipment poses obvious problems. Although video-recording no longer necessarily requires special lighting, the movements of the filmer can still be conspicuous. By comparison, what compact audio recorders lack in capacity to catch nonverbal or contextual detail, they can more than make up for in simplicity of operation, flexibility of use, and accuracy of sound track. Field-notes can add important complementary data if the observer's presence is not resented. In any event, teachers and pupils can usually vouch for the normality or otherwise of events, for their awareness of
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The School Context disruption, and for their feelings about being recorded. Such further data are helpful in estimating how intrusive the researcher has been. A comparable problem concerns the typicality of any particular setting in which recordings are made. It is axiomatic that any stretch of talk can only be understood in relation to its context. By the same token, questions arise about the extent to which stretches of talk may be so context-specific as to be of limited general relevance. Revealing typical structures of classroom communication across various settings is a common research ambition. Alternatively, detailed studies of particular classrooms may be valued for the questions and hypotheses which they generate about other settings and for demonstrating methods of investigation which can be used elsewhere. 4. Transcribing and Analyzing Classroom Talk
4.1 Taking Account of Context Practices and problems in making classroom recordings have their parallels at the transcription phase. In particular, researchers' working conceptions of 'context' influence their decisions about what to transcribe and how to select different kinds of data for analysis. The customary distinction between 'setting' and 'context' makes the point clear. The former term applies to location and to other 'givens' at the onset of the talk; the latter expresses the complex and dynamic interplay of forces which speakers and hearers attend to (e.g., their perception of each other and of the way their utterances, gestures, hesitations, etc., are received) as the talk proceeds. In this sense, a context is 'coconstructed' by those participating in it and constantly evolves. Thus researchers' assumptions and beliefs about what is potentially 'alive' in the contexts they study can be seen to inform their collection and use of data, and partly to determine how far they wish to go in including markers of paralinguistic, nonverbal, or prosodic features rather than relying on a simple transcription of the words. The rich redundancy of contextual meanings available to the participants also raises difficult questions about how accessible these meanings are to a researcher lacking much of their background knowledge, and about the 'commonsense' understandings of what classrooms are like on which that researcher at least implicitly relies in making sense of what is said. These questions may extend to the researcher's subsequent reliance on the reader's knowledge of classrooms to let the words exchanged by teacher and students 'speak for themselves.' They may entail some reference to 'respondent validation,' the confirmation of an account by the participants themselves (see Mehan 1979). Or, working in a different methodological tradition, the researcher may seek relatively unambiguous 'hard' indicators of meaning in, for example, the speakers' hesitations and pauses, intonation, or apparent vulnerability to interruption.
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4.2 Varieties of Transcription and Analysis Different approaches to context will now be illustrated through transcript extracts which supply varying amounts of information around the words, and so lend themselves to different forms of analysis. The order in which they are presented reflects a continuum already described: from research which assumes that a verbal record can offer a relatively unproblematical 'window' on to events, through to studies which are more oriented towards exploration of linguistic patterning. Underlying example (1) is a stated belief that the purposes which utterances perform can be identified without great difficulty, the inclusion of a 'function column' being intended 'merely to facilitate our understanding of the interaction taking place' (Fisher 1993: 246) Credibility is claimed for the data on a basis of professional experience shared by researcher and reader. It is assumed that a plain verbal record will be 'recognized' for what it is by those who possess the relevant situational competence. Little technical sophistication is required of such transcription. Any overlap between utterances, or pausing within them, is not displayed, while a 'new line . . . with a capital letter may be interpreted as the start of a new utterance' (Fisher: 246). Interest in the passage centers on these Year 2 (UK) pupils' planning skills, as they (Milly and Charles) prepare a Nativity story, 'build[ing] on each other's ideas, even when they challenge the plausibility of some of the offerings' (Fisher: 248). M: What would they be doing They wouldn't have skipping ropes C: I know what we can do M: What C: They'd be doing M: They'd be doing what C: They could be doing things like Some feeding their donkey they had in their backgarden M: Oh no C: We could put They could Their father could have drawed a hopscotch so the girl was playing on the hopscotch and the boy was C: Playing what M: Or they might just be sitting in the house reading a book or something C: I know They're outside and they're getting suntanned
questions
(1)
and suggests ignores and challenges questions questions counters with suggestion
challenges counters with suggestion
alternative suggestion challenges with alternative suggestion
Observing Classroom Language M: Yes cos Bethlehem is a hot place
accepts and explains
The transcription conventions here are broadly like those of a play-script but with more open punctuation. This makes the transcript easy to read, but may lose information which the participants themselves used in interpreting what was said. It therefore carries the risk of making the talk seem simpler than it was. It is therefore more usual practice to include a range of symbols specific to the technical requirements of sociolinguistic research. There are variations within this range, but some of those commonly used are found in (2): • / // bold [ (&)
Words undeciphered (2) Discourse omitted as irrelevant to the issue discussed Pause of less than 2 seconds Pause of more than 2 seconds Emphatic speech Simultaneous or interrupted speech Continuing speech, separated in the transcript by an interrupting speaker
These are the conventions used by Edwards and Mercer (1987: ix-x), who describe their research purposes as being: ... not to produce an analysis of linguistic structure, but to provide the sort of information that is useful in analysing how people reach common understandings with each other of what they are talking about. (Edwards and Mercer 1987: ix; see also Gomes and Martin 1996)
Pauses, interruptions, and the emphasizing of particular words are all well-suited to such a purpose. Indeed they can constitute valuable data for understanding various aspects of classroom talk. Wholeclass teaching, for instance, tends to be fast-paced partly because teachers see pauses as entailing risks to their control of turn-taking. In a setting where teachers normally own exclusive rights over the allocation of turns at talk, interruptions are similarly exceptional. Indeed, just-perceptible pausing on the part of the teacher, in conjunction with other subtle changes of cadence and postural shifts, can function to signal a topic-boundary or a moment at which interruption becomes permissible (see Cazden 1988:910 for a similar attention to pauses). Word-emphasis may also take on significance for conveying value attached to a technical term, or for identifying metastatements designed to encapsulate established knowledge. Such data can be seen to interact powerfully with pragmatic information, as in the extract (3) which comes from the first of a sequence of lessons on pendulums video-recorded in a class of 10- and 11year-olds (see Edwards and Mercer 1987: 137-38). During this talk, the pauses appear to mark the speakers' reflection on what is being said, while the simultaneous utterances reflect their urgency. Moreover,
a rhyming couplet—The shorter the string, the faster the swing'—is given weight by the teacher as an important summarizing formula. This extract has to be lengthy because it also demonstrates the tying of meanings over extended sequences of talk. Participants in talk may also rely heavily upon intonation to remove ambiguities in what they hear. Towards the more linguistic end of the theoretical continuum are found researchers who, in recognition of this fact, pay considerable attention to various prosodic features. Notable among them are Wells and his associates, whose detailed description of language development from infancy through the early years of schooling focused attention upon continuities and contrasts in their talk with adults which children experience at home and at school (see Wells 1985; also Home and School Language). The database for this project came from recordings using radio-microphones, talk being sampled by means of a time-switching device which functioned without speakers being aware of it. Insight into the processes whereby growth in structural and semantic control is 'negotiated' through interactive talk depended upon close scrutiny of the children's discourse and of the meanings exchanged. Transcripts were thus heavily analytical and noted a wealth of prosodic detail as well as text and pragmatics. The absence of such features in transcriptions of classroom interaction reflects difficulties posed by the greater complexity of such contexts. This is why it is a parentchild exchange (4) which is now used to illustrate the most technically detailed form of notation (Wells 1985:38). J is playing with the laundry as her mother washes up. The transcript displays the talk in separate columns: J's on the left, her mother's in the middle, with pragmatic notes on the right. Although space prohibits reproduction of these transcription conventions in full, they are set out here in enough detail to raise questions about what would be gained in classroom transcriptions if similar information were included. The double-slash symbol (//) here marks the beginning or end of a 'tone-unit,' which itself may coincide with all or part of an utterance. Each tone-unit is numbered for ease of reference here, though numbering of utterances is a more common practice. A preliminary stress mark is used to denote both a prominent and a tonic syllable. Both types of syllable may also be shown in CAPS, being then preceded by two digits (1 to 5) each of which denotes a 'band' of pitch. The figure 1 marks a high, and 5 a low, pitch in relation to that speaker's normal range. Together, the two digits thus indicate the height, the direction, and the extent of pitch change for that element of the tone-unit. Upward or downward arrows show a pitch to be high or low against what is normal for the speaker; a double arrow shows extra high or low variance. Increasing speed is marked by ('accel.'), while a digit between two pairs of dots gives
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The School Context T: Antony: T:
Sharon: T: David: T: David: T: David: T: Lucy: T: David: T:
David: Antony
1 2 3 4
(...) point seven three. So the shorter the string/ what? What happens when you shorten the string? The faster it gets. The shorter the string, the faster the swing. Right. That's good isn't it? Ask Jonathan how he went/with his.
T raising head and voice in slow, formal enunciation of the principle. T pointing towards Jonathan (off camera).
David gestures a swing. T nodding. (Did David mean length?)
T, Antony, and David recite together.
[J has the laundry bag]
//24—>LAUNdry' bag// //35—>LAUNdry ' bag// //In 14 THERE// //|' Put all THINGS in//
7
8 // 1 ' I want to 9
(3)
Sharon looking at David and Antony's matrix, speaking quietly.
God I don't understand really. |~ They're all/ different [They're all different. So theirs is the only pendulum that's/ makes a [~ difference. (_ It's just the string really. So you don't think it's the pendulum. It's just the string. It's the length of the (" string mm (&) \_ length of the string. (&)so that's very [~interesting isn't it? |_ Say if the string's/ erm/shorter it'll go faster. Yes. Yeh. We made up a little rhyme didn't we. What did we say?// The shorter The shorter the string the faster the swing. the string the faster and T: the swing.
5 //|I'm ' putting 35 THINGS in// 6
(4)
[J is putting washing in the bag] //24 NO 53 DARling (v)// / / ' N o ' no || no 15 NO// ('accel.') ..4..
' put those 12 THINGS// ('accel.')
10
the length of a pause in seconds. Lastly, the symbol (v) indicates that 'the preceding word was used as a vocative, to call or hold the attention of the addressee' (Wells 1985: 177 gives the complete coding system). These details make it possible to recapture, for example, the intensifying quality of J's mother's prohibitions which are revealed by the stress and fall-rise intonation in 6 and by the increasing speed and rising pitch of 7, with the downward sweep of its final 'no.'
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T looking with Antony at his matrix of recorded timings.
1/33 YES//
//When ' they're 24 WASHED you' can//
They also, of course, make the transcript very difficult to read. A simpler system is briefly employed by Cazden (1988:9), when she makes use of intonational data to identify a particular student strategy for avoiding potential interruption of an oral narrative by either teacher or peers. The strategy involves a 'sharing intonation' which is marked in the transcript by a rising arrow as, for example, (5):
Observing Classroom Language
Some forms of analytical transcription pay more attention to the structuring of lessons treated as speech events than to prosodic detail. The pioneering work of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) drew on speech act theory to investigate how things are done with words in classrooms. By revealing organizational principles operating at the suprasentential level, and so throwing light on how cohesion is achieved in spoken texts, their analysis proved effective in highlighting the special characteristics of teacher-led discourse. Their methodology proceeds by assigning stretches of talk, from utterance upwards, to various categories defined by function, from Act 'upwards' through Moves, Exchanges, and Transactions to the complete lesson (for a fuller commentary, see Edwards and Westgate 1987: ch. 6). This form of analysis has proved seminal in demonstrating the extent of teachers' dominance over the marking of various boundaries within the lesson, their management of turn-taking, and their control over content. Thus Mehan's comprehensive 'grammar' of lessons included a detailed account of how students' developing competence in finding 'the seams in the essentially teacher-controlled discourse' enabled them to take occasional initiatives themselves (Mehan 1979:139; see also Cazden 1988:31-51). This is part of a wider competence required of students if they are to participate appropriately in classroom discourse and to adjust to the largely reactive roles assigned to them by transmissional teaching. Similar coding of talk arising in other than wholeclass contexts may enable researchers and teachers to evaluate the pedagogic effectiveness of small-group settings. An important dimension of that task concerns associated cognitive activity, which remains at best indirectly accessible to research. Interest however has already been shown in the additional coding of cognition, an influential example being that of Barnes and Todd (1977). They focused upon the interplay between a verbal transcript and a simultaneous commentary with 'interactional' and 'content' frames. At the level of performance, the talk was coded according to a set of 'discourse moves' (such as initiating, qualifying, contradicting, accepting) and a parallel set of 'logical processes' (to do with proposing a cause, categorizing, putting an alternative view, etc.); at a second, competence-related level, the two frames corresponded on the one hand to 'social skills' (such as supportive behavior), and on the other to 'cognitive strategies' (setting up hypotheses, using evidence, etc.)
and 'reflexivity' (monitoring one's own speech and thought, showing awareness of strategies, etc.). Importantly, Barnes and Todd found the relationship between spoken language and processes of thought to be highly problematical: it certainly could not be handled on any one-to-one form-function basis. Their work had thus to retain that interpretational quality which can never be quite eradicated from even the most 'principled' and systematic of enquiries in this field. Markers of 'quality' in teacher-pupil talk continue to be sought by researchers analyzing longer stretches of discourse to identify strategies on the part of teachers which may encourage, for instance, speculative or hypothesizing moves on the part of pupils. Issues and suggested lines of enquiry are reviewed in Westgate and Hughes 1998. 4.3 Reporting Classroom Talk At the reporting phase, similar considerations affect the amount and type of evidence to be displayed. Whether interpretation of recorded talk is considered to be self-evident to those who share the culture of the classroom, or whether the support of various transcriptional and analytical procedures is called upon, reporting has initially to be selective. Illustrative passages have to be chosen, and ways found of relating such extracts to the full range of data, so that readers can assess the validity of a given interpretation. However, even if (as Mehan insists) the entire data corpus is made potentially available for rescrutiny, problems persist concerning the extent and form of data to be provided. As at every other stage of classroom language research, there are no absolute solutions to these problems. The form of reporting adopted is similarly constrained by the form in which data were constituted, itself a response to the purposes of the research and the audience for which it is intended. See also: Classroom Language; Discourse in the Language Classroom. Bibliography Barnes D, Todd F 1977 Communication and Learning in Small Groups. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Cazden C B 1988 Classroom Discourse The Language of Teaching and Learning. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH Croll P 1997 Systematic Classroom Observation (Rev. edn.). Palmer Press, London Dillon J T 1988 Questioning and Teaching. A Manual of Practice. Croom Helm, London Edwards A D, Westgate D P G 1994 Investigating Classroom Talk (Rev. edn.). Falmer Press, London Edwards D, Mercer N 1987 Classroom Knowledge The Development of Understanding in the Classroom. Methuen, London Fisher E 1993 'Features of pupil-pupil classroom talk and their relationship to learning', Language and Education, 7, 4: 239-57
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The School Context Gomes B A, Martin L 1966 'I only listen to one person at a time: dissonance and resonance in talk about talk', Language in Society, 25: 205-36 Heath S B 1983 Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Mehan H 1979 Learning Lessons. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Norman K (ed.) 1992 Thinking Voices: The Work of the
National Oracy Project. Hodder and Stoughton, London Sinclair J McH, Coulthard R M 1975 Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The Language of Teachers and Pupils. Oxford University Press, London Wells G 1985 Language, Learning and Education. NFERNelson, Windsor, UK Westgate D, Hughes M 1997 Identifying 'quality' in classroom talk: An enduring research issue. Language and Education 11(2): 125-39
Pedagogy A. Luke and C. Luke
The term 'pedagogy' refers to culture-specific ways of organizing formal teaching and learning in institutional sites such as the school. In educational theory, pedagogy is typically is divided into curriculum, instruction, and evaluation, referring respectively to cultural knowledge and content, classroom interaction, and the evaluation of student performance. These three interconnected linguistic 'message systems' together construct what counts as 'school knowledge' for teachers and students (Whitty 1985). The achievement of competence with language and literacy is a key aim of pedagogy. That is, spoken and written competence—and affiliated knowledges about language, writing, and literature—are goals of the formal curriculum framed in school programs, textbooks (see English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)), and lessons. Yet, since the 1970s, sociolinguistic and ethnomethodological research has highlighted how language is the essential medium of pedagogy. That is, spoken and written language provides educators with the linguistic and social resources for 'doing' instruction and evaluation. This research, however, stops short of explaining the role of pedagogy in the cross-generational production and reproduction of language and literacy as forms of 'cultural capital' (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). How the effects of pedagogy, ultimately tied up with social and economic power, are constructed by discourse in the classroom is the subject of structuralist and poststructuralist theories of pedagogic discourse; the reform of practice is the focus of neo-Marxist and feminist agendas for 'critical pedagogies.' 1. Language and Literacy as Aims of Pedagogy
The goals and practices of pedagogy have been matters of contention since antiquity. Whether defined in terms of Socratic dialog or Sophist rhetoric, the aims of western pedagogy before literacy and mass school332
ing were tied to the verbal arts and oral performance. With the emergence of compulsory state schooling and national literacy campaigns in the sixteenth century, techniques, practices, and texts for lay reading and writing became principal foci of mass pedagogy (Graff 1987). Standardized textbooks (see Textbooks), rules for pedagogic procedures and school administration, and systematic testing and evaluation methods for students and teachers were institutionalized across European Protestant states (Luke 1989; see Reading: Testing). The emergence of the printing press and Protestant ideology thus enabled the standardization of pedagogy and vernacular languages of instruction, legacies which remain the focus of controversy schooling in the early 1990s. Yet this historical basis of pedagogy in moral and religious training and social control is obscured in definitions which retain the nineteenth-century description of pedagogy as the 'arts' and 'sciences' of teaching, a definition propagated by the American pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey. Such a definition defers debates over whether teaching and learning are either 'artistic' or 'scientific' endeavors in the first instance. It reflects, however, the early twentieth-century secularization of pedagogy in state school systems, and, relatedly, the redefinition of reading pedagogy in English-speaking countries as the rightful domain of applied psychology (Luke 1988). One key political effect of these moves has been to suspend questions of values and ideologies, and to define language and literacy in terms of psychological skills which can be imparted and assessed with scientific precision. Pedagogy entails a 'selective tradition' of practices and conventions with the technology of the written word and selection of a literary canon (Williams 1977). Schools select and privilege a corpus of texts and
Pedagogy linguistic competences as worthwhile; they omit others. In mass schooling for literacy in all national contexts, and across age and grade levels, these are the core curricular issues for debate and adjudication. Insofar as such selections serve the interests of particular classes and social relations, decisions about literacy pedagogy are ultimately ideological and political, in spite of claims that schools are neutral providers of functional, 'natural,' and secular skills. Nonetheless, research and development in language and literacy education continues to center on finding effective scientific means for teaching literacy and also for teaching spoken language to both first- and second-language learners (see Oracy; National Oracy Project). Late twentieth-century debates over pedagogy are typically waged in terms of which modes of instruction and curriculum will best achieve literate and linguistic competences, which are evaluated in terms of standardized test and matriculation examination results. Such debates have been influenced by an increasing range of disciplinary theory and research, including psycholinguistic and cognitive models of reading (see Reading: Theories; Reading: Acquisition), reader response and poststructuralist literary theory, and sociolinguistic and systemic linguistic approaches to first- and second-language learning (see Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability; Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories; Reading: Second Language). But the educational pursuit of the 'correct' or most 'efficient' pedagogy fails to acknowledge that different pedagogies emphasize, select, and produce different kinds of literate and linguistic competence (Baker and Luke 1991), and that the 'selective traditions' of language and literacy pedagogy are motivated by political, economic, and cultural interests. Through the selection and omission of literary texts, of reading and writing practices and events, and of assessment criteria and instruments, pedagogy is used to construct what will count as linguistic and literate competence in the larger society. 2. Classroom Discourse Language is not a simple goal or object of pedagogy, arrayed on the pages of textbooks and tests. Language is the very medium of classroom education and, thus, of pedagogy. Linguistic and sociological research provides divergent descriptions of social and linguistic interaction in classrooms. In effect, each offers a different metalanguage, a vocabulary for describing pedagogic language. The patterns of interaction in the classroom consist of discourse conventions and protocols, an agenda often invisible to its participants (Bernstein 1990). These sequences of organized speech and literacy events can be explicated in terms of 'speech acts' and 'moves' characteristically taken by students and tea-
chers (Sinclair and Coulthard 1975; Edwards and Westgate 1988). That is, particular acts used by teachers and students (e.g., interrogatives, commands) can be classified in terms of communicative purposes and interactional outcomes. The teacher initiation/student response/teacher evaluation turn sequence is described by Mehan (1979) as the commonest pattern of classroom talk. In western schooling at least, this 'IRE' model acts as a 'default mode' (Cazden 1988) which, while particularly suited to kinds of knowledge transmission, deters alternative and varied patterns of classroom interaction (see Classroom Language). Classroom talk has the effect of setting out asymmetrical 'speaking rights' for participants in the classroom (Cazden 1988), situating students and teachers in differential relations of power (Kress 1985;). At the same time, patterns of classroom talk construct and signal to students what can be said, by whom, when, and how (McHoul 1978). In this way, power relations are entailed in the construction of knowledge, ranging from what will count as disciplinary knowledge (Lemke 1990) to what will count as 'reading' and 'writing' (Baker and Freebody 1989). Patterns of classroom talk thus construct a 'hidden curriculum,' a prepositional and cultural logic for particular school knowledges and social relations. In the structuring of knowledge and power relations, classroom instruction contributes to differential achievement and outcomes. All patterns of classroom interaction require that students demonstrate social and 'verbal repertoires' (Cazden, et al. 1972), which may entail demonstrations of particular speech acts, topic knowledge, turn-taking procedures, responses to prosodic cues, and so forth. Displays of such repertoires are viewed by teachers as 'natural' signs of successful academic participation and learning (Cook-Gumperz 1986). As studies of Native American, working-class Afro-American, HawaiianAmerican, and Australian Aboriginal children indicate, classroom interaction tends to discriminate against those whose patterns of home and community language and literate socialization diverge from patterns of mainstream culture and interaction (for a review, see Cazden 1988; see also Socialization). Even where the language of instruction is compatible with community language and dialect, the very rules and patterns of classroom interaction may be less than compatible with those 'ways with words' valued in community and home settings (Heath 1983). Furthermore, the lexical and grammatical resources and affiliated 'semantic networks' developed in children's social-class cultures may be considerably different from those demanded in the language of instruction (Hasan 1988; see Inter cultural Discourse). In this light, attempts to modify curricular texts to improve the representation of the values, images, and ideologies of minority cultures (Apple and Christian-
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The School Context Smith 1990) stop short of addressing the discriminatory character of classroom interaction. To address the role of pedagogy in the systematic production of unequal education outcomes, what is needed is a reappraisal of the significance of discourse in the construction of power and identity. 3. Pedagogy, Discourse, and Power Sociolinguistic and ethnographic research thus begins to explain how language in classrooms contributes to the reproduction of culture, class, and linguistic competence. However, while such work is rigorously descriptive, it stops short of theorizing the place of ideology and discourse in the cross-generational reproduction of language competences, a focus of critical social theory and sociology (see Discourse in the Language Classroom). What is needed is a theory of pedagogic discourse that connects the microanalysis of educational texts and contexts with a theorization of how language and literacy figure in the sociology of educational outcomes. This has been undertaken by Bernstein (1990), as an extension and modification of his earlier theory of codes and curricular knowledge. According to Bernstein, the 'modalities' of pedagogy make particular linguistic and knowledge demands upon children, who bring differing 'coding orientations' to school from community and home cultures (see Second Language Learning: Individual Differences). The 'explicit' and 'implicit' framing and classification of curricula in turn can be traced back to the constitutive social structures and forces which shape what will count as school knowledge (cf. Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). Bourdieu (1986) explicates how 'pedagogic action' and discourse figure in the class-based disposition, or 'habitus,' toward learning and achievement that children acquire from home and which schools, in turn, value and reward. These models draw upon structuralist sociology to stress the agency and power of the macrosocial in local sites such as schools and classrooms. As an alternative and extension of structuralist sociology, poststructuralist analysis views 'pedagogy,' like its cousin terms 'teaching' and 'learning,' not as essential phenomena, but as descriptors for particular discursive and social practices (Henriques, et al. 1984). That is, instead of asking which pedagogies are most efficient at the teaching of language and literacy or which modes of language and literacy best meet pedagogical ends, the issue could be seen to turn on how pedagogy is a theoretical and practical construct of language and discourse (Luke and Luke 1990). The question is then one of how discourse constitutes the pedagogic subject, and the aims, goals, practices, and outcomes of pedagogy. If one begins from a recognition that language is not a set of transparent signifiers for the real, simply located in the social contexts of classrooms and 334
schools, but in fact constitutes and creates the 'real' and the contextual, a very different picture of the relationship between pedagogy and discourse emerges. Teachers and learners, competences, curriculum, and pedagogies can then be seen as constructed in 'metanarratives' about education and language. Pedagogy is constructed by spoken and written discourse in various sites: in the formal curriculum of the textbook, in teachers' manuals and training texts, in classroom talk, and in the formal evaluation of tests and student talk. Human subjects and the exchange of knowledges in classrooms are constituted in and through written and spoken discourse in the classroom (Foucault 1977). By this account, language is not simply the message or the medium of pedagogy; pedagogy itself is in the first instance a discursive construction and pragmatic accomplishment (Walkerdine 1988). These constructions, furthermore, are not arbitrary but constitute particular interpretive communities of speakers and learners with different linguistic competences and academic achievements (Foucault 1972). Here, Bourdieu's (1986) notions of the 'habitus' and 'cultural capital' are useful, insofar as they provide analytic templates for explaining how pedagogic discourse is central to the reproduction of linguistic and literate competence. 4. Critical and Feminist Pedagogies The central and enduring issue facing twentiethcentury school systems has been the provision of equality of access to competence with language and literacy. The pedagogic variables are many: educational approaches to language and literacy select and valorize particular literate and linguistic texts and performances, and omit others. The very language and interactional organization of classrooms favors children of particular social-class, gender, and ethnic backgrounds, and excludes others. Freire's (1970) 'pedagogy of the oppressed,' first begun in Brazil in the 1960s, insisted on the centrality of the cultures, knowledges, and languages of thosegroups marginalized from mainstream schooling and politics. Drawing variously on existentialism, neoMarxism, and radical theology, Freire's pedagojgy for liberation (from various oppressions associated with illiteracy and socioeconomic disadvantage) marked a radical turn from conventional literacy programs sponsored by international development agencies. Freire insists that learning to 'read the word' always entails normative, political 'readings of the world' (Freire and Macedo 1987), and that, accordingly, pedagogy should begin from an articulation and analysis of themes from students' life worlds. Applications of this model in Brazil, Peru, Mozambique, and other countries with disenfranchized peasantries also provided a template for rethinking schooling in industrialized countries. 'Critical peda-
Pedagogy gogy' (Giroux 1983) espouses a model which begins by foregrounding the language and thematic knowledges of students' class and cultural backgrounds. Accordingly, it is envisaged as a 'pedagogy of empowerment' which entails development of a 'critical cultural literacy' and a 'language of critique' (Giroux and McLaren 1989). This pedagogy requires that teachers work as 'transformative intellectuals' in the politicization of student knowledges and the celebration of silenced 'voices.' In the American context, the aims of this pedagogy are tied to the restoration of the ideals of equality and democracy, hallmarks of the progressive pedagogy forwarded by John Dewey. Feminist pedagogy emerged as a distinct discourse in the 1980s with a focus on patriarchal schooling and mainstream educational theory in general, and on critical pedagogy theories in particular (e.g., Luke and Gore 1991). Despite different disciplinary and analytic orientations, neo-Marxist, poststructuralist, and liberal feminists agree that girls and women historically have experienced disadvantages in patriarchal structures, pedagogies, and knowledges of schooling. At the core of feminist theories of pedagogy are challenges to the outcomes of schooling for girls and women, and critiques of the very language, epistemologies, and theoretical frameworks which legitimate the rationalist and male-centered logic of western schooling. Feminist pedagogy is thus grounded in the gendered experiences of girls and women in schooling and contests the gendered dimensions of school knowledges, pedagogical practices, and educational theories. Poststructuralist feminism focuses on girls' and women's material and symbolic positionings in discourse (Lauretis 1987). Accordingly, such an approach rejects all essentialisms and focuses instead on language and discourse as sites of male-authored representations of the feminine and gendered subject positions (e.g., in school or popular cultural texts, in policy discourse, or classroom interaction). This theoretical orientation to feminist pedagogy goes beyond the conventional 'equality in schooling' debates, and it challenges the very notions of gender and equity underlying liberal social theory and institutions (Pateman 1988). It sets out to reverse feminine 'silence' and to 'voice' and to value girls' and women's writing, readings, and knowledges. Politically, it resists pedagogical processes and discourses that claim ostensible equality of outcome, yet sustain a powerful patriarchy in control of knowledge, education, and language. The teaching and learning of language and literacy are intricately tied to the distribution and exercise of power and knowledge. As it is structured in institutional sites like the school, pedagogy is a means for the production and reproduction of ideologies and discourses across generations and cultures. So seen, schooling, pedagogy, and the teaching and learning of language and literacy become, above all else, issues
of social justice and equity, whether in the contexts of postindustrial, industrial, or 'developing' countries. See also: Literacy; Second Language Teaching; Socialization; Educational Linguistics; Language Across the Curriculum. Bibliography Apple M W, Christian-Smith L C (eds.) 1990 The Politics of the Textbook. Routledge, London Baker C D, Freebody P 1989 Children's First School Books. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Baker C D, Luke A (eds.) 1991 Towards a Critical Sociology of Reading Pedagogy. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Bernstein B 1990 The Structure of Pedagogic Discourse: Class, Codes and Control, vol. 4. Routledge, London Bourdieu P 1986 (trans. Nice R) Distinction. Routledge, London Bourdieu P, Passeron J C 1990 (trans. Nice R) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 2nd edn. Sage, London Cazden C B 1988 Classroom Discourse. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH Cazden C B, John V P, Hymes D (eds.) 1972 Functions of Language in the Classroom. Teachers College Press, New York Cook-Gumperz J (ed.) 1986 The Social Construction of Literacy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Edwards A D, Westgate D P G 1987 Investigating Classroom Talk. Palmer Press, London Foucault M 1972 (trans. Sheridan Smith A M) The Archaeology of Knowledge. Random House, New York Foucault M 1977 (trans. Sheridan Smith A M) Discipline and Punish. Random House, New York Freire P 1970 (trans. Bergman M) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Seabury, New York Freire P, Macedo D 1987 Literacy: Reading the World and the Word. Bergin and Garvey, South Hadley, MA Giroux H 1983 Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition. Bergin and Garvey, South Hadley, MA Giroux H, McLaren P (eds.) 1989 Critical Pedagogy, the State, and Cultural Struggle. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY Graff H J 1987 The Legacies of Literacy. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN Hasan R 1988 Language in the processes of socialization: Home and school. In: Gerot L, Oldenburg J, Leeuwen T van (eds.) Language and Socialization: Home and School. Macquarie University, Sydney Heath S B 1983 Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Henriques J, Hollway W, Urwin C, Venn C, Walkerdine V 1984 Changing the Subject. Methuen, London Lauretis T de 1987 Technologies of Gender. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN Lemke J L 1990 Talking Science. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Luke A 1988 Literacy, Textbooks and Ideology. Falmer Press, London Luke A, Luke C 1990 School knowledge as simulation: Curriculum in postmodern conditions. Discourse in the Language Classroom: AusJEdSt 10:75-91
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The School Context Luke C 1989 Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism: The Discourse on Childhood. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY Luke C, Gore J (eds.) 1991 Feminisms and Critical Pedagogies. Routledge, New York McHoul A W 1978 The organization of turns at formal talk in the classroom. LiS 7:183-213 Mehan H 1979 Learning Lessons. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Pateman C 1988 The Sexual Contract. Polity Press, Cambridge Sinclair J M, Coulthard R M 1975 Towards an Analysis of Discourse. Oxford University Press, London Walkerdine V 1988 Mastery of Reason. Routledge, London Whitty G 1985 Sociology and School Knowledge. Mtfhuen, London Williams R 1977 Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, Oxford
School Language Policies D. J. Corson
School language policies are viewed by many in education as an integral and necessary part of the administration and the curriculum practice of modern schools. A language policy is a document compiled by the staff of a school, often assisted by other members of the school community, to which the staff give their assent and commitment. It identifies areas in the school's scope of operations and program where language problems exist that need the commonly agreed approach that is offered by a policy. A policy sets out what the school intends to do about these areas of concern; it is an action statement. 1. Origin and Early Developments In 1966 members of the London Association for the Teaching of English began to develop and extend their interest in the concept of 'language across the curriculum' (see Language Across the Curriculum} by preparing a discussion document entitled 'Towards a Language Policy Across the Curriculum' (Rosen in Barnes et al. 1971). This discussion document provided the catalyst for action that its authors had intended. Schools in various places within Britain, in other countries of the British Commonwealth, and in the United States began to develop their own language policies, using the original document as a reference point. In 1975 the point and value of language policies for British schools received official endorsement in A Language for Life (The Bullock Report): Each school should have an organized policy for language across the curriculum, establishing every teacher's involvement in language and reading development throughout the years of schooling (see English Teaching in England and Wales). Subsequently several influential texts (e.g., Torbe 1980) addressed the need for a whole-school language policy, especially at secondary level, and discussed the implementation of such a policy. As the idea of having
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school language policies spread, practitioners and theorists began to see potential in them for small-scale but important educational reform: for example, Knott (1985) presents novel ideas for researching pupil language use and discovering the attitudes of secondary school staff to language issues; and Maybin (1985) provides practical approaches for working towards a primary school policy for implementation in a culturally pluralist school setting. 2. Language Planning, National Language Policies, and School Language Policies 'Language planning' is another name for the evaluative approach to the sociology of language. Broadly conceived, language planning is concerned with any problem area in which language plays some role: it is the organized pursuit of solutions to language problems. Following in the language planning tradition as they do, national language policies are comprehensive and coherent documents that enable national decision makers to make choices about language issues in a rational and balanced way. Australia's 'National Policy on Languages' released in 1987 is an example of a policy of this kind (see English Teaching in Australia', also English Teaching in Canada; Irish Language Education Policy; Wales: Language Education Policy). In spite of great advances in language planning, researchers in the area have paid very little attention to the school as the basic context for language change. Even those rare texts that have linked language planning with education (Kennedy 1983) tend to address education as a macro phenomenon. However official documents have begun to suggest the need for formal school-level planning. In 1985 Education for All (The Swann Report) responded to the growing pluralism in British schools by warning that 'unless there is a school language and learning policy across the cur-
Textbooks riculum there will be a wastage of effort and often confusion' (see Black English (UK)}. The micro setting of the school as a site for language planning is now receiving more attention, beginning with research studies in New Zealand and Canada that address the' role of the school as the key agency in language planning. These studies borrow the model of 'language policies across the curriculum' developed for London schools and extend its original focus on mothertongue concerns to include second language, bilingual, and social justice issues (Corson 1998a) (see Maori Language Revitalizatiori). The studies argue that the social institutions needed to translate the visions of national policies into strategies capable of enhancing individual lives already exist throughout pluralist societies in the form of their schools. It seems a very reasonable thing to ask schools to be responsible for much of the working end of language planning and of national policies that deal with language issues. 3. Administration, Policy Studies, and Research in Education
The design and implementation of a school language policy are ultimately the responsibility of the school's administration, acting through a policy-making group, departmental subcommittees or ideally through the participation of the whole school's staff and community. As a result the applied value of the ideas in school language policies will depend on how well the concept is integrated into the training and professional development of school administrators and curriculum planners. Moreover many types of small-scale and large-scale research will be necessary in schools if policies are to provide adequate and implementable solutions to local language problems. The training of teachers in basic language research methods will need to become more common. A begin-
ning has been made in all these areas (Horuberger and Corson (1997)). The rise in interest in school language policies coincides with moves in Canada, Britain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand to devolve most educational decision making away from central bureaucracies and down to school level. A groundswell of interest in school policy making of all kinds has resulted (Corson 1998b). Perhaps much of the impetus for further development will come from the growing need in modern societies to improve the quality of the solutions offered to the problems of large-scale cultural pluralism. Increasing tolerance worldwide in the treatment of linguistic minorities should hasten this development. Encouraging evidence for these conclusions is to be found in Wodak and Corson (1997) and Cummins and Corson (1997). Bibliography Barnes D, Britton J, Rosen H 1971 Language, the Learner and the School. Penguin, Harmondsworth Corson D 1998a Language Policy in Schools. Erlbaum, New York. Corson D 1998b Changing Education for Diversity. Open University Press, Philadelphia, PA Cummins J, Corson D (eds.) 1997 Bilingual Education. Kluwer, Boston, MA Hornberger N, Corson D (eds.) 1997 Research Methods in Language and Education. Kluwer, Boston, MA Kennedy C (ed.) 1984 Language Planning and Language Education. Allen and Unwin, London Knott R 1985 The English Department in a Changing World. Open University Press, Milton Keynes Maybin J 1985 Every Child's Language An In-Service Pack for Primary Teachers. Open University Press/Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Torbe M (ed.) 1980 Language Policies in Action Language Across the Curriculum in Some Secondary Schools. Ward Lock, London Wodak R, Corson D (eds.) 1997 Language Policy and Political Issues in Education. Kluwer, Boston, MA
Textbooks F. I. Davies
In a literate society, the textbook, in its various forms, is an integral component of the educational process. As a distinct genre (albeit represented by a wide range of subgenres), the textbook serves the basic communicative function of instructing/informing a readership which is taken to be uninformed. Within the framework of a functional-systemic theory of language (Halliday 1985, 1989) the different socio-communicative functions of textbooks are
reflected in their language. Following Halliday, three functions of the textbook may be identified: (a) the 'interpersonal' function, which is concerned with the relationship between writer, as instructor/informer, and reader/learner; (b) the 'ideational' function, which is concerned with the selection and presentation of information; (c) and the 'textual' function, which is concerned 337
The School Context with organizing and constructing a coherent message or text in order to achieve the basic interpersonal and ideational functions. The language of the textbook reflects all three functions simultaneously and reveals the wide range of choices available to textbook writers. At the same time, it reveals the product of these choices, the linguistic forms with which textbook readers must interact and through which they must become informed.
clauses of condition, concession, and reason, etc., that are not signaled by subordinators, in first position:
1. Textual Function of the Textbook It is the textual function which has been the principal focus of studies of the language of the textbook; in such studies the basic aim has been to identify the syntactic structures which are predicted or empirically found to present processing difficulties for the intended readership. In pioneering studies of the readability of textbooks (Harrison 1980; see also Readability), five sources of syntactic difficulty are identified: a high number of clauses per sentence; the use of the passive voice; nominalizations deriving from verbs, for example, reduction from reduce', ellipsis as, for example, in The boat [that] I bought was green', and modal verbs. The constructions highlighted by Harrison and others (e.g., Perera 1984) include: an extended noun phrase as subject:
They found their inhabitants, the Aborigines of (8) Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand, definitely hostile.
The conversion of the products obtained from the crackers of the oil refineries into the basic raw materials of the plastics industry occupies a large section of the world's chemical industry.
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various types of 'interrupting constructions' between subject and verb, including subordinate adverbial clauses and finite and nonfinite relative clauses: Meanwhile the Normans, who earlier in the Confessor's reign had narrowly failed to gain a commanding position in the kingdom, were now preparing a landing somewhere along the coast.
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marked nonsubject noun phrases in first position in the sentence: The thread and screwdriver we hid.
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nominalization: The exploration and charting of the coastlines of these new lands was the work of an English seaman.
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the selection of nominal subordinate clauses as subject, particularly those introduced by a w/z-element or by a general 'fact' noun: The fact that the monomers and similar chemicals that are the starting materials for the manufacture of plastics can now be made cheaply in large quantities is a result of all the research and development that has been carried out in recent years.
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(5)
Had the journey been made in years gone by, they would have found the downs far more open.
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nonfinite adverbial clauses in first position: Returning from its feeding sojourn in the Antarctic Ocean the emperor penguin leaps to a height twice its own length.
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the SVO(i)O(d) and SVOC clause patterns:
concealed and/or double negatives: These seers seldom tried to make people's lives better.
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and various types of ellipsis: The world-famous physicist forgot [that] his old professor had been the first to suggest the crucial experiment to him.
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Viewed from the perspective of a Hallidayan framework, the studies also indicate that there are three systems of language which appear to be key variables in determining the relative accessibility of the language of textbooks: (a) choice of sentence-initial element or theme; (b) modality; (c) cohesion. Of these, the choice of sentence-initial element receives the greatest weight of attention and the majority of structures identified as potential sources of difficulty are, in fact, sentence initial, as in examples (1) and (3)-(7) above. Thus it may be hypothesized that the element selected for first position in the written language of the textbook may be crucial in processing; it may also be predicted that the place of such elements in the text as a whole should be considered when identifying potentially difficult structures. For example, the occurrence of a 'heavy' element in first position (extended noun phrase, nominalization, adverbial clause, or interrupted construction) may be a potential source of difficulty if it introduces new information, but so too will a simple, or 'light' sentence-initial element if it introduces new information. However, where a 'heavy' sentence-initial element summarizes a stretch of text or even a whole chapter and hence refers back to given information, it is less likely to be a source of difficulty and indeed may serve a crucial role in pulling together what has gone before. Similarly, having the object or complement in first position may not be a source of difficulty if its function in the text is clear. In narratives for (and by) children, the structure How beautiful you look today, Miss Chicken, may represent a marked grammatical choice, but when uttered by Mr Fox it may not necessarily be difficult to process. A further hypothesis which emerges from the above
Textbooks is that the potential difficulty of the structures which are identified as problematic may be a function of the lexical density which distinguishes written modes of language from spoken modes). As Halliday (1989) demonstrates in his analysis of the differences between spoken and written language, written language is characterized by much greater lexical density as measured by the ratio of lexical to grammatical items, the ratio of nouns to verbs and, hence, by degree of nominalization. The relative lexical density of textbooks at different levels of schooling would thus appear to be an area worthy of investigation. The identification of those items within the system of modality which are seen as potential sources of difficulty would also appear to be worthy of further study. Perera points to problems with the negative and Harrison to modal verbs. It is possible that the subtle differences in meaning which are signaled by items expressing such concepts as polarity, probability, obligation, usuality, and presumption are either not attended to by young readers or are difficult to interpret. Certainly there is evidence that the system of modality is problematic for nonnative speakers of English. From the account of (grammatical) cohesion presented by Halliday and Hasan (1976), this textbinding feature of language might be predicted to contribute to ease of text processing rather than to impede it. Nonetheless the evidence from the studies cited above suggests that certain types of cohesion can be a source of difficulty for the reader, particularly in cases where there is a distance between referential cohesive ties and the elements to which they refer, and in cases where the function of conjunctive cohesive items is unclear or ambiguous, or, as in the examples cited by Perera, where ellipsis creates ambiguity. However, subsequent studies of lexical cohesion and lexical chains (Hasan 1984; Hartnett 1986; Christie 1986), particularly as a tool for analyzing children's writing, indicate that this may be a more productive focus of investigation, since it will allow for analysis of both the grammatical and semantic relations across the complete texts rather than of elements within the sentence or across adjacent sentences. It may also contribute to an understanding of those linguistic features of text which are potential sources of disambiguation for the reader, and focus teachers' attention on how readers can become sensitized to these resources rather than on how some constructions are potential sources of text difficulty. A further consideration when evaluating the relative accessibility of textbooks is that of how the textbook is used. Studies which focus on potential sources of difficulty appear to be predicated upon certain assumptions about how the textbook is used, both in the presence of the teacher and in the teacher's absence. Studies of students' use of textbooks in an unsupported situation, notably by Nicholson (1984),
would support the view that the potential sources of difficulty identified in the studies described above do indeed create problems for learners. However there is also evidence that when teachers provide support for the readers the inherent difficulties of the language of textbooks become surmountable and the language experience of pupils is enriched. Among the most comprehensive studies of the use of textbooks under the guidance of teachers are those undertaken by the ERICA project (Morris and StewartDore 1984) in Australia, and the Reading for Learning project (Lunzer et al. 1984; Davies and Greene 1984) in the UK. In contrast to studies focusing on potential sources of difficulty at word and sentence level, researchers on these curriculum development projects sought to identify text-structuring resources which could be utilized by readers. The Reading for Learning project also sought evidence for distinct patterns or structures of information which underpin longer stretches of text. Such analysis was seen to be a prerequisite for teachers seeking to help pupils gain access to demanding texts. 2. Ideational Function of the Textbook The Reading for Learning project's focus on the informative or ideational function of the textbook has provided a categorization of texts by 'topic-type.' A topic-type is defined by its information constituents: categories of information conventionally associated with certain topics. For example, while topics such as flowering plant, suspension bridge, blast furnace, and lake village are distinct topics as presented in descriptive texts across the curriculum, at a generic, or topictype level, they are all identifiable as 'physical structures.' Descriptions of physical-structure topics are consistently represented through certain categories of information, namely information about parts (of the structure or system), location, properties, and function. Closely related to the topic-type physical structure is that of 'mechanism,' which has, in addition to the categories inherent in a physical-structure text, the additional information constituents, action and (interacting) phenomena. Topics which exemplify this topic-type include those of the heart/liver/kidneys, the aneroid barometer, and the electric bell. A further topic-type which shares some features with physical structure and mechanism is the topictype, 'process.' Process texts are, however, critically distinguished from mechanism texts by the fact that they describe a fundamental change of state, and hence are composed of the object/material to be transformed, properties/structure of object/material, steps or stages of transformation, location, and instrument or agent of change. The topic-types identified above, together with the topic-types 'instruction,' 'classification,' 'hypothesis/theory,' 'principle,' and 'force' are consistently
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The School Context repeated in science textbooks in the curriculum. However, their occurrence is not restricted to science textbooks; many are also found in geography textbooks, and some, such as instruction, classification, physical structure, and process, in textbooks in most subjects in the curriculum. There are further topic-types identified by the Reading for Learning researchers and others which are typically associated with certain subject areas. These include, in history and geography, the topic-types 'social structure,' 'state/situation,' 'system/production,' 'product,' 'environment,' and 'adaptation.' In addition to identifying the distinct topic-types which characterize school textbooks, the analyses of the Reading for Learning team also demonstrate that in more advanced texts there is embedding of topictypes which is predicted to create potential processing problems. A further application of the system is the analysis of the extent to which information slots are differently realized in different texts. In one study, Flowerdew (1987) demonstrates that in textbooks written for learners of English for medical purposes, the 'function' slot in descriptions of physical structure was typically not filled. The potential of topic-type analysis for the evaluation of textbooks has not been systematically investigated, nor has there been any survey of the relative distribution of topic-types within and/or across textbooks in the school curriculum. Evidence that the topic-type methodology has potential for sensitizing teachers to the nature of texts is, however, presented in the publications of the Reading for Learning project, and the concept of topic-type has been widely used in in-service courses for teachers, where it serves as the basis for designing 'directed activities related to text' (DARTS). These activities are designed to promote active, analytical, and critical study-reading by learners. The analytic system from which the topic-type hypothesis was derived and subsequently developed, involves a tabular representation of the language of the text, with language elements allocated to the relevant information constituent slots. From this it is clear that the criteria for the categorization of linguistic elements are lexico-semantic rather than grammatical. In studies following the Reading for Learning project, Davies (1986) analyzes the more general lexico-semantic relations such as synonymy/equivalence, hyponymy/inclusion, metonymy, and antonymy/opposition which 'bind' the discrete entries in the lexical 'chains' which fill information constituent slots. She demonstrates that the tabular analysis also reveals syntactic selections which characterize the elements within each slot, for example, the occurrence of the timeless simple present tense and of stative verbs in the properties slot of physical-structure texts, and of sentence-initial prepositional phrases functioning as adjuncts in the location slot. From this study it 340
appears that analysis of lexico-semantic relations within a topic-type framework has considerable potential for identifying simultaneously both the ideational and the textual features of the language of textbooks. The potential of such analysis for capturing the interpersonal features of the language of textbooks would, however, appear to be severely restricted. 3. Interpersonal Function of the Textbook
It is through choices within the interpersonal function that writers of textbooks establish the role(s) that they adopt towards the readership at different points in the text. The choices available with respect to writer roles have not to date been widely investigated but there is evidence in the language of textbooks that there is considerable variation in the way in which publishers and writers interpret the basic textbook function of informing/instructing. At one level, there is clearly a tension between the function of informing, from a knowledge base, and that of directing classroom practice; at another there is the choice of mode of expression, from that of the interactive discourse which is closest to the genre of spoken classroom discourse, to the more formal written mode which Halliday identifies as creating a 'different reality' from that created by speech. Such choices and views of reality are reflected in the different roles writers adopt towards their readers as they seek to inform and interact with their readers. Amongst the optional roles which appear to be available to textbook writers and which are taken up in varying degrees both within and across textbooks in the school curriculum are those of: (a) writer as source of knowledge, or informant; (b) writer as interactive facilitator of learning; (c) writer as classroom manager/trainer in methodology; (d) writer as teacher of the language of the subject. In textbooks, as in other genres, each of the options identified above is typically associated with certain linguistic forms which realize each distinct function. Thus, the informant role is represented by declarative clauses: Seawater contains about 35 000 parts per million of dissolved salts.
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The interactive facilitator role is typically expressed through the use of question forms, or statements addressed directly to the reader: Now, can you make a model ammeter based on these ideas? (12)
The manager/trainer role is associated with the use of imperatives: Connect your model into a simple circuit with a (13) power supply and a variable resistor as in Fig. 3.31.
while the language teacher role is typically represented
Textbooks through the presentation of explicit or 'reduced' definitions: This sort of diagram where each symbol represents a certain amount is called a pictogram.
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What is not known at present, however, is what the relative distribution of these different role-realizing forms is, within and across textbooks in the school curriculum, nor what effect specific choices or combinations of choices have on text-processing for specific groups of readers. Traditionally, the role most widely associated with the textbook is that of informant and there is evidence that this is still a dominant role in many textbooks. In other texts however, particularly for younger readers, the interactive facilitator and/or classroom manager roles predominate, while in all texts there is evidence at certain points of the writer shifting from one role to another. 3.1 Writer as Informant: Specifying and Maintaining Topic In the role of informant/source of information, writers are not obliged to interact personally with their readers, but rather to focus on the subject matter/topic under discussion. As informant, one of the principal obligations of the textbook writer is to specify 'topic.' what the text or sentence is about, typically through choice of grammatical subject (Davies 1988). When the informative role is dominant, the topic is impersonal, an entity or process, for example, The electromagnet, The formation of soil, The measurement of electric current. Such impersonal selections, when maintained over stretches of text, contrast with the choice of interactive participants: /, You, We, etc., when the writer adopts the interactive facilitator role and seeks to recreate the spoken discourse of the classroom. Within the informative role there are further options available for writers seeking to focus learner attention on topic. These include, as an almost standard form, the option of using section headings and/or bold type, as well as choice of subject to specify topic, as in the following example: General structure of roots. Usually white, roots cannot develop chlorophyll. They never bear leaves or auxiliary buds.
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A further widely taken up option for specifying topic is through anaphoric reference to the study/ investigation previously undertaken by the learner, or to the previously studied topic. The take-up of this option typically involves lexical contrast and may also involve explicit evaluation. In the example below (16), the criteria for evaluation are accuracy and practicality:
Aneroid Barometer. Although the mercury barometer can be a comparatively accurate measuring instrument, it is rather bulky and 'spillable.' Another instrument for measuring atmospheric pressure is the Aneroid Barometer ('aneroid' means without liquid).
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3.2 Writer as Interactive Facilitator of Learning: Specifying Topic When the writer shifts from the role of informant to that of interactive facilitator, the use of headings, bold type, lexical contrast, and evaluation are still maintained for the specification of topic, but there is also a direct address to the reader and to what they have been doing, as shown in example (17): Using an ammeter. So far, you have judged how much current is flowing in your circuit by the brightness of the lamps. Another way of measuring an electric current is to use an instrument called an ammeter.
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For the writer as interactive facilitator, however, the option closest to the genre of spoken classroom discourse is the option of specifying topic as a shared or assumed goal, as in the following example: We should next consider groups of villages.
(18)
In this example, certain interpersonal features typically associated with spoken discourse are retained in the textbook specification of topic, particularly the choice of the personal subject, 'We,' the use of a time, rather than a spatial frame of reference, and the specification of the mental/cognitive process 'consider.' In these respects textbook examples may be compared with the example below (19), from spoken (classroom) discourse which, in the choice of interactive subject and of mental/cognitive process as an explicit goal, is typical of the genre: Today, we, all of us, will be looking at the worm.
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3.3 Writer as Interactive Facilitator: Arousing Interest/Encouraging Reflection In order to motivate students to be receptive to new information, writers in their role as interactors are clearly under some obligation to try to arouse interest and also to encourage readers to reflect upon issues. One of the most widely used options for doing this, especially in texts for younger readers, is that of question raising. There is wide variation across textbooks with respect to the number, type, and position in the text of the questions raised, as in the following example (20) for instance, where questions are addressed directly to the reader: Physics. What is it? What is it to do with you? Can you eat it? (20)
Another option is to focus on the 'here and now,' the hypothesized real world of the reader. Typically
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The School Context associated with the selection of this option is some form of evaluation, as in the following: Man, animals, and plants cannot live without (21) water. In our country we are so used to merely turning on a tap to get unlimited supplies of this precious liquid that we seldom think how fortunate we a r e . . . .
3.4 Writer as Classroom Manager I Trainer In all subject areas, a basic function of the textbook is to introduce students, and sometimes their teachers, to the methodology of the subject. This entails the direction and management of what readers actually do in the classroom. Again there appears to be a wide range of options for realizing this role, from simple directives to the explicit statement of real world methodology. The most widely adopted option for introducing methodology is to give simple directives which are realized through the selection of the imperative mood. The simplest are variants of the traditional directives to 'answer questions/draw a map/write.' Other relatively easily followed directives require readers to observe, typically in the form 'look at ' More risky, for the student, as well as the classroom teacher, are directives to do something practical, as in example (22): Making an electromagnet. This is quite easy to do. Use a 'C' shaped piece of iron such as is shown in Fig. 3.10.
(22)
A concern with the relative ease or difficulty is also evident in the evaluative elements, such as 'easy,' 'simple,' 'will do (will be adequate)' which are embedded in directives. Also of note is the use of modals and the option of offering the reader the role of the 'professional,' for example, 'Try being an engineer... .' An alternative for writers seeking to introduce their readers to the methodology of the subject,- is to make reference to the activities of the real world practioner, for example, the scientist or geographer. Textbooks vary in the extent to which this option is taken up. In the example below (23), the real world methodology of the geographer is introduced in the first chapter and reference to this methodology provides a conceptual framework which is maintained throughout the book: A geographer is concerned with how things are distributed over the earth's surface and also with mapping the patterns they make or in other words with describing the way in which they are arranged.
(23)
3.5 The Writer as Teacher of the Subject Language As an integral part of both informing and facilitating learning, it is clear that the textbook writer will also be concerned with teaching the language of the subject, taking account of the developmental level of the readership. The inevitable tension between these two aims 342
is clearly revealed in the language of the textbook, as is a wide range of options for introducing new or unfamiliar terminology and at the same time maintaining control over syntactic complexity. Of the range of options for introducing new terminology, one is the traditional and widely used option of providing an explicit definition, and doing so through the use of core/common/familiar words and concepts, or through metaphor. Closest to the spoken discourse of the classroom are those definitions of terms which are introduced through the explicit use of 'verbs of defining' such as 'call,' 'say to be,' 'know as,' 'means,' 'refer to,' 'define.' This is an option which is taken up in textbooks at all levels of schooling. Within this, and other, options there is the further choice between providing an exemplification (sometimes through experiment or diagrammatic means), before introducing the new term, and that of presenting the exemplification after introducing the new terminology. As with the other communicative options identified above, there may also be the use of bold type to signal the importance of a particular term, or the concept which it represents. Examples include (24) and (25): Some substances do not seem to conduct electricity at all—they are called electrical insulators. Substances which do conduct electricity are called conductors.
(24)
Finally he, the manager, has to transport the goods to shops and customers and these costs are known as distribution costs.
(25)
A further option, not widely taken up by textbook writers, is to make reference to the Latin or Greek root of a term and/or to derivatives, as in the following: The word respiration is derived from the Latin respirare which means to breathe. The modern definition of respiration is: the processes which lead to, and include, the chemical breakdown of materials to provide energy for life.
(26)
An alternative, still close to spoken discourse in its deictic function and form is to make exophoric reference to the representation of a new term as it is presented in a diagram or photograph: In Fig. 4 the most important factor in the location (27) of the factory is materials, which is shown as a larger square on the diagram: this is a raw material location.
In contrast to previous examples, the definition in the example below (28) is not introduced through the use of a defining verb but through the use of an equative or defining clause of the form: x is y: Chalk allows water to pass through it freely and so is a permeable rock.
(28)
This is a widely adopted option, and one which may precede the introduction of the new term, as shown
Textbooks above, or follow it. As a 'reduced' definition, it is less explicit than definitions which make use of defining verbs. The option of substituting defining verbs and equative clauses to explain new terms with 'reduced' signals of synonymy such as 'that is,' 'or,' a dash [—], or brackets, is also widely adopted: In addition [the farmer] rotates the crops, that is, changes the crops in a given field from time to time.
(29)
A final option is the zero option, that of introducing new/unfamiliar items without definition or exemplification. Analyses reveal that this is indeed a widely adopted option; however, one problem with the most widely cited examples in the literature is that they are not presented in context. It is thus difficult to assess the relative accessibility of such items. The above examples indicate the potential of the analysis of writer roles as they serve the interpersonal function; they also suggest the need for empirically based investigations of writer roles, and of their effect on readers, in a substantial corpus of textbooks. 4. Summary
The potential of the functional-systemic framework proposed by Halliday for the study of all three functions of the textbook—interpersonal, ideational, and textual—is apparent from the studies described above. The evidence suggests that future studies of the language of the textbook will increasingly be informed by the hypothesis that selections within the ideational and textual functions are substantially determined by choices from within the interpersonal function of language. See also: School Language Policies; Language Across the Curriculum; Classroom Language; Metalinguistic Awareness; Text.
Bibliography Christie F 1986 Writing in schools: Generic structures as ways of meaning. In: Couture B (ed.) Functional Approaches to Writing: Research Perspectives. Frances Pinter, London Da vies F 1986 The structure and language of textbooks across the curriculum. In: Tickoo M (ed.) Language in Learning. RELC Anthology Series, Singapore Davies F 1988 Reading between the lines: Thematic choice as a device for presenting writer viewpoint in academic discourse. Especialist 9:173-200 Davies F, Greene T 1984 Reading for Learning in the Sciences. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh Flowerdew L 1987 An integrated approach to the teaching of reading (with analyses of EMP and science teaching texts). English for Medical Paramedical Purposes Newsletter 3(1) Halliday M A K 1985 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold, London Halliday M A K 1989 Spoken and Written Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford Halliday M A K, Hasan R 1976 Cohesion in English. Longman, London Harrison C 1980 Readability in the Classroom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hartnett C G 1986 Static and dynamic cohesion: Signals of thinking in writing. In: Couture B (ed.) Functional Approaches to Writing: Research Perspectives. Frances Pinter, London Hasan R 1984 Coherence and cohesive harmony. In: Flood J (ed.) Understanding Reading Comprehension. International Reading Association, Newark, DE Lunzer E A, Gardner K, Davies F, Greene T 1984 Learning from the Written Word. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh Morris R, Stewart-Dore N 1984 Learning to Learn from Text: Effective Reading in the Content Areas. AddisonWesley, Melbourne Nicholson T 1984 Experts and novices. Reading Research Quarterly 19:436-51 Perera K 1984 Children's Writing and Reading. Basil Blackwell, Oxford
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Dictionaries Dictionaries for Language Learners R. A. Carter and N. Schmitt
In the field of lexicography for langauge learners the most significant developments since the 1970s have involved more extensive corpora of spoken and written language and the creation of sophisticated computer-based access tools to such corpora. The greatest innovations have been stimulated by the COBUILD project at the University of Birmingham, England and the influence of such work can be measured by the fact that by the late 1990s all major English language learner dictionary projects have incorporated reference to extensive language corpora and developed computational techniques for extracting lexicographically significant information from such corpora. 1. The COBUILD Project The COBUILD is one of the largest and most ambitious lexical research projects ever undertaken. COBUILD stands for Collins Birmingham University International Language Database and is based in the School of English at the University of Birmingham under the direction of Professor John Sinclair who, in addition to having major responsibility for lexical and lexico-grammatical research, is editor-in-chief of the major lexicographic and other related publications of COBUILD which began with the publication in 1987 of the ground-breaking Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (CCELD). The principal aim underlying COBUILD research is to investigate in as much detail as possible how the English language is actually used at a given moment in time in both speech and writing and to allow such evidence to inform publications aimed at learners of the English language. As the project developed through the 1980s, it became clear that such evidence could only be made available by building a multimillion word corpus and the CCELD (1987) draws on a core database of 7.3 million words and makes supporting reference to a corpus of 20 million words. (For an account of early COBUILD corpus development see Sinclair 1987.)
Because most of the publications produced by COBUILD are for nonnative users of English, there has been less interest in the kinds of specialized oneoff uses of language which are often of major interest in dictionaries for native users of English and correspondingly greater interest in the most central and typical uses of the language. Evidence in COBUILD dictionaries is therefore often given by illustrating meaning and usage in citations from the most typical and sometimes even the most banal examples of usage. The usage cited is corpus-based and includes real uses of English attested in actual, naturally-occurring usage and not therefore the made-up examples and citations of lexicographers which had characterized foreign language lexicography before 1987. The main innovations of this first COBUILD dictionary and its latest edition the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (CCED) (1995) can be summarized as follows and with reference to sample entries: (a) Citations are examples of real English and do not involve made-up examples; the citations selected can be attested with reference to corpus evidence. (b) Linguistic and stylistic differences between spoken and written usage and British and American English usage can be separately stored and marked accordingly in dictionary entries. (c) Most crucially, relatively frequencies of occurrence are indicated and, most innovatively, in entries for individual lexical items the order of senses in multisense words corresponds to their frequency order in the corpus (Fig. 1). (d) Concordancing techniques allow illustration of the main collocational and colligational properties of a word. Such properties can be made part of the explanation of a word's meaning. Significant lexical patterns and grammatical behavior are separately highlighted in CCELD in a separate column which is positioned in parallel with the relevant entry. (e) Explanations are written in complete sentences 345
The School Context replies and as a marker of conversational boundaries as in: 'How are you? I'm fine thanks' or 'Is there anything anyone wants to add to this? OK, fine. Let's move on.'
Figure 1. A dictionary entry for mug. Source: CCELD, 1987
(not in abbreviated phrases or codes) and involve a particular strategy of clear, accessible language (without recourse to a defining vocabulary) and a use of natural syntactic formulae. For example, 'if-clauses' are used for purposes of explanation, just as they frequently are in everyday discourse. Thus, lexical items are defined in context, often using the most frequent patterns which surround them in actual use, rather than as disembodied entities. A defining vocabulary is not employed but a note in the latest (1995) edition (CCED) states (p.xviii) that 'most words in our definitions [are] amongst the 2500 commonest words of English.' (f) The COBUILD emphasis on the most frequent words in the language does not foreclose on the pragmatic or discourse functions of some of these frequent words. Thus, discourse markers such as now, well, right, and 'content-less,' propositionless words which have been largely ignored in previous dictionaries of this type, are also accorded illustration and explanation. A word such as fine, for example, is explained in a range of different senses but its meaning and function in conversational 346
In the years following the publication of CCELD, great efforts were invested in further corpus development as it was realized that lexico-grammatical description could be even better with a corpus with more words and more coverage from more different varieties of the English language. For example, Clear et al. (1996) note that in the 7.3 million word corpus there is only evidence that the word taciturn is used predicatively but the 20 million word corpus reveals that it is also used as a premodifier and regularly with another negative adjective as in taciturn and unfriendly. Descriptions were modified in the light of further evidence. The COBUILD corpus, previously termed the Birmingham Collection of English Test (BCOET), was renamed The Bank of English in 1991 and in 1998 stands at 350 million words. The corpus has informed work on grammar and on idioms including the Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms (1995), which gives unique guidance concerning both the frequency of different idioms and the different patterns which idioms form in varying degrees of fixedness and also including a dictionary of collocations Collins COBUILD English Words in Use (1997), which describes over 100,000 collocations in a range of lexical patterns and supported by attested examples from The Bank of English. Parallel publications include a series of concordance samplers for use in the classroom and CD-roms giving a wide variety of linguistic profiles of word usage. Simultaneously, the corpus is being continually updated to include a wider variety of spoken forms and data from other Englishes around the world. The most substantial insight to have been generated by COBUILD research is that grammatical and lexical patterns are coselected and mutually interdependent. Clear et al. (1996) have expressed this as follows: Particular grammatical patterns tend to cooccur with particular lexical items, and—the other side of the coin—lexical items seem to occur in only a limited range of patterns. The interdependence of grammar and lexis is such that they are ultimately inseparable, working together in the making of meaning, (p. 313) It is likely that future developments in lexicography will follow such insights; in the meantime it is worth reflecting that the publication of the first COBUILD dictionary in 1987 was greeted as idiosyncratic and unproven but that in the following 10 years corpus based lexicography following COBUILD lines has been adopted as standard practice in research, linguistic description, and publishing outcome.
Dictionaries for Language Learners 2. Further Major Innovations Other major and influential contributions to EFL lexicography have continued with subsequent editions of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) (third ed. 1995) and the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) (1995). Although influenced by COBUILD computational methodology and, in particular, by the now established prerequisite of a corpus of linguistic evidence, subsequent innovations and developments have uniquely evolved according to different presentational principles. In terms of corpora, both LDOCE and OALD have benefitted from the British National Corpus (BNC)— a corpus of 100 million words of written and 10 million words of spoken English—in the development of which both publishers (Longman and OUP) have been partners. Additionally, Longman has further extensive corpora of American English which inform all dictionaries including the Longman Dictionary of American English, the Longman Lancaster Corpus (LLC) (30 million words of written English) developed with advice from Professor Geoffrey Leech at Lancaster University and a 10 million word learner corpus including written texts from students at all levels from over 70 different language backgrounds and designed to provide evidence of the kinds of lexical mistakes most frequently made by learners as well as guidance concerning the kinds of words most likely to be understood by learners of English in dictionary definitions and explanations. Evidence from spoken corpora, in particular, has informed LDOCE (1995) in that the top 3000 most frequent words in speech (as opposed) to writing are marked out for special attention (see Fig. 2). Other particularly characteristic features of LDOCE (1995) include: (a) a continuing adherence to a finite defining vocabulary and to varied definition styles. (The 1995 edition of the Defining Vocabulary shows how the
Figure 2. Frequencies of the verb mean in spoken and written English. Source: LDOCE, 1995
word list is being constantly revised in the light of research with users.) Another avowed aim is, where possible, to define the unit of meaning rather than individual words; this means that there are regular entries for phrases as well as for words. Selection restrictions on particular word forms are also clearly indicated; (b) in LODCE (1995) a feature called 'signposts' is introduced to aid learners with the disambiguation of polysemous items. Signposts help the learner to make mental connections with the word in the context in which they encountered it; (c) dictionaries and related materials are corpusbased but not corpus-bound. In other words, examples are given in an order which is most likely to help the learner rather than solely on the basis of the frequency of one sense rather than another. Authentic citations from the corpus are similarly not always helpful to the learner and in LDOCE it is an important principle that pedagogic mediation should precede the reality of the example. The fifth edition of OALD (1995) and the first edition of the Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE) (1995) similarly contain numerous innovations. CIDE draws on the 100 million word Cambridge Language Survey (now the Cambridge International Corpus), with an emphasis on different national variations in English use and containing practical yet inventive features such as lists of false friends in English in comparison with 14 other international languages. CIDE also contains guide words which, in the case of polysemous words, orient the reader to the main or core meaning of the words listed in a single entry. OALD (1995) represents a marked extension of a number of key features and some innovations in other areas, with the 1995 edition offering a treatment of 2800 new words and meanings when compared with earlier editions. Additional features include: 90,000 corpus based examples (drawn from the 100 million word British National Corpus (BNC) and the 40 million word Oxford American English Corpus)', notes and illustrated pages giving information on cultural differences between British and American English; extensive usage notes covering areas of grammar and meaning which cause difficulty; and an expanded defining vocabulary (now 3500 words) is retained for purposes of definition and explanation. 3. Lexicography and English Language Learning: Contrasts and Comparisons Table 1 summarizes some basic data about the four main learner's dictionaries, versions of which were all published in the year 1995. Comparisons between these dictionaries depend, however, on the criteria adopted for comparison and the grounds can never 347
The School Context Table I. Some data about four learner's dictionaries of English LDOCE
OALD
COBUILD (CCELD, CCED)
CIDE
First edition (year) editor(s)
1978 P. Procter
1948 A.S. Hornby
1987 J. Sinclair P. Hanks
1995 P. Procter
Latest edition/year editor(s)
3/1995 M. Rundell
5/1995 J. Crowther
2/1995 J. Sinclair G. Fox
1/1995 P. Procter
No. of pages (a-z) No. of other pages No. of definitions claimed No of examples claimed Corpora
1644 64 > 80 000
1392 78 65000
1951 38 > 75 000
1701 91 1000000
-
90000
100000
> 100 000
LLC+BNC
BNC+OAEC
BE
CLS
After: Bogaards 1966. Abbreviations: LLC, Longman Lancaster Corpur (30 million words); BNC, British National Corpur (100 million words); OAEC, Oxford American English Corpur (40 million words); BE, Bank of English (200 million words; as of 1994); CLS, Cambridge Language Survey (100 million words).
therefore be entirely neutral, nor can any comparison be entirely valid without extensive empirical testing with users. However, among the evaluative frameworks to which reference needs to be made, at the very least according to the publishers' own criteria, are: (a) clarity of definition and explanation and the extent to which defining vocabularies assist in this aim; (b) authenticity, naturalness, and pedagogic mediation of examples; (c) ease of access to the most frequent uses and core meanings (which are, of course, not necessarily identical), (d) the extent to which words are shown in natural syntactic and collocational environments, (e) the extent to which polysemous words and words which mean differently in different phrasal forms are appropriately explained and ease of access to them is provided. A detailed comparison of these dictionaries is given in a special feature of International Journal of Lexicography (1996), (see in particular, Bogaards (1996) and Herbst (1996). See also Bejoint (1994) and Scholfield (1997)). Cameron (1998) raises valuable issues concerning the absence of diachronic information in many modern dictionaries, arguing that important cultural and ideological inflections become thereby deleted. 4. A Dictionary for Production
The Longman Language Activator (LA) (1994) is, uniquely, a production dictionary. It is aimed at inter348
mediate to advanced learners of English and is designed around a conceptual map of the core words of English. These 1052 key concepts include words such as sad/unhappy around which are grouped, in a kind of atlas of meaning, a further 13 related words and phrases such as be fed up with, be down in the dumps, depressed, miserable, downcast, glum. These related words and their different levels of meaning and style are explained with reference to the core concept in such a way as to help students produce a range of expressions. This information about meaning helps learners who know what they want to say but are seeking far more precise expressions; the learner should feel confident about expressing their ideas because information about a range or related meanings is given clearly and in accessible definitions (using a defining vocabulary). One aim of a production dictionary is to generate greater learner autonomy by encouraging learners to check, prior to use, how a word is used and in what collocational and colligational patterns. Decoding dictionaries involve, generally but not exclusively, less active modes of understanding. By contrast, the LA is essentially an encoding dictionary. 5. Bilingual Developments
Bilingual dictionaries have been extremely popular with language learners for a long time. In spite of this, second language teachers have viewed them with mixed emotions. On one hand, students could manage using them, being a quick and easy source of lexical information. On the other hand, it was clear that entries in bilingual dictionaries were often misleading, and sometime simply wrong. What was needed was a
Lexicology reference which retained the advantages of a bilingual dictionary, but which gave reliable information. Such a reference is now available with the introduction of the Word Routes (1995-). This innovative series combines easy lookup and accessibility with word entries compiled according to corpus-informed best practice. The explanations are in the first language (LI) but with numerous examples in the target language. Related words are clustered together in a thesauruslike arrangement, with L2 and LI indexes at the back to guide learners to the appropriate entry. Clustering in this way helps the learner to compare and contrast related words, and begin building the sense relationship connections necessary for native-like usage. There has never been any reason why bilingual dictionaries could not be compiled to the same standard and lexicographic good practice as the best monolingual ones; however, one disadvantage is that the cost of compiling a different dictionary for each different LI means that only the major languages are ever likely to benefit from this development. 6. Conclusions
English language lexicography has undergone a phase of considerable invention and innovation in the last three decades of the twentieth century. A number of problems in the presentation of lexical information, particularly to language learners, have been solved and there have been considerable advances in the treatment of fixed and idiomatic expressions. It is paradoxical that the most significant advances in the description of lexico-grammatical patterns have coincided with a time when the interests of linguists have shifted towards patterns of lexis in discourse. This means that lexicography is probably on the verge of even more exciting developments, including a major issue to address, in both theory and practice, in demarcating where grammars stop and where dictionaries start. For fuller surveys, reviews, and analysis see Carter (1998) and Schmitt and McCarthy (1997).
See also: Lexicology. Bibliography Bejoint J 1994 Tradition and Innovation in Modern English Dictionaries. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK Bogaards P 1996 Dictionaries for learners of English. International Journal of Lexicography 9,4:277-320 Carter R A 1998 Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy: Applied Linguistic Perspectives, 2nd ed. Routledge, London Cameron D 1998 Dreaming the dictionary: Keywords and corpus linguistics. In: Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, Vol. 1, pp. 35-46 CCED 1995 Collins CO BUILD English Dictionary. HarperCollins, Glasgow and London CCELD 1987 Collins CO BUILD English Language Dictionary. HarperCollins, Glasgow and London CIDE 1985 Cambridge International Dictionary of English. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Clear J, Fox G, Francis G, Krishnamurty R, Moon R 1996 COBUILD: The state of the art. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 1, 2:305-16 Herbst T 1996 On the way to the perfect learners' dictionary: A first comparison of OALD5, LDOCE3, COBUILD2, and CIDE. International Journal of Lexicography 9, 4:32157 LDOCE 1995 Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Longman, Harlow, UK LA 1994 Language Activator. Longman, Harlow, UK OALD 1995 Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Scholfield P 1997 Vocabulary reference works in foreign language learning. In: Schmitt N, McCarthy M (eds.) Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Schmitt N, McCarthy M J (eds.) (1997) Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Sinclair J (ed.) 1987 Looking Up: An Account of the COBUILD Project in Lexical Computing. Word Routes (1995-) (ed. McCarthy M J) English-Italian; English-French; English-Spanish. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Lexicology A. P. Cowie
This article is concerned with analyses of the vocabulary of a language (its 'lexis') in applied linguistics, and in particular with detailed descriptions intended to meet the needs of foreign learners. The principles discussed apply to all languages, though the examples are from English and the emphasis chiefly (though not
exclusively) on the work of UK lexicologists. Though it has not ignored relevant theoretical developments, lexicology in the UK has taken a firm descriptive or empirical course. Its findings have appeared in various published forms: as dictionaries aimed directly at the foreign student (Cowie 1989a); as reports on lexical 349
The School Context research undertaken with one or more future dictionaries in view (Sinclair 1987); and as lexical syllabuses or checklists intended as an input to course materials (Sinclair and Renouf 1988; Nattinger and DeCarrico 1989). This survey will be concerned with four developments, which together illustrate the range and depth of work in applied lexicology in the late twentieth century. One measure of the intense interest being shown in vocabulary learning and teaching is the extraordinary range of lexical items coming under scrutiny: simple words, certainly, but also abbreviations, idioms, collocations, and 'routine formulae' (GlSser 1986). Another clear sign is the number of books which attempt to link lexical analysis, research into vocabulary acquisition, and the concerns of the teacher and materials writer (Carter 1987; Carter and McCarthy 1988). Perhaps most remarkable of all, both as a source of authoritative descriptions for learners and as a stimulus to exploration of lexical relations of various kinds, is the latest generation of monolingual learners' dictionaries (Tickoo 1989). The starting point of this article is one area in which the general EFL dictionary has made a significant contribution to vocabulary learning. 1. Grammar in the Monolingual Learner's Dictionary
Providing information about the inflected forms and syntactic functions of words has long been a concern of EFL lexicographers, as this is essential knowledge for learners wishing to write or speak acceptable English. Learners need to know, for instance, whether a particular noun (say, table or coffee) can be used in both the singular and plural forms and whether, if singular, it can occur after such determiners as any, some, much, little. Pedagogical grammars are concerned with these characteristics, but only as defining properties of word classes (Greenbaum and Quirk 1990). Individual words figure in the grammar simply as illustrative examples of those classes. The complementary role of the EFL dictionary is to focus on the individual item, providing for each one a label denoting class membership, and explaining, and where possible illustrating, the relevant properties (Cowie 1987). In the case of coffee the dictionary will show that it is both an uncountable (or mass) noun [U] and a countable noun [C], that is, that in one use it has a fixed singular form, preceded by such determiners as any, some, etc., while in the other it can take either a singular or plural form preceded by a/an, one, two, etc. This information is recorded in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD 1989) as follows: coffee... 2(a) [U] drink made by adding hot water to ground or powdered coffee: a cup of coffee O make some coffee, (b) [C] cup of this drink: Two black/white coffees, please... 350
The categories [U] and [C] were incorporated in the earliest learners' dictionaries, including, in 1942, the forerunner of OALD. Its editor, A. S. Hornby (see Hornby, Albert Sidney), also recorded prepositions which 'collocate' regularly with verbs (e.g., adhere to, comply with, impose on), mainly by means of example sentences. But EFL lexicographers, then as now, have found that the most complex and difficult task is to specify the various constituents (such as noun phrases and nonfinite clauses) which can occur after a main verb, and to identify their sentence functions (as objects, complements, etc.). What type of clause, for instance, is used after the verbs decide, give up, think and does it function as a direct object or as some other element? In OALD and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE1987) the class of construction following the verb, and in OALD its sentence function also, are indicated in a table in the Introduction. Tables (like the one from LDOCE below) meet the need for systematic treatment of the various patterns, while the inclusion in the actual entries of a simple abbreviation ([+ to-v], [+ v-ing], etc.) acts as a clear but succinct reminder of the pattern and also as a pointer to the appropriate table: [ + to-v]
Many verbs can be followed [+ v-ing] by sentence patterns, such [+ (that)] as a to-infinitive, verb in the -ing form, or that-clause.
We decided to go. She's given
smoking.
I think (that) he's gone home,
2. Sense Relations and Lexical Fields
Until the early 1980s very little interest was shown in applied lexical research in the paradigmatic dimension of lexical patterning. Paradigmatic relations are meaning relations which exist between a particular word and other words of the same grammatical class which can be substituted for it. One such relationship, and probably the most familiar, is that of synonymy, illustrated by the items broad and wide substituted in the context It was a—river. Interest amongst applied linguists in the paradigmatic was greatly stimulated by the theoretical work of John Lyons (1968,1977) on 'sense relations' such as hyponymy (bird: swallow), complementarity (dead: alive), antonymy in the narrow sense (rough: smooth) and converseness (husband: wife). It is a small step from analyzing contrastive pairs of items to examining sets of words linked by one or more semantic features (consider in this respect seep, ooze, drip, leak), and in 1980 a research project was set up at Leeds University with the aim of providing a detailed analysis of such groupings ('lexical fields'), focusing particularly on verbs and attempting to show how the members of specific fields are related to each other in terms of meaning, syntax, and style (Cowie
Lexicology 1989a; cf. Lehrer 1974; Nida 1975). One such field is made up of the verbs crease, crumple, wrinkle, etc. These items have certain common features, including the component 'two-dimensional' (since fabric, paper, and sheet metal, though not wooden planks, are typically creased or crumpled). Individual verbs can be distinguished according to whether their folds are parallel or not and large or not (the folds of wrinkled material tending to be smaller than those of creased material). The description also focused on the tendency of certain verbs in certain fields to combine with a relatively narrow range of object nouns (technically, to 'collocate' narrowly). A narrow choice of objects characterizes the above set of verbs when they have to do with altering one's expression in a certain way rather than producing folds in material. Thus, pucker one's lips/one's brows is acceptable, but not *pucker one's nose, and wrinkle one's nose jone's forehead passes muster but not * wrinkle one's lips (Cruse 1986). Treatment of sense relations in EFL dictionaries was, until the late 1980s, haphazard rather than systematic. But the appearance of a third generation of general EFL dictionaries marked a shift of policy. Two lines of development can be seen. First, lexicographers have introduced more elaborate systems of cross-references, covering hyponymy and various types of oppositeness. These relations are indicated in the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987) by inserting the symbols =, =, and t (for synonym, antonym, and superordinate, respectively) in the margin to the right of the relevant word or sense division: put in— 6 If you put something in, you fix it, fit it, or plant it somewhere. = put off. 1 If you put something off, you delay doing it.
|
install remove = postpone
The second major advance is in the treatment of more complex sets of words. Certain of these, for example, scales such as hot, warm, cool, cold, cycles such as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., and partwhole relationships such as finger, hand, arm, body, are explained and differentiated in studies by Cruse (1986) and Lipka (1990). Several of these relationships lend themselves to effective presentation through charts, diagrams, and pictures. But lexical fields of the kind described above are best treated by means of explanations and examples in special usage notes, as in the 1989 edition of OALD. 3. The Analysis of Word-combinations The various developments described in this survey are of course interrelated. It has been seen, for instance, how lexical field analysis can be deepened and refined by taking account of the collocability of words in certain fields. But collocations, idioms, and routine formulae (e.g., You don't say! Now look here/) are a
pervasive feature of written and spoken language— important enough to be treated in specialized 'idiomatic' dictionaries (Cowie, et al. 1983; Benson, et al. 1986). These dictionaries also mark an important step forward: taken together, they give a comprehensive and detailed treatment of an area of the English lexicon that was hitherto relatively unexplored. With regard to collocations, it has already been seen that the earliest general EFL dictionaries attempted to record combinations such as adhere to or comply with. Coverage of these—referred to as 'grammatical collocations' (Benson, et al. 1986)—is now very thorough in all such dictionaries. As regards 'lexical collocations' (combinations of two or more major-class words), of which wrinkle one's nose and knit one's brows are instances, lexicographers have developed their own ways of signaling that, as in the case of wrinkle one's nose (cf. *wrinkle one's eyes}, there may be an arbitrarily limited set of choices. One method is to use the oblique to mark off the possible selections, as in: win/lose/hold/drop one's service (i.e., at tennis). Another is to state that a particular verb in a certain sense is found in only a limited range of contexts. The contexts are then quoted: bear2... 6... (used esp in the expressions shown): bear a grudge against sb/bear sb a grudge O He bears no resentment towards them. O She bore him no ill will.... (OALD 1989)
Routine formulae, also called 'deictic locutions' (Nattinger and DeCarrico 1989), are relatively fixed phrases, clauses, or even whole sentences used to direct the flow of conversation by signaling attitudes, expectations, criticisms, etc. (e.g., You must be joking! What did I tell you? You can say that again!}. Formulae are difficult to describe briefly, since the information to be conveyed is often phonological and grammatical as well as pragmatic (Cowie 1988). None the less, these expressions now feature prominently in dictionaries of idiomatic usage, and increasingly in general EFL dictionaries (cf. Sect. 4, below). Here is one possible arrangement of information of different kinds in a dictionary entry: you can say that again... you are undeniably correct;. .. MARY: / 'm worried about Dad, Andy. He's going to bits. Andy, it's serious/ ANDY: You can say that again/... used to express emphatic and often ironic agreement; stress pattern YOU CAN SAY ' THAT AGAIN. (Cowie et al. 1983)
4. The Computer in Lexical Research A key development in lexicology throughout the 1980s and early 1990s has been the increasing use of computers in the analysis of large corpuses of naturally occurring texts. This work has challenged the role of intuition in linguistic research and the authority of grammars and dictionaries based on intuition alone. Its positive achievements have been to reveal the 351
The School Context words, inflected forms, and syntactic functions preferred by native users across a range of English texttypes and styles and to bring to light their most frequent contexts of use (Sinclair 1985a, 1987). The use of 'authentic' material for analysis is not in itself new: in EFL lexicography it dates from the early 1960s. What is new is the scale of the resources available and the computational methods which make data accessible in a convenient form for analysis. The first steps in the UK towards building up these resources were taken during the 1980s by COBUILD (= Collins Birmingham University International Language Database), a collaborative research program based at the University of Birmingham under the general direction of John Sinclair. This ambitious project, whose initial aim was the compilation of an advanced-level EFL dictionary, since published as the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987), drew on a corpus of twenty million words, and this has since been extended still further. As regards analytical methods, articles by several COBUILD lexicologists show the favorite tool of analysis to be the so-called 'KWIC' ('key word in context') concordance, in which all occurrences of a given written form (say, declined or penny) are centrally displayed, while the items occurring immediately to the right are arranged alphabetically. Thus, in a concordance published for declined (Sinclair 1985a: 94), on successive lines are found: ... performance has relatively declined against that... ... currency declined, along with... ... the industry declined, and its members...
Such an arrangement makes the analyst quickly aware of prepositions or nonfinite verb forms occurring after given verbs or adjectives. In the same concordance, for example, one finds: ... the number of Con- declined from 371 to 361... gress Members ... world shipbuilding declined from 50 percent in had... 1914 to under 10 percent
Here the prepositions from and to are easily recoverable. Such information is of considerable value to EFL lexicographers wishing to know which prepositions should be made prominent in specific verb, adjective, or noun entries. Certain of the claims and theoretical assumptions made by COBUILD researchers are controversial. First, it is far from certain that the project has thrown up categories of lexical units that lexicologists working with more limited bodies of data were not already aware of (cf. Sinclair 1985b: 251). What is certainly new is information about the frequency of categories of items, or of specific members of those categories. For example, it is helpful to know (and COBUILD research has helped to show this) that the frequency
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ratings of such routine formulae as You see or I see are greater than those of supposedly more 'basic' senses of the simple verb see (Sinclair and Renouf 1988). Though no longer neglected in learners' dictionaries, formulae are given less than their due in vocabulary teaching, and data showing their prevalence in speech and writing may help to make syllabus designers more aware of their importance as discourse structuring devices (Nattinger and DeCarrico 1989). Too much stress, also, can be laid on frequency of occurrence as a measure of the importance to learners of certain words. Technical terms with a low frequency rating may be of crucial importance to advanced readers of English. As for collocations, students looking up an entry word in an EFL dictionary need to be provided with minimal contexts ('collocates') which throw further light on the meaning of the entry word and enable them to construct basic sentences which incorporate it. The verbs lead, form, and resign from may not be high-frequency collocates of the noun government, but they would surely feature high on the list of any lexicographer concerned with the productive needs of the foreign learner. The central role of the computer in lexical research and in the compilation, revision and printing of dictionaries of all kinds is reflected in the expansion of existing computer-stored corpora and the establishment of new ones. Because of the very heavy costs of equipment, staffing, and large-scale data-gathering, these developments have been put in hand either by long-established dictionary publishers or, as in the case of COBUILD, by a dictionary publisher (Collins) acting in collaboration with a university department. Without doubt, however, the most significant advance in this field is the creation of the British National Corpus by a consortium of three British publishers (Oxford University Press, Longman, and Chambers), two universities (Oxford and Lancaster), and the British Library, with substantial financial support from the Department of Trade and Industry. This initiative will provide considerable scope for pure linguistic research as well as meeting the needs of commercial dictionary development well into the twenty-first century. See also: Dictionaries for Language Learners; Lexis: Acquisition. Bibliography Benson M, Benson E, Ilson R 1986 The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English: A Guide to Word Combinations. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Carter R 1987 Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy: Applied Linguistic Perspectives. Allen and Unwin, London Carter R, McCarthy M (eds.) 1988 Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy and Language Teaching. Longman, London Cowie A P 1987 Syntax, the dictionary and the learner's communicative needs. In: Cowie A P (ed.) The Dictionary
Prescription in Dictionaries and the Language Learner. Lexicographica. Series Maior 17. Max Niemeyer, Tubingen Cowie A P 1988 Stable and creative aspects of language use. In: Carter R, McCarthy M (eds.) Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy and Language Teaching. Longman, London Cowie A P 1989a Pedagogical descriptions of language: Lexis. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 10: 196-209 Cowie A P (ed.) 1989b Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, 4th edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford Cowie A P, Mackin R, McCaig I 1983 Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English, vol. 2. Oxford University Press, Oxford Cruse D A 1986 Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Glaser R 1986 Phraseologie der englischen Sprache. Verlag Enzyklopadie, Leipzig (also Max Niemeyer, Tubingen) Greenbauffi S, Quirk R 1990 A Student's Grammar of the English Language. Longman, London Hornby A S, Gatenby E V, Wakefield H 1942 Idiomatic and Syntactic Dictionary. Kaitakusha, Tokyo. Published 1948 Oxford University Press, London, for distribution worldwide, as The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, 2nd edn. 1963 Lehrer A 1974 Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure. North Holland, Amsterdam Lipka L 1990 An Outline of English Lexicology. Forschung und Studium Anglistik 3. Max Niemeyer, Tubingen Long T H (ed.) 1979 Longman Dictionary of English Idioms. Longman, London
Lyons J 1968 Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Lyons J 1977 Semantics, 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Nattinger J R, DeCarrico J S 1989 Lexical phrases, speech acts and teaching conversation. In: Nation P, Carter R (eds.) Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy Acquisition. AILA Review 6. Free University Press, Amsterdam Nida E A 1975 Componential Analysis of Meaning. Mouton, The Hague Sinclair J M 1985a Lexicographic evidence. In: Ilson R (ed.) Dictionaries, Lexicography and Language Learning. ELT Documents 120. Pergamon, in association with the British Council, Oxford Sinclair J M 1985b Selected issues. In: Quirk R, Widdowson H G (eds.) English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures. Cambridge University Press for the British Council, Cambridge Sinclair J M (ed.) 1987 Looking Up: An Account of the COBUILD Project in Lexical Computing. Collins, London Sinclair J M, et al. (eds.) 1987 Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary. Collins, London Sinclair J M, Renouf A 1988 A lexical syllabus for language learning. In: Carter R, McCarthy M (eds.) Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy and Language Teaching. Longman, London Summers D (ed.) 1987 Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2nd edn. Longman, London Tickoo M L (ed.) 1989 Learners' Dictionaries: State of the Art. Anthology Series 23. SEAMEO Regional Language Center, Singapore
Prescription in Dictionaries L. C. Mugglestone
Modern dictionaries, in line with the approaches of twentieth-century linguistic study, attempt to describe rather than to prescribe lexical usage. However, many earlier dictionaries, and particularly those produced before the mid- to late-nineteenth century, were concerned rather to lay down rules of correctness for the use of individual words and meanings, and to proscribe other usages as 'incorrect.' The desire to erect a standard language, often highlighted by the workings of Academies, such as the Academic Fran9aise in France, or the Accademia della Crusca in Italy often led in these early dictionaries to a strong normative bias in accordance with prevailing attitudes of linguistic purism and codification. In terms of lexicographical practice, this is often evident in the principles of lexical selection adopted, as well as in the employment of restrictive usage labels and value judgments. Dr Johnson's Preface to his Dictionary of
the English Language (1755) can be seen to exemplify some of the notions of linguistic control behind prescriptive methods in lexicography, as in his conception that 'it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe' the 'improprieties and absurdities' present in every language. A similar prescriptive bias underlies his decision to exclude the 'casual and mutable' diction of the merchant classes from his dictionary on the grounds that it is merely 'fugitive cant, which is always in a state of increase or decay... and therefore must be suffered to perish with other things unworthy of preservation.' Though Dr Johnson does acknowledge the futility of trying to embalm the language by means of a dictionary, the prescriptive mode nevertheless influences a number of his lexicographical practices, as in the usage labels such as 'barbarous,' 'low,' and 'ludicrous' which he adopts for those lexical usages which, though current, he disapproves of.
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The School Context 1. Usage Labels Usage labeling, though not necessarily prescriptive, can often take on these implications, so that the word lesser, for example, is, in Dr Johnson's Dictionary of 1755, condemned as 'a barbarous corruption of less' in spite of its use in English since 1459. Though prescription may be less explicit in these areas in modern dictionaries, it may still operate. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, appends the paragraph sign f, by which it designates 'catachrestic and erroneous' usage, to the word refute used in the sense 'deny' in spite of both the increasing currency of such a usage in the late twentieth century, as well as the accompanying use of illustrative citations from authoritative publications such as The Observer. Users of dictionaries, however, seem to regard the provision of usage labels as essential, and their absence in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of 1961 was seen as an abdication of that lexical responsibility and linguistic control
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popularly (if erroneously) attributed to the preserve of the dictionary. It remains paradoxical that whereas lexicographers on the whole attempt to describe usage without imposing value judgments, the users of such dictionaries tend to see them as encoding linguistic standards, with the result that the inclusion of new words is seen as a legitimization of their existence, and the necessary delay in recording new meanings of older words as proof that such changes have not occurred or are 'incorrect.' See also: Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar; Standardization; Standard English. Bibliography Bejoint H 1994 Tradition and Innovation in Modern English Dictionaries. Clarendon Press, Oxford Landau S I 1984 Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. Charles Scribner Sons, New York
Electronic Age Computer-assisted Language Learning J. D. Fox
The forms of technology used in language teaching have become increasingly based around computers. (This description omits radio, tape recorder, slide projector and overhead projector.) CALL, or Computer Assisted Language Learning, is perhaps the best known technology; but more complex systems have evolved, incorporating sound and moving pictures; or using different ways of storing data, such as videotape, or computer or optical discs. Furthermore, the texts and graphics of language learning programs are distributed in various ways: on tape or disc; through electric wires; through landlines, as with the telephone system; or even through radio waves via satellites. These technologies are not methodologically neutral, for each lends itself to different ways of presenting learner tasks and practice material. The technologies are here considered alongside some of the exercises and tasks that are administered through them. The machines are the 'hardware,' but are of no use without accompanying 'software.' Note that the terms 'Educational Technology' and 'IT' or 'Information Technology' are widely used in this context. 1. Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) 1.1 Overview CALL is concerned with 'using computers to teach students foreign languages.' Indeed, some would prefer to express this differently, saying that CALL is mainly concerned with 'helping students to learn foreign languages.' (The distinction will be discussed further in Sect. 5.) Since CALL is administered through computers, it constitutes part of language learning technology. A brief review of CALL since it first appeared in the early 1960s shows how much it has been influenced by prevailing views in linguistic, language learning, and methodological theory during this period. Particularly important influences have been programed learning in the 1960s and communicative methodology in the 1980s. In the USA in the 1960s, partly
under the impact of Soviet success with Sputnik, work with computers was seen as scientific and ipso facto praiseworthy. The application of computers to language teaching and learning sometimes seems to have been a case of the technology validating the activity. Since machines were widely believed to be 'more efficient' or even 'better' than people, it was widely believed that CALL techniques were bound to be an improvement on an ordinary language teacher in a conventional classroom. However, with more than thirty years of hindsight, it could be argued in the 1990s that research in CALL has confirmed how important language teachers generally are if learning is to take place (cf. Sect. 5 below). CALL was initially based on programed learning. The tasks were often to fill gaps, or answer questions by choosing between alternatives ('multiple choice'). CALL was also influenced by audiolingual techniques, whose origins, like those of programed learning, had been in Skinner's theory of operant conditioning, and which favored repetitive drill and mechanical manipulation. However, CALL exercises differed from audiolingual practice in that the CALL practice was written, while the audiolingual drills were spoken. The types of activities favored in audiolingual practice had included imitation, repetition, and modification of sentences (e.g., transforming sentences from present to past form), and filling gaps (e.g., inserting tense endings or missing prepositions). Both, however, were essentially concerned with 'getting the right answer.' Gap-filling and multiple choice exercises on the computer are still to be found, particularly with test materials. While sometimes useful, they are somewhat uninteresting methodologically, particularly when computers can be used to promote language learning in much more interesting ways. The main developments in CALL until the end of the 1970s were in the use of similar exercises on more powerful computers, but the invention of the microcomputer brought about
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The School Context major changes. It was in 1976 that the first Apple II computer emerged from a garage in California. The microcomputer industry grew quickly, and in 1984 the first IBM PC (i.e., Personal Computer) appeared on the market. Since its beginnings, it had been argued that the virtues of CALL were its speed, its accuracy and reliability, its tirelessness, and its capacity to 'interact' with learners and to give them immediate 'reinforcement,' in the form of feedback or 'knowledge of results.' Microcomputers could do all of these, but were much cheaper than mainframes. Thus, the spread of microcomputers led to an acceleration in software production. Often CALL enthusiasts worked at home developing new ideas; though, in the UK at least, lack of central government support for pump-priming support in software development and inservice training programs for teachers has probably delayed development. With time, this increase in access to computers seems likely to give more power and control to learners as well as to teachers. There follows an overview of the state of CALL today; including some of the main types of CALL techniques and program types in use at the time of writing. The list is not exhaustive (traditional gapfilling and question-and-answer exercises are omitted, though still widely used); but pays particular attention to interesting developments in the 1980s and 1990s. While the program types described are for CALL, some of the exercise types are adaptable for use with the other technologies described below. 1.2 Text Manipulation Text manipulation was invented at the beginning of the 1980s by Tim Johns, who was at that time working with John Higgins, then of the British Council. The technique involved taking a text, distorting it in some way (e.g., omitting every seventh word; changing all the capital letters into lower case; changing the order of paragraphs or sentences in the text), and then displaying it in this distorted or reduced form on the computer screen. The student's task is then to put it together again. In the examples given, the first exercise type is a 'cloze' exercise, as was already in use for testing reading comprehension. Changing all letters into lower case and removing all punctuation marks creates an exercise to practice comprehension and punctuation. Similarly, jumbling the order of sentences, and asking the student to put them back in the right order, is another example of an exercise that practices both comprehension and production. Other than cloze, perhaps the most popular of all the Text Manipulation exercises has been STORYBOARD. In it: (a) the student is offered a choice of texts, each of about 15-20 lines. Often, they relate to other types of work being conducted in class, so that
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classwork and computer practice are integrated together, (b) the student can choose whether or not to look at the text before starting, (c) the screen clears and then the text is displayed, but all the letters have been turned into stars or dashes. For example: Fred and Mary have arrived at the farm, has become:
(d) This exercise (or is it a game?) is often done in groups. The group chooses a typist, and calls out possible words, using memory, knowledge of common words like 'the,' and general knowledge of the language. (e) The typist types in the word suggested. If it is right, the word appears in the right place on the screen. Otherwise the program displays 'Hard luck' or something similar. (f) In this way, the text is recreated and gradually built up on the screen, word by word. The activity is collaborative, and often pleasurable. The task of rediscovering the hidden text is a motivating one for most students, perhaps because it constitutes a challenge, like completing a crossword. Exercises like STORYBOARD have been successful, but it is hard to explain to the skeptical what their purpose is in terms of language learning. Part of the task can be seen as memorization during the initial display of the complete text. Another seems to be a hypothesis testing procedure similar to that used when one listens to strangers on the bus, and tries to work out what they are talking about. This is essentially interpretive work, using memory, the clues provided on the screen, and the collective knowledge of the target language of the group members. As such, it constitutes a core element of listening and reading comprehension. There are several important advantages to the use of text manipulation practice like STORYBOARD, which has been published in a number of versions. The unit of language which forms the basis of the work is the 'text,' and not just the word or sentence as in most previous CALL work. The close work with texts involved therefore includes important aspects of 'discourse' such as coherence and cohesion. The practice is 'meaning-focused' and lends itself to small group working. Working with groups of over a dozen may be less effective. Using these exercises constitutes in part the study of language use, and the way the information in the text hangs together. In terms of exploiting computers to maximum advantage, there is another advantage to text manipulation. If one types in or 'authors' (see Sect. 1.3) 10 texts; and if one has, say, four driver programs which
Computer-assisted Language Learning the texts can be used with, for example, STORYBOARD, CLOZE, a JUMBLE exercise (i.e., one that jumbles up words or sentences into a different order), and a PUNCTUATION stripping exercise, one immediately has available 40 different practice exercises. This follows a principle of computer programing, namely to separate the data (texts) from the computer programs that operate on them. 1.3 Authoring The invention of text manipulation caused a sharp increase in the use of authoring programs, which became an integral part of the packages. The routines allowed the teacher to put in her own texts, and thus to integrate the CALL work with the rest of the language program. Basically, they consist of a specialized wordprocessor, and they make it practicable for teachers without computer experience to enter new materials without any difficulty. Since it is they who select the texts for practice, they are able to control an important aspect of the learning process. While the general pattern has been for teachers to do the authoring, it is also possible for 'learners' to carry out the task, and this extends intriguing possibilities for the facilitation of language learning. For example, learners working in individualized situations can use authoring systems to produce their own practice material. Alternatively, a group of students could build up a specialized dictionary together in a particular domain. Students choose appropriate definitions and examples for their choice of entries. 1.4 Simulations Language teaching in the 1980s and 1990s has been considerably influenced by communicative methodology. One aspect of this is the tendency for the teacher to change her role toward being a facilitator of learning rather than an 'up-front' teacher instructing the class. This 'decentering' is accompanied by an increase in participation and involvement by the students, who, increasingly, create their own learning situation. Computer-based simulations provide opportunities for such developments, and give learners the opportunity to take on new identities and develop their use of language. A good example is the popular simulation Yellow River Kingdom. This simulation was included on the Welcome disk for BBC 'B' computers, and is thus well known. Students have to rule an ancient kingdom, and make decisions about manpower for food cultivation and storage, defense against bandits, etc. While the computer provides the results of the decisions (e.g., on how much rice to plant, or how many men to guard the villages), a useful development for CALL has been for the 'king's council' not to have the computer in the room with them; but to use a 'civil servant' to go to consult it, and report back. This technique naturally increases the amount of oral practice deriving from what is rather a simple program.
Another necessary element brought in by the machine is the random factor, the sudden flood, or failure in the crop. The computer, like the umpire of more conventional simulations, is accepted as having authority. There are particular problems with simulations in foreign language learning. If there is an interesting problem, the likelihood of students talking together in their native language increases. Students also often spend a considerable part of simulation practice actually chatting about their private lives, again in their first language. 7.5 Concordances In their classic manual Computers in Language Learning, Higgins and Johns (1984) devote a chapter to the use of the computer outside the classroom, particularly in concordancing. Here is a brief sample of a concordance of the word absolutely: also in terms of leave. It is absolutely essential for serious the musical comparison is absolutely essential to this book, judgement is that it will be absolutely essential to meet the en 'Here are chips, chips with absolutely everything'... and (er) ause were we to put in there absolutely everything that one mi (adapted from Higgins and Johns 1984:91)
Even a short example like this shows the power of the device of displaying the keyword in context (KWIC) of a particular word or set of characters from a corpus. Collocations with the keyword extraordinarily are revealed (essential, everything, and later fascinating, filthy, and gorgeous appear, and the structures which tend to follow the word are shown). Concordancing is particularly used for study of grammar or lexis with advanced students. Johns and other groups have produced concordancers, and manuals are available. Concordancing seems a good example of yet another way in which teaching or learning can be made easier and more pleasant by the appropriate use of computers. As with simulations, the computer's role is an organizing and presenting one, rather than a training or drilling one. Fast access to information and speedy ordering of it are the roles the computer plays in such situations. Both simulations and concordances offer means of exposing students to authentic language data, and of involving them with meaningful tasks. The concordance program also offers a powerful means of self-access to study for the individual learner; whereas the simulation, being a group activity, cannot do this. However, the fact that two such different learning activities are computer-based, and offer language learners the possibility of helping language
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The School Context learning to occur, returns us to the essential abstract, open-endedness of the computer. 2. Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (iCALL)
The application of artificial intelligence techniques to CAL goes back over twenty years; but researchers have only comparatively recently turned their attention to language learning. Much of the work has been done in intelligent tutoring systems (ITS), described in O'Shea and Self (1983). These are computer-based systems which are designed, essentially, to replace the teacher. The systems have domain knowledge, that is they can be said to 'know about' a particular subject, and can therefore answer questions from students. Furthermore, they can themselves acquire new knowledge by asking questions of experts, and incorporating this new knowledge into their knowledge base. Furthermore, they can reason, and draw conclusions by combining old and new knowledge. In order to be able to teach students (and the emphasis has tended to be on 'teaching' and 'instructing' rather than on acquiring or learning), the systems have a set of tutorial strategies, which direct the teaching; and knowledge of the learner. In fact, modeling the learner, that is, representing the learner's knowledge state, is currently a central field of research. The systems conventionally store a record of the student's past response history. In other words, they have a complete record of all past answers, performance in tests, etc. With such information, it should be possible to devise an appropriate teaching program for each student. Real human teachers, however, sometimes have other information about individual students' lives which may affect their learning, but is unlikely to be available to ITS. In fact, iCALL systems are expensive, and require powerful computers and many hours of programing. Yet it would not be wise to reject them prematurely. One of the reasons for this is their potential ability to handle students' individual 'needs.' Furthermore, in some systems, iCALL systems can engage in conversations with students. For example, Hamburger (1995) describes a microworld, pictured on the computer screen. It shows a kitchen scene, with a large pot by the sink. First, the system speaks (in a tinny, computer voice) to the student, and gives instructions to her, such as: 'move the pot to the stove'
The student moves the pot, using the mouse. If it is put on the table, instead of on the stove, the system reacts to this new situation, and comments: I told you to move the pot to the stove. You have put the pot on the table. Move the pot to the stove.
Thus, there is a form of rather lifelike dialogue between student and computer in which the student
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'speaks' by moving objects on the screen. This means one can have fairly lifelike 'conversations' between computers and students for language learning purposes, here by using microworlds and knowledge of the world. 3. Other Technologies (Multimedia and Hypermedia)
The term 'multimedia' is used to describe combinations of devices used in language teaching. Thus it includes interactive audio (computer plus tape recorder) and interactive video (computer plus videorecorder). 3.1 Interactive Audio This is technically the simplest enhancement of CALL and usually involves adding a specialized tape recorder to a CALL system. In a typical situation, the computer asks a question and offers four different possible answers in a multiple choice. The student picks the answer they think is best. The computer then switches on the 'fast forward' or 'rewind' sequence on the tape recorder and winds the tape forward or back to one of the four possible positions. The tape then moves to 'Play' and the appropriate piece of text (or music, etc. is played). This provides an economical interactive system under learner control, and the addition of sound to the bare text on most CALL screens can be a marked advantage. However, preparation of materials by teachers is time consuming, and there are technical problems with tape-stretch and with copying. Furthermore, systems based on tape and tape cassettes can be irritatingly slow in use. Voice-cards offer a possible solution. These store sound in the computer in digital form in a card that is fitted inside the computer. They overcome most of the technical problems of tapes and are very fast, but they are more expensive. 3.2 Interactive Video Interactive video has become a major form of IT in language learning technology, particularly in the sphere of training. In essence, it is interactive audio, but with vision added. Once the program has started, a point is reached when the student has to make a choice, and presses 'A', 'B', 'C' or 'D' and is presented with, for example, an example or scene from a play on the screen. The visual impact of seeing such material can be dramatic, and provide authentic language in context. However, the medium demands the production of high-standard visual materials, which then have to be programed to work with the computer. They can be stored on videocassette, which is slow, or on videodisc. This is a time-consuming process, since students choose their own routes through the materials, and there are many possibilities.
Computer-assisted Language Learning 3.3 CD-ROM CD-ROM (Compact Disc-Read Only Memory) is a storage medium which can store not only text but also graphics and sound. It resembles the audio compact discs used for hi-fi music centers; and its large storage capacity makes it particularly suitable for use with multimedia systems, combining text, vision and sound. Furthermore, the production of all multimedia materials up to the high standards which people now expect entails a large input of effort and expense. Perhaps the key feature of CD-ROMs is their enormous storage power. In this, they have the edge over laservision storage on videodisc. The first materials on CD-ROM have tended to be dictionaries and encyclopedias; and they may well play an important role in the future in helping learners to have fast and easy access to sources of linguistic information. 3.4 Hypermedia The notion of 'hypermedia' probably derives from the Apple Macintosh hypercard. This is a flexible device included in Apple Macintosh computers for writing computer programs and preparing textual and graphic materials. It can be used as an authoring program, for it makes it possible for the writer to link nodes or key points in the materials in a variety of meaningful ways. Relationships can be, for example, either hierarchical (world—country—county—place) or associative (rose—pollen—bee—honey). Naturally, many other associative links with rose could be made, such as 'red,' 'stem,' 'poppy,' or 'thorn.' By pressing buttons, users can swiftly move through the network of information. More complex developments on other machines include sound and graphics, and the ability to run videorecorders and other devices. Hypermedia can thus serve as the core of multimedia systems. The systems are very versatile, and can be tailored to individual needs. Texts or pictures can be displayed, or video material shown, in different combinations. It seems likely that hypermedia will constitute a popular form of multimedia language courseware in the future; though the expenses of production of film and videotape material for interactive video and other multimedia types will largely remain. 4. Satellite and Communications (E-mail and Fax) Three types of communications are considered here as forms of technology used in language learning. 'E-mail' is a form of electronic communications network common in and between universities and similar institutions. It sends printed or graphic information to other centers through landlines, with computers at either end. In the late twentieth century, research has connected children from primary school upwards with their colleagues on other continents, and has increased their interest in life in other countries, and thus their motivation for study.
'Fax,' now widely distributed in business, transmits digital pictures or text over the phone network. It tends to be expensive, being based on the telephone system; but is very easy to use. Transmission of a page of text takes a few seconds. 'Satellite television' has become well known through television. Some television companies distribute programs over a wide area by bouncing them off satellites. The system is also used for distributing news pictures, and enabling people to consult databases in other continents. In the early 1990s, authentic materials from other countries are used in language education, but they need editing except for very advanced students. The necessary hardware is not yet widely distributed. 5. Roles of Technology in Language Learning and Teaching As has been said, IT is expensive, and it has to be asked whether it really repays the cost. A partial answer might come from posing another question: Why use IT in language learning? The main aim of using IT in foreign language learning should, in this writer's view, be to support and enhance the student's learning by making it both more effective and more enjoyable. Ideally, computer-based technology should start from the learner's 'needs,' and this involves taking into account personal needs, preferences for certain ways of study and practice, as well as the particular domain of study. Learning will be likely to be more effective if the affective and personal needs of students are taken into account. This may be by encouraging learner 'autonomy,' and computer-based technology offers many ways of supporting individualized study. However, language remains an essentially social activity; and communicative approaches in particular do not square too well with the sight of isolated students working alone at the keyboard, except, perhaps, for brief periods. On the other hand, to place two or three at the keyboard together, rather than just one alone, can have a number of advantages, both linguistic and financial. And, in addition, the computer can be a useful adjunct in the communicative classroom as a specialized database and help system, supplementing the teacher's traditional grammar book and dictionary. Computers play a number of roles in the learning process both in CALL and in multimedia environments. Initially, they were used to instruct, check, and give feedback to the learner. Sometimes they were used as drillmasters, supplying controlled practice of different kinds. They also have served as testmasters, checking progress, and, where required to do so, giving immediate correction and knowledge of progress. They provide an excellent environment for games and simulations, though the more interesting these are, the more they tend to reduce the amount of communication in the target language.
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The School Context These are all important roles in certain circumstances, and there is no doubt that students sometimes value secure, tightly controlled forms of practice. But successful language learning also involves experiment, innovation, creativity, and a preparedness to take risks. To take the case of an advanced student writing a free composition. How could a multimedia system help this kind of learner occupied in writing a report? First of all, if the student was trying to find the right word, it could give easy, on-line access to dictionaries and specialized thesauruses. Another useful source of lexical information is the concordance, described above in Sect. 1.5. If these sources supply what the student wants, there are facilities for 'pasting' the newly discovered word(s) straight into the text. If, however, the student wanted ideas on how to finish the sentence, or even on how to adjust the style to that of a formal report, there are systems to provide this too, involving artificial intelligence natural language processing techniques. If the user wants to access a database of usable photos or films, this too can be done at the workstation. Our student, however, may not need all this sophistication and may simply want to practice English strong verbs. Basic language practice materials look likely to be intrinsic elements of new multimedia systems. Some systems produce practice exercises on-line, which means that they do not have to be pre-stored, but are actually produced when requested, using a technique called 'macro-generation of materials.' The general approach to CALL and multimedia system design of the type just outlined is less within a tradition of teacher-led instruction, than within more recent approaches in which the teacher tends to take a supportive role. In these approaches, her task is to create language learning situations in which groups have to work together to complete tasks, and, through their interactions, acquire language. What has been suggested here is that the computer can usefully play both an instructional and a supportive, 'facilitative' role. These roles are essentially mutually complementary. There are certain features which are important in the design of CALL and multimedia learning environments and materials: (a) the system should be designed to accommodate the needs of learners, (b) it should always be possible to stop and leave the materials at any time, without difficulty; and to return to the materials at the same point later if so desired, (c) it should always be possible for students to go backwards as well as forwards through the materials, and to move freely round the materials as needed, (d) the system should record what work the student has done, and how successfully. In sophisticated systems, it should be able to offer constructive advice on what to do next; or a printed record of work carried out,
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(e) ideally, the system should work not only with text, as with so many CALL systems, but also with graphics, still and moving pictures and sound. Multisensory learning environments are generally believed to aid learning; as memorability and depth of meaning are seen as linked, (f) meaning should be central, whether at the level of the propositional meaning of texts, of meanings personal to the learner, or of other types of meaning. 6. Conclusion
To conclude, CALL still faces the difficult task of using nonhuman machines to teach meaningful, interpersonal human behaviour. Recent attempts (e.g., Perelman 1992) to reduce the numbers of human teachers, and to replace them with IT, seem misguided if their aim is to 'raise standards' in second language learning. On the other hand, the use of IT to facilitate communication (email, internet, school links . . .), or to support study via the internet (exchange of multimedia materials, database information ...) (Eastment 1996a) is both promising and exciting. The recent swift spread of the internet (Sperling 1998) suggests that an increasing role for IT in the twenty-first century will be to facilitate meaningful, interpersonal communication and cooperation as core elements of language learning (Eastment 1996b). If this means cutting down on mindless drill, and reducing the computercontrolled repetitions and manipulations of a worn-out behaviorism, our language teachers will still have a job, and our students will have cause to be grateful. See also: Educational Linguistics on the Web; New Information Technology in Language Education. Bibliography Anon 1993 LINGUA DELTA Foreign Language Learning and the use of the new technologies. Conference proceedings. Bureau LINGUA, Brussels Eastment D 1996a Multimedia materials for Language Learning. Survey Review. English Language Teaching Journal 50(1) Eastment D 1996b The Internet and ELT. British Council, London Fox J 1994 Demystifying IT. In: Esch E (ed.) Self-Access and the Adult Language Learner. CILT, London Hamburger H 1995 Tutorial Tools for Language Learning by Two-Medium Dialogues. In: Holland V, Kaplan J, Sams M 1995 Intelligent Language Tutors. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ Higgins J, Johns T 1984 Computers in Language Learning. Collins, London Jones C, Fortescue S 1991 Computers in Language Learning. Longman, Harlow, UK O'Shea T, Self J 1983 Learning and Teaching with Computers. Harvester Press, Brighton, UK Perelman L 1992 School's Out. Avon Books, New York Sperling D 1998 Internet Guide, 2nd edn. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ
Educational Linguistics on the Web
Educational Linguistics on the Web L. Selinker and C. Kinahan
As with most other internet topics, there has been an explosion of links for Educational Linguistics on the Web. It is impossible for us to cover even a fraction of these as they seem to be proliferating daily. We think that the following entries provide some of the most useful starting points in that they all have numerous links to other useful sources. The Web address for each—at the time of writing—are at the end of the article. The phrase at the time of writing must be seriously noted since the Internet is replete with dead URLs (universal resource locators) or, nontechnically, 'Web addresses.' Also, the people called Web Masters, those computer gurus who design Web pages often with great skill and at great cost, are continually improving their sites so the particular site described below might be altered, but usually for the better. Another caveat is that given space limitations, we are not referring the reader to the dozens of relevant discussion lists, such as SLART-L, the 'second language acquisition research and teaching list'. The reader should note that these discussion lists are not equal: some are 'monitored,' where a moderator decides what messages go out on the list, and some are not, where literally anything goes, so that many strange and sometimes insulting messages can appear. Also, many of these lists come and go and are often not stable sites on the Internet. There are several highly valued Websites that provide links to hundreds if not thousands of relevant Web pages for Educational Linguistics. For example, the Applied Linguistics Virtual Library has sections on teaching and research institutions, short courses and workshops, Web courses, societies and associations, conferences and seminars, data archives, dissertations and theses, electronic journals, publishers, mailing lists, English as a second/foreign language, electronically available papers, and jobs. This was one of the earliest 'virtual libraries' in Educational Linguistics and is currently being redesigned to make it more interactive and 'user friendly'. Also, new sorts of information are being developed, for example, a section on 'Dissertations in Progress,' information that is available nowhere else. Importantly, regarding virtual libraries in general, there is a highly-valued directory of virtual libraries called The World Wide Web Virtual Library Catalogue. This leads you to hundreds of classifications and subclassifications. The main divisions and subdivisions are Agriculture, Business and Economics, Computer Science, Communications and Media, Education (which subdivides into Education, Cognitive Science, Libraries, Linguistics, Engineering, Humanities, Information Management, International Affairs,
Law, Recreation, Regional Studies, Science, and Society). We have given you all of these, since many of these subdivide into topics related to 'education' and/or 'linguistics' as these terms are defined in many ways. We have found The World Wide Web Virtual Library Catalogue to be, at times, a much better way to get information about a topic than so-called 'search engines' such as Yahoo!, Thunder stone, Lycos'A2Z, GoTo.com, Mining Co., Excite Guide, What U Seek, Magellan, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Excite, and AltaVista which can be useful at times. But not all search engines are equal; we like the type like Dogpile which search other search engines. Search engines are types of megaprograms that are often called 'agent programs' or 'agent software,' in that the most recent ones can 'learn' from your requests and point you to more relevant information. Where they often fall down is that they usually bring up the key word you type in for a search if and only //"that string (one word or more) is on the 'home page' of the Website in question. For example, if you want information on 'Linguistics in London', you might be surprised to find yourself at the home page of a university in the United States which in one case we experienced had a link to 'Linguistics + London' on its home page. The Center for Applied Linguistics is one of the oldest institutions in Educational Linguistics. Its Website has hundreds of links applying 'research information about language and culture to educational, social and cultural concerns'. This Website, as described on the Yahoo search engine, 'works to identify and develop effective educational practices for linguistic and cultural minority students'. Some of the topics on this Website include foreign language and ESL education (children and adults) in the US and other countries, bilingual education, literacy, refugee concerns, and public policy issues. There are links to clearinghouses such as the ERIC national (US) clearinghouse for ESL/literacy education (NCLE), containing articles about teaching English as a second language to adults in the US, and FAQs (frequently asked questions) about adult ESL literacy. This is an easy Website to get around in. The TESOL Website is one of the best organized and most impressive, as well as most useful in Educational Linguistics. Its home page is a model of organization and clarity. It begins with a useful section called: 'What's new?' and provides links to detailed pages on a myriad of topics such as TESOL Membership, Publications, Interest Sections, Affiliates, and Caucuses, Conventions, Placement/Career Services, ESL Standards for Pre-K-12 Students, The TESOL 361
The School Context Commission on Accreditation, TESOL's Guestbook, View or Sign our Guestbook, Request information from TESOL, and a TESOL mission statement of great detail, including information on how to download relevant files. The TESOL site also, importantly, gives you helpful descriptions that will allow you to decide whether the link is of interest to you. For example, under 'Publications' it tells the reader to 'Browse through TESOL's extensive catalog of publications, and materials, or learn how to contribute to a serial publication' and under 'Interest Sections, Affiliates, and Caucuses' the description tells you that you can 'Network with Colleagues Interest Sections—groups of members who share professional areas of interest.' The Human Languages Website contains a database of 1800 links for: 'on-line language lessons, translating dictionaries, native literature, translation services, software, language schools, or just a little information on a language you've heard about'. From this Website, you can get Web page translation: if you click on one of the languages at the top of the Human Languages home page, this takes you to an Aha Vista translation services page which asks you to type in the URL of the Web page you wish to see translated. The translations are far from perfect but, surprisingly, quite serviceable. One of the most important Websites is the Linguistics Virtual Library, linked to the Linguist Discussion List, one of the first virtual libraries on the Web. For example, under the category 'Pedagogy,' you can click onto ESL and EFL and find lots of links to Web pages of interest to ESL/EFL students/teachers, with English quizzes, interactive English exercises, news magazines, English on-line (information and materials on how to teach English on the Web), and advertisements on learning/teaching materials/ software. The Agora 'Web pick' of the month featured in the Agora Newsletter (linked to the Agora Language Marketplace home page) performs a useful service in each issue by reviewing a Website relevant to language learning. One favorably reviewed Website is 'Templates of the Month1 which provides HyperCard files useful for language teaching. Another interesting site is the Foreign Language Teaching Forum, which offers a link allowing you to browse through the archives of its discussion list (a discussion list all foreign language teachers are invited to join) where topics can vary as much as desired by the participants. For example, its archived April 1999 list ranges from proverb translation queries, to a long discussion about classroom use of movies. An edited version of the discussion list, accessible through the FLTEACH FAQs link on the Home page, will take you to a menu offering a choice of links to 'synopses of answers to FAQs on the FLTEACH Discussion forum' which, at the time of writing, included among other topics 'Memorization in FL Instruction,' 'Pro362
nunciation, Accent and Language Melody,' 'Student Journals,' 'Student Teaching,' and 'Listening Skills in the FL Classroom.' The contributions of the participants to a particular synopsis are slotted into appropriate subcategories, enabling readers to follow the discussion with greater ease. For example, the synopsis 'Listening Skills in the FL Classroom' (a topic prompted by a question from a novice language teacher) is usefully divided into the following categories: 'setting the stage of the discussion,' the nature of listening,' tips on encouraging listening,' 'focal stages in listening comprehension,' and 'references'. The link 'A Few Things to Check Out' on the Foreign Language Teaching Forum's home page takes the reader to a page offering links to free on-line course materials as well as to 'A Communications Technology Module for the Foreign Language Methods Course' (by Jean W. LeLoup). This informative, wellpresented, and free short course can be taken within a few minutes on-line (or can last several days if one experiments with the Internet technologies as directed by the tutor) and was 'designed to facilitate the integration of technology education' into FL teaching. The links 'Getting Acquainted with the Tools' and 'Learning the Basics' both introduce the reader to and explain how to get access to various interesting and useful Internet technologies (e.g. Electronic Discussion Groups, Usenet (discussion bulletin board), Internet Relay Chat (a program which allows participants to type responses to each other in (nearly) synchronous time), MOOs ('text-mediated virtual environments'), among others). The links Targeting Pedagogy' and 'Designing Lesson Plans' make suggestions on how to successfully integrate these technologies into a language classroom situation. The 'reference' link on the 'Getting Acquainted with the Tools' page provides a list of useful books as well as active links to articles discussing how these Internet technologies can best be used for educational purposes. The Language Experiences Website is well organized and offers a plethora of interesting links, such as 'Cross-Cultural Communication,' 'Foreign Language Resources,' 'Language Specific sites,' 'Multilingual Dictionaries and Translators,' 'Language Projects,' 'Libraries,' 'Foreign Language Newspapers and Magazines,' (which includes many links to on-line publications), and 'International Radio Stations' to name but a few. If key words such as 'educational + linguistics' are entered on the Linguistics Resources on the Net Web page (maintained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics), a search will commence for the relevant pages within its wide database of linguistics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing pages on the Net. This Web page also offers a number of links to other indexes of linguistics and educational linguistics on the Internet in order to facilitate a search.
Language Laboratory Some on-line electronic journals can be freely accessed on the Web. One such journal, a refereed journal for language educators, is in our opinion not only a good Web journal but a good scholarly journal. Language Learning & Technology has featured articles such as 'Teaching Text and Context through Multimedia,' "Reflective Conversation' in the Virtual Classroom', and 'Using Automatic Speech Processing for Foreign Language Pronunciation Tutoring: Some Issues and a Prototype'. Regular features include reviews of relevant books and articles discussing 'Emerging Technologies'. The Emerging Technologies section is not only one of the most useful columns in Educational Linguistics, but is valuable in general for discovering what is new and developing in the world of technology for any subject matter. Showing the value of electronic journals, back issues of the journal are easily accessible via a link on the journal's home page. They are always there and available unlike paper journals in your local university library. There is one serious caveat to the category 'Electronic journals'; many of the traditional paper journals are only making the files underlying their paper journals available to libraries that subscribe to the paper journal, for a fee of an additional 10%, say. These are only paper journals in disguise and give you nothing more than what you get with paper. The only advantage you have is that you can search the electronic ones as opposed to the paper ones. However, if you see in such a journal a claim that child second language acquisition of German has certain sounds and you would like to hear them, you cannot. A jour-
nal like Language Learning & Technology is in another class entirely. It has internal links to more various types of data referred to in the article and external links to some sources mentioned in the article. In principle, this latter sort of interactive journal can take advantage of the growing technologies to give you access to multimedia data and even to allow you to interact with that data. That day is coming. Bibliography Agora Language Marketplace: agoralang.com Applied Linguistics Virtual Library: alt.venus.co.uk/VL/AppLingBBK Center for Applied Linguistics: www.cal.org Foreign Language Teaching Forum: www.cortland.edu/www/flteach/ Human Languages: www.june29.com/HLP Language Experiences: www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/7726 Language Learning and Technology: polyglot.cal.msu.edu/llt Linguistics Resources on the Net: www.sil.org/linguistics/linguistics.html Linguistics Virtual Library: accessible via the WWW Virtual Library SLART-L discussion list:
[email protected]; message the 'owner' Kate Garretson <
[email protected]> for further information TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages): www.tesol.edu Templates of the Month: edvista.com/claire/hypercard/templates.html The World Wide Web Virtual Library: vlib.org/Overview.html
Language Laboratory A. G. Sciarone
A language laboratory is a room containing such equipment as audiotape recorders, video recorders, and sometimes computers, to help students learn a foreign language with or without a teacher. The laboratory has three major functions: (a) to allow students to listen to language material spoken by native speakers; (b) to allow them to listen and speak independently of fellow students; (c) to enable them to learn a foreign language at their own pace. 1. Origins In the first half of the twentieth century there was a shift in foreign language tuition from teaching writing
skills to teaching speaking skills. With this the need arose for means to record and reproduce sound to supplement the traditional textbook. These means became available early on with the gramophone disk, which became well-known in language teaching through Linguaphone. The gramophone, however, had two important drawbacks: first, the high cost of producing it; second, the impossibility of changing what had been recorded. Both problems disappeared with the advent of tape recorders,which became generally available after the Second World War. With tape recorders becoming less expensive and more userfriendly, especially with the introduction of cassette 363
The School Context tapes, their use became the rule in foreign language learning. When a special room was reserved and fitted with tape recorders for language instruction, this room was called a 'language laboratory.' 2. Types of Language Laboratories
Depending on the technical functions of the equipment, three types of laboratories can be installed: (a) audio-passive, when students only listen to the spoken sound; (b) audio-active, when they listen and also record their own voices; (c) audio-active-comparative, when students compare recordings of their own voice with the voice of the speaker. Language laboratories designed for use with a teacher present often come equipped with a so-called 'teacher's console', which gives the teacher control over the students' position. This arrangement allows the teacher to listen to individual students, to interrupt them in order to give advice or technical assistance, to link a number of students for conversational practice, to give instruction to some or all students, or to transmit a recording to them. Some language laboratories- are also equipped with projectors, which make it possible to teach the meaning of spoken sentences in a more natural way by showing objects and situations through pictures instead of by translation. The problems connected with synchronizing sound and pictures (using two different machines) disappeared when, in the early 1970s, the video recorder became available on a large scale. 3. Rise of the Language Laboratory
The immense popularity of the language laboratory in the 1960s and 1970s was due to three major reasons. First, it provided students with possibilities that were lacking in the traditional classroom: students could listen to native speakers instead of to a teacher speaking with a foreign accent; students could practice the taped materials continuously instead of having to wait for an occasional turn in class, and students could repeat materials according to their individual needs. When equipped with a so-called 'library system', the langauge laboratory also opened up new possibilities for students outside the classroom. With such a system, private persons, or students in their spare time, can borrow tapes from the library, work at their own pace, and seek advice from a teacher only when needed. In order to facilitate access to the library system, some institutions (such as the University of Michigan in the United Sates) developed a fully automated system which allows access to taped material by dialling a telephone number. The second major reason why the language laboratory became so popular was because it relieved teachers from time-consuming tasks such as reading a text aloud or correcting students' pronunciation 364
errors, leaving time for more important tasks such as engaging students in conversation. The third reason was that the available equipment met the needs of foreign language pedagogy strongly influenced by stimulus-response theory at that time. It was believed that learning a language was nothing more than a reaction to speech sounds (= stimuli) in meaningful situations. This view of language acquisition led to the development of instructional materials known as pattern drills. It was believed that by repeatedly listening to appropriate speech patterns (= stimuli) and by repeating what was heard (= reaction) students would acquire a foreign language. Another view of language teaching is known as the 'direct method'. Developed in the first half of the twentieth century—and still very much alive after the Second World War—it aims at teaching a foreign language without using the mother tongue. The meanings of words and sentences are taught by showing pictures instead of by translation. This view of language teaching was provided for by a language laboratory equipped with slide projectors. The teaching method used became known as the 'audio-visual' method. Its success was largely due to the French CREDIF, a government-founded organization that promotes French as a foreign language.
4. Decline of the Language Laboratory
After its initial success and spread into the average school, the language laboratory lost much of its attraction and almost completely disappeared from the regular school in the 1980s. In a large-scale study by Smith (1970), who compared the results obtained by audio-lingual methods (including use of a language laboratory) and more traditional ones, it was found that traditional methods did not do worse; sometimes they did even better. To explain the failure of the language laboratory, several factors may be adduced. First, stimulus-response theory proved unsuccessful for language learning. Patterns learned in a mechanical drill proved to be of little use for students in new meaningful contexts, in which a number of different language patterns must be used at the same time. The direct method was not without its problems either: pictures often proved to be ambiguous and students would translate a foreign word into their mother tongue even when their teachers did not. Second, students generally proved unable to compare their responses correctly to what they heard on the tape. Third, the price of audio equipment was reduced and many students acquired their own equipment at home—or, in the case of the 'Walkman' in their pockets. Therefore, the need for language laboratories is lessened. The first two reasons can be summarized in the words of Rivers (1968 p. 320): 'The language laboratory cannot teach. The teaching must be done
Language Laboratory by the teacher in the classroom, in a personal interchange with the students.' 5. Revival of the Language Laboratory With the introduction of computers and the sharp fall in their price, the language laboratory began to return to favor in the 1990s. Although the computer was occasionally used in the 'traditional' language laboratory, it was mainly used to reproduce on the screen what was in the textbook. It took some time before language teachers realized the power of computers. Unlike a textbook or a tape recorder, a computer can evaluate a student's response and thus react much as a teacher does. A language laboratory equipped with computers can indeed teach some aspects of foreign languages. Furthermore, the computer cannot only teach in the way the teacher considers useful, but also enables students to receive the instruction tailored to their needs. Computers can be used for teaching tasks such as helping students to understand a text. Words or passages requiring explanation can be indicated using reverse video or special colors, and students' understanding of what has been said can be assessed by putting questions to them. Furthermore, a number of options can be set in order to enable students to obtain information about other aspects of a text that they might want to know (such as the meaning of particular words, which could be provided by access to dictionaries, or grammatical information, provided by access to an on-line grammar that will also help students if they cannot analyze a complex grammatical form into its constituents). When the student has finished, the program can assess whether the teaching has been successful and suggest to the student what to do next. Finally, computers can help students to do language exercises by giving appropriate feedback when errors have been made. Apart from their high cost until the late 1980s, the large-scale use of computerized language laboratories has been hindered by two important factors: (a) the slow development of computer programs; (b) the absence of spoken language. Designing and writing computer programs is a special competency, well beyond the scope of the average language teacher. Most software for language teaching was produced either by specialists without a background in foreign language teaching or by language teachers without a solid background in computer science. Also, because of the original rarity of computerized language laboratories, most of this software was designed as a general purpose supplement to standard foreign language teaching methods instead of being integrated into special course materials. These problems have now been solved with the development of so-called 'authoring systems'; that is, computer programs written by specialists and able to carry out a variety of foreign language teaching tasks. The teacher is only required to prepare his or her instructional
materials in the format prescribed by the authoring system. The problem of spoken language has also been solved since a number of high-quality voice cards have become available. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the computer has important advantages over the traditional cassette tape recorder. Words or passages in a text that are difficult to pronounce may be given special attention by the program. Students can listen to particular words or passages by simply indicating them on the screen. Listening comprehension can be assessed by having students listen to a passage and asking them to type out on the keyboard what they heard. The program will evaluate their results by writing on the screen or by actually saying what was wrong and by giving advice on how to proceed. Of course, it is also possible for students to record their voices and have them compare the recording with that of the teacher, but as has already been seen with the traditional laboratory, this function is not very helpful. The computerized langauge laboratory also provides new possibilities for using pictures. With the traditional slide projector, pictures often were too general to represent meaning unambiguously. In the earlier laboratories, returning to a previous slide and to the corresponding sound passage on two separate machines was extremely difficult, and so the presence of a teacher was almost mandatory. All these problems are solved with the videodisk, which can hold more than 100000 pictures, each of which can be looked up instantaneously in the same way as sound passages can, and now the CD-ROM. The enormous number of available pictures makes it possible to represent meanings in a much more detailed way. Given the high increase in storage capacity on such disks, even movies will soon become a standard tool of the language laboratory. Furthermore, sound and image can easily be changed. It seems that the traditional language laboratory fell into disuse essentially because it could not teach. The language laboratory is making a comeback because, in computerized form, it can. Moreover, the computerized language laboratory has become a real laboratory; that is, not only a room equipped with machines in which people can learn a foreign language, but a room in which controlled research can be done. Many computer programs record how students work and the results they obtain. Consequently, teachers and researchers examine what instructional materials and/or what learning strategies are most effective. The laboratory also makes it possible to investigate whether different students need different materials and/or different strategies according to personal characteristics such as intelligence, diligence, and social background. Experiments can be carried out to test hypotheses in a more controlled manner than was possible before. Finally, with computer networks now spinning webs worldwide, the
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The School Context language laboratory will undergo a major change: instead of a real room it will become a virtual-electronic-room to which students have access via a terminal or a personal computer. Bibliography Jung U O H (ed.) 1988 Computers in Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching. A CALL Handbook. Peter Lang, Frankfurt Rivers W M 1968 Teaching Foreign-language Skills. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL
Smith D Jr. 1970 A Comparison of the Cognitive and Audiolingual Approaches to Foreign Language Instruction: The Pennsylvania Foreign Language Project. Center for Curriculum Development Inc. Smith W F (ed.) 1989 Modern Technology in Foreign Language Education: Applications and Projects. National Textbook Company, Lincolnwood, IL Stack EM 1971 The Language Laboratory and Modern Language Teaching, 3rd edn. Oxford University Press, London Yazdani M (ed.) 1993 Multilingual Multimedia. Intellect, Oxford
New Information Technology in Language Education E. K. L. Ng
Rapid advances in information technology (IT) in the late twentieth century have undeniably impacted on education. This article discusses several imaginative approaches in language education that take advantage of information technology, and which are based on sound instructional principles in language learning. 1. Approaches to IT-aided Language Instruction
Computers are used increasingly in society and are becoming accepted by the current generation as an integral part of life. Many language educators are interested in finding out ways to use IT to assist their learners. Four major approaches in information technology-aided language instruction will be discussed, which illustrate highlights of up-to-date developments in the field, and which provide language educators relevant options for evaluation and implementation in their classrooms. The four approaches are: (a) telecommunication-mediated writing; (b) word processor-facilitated composition; (c) hypermedia-supported language learning; and (d) simulation-stimulated oral discourse. Three criteria were used in selecting these approaches for discussion. First, they involve the use of new information technology that is affordable for educational institutions. Second, they are built upon well-established educational or linguistic theories. Ng and Olivier (1987) recommended that it is vital that computer-assisted language-learning programs and materials be designed on a theoretical basis, founded upon an understanding of language and language learning. Third, the approaches generate substantial interest among researchers and/or teachers. The sources of data for the identification of the four approaches include: (a) the articles on computerassisted language instruction from the Educational
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Resources Information Center (ERIC) database between 1987 and 1992, and (b) observations made during this period through working with classroom teachers enroled in computer-based learning courses in a Canadian university. Discussion of each of the approaches will focus on the following: (a) the distinguishing features of the approach and its educational or language principles; (b) examples of projects or research reports elaborating on the approach; and (c) the technology involved. 2. Telecommunication-mediated Writing
Computers and their users, separated by great distances, can be connected—networked—through telephone lines to permit exchange of messages and ideas. The most common methods of exchange for educational purposes are electronic mail and electronic conferencing. The former is similar to postal correspondence between two persons or one person and a group of people, but electronic mail is much faster. Electronic conferencing allows participating members to present their thoughts in written documents to a group and exchange comments on the work among themselves. Unlike a face-to-face conference, electronic conferencing is often asynchronous—participants do not have to be on-line using their computers at the same time. This allows participants to make time to reflect on exchanges in their discussion and to write considered responses. 2.1 Communities of Writers In language education, these methods of electronic communication are being used to assist students to develop writing competence by participating in communities of writers. One critical problem for many
New Information Technology in Language Education students who are learning to write is the artificiality of composition exercises. Students are taught to write by formulating goals reconciling personal intentions and expectations of the audience (Berkenkotter 1981; Scardamalia and Bereiter 1987). In the traditional classroom, however, the student's goal of writing an assignment is often to complete the task and obtain a good grade. The objective of the audience—usually just the teacher—is perceived to be the judging of the assignment. Telecommunication-mediated writing provides students with a genuine audience, consisting of peers, their teachers, students and teachers in other schools, and possibly expert writers such as professional novelists and poets. When exchanges involve students from different countries and cultures, in particular, students themselves readily perceive the importance of communicating clearly. Cohen and Kiel (1989) reported that students in a telecommunicationwriting group, understanding that they were writing to share information about themselves and their culture with students in a different country, produced higher quality writing than their counterparts writing for a regular composition mid-term examination that their teacher would grade. A telecommunication-mediated environment also provides an opportunity for cognitive cooperation. By virtue of having their work accessible to all group members, students take responsibility for reading their peers' writing, and comments about their own work. This range of feedback, wider than that available in most classrooms, offers a meaningful context for the teacher to assist the students to learn to revise their work through incorporation of others' suggestions. Students also learn to justify their choices of style, reasons, and arguments, and give constructive comments. 2.2 Writers in Electronic Residence and Electronic Learning Circles Writing instruction using electronic mail or computer conferencing can take two major forms: individual and group. In the former, students write within an electronic conference, and interact with any members of the writing community they choose. In the latter, students in a class work as a team and communicate with other classes or teams of students. The writing within a class generally takes place in a face-to-face group setting, while among classes the interactions are electronic. Two projects described below illustrate these variations. The Writers in Electronic Residence Program (Owen 1992) connects writing and language arts students in Canada, their teachers, and established writers. There are programs for elementary, middle school, secondary, and postsecondary school students. Participants write, read, consider others' work, and offer reactions and ideas. Expert writers and the more mature participants guide discussions between
or among the students. Typically, students obtain printed copies of other participants' work and experts' comments after transferring relevant portions from the conference to microcomputer text files. Students then read the feedback off-line, and compose their revisions and responses in class or at home on a word processor before rejoining the network to transmit them electronically. All students' compositions are exposed to the entire group, but students may choose to use their real names, or pseudonyms. The Learning Circles (Reil 1990) are educational projects which run on the AT&T Learning Network (created by the telecommunication company), working directly with classroom teachers to provide computer networking services for schools. A learning circle is a small number of classrooms (on average seven) selected to maximize diversity in culture and geographic regions. These classrooms interact electronically to accomplish a shared goal in a period of four months, organized around a sequence of structured activities designed by participating class teachers, and curriculum and technical experts from the Learning Network. The sequence of activities includes: (a) planning the project by all participating classes in the circle; (b) executing the tasks to implement the plan by individual classes as teams; (c) creating a joint publication of the project; and (d) sharing and assessing the publication. These projects can be related to any curriculum area. Writing is a natural and popular choice. Mindworks, for example, is a circle that involves elementary and junior high school students from the United States, Canada, and Germany in creative and exploratory writing. Students in the different classes write individually, or in groups, decide on the contributions to be included in the final publication, and subsequently evaluate the final products in small teams before summarizing comments to the circle. The product of one such fourmonth effort included poetry, stories, and short essays, covering topics on adolescence, food, the changing seasons, and animals (Jameson 1991). 2.3 Telecommunication Hardware and Software An educational telecommunication system is composed of computers, modems, communication software, telephone lines, and the right to access a central computer system. The cost of using a telecommunication system, if an educational institution already possesses a computer and a telephone, includes the charges for access to the central computer system, and investment in a modem and a communication software. The prices of modems have decreased significantly and schools can easily afford one that transmits and receives data at the (adequate) speed of 2400 baud—transmitting 2400 bits, or 300 (2400/8) characters, per second. Some communications programs, Kermit, for example, are public domain software; others come as part of
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The School Context reasonably priced integrated productivity programs such as Microsoft Works. In many schools, connection to a network is supported by university projects; the Xchange educational network at Simon Fraser University in Canada, for example, has distributed a great number of accounts on the university's computer system to schools in British Columbia (Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Education 1992). 3. Word Processor-facilitated Composition
Telecommunication-mediated writing represents an innovative use of technology, which is not yet a standard resource in the majority of schools. In contrast, word processor-facilitated composition uses a technology that is commonly available in schools. In fact, the use of word processors to assist writing is one of the most widely explored technology-based approaches in language education. 3.1 Applying Expert Writing Strategies The most obvious benefit in using word processors in writing classes is that students can make changes to their compositions easily and quickly, without having to rewrite the entire piece of work repeatedly. The improvement of efficiency in revision, on its own, does not necessarily lead to more or better writing. The editing and formatting capabilities of the software, however, make it easy to demonstrate to students that inserting, replacing, and moving text, and producing a legible and neat piece of work are not overly demanding. More helpfully, these software capabilities enable the teacher to develop and implement instructional procedures to address some of the difficulties in learning to write, well-noted by conscientious language teachers and documented in the literature. Educational researchers, for instance, have reported on the disparity between what children are capable of visualizing and what they actually write. Vygotsky (1978) contended that children tend to write with 'code' words—words that are 'saturated' with meaning for the writer but communicate little to a reader. Many primary school teachers have also observed that when children are asked to explain orally what they have in mind, they are quite able to convey their mental picture in considerable detail. When they are asked to put ideas on paper, however, they tend to write in bland generalities. Prompted writing using a word processor presents a valuable solution (Ng and Prosser 1992). In using this approach, the language teacher would choose a topic from a number of suggestions made by the students. He or she would then develop a series of writing prompts about the topic, save them in a word-processor document, and distribute the files to students on diskettes. (Some examples of prompts on a story on movie-making, for instance, could include: 'Write a
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lead sentence describing how you came upon something unusual happening somewhere near your neighbourhood'; 'Write a few sentences telling how you realized a movie was being made'; and 'Suddenly your favorite movie star appeared on the set. Write one sentence to tell who it was and what the star was doing.') Students would first be asked to discuss the topic and the importance of attending to details. They would then obtain a diskette, and respond to each prompt in the file. They then would remove the prompts, save the file under a new name, and revise the piece as a whole making elaborations, strengthening coherence and the like. Research in writing has continually pointed out the critical role of evaluation in the writing process. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1983), for example, examined how various cognitive processes interact during evaluation and revision, and developed a set of cues and directives to help students evaluate and revise their work. (Some examples of cues are 'People won't see why this is important'; 'I'm getting away from the main point'; 'I'd better give an example'; and 'I'd better cross out this sentence and say it a different way.') In writing classes in the computer laboratory, students are often paired up to revise their compositions. Effective cues from the teacher would be necessary supports for both the author and the teammate struggling with ways to make revisions other than cosmetic changes. 3.2 Issues Regarding Word Processing in Writing Using word processors is common in schools, and writing projects involving word processors are wellreported in the literature. Cochran-Smith conducted a critical review of the literature to examine comprehensively issues related to word processing and writing, using a detailed framework in the form of five major propositions on: (a) the social and technical aspects of using word processing in writing; (b) the effects of writing with word processing on students' composing processes; (c) the effects on the quality and quantity of students' writing; (d) students' attitu'de toward using the software; and (e) the relationships between keyboarding and word processing strategies and age. Among the conclusions from her investigation, one is particularly relevant to word processor-mediated writing: 'the effects of word processing are intertwined with the kinds of instructional interventions that occur concurrently with the introduction of word processing into the curriculum and with the kinds of individual writing tasks that are assigned' (Cochran-Smith 1991 p. 137). 3.3 Writing Assistance Tools Word processors now incorporate a number of writing assistance tools. For instance, Microsoft Word for Windows has built-in customized glossary, spell checkers, thesaurus, and grammar checker. The func-
New Information Technology in Language Education tions of grammatical analysis components still remain superficial. Grammar checkers, for example, can only identify obvious punctuation, verb, and sentence structural problems in rigid rule-based evaluation. Reliance on the use of such analysis tools by unguided students could be detrimental to learning: semantic and logical errors, for example, are not detected. Effective uses, however, have been devised with spelling checkers. For example, McClurg and Kasakow (1989) reported the use of Appleworks, and Sensible Speller, coupled with a spelling drill and practice program in spelling instruction. Students finished their composition on the word processor, and ran it through the spell checker. They then obtained printouts of misspelled words, which were entered into the computer drill and practice program. They then spent 15 minutes three times a week practising spelling via the computer drills. The researchers observed that students receiving spelling instruction in this way outscored students taking a traditional approach of composing by hand, taking spelling tests, and completing activities on spelling books, on both long-term and short-term measures. 4. Hypermedia-supported Language Instruction
Software used in education has often been criticized on two counts: (a) the predominance of text for presenting information; (b) the linearity and pre-determined nature of paths students follow through the content. Those who raise these objections argue that while some students learn best through text, others work more effectively using visual or audio modalities. Use of multiple modalities is especially important with language students because language communication involves textural, as well as graphical, audio, and other symbolic representations and signals. Modern instructional approaches that aim at assisting learners to construct knowledge actively are not well supported by traditional linear software. However, two new developments in computer technology—hypertext and multimedia—are likely to answer these objections. Although the term 'hypermedia' is sometimes used interchangeably with the term 'hypertext,' the former emphasizes the combination of multimedia and hypertext. 'Multimedia' refers to a collection of computercontrolled or -mediated technologies that enable people to access and use data in a variety of forms: text, sound, and still and moving images.'Hypertext' refers to a nonlinear approach to organizing and storing data involving associations of topics—nodes— through a web of links. When a hypertext system is implemented on a computer, users can move from one piece of information to another via a multitude of paths, and can impose and construct their own information structure, for example, by adding links and new information (Seyer 1991).
4.1 Taking Control in Authentic Contexts Students in hypermedia-supported language-learning environments can access information presented in a full range of media: text, speech, music, graphics, animations, and motion pictures, with the click of a mouse. As Wyatt (1988) put it, these possibilities open up new dimensions of language learning. Students can now view and listen to video episodes of language exchange in authentic contexts—in places and situations where specific genres and functions of the language are correctly, commonly, and effectively used. They can observe and imitate the nuances of interactions in body gestures and verbal exchanges, which illustrate not only vocabulary, idioms, and grammar, but also cultural and sociolinguistic appropriateness. More significantly, students can control the focus of their learning. They can concentrate on the spoken or textual component, for example, and they can skip over aspects they have mastered. Switching and selecting are as convenient as changing channels on a television or choosing a piece of music on a compact disc. Further, instructional questions, prompts, and review procedures can be included within the hypermedia materials to draw students' attention to important features of a language exchange episode. Students' progress—in comprehending reading and listening passages, for instance—can easily be monitored by the computer. Most critical of all, students can decide at any point in a lesson to delve more deeply into particular aspects of a communication exchange. For example, students wanting to focus on vocabulary and expression usage might first review specific parts of a video sequence, read a passage, and look up an electronic glossary for the definitions and pronunciations of the words about which they are uncertain. They might then return to the video episode to take note of how the words and expressions are used in context, do a test on vocabulary, and select just the visual component of the episode to cue the use of the vocabulary and expressions, and finally reconstruct the exchange in writing. 4.2 France Inter Active and Reading Disc A growing number of projects are using interactive video and audio and hypertext in language instruction (Friedlander 1988; Hult et al. 1990; Jones 1991b; Smith 1989). France Inter Active (Ingraham and Emery 1991) is one such project that is explicitly attempting to combine the benefits of using multimedia and hypertext technologies. France InterActive aims at creating an interactive student-centered language-learning system for a wide variety of second language students at an English polytechnic. The system primarily supports individualized self-monitored instruction. The initial course consists of 20 modules on beginning French, each involving completion of four computer-assisted language learning units. Every fifth module reviews
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The School Context the material covering the previous four and provides an opportunity for assessment. The first 10 modules concentrate on physical descriptions of things and people and abstract elements of wishes, desires, and intentions. The second half of the course focuses on application of the knowledge in typical situations in which awareness of sociolinguistic appropriateness would be reinforced. Each unit begins with a statement of objectives; these are followed by an extended 'real life' dialogue or scene which illustrates the usage being introduced, and incorporates the grammar and vocabulary elements that the student is expected to learn. The session is then divided into a series of exercises which explore and develop the student's functional, grammatical, and lexical competence. At any point in a unit students can pause, repeat a section, press a 'Help' button for context-sensitive advice, or request 'Hyperhelp' for further information on a particular problem. The Hyperhelp system is designed eventually to incorporate a number of language-learning resources, such as: (a) an extensive grammar book, (b) a book summarizing linguistic functions, (c) a book describing significant cultural factors in communication, and (d) an extensive glossary. These resources are electronically stored and available to the student at any time. These components involve multiple media; the glossary, for example, pronounces the words it contains and provides illustrations. On a less complex level, projects such as Reading Disc (Shaw 1991) and Discis Books (1990) focus on reading. Discis Books, for example, consist of computerized pages of children's books with text and illustrations. These books accompany the text with voices, music, and sound effects. Readers can request pronunciations, sound language translations, and simple, in-context definitions for any particular word by pointing to it on the screen and clicking using a mouse. 4.3 Hardware and Software for Hypermedia Interactive technology that offers computer-controlled sound and pictures has been available since the early 1980s, but has not been used extensively in education. Excitement about using hypermedia in language learning is due to two factors. First, computers are continuing to increase in power and quality and to decrease in price. The increased speed of computers makes it possible to access and use sounds and moving images without noticeable delays. Second, optical storage media have increased in capacity, decreased in price, and become more varied in format. In addition to vodeodisks, there are now audio compact disks (CD), and compact disk read-only-memory (CD-ROM), for example. Videodisks store information as analog signals, but CDs store information in a digital form, as computers do (van Horn 1991). CDs are, therefore, more convenient for use with computers. They are also less expensive than videodisks; 370
the latter, however, can store a greater amount of video than CD-ROM disks. A language instructor wishing to use hypermedia must buy hardware that supports the features of software to be used. The simplest system for delivering hypermedia-based instruction would consist of a personal computer equipped with a sound card and a high resolution monitor, a CD-ROM drive, and speakers or headphones. If videodisks are also to be used, a videodisk player is needed. If the instructor wishes to develop hypermedia programs, the following items are required in addition to those mentioned above: a video capture card and video editing software—Microsoft Video for Windows, for example; sound editing software such as Microsoft Sound System; authoring software such as Multimedia Toolbook, and reusable optical disks. 5. Simulation-stimulated Oral Discourse
Despite significant advances in the development of hypermedia-based language-learning materials, these systems are not yet very useful for speech training. Computer-based language materials can provide models of accurate pronunciation, diction, and intonation but cannot understand and evaluate the learner's speech responses. Voice recognition technology has developed slowly despite considerable research. Language educators, however, have imaginatively exploited existing information technology to help students acquire oral linguistic competence. A well-established approach is the use of simulation software to promote students oral discourse. 5.1 Opportunities and Encouragement for Student Dialogue In teaching students to speak a new language, enforcing accuracy in pronunciation and use is important. Providing students with opportunities to speak the language and encouraging them to converse with one anther for real communication are more useful. In language instruction, since it is seldom feasible to take students to live in places where the language is used on an everyday basis, various activities and resources must be designed to create meaningful contexts that will stimulate students to speak the language. Roleplaying and using films, news items, and stories to stimulate discussion are two instructional strategies commonly used in language classes. Information technology, in particular computer simulation, can facilitate the use of these methods. 5.1.1 Motivational and Contextual Framework There are several types of computer simulations, and several schemes have been devised to categorize them (Alessi and Trollip 1985; Jones 1991b). In terms of content, one can divide simulation programs into two groups: those that focus on manipulating physical objects or performing scientific processes—flying an
New Information Technology in Language Education airplane or conducting physics experiments, for example—and those that involve adopting roles and making decisions within well-defined human situations for the purpose of exploring social, ethical, or economic principles and dealing with constraints. The types of simulations that language instructors find more useful belong to the latter category, because students do not require domain-specific knowledge in order to use them. Computer simulations of this type generally present a scenario and either place the user(s) in different roles to explore various responses or solicit decisions regarding a set of variables to produce the best desirable outcome. The use of simulation programs in language instruction almost always takes place in group settings. The programs provide a motivational and contextual framework, and because students act out different roles or make decisions through discussion, the function of language as a communication tool is clearly demonstrated. The conversations and role plays in turn provide instructors with opportunities to identify students' strengths and weaknesses and then to select or develop instructional materials for training in formal linguistic structures. There is, of course, always the possibility that students will revert to using their own language during the activities if they possess the same mother tongue. The quality of the software and monitoring by the instructor are key factors in ensuring that students persist in speaking the new language. 5.2 Commercially Developed Simulations There are many commercially developed simulations that could be used in language education, some of which are very popular among school children; for example, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, SimCity, and The Other Side. With students learning their first language, these are used to help them develop social decision-making, and general problem solving skills. In second language instruction these programs can be used to simulate linguistic interactions and also provide practice in the skills just mentioned. Successful development of linguistic and other skills, however, depends on the use of additional related learning activities; for example, modelling and practising cooperative behavior before and during use of the program. Simulation software varies considerably in programming complexity, but its effectiveness in promoting student linguistic interaction is not necessarily related to its technical sophistication. The program's subject matter and its relevance to students' interests and to the curriculum appear to be more critical. Two simple yet effective simulation programs described in the following section illustrate this point. 5.3 Romance and Business Executive Decisions Romance (Jones 199la) is a simple maze which presents students with a problem: a girl in love finds her
boyfriend becoming distant and avoiding the subject of marriage. Students are asked to discuss and decide on an appropriate response to the girl's request to the boyfriend's best friend: 'You must know what's wrong—please tell me!' The software facilitates further discussion of the rationale for their decisions. Jones reported that when the program was tried out with several groups of graduate students, it stimulated a consistently greater amount of oral language production than did commercial adventure simulations. Business Executive Decisions (Chen 1992) is a computer simulation developed for teaching advanced spoken English for business management to students whose mother tongue is Chinese. During a 10 week course, the program teaches only the most essential management concepts. Computation, keyboard input, and other activities unrelated to language learning are kept to a minimum. It focuses instead on stimulating communication among students. Within the context of managing simulated air-conditioner manufacturing plants, students learn the most essential concepts of business management—strategic planning and policy-making, for example—through dynamic and meaningful interactions in English. Activities are designed for use before and after the simulation. Each week's lesson involves four steps. First, the teacher introduces a short passage giving some background information about the simulation's subject matter. Second the students use scripts to practice related English expressions, analyze the scripts, and reproduce them. Third, the students use the simulation program. Students are divided into groups of three or four; the groups represent competing airconditioner manufacturers. Each group must discuss policies and strategies. The results of the groups' decisions are entered into the computer which displays the current outcome of the competition. Students evaluate their company's performance for the whole simulation, using expressions they have learned. Chen reported very encouraging response: there was heated discussion in the target language during each simulation. Also, the simulation was observed to exercise 'a built-in controlling mechanism to keep students' attention from wandering' (Chen 1992). 6. Conclusion Discussion of these four approaches to using information technology in language education has illustrated several points. First, using technology in language instruction is not necessarily costly. Second, language instruction involves more than just giving students computers and software to work with. The instructor needs to provide a structure to the learning sequence, monitor student learning, and design effective intervention strategies. Third, language-learning principles must be considered in designing or choosing software and a way of using it to meet students' learning needs. Fourth, students' active involvement is 371
The School Context active video for language instruction. Simulation and Gaming 22(2): 239-47 McClurg P A, Kasakow N 1989 Word processors, spelling checkers, and drill and practice programs: Effective tools for spelling instruction? Educational Computing Research 5(2): 187-98 Ng E K L, Olivier W P 1987 Computer assisted language learning: An investigation on some design and implementation issues. System 15(1): 1-17 Ng E, Prosser R J 1992 Computers and learning. In: Ng E (ed.) Designs for Learning: Educational Uses of Computers. Centre for Distance Education, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC Bibliography Alessi S M, Trollip S R 1985 Computer-based Instruction: Owen T 1992 Wired writing: The writers in electronic residence program. In: Mason R (ed.) Computer ConMethods and Development. Prentice Hall, Englewood ferencing: The Last Word. Beach Home Publishing, Cliffs, NJ Victoria, BC Berkenkotter C 1981 Understanding a writer's awareness of audience. College Composition and Communicaiton 32: Reil M 1990 A model for integrating computer networking with classroom learning. In: McDougall A, Dowling C 388-99 (eds.) Computers in Education. Elsevier, Amsterdam Chen Z 1992 Learning management English through comScardamalia M, Bereiter C 1983 The development of evalputer simulation. Simulation/Games for Learning 22(3): uative, diagnostic, and remedial capabilities in children's 164-71 composing. In: Martlew M (ed.) 1983 The Psychology of Cochran-Smith M 1991 Word processing and writing in Written Language. Wiley, New York elementary classrooms: A critical review of related litera- Scardamalia M, Bereiter C 1987 Knowledge telling and ture. Rev. Educ. Res. 61(1): 107-55 knowledge transforming in written composition. In: Cohen M, Riel M 1989 The effect of distant audiences on Rosenberg S (ed.) Advances in Applied Psycholinguistics. students' writing. Am. Educ. Res. J. 26(2): 143-59 Vol. 2: Reading, Writing, and Language Learning. CamDiscis Books 1990 Interactive computer books for children. bridge University Press, Cambridge Tech. Trends 35(5): 35-38 Seyer P 1991 Understanding Hypertext: Concepts and AppliFriedlander L 1988 The Shakespeare project: Experiments cations. Windcrest Books, Blue Ridge Summit, PA in multimedia education. Academic Computing 2(7): 26- Shaw S 1991 The reading disc: Learning to read using inter29, 66-68 active CD. Educational and Training Technology InterGarrett N 1991 Technology in the service of language learnnational 28(4): 316-20 ing: Trends and issues. Modern Language J. 75(1): 74— Simon Fraser University, Faculty of Education 1992 Xch101. ange Communications Guide 92. Faculty of Education, Hult S, Kalaja M, Lassila O, Lehtisalo T 1990 Hyperreader— Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC An interactive course in reading comprehension. System Smith W F (ed.) 1989 Modern Technology in Foreign Lan18(2): 189-98 guage Education: Applications and Projects. National Ingraham B, Emery C 1991 'France InterActive' A hypTextbook, Chicago, IL ermedia approach to language training. Educational and Van Horn R 1991 Advanced Technology in Education. Brooks/ Training Technology International 28(4): 321-33 Cole Publishing, CA Jameson M (ed.) 1991 AT&T Learning Circle: Mindworks Vygotsky L S 1978 Interaction between learning and develMiddle #6 Circle Publication. Aubrey Elementary School, opment. In: Cole M, John-Steiner V, Scribner S, SoubBurnaby, BC erman E (eds.) Minds in Society: The Development of Jones F R 199la Mickey-mouse and state-of-the-art: ProHigher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press, gram sophistication and classroom methodology in comCambridge, MA municative CALL. System 19(1/2): 1-13 Wyatt D H 1988 CALL What can research tell us about CALL? Jones G 1991b Some principles of simulation design in interSystem 16(2): 221-23
critical in acquiring skills in any aspect of language, and using computers can help in enhancing the involvement. It is clearly implicit in the discussion of the approaches that information technology has not replaced, and will not replace, teachers. On the contrary, it has increased the demand for educators to work more intelligently, imaginatively, and resourcefully with learners.
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Teaching Language National Curricula English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales) K. Perera
Since 1990, England and Wales have, for the first time, had a legally enforceable National Curriculum in English. This is not a detailed syllabus and says nothing about teaching methodology or materials. Rather, it specifies the knowledge, skills, and understanding that pupils should have acquired by the end of four key stages in the period of compulsory education (5-16)—roughly at the ages of 7, 11, 14, and 16. It is organized according to the structure laid down in the Education Reform Act (1988) for all National Curriculum subjects. 1. The Structure of the National Curriculum in English For the purpose of reporting pupils' performance to parents and employers, the content of the English curriculum is divided into three 'profile components': speaking and listening, reading, and writing. Each profile component consists of one or more 'attainment targets,' within which the content of the curriculum is presented as 'statements of attainment' at 10 developmental levels. The attainment targets are supported by 'programmes of study' designed to ensure that pupils have covered what is necessary to enable them to reach the level of attainment appropriate for their age and ability. The attainment targets for each profile component (with illustrative statements of attainment) are as follows: (a) Speaking and Listening Attainment target 1: 'The development of pupils' understanding of the spoken word and the capacity to express themselves effectively in a variety of speaking and listening activities, matching style and response to audience and purpose. From level 7, pupils should be using Standard English, wherever appropriate, to meet the statements of attainment.' In order to achieve level 10 (the achievement of the ablest 16-year-olds), pupils have to fulfill three statements of attainment, including the following: 'express a point of view on complex
subjects persuasively, cogently and clearly, applying and interpreting a range of methods of presentation and assessing their own effectiveness accurately.' (b) Reading Attainment target 2: 'The development of the ability to read, understand, and respond to all types of writing, as well as the development of information-retrieval strategies for the purposes of study.' To achieve level 8 (an above-average performance for 16-year-olds), pupils have to fulfill five statements of attainment, including the following two: 'read a range of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction and drama, including pretwentieth century literature'; 'show in discussion and writing an ability to form a considered opinion about features of presentation which are used to inform, regulate, reassure or persuade, in nonliterary and media texts.' (c) Writing Attainment target 3: 'A growing ability to construct and convey meaning in written language matching style to audience and purpose.' To achieve level 5 (a slightly below-average performance for 14-year-olds), pupils have to fulfill five statements of attainment, including the following: 'write in a variety of forms for a range of purposes and audiences, in ways which attempt to engage the interest of the reader'; Attainment target 4: Spelling. To achieve level 3 (the average level for 9-yearolds) pupils need to satisfy four statements of attainment, including this: 'spell correctly, in the course of their own writing, simple polysyllabic words they use regularly which observe common patterns'; Attainment target 5: Handwriting. To achieve level 2 (the expectation for average 7-year-olds), pupils must be able to: 'produce legible upper and lower case letters in 373
Teaching Language one style and use them consistently.' Within the writing profile component, the three attainment targets are differentially weighted, with 70 percent of the assessment being allocated to AT3,20 percent to AT4, and 10 percent to AT5. This takes account of the fact that the targets relate to independent abilities: it is possible to write interesting, coherent, incisive prose and yet be a poor speller or have untidy handwriting. 2. Knowledge about Language
Although much of the curriculum reflects and codifies existing good practice, it has to be said that during the thirty years or so preceding its introduction, there was no widespread systematic study of the nature and structure of English in secondary schools in England and Wales (see Grammar (Mother Tongue) in British Schools; Schools Council (UK)). The Cox Report, which formed the basis of the curriculum, made a case for such study: 'Language is central to individual human development; human society is inconceivable without it. Therefore it is intrinsically interesting and worthy of study in its own right' (Cox 1991: 57-58). However, the Report was also firm that language should be studied in broad rather than narrow terms, and in the context of the normal activities of the English classroom. Accordingly, the statements of attainment that relate to knowledge about language are incorporated in speaking and listening, reading, and writing, rather than being given a separate profile component (the Cox Report is out of print and no longer widely available; it is largely reprinted in Cox 1991). The knowledge about language statements focus on four aspects: (a) Language variation according to situation, and regional or social group. Since such variation is most immediately apparent in spoken language, these statements of attainment form part of the speaking and listening profile component. At level 5 pupils should be able to: 'recognize variations in vocabulary between different regional or social groups, and relate
this knowledge where appropriate to personal experience.' (b) Language variation according to purpose and language mode. As these statements focus particularly on some of the differences between spoken and written language, they are placed in the writing profile component. At level 6, pupils should be able to: 'demonstrate, through discussion and in their writing, grammatical differences between spoken and written English.' (c) Language variation across time. The most extensive examples of such variation are found in literature from previous centuries, so these statements of attainment are included in the reading profile component. To achieve level 8, pupils should be able to: 'discuss and write about changes in the grammar of English over time, encountered in the course of their reading.' (d) The main characteristics of literary language. These statements are also in the reading profile component. At level 9, pupils should be able to: 'demonstrate some understanding of the use of lexical and grammatical effects in the language of literature.' The curriculum takes account of the research that demonstrates the ineffectiveness of decontextualized grammar teaching (see Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue)) not only by integrating language study within other English work but also by starting with the pupils' own language use; by advocating discovery learning; and by focusing on meaning and function as well as form. See also: Language Awareness; English Teaching in England and Wales; English Teaching in Scotland. Bibliography Cox B 1991 Cox on Cox: An English Curriculum for the 1990 's. Hodder and Stoughton, London Department of Education and Science 1989 English for Ages 5 to 16 (The Cox Report). HMSO, London Perera K 1993 Incorporating language study in an English curriculum. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy
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English Teaching in Australia M. O. Meiers
In Australia, the Commonwealth and State governments play different roles in education, each of the Education Departments and Ministries of the various 374
States and Territories having its own government school system. There are significant differences between the systems. The Commonwealth Depart-
English Teaching in Australia ment of Education and Training in Canberra provides financial and other resources, but State governments and their education systems play the major role in the teaching of English. Government reports on education, including the teaching of English as a mother tongue, can originate from both Commonwealth and State governments (the reports discussed in this article are listed in Sect. 3). There are differences in the relative influence on teaching practice of government reports, and in the degree of sustained support, through policy and funding, for implementing recommendations. Commonwealth government reports tend to exert an influence at the system level and on the English teaching profession at large; reports issued by the State governments are likely to have a more immediate influence on teaching practice in schools. Until the 1990s no government reports in Australia had been as far-reaching or as influential as the Bullock (1975) or Cox (1989) reports in the United Kingdom (Department of Education and Science 1975; 1989) (see English Teaching in England and Wales), but reports emanating from national and state sources from 1980 to 1991 reflected a range of approaches and concerns. One significant aspect of these reports was the recognition that the teaching of English as a mother tongue, and the achievement of literacy, was not solely the responsibility of schools, but encompassed the needs of adults as well as children. 1. State Initiatives
State reports tend to relate more directly to classroom practice. For example, in 1980 the Education Department of Western Australia commissioned the Martin Report, What Goes on in English Lessons. This report aimed to describe the state of teaching in West Australian schools, and to contribute to the clearer understanding of the subject in the 1980s. During the 1980s it was notable that English curriculum statements were developed independently by the various states. The status of these as guidelines for curriculum development meant that they exerted direct influence on the teaching of English, and offered a theoretical stance. The P-10 Language Education Frame-work, Queensland Education Department (1989), stated the Department's views on language education, focusing on developing children's capacity to speak, listen, read, and write, and explicating how language is an interactive, meaning-making process, adapted according to social context. The English Language Framework P-10, Victorian Ministry of Education (1988), is based on the principle that effective language learning occurs only when students are actually using language. This became part of a government Literacy Strategy for Victoria, and the English Profiles Handbook: Assessing and Reporting Students' Progress in English (1991) extended this strategy by providing a means of
describing development in reading, writing and spoken language. Other educational reports have given attention to the teaching of English. The Ministerial Review of Post-Compulsory Schooling in Victoria (1985), known as the Blackburn Report, included advice on the role of English in postcompulsory education, in the light of the demands created by increasing retention rates. This report recommended that the study of English be compulsory and sequential over two out of a total of four semester-length units over Years 11 and 12 for all students. The prime reason supporting this recommendation was that English, as well as providing a focus for wide reading and for the consideration of human and personal concerns, was also seen to provide the major means of ensuring the maintenance of standards of literacy. The recommendation was later strengthened, prescribing English as a compulsory study for all four semesters in the Victorian Certificate of Education, implemented for the first time as a 2-year certificate in 1990. The English study design developed for that certificate was based on three broad areas of study indicative of aspects of English held to be significant for a varied cohort of students in the final year of schooling: the craft of writing, reading and the study of texts, and the presentation of issues and arguments. Another interesting State development was the Writing and Reading Assessment Program initiated by the Education Department of South Australia to study the literacy of Year 6 and 10 students in South Australian schools. The interim report (1990) described the work of the three-year project: its prime purpose was to conduct a state-wide survey which would enable 'a rich portrait of literacy activity and performance' to be drawn, and which would contribute to improvement in the teaching and learning of literacy skills. 2. National Initiatives
At the national level, a number of reports attempted to provide an overview of various aspects of teaching practice. The 1972 Australian UNESCO Seminar on the teaching of English set out to provide a stocktaking overview of the current state of English teaching in Australia. Overseas consultants, James Britton and Roger Shuy, provided the seminar with perspectives on the current state of theory and knowledge relating to English teaching. An outcome of the seminar was the establishment of a National Committee on English Teaching, which in 1977 requested the Curriculum Development Centre to set up a Language Development Project. Phase 1 of the project focused on the gathering, exchange, and discussion of ideas and information about language. A report of this work was published in 1979, but no further publications were issued under the aegis of the project. 375
Teaching Language A government-supported review of similar scope to the Language Development Project was the National Guide to Literacy Project commissioned by the Curriculum Development Centre of the Federal Department of Education and Training in 1987. However, it was incomplete when the Centre was abolished in 1989. This project set up a study of classroom practice, focusing particularly on assessment of language development, with the aim of challenging the view that decontextualized testing offered anything which might improve teaching practice. In 1987, after extensive consultation, a National Policy on Languages was published by the Commonwealth Government. The policy provided a comprehensive analysis of language issues in Australia, including the teaching of English as a mother tongue. The primary purpose of this policy was to contribute to decision making about language issues in Australia. General principles enunciated in the policy valued the language pluralism of Australia as a national resource, and recognized the central importance of English in Australian life as a unifying element in society, with the consequent need to enhance the competence in English of all Australians. The policy noted that English was the first and usually only language of about 83 percent of the population as well as the language of the major and powerful institutions of the society. Recommendations on the teaching of English as a mother tongue referred to the need for inservice education, professional development and materials development, and for applied English language research. It also recommended attempts to improve levels of adult literacy in English, an area which received considerable attention during 1990, International Literacy Year. An initiative connected with the National Policy on Languages was a report, No Single Measure (1989), which surveyed adult literacy in Australia, and made a number of recommendations, including the urgent need to establish the likely literacy and numeracy demands on workers in the restructuring of industry, and the need to upgrade workers' literacy and numeracy skills, by integrating such literacy training with award restructuring and job training. The report also recommended action be taken to provide many and varied literacy experiences for all children. The Policy Information paper, Australia's Language The Australian Language and Literacy Policy, released in September 1991, built on the National Policy on Languages and the work of International Literacy Year. This policy took account of extensive consultation on a green paper, The Language of Australia (1990) which was intended to maintain and develop the National Policy on Languages by encouraging community consideration of issues relating to Australian Literacy and Language Policy for the 1990s. The issues included literacy in English, the learning of languages other than English,
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provision for English as a second language, and Aboriginal languages. The main strategic directions suggested for literacy for children and adults proposed building on State and Territory strategies, adopting consistent mechanisms to assess outcomes, establishing Commonwealth literacy and language services, encouraging the use of 'Plain English,' and creating a new strategic framework for existing Commonwealth school-based literacy activity. The policy information paper, Australia's Language (1991) highlighted the role of 'Australian English' as the national language and the major vehicle for language and literacy development in Australia, and noted the importance of implementing a comprehensive national language and literacy policy. One of the four goals of the paper related to English as a mother tongue: 'All Australian residents should develop and maintain a level of spoken and written English which is appropriate for a range of contexts, with the support of education and training programs addressing their diverse learning needs.' Australia's Language acknowledged the responsibility of the whole community, and the key role of schools, in the literacy development of children. It drew attention to the critical importance of the early period of schooling, noting evidence which suggested 'that if children are not making appropriate literacy progress by the end of the third year of primary school it is likely that they may not make up the gap through the rest of their schooling.' The significance of the transition from primary to secondary school was also noted. The policy information sets a high priority on the need for nationally consistent guidelines for the assessment of children's literacy skills, which 'in turn, will also enable special support measures to be provided for those assessed as needing additional assistance.' In 1991, as a national collaborative curriculum project, the Australian Education Council, comprising the Education Ministers of the States and Territories, as distinct from the Commonwealth Department of Education and Training, was working on the development of an agreed National Statement on English in Australian Schools. Associated with this was an English Profile Project, with a brief to develop a subject profile for English which included statements of student outcomes in terms of the strands identified in the national statement, and descriptions of outcomes according to six levels of achievement. This development was the beginning of a new stage in the teaching of English in Australia, in which government reports and policies were to have a much more direct influence on classroom practice. Another significant aspect was signaled in Young People's Participation in Post-Compulsory Education and Training (Report of the Australian Education Council Review Committee, 1991); namely, the widespread public recognition of the fundamental importance of language and communication skills to all aspects of life, including education, training, and employment.
English Teaching in Canada 1987
3. Summary of Reports, in Chronological Order 3.1 State Reports 1980
1985
1988 1989 1990 1991
What Goes on in English Lessons. Case Studies from Government High Schools, Western Australia. ('The Martin Report'). Education Department, Western Australia Ministerial Review of Post-compulsory Schooling in Victoria. (The Blackburn Report'). Ministry of Education, Victoria English Language Framework P-10. Ministry of Education, Victoria P-10 Language Education Framework. Department of Education, Queensland Writing and Reading Assessment Program: Interim Report. Department of Education, South Australia English Profiles Handbook Assessing and Reporting Student's Progress in English. Ministry of Education, Victoria
3.2 National Reports 1972
1979
Report of UNESCO Australian Seminar on the Teaching of English. Commonwealth Department of Education, Canberra Maling-Keepes J, Keepes B (eds.) Language in Education. The Language Development Project: Phase 1. Curriculum Development Centre, Canberra
1989
1990
1991
1991
Lo Bianco J National Policy on Languages. Commonwealth Department of Education, Canberra Wickert R No Single Measure. A Survey of Australian Adult Literacy. Commonwealth Department of Education, Canberra Dawkins J The Language of Australia. Discussion paper on an Australian Literacy and Language Policy for the 1990s. Commonwealth Department of Education, Canberra Dawkins J Australia's Language. The Australian Language and Literacy Policy. Commonwealth Department of Education, Canberra Young People's Participation in Post-compulsory Education and Training. Report of the Australian Education Council Review Committee. Commonwealth Department of Education, Canberra
See also: Australian Indigenous Languages; Australian Minority Languages; School Language Policies; English Teaching in Canada. Bibliography Department of Education and Science 1975 A Language for Life (The Bullock Report'). HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1989 English for Ages 5 to 16 (The Cox Report'). HMSO, London
English Teaching in Canada I. Pringle
Because education is a matter of provincial jurisdiction in Canada (see Canadian Language Education Policy), no branch of the federal government has a mandate to issue a report on teaching English as a mother tongue in Canada; the political fragmentation which results from this constitutional provision ensures in turn that a report from a provincial government agency is unlikely to have any impact nationally. In any case, reports commissioned by governments are not the normal way of developing educational policy in Canada. Usually, change has been initiated within a provincial ministry or department of education by a gradual process which proceeds from the perception of a need for change, through in-house needs analyses and literature surveys, to the development of new policy statements and guidelines, the latter with extensive consultation with and involvement of practicing teachers.
At the same time, it is clear in the late twentieth century that the federal government has been trying to influence many aspects of education, and would like to be able to exercise the kind of influence evinced in (for example) the Bullock, Cox, and Kingman Reports in England and Wales and the National Language and Literacy Policy in Australia (see English Teaching in England and Wales; English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)', English Teaching in Australia). The chief reason for this is the perception (shared by most provincial governments, and also by many journalists and many sectors of the business community) that inadequacies in 'basic' literacy skills (and also numeracy skills) are intrinsically harmful for and dangerous to the nation, and therefore legitimately of concern to the federal government. The two reports which are centrally relevant are Adult Literacy in Canada: Results of a National Survey
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Teaching Language (Statistics Canada 1991) and Reading the Future: A Portrait of Literacy in Canada (Statistics Canada 1996). These exemplary surveys certainly do not demonstrate that there has been a pervasive failure in mother-tongue education in Canada. However, the failure of many of those who refer to them to read them first, or to understand what they report, has led to many claims to the effect that they demonstrate that anywhere from 10 percent to 35 percent of adult Canadians are functionally illiterate. Those who cite such claims sometimes refer to a much earlier Ontario government report known as the Hall-Dennis Report (Language and Learning, 1968). This report, which made the case for an extremely child-centered approach to education, especially in the early years, contained only very vague recommendations, and in any case was not extensively implemented even in the province of Ontario; however, it has often been cited in the press and elsewhere as an example of the irresponsible 1960s' liberalism whose influence has allegedly caused the total collapse of traditional standards of achievement in English as a mother tongue, thus leading to the results which those who have never read Adult Literacy in Canada and Reading the Future: A Portrait of Literacy in Canada would like to believe that they document. In this climate, there have been a number of other reports, of both federal and provincial origin, all of which deal at least in part with mother-tongue education. A number are listed in the bibliography. They tend to make the same points: that schools have failed Canadians, as the results of the national surveys of adult literacy and other studies allegedly show; that, consequently, Canadians are less well equipped than other nationalities to face a competitive future in a new global economy; and that one of the responses has to be some form of nationwide standardized testing of
literacy skills. And indeed, in a historic reversal of the inability of the Canadian provinces to agree on anything at all within their own jurisdiction, the Council of Ministers of Education commissioned teams from the Evaluation Branches of the Quebec and Alberta Ministries of Education to develop, and pilot, tests of literacy and numeracy skills which are to be implemented nationally. Bibliography Canadian Chamber of Commerce 1989 Focus 2000: Report of the Task Force on Education and Training. Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Ottawa Corporate Higher Education Forum 1991 To Be Our Best: Learning for the Future. Corporate Higher Education Forum, Montreal DesLauriers R C 1990 The Impact of Employee Illiteracy on Canadian Business. (A Conference Board of Canada Report from the Human Development Resource Center). Conference Board of Canada, Ottawa Downey J, Landry A 1992 Schools for a New Century, Report of the Commission on Excellence in Education. Commission on Excellence in Education, Fredericton Economic Council of Canada 1992 A Lot to Learn. Economic Council of Canada, Ottawa Hall E M, Dennis L A 1968 Language and Learning: Report. Ontario Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario, Toronto Prosperity Secretariat 1991 Learning Well... Living Well. Ministry of Supply and Services, Ottawa Radwanski G 1987 Ontario Study of the Relevance of Education and the Issue of Dropouts. Ministry of Education, Toronto Statistics Canada 1991 Adult Literacy in Canada: Results of a National Survey (Statistics Canada BS89 C525). Statistics Canada, Ottawa Statistics Canada and Human Resources Development Canada 1996 Reading the Future: A Portrait of Literacy in Canada. (Statistics Canada 89-551-XPE). Statistics Canada, Ottawa
English Teaching in England and Wales R. A. Carter
Since the 1970s issues of language and education in the UK have been prominent not only in professional debate but in public controversy too. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed frequent government intervention in the form of reports by Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI) and by committees of inquiry; and the establishment of a National Curriculum saw the creation of working parties charged with the responsibility to make recommendations in key areas (see English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)}. In the 378
debates surrounding the place of English as a core subject in the curriculum, issues of language were and continue to be high on the professional and political agenda, with a 'back to basics' teaching of grammar and of Standard English in especially sharp focus (see Standard English). A very substantial basis to this issue is provided by the 'Bullock Report' (see Committee of Inquiry 1975), which made a wide range of recommendations on seminal issues such as: the need for all schools to have an organized policy for
English Teaching in England and Wales language across the curriculum (see School Language Policies', Language Across the Curriculum); improvements in language-based pre- and in-service teacher training; the strengthening of provision for second language learners of English and for adult literacy schemes; a nationwide creation of language/reading centers. The Bullock Committee saw itself very much as re-expressing the views put forward in the 'Newbolt Report' of 1921 (see DBS 1921)—views which had been widely disregarded for forty years or more. However, although many of the Bullock recommendations were not acted upon, the concentration on language issues has continued. English 5-16: Curriculum Matters 1 was published in 1984 (DES 1984) and its proposals contributed to vigorous discussion and one issue in particular, that pupils should be taught more directly about the forms and structures of the English language, was markedly controversial. English 5-16: Responses to Curriculum Matters 1 (see DES 1986) was a more guarded document and clearly acknowledged reservations among teachers of English about the proposals for more structured English language teaching. The report recommended that a committee of inquiry be set up to investigate further the possibilities of providing teachers and pupils with a more systematic knowledge about the workings of the English language. The outcome was the publication of the 'Kingman Report' by the Kingman Committee (see DES 1988), or, to give its full title, the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language. The Kingman Committee had the following terms of reference: (a) to recommend a model of the English language, whether spoken or written, which would: (i) serve as the basis of how teachers are trained to understand how the English language works, (ii) inform professional discussion of all aspects of English teaching; (b) to recommend the principles which should guide teachers on how far and in what ways the model should be made explicit to pupils, to make them conscious of how language is used in a range of contexts; (c) to recommend what, in general terms, pupils need to know about how the English language works and in consequence what they should have been taught, and be expected to understand, on this score, at ages 7, 11, and 16. The model of the English language recommended by the Kingman Committee was not a pedagogic model. However, the government accepted and funded a recommendation of the Kingman Committee—for an extensive in-service program of language development for teachers—and such a program (called the 'LINC project') operated nationally between 1989-92. The Committee also made additional recommendations in politically sensitive
areas. For example, although there is an avowal of greater attention to the forms and functions of language, there is unambiguous advice against a return to the kind of decontextualized, prescriptive teaching of grammar which characterized language teaching in the period prior to the 1960s (see Grammar (Mother Tongue) in British Schools). Additionally, moderate recommendations were made for a contextualized approach to the teaching of Standard English, mainly in the form of an extension to the linguistic repertoire of pupils. By the time of the publication of the Kingman Report, plans for a National Curriculum for England and Wales were under way. The English Working Party (Cox Committee) (see DES 1989) was established under the chairmanship of Professor Brian Cox—a member of the Kingman Committee—to make recommendations concerning the place of English as a core subject in the National Curriculum. The Committee was charged to take particular account of the Kingman Report and its exploration of the interface between language and education. The recommendations of the English Working Party on English 5-16 (the Cox Report) refer to the whole of the English curriculum, including drama, information technology, and media studies. However, the Committee devotes substantial parts of the report to language issues, including the central role of knowledge about language. The Cox Committee takes an essentially integrative view of language as informing all areas of the curriculum and underlines that the more language is addressed directly by teachers and pupils, the more positively enabled pupils will be in their language development. The Committee also recommends that language should be studied in its own right and demarcates a curricular area of 'knowledge about language' in which senior pupils investigate the forms of language with particular reference to language variation in a range of social and cultural contexts. The pedagogic emphasis of such work is on investigating and exploring language in use through mini-projects. Government reports on English and English language teaching, initiated in the 1920s by the Newbolt Report, continue to be important stimuli to debate and curricular development in the 1990s. Parallel UK developments have been undertaken in Scotland and Northern Ireland. See also: English Teaching in USA; English Teaching in Canada; English Teaching in Australia. Bibliography Department of Education and Science (DES) 1921 The Newbolt Report. HMSO, London Committee of Inquiry into Reading and the Use of English 1975 A Language for Life (The Bullock Report). HMSO, London
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Teaching Language Department of Education and Science (DES) 1984 English from 5 to 16: Curriculum Matters 1. HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1986 English from 5 to 16: Responses to Curriculum Matters I. HMSO, London
Department of Education and Science 1988 Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language (The Kingman Report). HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1989 English for Ages 5 to 16 (The Cox Report). HMSO, London
English Teaching in Scotland R. Cairns
The system of English teaching in Scotland has traditionally been one in which great discretion is allowed to the individual teacher. Some guidance was provided by the syllabi set down at various dates for Scottish Certificate of Education examinations at Ordinary and Higher grade, but even these were expressed in relatively general terms. Replacement of the Ordinary grade by the Standard grade in the late 1980s led to a greater element of prescription in the organization of the curriculum, and this was continued with the publication in June 1991 by the Scottish Office Education Department of national guidelines for teaching of English language to pupils aged from 5-14, commonly known as the '514 Programme.' The government commended these guidelines, invited education authorities and schools to use them as the basis of their English language programs from the beginning of the 1991-92 session, and believed that they provided 'a firm basis for coherent, progressive teaching in English Language in primary and early secondary education' (Circular 12/91). 1. Structure of the 5-14 Programme The document divides activity in English into four 'outcomes of language.' These are further subdivided into a number of 'strands,' or aspects of learning which pupils will experience. Attainment outcomes for each aspect of language are described in Sects. 1.1-1.4 below. 1.1 Listening 'Pupils will listen individually and in groups, in a variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes, so as to gain information, understand what they have heard, and respond to speakers and texts; in so doing they will achieve an awareness of genre and knowledge about language.' The various strands differentiate between listening for information, listening in order to respond to text, and certain criteria on awareness of genre and knowledge of language. To attain level A, pupils in Primary 3 (6- to 7-year olds) would have to listen to a simple
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story, poem, or dramatic text, and respond in a way that shows some reaction to one aspect of it. Pupils at level E (13-year olds) would have to listen to a wide range of stories, poems, and dramatic texts, and respond in a way that shows some appreciation of the differing viewpoints of characters or some awareness of what the author thinks about them. 1.2 Talking 'Pupils both individually and in groups will talk to convey information in a variety of contexts and will talk appropriately about experiences, opinions, feelings, and text, showing an awareness of audience and purpose; in so doing they will acquire knowledge about language.' The strands differentiate between various purposes for talk, and demand appropriate levels of audience awareness and knowledge about language. In order to achieve level C, 9- to 10-year old pupils have to attain six strands, including the following: 'talk to others in a group or one-to-one activity and contribute appropriately to the purpose of the activity by asking and answering questions.' 1.3 Reading 'Pupils will read to find and handle information for a variety of purposes and will read, on occasion aloud, to enjoy and respond to a variety of texts; accordingly they will achieve an awareness of genre and knowledge about language.' Different purposes for reading identified here include reading for information, reading for enjoyment, and reading to reflect on the writer's ideas and craft. In the 'reading for information' strand, 7-year olds will be expected to find, with the teacher's support, a piece of information from an informational or reference text. To attain level E, pupils are expected to apply the information required from a number of sources for the purposes of a piece of personal research. One strand in the upper levels of this attainment target demands knowledge of literary terms such
English Teaching in USA as 'setting,' 'theme,' and 'motive,' and linguistic terms such as 'syllable,' 'root,' and 'stem.' 1.4 Writing
'Pupils will write functionally, personally, and imaginatively, to convey meaning in language appropriate to audience and purpose; children will pay careful attention to punctuation and structures, spelling, handwriting, and presentation, and acquire knowledge about language.' To attain level C, pupils would have to use writing for a variety of purposes, with accurate punctuation and some attempt at the use of paragraphs. Handwriting should be legible and fluent. 1.5 Assessment and Reporting
These attainment targets are to be used by the teacher to provide a profile of the strengths and weaknesses of the pupil in each activity. Teachers are asked to comment on the pupils' strengths and development needs in each of the four outcomes but not necessarily on each individual strand. The original intention of the government was for these targets to be assessed by a formal system of national testing at the ages of 7, 9, and 14, but this was unacceptable to teachers and many parents, and the government appears, in the 1990s, to have agreed to an informal, classroom-based form of assessment. 2. English Teaching in the Later Years of Secondary Education
In the later years of the secondary curriculum, work is directed toward Standard Grade, Higher Grade, Certificate of Sixth Year Studies, and Scottish Vocational Education Council qualifications (ScotVEC). Standard Grade consists of three 'modes'—Talk, Reading, and Writing. Talk is assessed by the classroom teacher on a combination of group discussion skills and on ability to deliver a prepared talk to a
group or individual. Criteria include content, delivery, and the use of eye contact. Reading is assessed by a formal examination of comprehension skills and by a folio of three pieces of literary criticism, one of which may be an 'imaginative response' to the literary work. There is scope for the study of mass media, notably film and television. Writing is assessed by a formal examination and by the production of a folio of two pieces, one imaginative or personal writing and one 'transactional,' that is, writing to persuade or inform. These three modes are equally weighted, and an award is made at Foundation, General, or Credit level. In the fifth and sixth years of secondary education, less academically able students follow ScotVEC Communication modules. These are largely concerned with nonliterary aspects of language, although there is scope for literary study at level 4. Higher English is taken by more able students in the fifth year of secondary education. In its revised form (1989), assessment is based on a folio of writing and literary criticism weighted as one-third of the final grade, and on a formal examination of comprehension skills, literary criticism, and report-writing skills. The latter requires candidates to assemble materials from various sources to write a coherent report in formal, continuous prose. In the final year of secondary education, the most able students attempt the Certificate of Sixth Year Studies (CSYS). This requires the writing of a dissertation on either a literary or a linguistic subject, as well as work on two other elements chosen from literature, practical criticism, creative writing, and media studies. Bibliography Scottish Examination Board 1991 Revised Arrangements in English (Amended Version) Scottish Office Education Department 1991 English Language 5-14
English Teaching in USA R. E. Shaferf
Curriculum development within the schools in the USA takes place at a number of levels. Each of the 50 states acting through their legislatures, their policymaking boards of education and/or their administrative departments of education have complete legal authority over the organization and administration of educational matters.
Some of this authority is usually delegated to boards of education in local communities. Until the late twentieth century the federal government did not become involved in curriculum or assessment issues. In 1971, however, the federal government began the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in an attempt to measure achievement periodically in a var381
Teaching Language iety of school subjects. In May 1990, the NAEP governing board announced a plan to develop 'national standards of achievement' in reading, writing, and mathematics and to make comparisons by assessing achievement between and among the 50 states. Curriculum development in English comes about both through 'bottom-up' efforts by schoolteachers and through 'top-down' development by leaders in boards and department of education. Both kinds are influenced by the policy statements of key professional groups and theoretical position papers by leaders in English teaching. 1. Key Documents and Proposals since 1945
An early influential position statement was Teaching English Usage by Pooley (1946). This sought to establish a middle position between groups of teachers who adhered to a traditional (eighteenth-century) view of grammar as a system of rules to be imposed on students' usage of English and other teachers who believed that grammar should not be taught as a system of rules to control usage. Influential curriculum documents for the 1940s and 1950s were the five-volume English Language Arts series produced by the Commission on the English Curriculum of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). In advance of the research on child language acquisition which was to come in future decades, the series stressed the relationship between the physical, intellectual, and emotional growth of pupils and the development of their language abilities. Also proposed as additions to the English curriculum were topics such as reading development and the study of the mass media. A reaction to these proposals came in a report from the Commission on the Basic Issues on the Teaching of English (Stone 1961) which implied deep suspicion of the NCTE report and proposed in contrast a 'cumulative,' 'sequential' program based on a tripartite conception of language, literature, and composition proceeding in an upward spiral wherein each area would be divided into 'increments,' and each increment would be foundational for the succeeding one in the spiral. The formulation of this model coincided with the introduction of federal funding for curriculum development which led to the establishment of 22, three-year English Curriculum Development Centers most of which were concerned with developing sequential, cumulative English programs. The Anglo-American Seminar at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1966 resulted in mostly negative evaluations of the work of the English Curriculum Development Centers but produced a variety of documents which grew from a 'personal growth' model of English and were to have significant effects on English teaching worldwide. The personal growth model called for interactive approaches to language learning, relevant content, student involvement in 382
decision making, and emphasis on student growth in language, rather than the coverage of specific subject matter. Moffett (1967) proposed the only American program to go directly from the personal growth curriculum, so widely discussed at Dartmouth, to his own similar proposals which involved the uses of oracy in making connections with reading, writing, and the study of literature (see Oracy). Another feature of the post-Dartmouth experimentation which flourished at high-school level (grades 10 to 12) in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the 'phase elective' programs. In these, a series of short-term electives representing various aspects of language, literature, and composition replaced the traditional high school English programs. These phase electives were modeled on the program developed under the Project English federal grants of the 1960s at Trenton High School, Trenton, Michigan. As the popularity of the elective programs grew in the early 1970s a variety of structures emerged. Hillocks (1972) evaluated the phase elective programs and found that they eventually became top heavy in literature instruction, sharply reducing the study of English language, eliminating the attention paid to reading, writing, and oral language development. Then, the pendulum began to swing again as the 'back to basics' programs grew in the 1970s and elective programs began to disappear. 2. Issues in Language and Linguistics
The study of linguistics began to influence the teaching of English during the later 1960s (see Schools Council UK). Undoubtedly, the most significant area in which this influence was felt was in the study of dialect. The NCTE published books on dialect, including Discovering American Dialects by Shuy (1967). These were widely used by American teachers (see African American Vernacular English). The debate over the point of view to be taken by the teacher of English vis-a-vis prescriptivism and descriptivism in English language study came to a head at the NCTE's annual convention in 1972 (see Standard English). By a narrow margin, the membership voted approval of a resolution supporting, 'the students' right to their own language' (see Ann Arbor Case). The resolution read in part as follows: We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they may find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of the standard American dialect has any validity... a nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language. (College Composition and Communication, vol. 23, October 1972:325)
English Teaching in USA Despite the moves towards liberalizing the English language program, the English curriculum itself in the 1970s and early 1980s was in the grip of the 'competency-based education' movement. Glatthorn (1980), recognizing the sway of the CBE movement proposed a so-called 'mastery curriculum' restricted to areas in which mastery of particular concepts and information was thought to be an effective goal of education. He proposed that the mastery curriculum should be characterized by what he called a 'syncretic orientation' drawing upon content, knowledge of the children's cognitive development, the students' own sense of personal relevance, and the expectations of society. The elements of mastery deemed to be essential should be agreed upon by students, planners, teachers, and parents, and then 'carefully structured.' Aspects of English that did not lend themselves to careful structuring would be part of an 'organic curriculum' which would focus on affective response. In 1980, the Curriculum Commission of the NCTE published Three Language Arts Curriculum Models: PreKindergarten Through College edited by Mandel, which was a reaction to a resolution of the 1977 business meeting of the NCTE calling for 'national guidelines for a curriculum in English similar to the Bullock Report of England' (see English Teaching in England and Wales). Mandel explained the point of view of his Commission's publication as follows: ... No one on the Commission nor on the NCTE Executive Committee seemed disposed to interpret the sense of the House motion as a call for one set of national curricular mandates covering all levels of language arts and instruction... Our idea was that in lieu of one curricular model for all, we could present three curricular models each viewed as powerful and resourceful by its adherents, each used with varying degrees of success. (Mandel 1980:2-3)
3. A Decade of Reform In general, the 1980s can be characterized as a decade of educational reform. Murphy (1990) saw these reform proposals as having a focus quite different from earlier reform movements. For the first time in history, state legislators made a serious incursion into the professional core operations of the schools and involved themselves with issues previously reserved for local school boards. This incursion shifted reform forces away from legislation for minimum competencies and towards mandating and prescribing excellence; and away from a reliance on procedural assessments towards product or outcome accountability. Also, the 1980s saw a major shift in 'the locus of quality control from school districts and colleges of education to the state' (Murphy 1990:6). Clearly, through most of the 1980s, the emphasis continued on 'back to basics' and 'accountability,' although the reaction of the leaders in the English teaching pro-
fession became increasingly uneasy as they continued to detect the growing rigidity within the English curriculum. As state-controlled reform movements grew and state testing programs persisted, teachers found themselves seeking empowerment through increased participation in professional organizations and the development of grass roots movements, such as the 167 sites of the National Writing Project (see National Writing Projects) and the 'whole language movement' wherein many teachers citing the 1988 Report Card on Basal Readers (Goodman, et al. 1988), proposed new basic programs for primary schools integrating reading, writing, speaking, and listening around key literary works and 'authentic' themes where various language activities could be developed. The report on basal readers was a study conducted by the Commission on Reading of the NCTE which described how the basal reader systems of the 1920s and 1930s became the basic textbooks for teaching reading in the USA. These systems concentrated on teaching a 'word recognition' vocabulary of a number of key words frequently used in the language. They featured the development of the reader's word recognition skills by means of structural analysis (breaking words into their key syllables), phonic analysis, and gaining meaning from context (see Reading Teaching: Methods', Reading Teaching: Materials). 4. An Attempt at Consensus Many viewed the English curriculum as in need of consensus and in the 1980s a major effort to achieve unity was funded by several large foundations under the leadership of Franklin, of the Modern Language Association of America. This effort culminated in an invitational seminar in June 1987, where 60 participants from a coalition of eight English associations met to discuss the English curriculum. The conveners of the seminar hoped that the plans emerging from the meetings would be significant in charting the course for English for the 1990s and beyond. They nicknamed the conference 'Dartmouth II,' during the four years of planning that preceded it. Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford (1989) in their book describing the conference, called for an ideal English classroom which would offer a rich and supportive environment for learners actively engaged in reading, writing, interpreting, speaking, and listening, the teacher's task being to create situations and to provide materials that would encourage student inquiry, the practice and use of language, as well as interaction with peers and adults. Teachers would serve as model learners and users of language and would help students learn how to reflect on language. In their intense discussions, the 60 teachers participating in the Coalition Conference may well have set the stage for the changes required in the English curriculum in the twenty-first century.
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Teaching Language See also: English Teaching in Canada; English Teaching in Australia; English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales); Standards. Bibliography Glatthorn A A 1980 A Guide for Developing an English Curriculum for the Eighties. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL Goodman K S, Shannon P, Freeman Y S, Murphy S 1988 Report Card on Basal Readers. Richard C. Owen, Katonah, New York Hillocks G 1972 Alternatives in English: A Critical Appraisal of Elective Programs. ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, Urbana, IL Lloyd-Jones R, Lunsford A A (eds.) 1989 The English
Coalition Conference: Democracy Through Language. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL Mandel B J (ed.) 1980 Three Language Arts Curriculum Models: Pre-Kindergarten Through College. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL MoffettJ 1967 Drama: What Is Happening?National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL Murphy J 1990 The Educational Reform Movement of the 1980s: Perspectives and Cases. McCutchan, Berkeley, CA Pooley R C 1946 Teaching English Usage. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York Shuy R 1967 Discovering American Dialects. National Council of Teachers of English, Champaign, IL Stone G W (ed.) 1961 Issues, Problems and Approaches in the Teaching of English. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York
French Teaching in France D. Ager
French, language of the French Republic as declared in the Constitution, is 'a fundamental element of the country's identity and heritage, the language of education, work, interaction and public administration.' This preamble to the 1994 Toubon Law on the use of French declares that knowledge and use of French is crucial to the state; education in French and of French are of the greatest importance to French identity which is itself rooted in history. It is hardly surprising therefore that the teaching of French has been, and is still, a matter for the state, nor that it serves political and social, as well as educational aims. 1. French Society and the French Language
The French Revolution of 1789 introduced today's Republican values of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, together with administrative centralization. There remain in France today tensions between two strands of political thought: on one hand Liberty based on human rights, Equality based on the refusal of difference, and Fraternity as sovereign citizens voluntarily combine to form the nation-state. On the other, nationalism based on pride in a supposed common ethnic origin, in territory, and in specificity. Both strands have long seen French as the language of universal democracy, human rights, and enlightenment as well as the medium for a uniquely French way of life, literature, and culture. The state's language policy, implementing these themes, has replaced regional languages, like Breton and Occitan, by French. The French Academy, given the task of standardizing French in 1635, still approves new terminology. During the nineteenth century, the
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state's system of educational qualifications, particularly the Baccalaureate, took on the role of social filter. Today, social policy strongly advocates the assimilation, in French, of language minorities deriving from immigration. 2. The Education System
Education is a state responsibility, under the direct control of the Ministry of Education, founded in 1802 although then for secondary and higher education. 12627000 students enrolled in 1998 with 324000 teachers in primary schools and 509 000 at secondary level. The Ministry employs over a million state functionaries, while local authorities or private schools employ 225 000. The Ministry's culture is still that of centralized, administrative, and partly political control of the content of education, examinations, and diplomas, teachers' careers, and inspection. The decentralization of French administration from 1983 has had comparatively little effect yet on education: the 22 Regions (for lycees, with pupils aged 15 plus), 100 plus Departments (for colleges, ages 11 to 14) and nearly 40 000 Communes (for primary education, from ages 6 to 10) provide mainly capital investment with some additional running resources. They do not manage teachers nor affect the curriculum or syllabuses. Since 1989 each school must set up its own plan (project), specifying how it will implement national objectives and syllabuses. Private schools, mainly Catholic, must contract with the state to provide national certificates and diplomas; they form about 13 percent of primary schools and 20 percent of secondary.
French Teaching in France State and government policy have had an enormous effect on education. First, in the organization, training, and deployment of the teaching force. Teachers need a degree and two years of teacher training in Instituts Universitaires de Formation des Maitres (IUFM, created after 1991) to gain qualification, awarded on a competitive basis. Teacher numbers and allocations to posts in schools are centrally planned. Teachers' competence in administrative matters is evaluated by the school Director (40 percent) but, as a teacher (60 percent) by the Ministry's Inspectorate. Second, in setting national priorities and objectives, overall and for individual disciplines. All subjects must thus be taught in French, although there are some minor exceptions. Third, in deciding what to teach, how to teach it, and how to ensure success. There was a time when the Minister of Education could look at (usually) his watch in Paris and note that throughout France at that time classes were dealing with the same subject, at the same point in the progression of the lesson. Syllabuses are still legally enforceable, decided centrally, and published annually, after 1989 by a committee rather than just by the Inspectorate. Although academic freedom for teachers is guaranteed by law, syllabuses are accompanied by much detailed guidance. Examination questions are set nationally, marked externally, and grades awarded by the Ministry. Currently, obligatory scolarity runs from age 6 to 16, although some children may repeat a year. In the last year of primary school, for example, in 1995-6, 78.2 percent of children were age 10, the theoretical age for the class. From the last year of nursery school (Ecoles Maternelles), a common curriculum is organized in 2- or 3-year cycles until age 15. Thereafter, childrens' pathways diverge. Some leave at age 16 with no qualification (8 percent of leavers at all levels in 1993). In lycées professionnels, short vocational education ends with a certificate after one year (26 percent); long vocational education continues to Baccalureate level. Otherwise, education is in lycees until the Baccalaureate, notionally taken at age 18 in one of several streams (28 percent). The remaining 38 percent had higher education qualifications. The system is difficult to shift: it is overcentralized, bureaucratic, unresponsive, and subject to the corporatism of its employees. The academic Inspectorate, all-powerful until the 1970s, retains considerable influence. But the system is a source of pride for many; it has been the national budget priority for a generation; there is considerable input from parents and individual guidance for pupils; it reflects the nature of France; its national diplomas and certificates are (supposedly) of equal value wherever they were awarded. The last quarter of the twentieth century has seen two major and innumerable minor reforms of the system. In
1975 basic instruction in language and maths was revised and the common educational pattern introduced for all children to age 15. In 1995 mastery of French became the overriding goal to age 11. 3. The Teaching of French in Schools
All children must study French during their compulsory education. The following description is based on the 1998 Programmes and Accompaniments for the college level, devised in 1995 (for all subjects) to replace those of 1985 year by year to 1999-2000. French has a resource allocation of 23 percent, resulting in about 4-6 hours weekly of the total 24 and taught in groups of 24. 3.1 The Model The aims of French teaching are to 'allow all to develop their personality and become an aware, autonomous and responsible citizen'. The objectives of the college are to 'ensure mastery of the fundamental forms of discourse' and to provide the 'essential elements of a common culture'. Discourse types to be studied are narration in the first year, adding description and dialogue, and ending with 'argument' in the fourth year. 'The study of language is not an end in itself but is based on communicative situations.' 'French is linked with other subjects': the grammar of other languages, the study of pictorial representations, new technologies, basic cultural referents, history, and civics. Literary and culturally relevant texts are studied in the French classes. Considerable and detailed advice is given to teachers on the skills to be taught: reading; writing; speaking; and the use of linguistic tools (grammar, lexis, and spelling). In grammar, three levels are distinguished: discourse; text; and sentence. For example, the following divisions of text grammar are specified: text types; nominal substitution; theme and comment; progression; logical connectors; punctuation. In the Accompaniments, these are then explained, illustrated by example, and suggestions made for possible class implementation. Lists of possible texts for class study are listed in the Accompaniments, although the syllabuses themselves specify the type of text (a Moliere play, an anthology of nineteenth century poetry, a short novel). 'Nonliterary' texts are also recommended, including magazines, Press, and 'comic strips' (bandes dessinees). These are read, often in extracts (e.g., of Robinson Crusoe or Rabelais). Structured analysis of the texts is recommended in class, although it is repeated several times that this should not be too systematic nor recall the traditional exercise of text analysis ('explication de texte'). Of the four skills, writing and reading are for French traditionally the most difficult to acquire. Partly this difficulty derives from the divergence of spoken French from its written form, partly from the social 385
Teaching Language and vocational role of correct spelling. The most recent spelling reform (1990) was provoked by primary school teachers anxious to make the educational task less onerous, and defeated by a major Press campaign orchestrated by vocal and powerful purist defenders of the language and the status quo. Advice on teaching spelling in the 1998 Accompaniments ruefully acknowledges that it is still mostly taught by drills and dictation and somewhat unconvincingly suggests other techniques. The syllabuses do not make specific recommendations on teaching methods. The Accompaniments, however, strongly recommend an approach dividing the task into learning sequences of say 10 per year each of 12 hours. The global approach, stressing intertextuality and cross-referencing between subjects and between different aspects of learning language, is similarly approved. In summary, the teaching of French at the college level has three bases: a deliberately chosen model (discourse variety), teaching approach (progression in difficulty and acquisition of notions); and learning method (global learning (decloisonnement) or not dividing the subject into sections such as grammar, spelling, writing, dictation). 3.2 Results, Outputs, and Outcomes Evaluations have been undertaken of national achievement in French and maths since 1989, at two levels: start of CE2 (college third year) and the sixth class (start of lycee). The tests, originally designed as assessments of the system in response to condemnation of educational standards, are now published in a spirit of assistance to teachers to show where problems lie. In September 1997 the percentage successful in comprehension of French was 63.4 percent, in knowledge and mastery of the code 58.5 percent, in text production 62.5 percent. Overall, children had a success rate of 61.9 percent (in maths, the parallel result was 54.7 percent). In comprehension, tests of the new programs (understanding text genres and functions) showed children were 'generally successful despite their relative difficulty'. Problems arose when nonnarrative texts were used for the test, and teachers were recommended to vary text types more. Knowledge of the code was the worst result. The summary recommendation was 'to work on text rather than artificial exercises and to study grammar from the triple point of view of discourse, text and sentence'. The Inspectorate, too, publishes an annual report on its observation of classes. The three choices (discourse, progression, and globality) represent a fairly new approach although they were present in the 1985 syllabuses. The Inspectorate is by no means convinced in its 1998 report that teachers in practice either understand it or apply it fully. Some teachers had ignored the 1985 introduction of the notion of discourse,
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retaining the 1975 syllabus of traditional grammar, and were thus faced with difficult and disturbing change. Teachers read the syllabuses, but 'too few read the Accompaniments', so the logic of, and reasoning for, discourse variation may be either rejected or is simply not known. Inspectors are also concerned about the average age of teachers faced with new ideas (43), and their lack of satisfactory initial and in-service training to enable them to cope. 4. Debates and Discussions
The professional association of teachers of French as mother tongue (Association pour la Didactique du Francais Langue Maternelle) regularly reviews the disciplinary field. Divisions and debates include, first, those within 'French': is there a difference between LI and L2 teaching? Should one teach language or culture, particularly literature, and is this latter the purpose of language learning? Is the notion of a generally applicable common culture still valid? The same contrast exists between active, interactional communication, and the study of writing. Should one concentrate on the study of the system or on variation, on code or use of the code, or 'grammar' versus 'discourse'? Second, those between the subject and the method. The debate lies between disciplines and education, between applied linguistics and child psychology, language as required by the citizen, and child development. Traditionally, the emphasis was on the discipline and on delivery; more recent concern with child-centred learning is not altogether accepted. The choices made in the programs, for discourse, for teaching sequences, and for the global approach in learning seem to have been accepted, albeit with reservations. The acquisition of a common culture, socialization, and understanding of contemporary society, and the exercise of citizenship are specific national priorities decreed by the Prime Minister in 1996 as the duty of the college, which also contributes to individual development. But the aims and purpose of the teaching of French in France are primarily social and national, just as they were in 1794. The methods by which the education system can achieve these aims have changed to reflect a consensus expert view: the teachers are now encouraged, rather than instructed, to follow cental plans, although these remain, and the role of the Inspectorate has changed from control to support. Bibliography Ager D E 1999 Identity, Insecurity and Image. France and Language. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Chiss J-L, David J, Reuter Y 1995 Didactique du Francais. Etude d'une discipline. Nathan, Paris IGEN Annual Rapport de {'Inspection Generate de /'Education Nationale. Documentation Fran9aise, Paris Rope F 1990 Enseigner lefrançais: Didactique de la langue maternelle. Editions Universitaires, Paris
National Writing Projects
National Oracy Project J. A. Johnson
The National Oracy Project was a large-scale school curriculum development project in England and Wales, running from September 1987 to August 1993, concerned with the development of spoken language competence in pupils aged 3 to 19, and with the use of spoken language in classroom learning (see Oracy). It was one of a series of curriculum development projects established in the 1980s which sought to involve a widespread network of teachers in developing and implementing changes in policy and practice (see National Writing Projects). These changes were coordinated and disseminated by Project staff at both a national and a local level. The national officers were employed by the National Curriculum Council, and the local coordinators were employed by English and Welsh local education authorities. The Project was established because of concern that changes in knowledge of and understanding about language acquisition and development, and the importance of spoken language in learning in children of school age, had not been reflected by widespread changes in pedagogy. Classroom observation, both by researchers and by Her Majesty's Inspectorate, had shown that talking and listening were not given high status by teachers or pupils, and that schools' curriculum planning and delivery gave pupils little experience of a variety of roles, purposes, or audiences for talking and listening. The wide-ranging recommendations concerning spoken language in schools of a government committee of inquiry, the socalled Bullock Committee and its report A Language for Life (1975) had, for the most part, not been implemented a decade later (see English Teaching in England and Wales). Many initiatives in the development of schools' curricula had touched upon spoken language, both locally and nationally. But few,
if any, had focused principally on talking and listening. The Project followed a methodology defined by the then School Curriculum Development Committee as 'teacher-led.' Groups of teachers and schools were invited, in over 40 different education authorities, to conduct their own investigations and studies of the role of spoken language in some area or areas of their work. Thus school-based investigations of pupils' and teachers' talk were commenced in over 500 schools, covering all phases of education and a wide range of subjects and cross-curricular areas. Topics for investigation included: developing talk in mathematics, science, history, geography, etc; the role of teachers' talk; developing new purposes and audiences for talk; small group work; talk and literacy; story-telling; talk in the early years of education; pupils' and teachers' perceptions of talk; spoken language and assessment. The findings of teachers were shared both locally and nationally through meetings, conferences, and publications, especially newsletters and journals. Teachers were encouraged to apply their findings more widely in their classroom practice. And significant changes to the planning, organization, communication, and assessment of oral learning took place. Although evaluation is not complete at the time of writing, interim evaluations have confirmed the view of Her Majesty's Inspectorate, expressed in a national report, Curriculum Development in Oracy, that: the model of curriculum development in language employed by the Project has been successful; the quality of pupils' oral work has improved; teachers' understanding of the role and importance of spoken language in learning, and their management of the classroom to employ and develop spoken language, have improved.
See also: Language Across the Curriculum; School Language Policies.
National Writing Projects P. Czerniewska
In 1985 the English and Welsh School Curriculum Development Committee (replaced by the National Curriculum Council in 1988) launched the National
Writing Project in England and Wales, which aimed 'to develop and extend the competence and confidence of children and young adults to write for a range of pur-
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Teaching Language poses and a variety of audiences, in a manner that enhances their growth as individuals, their skill as communicators and their facility as learners.' The Project was funded for 4 years by a national grant plus some local support. While the Project was about writing development in schools, it was also about curriculum development, exploring means of effecting change in classrooms. To this end, it began by asking 24 local education authorities (LEAs) to form teacher groups which would look at different aspects of the writing curriculum for ages 3-18. Between them the groups covered such issues as writing in the early years; community involvement in writing; bilingual writers; writing development in different subject areas; writing and work; children's perceptions of writing; the use of micros for writing development, and the assessment of writing. The Project was coordinated centrally by a director and three project officers, and locally by LEA coordinators. 1. The Development of the National Writing Project in England and Wales
Most teacher groups began by observing writing practices and finding out children's perceptions of writing. A remarkably similar picture emerged nationwide. Teachers found that children perceived writing as something they did for the teacher, to show what they knew. Rarely did pupils perceive writing as something which could achieve different purposes and which varied according to the reader; neither was writing often seen as a tool for learning. Children judged writing by criteria of neatness and spelling, with content a poor second. When teachers reflected on their own writing behavior, they realized how little they talked to children about the processes of writing. Different approaches were explored to develop a classroom environment that would best support children's writing. While there was much variation, all shared some fundamental assumptions about writing: (a) Writing needs to be recognized as a social practice rather than as a bundle of skills. Writing happens for a reason and for somebody. Children should therefore be given a range of writing purposes and audiences that will allow them to 'master new meanings in new contexts better to understand what language is about and what it can do'(Bruner 1986). (b) Children learn to write through experimentation with the adult system and they construct their own knowledge about how writing functions. We need to look at what children can write and to value their explorations rather than to point out their failures to match the adult model. (c) Many children bring to school a rich resource in terms of their writing experiences; activities
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in school need to reflect the wide range of writing used in different homes and communities. (d) Writing is a complex process involving planning, drafting, revising, editing, and so forth. School writing tasks need to recognize this complexity and help children to reflect on their own behavior as writers. (e) Writing is a collaborative activity in which thoughts become written words after much discussion, and texts take shape through others reading and reacting to what is written. Writing activities should include opportunities for collaboration with peers, parents, teachers, authors, and other writers. (f) While writing is an important means of communicating, it is also a vital tool for learning, providing a means of organizing thought and perceptions. All subject areas need to recognize the role that writing plays in helping children to gain control over their learning. From the mass of documentary evidence provided by teachers, the Project put together collections of case studies, in-service resource material and a reader (see, for example, National Writing Project 1989, 1990). A databank of all materials is lodged with the National Curriculum Council. 1.1 Critique Local and national evaluation of the Project concluded that children's commitment to and confidence in their writing markedly improves when they have choice over what they write about; when audiences and purposes are real; and when they have more understanding of the writing process. But questions remain about the content of children's writing. Too often there may be uncritical acceptance of children's texts. There is a risk that differences in language use among different classes, genders, and ethnic groups have been obscured, and too little reflection given to the status of different writing practices outside school. It has also been argued that more support should be given to children to help them develop the structural forms of the written genres required for particular audiences and purposes (Christie 1985; see also Writing in School). 2. The US National Writing Project
Interesting parallels can be drawn between the English and US Writing Projects. Both place great emphasis on their models of staff development and both have developed 'process-centered' approaches to the teaching of writing (e.g., Graves 1983). The US Project evolved in the early 1970s from the Bay Area Writing Project. Since then, most states have set up their own Project(s), each with its own characteristics and funding, but linked nationally through a shared philosophy and structure.
Schools Council UK 2.1 Philosophy and Structure Three basic tenets underlie all US Projects: (a) the best teachers of other teachers are successful classroom teachers; (b) research on writing stimulates new ideas for teaching and encourages reevaluation of past experiences; (c) teachers of writing need to be writers themselves. Each State Project shares a similar structure in which staff development begins with a Summer Institute for chosen teachers. At these, teachers present examples of their classroom practice, read, attend lectures and workshops and, importantly, write. They then go back to their schools to form working groups, to act as teacher-consultants and so generate involvement of other teachers. Most Projects are based in higher education institutes with their own coordinating team linked to other Projects through conferences and publications.
In 1986, the Center for the Study of Writing was set up at the University of California, Berkeley to work in partnership with the US National Writing Project. See also: Writing Instruction. Bibliography Bruner J 1986 Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Christie F 1985 Writing and Education. Deakin University, Deakin Graves D 1983 Writing: Teachers and Children at Work. Heinemann Educational, London National Writing Project 1989 Becoming a Writer. Thomas Nelson, London National Writing Project 1990 Ways of Looking. Thomas Nelson, Walton-on-Thames, UK
Schools Council UK J. J. Pearce
By the mid 1960s any formal linguistic content had largely disappeared from English teaching in secondary schools in England, in favor of largely literary work (see Grammar in British Schools', Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue)). Concern over this has been evident ever since. An early response was a request from the Nuffield Foundation to Professor M. A. K. Halliday, then at University College London, to oversee a broad-spectrum curriculum development project. This began in 1964 and from 1967 to its end in 1971 was funded by the Schools Council. A handful of linguists and a team of teachers worked in three unrelated sections. David Mackay led a team developing Breakthrough to Literacy, a body of practical literacy learning materials for children aged 5-8. Published from 1969 onwards, it became a staple approach to early reading in numerous UK primary schools. It has now been largely overtaken by the centrally imposed program (1998) of the Literacy Hour (see Reading Teaching: Materials). A second group addressed the need to reshape conventional notions of knowledge about language studied in the 8-14 age range. It published three textbooks, Language and Communication, in 1977-80 when numerous competitors were appearing, but their popularity with pupils served them well. They subsequently (1991) gave way to developments associated with the National Curriculum. A third group focused on post-16-year-old students,
for whom materials on the study of language scarcely existed. Full-scale trials led to publication of plans for sets of lesson sequences, on topics that explored social and linguistic facts in disciplined ways. Examples included exploring levels of formality in news-reading, studying the use of marked and unmarked forms in everyday life, and relating styles of naming to social distance. The 110 units in Language in Use (Doughty et al. 1971, 1972) were widely but selectively used. They exerted much influence and widened the agenda for English teaching across the whole 11-18 range. Language in Use sold well for two decades and made its way into the consciousness of generations of English teachers. The near-missionary function of the project was sustained for some 12 years through the intensive writing and editorial work of the Language in Use team, which proved particularly effective in post-16-yearold vocational education and in teacher training. A key premise was that older pupils needed a developed language awareness in place of doubtfully linked fragments of linguistic information (see Language Awareness). The lack of sound linguistic knowledge among teachers has been partly remedied by training for the National Curriculum (1991 onwards), but the classroom effects focus on knowledge about language rather than sociolinguistic awareness. See also: English Teaching in England and Wales; English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales).
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Teaching Language Bibliography Doughty P S, Thornton G M, Pearce J J 1971 Language in Use. Edward Arnold, London Doughty P S, Thornton G M, Pearce J J 1972 Exploring Language. Edward Arnold, London
Forsyth I, Wood K 1977-80 Language and Communication One, Two, Three. Longman, Harlow Mackay D, Thomson B, Schaub P 1970 Breakthrough to Literacy. Longman, Harlow
Standards, Scales, and Guidelines B. Spolsky
1. The US Standards Movement
Language teaching in the United States has for the last decade been under the influence of the Standards Movement. Earlier examples of the use of standards in order to assure educational accountability may be found in the medieval practice of paying school masters by results, or the eighteenth century Jesuit adoption of the two thousand year old Chinese examination to control individual pupil progress, or the Harvard College public examination 'by all Comers' in the late seventeenth century (Spolsky 1995). The term 'standard' took on educational meaning with nineteenth century reform of British elementary schools. The NED defines a standard (in elementary schools) as each of the six 'recognized degrees of proficiency, as tested by examination, according to which school children are classified' (the seventh level was for those who were to become teachers) and notes the first use of the word in this sense in 1876. In the US, the recent attempt to develop national standards for achievement in the various areas of the school curriculum was another effort to impose some degree of national uniformity and accountability on an educational system that was constitutionally heterogeneous by virtue of being left to the States. The modern standards movement in the US is generally attributed to the publication of a report during the administration of President Reagan criticizing the level of American education (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983) and to efforts of an Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch (1995), who argued that standards could lead to improvements in educational achievement by giving a clear definition of what was to be taught and what kind of performance was to be expected. Concerns about the quality of public education led the US President, George Bush, to call an Educational Summit in Charlottesville, Virginia in September 1989, at which the President and the governors of all the states (including among them the future President Clinton) agreed on six goals for education by the year 2000. Two groups, the National Education Goals Panel and
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the National Council on Education Standards and Testing, were set up to consider subject matter to be taught, methods of assessment, and standards of performance to be aimed at. The earliest standards to be published were prepared by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in the area of school mathematics. Other fields followed in due course. There has been serious criticism of the movement, and attacks on the approach and on specific details so that the promise of a centrally organized assessment system has not been realized, but the movement seems to be having an influence on State and local attempts at curricular reform. /./ Scales and Guidelines for Foreign Language Education In the language education field, especially in foreign and second language teaching, the developing of standards was able to draw on earlier essays at expressing the goals of language instruction in the form of scales or proficiency guidelines. In 1938, Columbia University published what was probably the first, a Language Ability Scale, a listing of abilities (e.g., 'ability to answer simple questions when there is no thought difficulty') in the seven areas of the curriculum, which were silent reading power, aural comprehension, civilization, speaking, grammar, translation, and free composition (Sammartino 1938). A more elaborate performance scale for aural comprehension was proposed by Kaulfers (1944) but never implemented for the army language program (see ASTP); it included items like 'can understand the ordinary questions and answers relating to the routine transactions involved in independent study abroad.' Some of these notions (and the phrase 'routine transactions') formed the basis for the FSI scale, the proficiency scale created in 1957 by the Foreign Service Institute of the United States Department of State in order to regularize classification of the foreign language skills of the diplomats it trained and tested. The scale was divided into six levels, ranging from 0 to 5, and divided into speaking, reading, and writing. Level
Standards, Scales, and Guidelines 3 represented the level of ability required for functioning professionally; level 5 defined the level equivalent to an educated native speaker. For a number of years it remained an inhouse activity, continuously honed to meet local conditions, but was gradually adopted or adapted by other US government agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Language Institute, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and finally started to become noticed by the wider language testing and teaching professions. This became clear when, in 1980, the President's Commission on Foreign Languages and International Studies called for establishing a 'common yardstick' for foreign language achievement on the basis of which tests and curricula could be planned. The answer was the publication of the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) proficiency guidelines, essentially an adaptation of the FSI scale to the needs of US college foreign language teaching. While controversial, these guidelines constituted an important attempt by the foreign language teaching profession to define the goals of foreign language instruction and the stages to be followed in meeting them. The various approaches to specifying standards to be met in teaching second and foreign languages in the US in the last few years start essentially with the ACTFL guidelines and restate them in new vocabulary or revise them to recognize more current views of the objectives of instruction. In Europe, the notion of scales and guidelines was also adopted, and is most clearly to be found in the precise specifications prepared by the Council of Europe for the various levels (Threshold and Waystage) in the effort to develop a unified framework for foreign language education in Europe. 1.2 US Standards for Foreign Languages and for English as a Second Language Foreign language teaching was the seventh (and last) curriculum area in which the Federal Government supported the writing of a set of standards. An 11member taskforce of foreign language educators, aided by advisory committees, and a 141-member board of review undertook the work, which led to the publication in 1996 of the proposed standards (National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project 1996). The standards were divided into five headings: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities. The first of these, Communication, is something that has been commonly accepted for many years as a goal of foreign language instruction. The second, 'Cultures' with an 's,' emphasizes the learning of other cultures, and appears to be a continued effort to replace the elitist literary content of the older curricula with something more popular and politically correct. 'Connections' is a cover term for the use of foreign language ability in
studying other disciplines, and aims to restore enrollment among students with more practical bent. 'Comparisons' includes the understanding of the nature of language and culture by comparing their own with the ones studied. 'Communities' calls for use of the language inside and beyond the school 'in multilingual communities at home and around the world' and for the start of lifelong learning. There has been criticism of the Standards, and locally developed versions do not necessarily follow the same approach or use the same heading, but there are signs of major influence on the way that the foreign language profession sees its tasks. 1.3 Standards for English as a Second Language in the US In line with the approaches of the Standards movement, the TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other languages) Association (see Professional Associations) began work with the Center for Applied Linguistics (see Research Centers) to define standards for the teaching of English as a second or additional language to students in elementary and secondary schools in the United States. The project, which began in 1995, used volunteer writing teams from different parts of the USA, and the results were published the following year and revised in the light of comments (Center for Applied Linguistics 1997). The nine standards are grouped under three goals: using English for communication in social settings, using it for academic achievement in all school curricular areas, and using it in 'social and culturally appropriate ways.' The standards accept that students should continue to maintain their native languages, and are intended to supplement standards in other content areas. The standards set out the language competencies that students in elementary and secondary schools need to 'become fully proficient in English, to have unrestricted access to grade-appropriate instruction in challenging academic subjects, and ultimately to lead rich and productive lives.' They argue that achieving the standards in a new language is neither easy nor quick, and may indeed take six to nine years rather than the one year of special help provided by the more enlightened school systems. They aim then at the native-like proficiency that is required for academic and professional success and at full equality of opportunity. Since publication of the ESL Standards, TESOL and The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) have continued to be active in implementation through such activities as assessment and teacher training and through encouraging school boards to develop their own approaches. 1.4 Scales and Standards in Foreign Languages The development of scales, whether in the form of proficiency guidelines or standards or in the form of
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Teaching Language Key Stages—as in the UK National Curriculum Modern Foreign Languages Common Requirements (Department of Education and Employment 1996)— is an attempt to specify the goals of foreign language instruction in a way that allows for the planning and articulation of school programs and the assessment and evaluation of the achievement of schools and individual pupils. As a revolution, it imposes less strongly than did the Audio-Lingual Method or any other of the all-claiming methods, and concentrates more on goals than on pedagogy. At the same time, it is a means of centralized control of the educational system, emphasizing approved goals and accountability, while leaving more freedom for implementation than a detailed curriculum and required methods and textbooks might do. Bibliography Center for Applied Linguistics 1997 ESL Standards for PreK-12 Students: TESOL
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Department of Education and Employment 1996 The National Curriculum—Modern Foreign Languages Common Requirements. URL: http://www.dfee.gov.uk/nc/ mflcomon.html/ Kaulfers W V 1944 Wartime development in modern-language achievement testing. Modern Language Journal 28(2): 136-50 National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983 A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform: a Report to the Nation and to the Secretary of Education. National Commission on Excellence in Education, Washington, DC National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project 1996. Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century. Allen, Lawrence, KS Ravitch D 1995 National Standards in American Education: a Citizen's Guide. Brooking Institute, Washington, DC Sammartino P 1938 A language achievement scale. Modern Language Journal 22(6): 429-32 Spolsky B 1995 Measured Words: the Development of Objective Language Testing. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Grammar in Mother Tongue Teaching Grammar in British Schools A. M. Philp
Everyone seems to have a view on grammar teaching. In late twentieth century Britain it was a subject of public debate which even involved the Prince of Wales. It is useful, therefore, to trace the development of this controversial topic from the early 1960s, when the established pattern of English teaching in British schools began to change. This development can be viewed in terms of a swing from one extreme to another; from (a) the Traditional Grammar Approach, which regards explicit traditional grammar teaching as central to maintaining linguistic standards, to (b) the Creative Writing Approach, which emphasizes pupils' use of English, particularly in imaginative writing, as central to their linguistic and personal development. This second approach rejects explicit discussion of language features in relation to pupils' use of English. However, for many teachers, there was movement to a third, intermediate view, which may be termed Language-Study-Based Approach. This is influenced by a range of academic language studies, and emphasizes talking with pupils about how specific language features create meaning in texts, spoken or written, produced by pupils or by others. It can also involve pupil investigation of aspects of how language varies, how it is acquired, how it changes, etc. Two strands of this third approach can be distinguished, differing as to whether or not teachers should adopt explicit language terminology when discussing language with their pupils. 1. The Traditional Grammar Approach At the end of the 1950s, pupils were drilled in grammatical analysis of sentences and parsing of 'parts of speech' from upper primary until the final stages of compulsory schooling, and this grammatical prowess was tested in British public examinations at ages 16 or 17. The Bullock Report said of the GCE 'O'-level examination papers established in the early 1920s: Forty years later, in the early sixties, they had changed little. There was a precis, letter writing,
paraphrase, analysis and other grammatical exercises, the correction of incorrect sentences, the punctuation of depunctuated passages, and, of course, an essay. [For an example of a typical paper, see Keith 1990.] (Department of Education and Science 1975: 177) Such a catalog of activities obviously goes well beyond grammatical analysis, broadly defined by Bullock as: 'an analytical study of those formal arrangements of items in a language by which utterances have meaning' (Department of Education and Science 1975: 169). Yet the emphasis on the eradication of grammatical solecism, and on the practice of punctuation, is what is often popularly meant by 'grammar' teaching. The thinking behind traditional school grammar was essentially prescriptive, in the tradition of eighteenth-century prescriptive grammarians, such as Robert Lowth, and Lindley Murray, who attempted to 'fix' the language by prescribing exactly what constituted correct usage. The traditional school grammars held sway for at least 200 years. They were based on prescriptive attitudes, on forms and rules derived from Latin, and on exercises on the correction of sentences. There were two central assumptions: (a) that there is a correct standard form of the language normally only found in writing; (b) that pupils' development in written linguistic skill depends upon their being taught this grammar explicitly and being trained in its use (see Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar). Despite the pressure of the other approaches from 1960 to 1990, the traditional grammar alternative has still survived in many schools. The Bullock Report's survey (Department of Education and Science 1975) found that 82 percent of all 9-year olds surveyed spent at least half-an-hour per week on grammar and punctuation exercises. Twenty years later, in a survey of 10 local education authorities carried out by the Schools Curriculum and
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Teaching Language Assessment Authority (SCAA) from 1995 to 1997, it was found that 'explicit planning was patchy and that much coverage was implicit.' Yet the survey did show that, in relation to phrase, clause, and sentence structure, about one-third of schools at Key Stage 2 (ages 8-11) and about one-quarter at Key Stage 3 (ages 1114) included all the aspects set out for the English Order of the National Curriculum (SCAA 1995). In relation to the grammatical functions of words, about one-third of Key Stage 2 reported covering these and in Key Stage 3 less than half the schools referred to all the categories of words in their schemes of work. Although this situation is hardly satisfactory in the light of the requirements of the English Order, it does suggest that the reaction against traditional grammar which apparently held sway throughout the 1970s and 1980s in England and Wales, did not mean, by the 1990s, the wholesale disappearance of traditional grammar teaching from schools. 2. Reactions Against the Traditional Grammar Approach In the early 1960s in Britain the dominance of traditional grammar in English mother tongue teaching was weakened by several pressures, central among which was teachers' dissatisfaction with activities which were boring for pupils and unrelated to the development of skill in writing. This stance was supported by the findings of a number of research projects which questioned the assumption that formal grammar instruction leads to a development of written language skills (e.g., Macaulay 1947). Later the work of Elley and his associates in New Zealand, on a longitudinal study involving traditional grammar, transformational grammar, and a control group, showed that 'English Grammar, whether traditional or transformational, has virtually no influence on the language growth of typical secondary school students' (see Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue)}. Another major factor leading to the reaction against traditional grammar in England and Wales was the growth of interest in the 'creative writing' approach, whereby the child's potential for creativity was to be fostered through a series of motivating experiences involving widespread exposure to talking, reading, and writing. 'Fluency' was to be encouraged; consequently, teachers were careful to avoid attempts to 'correct' or 'improve' the child's creation, either during or after the act of writing. This doctrine fueled the extreme reaction against the traditional approach which was outlined above, although it survived within 'O'-level examinations. 3. Operational and Explicit Knowledge of Language The assumption that direct teaching of grammar as an end in itself will lead to improvement in writing is contradicted by the view stated in a bulletin of the 394
Scottish Central Committee on English (1972), The Teaching of English Language: . *.. The sorts of language work described here will be facilitated by the use of a suitable grammatical vocabulary, some of which will have been acquired earlier by means of 'mention'... The vital point is that grammatical terminology should be produced only in response to need. The grammar to be taught should be limited only to what pupil and teacher require. Scottish Central Committee on English (1972: 22) Grammatical concepts and terminology may be drawn upon by teachers as they discuss with pupils what meaning is being created in written texts, and how it is being created, but this is not the same as teaching grammar on the assumption that the pupil has to be taught the forms in order to be able to use them. This latter point implies a key distinction between 'operational' (implicit) and 'explicit' knowledge of language. As the Scottish Bulletin explains, 'the knowledge of his language which the schoolchild possesses is an operational one ... His knowledge of language allows him to use it but not to describe how he uses it.' Herein lies the confusion in popular claims that children must be 'taught the rules of grammar' if they are to 'improve' their use of English. In fact, they potentially 'know' most of the grammar already; what they have to be taught is how to utilize this knowledge appropriately. In such teaching it may be beneficial for teachers to draw upon grammatical terminology, if they consider it appropriate. This alternative view of the role of grammar became a central feature of one strand of the language-study-based approach (see Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness). 4. 'Linguistic' Approaches to Grammar Teaching
By the early 1960s, the reaction within academic linguistics in the USA against the 'unscientific' and 'notional' basis of traditional grammars, coupled with the growth of Structural Linguistics, led to an upsurge of structuralist-based grammar teaching in American and Scottish schools. There was an emphasis on Pattern Grammar, as characterized in Roberts' Patterns of English (1959), where the focus was upon structural patterns, with a minimal discussion of parts of speech. This 'cut-and-dried,' 'scientific' grammar had an appeal for school teachers, despite its lack of subtlety in relation to meaning. Similarly, there was Scottish interest in Hallidayan Scale and Category grammar, which supplied teachers with a new 'linguistic' grammar to replace the traditional one in classroom teaching. In the early 1960s, questions in the Scottish Higher English examination on structural patterns and on such 'nonacademic' texts as an advertisement
Grammar in British Schools and a knitting pattern created an outcry from traditionalists. In the USA, in the later 1960s TransformationalGenerative Grammar began to replace structural grammar as the preferred model in American schools. For example, Roberts (1964) produced a secondary textbook, and Thomas (1964) a textbook for teachers and student-teachers, both of which were based on transformational grammar. Nevertheless, this development in the USA did not lead to the establishment of transformational grammar in British schools at all, perhaps because of the complex demands it made upon both teachers and pupils. It is worth noting, first, that all these developments still rested firmly on the assumption that grammatical structures should be taught in classrooms; and second, that these ideas, while popular in the USA and Scotland, did not become prominent in England and Wales. Throughout the 1960s, in fact, there was a considerable gulf between the broad approach of progressive teachers in England and Wales and those in the USA and Scotland. In England, 'creative writing' approaches and 'Leavisite' views of the central importance of literature as a moral and linguistic developmental force held sway, coupled with an extreme antipathy to anything remotely connected with grammar teaching—a state of affairs commented upon by a group of American teachers who toured Britain in 1968 for a comparative study of the two systems (Wilkinson 1969). 5. Approaches Based on Language Studies Two other approaches to language teaching which developed in the 1960s became prominent during the 1970s and 1980s. They were two strands of the language-study-based approach, with one taking an implicit, and the other an explicit, approach to discussing langauge with pupils. The 'implicit' approach was associated with the work of people like Douglas Barnes, James Britton, John Dixon, and Harold Rosen. This approach saw the development of the child, as language user and mature human being, as being rooted in 'exploratory talk' and 'expressive writing,' as the child strove to find his individual 'voice' and in the process developed as a person. Its proponents saw literature and language study as equally important in this process but they took a stance against the explicit and systematic use of terminology from linguistics, basing their views on scholars such as the psychologist Vygotsky. They concentrated on developing their own eclectic approaches to how meanings are made in talk and writing. This view can be summarized as: Discussion of the audience's needs and whether they are being fulfilled is often valuable, but this is discussion in terms of content or style. Such discussion, though it necessarily refers to par-
ticular features in texts, need not demand that pupils first master an extensive generalised system for describing those features. Barnes(1988: 37-38) The 'explicit' strand of the language-study-based approach had its genesis in the Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching, directed by Halliday at University College Longon, from 1964 to 1969 (see Schools Council UK). This developed an approach which drew directly upon the insights of linguistics and considered their implications for mother-tongue teaching. The Language in Use materials which emerged from this program set out a variety of activities which involve pupils in investigations into a wide range of aspects of language as it is used in society: the relations between spoken and written language; language in social situations; patterning in language, etc. (Doughty et al., 1971). The focus is not upon 'teaching grammar' but creating knowledge for pupils about language as they meet it in daily life, and upon their using a range of registers as they investigate these concerns. The Bullock Report (Department of Education and Science 1975) broadly supported both these strands, although it is fair to say that its basic philosophy was closer to the Barnes-Britton alternative (see English Teaching in England and Wales). Nevertheless, the Bullock Committee took a broadly similar stance to the Scottish Central Committee on English (1972) on 'explicit rules and facts about language,' saying that these have direct practical value to pupils when they solve particular problems on the tasks they are engaged on, or when pupils are able to reconstruct for themselves the analysis that led to the rule. The views of the Bullock Committee were summed up thus: What we are suggesting then, is that children should learn about language by experiencing it and experimenting with its use. There will be occasions when the whole class might receive specific instruction in some aspect of language. More frequently however, the teacher will operate on the child's language competence at the point of need by individual or small group discussion. As a background to all this activity, he should have in his own mind a clear picture of how far and in what directions this competence should be extended. (Department of Education and Science 1975: 173-74) 6. The Role of the Teacher The question of the teacher's knowledge introduces two key, related, questions: (a) how far teachers, as opposed to pupils can benefit from an explicit knowledge based on the insights of language study; (b) how far and in what circumstances they should make that knowledge explicit to pupils. The debate which
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Teaching Language developed in the 1970s between the Language in Use team and the linguist Crystal (1976) centred on the issue of how far teachers would have to be trained in linguistics in order to work with Language in Use successfully. Certainly, the Kingman Report, published in 1988, saw the issue of training teachers in knowledge about language as a main priority and the LINC (Language in the National Curriculum) inservice training project in England and Wales was a direct response to this need (see English Teaching in England and Wales). The LINC team questioned the making of a clear distinction between 'implicit' and 'explicit' approaches. The project's director, Carter summed up their position: 'It would be wrong to assume that conscious knowledge operates independently of unconscious knowledge,; there is a constant interplay and interaction between different modes of knowing and explicit, analytical attention to language can and should serve to deepen intuitions' (Carter 1990: 18). Carter and his associates, in fact, believe in the coming together of the two strands of the language-study-based approach in the development of the overall language awareness of the pupil. Certainly, it is important that the teacher should have a clear awareness of how grammatical features serve to create meaning in a text: say, how strings of premodifiers in a noun phrase can create a sense of density and impressive technicality in a car advertisement (as in 'the BMW Motronic digital engine management computer'). The teacher can then decide how far he or she wishes to draw upon such awareness explicitly in discussion with pupils, but it is important that the teacher can clearly see how such grammatical features serve to create relevant meaning in texts. Hasan proposes three levels of literacy: 'recognition literacy,' 'action literacy,' and 'reflection literacy.' These are, in effect, three types of learning outcome, which can drive the approaches of teachers of language. Recognition literacy is the focus upon the recognition of language forms and the labeling of them as ends in themselves—upon isolated sound-symbol correspondences in early reading, upon parsing of parts of speech, and analysis of clauses in traditional grammar. Hasan points out that this kind of language activity 'is a conception of language far removed from social semiotic practice, that is, from the making of meanings which serve out social purposes in life' (Hasan 1996: 388). The latter is largely what she means by 'action literacy.' Yet this is not seen as a denial of the relevance of explicit knowledge of language. As she says, 'It is important to note ... that in order to achieve the goals of action literacy, pupils will need to have internalised the sorts of information that form the content of recognition literacy: they will need to be able to recognise the relations between the written shape and the spoken words, and they will need to know about the lexicogrammar. But there is a crucial difference. In action literacy, all this learning will be harnessed to some act of meaning' (Hasan 1996: 401).
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Hasan also questions recognition literacy on the grounds that it creates a passive, unreflecting view of literacy: 'Logically, the ideals of recognition literacy demand pupils who are not likely to ask questions, who are willing to follow wherever authority in the guise of the teacher leads them; they have to be pupils who do not expect their educational knowledge of language to have any direct relevance to what they do with language in the living of their life' (Hasan 1996: 391). This leads us to Hasan's third level of literacy, 'reflection literacy,' which advocates that we need to enable pupils to produce, rather than to reproduce knowledge, by developing in them 'the ability to reflect, to enquire, to analyse and to challenge' (Hasan 1996: 411). At first sight this seems very similar to the stance of the Bullock report, but Hasan advocates an explicit approach to the ways in which language operates to create meaning in texts. She explains it thus: To put a question to a text—to ask why the said is being said, what it implies, and on what grounds— calls for a much deeper understanding of language as a resource for meaning. So teachers will need to sensitise pupils to not simply the overall structure of the text ..., they would also be concerned to show what alternative ways there are of saying the "same thing." The point is that one can never say exactly the same thing using a different wording, so in fact the teachers will need to make pupils aware of the sorts of difference in meaning that may arise from putting it one way as opposed to another ... It is from this kind of deeper understanding of what 'the' text means that we can move to explanation questions.' For example, in the discussion of the noun phrase from the car advertisement above, the teacher could encourage enquiry into ways in which the same component could have been described in different ways in other contexts; the implications of this type of writing for the exploitation of potential consumers; the nature of jargon as opposed to technical language; the role of advertising in our society, etc. The approach to teaching outlined here, however, assumes considerable knowledge on the part of teachers, and we must now consider the level of teachers' grammatical knowledge in Britain at the end of the twentieth century. During the 1990s a number of surveys investigated the extent of teachers' and student teachers' knowledge of grammar in England and Wales. For instance, a detailed study of student teacher attitudes by Williamson and Hardman (1995) concluded that 'while the questionnaire only looked at grammar at the sentence level, which should constitute only one part of a wider framework of language study, it does reveal significant gaps in the student teachers' knowledge, although it is not as low as some critics might have us believe. It also reveals misconceptions and the lack of a metalanguage for talking about and analysing language use' (Williamson and Hardman 1995: 129).
Grammar in British Schools The SCAA survey (1995-97), which investigated teachers' confidence in planning for and teaching aspects of grammar, showed fairly similar results. 'The teachers acknowledged the limitations of not having a technical language to explain grammar, although such terms as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction and tense were widely used' (QCA 1998: 26). The QCA paper on the survey comments that 'although teachers at both key stages felt confident teaching at whole text level, this confidence did not extend to phrase, clause and sentence structure, either related to reading or in pupils' own writing. Sentence structure was found to be the least systematically covered in planning at both key stages,' and 'the levels of confidence recorded for their knowledge of, and ability to teach, sentence structure were considerably lower than for any other aspect of the survey, except identifying modal verbs' (QCA 1998: 27). Clearly, teachers, at preservice and in-service stages, need considerable input in relation to both grammatical descriptions and teaching methodology. On the latter point, the QCA paper reported that 'many (schools) commented on the difficulty of finding effective strategies for teaching sentence structure and grammatical terminology in the context of pupils' reading and writing' (QCA 1998: 34). 7. Developments Since the Bullock Report The years since the publication of the Bullock Report have seen a range of developments relating to the place of grammar in English teaching, and these can be summarized in relation to the outline in the Cox Report of the kind of grammatical description which is now considered relevant: It should be: (1) A form of grammar which can describe language in use; (2) Relevant to all levels from the syntax of sentences through to the organization of substantial texts; (3) Able to describe the considerable differences between spoken and written English; (4) Part of a wider 'syllabus of language study'. [see English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales); Department of Education and Science 1989: 4.28; see also Reading Difficulties] The first point refers to the need for grammatical descriptions which are functional or communicative, in that they are oriented to describing how meanings are created within various contexts of language use (for a survey of such grammars see Mittins 1988; for exemplars see Department of Education and Science 1989). Such grammars are useful for the teacher insofar as they show how meaning is created within specific texts in particular registers. Perhaps the most useful is Halliday's Systemic-Functional model, which underpins much Australian work aimed at the development and assessment of children's writing within specific
genders in primary schools (see Christie 1986; Martin and Rothery 1986). The second point builds upon the development since the early 1970s of studies in discourse analysis, or how sentences are related to each other in whole texts. This approach has taken grammar beyond the confines of the sentence to provide a more informed basis for teachers helping pupils to improve both the structure of their writing and the cohesive linkage of their sentences. The third point highlights the growing importance of spoken English, which has led to the examining of talking and listening in both GCSE English in England and Wales and Standard Grade English in Scotland. Also in Scotland, from 1999 onwards, the new national examination framework, 'Higher Still,' would include assessment of speaking and listening at all levels throughout the upper stages of secondary. This interest in the spoken word has led to a great deal more analysis in schools of spoken English grammar and its comparison with written English, sometimes through transcripts collected by pupils or students themselves (see Oracy). On the nature of spoken langauge and its relationship with written language, Halliday has reminded us of the richness of unselfconscious spoken langauge. '... it is only in the most spontaneous, un-self-monitored kinds of discourse that a speaker stretches his semantic resources to the utmost ... it is in unconscious spoken language that we typically find the truly complex sentences' (Halliday 1988: 38). The educational implication therefore is that teachers ought to enable pupils to develop this potential richness of language use and to take part in investigating it. In another important paper, Halliday also identifies the changing nature of the relationship between spoken and written language in the modern world of word processing and instant playbacks. Yet, as he says, 'it is not ... a question of neutralising the difference between written language and spoken. What the technology is doing is creating the material conditions for interaction between the two, from which some new forms of discourse will emerge' (Halliday 1996: 356). Therefore, the enhanced position of spoken language in schools must take full account of these factors. The fourth point focuses attention on various initiatives aimed at developing investigative language studies of various kinds, under the aegis of the Joint Matriculation Board version of 'A'-level English Language (for an example of a paper, and an account of developments in this area, see Keith 1990). Among other activities, this work involved the comparative study of dialect variety. Similar investigations were encouraged in work within multilingual schools by Richmond (1982), Houlton (1985), and others. The growth of interest in comparative and investigative approaches to language was also fostered in the 1980s by the Language Awareness' movement, which, as the 397
Teaching Language name implies, aimed to increase pupils' awareness of language throughout the secondary curriculum (see Language Awareness). 8. The Situation in the 1990s: The Return of Traditional Grammar At the end of the 1980s, despite a political climate which favored a return to the traditional grammar approach, two official reports which focused on this topic for England and Wales, and the equivalent official publication for Scotland (Scottish Office Education Department 1991), put forward a view which was closer to the 'explicit' strand of the languagestudy-based approach. They advocated that teachers should have a broadly based and accurate knowledge of language, and gave explicit guidance as to which concepts and terms should be introduced at which stages. There is in fact a surprising degree of unanimity among all the official reports on the value of what the Scottish bulletin called 'a grammar of mention,' although Bullock (Department of Education and Science 1975) adopted a rather more 'implicit' stance. After the LINC materials were produced, the British government of the time refused to publish or support them, presumably because they were not sufficiently traditional in language model or methodology. From that point onward, government policy in this area was aimed at ensuring that all primary teachers and all secondary English specialists in England and Wales would teach traditional grammar, directed at developing competence in standard English, on a regular and systematic basis. Williamson and Hardman (1995: 118) say of the revisions to the National Curriculum revised Orders that 'they place more emphasis on the need to teach standard spoken and written English and the rules of English grammar to all pupils.' They go on to add that the revisions 'also include more explicit grammatical terminology as part of a 'parts of speech' approach than was the case in the original Cox curriculum.' After several proposals and revisions, then, the final text of the English Order was published in January 1995, in a form which related the development of language to the study and use of texts in context (including pupils' own texts) but which also specified the grammatical terms and concepts which would be taught. Part of the Order for Writing at Key Stage 2 and Writing at Key Stages 3 and 4 (ages 11-16) is included here, to give an impression of the approach to grammar which is being proposed (QCA 1998: 22, 24). In the full Order much more is included about vocabulary and about the varieties and historical development of English. Writing (Key Stage 2) (as in the Order) (a) Pupils should be given opportunities to reflect on their use of language, beginning to differentiate between spoken and written forms. They should 398
be given opportunities to consider how written standard English varies in degrees of formality, (b) Pupils should be given opportunities to develop their understanding of the grammar of complex sentences, including clauses and phrases. They should be taught how to use paragraphs, linking sentences together coherently. They should be taught to use the standard written forms of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and verb tenses. Writing (Key Stages 3 and 4) (a) Pupils should be encouraged to be confident in the use of formal and informal written and standard English, using the grammatical, lexical, and orthographic features of standard English, except where nonstandard forms are required for the effect or technical reasons. They should be taught about the variation in the written forms and how these differ from spoken forms and dialects. (b) Pupils should be encouraged to broaden their understanding of the principles of sentence grammar and be taught to organize whole texts effectively. Pupils should be given opportunities to analyze their own writing, reflecting on the meaning and clarity of individual sentences, using appropriate terminology, and so be given opportunities to learn about: discourse structure—the structure of whole texts; paragraph structure; how different types of paragraph are formed, openings and closings in different kinds of writing; phrase, clause, and sentence structure—the use of complex grammatical structures and the linking of structures through appropriate connectives; the use of main and subordinate clauses and phrases; words—components including stem, prefix, suffix, inflection; grammatical functions of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and demonstratives; punctuation—the use of the full range of punctuation marks. Perhaps surprisingly, the change of government in Britain in May 1997 did not lead to any appreciable change in the above policy; in fact, the move towards a situation in which all teachers in England and Wales taught grammar was probably accelerated, and certainly made more effective. One key feature of the new government's approach was the National Literacy Strategy, initiated in August 1997. The central component of this strategy was the setting up of the National Literacy Hour, wherein all primary schools—apart from those which could demonstrate an equally worthwhile alternative strategy—would set aside one hour per day in each class for specified
Grammar in British Schools language development activities embracing reading, writing, and involving whole-class teaching, together with group and individual work. Within this structured daily hour there was to be, at Key Stage 2, approximately 15 minutes of whole class teaching devoted to a balance over the term of focused word work or sentence work, with 15 minutes on shared text work (reading and writing). There would also be 20 minutes devoted to individual and group work on texts or word and sentence work and 10 minutes whole-class work on review of points covered. Each term's work is set out in a series of closely linked objectives for a particular range of reading and writing, organised in three 'strands' for word level; sentence level and text level. 'Sentence Level' involves 'grammatical awareness and sentence construction and punctuation' (DfEE 1998). Several other government-inspired initiatives were developed by various official agencies from 1995, with the aim of developing teachers' language awareness, particularly in relation to grammar. The first of these involved the survey of teachers' confidence and awareness of language in relation to teaching, carried out by the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority from 1995 to 1997. This also included the series of papers produced for teachers by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in 1998, which have been frequently referred to in this article (QCA 1998). Third, the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) produced a series of papers aimed at enabling teachers to assess their own level of awareness and competence in language teaching (TTA 1998). The second initiative aimed at raising teachers' language awareness was the Initial Teacher Training National Curriculum for primary English. This is set out in three sections, viz. Section A: what trainee teachers must be taught during their training courses in order to understand how to develop children's abilities to use English effectively. Section B: the teaching and assessment methods which trainee teachers must be taught and be able to use. Section C: the knowledge and understanding of English which trainee teachers need to underpin their teaching of primary English. 9. The Situation in the 1990s: Developments in Scotland The Scottish guidelines for English Language (SOEID 1991) advocated a staged introduction to grammatical terms, identified within the Knowledge about Language strand of the Writing outcome. Pupils would be expected to be familiar with the main parts of speech by Level D (years 4-6) and with 'subject', 'predicate,' and 'clause' by Level E years 6-9). Terms for aspects of textual organization, namely, 'para-
graph,' 'topic sentence,' 'evidence,' were also required by Level E. The guidelines state that 'the terms included in this strand will enable pupils to understand aspects of the activities in the (other) strands (of Writing). They should be taught within the contexts of such activities and reinforced through regular use' (SOEID 1991: 48). Thus, the approach as set out in the guidelines is broadly similar to that of the English Order for England and Wales, but without the indepth prescription of the details and phasing of KAL which is seen in the National Literacy Strategy objectives (DfEE 1998). Moreover, in 1998, in the teaching approaches suggested for the new upper secondary national examination framework for English ('Higher Still'), a broadly similar approach to that set out in the National Curriculum English Order is proposed. For example, with reference to the Intermediate Level 2 (Pre higher) and Higher assessments, the teaching approaches for Literacy Study suggest that: 'In order to respond with maturity to the language use of others, the student should be familiar with: (a) language varieties (for example, register, dialect, standard and nonstandard forms, Scots language forms, changing forms of language); (b) classification of language (for example, noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, article, sentence, clause, phrase/group); (c) conventions of written language; (d) critical terminology., The proposals go on much in the tradition of the grammar of mention: 'Whilst appropriate contexts for developing knowledge may occur as a result of unit/course activities, some direct teaching such as modelling or explanation of concepts may be required. The emphasis should then shift to students demonstrating increasing independence in applying methods taught and knowledge acquired to the texts being studied' Scottish CCC, 1998). Consultation with HM Inspectors for Schools in Scotland suggested that, in the late 1990s and thereafter, the focus for staff development was to continue along the same lines. For instance, Inspectorate comments on secondary English teaching (SOEID, forthcoming) would advocate more frequent close reading of all kinds of texts for the analysis of meaning, and to develop language awareness and appreciation of the writer's craft. Moreover, in an initiative reminiscent of the Language Awareness movement, joint staff development guidelines for Modern Language and English Language, for both primary and secondary sectors, would be produced. These would set out common aims for these two modes of language teaching and indicate for the two modes the parallel activities through which these common aims could best be achieved. This approach would, it was hoped, encourage cooperation
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Teaching Language between teachers with an interest in both mothertongue and second-language teaching (including both foreign languages and ethnic minority languages). The two sides of the approach would be complementary in that, for modern langauge teachers, it would emphasize the importance of language in meaningful contexts and, for mother-tongue teachers, it would emphasize both the identification of specific language forms and their appropriate use in texts, and perhaps also an approach to language learning based on investigation and language games. All these aspects, particularly investigations and games, feature in the modern strategies which will be outlined in Sect. 10. This worthwhile Scottish staff development initiative may well lead to the widespread use of a similar approach within English teaching in Scotland. 10. Late Twentieth Century Developments: A Commentary
This commentary will consider some of the issues raised by the approaches to school grammar teaching advocated in Britain at the end of the twentieth century, and then outline various specific strategies utilized at that time for raising the level of grammatical awareness in school students. (a) The Relevance of Explicit A wareness of Grammar. The QCA paper commenting upon the requirements of the English Order (QCA 1998), in common with most of the other official pronouncements mentioned in this article, makes a clear distinction between 'implicit knowledge' and 'explicit knowledge' of language. Unfortunately, this central distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge does not always feature clearly in the actual language of the English Order, at least for Key Stage 2. Yet it is a crucial issue for teaching of grammar, as the Scottish bulletin clearly explains. It is reasonable for Carter to view the growth of explicit knowledge as a process which interacts and overlaps with implicit knowledge, but it is unhelpful to blur the distinction or ignore it, as such a stance probably leads to the folk-linguistic myth that we cannot really expect competence in grammar unless we 'know the grammar.' (b) Conscious and Unconscious Use of Language. This aspect raises another pertinent issue: that if explicit knowledge of language is to influence use of language, that use of language must be, or become, conscious, at least for a time. Yet Halliday (1988) reminds us that the complex, dynamic, creative language that we use unconsciously in spontaneous speech depends upon our unconscious grasp of grammar; whereas the typical language of writing or prepared speech depends upon lexis and a dense but usually less complex grammar, and is usually more of a conscious process. Halliday sums up his view thus: 'Our ability to use language depends critically on our not being conscious of doing so—which is the truth that every 400
language learner has to discover, and the contradiction from which every language teacher has to escape' (Halliday 1988: 38). Certainly, the production of effective writing may become a largely unconscious process for us, but in order to achieve this, we need to have internalized all the language features which would make that writing appropriate. Thus, features of written language can be identified consciously (with or without labeling) and then become internalized through practice within meaningful contexts, so that their use becomes unconscious within the writing process. Yet the central aim of teaching grammar in relation to writing is to extend pupils' writing skills by the use of certain grammatical features which are appropriate or effective within writing contexts—and to achieve that we may teach pupils to label those features so as to facilitate discussion of their use; the aim is not to teach the labeling of those features as an end in itself. At times in the National Literacy Strategy objectives, however, the aim does seem to be the acquisition of terminology for features which most pupils can already use unconsciously in speech or writing; for example, the teaching of adverbs (Year 4 Term 1, DfEE 1998: 38) and the focus on word-endings, coupled with the point 'that these are important clues for identifying word classes' (Year 4 Term 2, DfEE 1998: 42). (c) The Place of Terminology. The emphasis placed by the English Order and the QCA papers on the need for pupils to use grammatical terminology correctly seems misplaced for various reasons, viz. (i) The central argument for explicit knowledge about language by pupils is that they should acquire awareness of the nature and functions of the concept or class being focused upon, and not that they should be able to label it with the 'correct' term. It is awareness of the class and its functions that matters, and not that we use an official or traditional label. An approach which focuses clearly on developing awareness of grammatical concepts and classes, while introducing terminology as and when it makes sense is that outlined by Crinson, describing his work with Year 3 pupils (Crinson 1997-99). (ii) Another difficulty with the approach of the Order to terminology is that different terms may be used by linguists for the 'same' class of units, or they may be subdivided in various ways. For example, the terms 'conjunct,' 'conjunctive,' 'connective,' 'link word,' 'sentence adjunct,' and 'sentence adverbial' can all be found being used to refer to items like 'however,' 'nevertheless,' and 'therefore.' (iii) A related difficulty with the approach to terminology of the Order is that linguists, struggling with the meaningful categorization of the richness of language patterning, often use terminology in a fairly cavalier fashion. Hudson (1992) for instance, presenting grammar to teachers for use in the National Curriculum, makes remarks such as This isn't a stan-
Grammar in British Schools dard name, but it will do for the time being, and it illustrates the need to invent new terminology at times.' The investigative, creative approach to grammar operated by linguists—so different from the 'tablets of stone' approach to grammar of school grammar syllabuses—means that terms may refer to aspects of grammar which are, in some important grammatical models, done very differently. (iv) Most pertinent to this discussion, however, is the absence in the proposed terminology of a 'group' or 'phrase' level of structure, having its own distinctive structure and operating in certain ways within the clause. Crinson's approach, described above, focuses pupils' attention on the structure of noun and verb phrases with their headwords and modifiers operating in various ways. This is one key weakness of the National Literacy Strategy approach: the phrase or group level is not seen as the fulcrum of the patterning of clauses, and phrase structures mainly appear only as incidental extensions of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. For all the apparent theoretical neutrality, then, this is a fairly serious theoretical flaw in the National Literacy Strategy approach to grammatical awareness. (v) In an important article, Halliday raises an even more fundamental objection to the traditional approach to grammatical categories as seen in the National Literacy Strategy, namely that defining formal categories is an essentially limiting and superficial activity which does not allow us access to the lexicogrammatical and semantic richness of the English language. Obviously we cannot expect pupils to engage in systemic functional linguistics as such, but Halliday's approach suggests that the richness of the grammar cannot be opened up to pupils' awareness by identifying parts of speech but by an engagement with how grammatical structures work within whole texts, creating certain kinds of meaning appropriate to those texts. Thus it is particularly unfortunate that the textual possibilities which are opened up within the Text Level Strand of the National Literacy Strategy objectives are not supported by a functional or communicative grammar which at least to some extent would allow these possibilities to be explored by pupils in explicit terms. Moreover, the model advocated in the National Literacy Strategy makes no real concessions to the grammar of spoken English, as was advocated in the Cox Report. (d) Grammar and Texts. The NATE Position Paper on grammar (NATE 1997) emphasizes that the grammar pupils learn about should relate to their own texts: 'Pupils need to develop a vocabulary with which to talk about language, but it is important that it should arise from reflection on their own speaking, reading and writing and not simply be taught out of context' (NATE 1997: 2).
In fact, the National Curriculum and the National Literacy Strategy do take this stance, to some extent. Moreover, the National Literacy Strategy objectives do make links between the development of grammatical awareness and how grammar is utilized in texts, linking with pupil work in reading and writing at text level; for example, Year 4 Term 1, Sentencelevel work: 'e.g. narrative in past tense, explanations in present tense, e.g., "when the circuit is ...'" DfEE 1998: 38). Yet the Sentence-level and the Text-level strands are not helpfully or consistently linked, with the result that the impression is frequently given that the grammar of parts of speech is being taught for its own sake. For instance, adjectives are to be examined and their use encouraged in the writing of descriptive texts as a central feature, whereas it would be preferable to make the central perspective that of the language features which create meaning in descriptive texts rather than, apparently, the other way around, starting with adjectives. Thus, as an alternative approach, the genre of descriptions, including reports, could be regarded as using attributive clauses with linking verbs and adjectives ('my friend is tall') but only as one typical feature of such texts. Certainly, in Year 6 Term 3 of the National Literacy Strategy objectives there is to be revision of 'the language conventions and grammatical features of the different types of text' (DfEE 1998: 54), but nevertheless this linkage, together with the primacy of text, could be more prominently and regularly emphasized, and, as was indicated above, more textual awareness could be created by the use of a more textually-oriented grammar. (e) Ways of Teaching Grammar. One of the obvious issues in this area is how we actually teach grammar in terms of strategies and organization. The essential problem is clearly stated in QCA Paper 1: 'How can grammar teaching be systematic and progressive if it is only taught when it arises... in the context of pupils' own work. At the same time, how can a systematic grammar avoid being a study of form, divorced from the living language it is meant to represent?' QCA 1998: 16). One answer to the problem is provided by Keith in the following terms: 'What is needed for today's students is a semi-contextualised approach in which their explorations can move in and out of contexts in the manner of good scientific learning or learning a second language' (Keith 1994: 69). This kind of approach is now encouraged in a wide range of grammar courses for schools which appeared after 1990 (Keith 1994; Bain and Bain 1996; Bishop 1996; Bain and Bridgewood 1998). As Keith says, this approach, where issues are introduced and then arise in texts (or vice versa), is normal practice in each Modern Language and EFL teaching. This kind of two-way approach is demonstrated in the National Literacy Strategy in-service materials and is implied 401
Teaching Language but not made explicit in the National Literacy Strategy objectives. (f) Discovery and Problem-solving Approaches. Several linguists writing about the teaching of grammar have objected to the dogmatic and simplistic approach they see in most school grammars and have advocated approaches based on investigating grammar, discovering patterns, or solving problems. Hudson, for instance, suggests that pupils discover for themselves general language patterns in material presented by the teacher. He gives an example of starting to teach wordclasses by presenting only the words 'dung,' 'clung,' and 'hung' and having the pupils create as many as possible from these words. From the two possible grammatical combinations the pupils should discover that English words are of at least two different kinds, and thus, as Hudson says 'we have started to discover some word clauses' (Hudson 1992: 8-9). Cameron (1997) and Hudson (1992) show the value of discovering language patterns for oneself and also the problem that the complexity of language at times outstrips the grammatical apparatus that we normally supply to pupils for dealing with it. Yet the fact remains that most teachers will not feel confident in dealing with problematical areas in grammar and thus, despite the strength of these arguments, an approach which focuses on grammatical problems as such is not likely to be embraced by many teachers. (g) Focus on Ways of Expressing Meanings. One approach to grammar which is currently much underused in school grammar courses for mother-tongue teaching is described by Halliday thus: 'A language is interpreted as a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which meanings can be realised. The question is rather: "how are these meanings be expressed?" This puts the forms of language in a different perspective: as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves' (Halliday 1994: xiv). In the 1990s, this kind of approach was more common in second language teaching, where students often consider various ways of expressing the same thing and the different implications that these entail. Yet, in mother-tongue teaching too, this approach would be worthwhile, not least because it would focus on language choice in writing at the point at which that choice is probably most conscious. (h) Strategies. In the 1990s, the renewed interest in creating worthwhile grammar activities led to a range of worthwhile course materials aimed at involving pupils meaningfully. The range of strategies adopted can perhaps be adequately reflected through the list of strategies (slightly adapted and expanded here) provided in Bain and Bridgewood (1998). Playing detectives, e.g., spotting parts of speech in pupils' own reading and writing. Making lists, e.g., brainstorming lists of specific parts of speech used in particular contexts, or in Crinson's approach: listing forms of verb tenses used in three different types of text.
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Finding patterns and rules from a selected list of words or phrases, e.g., Crinson encouraged pupils to collect verb phrases from two different texts and to try to categorize the types of verb phrase in some way. Predicting and investigating uses of language for types of text, e.g., uses of types of sentences in different types of texts. Exploring unexpected uses of language, e.g., exploring the ways in which advertisements and newspaper headlines break patterns and use ambiguity to achieve effect and to attract the reader's attention. Comparing and contrasting texts, e.g., looking at groups of texts, on the same subject or in different genres, or for different audiences and for different purposes, and considering, in each, the similarities or differences in vocabulary, sentence structure, and organization. Messing about with texts, e.g., selecting, changing, adding, and deleting parts of speech in a given text or in pupils' own writing, or reconstructing cut-up texts to determine organizational strategies. Constructing texts, e.g., following organizational patterns determined through previous investigation of texts, using 'story-boarding' (pictures in sequence) to develop understanding about sentence, paragraph, and narrative structure). Playing Games. There are many activities described in the course materials referred to above which will involve children, through game-playing contexts, in exploring and becoming more aware of aspects of grammatical patterning. At the end of the twentieth century in England and Wales, then, there was a major initiative centred around the National Curriculum Order for English and the National Literacy Strategy for primary schools. Its purpose was to deliver a language curriculum in which grammatical awareness in relation to texts would be widespread and the fine detail of what was to be taught would be stipulated. While the focus upon text-level work was clearly worthwhile, the grammatical approach which was advocated, with its emphasis upon the identification and labeling of word-classes and its lack of focus on phrase and clause structure, and on the richness of spoken and written language, did not adequately equip pupils to engage with the process of meaning-making in texts, with consequent implications for the quality of their literacy, and their lives. Moreover, since the initiative was to be centralized and developed in a 'top-down' fashion, rather than developing from the involvement of coordinators with area groups of teachers, as had been the LINC Project model, its eventual success was hardly guaranteed. Bibliography Bain E, Bain R 1996 The Grammar Book: Finding Patterns— Making Sense. National Association for the Teaching of English, Sheffield, UK
Bain R, Bridgewood M 1998 The Primary Grammar Book. NATE, Sheffield, UK Barnes D 1988 Studying communication or studying language? In: Jones M, West A (eds.) Learning me your Language. Mary Glasgow, London Bishop J (ed.) 1996 Grammar (Mother Tongue) and Language Study at Key Stage One. Scholastic, Leamington Spa, UK Cameron D 1997 A vote of no confidence in SCAA's grammar test. The English and Media Magazine 36: 4-7 Carter R 1990 The new grammar teaching. In: Carter R (ed.) Knowledge About Language and the Curriculum: The LINC Reader. Hodder and Stoughton, London Christie F 1986 Writing in schools: Genetic structures as ways of meaning. In: Couture B (ed.) Functional Approaches to Writing. Frances Pinter, London Crinson J 1997-99 Step-by-step grammar: noun phrases, verb phrases, prepositional phrases, prepositions. The Primary Magazine 2: 4, 5; 3: 1-4; 4: 1, 2 Crystal D 1976 Child Language, Learning and Linguistics. Edward Arnold, London Department for Education and Employment 1998 The National Literacy Strategy: Framework for Teaching. DfEE Publications, Sudbury, UK Department of Education and Science 1975 A Language for Life (The Bullock Report'). HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1989 English for Ages 5 to 16 ('The Cox Report'). HMSO, London Doughty P S, Pearce J, Thornton G 1971 Language in Use. Edward Arnold for the Schools Council, London Halliday M A K 1988 On the affability of grammatical categories. In: Benson J, Cummings, Greaves W (eds.) Linguistics in a Systemic Perspective. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Halliday M A K 1994 Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold, London Halliday M A K 1996 Literacy and linguistics: a functional perspective. In: Hasan R, Williams G (eds.) Literacy in Society, Addison-Wesley Longman, London Hasan R 1996 Literacy, everyday talk and society. In: Hasan R, Williams G (eds.) Literacy in Society. Addison-Wesley Longman, London Houlton D 1985 All Our Languages: A Handbook for the Multilingual Classroom. Edward Arnold, London Hudson R 1992 Teaching Grammar: A Guide for the National Curriculum. Blackwell, London
Keith G 1990 Language study at Key Stage 3. In: Carter R (ed.) Knowledge about Language and the Curriculum: The LINC Reader. Hodder and Stoughton, London Keith G 1994 Get the Grammar. BBC Education, London Macaulay W J 1947 The difficulty of grammar. British Journal of Educational Psychology 17: 153-62 Martin J R, Rothery J 1986 What a functional approach to the writing task can tell teachers about 'good writing.' In: Couture B (ed.) Functional Approaches to Writing. Frances Pinter, London Mittins W 1988 English: Not the Naming of Parts. National Association for the Teaching of English, Sheffield National Association for the Teaching of English 1997 Position Paper: Grammar. NATE, Sheffield, UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority 1998 The Grammar Papers: Perspectives on the Teaching of Grammar in the National Curriculum. QCA Publications, Hayes, Middlesex, UK Richmond J 1982 The Resources of Classroom Language. Edward Arnold, London Roberts P 1959 Patterns of English. Harcourt, Brace and World, New York Roberts P 1964 English Syntax. Harcourt, Brace and World, New York School Curriculum and Assessment Authority 1995 The National Curriculum Orders: English. SCAA, London Scottish Central Committee on English 1972 The Teaching of English Language (Bulletin No. 5). HMSO, Edinburgh Scottish Consultative Curriculum Council 1998 Higher Still: Arrangements for English and Communication. SCCC, Edinburgh Scottish Office Education Department 1991 National Guidelines on English Language 5-14. HMSO Edinburgh Scottish Office Education and Industry Department (forthcoming) Standards and Quality: English in Secondary Schools. HMSO, Edinburgh Teacher Training Agency 1998 Assessing your Needs in Literacy: Needs Assessment Materials for Key Stage 2 Teachers. TTA, London Thomas O 1964 Transformational Grammar and the Teacher of English. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York Wilkinson A M 1969 UK English teaching—An American view. English in Education 3: 122-28 Williamson J, Hardman F 1995 Time for refilling the bath?: a study of primary student teachers' grammatical knowledge. Language and Education 9: 117-34
Grammar (Mother Tongue) R. Dirven
Theories of grammar in theoretical linguistics can have a double influence in the area of applied linguistics: they are felt in the theorizing about foreign language teaching (FLT), and also in some cases in the
actual practice of FLT. The function of grammar and grammar teaching in the process of FLT teaching has been a matter of great controversy: from an all-dominant position in the traditional grammar-translation 403
Teaching Language method, explicit grammar learning and teaching are now completely banned in some theoretical views. But the nature of grammatical meanings is so highly abstract that a sound pedagogical grammar (or pedagogy of grammar) will always be needed by the experienced FL teacher. 1. Different Types of Grammar
The term 'grammar' is polysemous and can be used to refer to different realities such as (a) the rather narrow concept of 'good and correct language use' as laid down in prescriptive grammar, (b) the explicit and descriptive account of the rules and rule complexes of a language, and (c) the 'grammar in the head' or the internalized and unconscious command of the grammar rules. A pedagogical grammar belongs to the second type of grammar, but has the special objective of facilitating the acquisition of grammar in the third sense, that is, the internalized grammar which allows the learner to speak and interact in that language. Descriptive grammar can be either purely scientifically descriptive or else also user-oriented: this is already so in the case of a reference grammar, and certainly in the case of a pedagogical grammar, since here the scientific description is not a purpose in itself, but the starting point for formulating the grammar rules in terms of learning problems. A further distinction can be made between a teaching (or 'didactic') grammar and a learning grammar: a teaching grammar is a preparatory stage at which authentic and multifunctional learning materials (texts, visualizations, exercises, etc.) are generated. A learning grammar contains the selection, gradation, and presentation of rules-in-context for a specific level of learners, viz. beginners, lower or upper intermediate learners, or advanced ones (see Mindt.1981: 32). Corder (1974:172), who was the founding father of one direction in pedagogical grammar, viz. error analysis, saw pedagogical grammar in a broader sense: he proposed replacing the object noun 'pedagogical grammar' by the activity noun the 'pedagogy of grammar,' by which he meant the whole organization of the syllabus which stimulates and triggers the setting up of hypotheses about grammar rules by the learners. This view is directly related to the theories of generative grammar and invites a more general review of the various linguistic theories and their impact on the theorizing and practice of teaching and learning grammars. 2. Formalistic Approaches to Grammar
In its development, grammar theory, whether traditional or modern, has needed a very long time to grow from a formalistic view (traditional, structuralist, and generative grammar) to a more sem404
antically based view (case grammar, communicative grammar, and cognitive grammar). In this section formalistic theories will be examined with respect to their impact on pedagogical grammar. Traditional grammar for centuries concentrated on the parts of speech and was mainly interested in the morphological rules governing word classes. For these phenomena it developed a rich metalanguage or grammatical terminology to speak about the facts of Classical languages and, to a large extent also, of modern Western languages. Just as for the learning of the dead languages, Greek or Latin, modern languages were approached at the morphological level of the regularities and irregularities of word classes. Traditional foreign language learning consisted of learning the rules of grammar as deductive rules which were to be applied in translation exercises. This is known as the grammar-translation method, and it prevailed in foreign language teaching until World War II and in many countries even long after it. Structuralist grammar—in America at least—had as one of its great merits that it widened the scope of linguistic awareness to the level of the sentence as a whole. Its fundamental limitation, however, was that it limited its view of the structure of sentences to a set of fixed sentence patterns (see, for example, Lado and Fries 1961). Combined with behaviorist learning theory, based on stimulus-response processes, the learning of language and grammar was seen as a process of 'drilling' the sentence patterns of the language intensively, so that they became habits. This process of learning as habit formation, known as the audiolingual (or audiovisual) method, found its full application in the language laboratory. This set of single booths with tape recorders offered taped materials to each single learner which he worked through in isolation, at his own speed, and with as many repetitions as he wanted. A more theoretical outcome of structuralist grammar in connection with language learning was contrastive linguistics. By the systematic confrontation or opposition of the structures of the learner's source language and the target language it was hoped that the syllabus could be designed in such a way that one was able to predict where the greatest differences and learning problems were situated and how the target language habits could best be aimed at (see James 1980; also Contrastive and Error Analysis). The audio-lingual or audiovisual method dominated the language teaching scene until the 1970s, when the effects of the generative paradigm in linguistics made itself felt in language teaching. The reaction of generative grammar to behaviorism and structuralist grammar (e.g., Chomsky 1959,1970) has been no less than a revolution. Some of its most antagonistic axioms are the following: (a) language is not a set of habits, but an internalized mental competence, (b) this competence does not come about by
Grammar (Mother Tongue) stimulus-response processes, but by setting up hypotheses about the linguistic input, and (c) the grammar is not a collection of sentence patterns, but a generative rule system which allows the production of an infinite set of ever new sentences. Although Chomsky (1970) in an interview with Stuart Hampshire does not see any direct relevance of generative theory for FLT, several authors suggest a number of practical implications, amongst them especially the need for the provision of a very rich linguistic input (Berndt 1970; Dirven 1972). However, the impact of generative theory is not so much felt on the practical teaching side, as on that of theorizing on it. Corder (1971, 1974) in particular, realizes that the axioms of generative grammar offer the potential for a totally new view of foreign language learning: errors in the learner's performance are not just mistakes in transferring structural elements from the source language to the target language as was predicted by contrastive linguistics; errors are rather hypotheses made by the learners about the target language. It is by testing out each hypothesis that the learner comes to discover the rules of the foreign language and builds up his ever progressing or transitional competence in the target language (see also Selinker 1972, 1989; Nickel 1989). But Corder (1974: 231 ff.) is criticized by Zydatiß for his claim (1971:61) that 'all the learner's utterances are potentially erroneous,' implying that superficial well-formedness is no guarantee that the learner is using the correct rule of the target language. This is a conclusion which is too far removed from the daily practice and progress made in foreign language classes (see Interlanguage). Another, more dramatic, hypothesis based on generative theory is that of the 'naturalistic approach' proposed by Krashen (1981,1982), Dulay et al. (1982), and Krashen and Terrel (1983). Experiments with young children in a natural environment led Dulay et al. to claim that second language (L2) morphology and grammar was acquired in a fixed order and in fact in much the same order as had been discovered for first language (LI) acquisition. From this they concluded that learning of L2 equals that of LI and that consequently teaching formal grammar explicitly has no sense. But some authors, such as Balcom (1985), who accept many of Krashen's views, point out that Krashen emphasizes the necessity of highly comprehensible and appropriately graded input and that this only makes sense if one accepts the fact of explicit grammar teaching since this (a) makes the input signal more comprehensible, (b) helps the learner to segment the incoming speech signals into more efficient units of comprehension, and (c) confirms or disconfirms the learner's hypotheses about the grammar of the target language. All in all, generative grammar has left the teaching world in great doubt about its own practice and put very little methodology in its place. On the contrary, it
has contributed to an enormous split between several aspects of grammar such as between the formal presentation of grammar and the grammar in the head, between a total grammatical competence and an erroneous actual performance, and especially between formal grammar competence and the communicative use of it. In spite of the emphasis on creativity, this creativity was supposed to be beyond the direct control and conscious grasp or understanding of the learner and the teacher. Only less formalistic views of language and grammar can be expected to offer new possibilities. 3. Semantically Based Approaches to Grammar Compared with the impact of these formalistic views of grammar on foreign language pedagogy, the impact of more semantically based views has been growing since the mid-1970s. As already stated, the semantic approach is found in the various versions of case grammar, communicative grammar, and cognitive grammar. Case grammar, or one of its alternatives such as valency grammar, has had a strong attraction for foreign language pedagogy for two reasons. First of all, instead of relying on formal classes only, it combines these with semantic classes such as the human roles of agent (the instigator of an activity or event) and experiencer (the one who is subject to a state); the causal roles of cause, instrument, and means; the object roles of patient, area, and partitive; the essive roles of identification, class, and change of state; the spatiotemporal roles of place, goal, source, path, and time; and the circumstantial roles of manner, accompaniment, measure, result, reason, and consequence (see Radden 1989). The attractiveness of the use of these 20-odd semantic classes is also that not only do several of them occur in the syntactic functions of subjects, objects, or prepositional phrases, but some also as adverbials and even as conjunctions (see Htinig 1989). Case grammar, thus, enables a semantic insight into language which reaches far beyond formal word classes or parts of speech. Another attractive feature of case or valency grammar is its focusing on the verb and its structural possibilities. Whereas each language has tens of thousands of nouns, it only has between 5000 and 10000 verbs and these constitute one of the most central learning problems. The most systematic account of the grammar of the verb is offered in the valency grammar by Helbig and Schenkel (1969). For each verb the possible case roles can be specified and thus a serious grasp of the semantic potential of language becomes possible. This semantic approach is also part and parcel of an even wider view of grammar, known as communicative grammar. Communicative grammar is a somewhat loosely used term aimed at combining semantic approaches 405
Teaching Language following from speech act theory, or pragmatics, and text grammar. It is sometimes referred to as the 'notional-functional syllabus' (Wilkins 1974, 1976) or communicative grammar (Leech and Svartvik 1975). Their overall interest focuses on notional or semantic categories such as those stated in the discussion of case grammar, and on interactive-communicative functions of language-in-use such as stating something, agreeing, persuading, thanking, apologizing, etc. Further systematizations of this type of communicative language teaching are explored in Brumfit and Johnson (1979); Besse (1980); Canale and Swain (1980); Finocchiaro and Brumfit (1983); Johnson (1982); and ZydatiB (1986). In this climate of communicative authenticity, moreover, the use of texts and of text grammar is repeatedly emphasized, for example by Hatch (1978); and Werlich (1980), but astonishingly enough, far less attention is given to sociolinguistic perspectives; an exception is Janicki (1977). Also to be situated in this general Zeitgeist of communicative language teaching is the setting up of a general threshold level of linguistic competence by the Council of Europe (Van Ek 1975; Coste, et al. 1976; Christ 1979). Alongside these more balanced 'communicative approaches' there is also a strong trend towards an autonomous communicative approach without any semantic grammar: though some warnings were voiced early on by Kleineidam (1982) and Rivenc (1982), the trend is stronger than ever and seems to unite with the forces of the 'naturalistic' approach. Still, this trend may be short-lived and miss the deeper meaning of the fundamental insights into the notion of grammar. Cognitive grammar has arisen as a new paradigm in linguistic theory since the mid 1980s and claims a fundamental interaction between language and the other mental capabilities such as perception and cognition. Language is seen as a symbolic unit of form and meaning, whereby meaning is not an autonomous set of purely 'linguistic meanings,' but as the sum of all the concepts needed to symbolize the experiential world and individual interaction with other members of society. In the cognitive view, grammar is seen as an integrative network of many facets and therefore many earlier dichotomies are seen as false dichotomies; these include oppositions such as diachrony versus synchrony, competence versus performance, morphology versus syntax, grammar versus lexis, semantics versus pragmatics, literal language versus figurative language, for example, metaphor. All these facets have been artificially separated from and opposed to each other and the task of linguistic research is to reveal how they overlap and how they are interrelated. The potential of this new theoretical approach for language teaching and especially for pedagogical grammar is only beginning to be realized now (see Dirven 1989, 1990, 1991; Holmes 1988;
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Taylor 1989). A major insight of cognitive grammar is the highly abstract nature of grammatical meanings. In fact, the grammar of each language is claimed to impose a conceptual grid over the expression of its speakers' experiences of the world and of their interaction with their partners in society. Since these 'grammatical' meanings constitute such major learning problems, they will be analyzed in more detail now. 4. The 'Synthetic' or 'Abstract' Nature of Grammatical Meanings It is only by realizing the proper nature of grammatical meanings that it is possible to understand the nature of a pedagogical grammar and the requirements placed on it. In order to understand the essence of grammatical meanings better, these will first be compared to lexical meanings. Both grammatical and lexical meanings are, first of all, similar in a number of respects: thus both grammatical and lexical forms are usually polysemous and the various senses are kept together by what can be called a 'schematic' meaning. The difference between the two is rather in the kind of meaning they denote: lexical items reflect the many single and individual phenomena in the global conceptual system of a cultural community, whereas the grammatical meanings rather reflect the often recurring and repeated facts of a community's experiences. Take the example of the lexical item 'cup,' which has no less than 20 different meanings, all of which denote single entities or states (1). These are linked mainly by two processes, viz. metonymy and metaphor. Extension by metonymy (1) 1) small china drinking vessel 2) its contents, for example, a cup of tea 3) a larger drinking vessel ('chalice') 4) its contents, for example, a cup of wine 5) a state, for example, 'the cup of sorrow' 6) an ornamental prize, for example, 'win the cup' 7) the whole tournament, for example, cup football 8) one part of it, for example, cup final Extension by metaphor, based on 9) acorn cup 10) buttercup 11) 'hip joint' 12) 'socket for capstan' 13) resin cup 14) cup for bleeding 15) heavier foliage in painting 16) hollow in a hill 17) metal container in golfing 18) the cups of a bra 19) a knee cup 20) gloves worn for boxing
form function of receptacle hollow shape inversed form as protection
In contrast with this multitude of single phenomena associated by metonymy or metaphor to one lexical form, grammatical meanings arise through abstract-
Grammar (Mother Tongue) ing away from the single entity, state, or situation, but highlighting the recurring aspects in them such as number, the time factor, the aspect of completeness or incompleteness of the process, the hypothetical or factual character of a situation, the kind of reference, etc. Thus, grammatical meanings are more synthetic in that they grasp what is similar or common in many situations. A clear case in point is the notion of plural, which has a common schematic meaning in each of the following contexts, which differ more or less strongly: (a) with countable nouns such as cups it means 'more than one instance.' (b) with pluralia tantum (nouns which only occur in the plural) such as binoculars, glasses, trousers, panties, etc. it means something like 'composed of more than one element.' (c) with uncountable nouns such as ashes, munitions, billiards, the waters (of an angler's heaven) the plural form implies the meaning of 'a multitude of composing particles or elements.' Note that other languages can have a similar perspectivization of the multitude notion instead of the mass notion as such, for example, in German, Abfalle 'litter,' Fortschritte 'progress,' Hausaufgaben 'homework,' Kaufwaren 'merchandise,' Mobel 'furniture.' (d) with abstract words such as fears, misgivings, doubts, silences the plural denotes 'several occurrences of an event or instantiations of a state.' These four contextual meanings of the plural can be summarized under the more general, schematic notion of 'multiplex' as against the notion 'uniplex' for the singular (see Talmy 1988:176). The learner of a foreign language must be enabled to learn a number of these various contextual meanings so that they can come to grips with the schematic meaning of a given grammatical form. Since they almost never have sufficient linguistic input to acquire these forms and their meanings unconsciously like the native speaker does, pedagogical grammar is called upon to intervene. Now, the plural is not such a great difficulty for any learner who has this category in their own native language, for example, a German learner. But if they have not, as is the case with Chinese, then the learning problems will be much bigger. A grammatical form of English that does not have parallels in any other language in the world—at least not in its complete paradigm of combinations with the various tenses—is the progressive form. Here pedagogical grammar is even more urgently required to provide for the selection, presentation, and gradation of learning and exercise materials. As is very often the case in grammar, the progressive also enters into a set of oppositions with another form, in this case with the simple (or nonprogressive) tense forms. The schematic meanings of these two aspects
can be summarized as the 'completive aspect' for the simple tenses, and the 'incompletive aspect' for the progressive tenses. The incompletive aspect subsumes a number of contextual meanings of the progressive such as (a) ongoingness, (b) temporariness, (c) nearness in future, (d) matter-of-course-ness, (e) without endpoint, (f) lack of specific result, etc. These contextual uses can be illustrated as follows: Incompletive
Completive
(la) He is writing a letter. (2a) He is living here at present. (3a) We are leaving tonight. (4a) I will be seeing him tonight. (5a) They were soon climbing up the hill.
(b) He writes novels, (b) He lives in London.
(6a) I saw the man who had been digging. (7a) I saw the man who had been digging a hole. (8a) Children are knowing more and more nowadays.
(2)
(b) The train leaves at 6 pm. (b) If I go there, I will see him. (b) The road passes through Cambridge and climbs up the hill, (b) I saw the man who had dug the hole, (b) I saw the man who had dug a hole, (b) Children know much more than 50 years ago.
In (la) the ongoing activity is synonymous with incompletenesses, whereas in (Ib) the activity is seen as a whole. In (2a) the temporariness follows from the fact that no definitive, global situation as in (2b) prevails. In (3a) the accomplishment of the future activity is not fixed, but arranged between partners, whereas in (3b) the future event has been scheduled in an official timetable. In (4a) the future activity normally follows from the course of events and is already underway, but in (4b) it only follows from some other action but it then occurs automatically, and is seen in its completeness. In (5a) the activity of climbing has not reached an endpoint and is seen in its incompletion, whereas in (5b) 'climb' is taken in a derived sense and denotes a permanent state. In (6a) and (7a) the activity of digging has no specific result (there is not much of a hole yet), but in (6b) and (7b) there is a definite or specific hole. In the case of (8a) with the stative verb 'know,' there is a gradual change, not in the state of knowing, but in the amount of knowledge, whereas in (8b) two different states at different periods of time are seen in their wholeness. It is through all these different contextual uses that the schematic meaning can be grasped and further spelled out. It is also clear from these oppositions that the aspect system does not operate independently, but that it is intricately interwoven with other systems such as the time/tense system in (1,2,3), the modality system in (4), the dynamic/stative distinction in (5), the transitivity system in (6a), and the reference system in (6b) and (7a, b). Finally (8a) shows that the aspect system 407
Teaching Language is not just linked to the verb, but operates at a much higher level. 5. Consequences for a Theory of Grammar Learning/Teaching
The set of illustrative examples and their discussion in Sect. 4 have shown some important facts about grammar in general, and about pedagogical grammar in particular. (a) The meanings of grammatical structures are usually of a highly abstract nature, in strong contrast to the more concrete meanings of most lexical items, especially nouns. (b) These grammatical meanings are not single, isolated 'building blocks,' but are highly interactive and mutually condition or restrict each other. In this respect, the metaphor of the 'building blocks' is even misleading in that it suggests isolated units which are joined together. Therefore.the scaffolding metaphor may be far more appropriate, especially if one sees the scaffolding as an intertwined, indivisible construction or grid (see Dirven 1991). (c) These meanings are language-specific. This does not mean that other languages are not capable of expressing such meanings, too, but rather that they do not have to do so all the time, and what is more important, that they do not do so systematically. This also means that whereas one language has to express certain distinctions all the time, other languages do so only occasionally, very often by means of lexical or derivational means. These facts cannot but have important implications for the presentation of grammar in foreign language teaching and learning. First of all, since the meanings of grammatical structures are so abstract and general, it is extremely difficult, if at all feasible, to paraphrase them accurately. Any attempt at formulation of the grammatical meanings or rules will be subject to simplifications and, hence, distortions. The best strategy therefore may well be not to rely, in the first place, on such rule formulations but to concentrate on a large number of well-chosen pairs of oppositions and to present the learners with carefully chosen exercise materials instead. In such a learning context, the learners can, just like native learners, form a nonverbally represented internalization of the abstract rules (or meanings). This is how native speakers acquire command of the grammatical scaffolding of their linguistic system. Non native speakers never enjoy the 'rich linguistic environment' of native learners, but to some nontrivial extent this can be compensated for by carefully chosen opposition pairs and exercises in FLT. Second, since grammatical meanings are highly abstract schematic meanings, covering all the uses of a given grammatical form, the best approach might
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be to try to present grammatical phenomena by means of visual symbols, rather than by verbal means alone. That this approach is possible is shown in many of the analyses offered by Ronald Langacker (1987). His diagrams, though often highly intricate and precise, are meant as informal and heuristic devices, not in any way as necessary representations. Still, such diagrammatic or pictorial representations are highly natural and perspicuous. However complex his visual presentations of grammatical insights may be, they do contain elements that could be useful in the pedagogic presentation of rule systems, rule complexes, and single rules. Nontheoretical, but more pedagogically oriented visual rule presentations have been developed by Engels et al. (1989) for the English tense/aspect system, by Dirven (1989) for the spatial meanings of English prepositions, and by Radden (1989) for their figurative meanings. Third, as a study by Schmid-Schonbein (1988) shows, the order of the grammatical structures presented to learners may have strong effects on their accurately learning correct grammatical forms and their meanings. A large number of wrong generalizations are made by learners on account of inaccurate rule formulations and especially of unpedagogical sequencing or grading of the various areas of grammar. Fourth, it will never be possible to dispense with rule formulations as such. Even if one relies heavily on starting from opposition pairs and well-graded exercise materials (in a larger communicative context), the learners will continue, in the greatly reduced learning situations of a few hours of FLT per week, to need the help of rules. That this need is now so strongly being felt again, after the first wave of a communicative teaching approach which avoided concentrating on the grammar of the foreign language, is confirmed by the large number of grammars that have very recently appeared, including: Alexander (1988); Broughton (1990); Dirven (1989); Hullen (1986); Leech (1989); Sinclair et al. (1990); Wierzbicka (1988). It seems that grammars are needed now more than ever before. See also: Syntax in Second Language Acquisition; Contrastive and Error Analysis; Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language). Bibliography Alexander L G 1988 Longman English Grammar. Longman, London Balcom P 1985 Should we teach grammar? Another look at Krashen's monitor model. Bulletin of the CAAL 7(1): 3746 Bausch K R (ed.) 1979 Beitrage zur didaktischen Grammatik: Probleme, Konzepte, Beispiele. Scriptor, Koningstein Berndt R 1970 Transformational generative grammar and the teaching of English. Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 18: 239-61
Grammar (Mother Tongue) Besse H 1980 Enseigner la competence de communication? Franqais dans le Monde 153 Broughton G 1990 The Penguin English Grammar A-Z for Advanced Students Exercises. Penguin Books, London Brumfit C J, Johnson K 1979 The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching. Pergamon Press, Oxford Canale M, Swain M 1980 Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1: 1 Chomsky N 1959 Review of Skinner (1957). Lg 35: 26-58 Chomsky N 1970 Noam Chomsky's view of language. In: Lester M (ed.) Readings in Applied Transformational Grammar. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York Christ H 1979 Didaktische Grammatik als kommunikative Grammatik, dargestellt am Beispiel der Grammatik von 'Un Niveau-seuil.' In: Hunfeld H (ed.) Neue Perspektiven der Fremdsprachendidaktik. Scriptor, Kronberg Corder S P 1971 Idiosyncratic dialects and error analysis. IRAL 9: 2 Corder S P 1974 Pedagogical grammar or the pedagogy of grammar? In: Corder S P, Roulet E (eds.) Corder S P, Roulet E (eds.) 1974 Linguistic Insights in Applied Linguistics. Aimav, Brussels Coste D et al. 1976 Un Niveau-seuil. Council of Europe, Strasbourg Dirven R 1972 Surface structure and deep structure in language teaching. ITL Review of Applied Linguistics 17: 37-57 Dirven R (ed.) 1989 A User's Grammar of English. Word, Sentence, Text, Interaction. P Lang, Frankfurt Dirven R 1990 Pedagogical grammar. Language Teaching 23(1): 1-18 Dirven R 1991 Grammar as the scaffolding of a community's conceptual world. Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen 20 Dulay H C, Burt M, Krashen S D 1982 Language Two. Pergamon Press, Oxford Edmondson W, House J 1979 Konzeption einer didaktischen Interaktionsgrammatik. In: Bausch K R (ed.) Engels L K et al. 1989 Time, tense, and aspect. In: Dirven R (ed.) Finocchiaro M, Brumfit C 1983 The Functional Approach: From Theory to Practice. Pergamon Press, Oxford Harks-Hanke J, Zydatii W (eds.) 1986 1945-85 VierzigJahre Englischunterricht fur alle. Cornelsen-Velhagen and Klasing, Berlin Hatch E M (ed.) 1978 Second Language Acquisition. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Helbig G, Schenkel W 1969 Wdrterbuch zur Valenz und Distribution deutscher Verben. VEB, Leipzig Holmes J 1988 Doubt and certainty in ESL textbooks. Applied Linguistics 9(1): 21-44 Hiillen W 1986 Englische Grammatik für Erwachsene. Cornelsen, Berlin/Oxford University Press, Oxford Htinig W 1989 Cohesion and coherence. In: Dirven R (ed.) 1989 James C 1980 Contrastive Analysis. Longman, Harlow Janicki K 1977 On the feasibility of pedagogical contrastive sociolinguistics. Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics 6: 17-26 Johnson K 1982 Communicative Syllabus Design and Methodology. Pergamon Press, Oxford Johnson R K 1985 Prototype theory, cognitive linguistics
and pedagogical grammar. Working Papers in Linguistics and Language Teaching 8: 12-24 Kleineidam H 1979 Systematische Grammatik versus kommunikativer Grammatik.-Zum Problem der Norm in einer Referenzgrammatik fur L2-Lerner. Kongrefiakten des Romanistentages. Fink, Munich Kleineidam H 1982 Kommunikation ohne Grammatik oder Grammatik ohne Kommunikation? Neusprachliche Mitteilungen 35: 103-13 Krashen S D 1981 Second-language Acquisition and Secondlanguage Learning. Pergamon Press, Oxford Krashen S D 1982 Principles and Practice in Second-language Acquisition. Pergamon Press, Oxford Lado R, Fries C C 1961 English Structure Patterns; English Pattern Practice, English Pronunciation. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Langacker R 1987 Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. University of California Press, Standford, CA Leech G 1989 An A-Z of English Grammar and Usage. Longman, London Leech G, Svartvik J 1975 A Communicative Grammar of English. Longman, London Mackey W F 1965 Language Teaching Analysis. Longman, London MindtD 1981 Linguistische Grammatik, didaktische Grammatik und padagogische Grammatik. Neusprachliche Mitteilungen 34: 28-35 Nickel G 1989 Some controversies in present-day error analysis. 'Contrastive' versus 'non-contrastive' errors. IRAL 27(4): 293-305 Radden G 1989 Figurative use of prepositions. In: Dirven R (ed.) Rivenc P 1982 Et la grammaire dans tout cela? Revue de Phonétique Appliquée 61(3) Schmid-Schonbein G 1988 Fiir Englisch unbegabt? Forderstrategien bei versagenden Englischlernern. Ergebnisse empirischer Untersuchungen. Aks-Verlag, Bochum Selinker L 1972 Interlanguage. IRAL 10: 209-31 Selinker L 1989 CA/EA/JL: The earliest experimental record. IRAL 27(4): 267-91 Sinclair J et al. 1990 Collins/Cobuild English Grammar. Collins, London Talmy L 1988 The relation of grammar to cognition. In: Rudzka-Ostyn B (ed.) Topics in Cognitive Linguistics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Taylor J R 1989 Cognitive English grammar. LAUD Series A 242. Duisburg Van Ek J 1975 The Threshold Level. Council of Europe, Strasbourg Werlich E 1980 Texttypologie und Grammatikvermittlung. Zur Auswahl, Inventarisierung von Strukturen. Der fremdsprachliche Unterricht 54: 152-66 Wierzbicka A 1988 The Semantics of Grammar. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Wilkins D A 1974 Notional syllabuses and the concept of a minimum adequate grammar. In: Corder S P, Roulet E (eds.) Wilkins D A 1976 Notional Syllabuses. Oxford University Press, Oxford ZydatiB W 1986 Grammatik im kommunikationsorientierten Englischunterricht fur Hauptschuler. Beispiel 'Passiv.' In: Harks-Hanke J, ZydatiB W (eds.)
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Teaching Language
Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue) W. B. Elley
After their 1963 review of research findings on the impact of formal grammar teaching, Braddock et al. (1963) concluded that it has 'a negligible... or even a harmful effect on the improvement of writing.' This article examines the validity of this assertion in the light of empirical investigations conducted up to the late 1990s on the effects of grammar teaching on students' writing and related language abilities. Debates on the role of formal grammar occur in most English-speaking communities, and have frequently reached high levels of intensity. Employers, editors, and university teachers in particular are prone to attribute the poor writing skills of high school graduates to an insufficient grounding in grammar. Such debates are rarely informed by research findings, and are often confused by lack of consensus on terminology. Indeed the word 'grammar' is used in so many senses, that writers on the subject are given to devoting, several pages to the fine distinctions which can be drawn between the various usages of the term. In this article, the formal teaching of grammar refers to systematic instruction in the analysis of sentences. It is systematic in the sense that it is deliberately designed to help students break sentences down into their component parts. It includes instruction on the labeling of sentence components—subject and predicate, phrases, clauses, word classes (nouns, verbs, prepositions), and their use in breaking down, building up, and editing sentences. Formal grammar does not refer to usage exercises or editing assignments in the absence of such specialist terminology. The grammar taught may be traditional, structural, or transformational, but it is characterized by formal categories, labels, and exercises designed to provide practice in their use in analyzing and generating language. 1. Early Research
The first reported empirical studies of students' grammatical knowledge (e.g., Rapeer 1913) revealed surprisingly low correlations between such knowledge and students' written composition skill. Such findings seemed to challenge the traditional orthodoxy about the importance of grammar, and gave rise to several small-scale experimental studies (e.g., Ash 1935). Although not well-designed by today's standards, these investigations produced only negative findings on the benefits of instruction in grammar. In the intervening period, up to the review of Braddock et al. (1963), another 10 experiments replicated these early findings. Most of these studies are well summarized in Meckel (1963). 410
Supporters of the grammar cause were not persuaded, however, as most of these investigations suffered from one or more of the following faults: (a) They were too short to expect measurable benefits to be detected. Most extended over a halfyear period, or less. (b) They were assessed by inadequate measures of language—such as objective English tests or a single written essay. (c) They did not control for the effects of teacher attitudes or competence, which can be crucial in small-scale studies. The one early study which appeared to avoid most of these serious criticisms was that conducted by Harris (1962) in English secondary schools. He compared the effects of instruction in formal grammar with those of a nongrammar (or direct instruction) group, on 228 pupils aged 12-14 years over a period of 2 years. In each of the five participating schools, one class followed a course in formal grammar for one period a week using a traditional textbook, while another class, similar to the first in language ability and size, spent this time undertaking additional work in written composition. In four of the five schools the two classes were taught by the same teacher. They were all described as 'willing to be convinced by the evidence, and desirous of finding out the truth of the matter.' When teaching the nongrammar groups, they deliberately avoided the use of grammatical terminology in teaching and marking students' work. Harris used two sets of criteria to evaluate the effects of the different programs. On a test of 'formal grammar,' the students who had regular grammar teaching over the 2-year period showed large gains in all five classes. Overall they nearly doubled their pretest scores, while the nongrammar groups showed negligible improvement. This result was important, as some earlier studies had shown that students often failed to master enough grammatical concepts for any anticipated benefits to appear in the students' writing. Despite these knowledge gains, however, the grammar groups in Harris's study failed to show any advantage over the nongrammar groups in the essaywriting tasks, as measured by 11 objective criteria. These criteria (which had been meticulously validated in a pilot study), included sentence length, number of common errors, subordinate classes, adjectival phrases, total words, and the like. In a preliminary check after nine months, the comparative results were inconclusive. After 2 years, however, 11 of the possible 55 comparisons across the five schools showed sig-
Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue) nificant benefits for the nongrammar students, while none favored the grammar groups. The main differences observed were in such criteria as sentence complexity and numbers of errors. Among other things, Harris's investigation underlines the dangers of drawing conclusions from shortterm studies. The trends which were consistent after 2 years were scarcely obvious after 9 months. The study showed, more importantly, that grammar instruction had no measurable benefits in student writing. However, he did use only one essay in the final testing, and the differences he observed were not powerful. In 1963, then, Meckel could be excused for cautioning that the research findings, consistent though they were, did not provide 'conclusive evidence that grammar has no transfer value in developing composition skills.'
over mechanics, usage, and appropriate word choice and style. Once again, the study included no exercise in which students had to generate their own writing. Other comparisons of structural versus traditional grammar (e.g., Smith and Sustakowski 1968; Kennedy and Larson 1969) found no differences in writing or usage skills, although the structural group in Kennedy and Larson's study showed significant gains in a test of 'syntactic sensitivity.' In the same study the traditional grammar group showed a loss in score on the STEP Essay Test, suggesting a deterioration in performance as a result of their grammar lessons. Thus, the promise of alternative grammars was not upheld in the research up to 1970. They appeared to generate no more clear-cut advantages than traditional grammar in the central aims of improving writing ability and general usage skills.
2. The Effects of New Linguistic Grammars . During the 1960s, a number of new linguistic gram3. Research Since 1970 mars emerged, and many secondary schoolteachers adopted them with high hopes for their effects on Between 1970 and 1973, a long-term investigation of children's language. Writers such as Bateman and the effects of traditional and transformational gramZidonis (1966) saw values in Transformational Gram- mar on students' language was mounted in New Zeamar which would make it more meaningful and useful land by Elley et al. (1975, 1979). Starting with eight for students, and new textbooks and programs were matched classes of 248 pupils from a large suburban coeducational high school, they designed an elaborate designed on this assumption. In an empirical study of the effects of Trans- study in which the language growth of these pupils formational-generative (TG) Grammar, Bateman and was monitored over 3 years. The pupils undertook Zidonis (1966) compared the essays of two groups one of the three English programs, differing only in of US high school students, one of whom had been the grammatical instructional variable. One group exposed to a 2-year course in TG grammar, while the studied a traditional grammar course, one a transother had had no grammar teaching at all. After care- formational grammar course, and the third had no ful analysis of the students' writing in six post test grammar teaching at all. They spent 40 percent of the essays, the authors found that the experimental group extra time in English classes on free reading of books, was 'producing more well-formed sentences of greater journals, and magazines, another 40 percent on readstructural complexity.' However, any conclusions ing of set texts, and the remainder on exercises in were premature because the grammar group was very creative writing. Grammatical terminology was avosmall (21 pupils) and atypically bright. It showed ided in class lessons and homework for this group. higher IQ scores than the control group at the outset, The students' work in other aspects of English study and a close analysis revealed that the improvements was standardized across all three groups. To control for the teacher variable, each class was were really confined to only four of the 21 pupils. Nor were there adequate controls exercised over the two taught by each of the three teacher-researchers for teachers' competence and attitudes, or the nature of one of the 3 years, although logistical constraints meant that two additional staff members were the control group's program. A similar but shorter study of US eighth graders required to teach the traditional group in the third showed small but significant benefits for a TG program year. The teachers were open-minded about the outwhen compared with a traditional grammar course, comes and 'curious to know.' A wide range of language tests, essays, and attitude but its brevity and limited controls again left uncerscales was used at the end of each of the 3 years of the tainty, and no measure of free writing was used. In another investigation at junior high school level, study, but the pattern of results was very similar in students who were taught a course in structural gram- each year. No significant benefits were found for either mar showed greater gains on the STEP Writing Test of the grammar groups in conventional measures of than comparable groups following courses in tra- writing quality, or in T-units, numbers of syntactic ditional grammar or free reading. However, the tea- transformations or frequency counts of vocabulary cher factor was again not controlled, and the range. These judgments were made on the basis of 10 dependent variable, the STEP Test, is really a measure essays by each child written on a wide range of topics of editing skill, assessing only the students' control over the 3 years, and graded by well-trained, experi-
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Teaching Language enced markers on four criteria: content, mechanics, style, and structure. On the other dependent variables there were no significant differences in tests of reading, vocabulary, sentence combining, spelling, listening, literature, study skills, or English usage in the first 2 years. All of these tests were reliable and sensitive enough to detect differences, had they existed. At the end of the third year small differences were detected in the usage test, favoring the two grammar programs, but a close item analysis showed that the differences were spread over a range of minor mechanical problems, and could well have been chance effects. There were no differences in run-on sentence exercises, where theory and commonsense would have predicted a benefit for grammatical instruction. In a sentence-combining exercise, the traditional grammar group performed significantly worse in the third year, and the attitude scales showed that the TG course was not popular. The nongrammar group expressed the most positive attitudes overall. Reviewing the evidence of 3 years and 111 mean comparisons, the authors stated that 'it is difficult to escape the conclusion that English Grammar, whether traditional or transformational, has virtually no influence on the language growth of typical secondary school students' (Elley et al. 1975: 38). While slightly more cautious than the conclusion of Braddock et al. (1963), it is certainly consistent with it. Moreover, no experimental study over a period of over 80 years has appeared to contradict it. Since the New Zealand study was reported, empirical studies of the impact of grammar instruction have dried up. Apparently, the consistency of the findings had persuaded researchers that there was little profit in further study of the issue. A meta-analysis of experimental studies designed to improve the teaching of written compositions (Hillocks 1986) refers to only five comparisons of grammar vs. nongrammar instruction after 1963. Two of these were derived from the New Zealand study described above (Elley et al. 1975), the others from a pair of dissertations at Boston University on the same samples of students. When compared with courses designed to teach writing tasks directly, the grammar/mechanics groups performed consistently worse on the essay-writing exercise. The mean effect size for grammar instruction for these five studies was -0.29 (Hillocks 1986: 206). By contrast, the mean effect size for the 72 instructional approaches surveyed in this study was +0.28, ranging from +0.57 (inquiry methods) to +0.16 (free writing). Only grammar teaching showed an overall negative effect. Not surprisingly, Hillocks supported the pessimistic conclusion put forward by Braddock et al. (1963), cited at the beginning of this article. On the basis of a comparison of 67 experimental studies, Hillocks commented, 'Nearly everything else is more effective in increasing the quality of writing' (Hillocks 1986: 214).
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4. Conclusion In view of the persistently negative findings about the benefits of grammar study, and the continued widespread belief that a knowledge of grammar is fundamental to language growth, there is a need to offer some explanation of the discrepancy. Some critics refuse to accept the findings (see Hartwell 1985 for a comprehensive summary of the debate). It is contended, for instance, that the issue is not capable of empirical demonstration. However, a perusal of the studies showing consistently positive findings in Hillocks' review must undermine this case. Experimental studies often do show marked benefits for alternative approaches to writing instruction. Though many researchers have tried throughout the twentieth century, none has succeeded in showing any transfer effects to language growth due to grammar instruction, whether tested by measures of writing quality, sentence structure, editing tasks, reading skills, or attitudes to writing. Hillocks (1986) claims that grammar instruction is not designed to help pupils generate sentences, but only to parse already-generated sentences. Many studies have shown that most of the grammatical structures that children will use have been acquired well before the time that formal grammar instruction begins (see Grammar Acquisition). Hartwell (1985) provides many examples of the unconscious use of the grammar rules in people's heads (Grammar 1) to express ourselves, and argues that the rules of grammar, as taught in school (Grammar 2) 'are simply unconnected to productive control over Grammar 1.' Some support for this position is provided in a study by Seliger (1979), who showed no correlation between students' ability to state the formal rule for choosing between the articles a and an, and the students' use of these articles in a practical task he set them. In the 1990s, fewer language specialists argue that grammar instruction is required to improve students' writing, or language ability. However, the Kingman Report in the UK (1988) did argue for greater emphasis on grammar teaching in English secondary schools, citing the need for a common vocabulary for teachers and pupils to discuss difficulties in expression (see English Teaching in England and Wales). Some authorities still believe too that 'learning about grammatical structures, word order and cohesion devices can improve written style' (Greenbaum 1988: 29). There may be other arguments for the regular and systematic teaching of grammar, and they are often raised in connection with those who plan to teach English, and those who would acquire a foreign language. However, as a vehicle for improving the writing or language skills of typical first-language users, the empirical evidence is consistent. Formal grammar instruction appears to contribute nothing to the development of writing and reading skill. See also: Schools Council UK.
Language Awareness Bibliography Ash I O 1935 An experimental evaluation of the stylistic approach in teaching written composition. Journal of Experimental Education 4: 54—62 Bateman D R, Zidonis F J 1966 The Effect of a Study of Transformational Grammar on the Writing of Ninth and Tenth Graders. NCTE Research Report No. 6. National Council of Teachers of English, Champaign, IL Braddock R, Lloyd-Jones R, Schoer L 1963 Research in Written Composition. National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL Elley W B, Barham I H, Lamb H, Wyllie M 1975 The role of grammar in a secondary school English curriculum. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies 10: 26—42 Elley W B, Barham I H, Lamb H, Wyllie M 1979 The Role of Grammar in a Secondary School Curriculum. New Zealand Council for Educational Research, Wellington Greenbaum S 1988 Good English and the Grammarian. Longman, London Harris R J 1962 An experimental inquiry into the functions and value of formal grammar in the teaching of English. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of London
Hartwell P 1985 Grammar, grammars and the teaching of grammar. College English 47(2): 105-27 Hillocks G 1986 Research on Written Composition, ERIC Clearing House on Reading and Communication Skills, Urbana, IL Kennedy L D, Larson A D 1969 The influence of structural and of traditional grammatical instruction upon language perception and writing ability. Illinois School Research 5(2): 31-36 Meckel H C 1963 Research on teaching composition and literature. In: Gage N L (ed.) Handbook of Research on Teaching. Rand McNally, Chicago, IL Rapeer L W 1913 The problem of formal grammar in elementary education. Journal of Educational Psychology 4: 12537 Seliger H W 1979 On the nature and function of language rules in language learning. TESOL Quarterly 13: 359-69 Smith H L, Sustakowski H J 1968 The Application of Descriptive Linguistics to the Teaching of English and a Statistically-Measured Comparison of the Relative Effectiveness of the Linguistically-Orientated and Traditional Methods of Instruction (ERic document ED 021 216). State University of New York, Buffalo, NY
Language Awareness E. W. Hawkins
Language awareness is an ambiguous term. It should be distinguished from 'linguistic awareness,' which is the term used by those who investigate young children's 'reading readiness' to describe that awareness of the characteristics of the written language which makes for a successful attack on reading in the infant school (see Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness', Literacy: Phonological Awareness). As used in discussion of the language curriculum offered in primary and secondary schools, the expression 'language awareness' was confined to Britain and did not come into general use until the 1980s. In this context 'language awareness' (hereafter LA) can be described as a movement aimed particularly at the middle years of schooling (ages 10 to 14) which seeks to stimulate curiosity about language, as the defining characteristic of the 'articulate mammal,' too easily taken for granted. In addition to awakening curiosity about language, the movement also aims to integrate the different kinds of language teaching met at school. This involves cooperation between teachers who have traditionally worked in isolation from each other. Such collaboration is seen as necessary whether viewing the curriculum 'horizontally' or synchronically (across the
child's many different language experiences, e.g., in science laboratory, poetry or history lesson, foreign language class), as well as in the developing language experiences met by the child moving up through the school system (the 'vertical curriculum'). A third, related, aim of some LA programs has been to help children to make an effective start on their foreign language in secondary school by including an element of 'education of the ear.' LA made rapid progress during the 1980s in British schools. By 1985 some 280 schools in the State sector and some 20 independent schools were claiming to have introduced LA courses (Donmall 1985). Between 1984 and 1988 the number of such schools trebled, with up to 10 percent of English secondary schools becoming involved. The history and rationale of this development, and the questions that it has raised for curriculum planning and teacher education, are examined in the sections that follow. 1. The Case for LA in the Curriculum Protagonists of introducing LA into the curriculum have differed in their emphases but the chief arguments commonly advanced can be summarized. 413
Teaching Language 1.1 Incoherence of Traditional Teaching About Languages The haphazard nature of most school teaching about language has been noted by Her Majesty's Inspectorate: Anyone, by following a group of pupils through a day in a secondary school, can prove that their language experiences are largely a matter of chance The pupil's own use of language may be subject to spasmodic correction . . . [but] many pupils (who have a view of language as a minefield) do not understand the characteristics of language in the context of learning [and] fail to develop the confidence and incentive to participate which are vital. . . . We cannot be satisfied with the preparation we give to young people for the language needs of their lives. (Department of Education and Science 1977)
1.2 Lack of Cooperation Between English and Other Language Teachers In any large English secondary school there may be five kinds of language teaching going on in adjacent classrooms: (a) English (mother tongue) (b) Foreign language (most commonly French) (c) English as second language (for children of ethnic minorities) (d) One or more ethnic minority ('community' or 'heritage') languages, commonly Arabic, Chinese, Modern Greek, Italian, Punjabi, etc. (e) Latin (and/or occasionally Ancient Greek). These five kinds of language teacher rarely have any meeting ground. Each remains ignorant of what the others may be saying about language. Their pupils, commuting from one sealed-off classroom to the next, have to try to make some synthesis of the different pictures of language they are offered. LA, as an element in the curriculum, offers these teachers, for the first time, a common program on which they can collaborate as a team (with help from teachers of, say, music, biology, or history, all of whom have much of value to contribute to a program about language). 1.3 Excessive Eurocentrism of Traditional Approaches to Language Some advocates of LA have argued the need to break out of an exclusively Eurocentred language experience. The point was made by the Head of a large London comprehensive school, Michael Marland: The main cultural and general educational arguments for the teaching of languages seem hardly to be met if there is no access to non-European languages... Can we call a person educated for the 'global village' of today if he or she has no idea of at least one non-European language? (cited in Donmall 1985)
Developments in world affairs must surely have strengthened arguments for a less Eurocentered curriculum. 414
1.4 Mother Tongue and Foreign Language Learning as 'Disaster Areas' in the Curriculum Another factor which strengthened the case for rethinking language education was the persistent evidence from a number of studies that children from disadvantaged socioeconomic groups experience language-related problems in school learning and so fail to profit from their schooling (see Educational Failure). An influential example was the first report of the National Child Development Study (Davie et al. 1972). This revealed that nearly half (48 percent) of the children of unskilled manual workers (Class V) were poor readers at the age of 7, compared with only 1 in 12 (8 percent) of children from the administrative class (Class I). Furthermore, as the Bullock Committee noted, 'the position worsens as the children grow older, there being a progressive decline in the performance of the lower socioeconomic groups between the ages of 7 and 11' (Department of Education and Science 1975: p. 22). For pupils of Afro-Caribbean origin English teaching seems to fail even more disastrously. Studies reported by the Rampton (later, the Swann) Committee showed that only 9 percent of Afro-Caribbean pupils leaving school at age 16 achieved grades A to C in English at GCE 'O' level, compared with 21 percent of Asian pupils (for most of whom English was a second language) and 29 percent of other school leavers. Thus, for over 90 percent of the AfroCaribbean pupils, the door to higher education was effectively closed at age 16 +, for lack of a good GCE O-level pass in English. Social background could also be a handicap in the foreign language classroom. Studies carried out by the National Foundation for Educational Research revealed a 'linear correlation' between performance in a foreign language and the status of the parental occupation. Some teachers argued, (quoting MacCarthy 1978), that 'education of the ear is a prerequisite for effective foreign language learning' and that many working-class pupils lacked an important 'tool for verbal learning,' namely ability to listen (see Listening in a Second Language). Such teachers wished to see, as part of language awareness, courses in 'learning to listen,' supported by simple discovery activities in basic phonetics. 7.5 Absence of any Investigation of the Phenomenon of Language Itself Critics of the traditional curriculum further pointed out that while it is taken for granted that pupils should examine the ways their bodies work (in biology), the structure of the physical universe (physics and chemistry), the geography of the planet, and the history of life on it, they are not challenged to ask basic questions about language, the defining characteristic of humanity, such as:
Language Awareness (a) What is special about human language and exactly how does it differ from the communication systems of animals, birds etc.? (b) How is language learnt by the baby? And how does this process compare with the acquisition of a foreign language in school? (see Language Acquisition). (c) Where did our language come from and why do languages change? (d) How do written and spoken language compare? And specifically how does our alphabetic, leftto-right writing compare with other writing systems (e.g., logographic Chinese writing)? (e) How many languages are spoken in our country, in the European community, in the world? What is a language 'family'? And how do dialect and regional accents fit into the picture? (f) What similarities ('universals') are there between languages? And what are some of the most interesting contrasts? (g) Would it be a good idea to 'reform' English spelling? What might be the disadvantages? (h) How does language work to convey meaning? Can our language not only convey meanings but determine the kind of meanings that we are able to think about? 1.6 What LA in the Curriculum Seeks to Offer Most published LA teaching materials may be summarized as attempts to find ways of discussing the above questions at the level of 11-year-olds. The best 'courses' have stressed the need for pupils to discover as much as possible for themselves, starting from what they already know about language (often more than they think). Protagonists of LA in the curriculum accept that these proposals may be dismissed as a watered-down version of the study known in universities as 'linguistics.' They answer that the teacher of 'nature study' in school does not need to apologize for the subject simply because their own university degree was called 'botany' or 'zoology.' Advocates of LA argue that they are seeking to light fires of curiosity about the central human characteristic of language which will blaze throughout their pupils' lives, while arming their pupils against fear of the (linguistically) unknown which is a fertile ground for prejudice and antagonism. Above all they wish to make their pupils' contacts with language, both their own and those of their neighbors, richer, more interesting, simply more fun. Some advocates of LA have added two further considerations. First, in volatile inner city communities it is useful to have a regular opportunity in school for pupils from a variety of language (and dialect) backgrounds to examine together, as equals, questions such as language acquisition, or language variety, to which all pupils, because of their diverse backgrounds, can contribute interestingly. Multilingualism can thus be
seen as enriching the life of the classroom rather than as presenting just one more problem for the hardpressed teacher (see Multilingualism). Second, young parents are given no preparation by the traditional language curriculum for possibly one of the most challenging responsibilities they will ever face, namely acting as language informant and model in the first critical months and years of their baby's life, when the baby acquires, through language, what Sapir called its 'world view.' School leavers' courses ('preparation for parenthood') have developed encouragingly in many schools but have rarely included any language element. Protagonists of LA in the curriculum have seen the possibility of starting to arouse curiosity about these issues in early adolescence, with the promise of returning to them in more mature discussion as pupils approach school leaving age. The arguments for a new approach to language in the curriculum summarized above have taken some time to win wide support. The main stages in the debate are set out in the following section. 2. Long-standing Anxiety about Language Education
2.1 Dissatisfaction Expressed in Official Government Reports Dissatisfaction with English language teaching has a long history. As early as 1921 the Newbold Committee spoke of 'the danger confronting English today . . . being . . . not so much indifference as distraction... the risk that much of English as a distinctive subject might be crowded out of the school curriculum by the demands of other ways of developing children's abilities ' Reform of language education was called for in the 'Crowther Report' (Central Advisory Council for Education 1959:211): 'We are all agreed that "mastery of language" is one of the most important elements of a general education and one where there is little ground for complacency about the effectiveness of present teaching methods. . . .' The committee called for 'a rethinking of the whole basis of the teaching of linguistics in the schools.' (The term meant something akin to LA, rather than the modern academic discipline of linguistics.) 2.2 Action by The Schools Council for Curriculum and Examinations Reacting to the call for rethinking, in 1961 the Schools Council set up a program in Linguistics and English Teaching under the chairmanship of Professor M A K Halliday (see Schools Council UK). The resultant materials were published as Language in Use (Doughty et al. 1971). Halliday's Foreword makes a strong case for 'awareness of language': Each one of us has this ability [to use language] and lives by it; but we do not always become aware of it or realize fully the breadth and depth of its possibilities... there is no place for language in the division of knowledge into arts and sciences—this is no doubt a principal reason for
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Teaching Language its neglect in our educational system, which depends on boundaries of this kind. . . . There should, however, be some place for language in the working life of the secondary school pupil; and, it might be added, of the student in a College of Education. . . . The development of [language] awareness has a marked effect upon a pupil's ability to cope with the whole range of his work. (Doughty et al. 1971:10)
2.3 The National Child Development Study A further milestone in the debate was the publication of the first report, From Birth to Seven (Davie et al. 1972), of the National Child Development Study. The revelation of the close correlation between children's failure to read and their social background shocked public opinion, and was one of the factors which, in 1972, caused Margaret Thatcher, then Secretary of State for Education, to set up the Bullock Committee to enquire into standards of literacy. 2.4 The Bullock Report Among the many excellent things in the Bullock Report (see English Teaching in England and Wales) later to prove relevant for the development of LA in schools, -were its models of language education to be included in the training of all teachers. Advocates of the kind of 'awareness' of language envisaged by Professor Halliday and his team (Sect. 2.2 above), however, were disappointed by the Bullock Report. In particular they regretted Bullock's failure to make any mention, in the 609 pages and 333 recommendations of A Language for Life, of the contribution that learning a foreign language can make to a child's general linguistic education. The reaction of foreign language teachers to the failure of English teachers to take up the challenge of Halliday's work was to take the lead themselves. Thereafter, in LA work, as Professor C Brumfitt later observed (in Garrett and James 1991 p., 27), it was 'conventional modern language teachers who have made most of the running'. Continuing anxiety about English teaching a decade after Bullock led to the setting-up of a fresh government commission, the Committee of Inquiry into the teaching of the English Language chaired by Sir John Kingman (see English Teaching in England and Wales). The difference in approach between the 1975 Bullock Report and the Kingman Inquiry (Department of Education and Science 1988) largely reflects the development in the intervening years of a consensus regarding the place of knowledge about language in the curriculum. 2.5 Initiatives by CILT The debate opened up by Halliday on the role of 'awareness of language' in the curriculum returned, after Bullock, to the need for cooperation between teachers of English and teachers of foreign languages, on which Bullock had had nothing to say. This was 416
the theme of a conference organized by the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT) in 1973. One of the papers from the conference proceedings (Perren 1974) argued for: 'A new subject called "the Study of Language" in the secondary school. . . pupils would examine the function of language . . . learn about language acquisition, as future parents . . . analyze linguistic prejudices . . . study by means of field work the effectiveness of language in a variety of contexts. . . (Hawkins, in Perren 1974)
The program would also include contrastive studies of the mother tongue and foreign languages being studied. 2.6. School Initiatives and New Materials Isolated experiments in schools trying to effect such cooperation 'across the language curriculum' had begun as early as 1972 (see Hawkins 1984). They were further encouraged by the publication of a number of collections of innovative teaching materials (e.g., Hawkins 1981; Raleigh 1981; Newby 1982). 2.7 LA and the Education of Children of Ethnic Minorities Towards the end of the 1970s further support for LA as a 'bridging subject' in the curriculum came from those concerned with the education of children of ethnic minorities. In March 1979 the UK Government set up the Rampton Committee, which later became the Swann Committee, to investigate the 'underachievement' of such children in school. In its final Report, the committee endorsed the idea of language awareness as helpful for children of ethnic minorities and reprinted in an Appendix, as a model of a possible 'bridging course,' a 'suggested outline for the secondary course in awareness of language' (from Hawkins 1981) (see Black English (UK)}. 2.8 The Role of the NCLE Working Party The case for giving language its own place, as a bridging subject across the curriculum was further developed at the first Assembly of the National Congress on Languages in Education (NCLE) held in 1978. One of the Assembly working parties studied 'the relationship between the acquisition and teaching of the mother tongue and the learning of other languages.' One of the papers returned to the idea of a new subject 'conceived as very far from being simply a widening of the conventional study of English. . . . What is proposed is a subject that will be a bridge across the "Space Between" English and the rest' (Hawkins, in Perren 1979). It was in response to interest in this idea expressed at the following Assembly of NCLE in 1980, that John Trim, then director of CILT convened a national conference on Language Awareness in 1981. The
Language Awareness response from schools was encouraging and it was decided to set up a Working Party under the auspices of CILT and NCLE, (a) to enquire into the extent of language awareness work in schools, and (b) to select a few schools experimenting with such work and prepare 'case studies' of their activities. The Working Party, under the chairmanship first of John Trim, and later of Professor John Sinclair, saw its role as monitoring, coordinating, supporting, and guiding Language Awareness work in the schools and bringing theory and practice together (Donmall 1985). It held 13 meetings, and organized a two-day conference on Language Awareness at Leeds University in January 1983, attended by some hundred interested teachers and language advisers, examiners, publishers, and others. The Working Party's Newsletter was distributed widely to interested teachers and institutions between 1983 and 1988. The Working Party's Report for the Fourth Assembly of NCLE held in 1984 was published by CILT (Donmall 1985). The Report was supplemented by a bibliography of materials and publications covering the whole field of language awareness, prepared by P J Downes and TRW Aplin. Work on this bibliography has been continued by T W R Aplin at the University of Leicester, School of Education. His revised and updated Knowledge about Language and Language Awareness—An Annotated Bibliography published in June 1997 by the Association for Language Awareness from the University of Leicester, now provides a comprehensive source of reference. When the Working Party completed its work after the 1986 NCLE Assembly, it was decided to set up a consortium of regional centers to provide continuing support for LA work. Ten such centers were established, nearly all in university education departments, coordinated by a Centre for Language Awareness at King's College, London. From this base has grown the Association for Language Awareness, Hon. Secretary Miss Joyce Angio (Departement des langues, Cegep de SainteFoy, Quebec, Canada G1V 1T3). The Association organizes an international conference every two years. It has its own Journal Language Awareness published by Multilingual Matters Ltd, with an international Editorial Board of some 25 well-known scholars. Its Editor is Peter Garrett (School of English, Communication and Philosophy, University of Cardiff, PO Box 94, Cardiff CF1 3XB). 3. 'Knowledge about Language.' The Case Accepted in the Kingman and Cox Reports
The setting up of the Kingman Committee (see Sect. 2.4 above) was largely in response to public reaction to a discussion document from Her Majesty's Inspectorate. In this paper HMI proposed four aims for English teachers, the first three involving speech,
reading, and writing and the fourth being 'to teach pupils about language.' This proposal by HMI that pupils should learn about language had a mixed reception. Some teachers saw in it the threat of a return to an arid, prescriptive teaching of grammar (see Grammar in British Schools). In a follow-up publication HMI concluded that 'there is a clear need and some growing willingness to settle an agenda ... as to what might be taught [about language] to intending teachers, to those in post and to pupils in schools' (Department of Education and Science 1988). The Kingman Committee saw its main purpose as helping to set such an agenda. The Kingman Report accepts that 'knowledge about language' must have its place in the curriculum: 'Awareness of the forms of language is an entirely natural development . . . Teaching language must involve talking about language. . . .' As for practice in schools at the time the Report is cautious: In many schools in England 'language awareness courses' of different kinds are taught. These courses vary in quality. In some schools which offer language awareness courses, we have met an enthusiastic openness to language study which we applaud. It can only be sensible for all teachers of language in a school—whether they are teaching French or Latin, English or Punjabi—to ensure that they are using the same framework of description for talking about language... it can only be sensible to make overt comparisons between the languages which the pupils know . .. through a coherent and consistent approach ... [all schools therefore should] develop a co-ordinated policy for language teaching (see School Language Policies). (Department of Education and Science 1988)
The committee did, however, criticize some language awareness courses for their 'superficial and unsystematic' approach, and was against the teaching of 'knowledge about language' as a separate component of the curriculum: 'It should not be bolted on but should inform all classroom work.' For this, teachers would need training and of the 18 recommendations in the Report no fewer than seven were concerned with 'knowledge about language' as an essential component in teacher training and retraining. Another stressed the need in all schools for 'a co-ordinated policy for language teaching.' The case for including knowledge about language in the curriculum was stated even more clearly by the National Curriculum English Working Group (Department of Education and Science 1989) (see English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)). This committee, charged with spelling out exactly what should be taught in the four Key Stages (ages 5 to 16) of English in the National Curriculum, devoted a whole chapter to the case for 'knowledge about language.' Acknowledging that the conclusions of the Kingman Inquiry in favor of the teaching of knowledge about language are still rejected by some, the Report makes a strong case for teaching pupils about 417
Teaching Language language: Two justifications for teaching pupils explicitly about language are, first, the positive effect on aspects of their use of language and secondly, the general value of such knowledge as an important part of their understanding of their social and cultural environment.' The Report stresses that language is 'intrinsically interesting and worthy of study in its own right.' The committee reexamined the possibility, rejected by Kingman, that language awareness should become a separate 'profile component' within the English curriculum. It concluded that for the time being it should not. One reason given for this decision is that: 'substantial programmes of teacher training are required if teachers are to know enough to enable them to design with confidence programmes of study about language.... Such training is now underway. It may be, when such training programmes have been followed for a few years, that it would be appropriate for knowledge about language to become a separate profile component. We recommend that HMI should advise on this, and that the National Curriculum Council should periodically review the structure of the English curriculum with this in mind.' (Department of Education and Science 1989: ch. 6)
The Kingman and Cox Reports taken together make a conclusive case for the inclusion of language awareness in the curriculum for all pupils. However the two reports make it clear that the argument for LA as a 'bridging subject' serving to bring all teachers of language together 'across the curriculum' has not yet been accepted (see Language Across the Curriculum). Only as a separate curriculum module could LA fulfill such a 'bridging' role, and while Kingman rejects this completely, Cox will consider it but only when teachers are adequately trained. 4. Critical Language Awareness
A further dimension was added to the debate on language awareness in the curriculum by the publication in 1992 of Critical Language Awareness edited by N Fairclough of the University of Lancaster. In this symposium Fairclough and his colleagues, while recognising the importance of LA 'in advancing the general case for making knowledge about language a significant element in language education, and doing so partly on the basis of social concerns which overlap to some extent with our own' . . . sets out 'a critique of existing conceptions of language awareness.' The main points of the critique are: (a) that 'traditional LA' (as exemplified by Hawkins 1984 and Donmall 1985) accepted the norms of 'standard' English too uncritically. In Fairclough's words: 'there is no recognition in LA work that in passing on prestigious practices and values such as those of standard English without developing a critical awareness of them, one is implicitly legitimising them and the asym418
metrical distribution of cultural capital (Fairclough 1992 p. 15). (b) that LA has not sufficiently stressed ways in which linguistic imperialism can operate and how language can 'empower' some speakers and 'disempower' others. To this criticism Hawkins has answered (at the ALA conference in Quebec June 1998) that early work in LA did recognise how language can 'empower', quoting from one of the earliest papers on LA (Hawkins 1978): 'Linguistic prejudices and snobberies which are endemic in our linguistically naive community are no longer a joke when they interfere with the life chances of large numbers of children ... prejudice is nurtured by linguistic ignorance and insecurity . . . the study of language will go beyond, will get outside, English and attempt to help the pupil to look objectively at language behaviour'. Hawkins has argued that the only difference between LA and CLA turns on questions of priorities. Early LA work had concentrated on the need to help the many children who were entering secondary school ill-prepared for the linguistic challenges of the secondary curriculum. Criticism of 'standard' forms of language was seen as having its place in the curriculum but at a later stage, and in teacher training. This debate continues. 5. The Importance of Teacher Training
Kingman and Cox, like Bullock before them, make it clear that the future of knowledge about language as a viable element in the curriculum will depend on adequate teacher training. The outlook is not bright. Provision of 'language in teacher education' was the subject of a survey carried out by an NCLE working party (Brumfitt 1988). The report showed that, although enterprising courses in language for teachers were being developed in a few universities, polytechnics, and colleges, only a small minority of future teachers in Britain had access to such preparation. Out of 33 universities approached by the working party only nine reported that they made language a compulsory unit in the preservice education of teachers; out of 26 polytechnics only seven made such provision. The Report quotes Marland (1986), 'this is an area where some schools are thinking ahead of teacher education.' The urgent need for teacher education in this field was again shown by the 'Survey of Language Awareness and Foreign Language Taster Courses' carried out by a team of foreign language specialists of Her Majesty's Inspectorate (Department of Education and Science 1990). The Report is based on an inspection of some 36 schools in an area covering London, Birmingham, and Sheffield. HMI found just under 30 percent of the work seen to be unsatisfactory ('superficial, too general, excessive presentation of factual
Systemic Grammar Applied material, dialogue between English and foreign language teachers restricted' etc.). The remainder was satisfactory, with a few of the lessons being very good. 'The general characteristics of the better language awareness lessons were consistent. . . pupils developing skills of observation and analysis . . . forming more open attitudes... understanding grammatical concepts.' The courses seen by HMI were mostly run by modern language or English departments, generally taking from 15 to 40 percent of the time allocated to that subject. Sometimes a block of time was allocated in the autumn term, intended to lay the foundation for foreign language learning. Other courses ran throughout the year, taking one lesson per week. A danger in both patterns was formal separation of language awareness work from language learning. The Report comments, 'More successful was a "wedge" pattern where foreign language time was mainly devoted to language awareness activities at the outset but this decreased progressively as more time was given to learning French or German... this allowed flexible... and valuable cross-referencing and mutual reinforcement.' On the whole the HMI Survey is an indictment of the failure of teacher trainers to prepare teachers for developing knowledge about language in the classroom. This account of LA in the curriculum must therefore end with a question mark. The case for knowledge about language as an important element in the education of all children appears to have been accepted, after a long debate. Its future will depend on whether or not teachers can be adequately prepared to guide their pupils in the kind of discovery-based learning that is required. Bibliography Aplin R 1997 Knowledge about Language and Language Awareness—An Annotated Bibliography. Association of Language Awareness, University of Leicester Brumfitt C (ed.) 1988 Language in Teacher Education. National Congress on Languages in Education, Brighton Central Advisory Council for Education 1959 75 to 19 (The Crowther Report'). HMSO, London
Davie R, Butler N, Goldstein H 1972 From Birth to Seven. Longman, London Department of Education and Science 1977 Curriculum 11 to 16. HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1985 Education for All (The Swann Report'). HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1985 English from 5 to 16. HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1988 Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language (The Kingman Report'). HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1989 English for Ages 5 to 16 (The Cox Report'). HMSO, London Department of Education and Science 1990 A Survey of Language Awareness and Foreign Language Taster Courses. HMSO, London Donmall G (ed.) 1985 Language Awareness. NCLE Papers and Reports 6. CILT, London Doughty P, Pearce J, Thornton G 1971 Language in Use. Edward Arnold, London Fairclough N (ed.) 1992 Critical Language Awareness. Longman, London Hawkins E W 1974 Modern Languages in the Curriculum. In: Perren G (ed.) The Space Between. CILT Reports and Papers 10. CILT, London Hawkins E W 1979 Language as a Curriculum Study. In: Perren G (ed.) The Mother Tongue and Other Languages in Education. CILT, London Hawkins E W 1981 Modern Languages in the Curriculum. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hawkins E W (ed.) 1981-91 Awareness of Language Series. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hawkins E W 1984 Awareness of Language—an Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MacCarthy P 1978 The Teaching of Pronunciation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Marland M 1986 Towards a curriculum policy for a multilingual world. British Journal of Language Teaching 24:123-38 Newby M 1982 Making Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford Perren G (ed.) 1974 The Space Between—English and Foreign Languages at School. CILT Reports and Papers 10. CILT, London Perren G (ed.) 1979 The Mother Tongue and Other Languages in Education. NCLE Papers and Reports 2. CILT, London Raleigh M 1981 The Languages Book. ILEA English Centre, London
Systemic Grammar Applied C. S. Butler
Many theoretical linguists, especially those working with the more formal models of language, see the possible applications of linguistic theory and description as (at most) incidental by-products of their work.
For Halliday's systemic functional model, however, the usefulness of the model for those who might wish to apply it is a fundamental criterion of adequacy. Halliday's primary interest is in language in relation 419
Teaching Language to the social system, and therefore in the texts which language users create, and the relationship of these texts to their contexts of creation. The text is viewed as a semantic unit, which is realized by, rather than consisting of, sentences. The production of a text is seen in terms of successive choices by the speaker(s) or writer from the 'meaning potential' offered by the language in use, these choices being sensitive to a range of contextual parameters concerned principally with the nature of the social process in which the language users are engaged, the social relationships between addresser and addressee(s), the medium of interaction, and the purpose for which interaction is taking place. The meaning potential of a language is claimed to be organized into three metafunctions: choices within the ideational metafunction are concerned with the representation of experience, interpersonal choices with the expression of communicative roles and personal attitude, textual choices with the organization of the text in such a way that it is coherent both internally and with respect to its context. In what follows, it will be demonstrated that each of the features alluded to above—the emphasis on text in relation to context, the view of text creation as a process of choice from semantically-based alternatives, and the concept of function as an organizing principle in language—is important in explaining why systemic functional grammar has proved a very useful model in a number of areas of applied linguistics, including stylistics, educational linguistics, clinical linguistics, and computational linguistics. For a review of applications of systemic linguistics up to 1984, see Butler (1985); accounts of other developments in some areas can be found in Fawcett and Young (1988). 1. Systemic Grammar in Stylistic Studies The earliest stylistic work using a Hallidayan approach to language was based on the model of Scale and Category Grammar. The principal merit of Scale and Category Grammar in stylistic work was that it provided a comprehensive set of taxonomic categories which could act as a framework for the detailed linguistic analysis of texts. In particular, the arrangement of linguistic units on a hierarchical scale of rank, though criticized by some on theoretical grounds, proved to be a fruitful organizational device for stylistic work, as did the concept of classes of unit (independent versus dependent clauses; nominal, verbal, and adverbial classes of group; and so on). Typical of these early studies are various analyses by Sinclair of twentieth-century English poetry, in which the syntax is described in detail, rank by rank and class by class, in relation to its interplay with line divisions. This work, which also draws on the concept of collocation, succeeds in showing how the convergence of grammatical and lexical patterns con420
tributes to readers' impressions of the texts. Sinclair develops the notions of arrest (where a structural unit is interrupted, thereby generating tension) and acceleration (an increase in repetition rate of textual elements), and relates these to the 'public meaning' of the poem. The stylistic work of Gregory in the 1960s and 1970s made fruitful use of the situational parameters of field, tenor, and mode developed in the early 1960s by Halliday, Gregory, and others. The category of field of discourse allows the analyst to describe the exploitation of the linguistic features of specialized registers for literary purposes; the category of personal tenor provides a basis for discussing the relationships not only between writer and reader, but also between characters in fictional discourse; the category of mode allows the principled analysis of dialogue, monologue, narrative, etc., in literary texts. The emphasis on text as a semantic unit responding to social context which characterized the development of systemic linguistics in the 1970s provided a natural starting point for a series of stylistic studies exploring 'deeper' aspects of literary texts which could not be addressed in the work based on Scale and Category Grammar. Especially illuminating was the demonstration that style is not concerned only with noncognitive aspects of meaning, but may also be intimately bound up with ways of representing experience, as reflected in the choices made within the ideational metafunction of the language system. A number of studies, beginning with Halliday's analysis of Golding's novel The Inheritors, but also including explorations of works by Steinbeck, Conrad, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and others, showed convincingly that choices of process type (for instance, the proportions of material actions and events, mental processes, verbal actions, relational states, etc.) contributed significantly to a number of literary processes, including characterization and the creation of particular world views. A number of papers dealing with matters of this kind can be found in Carter (1982). Work in stylistics during the 1980s, both within and outside the systemic framework, has witnessed a number of important shifts of emphasis. There has been a move away from the analysis of sentence-and group-based linguistic features as such, and towards the study of textual macrostructure. An increased level of interest in the ideological aspects of texts is also evident, reflecting not only a concern with the power of language to influence, but also the view that any analysis of a text is of necessity an ideologically committed act. A third trend is towards the analysis of the relationships between texts, exploiting the idea that the creation of each new text modifies the context in which existing and future texts may be interpreted. All of these are areas which have been focal in the development of systemic functional linguistics over
Systemic Grammar Applied the past few years. Work by Halliday, Hasan, Martin, Ventola, and others has explored the generic structure of texts and its relationship with register. Lemke's work has stressed the concept of intertextuality. Studies by Martin, Hodge, Kress, and others have paid particular attention to ideological issues. It is not surprising, then, that recent systemically-oriented work in stylistics should show a marked shift towards such concerns. The collection edited by Carter and Simpson (1988) contains a number of papers on discourse stylistics which are influenced, to varying degrees, by systemic models. Birch and O'Toole (1988) assembles a series of articles, all of which take systemic functional grammar as their basis, and which illustrate very clearly the concerns with function, genre, intertextuality, and ideology mentioned above. 2. Systemic Grammar in Educational Linguistics
Systemic grammar has probably achieved its greatest popularity and esteem among educationalists. Several strands can be recognized in the contribution made by systemic linguists to educational linguistics: one concerned with the teaching of a first or foreign language and, more widely, with the place of language in the school curriculum; a second with the place of language in the socialization of the child; and a third with the acquisition of the native language by children. Such a division is, of course, largely a descriptive convenience: in practice, proposals in one area have influenced the others. One of the first major linguistics publications to influence language teaching was The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching (Halliday et al. 1964), in which the authors presented Scale and Category Grammar, together with a Hallidayan approach to the analysis of situation types, as a suitable framework for the description of the language to be taught. The approach taken in this book foreshadowed the considerable interest in the teaching of languages for special purposes which was to emerge later. Between 1964 and 1971, Halliday played a leading role in a project, sponsored by the Nuffield Foundation and the Schools Council, whose aim was to examine, from the point of view of contemporary linguistics, the teaching of English in schools, and to furnish descriptions of English which would be of use to teachers, with indications of how they might be used. The materials produced, although not explicitly based on any one linguistic model, show in abundance the concern of Hallidayan linguists with language as a social phenomenon, and in particular with its functions and its variability in different social contexts. During the 1980s, attention has turned to the role of written genres in schooling. Since 1980, a group of systemic linguists in Australia, centered around Martin, Rothery, and Christie, have gathered a very large amount of evidence, from the close study of thousands of texts written in schools, showing that
a number of genres are especially important in the learning of the range of subjects taught in schools (for a number of papers in this area, see Reid 1987). These genres are largely those, such as report, explanation, and exposition, which have evolved in the culture as ways of getting things done through language, and are vital tools in, for instance, business and industry, government and trade union activities. The Australian group found that on the whole these genres were badly taught in schools, possibly largely because the teachers had little idea of their structural and functional characteristics. The group sees its role as providing to teachers an accessible account of these characteristics, and engaging in discussion with the educators on the most fruitful ways of improving children's writing. Clearly, as with the stylistic studies reviewed earlier, work of this kind has important ideological implications, of which the systemic linguists concerned are very much aware, holding that no linguistic act is ever neutral ideologically, since language is the main resource used to construct and convey meanings, which are in turn embedded in, and which help to construct, the cultural and ideological matrix. Systemic work on the role of language in child socialization is now discussed. When developing his sociolinguistic model of language in the 1970s, Halliday turned to the sociological theories of Basil Bernstein for an account of those social contexts which are of especial importance in Western culture, and which might therefore serve as anchor points for the socially based study of meaning choice. Halliday's reinterpretation of Bernstein's theory of elaborated and restricted codes suggested that children from certain types of social background might be disadvantaged by having severely limited access to particular registers of their language which are regarded as essential for progress within the educational system. This proposal gave rise to a number of studies which demonstrated relationships between social class and language use, based on a Hallidayan model of description. Although early studies were based on Scale and Category Grammar, and therefore emphasized structural considerations, later studies moved towards the analysis of meaning choice in children's language, in relation to the context of use for examples of such studies, see Bernstein 1973). Systemic work on child language acquisition offers a perspective quite different from that found in the structurally based, psycholinguistically oriented work which had dominated this area in the 1960s and early 1970s. Halliday's approach to acquisition is aptly captured in the title of his major contribution to this area, Learning How to Mean (Halliday 1975). The process of learning the mother tongue is seen, not in terms of the progressive mastery of structural patterns per se, but as the learning of a range of meanings and the means for their expression. Halliday's explanation for 421
Teaching Language the order of emergence of particular features in the cations of systemic linguistics in language pathology. child's language is, as might be expected, a functional It would seem that a model which emphasizes what one: the child learns those meanings which will allow speakers can do with language in contexts, and which him/her to use language for the functions for which encourages the study of naturally occurring texts, s/he needs it at that stage of development. Language would be ideal for applications in this area. The only major systemically based work in clinical acquisition is thus seen as the expansion of a functional potential, and the mastery of structures as a linguistics to date (1992) is that of Rochester and way of expressing that potential. The social frame- Martin (1979) on the language of schizophrenics. work within which the functional needs arise is taken These workers were able to show that there were sigto be that proposed by Bernstein in his work on soc- nificant differences in the extent and/or type of cohesialization. Halliday's book charts the development of ive devices (described according to the model of meaning potential in one child, Nigel, from the age of Halliday and Hasan (1976)), and especially in types of reference, in the spoken language of thought-disnine months to two years and beyond. schizophrenics, nonthought-disordered The basic picture which emerges is that of a three- ordered stage process of evolution. In Phase I, which lasted schizophrenics and nondisadvantaged speakers, in from about 9 months to 16^ months, each of Nigel's certain types of situational context. Reference has also utterances served just one of a set of functional uses been studied by Fine and his colleagues in patients relevant to the child's needs at this stage. During Phase with other types of linguistic disability. Gotteri, in the article mentioned above, suggests II, which lasted until Nigel was 2 years old, these functional uses became generalized and combined to that several of the concepts employed within systemic give two main functions, initially signaled inton- grammars might be of considerable value to speech ationally: the mathetic function allowed the child to therapists in making assessments of patients' conact as observer and explorer of the world around him; ditions and of suitable remedial measures. In particuthe pragmatic function related to contexts in which lar, the ideas of choice, system network, realization, the child intruded into his environment by asking for and delicacy are seen as potentially useful. objects to be provided or actions to be performed. At first, each utterance had only one of these two 4. Systemic Computational Linguistics functions, but Nigel later learned to combine the two Since about 1970, great strides have been made in the in one and the same utterance. Since there was no computer simulation of human linguistic processes longer a one-to-one relationship between content and (often known as 'Natural Language Processing' expression, the child needed to develop a grammar in (NLP), a branch of Artificial Intelligence). Systemic order to map the functions on to one another in a linguistics has made, and continues to make, a highly single, multifunctional utterance. This was an impor- significant contribution to this area. tant step on the way to the adult linguistic system, One of the seminal works in NLP was Winograd's in which almost all utterances are multifunctional. account of his SHRDLU system, a computer program Nigel's approach to the adult system came in Phase designed to 'understand' information and instrucIII, from 2 years onwards, during which the mathetic tions, typed in English, concerned with a specific function evolved into a fully fledged ideational com- domain consisting of a world of movable toy blocks ponent, the pragmatic into an interpersonal compon- on a table. The system was interactive, accepting ent, and the ability to relate language to its context instructions, asking questions, requesting clariprovided the basis for development of a textual com- fication, and obeying commands, where possible, by ponent. means of an on-screen representation of a robot arm A study by Painter (1984) was designed to discover which can pick up blocks and move them around. In whether the stages found in Nigel's development were constructing this system, Winograd elegantly achieved generalizable to another child, Hal, and to provide a his stated objectives: to develop an operations more detailed account of certain stages in the acqui- language-understanding system; to learn more about sition process. Painter found that the broad outlines how language itself works; and to advance knowledge of Nigel's development were also valid for Hal, in that of what intelligence is, and how it can be modeled a division into three phases (protolanguage, transition using computers. involving mathetic and pragmatic functions, mother As a theoretical model to underpin his system, Wintongue) was clearly recognizable, though the details ograd chose systemic linguistics rather than the transof development within this overall framework often formational approach which had generally been differed for the two children. preferred in computational linguistics. His main reason for this choice was that Halliday's model was 3. Systemic Linguistics in Clinical Studies primarily concerned with how language is organized As Gotteri remarks in his contribution to Fawcett and to convey meaning, rather than with forms and strucYoung (1988), it is perhaps surprising that so little tures per se. The rank-based organization of the gramattention has so far been given to the possible appli- mar and the explicit inclusion of information on 422
Systemic Grammar Applied grammatical function were also seen as advantages. The adoption of a semantically motivated functional model was without doubt one of the main reasons for the impressive capabilities of the system in using the linguistic (and also, to a certain extent, nonlinguistic) context to choose the most likely interpretation of the written input, and in coping with the complexities of deictic relations and ellipsis. A lucid summary of the advantages of systemic and other functional grammars for this type of work can be found in Winograd (1983). While Winograd's program was designed primarily as a language understanding system, the work of Davey (1978) was directed towards the building of a system which could produce fluent English text. Again the domain of application was restricted—in this case, that of a game of noughts and crosses. The program accepted as input a list of moves in a complete or unfinished game, or could play a game with an opponent, the output in each case being a prose description of the game, which showed impressive handling not only of sentence structures, but also of cohesive devices. Unlike Winograd's system, however, it was not interactive, and so could not remedy any lack of understanding by asking questions of the user. Davey's program, like Winograd's, was systemically based; this time, however, the model used was not from Halliday's work, but rather the one developed by Hudson in a detailed analysis of complex sentences in English. Davey pointed to several features of the model which were of particular importance in a computer implementation: Hudson's account is generative, with completely explicit rules for sentence construction; the separation of system networks (which define the features characterizing items under construction) from realization rules (which translate those features into structures) provides a convenient division for computational implementation; the attention given by the model to the meaning-bearing, functional characteristics of linguistic units was also an advantage. During the 1980s, insights from later versions of systemic theory have been successfully incorporated into text-generating systems. One such system is the Nigel program (so called after the subject of Halliday's analysis of child language acquisition; see Sect. 2) developed by Mann, Matthiessen, and their colleagues as part of a larger project, Penman, whose object is to generate discourse appropriate to a range of textcreation needs. The reasons for the choice of a systemic model were similar to those of previous workers: the emphasis on choice; the semantic orientation of the model; the separation of networks, specifying all sources of variation, from realization statements which convert the systemic choices into structural configurations; and finally the functional perspective, allowing a specification of what grammatical units and constructions can be used for. The most recent
versions of the Nigel grammar incorporate a systemically oriented theory of discourse structure known as Rhetorical Structure Theory, and are thereby enabled to produce text which is acceptable not only in terms of its sentence-internal properties, but also in terms of its macrostructure (for accounts of Nigel and other systemically based text-generation systems, see Matthiessen and Bateman 1989; Patten 1988). While the Nigel system is designed to generate monologue, the communal project of Fawcett and his colleagues is attempting to construct dialogue as well, and currently operates with the largest computerbased systemic grammar of English available. The model of discourse incorporated into the system is described in the contribution of Fawcett et al. in Fawcett and Young (1988). An overview of command can be found in Fawcett (1988). Both the analysis and the generation of texts are involved in attempts to translate from one language to another using computers. After an initial period in which great enthusiasm for machine translation led to little in the way of concrete results, funding for this area of computational linguistics became scarce, and progress slow. Since the late 1980s, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in machine translation, and a number of systems have been developed. One important system is eurotra, a joint enterprise among the countries of the European Community, set up to provide a means of translating technical, legal, and administrative documents between the languages of member states. That part of the system which is being developed for German owes a considerable debt to systemic functional linguistics (see Steiner et al. 1988). 5. Concluding Remarks
It has been demonstrated that various versions of systemic theory and description have enjoyed a remarkable success in applied linguistics, especially in the areas of stylistics, educational linguistics, and computational linguistics. It is perhaps worth reiterating the properties of systemic approaches which make them so suitable for application. Arguably the most important characteristic of systemic grammars, which marks them off from all others, is their firm emphasis on the centrality of linguistic choices. This orientation, combined with the insistence that language is meaningful activity, and that meaning should therefore be at the core of the model, goes a long way towards explaining the applicability of systemic linguistics. In stylistics, it can be profitably viewed that the creation of a text as a process in which the most important element is the choice of certain meanings from among those potentially available to the writer, and the exclusion of other meanings which could have been expressed. In educational linguistics, it has proved illuminating to con-
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Teaching Language sider the process of language acquisition as the progressive expansion of meaning choices and the means for their realization. The teaching of a language, whether the mother tongue or a second or foreign language, can also be seen as a process of enablement, by which learners will hopefully become empowered to choose meanings and to express them appropriately. In computational linguistics, the semantic orientation of systemic grammars has been singled out as a particular advantage. The second concept which is crucial for the applicability of systemic models is that of function. At the most general level, systemic models are functional in that they are primarily concerned with what people can do by means of language, and this orientation provides an alternative to more structurally based approaches. For instance, the acquisition or teaching of language can be interpreted in terms of an expansion in what the learner can use language for, rather than solely in terms of the overcoming of the hurdles presented by the structures and vocabulary of the language. And the breakdown of communication in language handicap can in some cases fruitfully be seen as the disruption of what the patient can achieve by means of language. The view of language as an instrument for doing things is not, of course, unique to systemic linguistics, but is shared by a number of other functionally based models. It was also pointed out, however, that function is central to systemic linguistics in another sense: the linguistic system itself is claimed to be organized around three main types of functional, meanings, labeled by Halliday as ideational, interpersonal and textual. This view of language has also proved illuminating in the various areas of application: recall, for instance, that systemic stylisticians have been able to demonstrate the crucial importance of (ideational) choices in process type for the interpretation of certain literary texts; and that Rochester and Martin's work (1979) on the language of schizophrenics pinpointed deficiencies in the cohesive organization of speech, located within the textual function. Finally, the concern of systemic linguists with text and its relation to context of situation has been of great importance in applying the model. Texts are, of course, the prime object of study in stylistics; further, the description of situational context in terms of register and dialect allows explorations of the placing of the text in relation to its (social, generic, historical) situation of production, and in relation to any social contexts portrayed within it. In educational linguis-
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tics, it has been seen that attention is being given to the teaching of textual macrostructures and their relationship to the context of text production. In the computational field, the text-context relations are allimportant in ensuring appropriacy in text analysis and generation. See also: Halliday. Bibliography Bernstein B (ed.) 1973 Class, Codes and Control 2: Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of Language. Vol. IV: of Primary Socialization, Language and Education. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Birch D, O'Toole M (eds.) 1988 Functions of Style. Pinter, London Butler C S 1985 Systemic Linguistics: Theory and Applications. Batsford, London Carter R (ed.) 1982 Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Stylistics. Allen and Unwin, London Carter R, Simpson P (eds.) 1988 Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics. Unwin Hyman, London Davey A 1978 Discourse in the Language Classroom Production: A Computer Model of Some Aspects of a Speaker. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Fawcett R P 1988 Language generation as choice in social interaction. In: Zock, M, Sabah G (eds.) Advances in Natural Language Generation: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, vol. 2. Pinter, London Fawcett R P, Young D J (eds.) 1988 New Developments in Systemic Linguistics. Vol. 2: Theory and Application. Pinter, London Halliday M A K 1975 Learning How to Mean. Edward Arnold, London Halliday M A K, Hasan R 1976 Cohesion in English. Longman, London Halliday M A K, Mclntosh A, Strevens P 1964 The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. Longman, London Matthiessen C M I M, Bateman J A 1989 Text Generation and Systemic-Functional Linguistics: Experiences from English and Japanese. Pinter, London Painter C 1984 Into the Mother Tongue: A Case Study in Early Language Development. Pinter, London Patten T 1988 Systemic Text Generation as Problem Solving. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Reid I (ed.) 1987 The Place of Genre in Learning: Current Debates, Typereader Publications No 1. Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria Rochester S, Martin J R 1979 Crazy Talk: A Study of the Discourse of Schizophrenic Speakers. Plenum, New York Steiner E, Schmidt P, Zelinsky-Wibbelt C (eds.) 1988 From Syntax to Semantics: Insights from Machine Translation. Pinter, London and Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, NJ Winograd T 1983 Language as a Cognitive Process. Vol. I: Syntax. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA
Reading in the Mother Tongue Literature Teaching R. A. Carter
The 1980s have witnessed marked advances in the relationship between linguistic criticism and pedagogical approaches to literature. During this period there have been refinements—in theory and in practice—in both linguistic criticism and in the teaching of literature and, where they have converged, these developments can be properly considered to have been of mutual benefit. Developments have occurred across a broad field of English Studies, but progress has generally been more marked within the second- or foreign-language curriculum than within the mothertongue English curriculum.
normally take out of something we read is minimal, actually, because we simply take from the passage what fits the frame of reference we have already established before reading. Now, you can't do that with literature... because you've got to find the evidence, as it were, which is representative of some new reality. So, with literary discourse the actual procedures for making sense are much more in evidence. You've got to employ interpretative procedures in a way which isn't required of you in the normal reading process. If you want to develop these procedural abilities to make sense of discourse, then literature has a place. (Widdowson 1983: 33)
Such a position has led to an undoubted resurgence of pedagogic interest in literature in the foreign-language classroom, as well as to some reconsideration of the ways in which literature is traditionally taught as part of English courses in universities in which English is not the mother-tongue. Widdowson's arguments are of equal validity for mother-tongue as well as for non-native students of English. Even more relevant to mother-tongue literature teaching are arguments for stylistic analysis. In this connection stylistic analysis is seen as a valuable extension to largely impressionistic and intuitive accounts of the operation of language in literature— a characteristic of the dominant critical mode of practical criticism. The starting points for such pedagogic practice are that language is the medium of literature and that literary studies are disadvantaged by uninformed accounts of language organization. Furthermore, effects of language give rise to readers' intuitions about texts; stylistic analysis enables such intuitions to be formalized and tested and then modiIf you're a sensible teacher you use every resource that fied and refined. Interpretations which result from comes to hand. But the difference between conventional these processes are necessarily provisional, but the discourse and literature is that in conventional discourse processes do allow intuitions to be accounted for and you can anticipate, you can take short cuts; when reading a passage, let's say, you often know something about make interpretation more open to genuine debate. It the topic the passage deals with, and you can use that should also result in pedagogic practices which are knowledge while reading naturally in order to find out less teacher-centered, and which are therefore more what's going on in the passage. This is a natural reading conducive to greater critical independence in the procedure: we all do it. The amount of information we student.
1. Pedagogical Stylistics During the past decade work in the pedagogy of linguistic criticism or what might be termed 'pedagogical stylistics' has continued to derive considerable impetus from H. G. Widdowson's Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature (1975). This influential book makes a primary case for the reinsertion of literature within an EFL or ESL teaching context. The teaching of English within such a context has been dominated by largely instrumental communicative goals and Widdowson argues for the value of language-based approaches to texts which have primarily aesthetic functions. A key point in this advocacy of pedagogical stylistics is that the lack of situational context in literary texts enforces a heightened attention to language; in turn, it is through an increased focus on language and its working that interpretive and inferential skills can be best developed. As Widdowson puts it:
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Teaching Language A further implication of Widdowson's work is that literary and nonliterary texts should be studied alongside one another, in mutually supporting ways, with students developing a sharper awareness of both. Such work supports the growth of studies in rhetoric and text and of the text-based, student-centered, and activity-based pedagogies which accompany them, particularly within the theoretical framework of communicative approaches to language teaching in EFL and ESL. Such a framework has, however, raised fundamental questions about the pedagogic purposes of integrated literature and language teaching. Teachers have had to ask themselves whether the main focus is on literary texts as an object of study in their own right or on literary texts as a valuable resource for language teaching purposes. In any case, an integrated approach has been valued as bringing together areas of the curriculum which have tended to go separate ways.
given. Reading texts with close attention to language must continue to be a primary pedagogic practice but texts cannot be taught as if they had single eternal meanings; interpretation of all texts, 'literary' and 'nonliterary,' is ineluctably conditioned by a 'variety' of factors such as race, social class, religious beliefs, values, and so on. Consideration of such sociolinguistic, cultural, and ideological factors has been facilitated by recent developments in linguistic-stylistic description away from extracts and short, linguistically deviant lyric poems toward a study of larger units of language organization such as genre, rhetorical patterning, and narrative as socially signifying practices. Stylistic analysis now draws eclectically but systematically on advances in text linguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics—the study of language in socially shaped contexts of use.
2. Perspectives from Literary Theory
The inspiration for much of this work in linguistic criticism comes from publications by Fowler, most representatively in Literature as Social Discourse (1981) and Linguistic Criticism (1986), both of which emphasize the importance of contextualization and which point to such concerns with language, sociohistorical meanings, and literature as a potentially uniting force across departments of English studies. There are some important challenges to pedagogy posed by such developments. A main one is to seek adequate classroom treatment of literary texts which reconciles detailed textual scrutiny with proper consideration of the historical and cultural factors which have contributed to the particular formal and linguistic character of that text. In keeping with developments in many secondary schools in the UK, and with the general pedagogic philosophy enshrined in UK National Curriculum programs of study for language and text study, it is probable that, in higher education too, such investigation will be projectbased. This will involve students establishing particular hypotheses about the relationship between a text or aspects of a text and relevant historical or social contexts; the investigation will involve testing of the hypotheses based on detailed linguistic critical description and a subsequent revision to hypotheses in the light of the research. Such a methodology is essentially that of an independent, small-scale research project. It is a natural extension to student-centered, teacher-supervised, discovery-based modes of learning which are increasingly influential in the reshaping of approaches to English teaching in primary and secondary education. Linguistic criticism tends to be confined to post-16 education but, given both its particular character and recent developments in both the theory and practice of the subject, it is not unreasonable to suppose that linguistic criticism may be in the
3. Literature, Context, and Pedagogy
An openness to new developments in literary theory has also promoted an integration of linguistic and literary studies. In particular, the questioning within recent literary theory of the nature of literature itself, the construction and deconstruction of literary canons, and the study of the changing reception of 'literary' texts relative to social context, have led linguistic critics to embrace a much wider range of texts as sources of literariness. It is now not uncommon for jokes, popular fiction, and advertising language to be analyzed alongside a Shakespearean sonnet or an opening to a novel by Jane Austen. Such developments have tended to align some linguistic critics with changes within 'English' which are now more properly termed cultural studies. One major effect of these developments has been a steady discharging of a canon of British, American, or generally Eurocentric texts and its replacement by texts from different national literatures in English and by a wider range of spoken and written discourses. Classroom explorations of the role and function of style in such texts cannot, of course, narrowly confine themselves to the language or style (see Brumfit and Carter 1986). Throughout the 1980s there was an acceptance that stylistic analysis cannot be conducted as if the meanings of a text were text-immanent, as if, in other words, meanings wholly resided in the words on the page. The dangers here are those associated with 'new criticism' and 'traditional' stylistics: texts are seen to exist in a kind of vacuum, a social and cultural space disinfected of historical and ideological determinants on both the text and the reader. There is now substantial agreement among linguistic critics that texts cannot be read as expressing universal truths. In teaching contexts, in particular, students need to be shown that meanings are produced, not 426
Miscue Analysis forefront of renewal and change in the teaching of literature in higher education. Bibliography Brumfit C J, Carter R A (eds.) 1986 Literature and Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Fowler R 1981 Literature as Social Discourse. Batsford, London Fowler R 1986 Linguistic Criticism. Oxford University Press, Oxford Widdowson H G 1975 Stylistics and The Teaching of Literature. Longman, London Widdowson H G 1983 Talking shop: Literature and ELT. English Language Teaching Journal 37: 30-35
Miscue Analysis H. Arnold
Miscue analysis is a procedure for assessing oral reading, based on psycholinguistic theory. It was devised by Goodman, who first used it as a research tool in 1963. Psycholinguists claim that learning to read is a problem-solving activity, necessitating the simultaneous use of three main cueing systems: graphophonemic (matching sound to visual display), syntactic (using grammatical constraints), and semantic (using content clues). Readers' deviations from the original text provide overt evidence of underlying strategies. Some errors, or miscues, as Goodman called them, are positive, indicating reasoned hypotheses, while negative miscues indicate overreliance on one cueing system. The Reading Miscue Inventory (Goodman and Burke 1972) is a taxonomy for classifying and evaluating a reader's strengths and weaknesses. Each miscue is analyzed by asking nine questions about its nature, culminating in the all-important 'Does the miscue result in a change of meaning?' Whereas Goodman focused on linguistic and cognitive causes for miscueing, Bettelheim and Zelan (1982) explained many miscues, especially substitutions, psychoanalytically. Few teachers use the original taxonomy, but simplified versions have been introduced, for example by Moyle (1979), Arnold (1982), and Campbell (1983). Teachers have found that miscue analysis, in one form or another, enables them to conduct reading interviews more logically, giving appropriate help to pupils. It does indeed, as Goodman suggested, become 'a window on the reading process.' The procedure has been used by researchers, somewhat inconclusively, to detect developmental patterns in reading acquisition. For example, Campbell (1987) found it difficult to isolate clear patterns of development in beginning readers, and questioned previously postulated stages (see Reading: Early). Other researchers have used miscue analysis to examine the interaction between reader and text, for example, Potter (1987) and Pumfrey and Fletcher (1989) (see Read-
ing: Testing). They too found limitations in the technique. Pumfrey concluded that there were 'unresolved methodological and conceptual issues.' Doubts about the validity of miscue analysis have been raised since its inception (Hood 1975; Leu 1982). Its subjectivity precludes standardization of results, and it is hard to obtain inter-judge reliability in classifying and interpreting miscues. Criticisms, however, tend to be of lack of consensus in making judgments rather than of underlying principle, and miscue analysis remains a promising qualitative method of evaluating early reading strategies. See also: Reading: Theories. Bibliography Arnold H 1982 Listening to Children Reading. Hodder and Stoughton, Sevenoaks, UK Arnold H 1992 Diagnostic Reading Record. Hodder and Stoughton, Sevenoaks, UK Bettelheim B, Zelan K 1982 On Learning to Read. Thames and Hudson, London Campbell R 1983 Guidelines for hearing children read. Reading 17(3): 147-60 Campbell R 1987 Oral reading errors of two young beginning readers. Journal of Research in Reading 10: 144-55 Goodman Y M, Burke C L 1972 Reading Miscue Inventory Manual. Macmillan, New York Hood J 1975 Qualitative analysis of oral reading errors: The inter-judge reliability of scores. Reading Research Quarterly 11: 577-98 Leu D 1982 Oral reading error analysis: A critical review of research and application. Reading Research Quarterly 17: 420-37 Moyle D 1979 Informal testing of reading needs. In: Raggett M S E J, Tutt C, Raggett P (eds.) Assessment and Testing of Reading: Problems and Practices. Ward Lock Educational, London Potter F N 1987 Oral reading errors: Part of speech effects and their theoretical and practical implications. Journal of Research in Reading 10:43-56 Pumfrey P P, Fletcher J 1989 Differences in reading strategies among 7- to 8-year-old children. Journal of Research in Reading 12: 114-30
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Readability C. Harrison
In its general sense, 'readability' is an attribute of a text, referring to whether or not it is interestingly and attractively written, and easy to understand. In its more technical usage, the study of readability relates to the systematic examination of a wide range of factors that in combination have been found to be associated with the interest and difficulty levels of texts. The study of readability has been a cause of debate, mainly because its analysis of the surface features of texts, and the relating of these to likely comprehensibility, has been taken by some commentators as representing an atheoretical approach to the study of what makes a text readable. Furthermore, the indiscriminate application of readability formulas, which predict probable comprehension using counts of surface text features, has been criticized by some as being dangerous and unreliable. The current consensus view of readability formulas is that they can, under certain circumstances, offer useful indications of the comparative levels of difficulty of texts. Readability formula scores are, however, only estimates, and while they can make some useful general comparisons, they are not to be trusted in the more sensitive task of matching individual readers to texts (see Reading Inventories). 1. The History of the Study of Readability The serious study of readability began in the USA in the 1920s, and had two main areas of focus: basal reading schemes (that is, series of books for beginning readers), and content area reading (that is, school textbooks on subjects such as mathematics, history, or science; see Reading Teaching: Materials). The vocabulary of school texts was given close attention following the publication in 1921 of Thorndike's A Teacher's Word Book of 10,000 Words. Trends towards extending education to a wider population led teachers to consider more carefully whether the books then in schools were too difficult for a new generation of students who were the first in their families to attend secondary school. Thorndike's study of word frequencies was seminal since it provided a principled basis for estimating vocabulary difficulty, based on mean word frequency. This in turn led to the first readability formulas. A second catalyst for readability studies came from journalism and mass communications research. Studies in these areas began in the 1930s and were given further impetus by World War II, in which adult literacy needs were addressed by many psychologists and reading specialists, and during the 1940s some of the most widely used readability formulas were devised.
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2. Readability Formulas Klare (1963) and Harrison (1980) have given detailed accounts of the development of readability formulas. Nearly all formulas, including those devised in the 1920s, had a similar genesis and share certain characteristics. Most formulas were derived by selecting a number of texts or passages and analyzing the relationship between a group of linguistic variables and some criterion, such as comprehension test scores or teachers' ratings of difficulty. The formula is then constructed by combining arithmetically the statistics identified as the most highly predictive, such as word length or sentence length. The most widely used formula is that of Flesch (1948). Flesch developed a number of formulas, but the best-known is his 'reading ease formula': Reading Ease Score = 206.835 -(0.846sylls/100w)-(l. 015wds/sen)
In the formula, sylls/100w stands for the mean number of syllables per 100 words, and wds/sen for the mean number of words per sentence. The reading ease score itself is a notional comprehension score out of 100, in which 100 indicates a very easy and 0 a very difficult passage. This formula is typical of many in that it includes one vocabulary variable—the count of syllables per word—and one syntactic variable—the mean number of words per sentence. 3. Criticisms of Readability Formulas The Flesch formula has been shown to be one of the most valid and reliable, but it also demonstrates most of the weaknesses for which readability formulas have been attacked. First, the vocabulary variable does not take account of word frequency: in English there are many short rare words and many long frequently used ones, and the formula would be insensitive to this. Second, no account is taken of repetition; if a long or difficult word is glossed and then repeated, the passage containing it presumably is less difficult to comprehend than a similar passage containing many different long words, but the formula does not allow for this. Third, sentence length is a very crude index of syntactic complexity; periodic sentence constructions with simple clause structure would be rated as difficult, while compressed, embedded, or elliptical constructions would be assessed as relatively easy. Fourth, many critics have pointed out that such formulas are insensitive to disruptions in coherence; if the sentences (or indeed all the words within them) were randomly reordered, the formula score would
Readability remain unchanged, while the comprehensibility of the passage would certainly be altered. Such criticisms sound damning, but the fact that readability formulas have been used in hundreds of studies suggests that they have some merits. To understand these merits, one must accept that readability studies are based on correlations, not causal relationships. From a statistical standpoint, if certain variables correlate highly with actual difficulty, then it is reasonable to include them in a predictive formula. Many dozens of studies have confirmed that vocabulary is by far the best single predictor of text difficulty, and for this reason it is included in nearly all formulas. Flesch's variable of syllables per word may seem arbitrary, but it has certain advantages; it has been found to correlate more highly with actual vocabulary difficulty than a count of mean word length, as expressed in letters per word, and it is much easier to apply reliably than counts of word frequency. Word frequency counts have many problems, such as how to treat irregular plurals, proper names, abbreviations, and compound words, and every problem potentially adds to unreliability in application. Equally, while a count of the mean number of words per sentence is crude, it does in fact account for most of the variance attributable to grammatical structure. Many attempts have been made to include more complex grammatical variables in readability studies, but when this is done, other problems can occur. First, readability formulas are derived from multiple regression analyses, and it is axiomatic that each new variable added gives less additional predictive accuracy than the last, but adds a full measure of error. For this reason, formulas tend to have no more than three or four variables. Some studies have begun with over 100 syntactic variables, including indices of embeddedness, frequency of passives, and other verb forms associated with difficulties in comprehension, but complex formulas derived from them have not proved to be any better at predicting difficulties associated with grammatical structure than a simple measure of sentence length. For all its weaknesses, therefore, the Flesch formula remains a perfectly adequate one, and the more complex analyses available today have not really improved upon it. If a formula is misused, however, even its author would declare the results invalid. Such circumstances could occur, for example, if a formula derived from an analysis of school textbook prose were applied to poetry. There is also some doubt over the appropriateness of using a formula to analyze very brief segments of text, such as labels, instructions, or individual sentences, though this issue is partly one of sampling adequacy. 4. Sampling Adequacy and Readability
Even if one concedes that under certain circumstances it can be valid to apply a readability formula, there
remains the problem of sampling. Some studies have shown that readability estimates based on 100-word samples of text can be misleading. A number of formula developers suggested that three such samples should be taken as a minimum, and their results averaged. This has not prevented the sale of computer programs to estimate readability which will not permit the user to sample more than a single 100-word passage. However, such a weak sampling procedure may be useless: Fitzgerald (1981) used a computer to estimate the readability of five high-school textbooks, then went on to calculate the critical number of passages needed to be 80 percent certain that there would be no more than one year's difference between the sample mean and the overall mean. She found that in one case it was 72 samples, which amounted to nearly half the book. The problem here relates not to the number of samples, but to the relatively modest information on mean sentence length obtainable from a 100-word sample. In beginning reading texts there may be 10 or more sentences in a 100-word passage, but in textbooks sentences in the range 30-50 words long are common (see Textbooks). This means that a 100-word passage offers an adequate basis for estimating mean word length, but an inadequate one for estimating sentence length. One solution is therefore to analyze 250-word samples, rather than ones of 100 words. Such a procedure does not degrade the validity of a formula, and it may well increase its reliability. 5. Nonformula Approaches to Estimating Readability A nonformula approach to estimating readability which has been widely used is the 'Fry graph' (1977), which is reproduced in Fig. 1. One feature of this graph is that it extends up to USA grade level 17, and thus claims to analyze material beyond school and up to college level. One other feature is that the location of the point indicating the mean grade level of the passage gives further information concerning the relative difficulty of the passage: if it is above the median line, one might expect the passage to be, in relative terms, more difficult in vocabulary than grammar; if it is below the line, one would expect the reverse to be the case. 6. Cloze Procedure and Readability During the 1960s, cloze procedure was seen by some as a potentially exciting new practical and theoretical basis for readability analysis and validation. Major studies in the 1960s and 1970s used cloze scores to measure relative text difficulty in what was then thought to be a more valid and reliable way than had hitherto been considered possible. This was because cloze treated every passage in the same way, and researchers were not faced with problems of attempting to equalize comprehension question difficulty. 429
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Figure 1. Fry graph for estimating readability—extended (Fry 1977).
Words were deleted on a regular basis, generally every fifth, seventh, or tenth word, and readers had to replace them. The mean cloze score provided an index of the comprehensibility of the passage, and this could be compared with scores derived from other passages using the same group of readers. It was hoped that this would offer more valid readability data. In the event, this promise was not fulfilled. It is now accepted that what cloze measures is redundancy, rather than comprehension, and these differ in important ways. For example, in a complex science passage, a reader might readily supply a missing word in a cloze test, because it collocates with another in a different part of the passage, but this may have little to do with whether it is understood or not. Conversely, in a literary text, a reader might supply an incorrect but grammatically acceptable synonym, which would be scored as wrong in a cloze test. 430
Other studies have called into question the sensitivity of cloze to intersentential constraints. Scrambling the sentence order of a text has only a small effect on cloze scores, but has been found to seriously disrupt recall and comprehension. For these reasons cloze is currently used less widely in readability research. 7. The Future of Readability Research
Readability research has been regularly discredited, but it refuses to pass away. This is perhaps because the issue of making reading material more comprehensible to a wide audience is the goal of most authors and publishers. Psychologists and linguists have castigated readability research, but it is still being used to help produce more readable newspapers, consumer material, and legal documents. Uncritical use of readability formulas can produce nonsensical
Reading: Acquisition prose, but provided users avoid the fallacy of assuming that correlation is causation, readability measures may still have a limited role to play. Current initiatives are attempting to take account of the enormous influence that cognitive psychology has had upon our understanding of the reading process since the early 1970s. Studies of text structure, and of the reader's knowledge of text structure, are having a major impact upon how comprehension is viewed, and such studies are now being recognized as important in readability analysis (see Reading: Theories). Similarly, a reader's prior knowledge of the specific topic dealt with has a significant effect on his or her ability to cope with a text. These interactions are unique for each individual, as are those related to motivation and interest level. The effect of all these
factors is difficult to quantify, but it is recognized that a complete analysis of readability must take account of them. Bibliography Fitzgerald G G 1981 How many samples give a good readability estimate?: The Fry Graph. Journal of Reading 24:404-10 Flesch R F 1948 A new readability yardstick. Journal of Applied Psychology 32:221-33 Fry E 1977 Fry's readability graph: Clarifications, validity and extension to level 17. Journal of Reading 21: 242-52 Harrison C 1980 Readability in the Classroom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Klare G R 1963 The Measurement of Readability. Iowa State University Press, Ames, IA Thorndike E L 1921 A Teacher's Word Book of 10,000 Words. Columbia University, New York
Reading: Acquisition J. Oakhill
When people think about children acquiring reading skills, they usually think of learning to read words— 'cracking the code.' However, the real purpose of reading is finding out the meaning of the text, and this aspect of reading acquisition will be reviewed later in the article. There is a very large body of research into how children learn to read, and the best method of teaching them, and this article is necessarily very selective. Almost all of the research has been on reading words, and the balance of this article reflects this bias. The first section outlines a variety of reading-related skills that children acquire in the early years of school, and considers which, if any, of these skills are prerequisites for learning to read. The second section surveys some current methods of teaching children to read, and the third gives an account of some important aspects of the development of reading skill. In the final section, comprehension is considered: both its normal development, and the causes of comprehension difficulties. 1. Reading-related Skills Children who are learning to read already possess a wide variety of relevant skills and will acquire many others. Many of these skills are either prerequisites for reading or are related to it in other, less direct ways. However, many children who cannot yet read have vague or even wholly misguided conceptions about it. Even those who do not will find much of the terminology used in reading lessons new. They may not
be familiar with the idea of talking about language. They may lack the necessary knowledge about words, syllables, and phonemes that are prerequisites for an analytic approach to reading. To master the art of reading they will have to learn to pay attention to features of language that they have previously ignored. Although children beginning school have a good command of spoken language, which they can produce and comprehend effectively, they lack the ability to analyze and reflect on the form of language, independent of its meaning. The ability to think and talk about language is sometimes described as a 'metalinguistic' skill, one level up from the basic linguistic skills required for using language to talk about the world. Before discussing the development of specific reading-related skills, it is necessary to make one methodological point. Many of the findings about how the development of these skills relates to progress in reading are only correlational—they show that the age at which a child acquires a certain skill reflects the age at which that child develops a particular reading ability. However, it is a truism that correlations are not necessarily indicators of causal relations. Furthermore, even when there is a causal relation, a correlation cannot show which direction it runs in. The skills considered could, therefore, be related to reading in various ways. Ehri (1979) identifies four types of relation. First, skills may be 'prerequisites': skills upon which reading builds, and which must be acquired before reading can be learned. Second, they may have
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Teaching Language the role of 'facilitators': skills which may speed progress in beginning reading, but which are not essential. Third, they may be consequences of learning to read: skills that develop through practice at reading rather than vice versa. Finally, there may be no direct link between a skill and reading ability at all—they may be incidentally correlated, perhaps because each is related to some other factor, such as intelligence. Because a variety of explanations are possible for a correlation between a particular skill and reading ability, it is not always clear that training in that skill will improve reading. Training can only be useful if a skill is either a prerequisite for or a facilitator of reading development. One method by which causal relations can be tested uses a mixture of longitudinal and training studies. Longitudinal studies establish which of two abilities develop first in the individual child. Since abilities that develop later cannot cause the development of abilities that develop earlier, longitudinal studies rule out whole sets of causal hypotheses. But abilities that develop earlier do not necessarily cause the development of abilities that develop later, even if the two are strongly correlated. The development of both may be caused by a third factor—a general facility with language, for example. However, if training the ability that develops early has a specific effect on the ability that develops later, and if more general training does not have the same effect, then a causal relation is indicated. However, combined longitudinal and training studies are difficult and time-consuming to carry out, and their importance has only recently been recognized. There is, therefore, some uncertainty about which skills are necessary for reading to begin. It follows that the concept of 'reading readiness' must be questioned. Readiness tests are intended to assess whether a child is ready to begin formal reading instruction. They assess the perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic skills assumed to be used in reading (for example, visual and auditory matching, letter-sound relations), so that appropriate prereading instruction can be given, if necessary. But reading-readiness skills will only be helpful if the skills taught are prerequisites for beginning reading. As will become clear from the evidence below, learning to read may foster some 'readiness skills,' rather than vice versa. /./ Understanding of Printed Language Concepts Between the ages of 3 and 5 years children's ideas about reading change dramatically, as do their ideas about the components of written language. For instance, 3 year olds are more likely than older children to misassess their reading ability, thinking that they can read when they cannot. By 5 years, most children know if they are unable to read, and know about the importance of words. Preschool children may not know about the directional constraints in
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reading, and also typically have some difficulty in understanding reading and writing terminology—they often cannot distinguish between letters, words, and sentences or between letters and numerals. Thus, it cannot be assumed that children start school with any clear concept of reading. They probably know that they will learn to read, but may not know what this means. Children's early knowledge of the language and terminology of reading has been shown to correlate with their later reading skill. However, an explicit understanding of reading-related concepts may not be a prerequisite for reading. Reading instruction may encourage children to develop a more analytic approach and to learn more about the terminology, rather than vice versa, though without some basic concepts, such as an understanding of the left-to-right rule in English, reading will not progress very far. 1.2 Letter Recognition Children's knowledge of letter names when they start school is a good predictor of reading progress during the first year, but is not related to later success in reading. However, teaching children letter names does not improve their reading, and children can learn to read without being able to name any letters. It is likely that, rather than letter knowledge having a causal role in reading acquisition, some common variable, such as an interest in written materials, underlies both letter naming and reading. Children often have difficulty discriminating between letters that are mirror images of one another. This difficulty has nothing to do with visual discrimination, but is probably related to the need to pay attention to orientation, which will not have been important to the child previously. Although many objects have a canonical orientation, they do not assume a different identity when their orientation changes. 1.3 Word Consciousness 'Word consciousness' or 'lexical awareness' is the ability to recognize that both writing and speech are made up of distinct entities called words. Although the concept of a word is one that literate adults take for granted, it is not necessarily an obvious one to young children. Some 5 year olds still find it difficult to recognize words as distinct units. (An excellent review of research on word consciousness is given by Ehri (1979), who also addresses some of the broader issues about the relation between word consciousness and reading.) Performance on some tasks that measure word awareness skills is correlated with early reading ability. For example, in beginning readers, reading skill correlates with ability to judge whether a sound is made up of one word or two words or whether it is a word at all. Reading ability is also related to the
Reading: Acquisition many approaches to reading, although they are perfectly able to perceive differences at the phonemic level (e.g., they know that two words that differ in one phoneme are not the same). Prereading success on the phoneme segmentation task predicts reading success in the second grade. Young children's difficulty in this area is probably related to the fact that phonemes, unlike syllables, do not have acoustic boundaries separating them in speech. Furthermore, phonemes overlap in speech, largely because of a phenomenon known as 'coarticulation.' The way the parts of the mouth move means that, for example, the articulation of /b/ will depend on the following vowel. The first part of bat is pronounced differently from that of but. The very first bit of the word contains information about 1.4 Phonemic and Linguistic Awareness Children may begin to read by learning to recognize the vowel as well as about the /b/. Thus, when a word whole words as visual patterns, more or less as 'log- is broken into its constituent sounds, and these are ographs.' But learning an adequate reading vocabu- said individually—for example, cat into /k/, /a/, and lary in this way would place an enormous, and /t/—only approximations to the underlying phonemes unnecessary, burden on memory. Children learning can be derived. Therefore, no matter how fast the an alphabetic writing system can capitalize on the fact consecutive phonemes are spoken, they will not blend that the written symbols are (to a greater or lesser together to form cat unless they are distorted. More general phonemic awareness skills have also extent) associated with phonemes. Once children have grasped this principle, which is regarded by many as been shown to be related to early reading. Even very the key to learning to read, they will be able to gain obvious features of words, such as their spoken or independence in reading, and be able to recognize for written length, may be difficult for children to themselves words that they have never before seen perceive. For example, pre-reading children perform at chance level when shown two cards and asked to written. In particular, children must learn the rules that say which shows the word mow and which motorcycle. relate written letters or groups of letters to sounds. They do not understand even this highly-salient feaHowever, in English, these rules are complex as there ture of writing—that the word that looks longer has is often no one-to-one correspondence between letters the longer pronunciation. Young (kindergarten) children experience even and sounds. Such rules are called 'grapheme-phoneme correspondence' rules (GPC rules) because they state greater difficulty in tasks that require them to be aware the relation between small units of written language of more subtle phonemic differences between words, (graphemes) and small units of spoken language (pho- such as deciding whether two words begin with the nemes). To apply grapheme-phoneme correspondence same sound, or whether two words rhyme. The lack rules, children have to be able to break written words of phonemic awareness in young children is also indiinto parts, and put the parts back together once the cated by their performance on sound deletion tasks. corresponding sounds have been determined (these For instance, when asked to say what remained when skills are called 'segmentation' and 'blending'). The a particular sound was removed from a word (e.g., /h/ use of these rules demands at least an implicit mastery removed from hill), children with a mental age below of the phonemic system of the language. The pho- 7 are unable to perform the task at all, and for more nemes or sound segments produced by application of advanced children middle sounds (e.g., /s/ in nest) are the rules must then be blended to produce a pro- harder than initial or final ones. Performance on this phoneme deletion task has been shown to correlate nunciation for the word as a whole. However, before they can apply an analytic strategy with reading skill in the first and second grades. In an important and influential study, Bradley and to word decoding, children must become aware of the phonemic segments into which words can be divided. Bryant (1978) addressed the question of whether there Without such awareness, decoding using grapheme- is a causal link between phonemic analysis skills and phoneme correspondence rules and blending are reading. They compared backward readers (10-year impossible. But experiments with young children (4- olds) not only with normal readers of the same age, to 5-year olds) have shown that they find segmentation but with normal children (6-year olds) who had the of words into phonemes almost impossible. Children same reading age as the backward readers. They asked are much better at dividing words into syllables and children to detect the odd-one-out in sequences of putting syllables together to form words. Such data four spoken words (either on the basis of alliteration, clearly show that the younger children have difficulty or of rhyme), and to produce words that rhymed with making explicit the phonemic distinctions needed for other words that they read out. The older normal ability to pick out the word or words that differ between two sentences. More surprisingly, first-grade children have difficulty detecting word boundaries in printed materials, despite the fact that there are clear visual cues to where one word ends and the next begins. The ability to pick out printed words develops with increased reading proficiency. It has not been clearly established whether teaching word consciousness skills enhances reading. Some children are aware of words before they begin to read, so word consciousness is not simply a consequence of learning to read. However, there is no evidence that it is essential for reading to begin.
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Teaching Language readers showed the best performance, but the important finding was that the backward readers were poorer on such tasks than the younger normal readers, even though they had, presumably, had much more experience of written language. Bradley and Bryant argue that phonemic analysis skills do not simply develop through exposure to print, but that they are causally related to reading—phonemic awareness helps children learn to read. In a later longitudinal study, they provided further evidence for this idea. They showed that performance on the odd-one-out task at 4- or 5-years was a good predictor of reading achievement, but not of mathematical ability, three years later. They also found that training in categorizing picture names by their sounds improved reading and spelling skills in nonreaders who were lagging behind in phonemic awareness, but only when it was supplemented by teaching with plastic letters that demonstrated to the children how words that have sounds in common often have common spelling patterns. The improvement in reading was longlasting—when the children were retested at age 13, those given phonological training were still ahead of the control groups (who were either given no training, or training in an unrelated skill) in reading and spelling, but the children trained in the connection between sounds and letters were still ahead of all other groups. In this study, as in the previous one, there were no differences between the groups in arithmetic—the training effect was restricted to reading and spelling. These studies by Bradley and Bryant have shown that training to rectify a deficiency in the skill of sound categorization can improve reading generally. But it is also possible that learning to read improves phonemic awareness. Ellis and Large (1988) have suggested that the causal relation between reading and phonemic skills (they used syllable- and phoneme-segmentation, and rhyming and blending tasks) changes over the first few years of schooling. In a longitudinal study, they showed that the phonemic skills of those children who were nonreaders at age 5 predicted their reading ability at age 6. However, once reading ability begins to develop, it causes the development of reading-related skills. For those children who had begun to read, reading skill at age 5, and again at age 6, predicted phonemic skills 1 year later. Ellis has suggested that the ability to read 'makes sense of sound skills and fosters their development. Work with adults also suggests that learning to read using an alphabetic system allows phonemic awareness to develop. Chinese adults (who were fluent only in a logographic script) did poorly on phonemic segmentation tasks by comparison with those who could read an alphabetic script. Similar results have also been found when Portuguese illiterates and ex-illiterates are compared on segmental analysis tasks. The poor performance of illiterate adults on such tasks suggests that learning to 434
read has a causal role in the development of phonemic awareness. However, whatever the precise relation between such skills and reading, young children should find an analytic approach to reading difficult. 1.5 Orthographic Awareness The orthography, or writing system, of a language such as English comprises more than just an alphabet. There are also rules about which sequences of letters are admissible. For example, the orthographic rules of English would be violated by a word beginning zn-. Furthermore, some letters appear more often in certain positions in words, and some of the permissible sequences of letters are more common than others. Just as words within sentences are to some degree predictable—for example, one expects articles to be followed by nouns—so are letters within words. To the extent that a letter is highly predictable it is said to be 'redundant.' In one type of experiment to investigate orthographic awareness, children are asked to make explicit judgments, for instance, saying which of two nonwords they think are more 'word like.' Their ability to perform this task increases with age and with reading fluency. However, studies that have investigated how orthographic structure affects speed of word identification or naming have found no improvement with age beyond the initial stages of learning to read. But, in a task that more closely approximates reading— lexical decision (deciding whether a string of letters is or is not a word)—younger children are more influenced by the orthographic features of letter strings than older children. The nonwords are either similar or dissimilar, orthographically, to real words. In this sort of task, younger children take longer to reject the wordlike nonwords. 2. Approaches to Teaching Reading
The two main methods currently in use to teach children to read are the 'whole word' (or look-and-say) approach, and the 'phonies' (or code-based) approach, though a method gaining in popularity is the 'real books' or 'apprenticeship' approach. The contribution of the skills discussed in Sect. 1 to children's reading development may depend on how they are taught to read. Letter orientation, order, and attention to salient features of words will be important for approaches that emphasize sight recognition of words, with little attention to letter-to-sound rules. Differentiation of letters, the association between sounds and letters and blending of sounds will be more important for phonics approaches. 2.1 Whole Word (Look-and-Say) As has already been seen, it is difficult for young children to segment and analyze words into their component features. In this approach the overall shape and gross visual features of the word are stressed, and
Reading: Acquisition not its component letters, so analytic skills are not necessary. The assumption behind this method is that children should be taught to read the way skilled readers do, by recognizing words 'directly' without having to analyze them into their component letters. Children are taught to recognize a small set of words from cards. These first words are those that occur very frequently in print, and ones which will be in their first reading books. Once children have built up a basic sight vocabulary they progress to the first reading book in the scheme, in which almost all the words are taken from the flashcards. The method also circumvents the problem that, in English, there are numerous exceptions to any simple set of graphemephoneme correspondence rules. An approach that is related to the whole-word approach which has been widely used is the language experience approach. This approach combines learning to read with learning to write, and relates reading to the child's own experiences and spoken language. The correspondence between spoken and written language is stressed. From the start, children are encouraged to make up written sentences about things that are of interest to them. For instance, they might write their own captions for pictures, and then put together a series of such captioned pictures to make a 'story' booklet, which then becomes a text for learning to read. In one such scheme, children have their own word file or dictionary. The file contains basic words from reading books, each on a small card, together with the child's individual words, which are written on blank cards by the teacher. The philosophy of this approach is that learning to read should be related to functions of language with which children are already familiar, in particular its communicative function. The first words taught are based on children's own experiences. By using these words to compose written sentences about events that are meaningful to them, children learn both about reading and about its connection with writing. One advantage of the language experience approach is that the real function of written words—that they convey meanings—is emphasized from the outset. A second advantage is that this approach can be tailored to individual children's language capabilities and vocabulary, as well as relating reading to topics that are of interest to them. The whole-word method has numerous disadvantages and limitations. The argument that children should be taught to identify words the way that skilled readers do is contentious. Skilled readers may access word meanings directly (without phonological receding), but beginning readers may, nevertheless, benefit from training in decoding. Indeed, there are occasions when skilled readers need to recede phonologically, for example to identify words that are in their spoken vocabulary, but which they have not met before in written form. Equipped with only the ability to recognize words as visual patterns, beginning readers
will have no tools for deciphering new and untaught words. They need to learn the alphabetic principle. 2.2 Phonics Phonics approaches to the teaching of reading stress the importance of GPC rules. Children taught this way learn the sounds that the letters of the alphabet usually make, so that they can pronounce unfamiliar printed words. They may have to attain a certain level of proficiency in producing the appropriate letter-tosound correspondences before they are exposed to words. This approach provides children with a more general reading skill. In principle, they should be able to 'sound out' any new word they come across. In practice, however, things are not so straightforward. Grapheme-phoneme correspondences in most of the languages that use an alphabetic writing system are irregular to a greater or lesser extent, and a letter may be associated with several different sounds. Furthermore, as discussed in the previous section, a letter's sound often depends on the surrounding letters. A more serious problem for phonics methods arises from the difficulty that young readers have in dividing words into their parts. Most 5-year olds find it impossible to perform the word segmentation and blending that are fundamental to the phonics approach. 2.3 The 'Psycholinguistic' Method Finally, an approach to reading instruction based on Goodman's 'psycholinguistic guessing game' account of reading requires consideration (see, for example, 1967). This account assumes that readers begin with numerous expectations about the meaning and purpose of the text, and use the print only to confirm or disconfirm these predictions. Smith, another proponent of this approach, argues that, since adults can access word meanings directly without first deriving a phonological representation, there is no reason to teach children to read by this 'unnatural' method. He further argues that the reading speed of skilled readers proves that they cannot be attending to every letter. Fluent readers make use of all kinds of information— syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic—in recognizing words, and Smith's view is that beginners should be taught to read in the same way. He argues that decoding is not only an unnatural and difficult method of learning to read, but that it can be positively harmful. He proposes that in 'making sense' of the text, children will learn whatever rules they need to. In other words, children should 'learn to read by reading'—by deriving hypotheses from the context and from prior knowledge of what the text is about (for a summary of these ideas see Smith 1973). However, Smith is not explicit about how children should be taught. He simply suggests that children should be immersed in interesting, meaningful materials. Nevertheless, his ideas have been very influential in educational circles, and a method that 435
Teaching Language is becoming increasingly popular—the real books or apprenticeship approach—has been motivated by the ideas of Smith and Goodman. In this approach, the similarities between learning to read and learning to speak are stressed, and the emphasis is on books with motivating content and an interesting story line. There is little attempt at formal teaching in the initial stages, which are similar to the sorts of initiation into reading that the child might experience at home. First, children simply listen to an adult reading to them, while following the story in a book, then they attempt to read along with the adult until they feel able to 'read' some or all of the text themselves. However, apart from Smith's failure to explain exactly how children should be taught, there are a number of flaws in his arguments. For example, there is no good evidence that skilled readers rely heavily on context to help them identify clearly printed words in normal reading. Such guesswork may sometimes be useful in identifying a visually unfamiliar word or even for working out the meaning of a wholly new word. But, in general, contextual information is usually available too late to aid word identification in skilled readers. Smith's theory predicts that skilled readers make greater use of context in word identification but, as will be seen below, the evidence suggests the reverse. Finally, there is no reason to believe that the best way to teach reading is to train young children in the skills used by adults. Reading cannot simply be a guessing game. There must be some decoding of the printed text so that the guesses can be confirmed or disconfirmed. Furthermore, decoding usually needs to be taught. It cannot be expected to materialize as a by-product of intelligent guesswork, though some children are undoubtedly able to work out the rules for themselves, with little formal instruction. Interesting accounts of the characteristics of children who learn to read before they go to school can be found in Clark (1976). 2.4 Assessment of Teaching Methods It is difficult to make an objective assessment of methods of teaching reading, because there are so many factors that cannot be controlled. Indeed, it has been suggested that children's progress in learning to read is much more closely related to the quality of their teacher than to the program used. Some children seem to learn by any method, and some fail by any method. However, presumably some methods produce better results on average than others. Chall (1979) surveyed research on the relation between teaching method and reading achievement. Her conclusion was that an early emphasis on phonics led to better reading by the time the children had reached the fourth grade than did a whole-word approach, at least as far as reading new words and reading aloud were concerned. However, teaching
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method had little effect on comprehension, or on interest and involvement in reading. A more recent review of this research (Johnson and Baumann 1984) also confirms that early intensive instruction in phonics produces readers who are more proficient at pronouncing words than are those taught by a wholeword approach. There is little evidence on the efficacy of the apprenticeship approach because it is too new to have been properly assessed. 3. The Development of Reading 3.1 Stage Models of Reading There are various models that attempt to give an account of the stages that children go through as they learn to read (for an example of such a model see Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention). In general, such models propose that the child progresses from learning words as unanalyzed wholes to a more analytic approach in which grapheme-phoneme and orthographic rules are used. For instance, two such models are similar in proposing three stages: (a) a logographic stage in which familiar words are recognized as visual patterns, using salient visual features, and new words cannot be identified at all; (b) an alphabetic phase, in which the child learns and uses GPC rules and can tackle novel words and decode nonwords; (c) an orthographic phase where the child learns the conventions of the English orthography, and identifies words by making use of orthographic units, without the need for phonological conversion. A detailed comparison and critique of these two models, and a related one, can be found in Stuart and Coltheart (1988), who argue that the way in which children approach initial reading is not invariant, but depends on what skills they have available to them: for instance, children who already have some phonological skills may not enter the logographic phase at all. 3.2 Meaning Access: Direct or Mediated The conversion of a written word into its spoken form may be a useful way of recognizing that word, even in skilled readers. The ability to carry out this so-called phonological recoding may be an important part of the development of reading. Phonological recoding in word recognition requires the use of spelling-to-sound rules, such as the GPC rules discussed earlier. Since the sight vocabularies of beginning readers are relatively underdeveloped in comparison with their aural vocabularies, phonological coding is important for these readers in retrieving the meanings of words that they have heard but never before encountered in print. However, even beginning readers can recognize some words directly, from their visual appearance. Although the research in this area has
Reading: Acquisition produced somewhat inconsistent results, most evidence suggests that phonological recoding skills are relatively late in developing. Children progress from accessing the lexicon without the use of phonology to the use of both phonology and direct (visual) access. However, some studies have shown the reverse pattern: that young children rely more on phonological information in word recognition than older children. These discrepant results may have arisen because of the sorts of stimuli used in the experiments: high frequency, concrete words might invite direct access, whereas less frequent, abstract words may require phonological mediation. Of course, the relative use of different strategies in word recognition may depend not only on age, reading ability, and type of word, but also on the method used to teach reading. Words could also be converted to a phonological form after they are recognized, by simply looking up the pronunciation in the mental dictionary. So, even if children can access the meanings of words directly, phonological recoding may play some part in their reading strategies, and those of skilled readers, because it provides a more durable medium than visual coding for storing early parts of a sentence so that they can be combined with what comes later. There is good evidence that children use postlexical phonology to aid comprehension. Indeed, older children and adults find it hard to suppress phonological coding even when it is disadvantageous (e.g., in remembering lists of phonologically-confusable picture names). Even Japanese subjects reading Kanji, a logographic script, store the symbols in a phonological rather than a visual or semantic form. In these cases, a phonological code cannot be produced from the pictures or logographs by using GPC rules. The word must be accessed from the visual pattern and its phonological form retrieved and used as a memory code. 3.3 Use of Context in Reading A number of experimental studies have investigated changes in children's use of context as their reading skill develops. However, a distinction must be made between the use of context to correct or prevent errors, and the use of context to speed word recognition. In general, older readers are better at using context to make predictions (e.g., guessing what the next word might be) or to check them, but they do not use context as much as younger readers to identify words in the normal course of reading. The use of context in reading has played an important role in some theories of reading acquisition. Certain theorists (notably, Frank Smith) have based their ideas for teaching reading on the premise that good readers are better at using contextual information to help them decipher words. However, there is no evidence to support this hypothesis at the level of word recognition and, in any case, most content words are not very predictable, so that use of context will not compensate for inadequate
word decoding. In fact, all the experimental evidence on the effects of context on word recognition points to the opposite conclusion—the use of context decreases as reading skill increases (for a review, see Stanovich 1982). There is no doubt that contextual and perceptual information work together in word recognition—they interact. However, the primary use of context in poorer readers is to compensate for the fact that they cannot recognize words from their perceptual properties alone. 4. Reading Comprehension
4.1 The Development of Comprehension Skills One might assume that, once children have learnt to decode the words in text reasonably efficiently, comprehension will follow automatically. Since children learning to read have, for some years, been understanding spoken language, one would expect the skills they have learnt to transfer to understanding language in written form. However, this does not always seem to be the case. Reading comprehension is highly correlated with listening comprehension but, in fact, children's listening comprehension may not be as highly developed as one would expect from their level of language development—many children who have reading comprehension problems also have listening comprehension problems. However, there are also a number of reasons why beginning readers might have problems that are specific to reading. Both of these possibilities will be discussed here in relation to the development of comprehension skills. Writing is not simply 'speech written down.' The language of books is a particular language register that children may not be familiar with unless they have had many books read to them before and as they learn to read. In addition, written language does not have all the supporting cues (stress, intonation, gestural, and facial expression) that accompany everyday oral interactions. If children are to read with understanding, they need to be initiated into this 'language of books.' A second problem is that young children may be so engrossed in the word-decoding aspect of reading that they do not have the cognitive capacity to simultaneously carry out comprehension processes. In addition, the rapid loss of information from shortterm memory makes it difficult for very slow readers to 'hold' information from early in a sentence so that they can integrate it with what conies later. If word recognition is slow and labored, much of the prior context may have been forgotten by the time the current word has been recognized. Decoding skills will obviously improve with practice so, as children get older, they can devote more attention to comprehension. Indeed, it has been shown that in the later primary school years, comprehension skills replace decoding skills as the most important predictors of 437
Teaching Language overall reading ability. A related problem is that beginning readers may think that 'getting the words right' is the point of reading, and may not connect this activity with having stories read to them. It may not be until children's word recognition skills become relatively fast and automatic, that they are able to give their full attention to comprehending the content of the text. In the remainder of this section, consideration is given to comprehension skills where there is likely to be some overlap between written and spoken language understanding. However, it should be borne in mind that some of the processes may be more difficult to carry out in the case of written text, for the reasons given above. Understanding a text results in a mental representation of the state of affairs the text describes— a mental model of the text. Even after the individual words have been identified and grouped into phrases, clauses, and sentences, a number of other skills will also be necessary to construct such models. The meanings of individual sentences and paragraphs must be integrated, and the main ideas of the text identified. In many cases, inferential skills will be needed to go beyond what is explicitly stated, since authors necessarily leave some of the links between parts of the text implicit. The development of children's ability to make inferences from text is considered later, and also a number of more specific skills that are necessary for comprehension. For story understanding, these include: identifying the main characters and their motives, following the plot, and deriving the main theme. In the case of expository texts, the skills include identifying the topic, differentiating between important and trivial information, following the argument, and extracting the gist meaning of the passage. The development of children's ability to monitor their own comprehension—to be aware of whether they have adequately understood a text—is also reviewed. As reading progresses beyond the beginning stages, such 'metacognitive' skills become increasingly important. Although beginning readers also need to make use of metalevel knowledge (the technical vocabulary of reading), comprehension processes are much more dependent than word recognition and decoding on metacognitive abilities. Children need to be aware that they have not adequately understood a piece of text, and to know what to do to remedy their lack of understanding. 4.1.1 Understanding the structure of the text Many recent theories of comprehension have drawn attention to the fact that information in a text is hierarchically structured. This structure arises because each text is focused round one or more main ideas, with subsidiary ideas and trivial details subordinated to the main ones. Proper understanding of a text depends on
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an understanding of the main point, and on sensitivity to the relative importance of the other ideas. During the primary school years there is a marked increase in children's ability to pick out the main idea of a text, and to judge the relative importance of different aspects of a text. Even at age 12, most children are only able to distinguish explicitly between the very important and very unimportant information (and not between intermediate levels). In contrast, children's recall of text is very sensitive to level of importance (as determined by adults): even 5-year olds are more likely to recall the main events in a text than the trivial details. This discrepancy between awareness of levels of importance and the effect of importance on recall may be related to children's developing metacognitive skills (see below)—children may pay more attention to the more important ideas in a text, even though they cannot explicitly identify which those ideas are. Another important element in comprehension is understanding how the ideas in a text are related, and one way to assess children's understanding of the logical structure of texts is to ask them to tell stories themselves. Research has shown that children gradually develop the ability to tell coherent narratives and that, like adults, they expect certain types of information to be present in stories. When expected information is missing, it is often added in retelling, so that the story corresponds to what was expected. Similarly, when a story relates events out of order, the normal order is often restored in retelling and, as children get older, they are more likely to reproduce an illstructured story in a well-structured form (for a review, see Baker and Stein 1981). The ability to understand how ideas are interconnected in a story probably develops even before children learn to read. 4.1.2 Making inferences from text Inference has many roles in comprehension (for a review, see Oakhill and Garnham 1988: ch. 2). In particular, inferences are crucial to the process of connecting up the ideas in a text, since many things are left implicit. The emerging mental model of the text will indicate where such gaps arise and, therefore, which of the multitude of possible inferences need to be made. There have been numerous studies of the development of children's inferencing skills. In general, these studies support the idea that young children can make the same inferences as older ones, although they do not do so spontaneously, and only do so when prompted or explicitly questioned. A related important question is whether inferences are drawn as a text is understood, or only later. It is quite feasible that neither younger nor older children make optional (i.e., elaborative) inferences during comprehension, but that older children are superior at answering inferential questions because they are able to recall a greater proportion of the explicit infor-
Reading: Acquisition mation in the text, from which they can make inferences retrospectively. The available data are compatible with this explanation of developmental trends. 4.1.3 Comprehension monitoring Comprehension monitoring is necessary as a means of assessing whether one's understanding is adequate, so that appropriate action can be taken to overcome any comprehension difficulties. This is one of the metalinguistic skills that children acquire as their linguistic skills develop. All readers monitor their comprehension to some extent but, in general, younger children are less likely to realize that they do not understand, or to know what to do about it if they do realize (for a review, see Garner 1987). They are, for example, unable to detect that crucial information is missing from a text, or to spot even gross inconsistencies. However, there is no good evidence that metalinguistic awareness is causally related to comprehension skill. It may be that the process of learning to read increases the child's language awareness, rather than the other way round. Children's ideas about reading, which can be elicited in interviews, also provide some indication of their metacognitive awareness. A typical finding is that younger children generally have fewer resources to help them deal with comprehension failures. 4.2 Theories of Poor Comprehension The problems of poor comprehenders—children who have adequate word recognition skills, but who do not understand what they read as well as might be expected, will now be considered (for a review of this area; see Oakhill and Garnham 1988: ch. 5). Three main types of theory have been advanced to account for children's comprehension difficulties. The first is that children have problems at the level of single words. One obvious possibility is that poor comprehenders have inadequate vocabularies—they may be able to decode many words whose meanings they do not know. In general, vocabulary size is a good indicator of reading comprehension skill perhaps, in part, because both depend on general linguistic experience. However, procedures that are effective in increasing vocabulary do not necessarily improve comprehension. Furthermore, it is possible to identify groups of children who are matched on vocabulary who nevertheless differ markedly in comprehension skill. Another potential problem at the level of words is that poor comprehenders' word recognition, though accurate, is not automatic. Some authors (notably, Perfetti, see for example, 1985) have shown that good comprehenders recognize words more rapidly than poor comprehenders and they argue that this lack of automaticity creates a 'bottleneck' in working memory. On this view, poor comprehenders have less capacity available for comprehension processes—not because they have smaller working memories, but
because they make less efficient use of them. However, although there are several sources of evidence that poor comprehension and slow decoding go together, there is probably no direct causal link between the two. It may be precisely because decoding is such a basic part of reading that children who read more decode faster. Furthermore, speed and automaticity often go hand in hand with a large vocabulary and accurate decoding. When these two factors are taken into account, fast decoding is not such a reliable indicator of good comprehension. Some work has suggested that good comprehenders, like older children, make greater use of context in reading. In general, good comprehenders are better at using context as a check on their decoding, but they do not make so much use of context as poor comprehenders to speed word recognition. A second view is that comprehension problems arise at a higher level of text processing. One hypothesis is that poor comprehenders fail to make use of the syntactic constraints in text. Work to explore this idea has shown that poor comprehenders tend to read word-by-word, and do not spontaneously group text into meaningful phrases. Other studies that have investigated sensitivity to syntactic structure more directly have shown that, rather than using the syntactic and semantic cues in a text to integrate the meanings of the individual words, poor comprehenders seem to treat each word separately. These processing characteristics might, at least in part, be related to differences in working memory between good and poor comprehenders. The third view is that poor comprehenders' problems arise beyond the sentence level—at the level of text integration and inference. Many studies indicate that good and poor comprehenders differ in the extent to which they integrate the information in a text, and in their use of inferences. Such studies show that the making of inferences not only helps the skilled comprehenders to understand the text, but also to remember it. If poor comprehenders make fewer inferences than good ones, one must always ask whether it is because they have poorer inferential skills, or whether they cannot remember the information on which the inferences are based. This question is particularly important because many measures of text comprehension impose demands on memory. However, the evidence suggests that the poor comprehenders's inferior inference skills cannot be explained in terms of poor memory for the text, but that poor comprehenders are less good at working memory tasks than their skilled counterparts. Since working memory is important in making inferences and in the construction of a meaning representation of the text, it is not surprising that poor comprehenders are deficient in these text-comprehension skills. Other text-level skills differentiate between good and poor comprehenders. In Sect. 4.1.3 it was seen
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Teaching Language that young children are often poor at monitoring their comprehension, and fail to realize that they have not understood a text. Good comprehenders, like older children, seem to have a better awareness of what comprehension is and when it has been successful. There is evidence that poor comprehenders' problems arise, at least in part, because they fail to monitor their comprehension, or make less use of monitoring strategies (see Garner 1987, for a review). Again, working memory may play a part in such processing— readers with deficient working memories will have little scope for the sorts of processes required to monitor comprehension. Of course, each of the possible explanations of poor comprehension may be right—each may characterize the difficulties of a distinct group of poor comprehenders, or may partly explain an individual child's problem. In general, though, it seems that children with a specific comprehension deficit have particular difficulties in making inferences from and integrating the ideas in text. Poorer readers also have metacognitive deficits. They often have inadequate conceptions of reading, and may not realize that the primary purpose is to make sense of the text, focusing on reading as a decoding, rather than a meaning-getting, process. Fortunately, a variety of procedures designed to help such children have proved quite successful (for a review, see Oakhill and Garnham 1988: ch. 6). In general, children who are poor at understanding text are also poor at understanding spoken language. Many studies have found differences between good and poor text comprehenders even in listening tasks. Such findings again support the idea that decoding speed and automaticity can only be part of the poor comprehenders' problem. The skills on which good and poor comprehenders differ also suggest that they will experience difficulty with listening too. Problems with syntax, memory, and metacognitive monitoring would certainly be expected to be general comprehension problems, and not restricted to reading. This does not, of course, mean that reading is no more than decoding plus oral comprehension skills. There are many important differences between oral and written language, but children who have trouble under-
standing written language often have trouble with spoken language too. So, although slow decoding might contribute to reading comprehension problems, particularly in the initial stages of learning to read, it is unlikely to be their only cause. See also: Reading: Theories; Reading: Early; Reading Difficulties; Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention; Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness; Literacy: Phonological Awareness; Postliteracy. Bibliography Baker L, Stein N L 1981 The development of prose comprehension skills. In: Santa C, Hayes B (eds.) Children's Prose Comprehension: Research and Practice. International Reading Association, Newark, DE Bradley L, Bryant P E 1978 Difficulties in auditory organisation as a possible cause of reading backwardness. Nature 271: 746-47 Chall J S 1979 The great debate: Ten years later, with a modest proposal for reading stages. In: Resnick L B, Weaver P A (eds.) Theory and Practice in Early Reading, vol. 1. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Clark M M 1976 Young Fluent Readers. Heinemann Educational, London Ehri L C 1979 Linguistic insight: Threshold of reading acquisition. In: Waller T G, MacKinnon G E (eds.) Reading Research: Advances in Theory and Practice, vol. 1. Academic Press, New York Ellis N, Large B 1988 The early stages of reading: A longitudinal study. Applied Cognitive Psychology 2: 47-76 Garner R 1987 Metacognition and Reading Comprehension. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Goodman K S 1967 Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. Journal of the Reading Specialist 6: 126-35 Johnson D D, Baumann J F 1984 Word identification. In: Pearson P D (ed.) Handbook of Reading Research. Longman, London Oakhill J, Garnham A 1988 Becoming a Skilled Reader. Blackwell, Oxford Perfetti C A 1985 Reading Ability. Oxford University Press, Oxford Smith F 1973 Psycholinguistics and Reading. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York Stanovich K E 1982 Individual differences in the cognitive processes of reading. Vol. II: Text-level processes. Journal of Learning Disabilities 15: 549-54 Stuart M, Coltheart M 1988 Do'es reading develop in a series of stages? Cognition 30: 139-81
Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention M. J. Snowling and A. Edmundson
In any literate society, a serious yet largely 'hidden' handicap is the inability to read and/or spell. This condition, usually referred to as 'dyslexia,' can occur 440
in adulthood as the consequence of brain damage, for example, following stroke or other neurological insult. It can also occur in children as a developmental difficulty.
Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention While developments in the area of acquired dyslexia have included a revival of the view that there are 'disconnection' syndromes, the trend during the late 1980s and the 1990s has been to move away from the traditional neurological syndrome classifications. Emphasis is now placed on detailed analysis of the processing disorders underlying acquired reading and writing difficulties. Moreover, psycholinguistic classification systems rooted in cognitive-psychological models have been adopted for both the acquired and the developmental dyslexias. 1. The Cognitive Approach Cognitive psychologists assume that skills such as reading and writing involve a number of processing stages, each of which is carried out by a specialized processing module. The processing components are described in terms of their function, without attempting to localize the modules in the brain. There has been extensive research on reading and writing within this framework, and detailed processing models have been developed based on converging evidence from studies of skilled performance and from case studies of patients with acquired reading and writing disorders. 1.1 Models of Reading An influential account of skilled reading is the 'dualroute' theory which claims that there are two different processing routes for reading, a lexical-semantic route and a sublexical route. In addition, skilled readers have an internal dictionary or 'lexicon' in which knowledge about each word in their vocabulary is stored. Familiar written words are processed as units by the lexical-semantic route; in order to recognize the printed word, it has to be matched to its stored visual representation in the lexicon. The speed with which this occurs is dependent upon how frequently the particular word is encountered in its written form. The stored representations for high frequency words are accessed more rapidly than for low frequency words. To obtain a pronunciation for a word, stored information about its meaning (or semantics) is first accessed. This in turn is used to access stored information about its pronunciation. It is important to note that the use of the lexical-semantic route involves access to stored information at each processing stage. Novel letter strings cannot be read in this way because, by definition, they are not represented in the lexicon. The 'sublexical' route involves the use of lettersound correspondences to convert the letters of a word into a phonological code. Following the recognition of individual letters, knowledge of letter-sound correspondences is used to work out how each letter is pronounced. Reading in this way allows the accurate pronunciation of regular words like hat and brush which have predictable relationships between their spelling and their pronunciation. It also allows pro-
nunciations to be derived for unfamiliar letter strings, such as novel surnames or nonwords like from. Historically, it was widely believed that letter-sound correspondences were obligatorily used in skilled reading. However, English, like many other languages with alphabetic writing systems, does not have a simple one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. Reading via the sublexical route therefore leads to 'irregular' words, such as sword and pint, being mispronounced. The idea that words can be read by two different processing routes was developed with reference to English, an alphabetic language. The dual-route theory of reading has since been shown to be applicable to other languages with rather different types of writing systems. Japanese, for example, has two writing systems. The kana system is a syllabic writing system. Each spoken syllable that occurs in Japanese corresponds to a written kana which can be read aloud sublexically using knowledge about the kana: syllable correspondences. The other writing system uses symbols known as kanji, each of which represents a Japanese word. The lexical-semantic route is used to read kanji, being visually recognized and matched to its stored visual representation in the lexicon. Since the dual-route model of reading was first proposed, a third reading route has been postulated. This third route is again a lexical route. Once the stored visual representation has been accessed, a word's stored pronunciation is directly accessed. Because this route bypasses the semantic representation, it is referred to as the 'direct lexical' route. Although this processing model has been very influential, various details about how it actually works have not been sufficiently specified. For example, while the use of letter-sound correspondences may be crucial for the acquisition of reading (see Sect. 3.2) it is not clear to what extent skilled readers rely on this somewhat error-prone route for reading. Some theorists suggest that the reader has control over which reading routes are used; others have claimed that the different reading routes operate automatically and simultaneously when a word is presented. 1.2 Models of Spelling and Writing Normal skilled spelling has been less extensively investigated than reading. Cognitive models of spelling have therefore drawn quite heavily on evidence obtained from investigations of acquired spelling disorders. As with reading, it is suggested that a number of different processing routes are available for spelling, the distinction again being made between sublexical and lexical processing routes. The sublexical route for spelling involves using knowledge about sound-letter correspondences to convert from the word's pronunciation to its spelling. In writing spontaneously, this requires the stored pronunciation for the word to be accessed. When writing
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Teaching Language a word to dictation, the pronunciation is provided by the speaker. As with the sublexical reading route, the sublexical writing route is error-prone. Good attempts can be made to spell unfamiliar or novel words, but spelling errors occur for words with irregular spellings. In addition to a sublexical route for writing to dictation, two lexical routes are hypothesized. In both of these, the spoken word that has been dictated is recognized and matched to a stored auditory representation in the lexicon. The lexical-semantic route then proceeds via the word's semantic representation which is used to access stored information about its spelling. The direct lexical route bypasses the semantic system, the stored auditory representation directly accessing the stored spelling. Lexical processing routes are also available for writing spontaneously. The word's semantic representation can be used to access its stored spelling directly. Alternatively, the stored pronunciation of the word can be obtained, and this can be used to access the stored spelling. It will be apparent from this brief discussion that many parallels can be drawn between the processing routes involved in reading and spelling. For example, reading by a sublexical route is claimed to involve the use of letter-sound correspondences while spelling by a sublexical route involves sound-letter correspondences. One question which arises is whether the same stored knowledge is employed (in reverse directions) for reading and spelling, or whether the psychological processes involved in the two tasks are quite different. One line of evidence, that seems to favor models in which sublexical reading and spelling are considered to involve functionally separable processes, is that dissociations between letter-sound knowledge and sound-letter knowledge have been reported in patients with acquired reading and writing disorders. Once a spelling has been obtained for a word, this information can be passed onto any one of a number of different processing modules, depending on whether the word is to be written down, or typed, or spelled out aloud. Models of writing are not as fully specified as models of spelling. The aspect that has been most widely studied to date is the selection of the appropriate form of the letter. Each letter can be written in a variety of ways including uppercase, lowercase, and cursive script. If the word is to be written down by hand, it is suggested that information about its spelling is passed to a module which contains stored representations of the various different forms of each of the letters. The appropriate form is selected, and then the sequence of strokes required to produce the letter on the paper is specified. Eventually, processing models for writing will have to account for the fact that the size of writing and the muscle systems involved in writing can vary. Large writing on a vertical surface such as a black-
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board, for example, uses arm movements as well as the finger and wrist movements involved in writing on a narrow-feint notepad. The accounts of the processes involved in reading and writing that have been discussed assume first, that processing occurs in a series of discrete and sequential processing stages and second, that functionally distinguishable processing routes exist. A number of challenges have been made to these assumptions. The advances made in the 1980s in cognitive psychology have ted to the development of new interactive models. These interactive models allow considerable exchange of information between the different levels of processing within the system, and dispense with the idea of different sublexical and lexical processing routes. However, although the theoretical emphasis in the 1990s is on the development of interactive accounts of processing, stage models are still proving to be of considerable practical use for the assessment and remediation of acquired disorders of reading and writing. 2. Acquired Disorders of Written Language
In 1973, Marshall and Newcombe introduced a new classification system for acquired dyslexia, using the dual-route model of reading to provide elegant explanations for the syndromes that they described. They hypothesized that patients with 'surface dyslexia' were reading sublexically, making use of letter-sound correspondences. 'Deep dyslexic' patients were relying on the lexical-semantic reading route. Since Marshall and Newcombe's paper, a new discipline, known as cognitive neuropsychology has burgeoned and been applied to the study of acquired disorders of reading and of other areas of cognition. Cognitive neuropsychology rejects the classical neurological syndromes on the grounds that they are not homogenous disorders, and advocates that acquired disorders of reading and writing should be considered in terms of the processing problems that underlie them. Because many different processing modules are involved in reading and writing, difficulties which superficially appear to be similar can in fact arise from disruption at different stages in the underlying processing. The symptoms of 'alexia with agraphia,' for example, may be a consequence of many different processing difficulties. Since Marshall and Newcombe's seminal paper, patients with a variety of acquired reading and writing difficulties have been identified and quoted in the literature. A comprehensive review is given by Ellis and Young (1988) and some of the cases in that review are used to illustrate the following sections. 2.1 Acquired Reading Disorders 2.1.1 Surface dyslexia Marshall and Newcombe (1973) described a patient, J.C., who seemed to be using letter-sound cor-
Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention respondences when reading aloud. For example, he pronounced the word island as 'is-land' rather than 'eye-land.' In reading aloud, J.C. regularized the pronunciations of irregular words, and made phonologically plausible errors. His understanding of written words was based on his pronunciation of them. For example, he read begin as 'beggin' (i.e., collecting money). Marshall and Newcombe termed this syndrome 'surface dyslexia.' Generally, it is held that surface dyslexics read regular words more accurately than irregular words. Thus, the regularity effect is both a necessary and sufficient symptom for the diagnosis of surface dyslexia. Three other symptoms usually accompany the regularity effect. The errors produced when reading irregular words aloud are regularizations. Errors in reading polysyllabic words are often the result of stressing the syllables incorrectly (as in the example of J.C.'s pronunciation of begin). Finally, when asked to read two-letter strings silently to themselves and decide if they sound the same or not, surface dyslexic readers perform accurately with pairs of regular words; they are also good at deciding about nonwords, but they make errors on irregular words. These four symptoms all arise as a consequence of relying on letter-sound correspondences to read aloud. A similar dissociation between the sublexical and lexical reading routes has been reported in Japanese patients. Japanese surface dyslexic patients can read words written in the syllabic kana script by means of the sublexical reading route, but are poor at reading kanji as these are normally processed lexically. 2.7.2 Deep dyslexia The defining characteristic of 'deep dyslexia' (or 'phonemic dyslexia') is the occurrence of semantic errors in reading aloud. For instance, another patient, G.R., read speak as 'talk' and daughter as 'sister.' He also made visual errors, reading perform as 'perfume,' and errors which seemed to be a combination of both visual and semantic factors (e.g., sympathy was read as 'orchestra,' presumably because of the visually similar word symphony). A number of other symptoms usually occur in these patients. Deep dyslexic patients are unable to read nonwords. This indicates that they cannot use letter-sound correspondences for reading aloud, and their ability to read real words is affected by a number of different variables. The 'imageability' of a word is the ease with which a mental image of its meaning can be conjured up. High imageability words such as apple are read more accurately than low imageability words like faith. The part of speech is also very influential, with nouns being the easiest, and function words like the and of being the most difficult. Deep dyslexics produce a variety of reading errors. As well as semantic errors, function words are often substituted for other function words. Visual errors, mixed visual/semantic errors and derivational errors
such as reading wise as 'wisdom' are also quite common. Theoretical accounts of deep dyslexia conclude that these patients are relying on the lexical-semantic route for reading. One explanation for the frequent semantic errors could be that this route is normally error-prone. However, semantic errors occur only rarely in the reading and speech of nonbrain-damaged individuals. The alternative hypothesis is that, in addition to the sublexical processing route being impaired, the processing of the lexical-semantic route is also disrupted in deep dyslexia. Sasanuma (1980) reports a case of a Japanese deep dyslexic patient. Y.H.'s oral reading of words written in the syllabic kana was severely impaired. When reading kanji, her errors were predominantly semantic and she showed an effect of part of speech, with nouns being read most accurately, and an imageability effect. 2.1.3 Phonological dyslexia Like deep dyslexic patients, phonological dyslexic patients show a dissociation between their ability to read words and nonwords. However, while these patients' cannot read nonwords aloud, their reading of real words is generally quite accurate. This has been interpreted to suggest that they are using the direct lexical route to read aloud. One such patient, W.B. (Funnell 1983), read only 5 percent of nonwords aloud. He failed to respond to about half of them, and for those that he attempted he usually produced the pronunciation for a visually similar real word. In contrast, he read approximately 90 percent of real words correctly irrespective of their part of speech, their imageability, or their regularity. Phonological dyslexics might be using an intact lexical-semantic route rather than the direct lexical route. However, further evidence from W.B. seems to rule this possibility out. Assessment of W.B.'s semantic knowledge about words found that he made confusions between words of similar meaning. If W.B.'s reading involved the semantic representations he would have made semantic errors in reading aloud. This was not the case. 2.1.4 Reading in dementia Additional evidence that reading can proceed via a direct lexical route comes from patients with a rather different form of acquired reading difficulty. The case of a woman called W.L.P. who was suffering from presenile dementia is reported. The pattern of deterioration of W.L.P.'s language skills was charted. As is often reported in cases of dementia, W.L.P.'s reading was relatively well-preserved in relation to other aspects of her language. At the time when she had no apparent understanding of the meaning of common words, W.L.P. could read many regular and irregular words aloud. Her lack of understanding of their meaning was demonstrated by her reaction to the task. For 443
Teaching Language example, when given the word hyena to read aloud, she said 'hyena ... hyena ... now what in the heck is that?' Because of her poor comprehension it seemed unlikely that she was using the lexical-semantic route as this involves the word's semantic representation. Reading via the sublexical route was also ruled out because she could read many of the irregular words aloud. Like the phonological dyslexic patients, W.L.P. seemed to be relying on a direct lexical route for reading. 2.2 Problems with Classification Cognitive neuropsychology rejected the classical neurological syndromes of acquired dyslexia because they were not homogenous and initially replaced them with new syndromes such as surface and deep dyslexia. As cognitive neuropsychology has developed, it has become apparent that the new 'syndromes' are not homogenous. For example, the term 'surface dyslexia' is used to describe all patients who rely on the sublexical reading route to read aloud. However, there may be many different reasons why letter-sound correspondences have to be used in reading aloud. Some surface dyslexics use the sublexical route to read aloud because of difficulties with access to stored visual information in the lexicon. When these surface dyslexics misread a word they also miscomprehend it because they have to use the word's pronunciation to access its stored semantic representation. Other surface dyslexics can access the lexicon from the written word, but disruption at some subsequent processing stage prevents them from accessing the word's pronunciation by this route. These patients read words aloud by the sublexical route, but can comprehend even the irregular words that they mispronounce because they have access from the written form of the word to its semantic representation. A further problem with the new cognitive-neuropsychological syndromes is that, as with the classical neurological syndromes, few patients fit neatly into the syndrome classifications. The cases in which clearcut dissociations have been found between the different processing routes have been cited as converging evidence for the existence of functionally separable processing routes. However, many patients with acquired reading difficulties show less clear-cut dissociations. For example, a patient who makes semantic reading errors may also be found to have some residual knowledge of letter-sound correspondences and hence be able to read some nonwords. One response to these problems of classification has been to suggest that more precise syndromes should be identified. However, given the complexity of the underlying processing system, this suggestion would seem to be impractical. Alternatively, it has been suggested that, instead of grouping patients into syndromes, each patient should be considered in terms of their specific underlying processing difficulties. This 444
solution has proved useful for the planning of remediation programmes (see Sect. 4). Syndrome labels such as surface dyslexia have, however, been retained to some extent as they provide a useful shorthand to describe the kind of symptoms exhibited by a patient. 2.3 Acquired Disorders of Writing Because of the neurological organization of the brain, a lesion which produces an acquired language disorder also often leads to paralysis of the preferred arm and hand. As a result, many dysphasic patients have difficulties with writing. However, acquired disorders of spelling and writing cannot all be accounted for simply by the fact that the person is now having to use their nonpreferred hand to write with. 2.3.1 Acquired spelling disorders As with acquired reading disorders, the application of cognitive processing models led to the identification of new syndromes of acquired dysgraphia. The emphasis is now on the identification of each patient's particular processing difficulties. Patients have been described who make semantic errors, such as writing chair as 'table,' when asked to write words to dictation. A patient, J.C., could not write nonwords to dictation and showed a response to the part of speech and imageability when writing words to dictation. Function word substitutions occurred, for example our being written as 'MY.' J.C.'s difficulties could not be explained in terms of problems perceiving the words and nonwords that she was asked to write because she could repeat them accurately. It is suggested that J.C. was using a lexicalsemantic route for writing to dictation, hence she could be described as 'deep dysgraphic.' Patients have also been reported who are relying on a sublexical spelling route. For example, R.G. could provide acceptable spellings for dictated nonwords. He could spell 93 percent of regular words correctly, but only 38 percent of irregular words. Spelling errors generally were in the form of nonwords which had the same pronunciation as the target word. Another patient, G.E., seemed to be using a direct lexical spelling route in writing to dictation. G.E. could write words to dictation although all other aspects of his language were severely impaired. While he could make reasonable attempts at spelling some short nonsense words to dictation, his spelling of real words was much more accurate. This led to the suggestion that he must be using lexical knowledge when writing real words to dictation. This was supported by the finding that his ability to spell words accurately was unaffected by their regularity. Neither part of speech nor imageability influenced his spelling performance. Involvement of a lexical-semantic route in spelling was ruled out by his poor comprehension of spoken words. For example, when he was asked to select the picture that went with the spoken word from amongst a set of
Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention semantically related pictures, he chose the correct picture for only 66 percent of the words. In contrast, he correctly wrote 94 percent of the words to dictation. It was concluded that G.E.'s remarkably preserved ability to spell to dictation was supported by a direct lexical spelling route. In some patients with both acquired reading and spelling disorders, the pattern of spelling errors can mirror the pattern of reading errors. Thus, a deep dysgraphic patient may also be deep dyslexic. This is not necessarily the case. J.C., the deep dysgraphic patient, generally read both words and nonwords accurately and did not produce semantic errors in reading. R.G., the surface dysgraphic, could write but not read nonwords, and read but not write irregular words. 2.3.2 Acquired writing disorders Acquired writing disorders are now beginning to be interpreted within cognitive processing models, the development of models of writing being influenced by the dissociations observed in patients. M.W. is described as a patient whose pattern of spelling errors differed in oral and written spelling. When asked to write single letters to dictation, M.W. occasionally wrote an incorrect letter. Such letter substitutions did not occur when he spelled words aloud orally, but were evident in tasks which involved writing. For example, they were produced in writing to dictation and spontaneous writing and in both copying and delayed copying when M.W. was asked to transcribe a stimulus written in upper case into lower case or vice versa. It is suggested that M.W. had a difficulty with accessing the appropriate stored representations for the written forms of letters. A patient with somewhat similar difficulties is described by Black et al. (1989). Oral and typed spelling were accurate but letter substitution errors occurred in writing. It was reported that the production of letter substitutions was influenced by the frequency of occurrence of the particular letter. The letters that occur most frequently in English tended to be written correctly. Because case errors did not occur, it is suggested that the letter forms were selected appropriately, the processing impairment being problems with passing this information to the stored motor patterns for writing. While both of the above patients were able to select the appropriate case for letters, other patients have been reported to make case errors. For example, 5 months poststroke, one patient, D.K. (Patterson and Wing 1989), accurately copied 83 percent of words written in uppercase letters, but only 21 percent of words written in lowercase. He was also severely impaired at transcribing between upper- and lowercase and vice versa. Another (Italian) patient, despite being asked to write in script, wrote words in mixed upper-
and lowercase and appeared to have no control over this 'case-mixing.' Theoretical accounts of different types of acquired writing difficulties are still largely speculative as the processes, involved in writing are not yet fully specified. Nevertheless, the application of cognitive neuropsychology to the study of writing is currently stimulating considerable interest. 3. Developmental Disorders of Written Language 3.1 Developmental Analogues of the Acquired Dyslexias and Dysgraphias Following the successful application of cognitive models to the analysis of acquired disorders of reading and spelling, there have been a number of attempts to describe developmental dyslexias by analogy to acquired dyslexias. In children, two main types of reading disorder have been described. Children with developmental phonological dyslexia can read words significantly better than nonwords of similar phonological structure, yet, as far as has been ascertained, their visual word recognition is normal. The first case to be described, H.M. (Temple and Marshall 1983), a 15-year old girl, was reading at the 10-year level. She made a high proportion of visual and derivational errors in her word reading, and had extreme difficulty in reading nonwords aloud. Children with developmental surface dyslexia show a contrasting pattern of deficit, making predominantly phonological or 'regularization' reading errors, and having particular difficulty reading irregular or exception words. It can be assumed from the case descriptions that these children's visual word recognition is impaired, but that their phonological reading skills are good. However, perhaps the best-known patient described in the literature is C.D. whose nonword reading was impaired, despite a marked regularity effect in her reading. This illustrates one of the problems of an approach which attempts to classify reading disorders. There have also been less clear case studies reporting other forms of reading disorder in children, for instance children who make semantic errors in singleword reading and therefore resemble deep dyslexics. Unfortunately in these cases, the proportion of errors which could unequivocally be classified as semantic was low and, given generally poor levels of reading attainment, these are expected, even in normal development. A disappointing feature of the early case studies of developmental dyslexia using the cognitive approach, was that they focused exclusively on the reading strategies of the affected children and tended to explore neither their spelling performance (which was always affected), nor the skills underlying reading and spelling, such as phonological and visual processing abilities. However, Campbell and Butterworth (1985) presented an informative case of developmental dyslexia, R.E., who was an undergraduate student. By 445
Teaching Language this time her reading and spelling skills were within the normal range. In spite of her high level of literacy, she was found to be virtually unable to read nonwords aloud, thus resembling a phonological dyslexic. Moreover, her spelling errors were primarily dysphonetic. Campbell and Butterworth went on to examine her phonological processing skills in depth; R.E. had marked verbal short-term memory difficulties and extreme difficulty with tasks requiring phoneme awareness. It was argued that these problems were the cause of the difficulties she had experienced in learning literacy skills. Studies like these are incapable, by their very nature, of demonstrating causes. Nonetheless, they are highly suggestive of the possibility that phonological dyslexia is traceable to difficulties with phonological awareness and verbal short-term memory. A major criticism of many case studies of developmental dyslexia collectively, is that they have failed to include comparison with appropriately matched normal readers. When studying development, it is crucial to know the extent to which patterns of performance are normal, in which case a delayed pattern of development might be assumed, as opposed to a different pattern. In the absence of such data, it is impossible to make the claim that there is anything atypical about the reading strategies and error patterns shown by the individuals tested. Indeed, data from normal 10-year old readers shows that patterns of reading, indistinguishable from those of developmental phonological and developmental surface dyslexics described in the literature, are quite common in normally developing readers. These data provide a definite challenge to the view that it is possible to use similar models of reading (and spelling) to classify acquired and developmental disorders. 3.2 A Framework for the Normal Development of Literacy Developmental models focusing on the acquisition of literacy provide an important framework within which to examine the reading and spelling skills of dyslexic children. Frith (1985) views the child as passing through a series of stages or phases before becoming fully literate, each stage building on the previous one. In the initial stage, it is widely held that reading is visually based and proceeds by the use of partial cues. According to Frith, children in this early 'logographic' phase make visual reading errors because they remember words according to features like first letters, 'wish' for water, or word length, 'gentlemen' for grandmother. It is also important to note that at this stage the child has no strategies for deciphering unfamiliar printed words (other than by visual approximation to known words) and spelling is rudimentary, perhaps being restricted to a few rote words. The next stage, the alphabetic, is one in which the child begins to be able to decode, recognizing the
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importance of letter-sound correspondences. It is widely held that a prerequisite for transition into this phase is the development of phonological awareness, providing insight into the alphabetic principle. Furthermore, once the child recognizes that there are relationships between sounds and letters as embodied in print, this will bring with it the ability to spell, or at least to transcode phonetically, spoken into written words. The final stage, the orthographic, is characterized by both automaticity and flexibility. Reading and spelling proceed independently of sound at this stage and lexical analogies can be used both in reading and spelling. There is considerable debate about whether it is appropriate to view reading development as a series of stages. However, it is suggested that the development of reading must be viewed as the acquisition of two distinct systems; a lexical-semantic system for the processing of familiar printed words and a secondary, phonological or sublexical reading system which the child can use to decipher unfamiliar words. There is ample evidence that children make use of a sight vocabulary when reading and also can resort to the use of phonological strategies when presented with unfamiliar words. Furthermore, it seems clear that awareness of the phonological structures of words will be central to the development of decoding competence since this relies upon knowledge of letter-sound correspondences. 3.3 The Cognitive-developmental Approach to Dyslexia According to Frith, the classic developmental dyslexic who has problems with both reading and spelling, fails to make the transition to the alphabetic phase of literacy development. This hypothesis makes sense in view of the vast amount of literature pointing to phonological deficits in dyslexic children (for a review of these see Snowling 1987). Consistently, studies pursuing the causes of dyslexia have highlighted difficulties with phonological awareness, verbal shortterm memory, naming and nonword repetition. It would be premature to attribute causal status to all of these difficulties. Nonetheless, they are significantly associated with dyslexia in children and plausibly contribute to the difficulty experienced in learning to use letter-sound and sound-letter rules, all of which places heavy demands on sound-processing and memory skills. Moreover, the pattern of reading most commonly associated with dyslexia is one where reading of words outstrips nonword reading. This is exactly as would be predicted given 'arrest' at the logographic stage. Snowling and colleagues presented a series of seven individual case studies of children who fell into this pattern and, interestingly, the pattern of performance of those with higher reading age was similar to those who were still at the beginning stages. These
Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention data suggested that, in spite of phonological problems, it is possible to learn to read, presumably by using an atypical or compensatory pathway. Indeed, one of the younger dyslexics in this study, J.M., has been followed longitudinally and, some 4 years later, although a better reader, still could not read nonwords and still spelled phonetically. It has been argued that he has learned to read by relying heavily upon visual and semantic strategies. Among developmental dyslexics, there are also those who appear to be arrested at the alphabetic phase. Frith referred to these as developmental dysgraphics, because their spelling problems were more marked than their reading difficulties. The classic feature of these children is that they read well in context but, in single-word reading rely heavily upon sound, thus, for example, confusing homophones like pearpair, leek-leak. Their spelling is phonetic. An example is the case of a dyslexic undergraduate, J.A.S., described by Goulandris and Snowling (1991). On the face of it, J.A.S. was an adult reader, and she could read nonwords proficiently. However, she performed randomly on tasks requiring her to discriminate between homophones. Moreover, her spelling was almost entirely phonetic and she showed particular difficulty when required to spell irregular words. The interesting feature about J.A.S. was that, unlike the majority of dyslexics, she did not have phonological problems. Instead, her visual memory was seriously impaired, providing a plausible account of her failure to learn orthographic principles. The last type of developmental literacy problem is that of specific dysgraphia. In this condition, spelling problems exist in the absence of reading difficulty. Thus, these individuals have moved into the orthographic phase for reading but not for spelling. Like developmental dysgraphics, their spelling is phonetically correct but frequently violates English spelling conventions. Interestingly though, when such children are studied in detail, their problems appear to be due primarily to the way in which they process words during reading. Even though they are relatively good readers, they are less good than normal readers who are also good spellers, in proof reading and in nonword reading. These results suggest that as a group, they tend to process words holistically, without detailed visual attention to their letter-by-letter structures. A problem with this interpretation is that many such poor spellers also have problems on tasks requiring explicit phoneme segmentation. It is therefore plausible that their spelling problems originate from reading difficulties in common with other dyslexics, but that they have largely resolved their earlier reading problems by the time their spelling becomes the focus of their difficulties. Thus, there is some support for Frith's idea that developmental difficulties with literacy can be usefully grouped according to the point in time when devel-
opment becomes arrested. However, there are a number of difficulties with the theory. Notably, it is difficult to make predictions about how dyslexics will develop following arrest. Frith does not rule out the possibility that teaching might provide a stimulant to development, or that it could proceed along alternative pathways. However, these options are not spelled out in the model, and nor are the specific characteristics of the various phases. Specifically, the differences between reading in the logographic phase and reading in the orthographic phase are unclear. An alternative model of the processes required for learning to read was proposed by Seymour (1986) with a view to classifying reading difficulties. The model had three components: a visual processor, involved in the registration and parsing of printed words, a phonological processor containing both a graphemephoneme convenor and a phonological word store involved in the sound translation of words, and, finally, a semantic processor containing word meanings. Working within this framework, Seymour used both reaction-time and error measures to investigate the responses of individual dyslexic children and normal 11-year olds to words which differed on various dimensions such as frequency of occurrence and spelling regularity, and in their visual configuration. Seymour unveiled a constellation of processing deficits but because these were seldom pure, he concluded there was no evidence for distinct subtypes. Rather, these children could be characterized by the processing system that was most severely affected. Some dyslexics had difficulties primarily with the phonological processor. He referred to these as developmental phonological dyslexics. Others had problems in one or other mode of operation within the visual processor; he referred to these as visual processor dyslexics, and, finally, still others had impairments of the multiletter routes to phonology and/or semantics. These children were reminiscent of the surface dyslexics described by other authors. Seymour described them as 'developmental morphemic dyslexics.' 3.4 Reading Comprehension Deficits (Hyperlexia) The focus of much work on developmental reading disorders has been on the problems of children who have decoding problems. Amongst dyslexics, it is widely held that reading comprehension is in advance of decoding skill and any comprehension difficulties experienced by dyslexic children are attributable to decoding problems at the single-word level. These views have been formalized in an interactive-compensatory model of reading, indicating that children who are poor decoders actually use context more during reading (because there is time for it to have an effect) than good decoders who do not require this resource. However, there are children who can decode well but who have comprehension difficulties. 447
Teaching Language Several papers have postulated a syndrome of 'hyperlexia' in which decoding skills are precocious, but in which children do not understand what they read. Much of this work has been carried out with children who have developmental language problems or who show autistic features. It was generally assumed that these children 'barked at print,' having learned to read in a mechanistic manner, without attention to meaning. However, detailed examination of the reading skills of so-called hyperlexic children has revealed that, while their decoding skills are advanced, their comprehension is generally not unexpectedly poor given their overall IQ and language skills. Thus, they can choose semantically appropriate completions for sentences which they read and they can detect semantic anomalies in texts to the same extent as mental age-matched controls. Moreover, the majority can answer questions based on passages they have read. For a minority of these children only, there are problems to do with integrating the meanings of single sentences, so that they have difficulties with text integration and also, in answering questions that require inferences to be made. 3.5 Problems of Classification A number of different problems encountered when trying to classify developmental reading and spelling disorders have emerged during this review. First, the development of literacy should, in principle, encompass the child's acquisition of reading, spelling, and writing. There is no consensus concerning whether reading difficulties should be considered separately from spelling problems; schemes which examine the processes separately may come up with different results to those which take an integrated approach. Moreover, almost nothing is known about specific writing difficulties, although the problems that 'clumsy' children have with this and other fine-motor tasks are well-known. Second, there is the major question concerning the appropriate controls which must be included if valid comparisons are to be made between dyslexic and normal readers. The absence of these in much of the case-study literature renders the validity of many classification schemes questionable. Related to this is the issue of development itself; many classification schemes look at individuals at one point in time—a stance which is perhaps indefensible given a developmental disorder. Finally, a major theoretical issue concerns the cause or causes of specific reading difficulties. From a biological viewpoint, there is increasingly good evidence that dyslexia is inherited. However, the mode of transmission remains unknown. In some there is thought to be autosomal dominant transmission, but there is almost certainly genetic heterogeneity. An important extension to the work on the genetics of dyslexia has found that some, but not all, of the subcomponents of
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reading are heritable. Specifically, phonological skills have greater heritability than orthographic skills, although, importantly, both are amenable to training. These findings fit well with the present knowledge concerning the cognitive causes of reading failure. Surprisingly, in the light of a wealth of knowledge concerning the nature of developmental dyslexia, there have been relatively few attempts to tie the underlying cognitive and linguistic impairments of these children with the pattern of reading and spelling performance they exhibit. Equally, there have been few attempts to show how these patterns might change through time, or in relation to the teaching received. Arguably, a full understanding of developmental disorders of literacy will await the outcome of studies which investigate how individual dyslexics, with particular constellations of cognitive strengths and weakness, actually learn to read, and how they respond to different programs of intervention. 4. Implications for Treatment
4.1 Implications for the Treatment of Acquired Disorders Over the years, a variety of therapy models have been advocated for acquired dyslexia. For example, it has been suggested that tracing the letters of the word with the finger would aid reading. While the conclusion has often been that therapy for such disorders is of only limited success, a number of single-case studies have provided cause for more optimism. These studies have shown that therapy can be very beneficial when it is designed to overcome the specific processing problems underlying the reading disorder. De Partz (1986) reported a successful remediation program carried out with a French gentleman named S.P., who was identified as being deep dyslexic, producing many semantic errors and being unable to relate sounds to letters. De Partz derived a therapy program that aimed to use S.P.'s spared knowledge about words to overcome these difficulties. For each letter of the alphabet, S.P. was asked to identify a word beginning with that letter. He then practiced associating the letter-word pairs until on seeing the letter he could automatically say the paired word. Over a period of time, S.P. learned to read letter strings by segmenting and blending the initial phonemes from the associated words. Later stages of the therapy program involved teaching S.P. a further strategy, again based on his knowledge of words, to allow him to derive the appropriate phonology for letter combinations such as vowel digraphs (-ou-, -au-, etc.). At the end of a year of intensive therapy, S.P. was able to read slowly but accurately. While this therapy program was shown to be effective for a patient with deep dyslexia, it would not be useful for surface dyslexic patients because they already rely heavily on letter-to-sound conversion in reading. Therapy methods that encourage surface dys-
Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention lexic patients to focus on the meaning of a word rather than on the letters that form it have also been described. Byng and Coltheart (1986), for example, demonstrated that picture cues could be used to reteach a surface dyslexic patient, E.E., to read a set of highly irregular words. E.E.'s ability to read the set of words was assessed repeatedly over a number of weeks prior to the start of the therapy. No change was seen, indicating that his reading was not spontaneously improving. Picture cues were then introduced for a two-week phase of therapy. E.E. was given half of the set of words and asked to practice reading them aloud with the help of the pictures. At the end of the therapy, he was then asked to read the words aloud without the help of the cues. His performance was found to have significantly improved on the treated words, with some slight improvement also being seen on the words that had not been treated. A fortnight of therapy was then carried out for the untreated words. Subsequent reassessment found that E.E. was able to read all of the words. Cognitive neuropsychological principles have also been applied to the remediation of the writing difficulties of deep dysgraphic and surface dysgraphic patients, and the results have been similarly encouraging. However, the application of cognitive neuropsychology to the remediation of acquired disorders of language, including reading and writing, is still in its infancy. The preliminary studies produced evidence that a therapy program was of benefit to one patient with a particular processing difficulty. Now, research in this field is being extended to include replication studies in which therapy programs are being evaluated with a number of patients with the same underlying processing difficulties. Future work will include the development of a 'theory of therapy.' Different therapeutic approaches—the reorganization of processing, the relearning of information, and the facilitation of the impaired access to stored information—have all been shown to be effective. The next stage will be to evaluate systematically which therapy approach, or approaches, are more successful for a given underlying processing difficulty. 4.2 Implications for the Treatment of Developmental Reading Disorders The predominant approach to teaching dyslexic children, once they have failed to learn in the normal way, recognizes their difficulty with sounds. The most popular teaching methods embody highly structured phonic teaching with explicit emphasis on learning to relate spelling patterns to sound (Snowling 1996). A number of studies carried out using variants of multisensory teaching techniques have reported gains in reading performance but these studies have often lacked appropriate experimental controls, limiting their validity. Increasingly it has been recognized that
early intervention is a more appropriate way to proceed, in effect, to prevent at-risk children from failing. The most effective early intervention programs include training in phonological awareness to provide a good foundation for the acquisition of reading and spelling skills. Moreover, phonological awareness training is particularly effective when linked with systematic instruction in reading (Hatcher et al 1994). See also: Language Disorders. Bibliography Aaron P G 1989 Dyslexia and Hyperlexia: (Diagnosis and Management of Developmental Reading Disabilities). Kluwer, Boston, MA Black S E, Behrmann M, Bass K, Hacker P 1989 Selective writing impairment: Beyond the allographic code. Aphasiology 3(3): 265-77 Byng S, Coltheart M 1986 Aphasia therapy research: Methodological requirements and illustrative results. In: Hjelmquist E, Nilsson L G (eds.) Communication and Handicap. North Holland, Amsterdam Campbell R, Butterworth B 1985 Phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia in a highly literate subject: A developmental case with associated deficits of phonemic awareness and processing. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 37A(3): 435-75 De Partz M-P 1986 Re-education of a deep dyslexic patient: Rationale of the method and results. Cognitive Neuropsychology 3(2): 149-77 Ellis A W, Young A W 1988 Human Cognitive Neuropsychology. Erlbaum, Hove Frith U 1985 Beneath the surface of developmental dyslexia. In: Patterson K E, Marshall J C, Coltheart M (eds.) Surface Dyslexia. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Funnell E 1983 Phonological processes in reading: New evidence from acquired dyslexia. British Journal of Psvchology 74(2): 159-80 Goulandris N K, Snowling M 1991 Visual memory deficits: A plausible cause of developmental dyslexia? Cognitive Neuropsychology 8(2): 127-54 Hatcher P, Hulme C, Ellis AW 1994 Ameliorating early reading failure by integrating the teaching of reading and phonological skills: The phonological linkage hypothesis. Child Development 65: 41-57 Marshall J C, Newcombe F 1973 Patterns of paralexia: A psycholinguistic approach. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2(3): 175-99 Patterson K E, Wing A M 1989 Processes in handwriting: A case for case. Cognitive Neuropsychology 6(1): 1-2 Sasanuma S 1980 Acquired dyslexia in Japanese: Clinical features and underlying mechanisms. In: Coltheart M, Patterson K E, Marshall J C (eds.) Deep Dyslexia. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Seymour P H K 1986 Cognitive Analysis of Dyslexia. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Snowling M J 1987 Dyslexia: A Cognitive Developmental Perspective. Blackwell, Oxford Snowling M J 1996 Annotation: Contemporary approaches to the teaching of reading. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 37(2): 139-48 Temple C M, Marshall J C 1983 A case study of developmental phonological dyslexia. British Journal of Psychology 74(4): 517-33
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Teaching Language
Reading: Early J. Masterson
This article examines psycholinguistic investigations of normal reading acquisition. Traditional 'stage' theories are contrasted with a radical parallel distributed processing theory. 1. Stage Models of Reading Development
Three theories of reading development proposed by Marsh, et al. (1981), Frith (1985), and Seymour and McGregor (1984) suggest that learning to read involves progression through a series of stages, each of which has its own characteristic processing strategies. The first 'logographic' stage involves attention to the salient graphic features of words (such as letter length, ascenders and descenders). Marsh, et al. (1981) posit two such logographic stages. The strategy in the next, 'alphabetic' stage of learning to read is said to involve the sequential decoding of letters into sounds (but see Ehri 1987 for a stage prior to the alphabetic phase involving 'phonetic cue' reading). Finally, the 'orthographic' stage involves conversion of larger graphemic units to sound and/or meaning. A number of studies have provided support for the existence of the logographic stage of reading development. For example, Seymour and Elder (1986) reported the reading performance of a group of 4- and 5-year-old children who were undergoing the first year of reading instruction. The children were given no phonics training and the authors found that they were able to read correctly only words that they had previously been taught using a whole-word method. Attempts at decoding unfamiliar words using alphabetic procedures were only observed later, once the children had had some letter-sound teaching that was incorporated in their writing instruction (see Reading Teaching: Methods). Studies of reading strategies in older children (six years and upwards) have shown a developing proficiency in the use of alphabetic processes with age, as demonstrated in the ability to read nonwords or low frequency words (e.g., Marsh et al. 1981). Stuart and Coltheart (1988), on the basis of the results of a longitudinal study, suggest that children who have phonemic segmentation skills and who know letter-sound correspondences use alphabetic procedures from the outset in learning to read and do not pass through the logographic stage (see Literacy: Phonological Awareness). 2. A Parallel Distributed Processing Model
Seidenberg and McClelland (1989) have presented a parallel distributed processing model of reading devel450
opment. They suggest that their working model performs just as skilled readers do in tests of word recognition and pronunciation. During a training phase, the model also simulates effects reported for children at various levels of reading ability. The model consists of a network of interconnected processing units. There is a level of orthographic units, a level of 'hidden' units, and a level of units for phonemic output. The model was 'trained' on a set of 2897 monosyllabic words. This involved presenting stimulus pairs of letter strings and pronunciations and adjusting the weights on connections between the orthographic and phonemic levels. Seidenberg and McClelland (1989) report that in the early stages of training the model produced output that closely resembled the reading performance of children reported by Backman et al. (1984). This team tested the naming accuracy of children from seven years old and upwards on regular words (e.g., hope), exception words (e.g., said), regular inconsistent words (e.g., paid), and ambiguous words (e.g., lost) containing a spelling pattern that is associated with two or more pronunciations, each of which occurs in several words (e.g., lost/most). All of the words were high frequency items. The authors found that the younger children (7- and 8-year olds) made more errors with the exceptions with regular inconsistent and ambiguous words, than with the regular words, whereas the older children and high school students did not show differences for spelling type. Seidenberg and McClelland point out that it has been found that, in terms of accuracy and pronunciation latencies, adults show differences for spelling type, for low frequency words but not for high frequency words. They argue that the similarity of the unskilled readers' performance in naming high frequency words to skilled readers' performance in reading low frequency words is because the effect of training or experience leads to a floor value (i.e., no errors) for regular and exception high frequency words. 3. Comparing the Models
A major difference between the distributed developmental model of Seidenberg and McClelland (1989) and the earlier stage models is that many of the latter are predicated on the assumption that learning to read involves the establishment of word recognition units in conjunction with a procedure for converting novel letter strings to sound. The Seidenberg and McClelland model, however, has no visual lexicon consisting of word recognition units, and there is just one procedure which processes both familiar and novel letter
Reading Difficulties In: Patterson K E, Marshall J C, Coltheart M (eds.) Surface Dyslexia. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Marsh G, Friedman M, Welch V, Desberg P 1981 A cognitive-developmental theory of reading acquisition. In: MacKinnon G E, Waller T G (eds.) Reading Research Advances in Theory and Practice, vol. 3. Academic Press, See also: Reading: Acquisition; Reading: Theories; New York Reading Difficulties. Seidenberg M S, McClelland J L 1989 A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming. Psychological Review 96: 523-68 Bibliography Seymour P H K, Elder L 1986 Beginning reading without Backman J, Bruck M, Hebert M, Seidenberg M 1984 Acquiphonology. Cognitive Neuropsychology 3:1-36 sition and use of spelling-sound correspondences in Seymour P H K, MacGregor C J 1984 Developmental dysreading. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology lexia: A cognitive experimental analysis of phonological, 38:114-33 morphemic and visual impairments. Cognitive NeuEhri L C 1987 Learning to read and spell words. Journal of ropsychology 1:43-82 Stuart M, Coltheart M 1988 Does reading develop in a Reading Behavior 19: 5-31 sequence of stages? Cognition 30:139-81 Frith U 1985 Beneath the surface of developmental dyslexia.
strings. Future work will allow students to judge which of the two types of model is the more appropriate for characterizing the development of reading.
Reading Difficulties M. J. Snowling
For most children, learning to read involves the integration of a system for processing written language with one which already exists for processing spoken language. When learning to read in an alphabetic script such as English, the child has to learn that printed words convey meanings, that the printed letters (graphemes) in written words map on to the individual speech segments (phonemes) of spoken words, and that there are irregularities in these mappings. In addition, when reading continuous text, the child has to integrate the meanings of words in phrases and sentences, using knowledge of syntax and text integration. The attentional resources which these various processes require are considerable and place limitations on the extent to which the novice can be expected to read well. This is especially true if the child has basic language deficiencies. Children experience difficulties learning to read for two main reasons. They may be generally slow in all curriculum areas, perhaps because of a global language difficulty. These children are usually described as 'garden-variety' or simply, poor readers. On the other hand, they may have a specific reading difficulty (or 'dyslexia'). Arguably, these children have more specific language problems than generally backward readers and Snowling 1991). From a linguistic perspective, they have specific difficulties with one or
more of the component subskills which contribute to fluent reading. 1. Phonological Difficulties It is widely held that phonological awareness is one of the best predictors of reading achievement, even when the substantial effects of IQ are partialled out (Goswami and Bryant 1990). Moreover, phonological deficits, including difficulties with phoneme segmentation and nonword repetition, are characteristic of dyslexic children, who also have difficulty using phonological short-term memory codes. It is therefore not surprising that the primary problem which they have with reading is in the use of phonological strategies (see Phonology in Language Acquisition). This can be seen most directly in their approach to reading nonwords (words which are new to them). There have been many studies showing that dyslexics have nonword reading deficits which are out of proportion to the problems that they have in reading words. Moreover, case-study evidence concerning such individuals (described as developmental phonological dyslexics) has shown that the striking discrepancy between word and nonword reading skill is not transient; it may persist throughout development, imposing a constraint upon reading unfamiliar materials, such as technical or foreign words.
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Teaching Language 2. Morphological Problems The development of alphabetic competence (the appreciation that there are mappings between sounds and letters), must be accompanied by increasing proficiency with orthographic processing (Frith 1985). Words in English orthography vary in the directness of mapping sound onto spelling. Some words (e.g., cat) have a simple pattern where each phoneme is represented by a single letter; in other cases more complex (e.g., head) or obscure relationships (e.g., yacht) exist. Many are nevertheless rule-governed, and dictated by morphological factors (e.g., sign-signature). These 'opaque' orthographic conventions, violating the simple application of letter-sound rules, are gradually learned. However, some dyslexic children are unable to make this advance; their reading remains alphabetic, proceeding on the basis of sound. Thus, they have more difficulty in reading irregular words than regular or nonsense words. These children have been described as developmental surface dyslexics. The causes of surface dyslexia are not known but generally their phonological difficulties are milder than those of phonological dyslexia.
3. Syntactic Deficits A number of recent studies have suggested that dyslexic readers have difficulties with syntactic processing, for example, problems with judgments of grammatical well-formedness, and a delay in the acquisition of certain syntactic structures (Shankweiler and Crain 1986). A problem with these studies, is that certain syntactic structures—for example, some types of relative clause—may only be encountered with any frequency in written language. It follows that poor readers will have had less exposure to these than good readers and, hence, will have difficulty in dealing with them. Thus, it remains equivocal whether syntactic processing problems actually affect the reading process.
4. Semantic Deficits The reading difficulties which characterize dyslexic children are specific difficulties with decoding processes. However, there are also children who can decode well but who have comprehension difficulties. These children are proficient in the use of phonics (see Reading Teaching: Methods). Detailed examination of their reading comprehension shows that it is generally in line with (poor) vocabulary development (see Vocabulary in Language Acquisition). Thus, the development of single-word reading skills can advance without the support of comprehension. This pattern of performance can also be observed in children learning to read in a second language (see Reading in a Second Language).
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5. Knowledge of the World Reading for meaning involves the integration of information gleaned from a text with the reader's existing knowledge of the world. Yuill and Oakhill (1991) review studies showing that young readers and poor comprehenders have difficulties in making inferences from, and integrating the ideas in, texts. It has also been shown that readers of low verbal ability have more difficulty in choosing story-appropriate completions for sentences during reading, regardless of grammatical category, than children of higher verbal ability but similar decoding skill. Moreover, when subsequently asked to answer questions about texts they read, they can answer those requiring memory for facts as well as controls can, but they have difficulty with those on which they have to bring general knowledge of the world to bear.
6. Conclusions It is clear that there are numerous specific difficulties which children can encounter when learning to read. Collectively, these difficulties extend beyond singleword processing and may affect reading comprehension. The capacity of individual children to overcome such difficulties will depend upon the interaction of their cognitive strengths and weaknesses with the teaching they receive (Snowling 1987). Interventions that promote phonological awareness in the context of reading prove highly effective for the remediation of children's reading difficulties. See also: Reading: Acquisition; Reading: Testing; Reading: Early; Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness; Reading: Theories; Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention.
Bibliography Frith U 1985 Beneath the surface of developmental dyslexia. In: Patterson K E, Marshall J C, Coltheart M (eds.) Surface Dyslexia. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Goswami U, Bryant P 1990 Phonological Skills and Learning to Read. Erlbaum, Hove, UK Hatcher P, Hulme C, Ellis AW 1994 Ameliorating early reading failure by integrating the teaching of reading and phonological skills: The phonological linkage hypothesis. Child Development 65: 41-57 Shankweiler D, Crain S 1986 Language mechanisms and reading disorder: A modular approach. Cognition 24:13968 Snowling M 1987 Dyslexia: A Cognitive Developmental Perspective. Blackwell, Oxford Snowling M J 1991 Developmental reading disorders. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 32: 49-77 Yuill N, Oakhill J 1991 Children's Problems in Text Comprehension. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Reading Recovery
Reading Inventories £. Goodacre
The informal reading inventory (IRI) consists of graded passages of text which the learner is asked to read aloud. Questions are then asked about their understanding of what they have read. On the basis of this performance, the teacher can decide the level of difficulty of text with which the pupil can cope. Although a form of assessment, the technique is seen as more natural and closer to the classroom situation than a formal reading test (see Reading: Testing). As Powell (1971:642) has explained, 'the strength of the IRI is not as a test instrument, but as a strategy for studying the behavior of the learner in a reading situation and as a basis for instant diagnosis in the teaching environment.' The use of the IRI can be traced back to the 1920s, although Betts (1957) is usually credited with popularizing and carefully describing the technique in the 1940s and 1950s; he identified several levels of student functioning in reading: 'independent,' 'instructional,' and 'frustration,' according to the number of errors made and the questions answered correctly. Pikulski (1990), comparing four IRIS, reported considerable variety in respect to the grade levels covered; the length of passages used; the source of passages (whether they were specially written; whether they were based on readability formulas; whether they were selected from basal readers or taken from literature books); the use of pictures; the range, type, and number of questions used for each passage; the criteria adopted for the instructional level; the time needed to give the IRI; and the type of text used (expository or narrative, or both). Questions to assess understanding could be factual, inferential, or terminological; conclusion or evaluation questions were used rarely.
Sometimes the literature refers to 'curriculum IRIS.' This is where the teacher constructs their own IRI by using passages from the reading scheme or basal series being used in the classroom. The development of 'miscue analysis' has had considerable influence on how 'errors' are perceived (see Miscue Analysis). More recent IRIS have taken such research into consideration, and published versions provide detailed information as to what should be recorded as an error. So the effective use of the IRI depends on users who have a good understanding of the nature of the reading process and are familiar with the flexible diagnostic use of IRIS to provide insights into how the learner is coping with the process and developing appropriate strategies. Generally, the IRI is now seen as a way to evaluate reading less formally; as an attempt to match readers with the texts that are likely to be experienced in the classroom; and as a technique to enable teachers and reading specialists to answer specific teaching questions and to understand the nature of a child's reading. For all these purposes, it is necessary that the results are seen as tentative. Bibliography Betts E A 1957 Foundations of Reading Instruction. American Book Co., New York Johnson M J 1987 Informal Reading Inventories. International Reading Association, Newark, DE Pikulski J J 1990 Informal reading inventories. The Reading Teacher 43: 514-16 Powell W R 1971 Validity of the IRI reading levels. Elementary English 48:637-42
Reading Recovery N. Hall
Reading recovery is a program created as a 'prevention strategy designed to reduce dramatically the number of children with reading and writing difficulties in an education system' (Clay 1987: 36). It was developed initially in New Zealand during the late 1970s by Marie Clay. Children who are identified early on in their school careers as being within the bottom 20 percent of read-
ers in their class receive individual daily lessons from a specially trained teacher. Once the children are able to work comfortably at the average class level they leave the program. It is claimed that this standard is achieved by about 80 percent of children on the program within a 12-20-week period. Because the reading ability of a child selected for the program is relative to its class scores there may be significant differences 453
Teaching Language between schools in the reading levels of their reading recovery groups. Unlike many other educational innovations which tend to spread on a fairly random basis, the introduction, dissemination, and development of reading recovery has been, and will continue to be, regulated very tightly. Access to the program by teachers is rigorously controlled. Class teachers must participate in a year of part-time training by 'teacher leaders' who have themselves undertaken a year-long full-time course of training. The number of training institutions is small and within countries whole networks are set up to maintain the purity of the procedures. Since the program's inception, reading recovery has been introduced to Australia (1984), USA (1984), Canada (1988), and the UK (1990). Each reading recovery session is structured within a 'lesson frame.' During a 30-minute session a child: (a) reads familiar materials; (b) reads yesterday's new book; (c) engages in some writing; (d) is introduced to, and reads, a new book chosen from a collection organized into 20 levels. During these four phases the teacher keeps records and interacts with the child, introducing strategies as appropriate. Once the session is finished the child returns to the classroom and experiences regular class teaching. The pedagogic orientation is toward helping the child develop a range of strategies within meaningful contexts rather than forcing her/him to learn sets of discrete skills (DeFord et al. 1991).
The adherents of reading recovery claim great success for the program. Only a limited number of studies have examined these claims, most of which have been carried out by people involved in developing and teaching reading recovery. There are even fewer longterm studies of the consequences of reading recovery. The studies tend to support the claims but there are still questions to be examined. One problem is that there is really nothing to compare the program with; the degree of control over the implementation and teaching of the program seems unique. Thus, for some educationalists, it remains to be seen whether it is the particular literacy strategies, the degree of one-to-one teaching, or the systematically controlled application of the program which are critical for success. Reading recovery is inevitably a very expensive program to implement and maintain, and the rigid control of the program means there can be no cost cutting. The absence of substantial long-term studies means that the cost-effectiveness of the program remains uncertain. See also: Reading Teaching: Methods; Reading: Early; Reading Difficulties. Bibliography Clay M 1987 Implementing reading recovery: Systematic adaptations to an educational innovation. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies 22: 35-58 DeFord D, Lyons C, Pinnell G 1991 Bridges to Literacy: Learning From Reading Recovery. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH
Reading Teaching: Materials K. Perera
In past centuries, people learnt to read from the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress. In the late twentieth century scores of books are written for the specific purpose of teaching children to read. In Britain they are called 'reading schemes,' in North America 'basal reading programs.' Typically, a reading scheme is 'any set of books which has a common theme and authorship, follows a progression of difficulty such that the earliest books or materials can be read to some extent by beginning readers, ascends in level of difficulty, style and content, and is marketed with associated materials such as teachers' manuals, prereading activities, workbooks, and kits' (Winch 1982:76). Writers have to create texts that enable learners to induce the complex relationships between the marks on the page and their own oral language. There are a number of ways in which this can be done.
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1. Phonic Schemes
Phonic schemes aim to simplify the learner's task by using a high proportion of words that have regular spellings. In the early stages, this usually means words with short vowel sounds represented by single vowel letters and with consonant sounds represented by the letter or letters most frequently associated with them, for example, 'cap,' 'bed,' 'milk,' 'strong,' 'funny.' Later, words with long vowels or diphthongs represented by common vowel digraphs or by a vowel letter plus <-e> may be included, for example, 'wait,' 'tree,' 'mine,' 'boat,' 'food.' It is never possible for all the words to be regularly spelt since so many of the unavoidable grammatical words in English use infrequent spelling patterns, for example, 'the,' 'was,' 'of,' 'one.' If pupils have understood the alphabetic principle and have learnt the most frequent gra-
Reading Teaching: Materials pheme-phoneme correspondences, then it should be possible for them to read a considerable number of regular words without having had to memorize them visually. Phonic reading schemes are therefore generally characterized by a relatively high number of different words ('types') in each text. This gives the writer some scope for writing a reasonably interesting story and for avoiding unnatural levels of word repetition. However, the linguistic disadvantage of a high proportion of phonically regular words is that it tends to produce an arhythmic text—because so many of the words are monosyllables—which may also have an unhelpful amount of unintended rhyme. There is research evidence that the worst examples, for example, The cat can bat the pan, are 'inordinately difficult to process' (Adams 1990: 322). Later phonic schemes have avoided these excesses; a British example is New Way (1987). 2. 'Sight'Schemes A quite different approach to simplifying the beginning reader's task is to select words that are visually distinctive in the hope that the child will remember the appearance of the whole word without having related its component letters to their phonemic equivalents, for example, 'aeroplane,' 'adventure,' 'elephant,' 'tortoise.' This approach, which is sometimes called 'look and say,' requires writers to control strictly the number of word types both within and between books in a scheme in order to lighten the burden on the reader's memory. Such vocabulary control necessarily means that the words that do appear have to be repeated frequently. Although repetition is needed if children are to develop a vocabulary of words recognized on sight, it can have two detrimental effects. The first is the occurrence of grammatical structures not usually found other than in reading schemes (leading to a style sometimes known as 'readerese'), for example: See the children play.
(1)
Fly fast, big aeroplane!
(2)
The second is the violation of the normal information structure of a written discourse, where there is an expectation that—apart from passages in which the author explicitly summarizes what has gone before— each new sentence will introduce some new information. In reading books where the same words are recycled repeatedly, the information gets recycled too, for example: My house has a roof. It is a red roof. The roof of my house is red.
(3)
With text like that, the motivation for continuing to read has to come from something external, such as the desire to learn to read or to please the teacher, because the meaning alone is not enough to carry the reader forward. A sight scheme with less obtrusive
vocabulary repetition is Reading 387 (1978), widely used in both Britain and North America. A particular type of sight reading scheme selects a high proportion of the vocabulary on the basis of a word frequency list. The best known example in Britain is the Ladybird Keywords (1964) scheme. This was devised in the light of research that showed, among other things, that just 12 words—'a,' 'and,' 'he,' T,' 'in,' 'is,' 'it,' 'of,' 'that,' 'the,' 'to,' 'was'—constitute roughly a quarter of all adults' and children's reading material. The authors believed that, if children learnt to read from books that repeated these and other high frequency words very often, they would rapidly be able to read a wide range of texts. Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that short words that are not picturable are very hard for young children to remember; also, a heavy concentration of them produces remarkably arid language, for example: He will let us go in with him.
(4)
Later sight schemes, for example, Story Chest (1982) put more emphasis on meaning and less on strict vocabulary control. 3. Modified Orthography A more radical approach to the particular problem of the complexity of the English writing system is to modify it. Various approaches have been tried, including diacritics, color coding, and a revised alphabet (see Southgate and Roberts 1970). The only one that has had any significant take-up within the British education system is i.t.a. (the initial teaching alphabet), which was designed by Sir James Pitman. During the 1960s and early 1970s it was adopted by 10 percent of English schools that had infant classes but later it was virtually abandoned and is of only historical interest. Even so, it is worth a brief account because it illustrates some of the problems that, despite generous funding and official recognition and support, beset attempts to revise English orthography. The i.t.a. contains 44 characters, including 24 from traditional orthography (TO) (<x> and
are omitted). The 20 additional characters are similar in design to traditional graphemes; indeed, 14 of them are digraphs consisting of two familiar letters joined by a ligature. The aim of the system is to provide, as far as possible, a one-to-one relationship between sounds and symbols while retaining sufficient similarity to TO to make transfer easy. So postvocalic is retained in words like farm , even though most English speakers of English do not pronounce the in that position. Although it is possible to find words in which every character is new, for example, chose , the majority of words undergo only slight changes, for example, little , morning <morniq>. The problems that led to the demise of i.t.a. in the classroom were largely practical: parents' opposition; the paucity of reading materials available in i t a;
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Teaching Language the difficulty for teachers of managing the transition phase, when some of their pupils were on i.t.a., some on TO and some between the two; and so on. There was one shortcoming, though, that arose from a failure to exploit fully the advantages of a regularized alphabet: i.t.a. was not associated with any one particular reading scheme, and several TO schemes were transliterated into i.t.a. This meant that when sight schemes with severely restricted vocabulary were transliterated, all the problems of unnatural grammar and static discourse were carried over to the new medium, despite the fact that, with the benefit of consistent graphemephoneme relationships, pupils should not have been so dependent on visual memory and should have been able to decode a wider vocabulary. 4. 'Language Experience' Materials An alternative to using published reading materials as a basis for early reading lessons is to use books that children write themselves—in other words, to foster a closer relationship between the teaching of reading and writing than is usual (see Writing: Process Approach). This is most likely to happen when a school adopts a 'language experience' (or 'whole language') approach. Obviously very young children have not got sufficient manual skill to produce handwriting that will be sufficiently legible for other children to read. However, the widespread use in primary schools of computers with concept keyboards and simple wordprocessing programs means that even 5-year olds can create little stories that become part of the classroom reading stock. Another method used in some British schools to help beginners to write is called 'breakthrough to literacy.' This is a set of materials and techniques that was a product of the Schools' Council Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching (see Schools Council UK). Children have a small plastic stand and a sentence maker, which is a folder containing small pieces of card, some with a high-frequency word printed on them, and some blank for the child's own words. When they want to write a sentence, the children select the words they need from the sentence maker and arrange them in sequence in the stand. Their finished work can be transcribed by the teacher and the resulting books made available to all the children. The biggest advantage of reading materials that derive from language experience approaches is that the language comes from the children themselves, so there is no risk of the unnaturalness of 'readerese.' 5. 'Real'Books During the 1980s, a small but influential group of educationists in Britain led a movement against published reading schemes. They advocated that children should be taught to read using so-called 'real' books (a misleading label, since it implies that any book written with the express purpose of teaching children 456
to read is somehow not 'real'). The emphasis is on the quality of the writing and illustrations in the books offered to children, rather than on the vocabulary control and graded progression from one level to another that characterize reading schemes. Vast numbers of fine books for young children are published every year. The idea is that a selection should be available in the classroom; that the child should choose any book and 'read' it with the support of the teacher or another adult. This 'apprenticeship' approach (Waterland 1985) puts the enjoyment of reading before the acquisition of skills and allows the child to learn from the behavior of a skilled practitioner, but it obviously makes substantial demands on teachers' time. A comparison of the language of reading schemes and 'real' books (Perera 1993) shows that the latter generally have longer sentences, a greater variety of sentence length, more polysyllabic words, and less word repetition. Together, these features lead to more natural-sounding language than is found on the whole in reading schemes. However, the high rate of introduction of new words can cause reading difficulty. A particular problem is that there may be no overlap of vocabulary from one book to the next that the child chooses. 6. Trends in the 1990s
Since the 1970s there have been changes both in the kinds of books used in the teaching of reading and in the way they are used by teachers (Department of Education and Science 1990). In the 1970s, it was fairly common for a school to have just one reading scheme and for children to work their way through all its books and any associated activities. During the 1980s, there was a tendency to use reading schemes more flexibly: many schools stocked a number of different schemes, with the result that teachers were to some extent able to tailor a reading program to individual needs. Trends in the 1990s point to some blurring of the earlier rigid distinction between reading schemes and other books, with teachers making both kinds of books readily available to young learners. As far as the reading materials themselves are concerned, conscious attempts are made to avoid racist, sexist, or social class bias; there is awareness of the need for language and story structure that will accord with the child's expectations; there is a measure of integration of sight and phonic approaches within one scheme (e.g., Oxford Reading Tree 1986); and there is an increased use of a wider range of genres, including nonfiction and poetry, as well as the traditional story texts. See also: Reading Teaching: Methods; Reading: Early; Reading: Theories:.
Teaching Additional Languages (metaphorical expressions in particular) which acquire a specific meaning and eventually become defined technical terms (e.g., 'river piracy' in geology; 'hungry soil' in agriculture; 'resistance' in physics; 'depression' in medicine, meteorology, and mathematics; 'value' in economics; 'plot' in literary theory, etc.). Further sources of technical or scientific neologisms are wordformation processes with native or Latin and Greek lexical elements such as 'aqua-,' 'hydro-,' '-itis,' '-phobia'; borrowings from foreign languages (including loan translations) and designations by means of figures or artificial symbols (e.g., in mathematics, genetics, and logic). However, vocabulary of LSP is not limited to defined technical terminology and phraseology, but equally includes nomenclatures, i.e., sets of lexical items which merely label an individual object within a systematic order, but do not have a defining function cf. the nomenclatures of medicine, chemistry, zoology, botany, mineralogy, meteorology, etc. LSP vocabulary also contains 'semiterms,' that is, job-specific words and phrases on the fringe of general language (e.g., 'the talk and chalk method' in education); and, to some extent, professional slang, that is, oral vocabulary with expressive and stylistic connotations, but not related to a defined concept (e.g., 'cow-dung bomb,' in mining; 'roughneck' in geophysics). In addition, trademarks or trade names may be regarded as an essential component of particular specialist vocabularies (e.g., 'aspirin,' Togal' in pharmacology; 'Kodak,' 'Hoover' in commerce). The morphological and syntactic properties of LSP, by and large, correspond to those of the general language, but may differ strikingly in frequency of occurrence. Thus, particular lexical morphemes or certain economical structures may be given greater preference than others. On the textual level, however, LSP has developed traditional text forms (or genres) of its own, whose compositional patterns may be highly conventionalized (e.g., experimental reports; case studies; conference abstracts and abstracts in reference journals; patent applications and lexicon articles). Spoken LSP discourse is distinct from that of general language due to its particular strategies in face-toface communication or in telephone communication. These strategies are reflected by metacommunicative speech acts and particular patterns of prosody (e.g., in parliamentary debates, interactions at court, business meeting discourse, sports commentaries, sermons, argumentative discussions at international conferences). 3. LSP and Applied Linguistics The study of LSP is closely related with a number of fields within the framework of applied linguistics. Among those, 'terminology studies' and 'terminography' are mainly concerned with the description of specialist concepts and terms, and their stipulation 514
and standardization for international use. Another practical issue is the compilation of technical vocabulary and phraseology in glossaries and dictionaries for the specialist. 'Contrastive linguistics' has focused on particular features of LSP texts between different languages and also between LSP communication and that of general language. Moreover, 'translation theory' investigates the equivalence relationship between lexical items and phraseological units in the vocabularies of source language and target language. It also deals with appropriate translation techniques applied to specialist texts. In 'sociolinguistics,' functional h'nguistic varieties (sublanguages) of specific social groups are the subject of LSP communication research. 'Psycholinguistics' analyzes the interdependence between specialist thinking (i.e., its degree of abstraction), verbal expression, and iconic visualization. Focusing on technological and scientific subjects, 'foreign language teaching' at university level has developed teaching methodology concepts for proficiency training in LSP (e.g., curriculum planning theory and the elaboration of teaching materials). Inside LSP research, current studies have mainly come from the areas of 'LSP stylistics' (based on the concept of functional styles or functional varieties), 'LSP text linguistics' (concerned with the linguistic properties of specific traditional text forms/genres, and the classification or typology of LSP texts), and 'LSP onomastics' (investigating the form and function of onymic elements, i.e., proper names, items of nomenclature, in special vocabularies and LSP texts). 'Spoken discourse analysis of LSP' is another field of current research (cf. Sect. 4.3). On the whole, the definition of LSP by means of a polarization between language(s) for general/common purposes and language(s) for specific purposes, which largely dominated LSP research in the 1960s, was discarded in favor of a new definition of LSP in terms of the totality of linguistic means used in written or spoken texts. However, LSP is neither monolithic nor uniform, but reveals, on closer inspection, both a horizontal structuring (Gliederung) and a vertical stratification (Schichtung). The criteria underlying this stratification of 'text levels' include: (a) the interaction of specialists in a particular social setting (i.e., their work environment); (b) the degree of abstraction in dealing with a specific subject (with respect to the addressee's previous knowledge); and (c) the linguistic means and the nonlinguistic (artificial) symbols or visuals used in an LSP text. Thus, Sager et al. distinguish the following levels based on Hoffman (1976:192): A. the language of the theoretical basic sciences B. the language of the experimental and technical sciences C. the language of the applied sciences and technology D. the language of material production E. the language of consumption. (Sager et al. 1980:183)
Language for Special Purposes Another model of the internal structuring of LSP was suggested by Mohn and Pelka (1984). It is based on the concept of center and periphery and the grading of specialism in an LSP text. The authors differentiate between 'communication among specialists within the same subject area' (fachintern), 'communication between specialists from different subject areas' (interfachlich), and 'communication outside a specific subject area', between specialists and nonspecialists, e.g., interested lay persons or the general public (fachextern). There are, however, no hard and fast dividing lines between these levels or spheres of LSP communication. Their interdependence should be regarded as a sliding scale, just like the relation between the language for general and for specific purposes which is in a constant state of flux. 4. Issues in LSP Research 4.1 Centers and Documentation of Research Work in General An exhaustive survey of LSP research centers cannot be provided in the scope of this article. There have been updated documentations of research projects published under such titles as The World of LSP (H0edt and Turner 1981) and The World of LSP II (Draskau and H0edt 1984). These are information surveys intended for LSP theorists and practitioners, interpreters and translators, terminology specialists, and LSP teachers. There are research centers in Scandinavia at the Copenhagen School of Economics (The Language Institute); at the University of Uppsala (FUMS), Sweden, at the University of Vaasa (School of Modern Languages), Finland—with affiliations to Turku, Tampere, and Jyvaskyla. In Germany, LSP research work has been conducted at the universities of Hamburg, Heidelberg, Hildesheim, Mainz-Germersheim, Leipzig (The Foreign Language Center), and Dresden (The Institute of Applied Linguistics). LSP centers in Austria are the INFOTERM Institute in Vienna and the International Language Center at the University of Graz. Research activities in the field of LSP in the UK are located at the universities of Manchester (UMIST), Aston, Birmingham, Lancaster, and London. LSP centers in the USA include the University of Michigan (ELI), Oregon State University (Eugene); New Mexico State University (Las Cruces); the University of Utah (Salt Lake City); the University of California, and others. Mention should also be made of the concept of 'LSP rhetoric' which has become known in Western Europe under such labels as 'the "northwest" or "Washington School" of EST,' 'post-Aristotelian rhetoric,' and 'new rhetoric.' It originated from a project group at the University of Oregon (Trimble et al. 1978). What classical and LSP rhetoric have in common is the pragmatic understanding of a subject-
specific text and the deliberate choice of linguistic means for particular communicative ends. Thus, situational norms can be found to govern the appropriate use of terminology, syntactic structures, and textual patterns. The effective application of these linguistic means has been formulated in rhetorical principles summarized in the so-called 'rhetorical process chart.' This chart is intended as a guideline for the EST text author and has been chiefly applied to learned articles. As an essential text constituent the conceptual and physical paragraph carries rhetorical functions and techniques (cf. Trimble et al. 1978; Trimble 1985). Attempts have been made to underpin the theoretical basis of LSP rhetoric in terms of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and stylistics. Reflexes of this concept may be traced in the publications of Widdowson (1979), Swales (1985), and Myers (1990). Activities in LSP research have been documented by a considerable number of international conferences, especially those convening at regular intervals, for example: the biennial European symposia on LSP, Vienna 1977, Bielefeld 1979, Copenhagen 1981, Bordeaux 1983, Leuven 1985, Vaasa 1987, Budapest 1989, Jerusalem 1991, and Bergen 1993. Moreover, there have been regular conferences of LSP linguistics in the Nordic countries, covering subjects of text linguistics, terminology research, data processing, translation theory and practice, and foreign language teaching. Since 1982, the School of Modern Languages at the University of Vaasa (Finland) has hosted the annual VAKKI-seminars on 'LSP and Theory of Translation.' Moreover, LSP topics have been duly represented in sections at national and international conferences and congresses on applied linguistics. Thus, the German Gesellschaft fur Angewandte Linguistik (GAL) at annual venues has a permanent section of LSP communication and translation (Fachsprachliche Kommunikation, Ubersetzungswissenscha.fi) where new results in LSP research may be represented. The Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) has equally established a commission on LSP. In the USA, LSP sessions have been a permanent part of the annual MLA conferences. In 1987, the Society for Literature and Science (SLS) was founded in Worcester, Massachusetts, to serve as a basis for interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange among scientists from various disciplines (e.g., chemistry, technology, linguistics, etc.). Current research in LSP may also be observed in international LSP journals. These are usually linked with research centers: in the first instance, the UNESCO ALSED-LSP NEWSLETTER (founded in 1977 at the Copenhagen School of Economics). The Austrian journal Special Language/Fachsprache (founded in 1979, renamed Fachsprache—InternalionalJournal of LSP in 1990) follows the tradition of terminology work at INFOTERM, Vienna, and is intended as an 'International Journal of LSP,
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Teaching Additional Languages research, didactics, terminology.' There is also the Nordic journal Nordisk tidsskrift for fagsprog og terminologi which features contributions in five languages (cf. also Glaser 1988). Other journals are the ESP Journal founded in 1982 and renamed in 1986 English for Specific Purposes: An International Journal (Pergamon Press). For a number of years, the newsletter English for Specific Purposes (edited at Oregon State University) had a wide circulation but ceased to appear in 1985. 4.2 Synchronic Studies of LSP The majority of LSP work since the 1970s has been concerned with the description of the current usage of LSP and the properties of subject-specific communication with regard to the levels of the linguistic system. In the initial stage, the main focus was on the vocabulary of LSP (chiefly terminology), word formation patterns, the sources of terminology of a particular province of discourse, the pragmatic motivation of, and the semantic relations within, subject-specific words and phrases. Practical results of this phase were frequency word-lists and multilingual frequency dictionaries for the foreign learner (cf. Hoffmann 1988). In the following years, more emphasis was placed on syntactic properties of LSP texts, for example, the typical sentence patterns and the functional sentence perspective (theme and rheme), with emphasis also on contrastive studies. Later research has attempted to draw generalizations and explanations from the considerable data base collected by inductive-empirical studies. These had been flourishing for English, German, Swedish, and Russian corpora. Comparatively fewer studies have so far been devoted to the Romance languages. In synchronic LSP work, the range of subjects under analysis which were based on clear-cut linguistic categories and methods, has been remarkably broad. It comprises, among other aspects, such concepts as (a) genre analysis, (b) macrostructures, (c) conceptual and physical paragraphs, (d) coherence markers in a text (i.e., the function of pronominalization and anaphoric/ cataphoric links), (e) elaboration of a text topic (in terms of theme/rheme progression), (f) structural signals, (g) metacommunication, (h) hedges, (i) emotive features and stylistic properties of LSP texts, (j) the interrelation between text and visuals, and (k) text and 'encyclopedic knowledge' (e.g., hypertext). Other methodologies in LSP text analysis have tried to integrate results gained from investigations on
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different text levels (word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, 'subtext,' text) in the so-called cumulative approach. They have also correlated distinctive linguistic text features with rhetorical functions in terms of cognitive and communicative strategies. 4.3 Diachronic Studies in LSP Although the synchronic investigation of LSP has been the dominating trend of research since the 1970s, there has been a growing interest in diachronic studies, with reference to German, English, the Romance, and the Nordic languages. With respect to the German language, topics of these analyses have included: (a) roots of special vocabularies in historical records of German, ranging from the medieval artes literature to the writing in the Age of Learning; (b) the relation between Latin and German in the natural sciences since the seventeenth century; (c) the beginning of popular writing in the nineteenth century; and (d) the style of scientific prose in the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment (cf. Drozd and Seibicke 1973; Porksen 1986). English studies have mainly attended to the development of technical vocabularies in Early Modern English (cf. Barber 1976), to the progress in scientific prose style in seventeenth-century England, and the language of philosophical thought represented by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Bishop John Wilkins (cf. Glaser 1990; Hiillen 1987). Modern text linguistics has isolated predecessors of traditional text forms in Middle English and Early Modern English and looked at the history of the research article in physics during the twentieth century (cf. Bazerman 1984; Glaser 1990). The diachronic analysis of individual features of LSP in the Romance languages is the guiding principle of a collection of papers edited by Kalverkamper (1988). The corpus of these studies, among other sources, consists of an Italian merchant's letter of the thirteenth century, a Venetian maritime insurance text of the fifteenth century, and a French treatise on language and style of the eighteenth century. A separate study was devoted to popular scientific writing clothed in a simulated dialogue in French prose of the early eighteenth century. In Scandinavia, various projects at the University of Uppsala (FUMS), Sweden, and at the universities of Vaasa, Turku, and Jyvaskyla, Finland, have been directed at a diachronic comparison of Swedish texts with German, Finnish, and English texts, taken from various subject areas and genres. The research group at FUMS investigates the change of scientific and technical writing in certain time intervals (1895-1905; 1935-45; 1975-85) in the fields of medicine, economics, and electrical engineering, based on samples from textbooks, learned articles, and popularized articles (cf. Gunnarsson 1989). Comparative and diachronic studies in Finland have been devoted to articles
Language for Special Purposes in medical journals, with respect to the reflection of changes in the research paradigm at the turn of the century and to culture-specific features. 4.4 Spoken Discourse Analysis in LSP Due to the difficulties associated with research on spoken discourse, LSP studies have predominantly dealt with written texts. Research on spoken LSP discourse requires representative data corpora gained from tape transcripts and, ideally, supplemented by videos to provide auxiliary information to the verbal text. In contrast to written LSP communication, oral communication on complex subject-specific problems may feature considerably reduced verbal text (e.g., sequences of elliptical sentences and even incoherent utterances). Such reduction is possible whenever the communicative partner has recourse to deixis (Zeigefeld) in a particular speech act (e.g., pointers to a physical object or visualizations on the blackboard, on a poster or a screen). Thus, the spoken discourse analyst should both be competent in a particular province of discourse and have a close insight into the subject matter underlying the dialogue or multilateral discussion both between specialists and between experts and nonexperts. So far, preferred subjects of investigation into oral LSP communication have included: conversation in the classroom and in the university seminar; gambits and hesitation phenomena; stylistic features and metacommunication in lectures given at ESP summer courses; lectures in physics for mixed audiences; sales talks between company representatives and customers; the performance of auctioneers at New Zealand cattle auctions; typical phrases used in poster sessions at international congresses; turn-taking at business meetings of a British company (Lenz 1989); and dialogues occurring in rehearsals of opera productions (Schneider 1983). Studies of radio and TV communication have also marginally touched upon LSP topics. Thus, Leitner (1983) analyzed phone-ins at BBC TV London, and Jucker (1986) news interviews at BBC Radio 4. On the whole, these studies have focused on the mechanism of turn-taking, on hedges and metacommunicative strategies, and on routine formulae as well as on rhetorical features of oral LSP communication. So far spontaneous dyadic face-to-face speech acts and guided formal discussions have been analyzed on a still limited database. However, they have been able to highlight general methodological problems and to widen the scope of interest in the interlacing of verbal and nonverbal communication, with regard to both visual aids (graphs, posters) and practical demonstrations performed on an object. The results of spoken LSP discourse analysis may help in serving the needs of subject-specific teaching (e.g., EAP at both the secondary and tertiary levels).
5. Future Work
LSP research will continue to expand in several directions as it is required to respond to the rapid developments of modern society and to the requirements of international communication. One can, however, anticipate that the enormous technical facilities of computerized data bases will aid the progress of LSP work in both theory and practice. Bibliography Barber Ch 1976 The expanding vocabulary. Early Modern English. Andre Deutsch, London Bazerman Ch 1984 Modern evolution of the experimental report in physics—spectroscopic articles in Physical Review, 1893-1980. Social Studies of Science 14(2): 16396 Buhlmann R, Fearns A 1987 Handbuch des Fachsprachenunterrichts. Unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung naturwissenschaftlich-technischer Fachsprachen. Langenscheidt, Berlin Bungarten Th (ed.) 1981 Wissenschaftssprache. Beitrage zur Methodologie, theoretischen Fundierung und Deskription. Fink, Munich Bungarten Th (ed.) 1986 Wissenschaftssprache und Gesellschaft. Aspekte der wissenschaftlichen Kommunikation und des Wissenstransfers in der heutigen Zeit. Akademion, Hamburg Draskau J, H0edt J (eds.) 1984 The World of LSP II. The LSP Centre. Copenhagen School of Economics, Copenhagen Drozd L, Seibicke W 1973 Deutsche Fach- und Wissenschaftssprache. Bestandsaufnahme—Theorie—Geschichte. Oscar Brandstetter, Wiesbaden Dubois B L 1985 Poster sessions at biomedical meetings: Design and presentation. The ESP Journal 1: 37-48 Felber H, Budin G 1989 Terminologie in Theorie und Praxis. Gunter Narr, Tubingen Fix U 1986 Das Asthetische als Eigenschaft nichtpoetischer Texte. Textlinguistik 13. Padagogische Hochschule Dresden Fluck H-R 1976 Fachsprachen. Einfiihrung und Bibliographie. Francke, Munich Glaser R 1979 Fachstile des Englischen. Verlag Enzyklopadie, Leipzig Glaser R 1988 LSP Research in the Nordic Countries. Special Language/Fachsprache 10: 1-2, 2-21 Glaser R 1990 Fachtextsorten im Englischen. Gunter Narr, Tubingen Gunnarsson B-L 1989 LSP texts in a diachronic perspective. In: Lauren Ch, Nordman M (eds.) Special Language: From Humans Thinking to Thinking Machines. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK H0edt J, Turner R (eds.) 1981 The World of LSP. Copenhagen School of Economics, Copenhagen H0edt J, Lundquist L, Picht H, Qvistgaard J 1982 Proceedings of the Third European Symposium on LSP, Copenhagen, August 1981, 'Pragmatics and LSP.' Copenhagen School of Economics, Copenhagen Hoffmann L 1976 Kommunikationsmittel Fachsprache. Eine Einfiihrung. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin Hoffmann L 1988 Vom Fachwort zum Fachtext. Beitrage zur Angewandten Linguistik, Gunter Narr, Tubingen Hiillen W 1987 Style and Utopia. Sprat's demand for a plain style, reconsidered. In: Aarsleff H, Kelly L G, Niederehe
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Teaching Additional Languages H-J (eds.) Papers in the History of Linguistics. Benjamins, Amsterdam Jucker H 1986 News Interviews: A Pragmalinguistic Analysis. Benjamins, Amsterdam Kalverkamper H (ed.) 1988 Fachsprachen in der Romania. Gunter Narr, Tübingen Kocourek R 1991 La Langue française de la technique et de la science. Ver sune linguistique de la langue savante. Oscar Brandoetter, Wiesbachen Lauren Ch, Nordman M (eds.) 1989 Special Language. From Humans Thinking to Thinking Machines. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Leitner G 1983 Gesprachsanalyse und Rundfunkkommunikation. Die Struktur englischer phone-ins. Georg Olms, Hildesheim Lenz F 1989 Organisationsprinzipien in mündlicher Fachkommunikation. Zur Gesprachsorganisation von 'Technical Meetings' Peter Lang, Frankfurt Möhn D, Pelka R 1984 Fachsprachen. Eine Einführung. Max Niemeyer, Tubingen Myers G 1990 The social construction of popular science: The narrative of science and the narrative of nature. In: Writing Biology. Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI Nordman M 1989 Rhythm and Balance in LSP Texts. Special Language I Fachsprache 11: 24-37
Picht H, Draskau J 1985 Terminology: An Introduction. Copenhagen School of Economics/University of Surrey, Guildford Porksen U 1986 Deutsche Naturwissenschaftssprachen. Historische und kritische Studien. Gunter Narr, Tubingen Sager J C, Dungworth D, McDonald P F 1980 English Special Languages. Principles and practice in science and technology. Oscar Brandstetter, Wiesbaden Schneider G 1983 Probensprache der Oper. Untersuchungen zum dialogischen Charakter einer Fachsprache. Max Niemeyer, Tubingen Swales J 1985 Episodes in ESP. A source and reference book on the development of English for Science and Technology. Pergamon Institute of English, Oxford Swales J M 1990 Genre Analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Trimble M T, Trimble L, Drobnic K 1978 English for Specific Purposes: Science and Technology. English Language Institute, Oregon State University, Eugene, OR Trimble L 1985 English for Science and Technology. A discourse approach. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge von Hahn W 1983 Fachkommunikation. Entwicklung— Linguistische Konzepte—Betriebliche Beispiele. Walter der Gruyter, Berlin Widdowson H G 1979 Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Learning Strategies R. L. Oxford
While research on language learning strategies is relatively new, having begun only in the 1970s and 1980s, it is possible to suggest some potential implications for future investigations and for classroom practice. This article describes the state of the art in research on learning strategies, points out continuing areas of difficulty that need resolution, and notes relevant implications for researchers and teachers. In contrast to general language learning styles, such as auditory versus visual or global versus analytic (see Second Language Learning: Individual Differences), language learning strategies are specific actions, behaviors, steps, or techniques that students use to improve their own progress in developing skills in a second or foreign language. These strategies can facilitate the internalization, storage, retrieval, or use of the new language. Strategies are especially important for language learning because they are the tools for active, self-directed involvement that is necessary for developing communicative ability. Language learning strategies include dozens or even hundreds of possible behaviors, such as seeking out conversation partners, grouping words to be memorized, or giving oneself encouragement to tackle a difficult language
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task. In general, research suggests that effective learners are consciously aware of using learning strategies and that they tailor their strategies to their needs and purposes at any given time. This article discusses the following: (a) ways that research results are gathered on language learning strategies; (b) existing research findings about the effectiveness of language learning strategies, factors affecting strategy choice, and means of teaching students to use better strategies; and (c) implications of current research on learning strategies. This article cannot describe individual studies in detail; for more information, see reviews by O'Malley and Chamot (1990); Wenden and Rubin (1987); Oxford and Crookall (1989); Oxford (1989, 1990a, 1990b); Cohen (1990); and Galloway and Labarca (1991) and the many separate investigations cited therein. 1. How We Learn about Learning Strategies
Researchers and teachers discover students' language learning strategies in a variety of ways. Techniques for assessing students' use of strategies include informal observation, formal observational rating scales, infor-
Learning Strategies mal or formal interviews, group discussions, language learning diaries, dialogue journals between student and teacher, open-ended surveys, Likert-scaled surveys of strategy frequency, and think-aloud procedures that require students to describe their strategies aloud while using them. Most of these assessment techniques involve some type of learner self-report, either retrospectively (asking the learner to look back at strategies used for a particular task or at strategies generally used under ordinary circumstances) or concurrently (asking the learner to comment on strategies while actually doing a language task). The reason for researchers' frequent use of learner self-report is that it is often difficult for researchers to employ standard observational methods, because language learning strategies are often internal and unobservable by an external observer. Thus, much of the research on language learning strategies depends on learners' willingness and ability to describe their internal behaviors, both cognitive and affective (emotional), as noted by Galloway and Labarca (1991); Oxford (1990b); and Harlow (1988). This situation has led some people to question learning strategy research because of possible problems in self-reporting: 'social desirability' biases in responses, over-subjectivity, inability to verbalize clearly, forgetfulness effects, and low self-awareness among some learners. Nevertheless, many researchers have discovered, through conducting repeated studies with clear instructions in circumstances nonthreatening to students, that many or most language learners are capable of remembering their learning strategies and describing them lucidly and in a relatively objective manner. 2. Results of Research on Learning Strategies This section presents a short, evolutionary account of research on language learning strategies. It also draws on research outside of the language field that has strongly influenced language researchers. 2.1 Early Strategy Lists Early researchers tended to make lists of strategies presumed to be essential for all 'good language learners.' One of the earliest lists from the 1970s suggested that good language learners (a) are willing and accurate guessers; (b) have a strong drive to communicate; (c) are often uninhibited and willing to make mistakes; (d) focus on form by looking for patterns, classifying, and analyzing; (e) take advantage of all practice opportunities; (f) monitor their own speech and that of others; and (g) pay attention to meaning. Another list of the same vintage added that successful language learners eventually learn to think in the language and also address the affective aspects of language learning.
2.2 Empirical Research Outside of the Language Field Meanwhile, empirical and well-controlled research on learning strategies was booming outside the language field. It is important to review this research briefly, because it has had a profound effect on subsequent research on language learning strategies. Research outside the language field discovered that effective learners actively associate new information with existing information in long-term memory, building increasingly intricate and differentiated mental structures or schemata. The use of well-chosen strategies distinguishes experts from novices in many learning areas. According to the research, successful learners often use metacognitive (i.e., 'beyond the cognitive') strategies such as organizing, evaluating, and planning their learning. Use of these behaviors—along with cognitive strategies like analyzing, reasoning, transferring information, taking notes, and summarizing— might be considered part of any definition of truly effective learning (Brown et al. 1983). Additionally, competent learners often use compensation strategies such as guessing or inferencing and memory strategies like grouping and structured reviewing—all of which have been included under the general rubric of cognitive strategies by most researchers, but which Oxford (1990a, 1990b) notes have their own special functions. Some strategy research outside the language field has concentrated on the emotional and social side of learning; results indicate that a few of the best learners use affective and social strategies to control their emotional state, to keep themselves motivated and on-task, and to get help when they need it (Dansereau 1985), but that students are largely unaware of the potential of affective and social strategies unless they receive strategy training. Strategy training studies outside the language area have shown that the most effective training is explicit rather than implicit; that is, learners are told overtly that a particular behavior or strategy is likely to be helpful, and this is how to use it and how to transfer it to new situations. Blind training, in which students are led to use certain strategies without realizing it, has been shown to be less successful, particularly in regard to transfer of strategies to new tasks. Strategy training succeeds best when it is woven into regular class activities on a normal basis, according to most of the research. 2.3 Empirical Research in the Language Area Researchers in the language learning field built on the techniques and results of strategy investigations outside the language area. Research results (see earlier citations) have been generally positive about the effectiveness of using language learning strategies. Findings show that use of appropriate language learning strategies results in improved proficiency overall, or in specific skill areas.
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Teaching Additional Languages Skilled language learners tend to select strategies that work well together in a highly orchestrated way, tailored to the requirements of the language task. These learners are often very articulate about the strategies they use and why they employ them, as found in both diary studies and in think-aloud procedures. Among skilled language learners, cognitive and metacognitive strategies are often used in tandem, supporting each other. Social and affective strategies are far less frequently found, probably because these behaviors are not as carefully studied and also because learners are not familiar with paying attention to their own feelings and social relationships as part of the learning process. One line of research suggests that less skilled language learners sometimes are not even aware of what strategies they use, which may be of a noncommunicative or rather mundane nature, such as translation, rote memorization, and repetition. However, more recent research indicates that many of the less effective language learners are indeed aware of the strategies they use, can describe them clearly, and even use just as many strategies as effective learners—but without the careful orchestration and without appropriate targeting of the strategies to the task. Less effective learners do not develop language into a wellordered system but instead retain a rather messy set of unrelated, fragmented items. Although these learners frequently complain that they lack memory for language, the real truth is often that they lack the appropriate combination of language learning strategies. While abundant research has been conducted on how to teach language learners to improve their strategies, these strategy training studies have not been uniformly successful or conclusive (see reviews mentioned earlier). Some strategy training has been effective in various skill areas but not in others, even within the same study. Careful examination of the formal studies, or the parts of studies, in which strategy training seemed to have little effect reveals methodological problems in the research that might have obscured some potentially important findings. Such problems include: too short a period for strategy training; disproportionate ease or difficulty of the training task; lack of integration of the training into normal language classwork and perceived irrelevance of the training; and inadequate pretraining assessment of learners' current strategy use and needs. In almost all formal strategy training studies in the language area, the very powerful affective strategies such as positive self-talk and self-reward (see Horwitz 1990 and Oxford. 1990a, 1990b on the affective domain) have been ignored, with a concentration on metacognitive and cognitive—that is, on the more purely intellectual aspects of language learning. Less formal strategy training programs unconnected with rigorous scientific investigations have
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focused on a more even balance of cognitive, metacognitive, affective, and social strategies. Six naturalistic, nonquantitative case studies from around the world demonstrate how the 'whole learner' can be taken into account during learning strategy training (Oxford et al. 1990). These case studies show strategy training success despite very different populations. All used the following basic principles: strategy training should be based clearly on students' attitudes, beliefs, and stated needs; strategies should be chosen so that they mesh with and support each other and so that they fit the requirements of the language task, the learners' goals, and the learners' style of learning; strategy training should, if possible, be integrated into regular" language activities over a long period of time rather than taught as a separate, short intervention; affective issues should be directly addressed and not ignored; strategy training should be explicit, overt, and relevant and should provide plenty of practice; materials should be meaningful; and learners should help evaluate the success of the training and the value of the strategies in multiple tasks. More formalized research on strategy training, preferably over a long time-span and with well-selected, carefully integrated strategies, should test out these principles rigorously in varied language learning environments. Oxford (1989) synthesized existing research on factors influencing the choice of learning strategies among students learning a second or foreign language. These factors include: motivation, sex, cultural background, nature of the task, age, and stage of language learning. More motivated students tended to use more strategies than less motivated students, and the particular reason for studying the language (motivational orientation, especially as related to career field) was important in the choice of strategies. Engineering students, for instance, chose language learning strategies that were far more analytic than those selected by humanities students. Females reported greater strategy use than males in several studies. Cultural background is an important influence; rote memorization is a more prevalent strategy among some Asian students than among Hispanics learning English, for example. The type of task—conversation versus letter writing, listening for details versus listening for the main idea—helped determine the strategies students naturally used to do the activity. Students of different ages and different stages of foreign or second language learning used different learning strategies, with more sophisticated strategies often being employed by more advanced students. Language learning style (general approach to language learning) has been identified as a key determiner of choice of language learning strategies. When allowed to learn in their favorite way, unpressured by requirements from their learning environment, students tend to use strategies that directly reflect their learning style preference. For example, students with
Learning Strategies an analytic learning style tend to prefer strategies such as contrastive analysis, rule-learning, and dissecting words and phrases, while students with a global style use strategies that help them find the big picture (guessing, scanning, predicting) and assist them in conversing without knowing all the words (paraphrasing, gesturing). Visual students use visually based strategies like listing, word grouping, and so on, while auditory students like to work with tapes and practice aloud. Students whose style includes tolerance for ambiguity use significantly different learning strategies in some instances than do students who are intolerant of ambiguity. Statistical and observational linkages between learning strategies and their underlying learning styles have been repeatedly found. Investigations have also shown that students sometimes—on their own—decide to 'stretch' beyond their learning style to use a variety of strategies that are initially uncomfortable but that might be valuable. In addition, strategy training can sometimes help students learn new strategies that extend beyond their typical stylistic boundaries. Researchers have spent many pages and many gallons of ink trying to define and systematize the wide array of possible language learning strategies. This author has identified at least 23 major, different typologies or taxonomies of language learning strategies published since the 1970s, and no doubt many more exist. These strategy systems can be divided into the following five groupings: (a) systems related to behaviors of successful language learners; (b) systems based on psychological functions, such as cognitive, metacognitive, and affective; (c) linguistically based strategy systems dealing with inferencing, language monitoring, formal rule-practicing, and functional (communicative) practicing; (d) systems based on particular language skills, such as oral production, vocabulary learning, reading comprehension, or writing; and (e) systems based on different types (or styles) of learners. The existence of these five distinct kinds of strategy typologies indicates a major problem in the research area of language learning strategies: lack of a coherent, universally accepted system for describing these strategies. Competing types of systems exist, all vying for attention in different studies. This situation makes results of investigations sometimes difficult to compare. In an attempt to codify many of the strategies found in existing strategy systems, to place them into a more coherent and more comprehensive typology, and to redress the woeful lack of research emphasis given to social and affective strategies, Oxford (1990b) developed a strategy system containing six general sets of language learning strategies, including: (a) metacognitive strategies, such as paying attention, consciously searching for practice opportunities, planning for language tasks, self-evaluating one's progress, and monitoring errors; (b) affective strategies, such as anx-
iety reduction, self-encouragement, and self-reward; (c) social strategies, such as asking questions, cooperating with native speakers of the language, and becoming culturally aware; (d) memory strategies, such as grouping, imagery, rhyming, and structured reviewing; (e) general cognitive strategies, such as reasoning, analyzing, summarizing, and practicing; and (f) compensation strategies (to compensate for limited knowledge), such as guessing meanings from the context in reading and listening and using synonyms and gestures to convey meaning when the precise expression is not known. Different versions of this system contain between 60 and 200 strategies, depending on the need for detail. 3. Implications for Future Research and Instruction
Although complete evidence is not yet available due to the state of the art in learning strategy research, we might speculate about some important implications for future research and instruction based on existing findings. First, language researchers might wish to reconceptualize language learning strategies in a way that includes the social and affective sides of learning as well as the more intellectual side. Language learning, more than almost any other discipline, is an adventure of the whole person, not just a cognitive exercise. Second, significant issues about terminology and classification of language learning strategies call for resolution. The effectiveness of learning strategy research might be hampered as long as researchers continue to use different strategy systems and conflicting definitions of concepts. Replication of studies (within a given culture and across cultures)—a prerequisite for solid findings in any area of educational investigation—cannot take place without greater uniformity of systems and definitions. Third, more research would be useful on factors affecting strategy choice and on the effectiveness of different types of strategy training. This whole realm of investigation is ripe for study, although we have already reached some basic conclusions (e.g., greater effectiveness of integrated and explicit strategy training). Fourth, skilled teachers appear to be able to help their students recognize the power of consciously using language learning strategies for making learning quicker, easier, more effective, and even more enjoyable. Some students are not aware of their own strategies or of their ability to improve their strategy use. To help all students become more aware of their strategy choices, teachers might first assist students in identifying their current learning strategies by means of surveys or interviews. Based on this information, teachers might weave learning strategy training into regular classroom events in a natural but explicit way. Research suggests that knowledge of the general learning styles on which specific strategies are based is also very useful, and that through well-tailored strategy 521
Teaching Additional Languages instruction it is possible for teachers to help students orchestrate the use of multiple strategies that work synergistically. Bibliography Brown A L, Bransford J D, Ferrara R A, Campione J C 1983 Learning, remembering, and understanding. In: Mussen P H (ed.) Handbook of Child Psychology. Wiley, New York Cohen A D 1990 Language Learning: Insights for Learners, Teachers, and Researchers. Newbury House/Harper and Row, New York Dansereau D F 1985 Learning strategy research. In: Segal J W, Chipman S F, Glaser R (eds.) Thinking and Learning Skills. Vol. 1: Relating Instruction to Research. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Galloway V, Labarca A 1991 From student to learner: Style, process, and strategy. In: Birckbichler D W (ed.) New Perspectives and New Directions in Foreign Language Education. National Textbook Co./ACTFL, Lincolnwood, IL Harlow L L 1988 The effects of the yellow highlighter— second-language learner strategies and their effectiveness: A research update. Canadian Modern Language Review 45(1): 91-102 Horwitz E K 1990 Attending to the affective domain in foreign language learning. In: Magnan S S (ed.) Shifting
the Instructional Focus to the Language Learner. Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Middlebury, VT O'Malley J M, Chamot A U 1990 Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Oxford R L 1989 Use of language learning strategies: A synthesis of studies with implications for strategy training. System 17(2): 235-47 Oxford R L 1990a Language learning strategies and beyond: A look at strategies in the context of styles. In: Magnatl S S (ed.) Shifting the Instructional Focus to the Language Learner. Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Middlebury, VT Oxford R L 1990b Language Learning Strategies: What Every Teacher Should Know. Newbury House/Harper and Row, New York Oxford R L, Crookall D 1989 Research on language learning strategies: Methods, findings, and instructional issues. Modern Language Journal 73(4): 404-19 Oxford R L, Crookall D, Cohen A D, Lavine R Z, Nyikos M, Sutler W 1990 Strategy training for language learners: Six situational case studies and a training model. Foreign Language Annals 23(3): 197-216 Wenden A, Rubin J (eds.) 1987 Learner Strategies in Language Learning. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Morphology I. S. P. Nation
Etymology and the role of morphology in language learning are closely related. A study of the etymology of English (Roberts 1965) reveals that around 44 percent of the most frequent 1000 words of English are borrowings from French, Latin, or Greek. The figure is 60 percent for the second 1000 words and 66 percent for the next most frequent 8000 words. Clearly learners of English will come into frequent contact with many of the word-building devices used in these languages which have been carried over into English both in borrowed complex forms and as word-building procedures. These forms affect language learning. Corson (1985) considers that the Graeco-Latin vocabulary of English acts as a barrier or 'lexical bar' to vocabulary growth and to success in education. The factors supporting this lexical bar are related to social stratification affecting experience with such words, motivation to learn and use them, and modeling of their use by peers and role models. Research shows that children have an awareness of derivational and inflectional morphology from as young as the age of 2 years. Knowledge of derivational morphology includes at least three aspects—recognizing that a word is complex and that it contains
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parts that occur in other words, understanding the syntactic role of suffixes, and mastering the restrictions governing the attachment of affixes to bases (Tyler and Nagy 1989). This article examines the effect of morphology on the size of the vocabulary-learning task, derivational morphology and language learning, and inflections and language learning. 1. Morphology and the Vocabulary-learning Task
There are two ways of approaching the teaching and learning of inflected forms. One way is simply to regard a difference in form as an indication of a different item to be learned. That is, govern and government are two learning items. Another way is to focus on patterning, and wherever possible, to group morphologically and lexically related items together. This greatly reduces the vocabulary-learning task. For example The Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words (Thorndike and Lorge 1944) actually contains 13900 word families. This indicates that for receptive learning, grouping by word families reduces the vocabulary learning task by approximately 50 percent. This figure is borne out by other studies.
Morphology Grouping into word families on the basis of both morphological and lexical relationships is not always straightforward. Words which bear a close formal resemblance may not have a close meaning relationship. The computer-based corpus research for the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (Sinclair 1987) involved the study of large numbers of examples of words in contexts. One of the principles to be confirmed by the study was that distinctions in meaning are associated with distinctions in form. Distinctions in form may relate to syntax, collocations, morphology, etymology, and phonology. It is not difficult to find entries in the COBUILD Dictionary where the presence of an inflection or derivational suffix signals a different sense from the base form and a different set of collocations. See, for example, hard/hardly, main/mains, piddle/piddling, electron/ electronic, element/elementary. To be valid, grouping into word families needs to reflect sensible teaching and learning practice, and grouping needs to be able to be made reliably. A study by Nagy and Anderson (1984) provided an effective solution. In their study of a frequency count of printed school English they devised a six-point scale to help them decide which morphologically related forms should be included in the same word family and which should be counted as different words. The scale is based on the likelihood of success and amount of contextual help needed in interpreting a form if a related form was known. The scale considers only receptive knowledge. Nagy and Anderson (1984) achieved a satisfactory level of inter-rater reliability in applying the scale. The scale considers not only formal relationship but also meaning relationship. Bauer and Nation (1993) devised a scale of affix levels based on the criteria of frequency, productivity, and regularity to provide the basis for a staged introduction to affixes. For productive learning there is not a strong justification for grouping derived forms into a word family with the base form. A change in form by the addition of a derivational suffix, or at times even an inflection, may signal a change in sense and often in grammatical pattern and collocation. For receptive learning however, for which Nagy and Anderson's scale was designed, there are strong reasons for grouping closely related derived forms together. First, it is in both the teacher's and learner's interests to reduce the number of items that need to be learned while still getting a good return for the learning. Teaching and learning so that the common features of related forms are brought out is a good way of doing this. Second, evidence from studies of guessing words from context indicates that most contexts provide sufficient support for inferring meanings of related items. Third, failure to consider related forms when making tests of receptive vocabulary size can lead to distortion in the results. Tests based on frequency lists are particularly
susceptible to this. This distortion occurs when an infrequent form of a frequent word family is included in the test. This results in an overestimate of the proportion of items known at that frequency level. 2. Derivational Morphology and Language Learning Advocates for using word parts to help vocabulary learning have good reasons for this approach, but they also need to show (a) that there are sufficient high frequency items to justify attention to them, (b) that there is sufficient regularity in the system to make focusing on the items feasible, and (c) that such an approach works. Becker et al. (1980) carried out a morphographic analysis of the Thorndike and Lorge (1944) list with some words added from more recent lists. Eight hundred of the morphemes in their 6,531 item list each occurred in 10 or more words. Stauffer (1942) studying an earlier version of the Thorndike and Lorge list came up with a list of the most frequent prefixes. Stauffer found that almost a quarter of the words in the list had prefixes and that just 15 prefixes accounted for 82 percent of these words. Clearly there are sufficient high frequency items to make the return for learning them worthwhile. Thorndike (1941), in a thorough and detailed study, examined English suffixes considering frequency, transparency of the word as one made up of a base plus a suffix, and ease of inferring the meaning of the word from knowledge of its main part and common meanings of its suffix. Thorndike's study presents this information for each suffix and thus allows teachers to make an informed choice of the suffixes to which they should give attention in teaching. His study shows the substantial returns that could come from well-directed teaching. In his rating of transparency and ease of inferring, Thorndike assumed that words consisting of a free morpheme base plus a suffix (e.g., sadness) would be easier to recognize as complex and to infer the meaning of than a bound morpheme base plus a suffix (e.g., appreciable). Experimental studies have looked at (a) word parts and lexical storage, (b) the influence of learning Latin or knowledge of word parts on the size of English vocabulary, and (c) the effect of teaching word parts on inferring the meanings of new words. (a) There has been considerable research on the role of affixes in lexical storage and retrieval, most of it leading to the conclusion that lexical representations of low frequency words are stored in a morphologically decomposed form (Laudanna, et al. 1989). This conclusion is encouraging for the teaching of word parts. (b) Correlational studies have not found evidence for the study of Latin having clear positive effects on English vocabulary size. Shepherd (1974) found a significant correlation between word-part knowledge and knowledge of deriva-
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Teaching Additional Languages lives with a free morpheme base, but no significant correlation between word-part knowledge and knowledge of derivatives with a bound morpheme base. This provides clear support for Thorndike's system of rating transparency. (c) Other researchers have found that only the most able students benefited from learning prefixes and roots to the extent that they were able to infer new words and make use of morphological relationships to help learning. Wysocki and Jenkins (1987) tested students' ability to use morphological and contextual information to determine the meaning of unknown words. Wysocki and Jenkins found that training did improve morphological generalization particularly for learners at higher grade levels (sixth and eighth grades). These studies show that learners can benefit from learning word parts, particularly where the complex form of the word is obvious. It is necessary to improve training so that the benefit is available to a wider range of learners. All of these studies have looked at the use of word parts to infer the meaning of unknown words. As Thorndike's study showed, the chances of success vary considerably from one word to another. It is likely that the greatest value from learning word parts comes from using them as mnemonic devices to learn given meanings. Such a procedure for using derivational morphology to help the learning of new words involves phrasing definitions of the words so that they include the meaning of a prefix or base. For example, to help learn the word compost the teacher or learner needs to rephrase the dictionary definition so that the definition contains the words with or together (com) and put (post). So a satisfactory definition to help learning would be decaying plants put together to add to the soil to help plants grow. Research into the effectiveness of this procedure began in the late 1980s. It represents an application of the keyword technique which has been the subject of considerable research (see, for example, Pressley et al. 1982). The minimum prerequisite skills for using this procedure are (a) knowing the meaning of the most frequent prefixes (the Stauffer (1942) list is sufficient), (b) being able to recognize these prefixes in words, (c) being able to rephrase definitions to include the prefix meaning. Most learners require practice with about 10-15 examples to be able to do this. Several course books for second language learners which focus on academic vocabulary and other specialized vocabulary make extensive use of word parts. Vocabulary expansion books for native speakers take a similar approach. Although current approaches to language teaching favor contextual approaches to vocabulary learning over analytical decontextualized approaches, the high
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frequency of a small number of prefixes and bases and the effectiveness of making use of them in vocabulary learning recommend their use. Even a less systematic approach than the one described here can have benefits. Providing useful and interesting etymological information on new vocabulary can be a simple way of enlivening and enriching learning. Derivational morphology can play a role in inferring the meanings of words from context. The safest procedure involves breaking an unknown word into parts as a way of checking after a guess has been made using contextual clues. This is to avoid the misinterpretation of word parts which then results in a twisting of the contextual meaning to suit the misinterpretation. Research and practice in the use of derivational morphology in language learning indicates that by focusing on frequent and regular prefixes and suffixes, vocabulary learning can be made much more manageable. This is because such a focus reduces the number of items to be learned and provides an approach to learning which relates to previous knowledge. Little training is needed where prefixes and suffixes are attached to free morphemes. Transferring this knowledge to words where the base is a bound morpheme requires a well-thought out training program. There are enough frequent regular word parts to make such training worthwhile. 3. Inflections and Language Learning
The use of inflections is clearly rule-based and so it would seem a straightforward matter to teach and learn them. However the persistence of errors in their use (or nonuse) by nonnative speakers indicates that this is not so. In this section the sources of difficulty in learning and using inflections is examined and ways of coping with them are suggested. Some theories of language learning postulate that rule-based teaching has no effect on the learning of a rule. According to these theories the only way that a rule is learned is through experience of understandable messages and subconscious abstraction from this experience. Inflections are learned when the learners are ready to learn them. Pienemann (1985) has experimental evidence that classroom teaching can have an effect but only if it occurs at the appropriate stage of the developmental sequence of language acquisition. For example, the English third person singular inflection can only be learned or be affected by teaching after learning the essential features of the preceding items in the sequence. These include yes/no inversion, particle shift, and some verb + to + verb constructions. The order of items in the sequence is determined by the processing prerequisites that preceding items provide for those that follow. Thus, in order for teaching or conscious learning to affect the learning of inflections it would be necessary to discover what stage learners
Motivation were at in their developmental sequence. At present, a simply administered test to discover this does not exist, although work is proceeding on producing one (Pienemann et al. 1988). Thorndike (1941) recommends that the teaching of word parts should not begin until learners already know several words containing the parts. This means that, initially, in highly inflected languages like Finnish inflected items should be learned without breaking them into parts. Once learners have a sufficient fund of examples to draw on, these items can be analyzed and this analysis is then used to help the learning of other words. Interestingly, in English many of the most frequent items have irregular forms, thus making initial analysis unhelpful. Studies of children learning the morphology of their first language show that some inflected words are learned as complete units which are later analyzed (and sometimes incorrectly regularized). One of the problems facing those who see a role for teaching in the learning of inflections is that on most occasions they are redundant, that is, they convey little or no information that is not already present in the context. Thus, in the teaching of inflections it is useful to find situations where the inflections are significant. 4. Future Research There has been some research on the effect of using word parts as mnemonic devices for receptive vocabulary learning and this needs to be continued to see if the effort of learning word parts is repaid by fast and secure learning. This applies particularly to those items which are bound morpheme bases or are attached to bound morpheme bases. There also needs to be investigation into what first and second language learners see as being members of a word family. This would allow researchers and teachers to have a realistic view of the vocabulary learning task.
See also: Lexis: Acquisition; Vocabulary in Language Acquisition. Bibliography Bauer L, Nation ISP 1993 Word families. International Journal of Lexicography 6: 253-79
Becker W C, Dixon R, Anderson-Inman L 1980 Morphographic and Root Word Analysis of 26,000 High Frequency Words. College of Education, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR Corson D 1985 The Lexical Bar. Pergamon Press, Oxford Laudanna A, Badecker W, Caramazza A 1989 Priming homographic stems. Journal of Memory and Language 28: 531-46 Nagy W E, Anderson R C 1984 How many words are there in printed school English? Reading Research Quarterly 20: 304-30 Nation ISP 1990 Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. Newbury House, New York Pienemann M 1985 Learnability and syllabus construction. In: Hyltenstam K, Pienemann M (eds.) Modelling and Assessing Second Language Acquisition. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Pienemann M, Johnston M, Brindley G 1988 Constructing an acquisition-based procedure for second language assessment. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 10(2): 217-43 Pressley M, Levin J R, Delaney H D 1982 The mnemonic keyword method. Review of Educational Research 52: 6191 Roberts A H 1965 A Statistical Linguistic Analysis of American English, Jan L, Series Practica 8. Mouton, The Hague Shepherd J F 1974 Research on the relationship between the meanings of morphemes and the meanings of derivatives. In: Nacke P (ed.) Interaction. Reading and Practice for College-Adult Reading. National Reading Conference, Clemson, SC Sinclair J (ed.) 1987 Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary. Collins, Glasgow Stauffer R G 1942 A study of prefixes in the Thorndike list to establish a list of prefixes that should be taught in elementary school. Journal of Educational Research 35: 453-58 Thorndike E L 1941 The Teaching of English Suffixes. New York Teachers College, Columbia University, Columbia, NY Thorndike E L, Lorge I 1944 The Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words. New York Teachers College, Columbia University, Columbia, NY Tyler A, Nagy W 1989 The acquisition of English derivational morphology. Journal of Memory and Language 28: 649-67 Wysocki K, Jenkins J R 1987 Deriving word meanings through morphological generalisation. Reading Research Quarterly 22: 66-81
Motivation Z. Dornyei
Motivation is one of the most elusive concepts in applied linguistics and indeed in educational psychology in general. Although it is typically seen as a
key factor in any learning process and the term is frequently used both by researchers and practising teachers for explaining learner success or failure, the
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Teaching Additional Languages task of providing a precise definition of what exactly motivation entails turns out to be somewhat of a challenge. This is not at all surprising if we consider that motivation theories attempt to do no less than explain why humans think and behave as they do. And since human beings are infinitely complex organisms, it is only to be expected that their thought processes and behaviors are determined by an extensive array of diverse motivational sources. 1. Perspectives of Motivation Controversies over the nature of motivation already start when we try to determine the level of analysis of the principal human motives. Are these primarily conscious or unconscious in nature? Is motivation an affective or a cognitive factor? And, to go one step further, is motivation a relatively static internal state, reflecting some sort of cumulative arousal, attitudinal complex, or psychical energy level that energizes behavior and gives it direction? Or is it more appropriate to consider it as a dynamically changing and evolving mental process, characterized by constant (re-)appraisal and balancing of the various internal and external influences that the individual is exposed to? Perhaps the only thing about motivation most researchers would agree on is that it determines three aspects of human behavior: the choice of a particular action, persistence with it, and effort expended on it. That is, motivation is responsible for why people decide to do something, how long they are willing to sustain the activity, and how hard they are going to pursue it. These issues are, evidently, central to the understanding of the psychology of human beings in general, and therefore the study of motivation has traditionally occupied a distinguished place within mainstream psychological research. Indeed, all the prominent psychological directions and subfields (i.e., psychoanalytic theory, behaviorist psychology, humanistic psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology) contain specific theories explaining human motivation and action (for a recent overview, see Graham and Weiner 1996), and as a result there is no shortage of competing motivation constructs in educational psychology (for reviews, see Pintrich and Schunk 1996; Stipek 1996; Wigfield et al. 1998). Although the findings concerning the two most researched types of motivation, 'achievement motivation' and 'motivation to learn,' show many similarities (and therefore findings in these two fields have usually been transferred to the other), there are also some basic differences between motivation in educational and other (e.g., work) contexts. In a summary of the neurobiology of affect in language, Schumann (1998) refers to second/foreign language (L2) studies as 'sustained deep learning' and argues that prolonged learning processes of skill/knowledge acquisition that last for a considerable period (often several years) have
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unique motivational characteristics. Indeed, in L2 learning within institutional contexts most of the decisions and goals are not entirely the pupils' own, but are imposed upon them by the system, thus limiting the importance of the 'choice' aspect of motivation. The key motivational function in educational environments, therefore, is to preserve and enhance the motivational impetus, that is, to maintain assigned goals for a considerable period, elaborate on subgoals, and exercise control over other thoughts and behaviors that are often more desirable than concentrating on academic work. In other words, in complex learning contexts such as L2 classrooms, the importance of motivational influences that affect learning during action (i.e., the 'how long' and 'how hard' aspects) gain more significance than those that operate prior to action initiation (i.e., the 'why' aspect). Heckhausen (1991 p. 170) refers to these two dimensions of motivation as 'executive motivation' versus 'choice motivation,' respectively, and points out that motivation research has traditionally restricted its focus to choice motivation, while very few paradigms have touched upon executive (or 'volitional') aspects of motivation. 2. The Components of Motivation Past research on 'decoding' human behavior has identified a plethora of relevant influencing factors, ranging from (often unconscious) drives, basic human needs, and behaviorist stimulus-reinforcement contingencies, to more recent cognitive conceptualizations of self-perceptions of expectancies, values, competencies, goals, qualities of learning, past achievement history, individual worth, degrees of autonomy, and various affects (such as anxiety, pride, satisfaction). Accordingly, the ultimate challenge for motivational psychologists has been to map the vast array of relevant motivational factors on to a smaller number of theoretical construct constituents in order to create greater conceptual clarity. What are the organizational principles of the currently dominating mainstream motivational paradigms? Expectancy-value theories assume that motivation to perform various tasks is the product of two key factors: the individual's expectancy of success in a given task and the value the individual attaches to success in that task. Within this framework, we can identify a variety of subtheories that attempt to explain the cognitive processes that shape the individual's expectancy of success: attribution theory places the emphasis on how one processes past achievement experiences (successes or failures); selfefficacy theory refers to people's judgement of their capabilities to carry out certain specific tasks; and selfworth theory claims that the highest human priority is the need for self-acceptance and to maintain a positive face.
Motivation Goal theories propose that human action is triggered by a sense of purpose, and for action to take place, goals have to be set and pursued by choice. Accordingly, the key variables in goal theories concern goal properties. The underlying principle of a third main direction in current motivation research, self-determination theory, and the accompanying intrinsic versus extrinsic motivational paradigm, is that the desire to be self-initiating and self-regulating is a prerequisite for any human behavior to be intrinsically rewarding, and therefore the essence of motivated action is a sense of autonomy. Finally, the key tenet in social psychological theories of action is the assumption that it is attitudes that exert a directive influence on people's behaviour since one's attitude toward a target influences the overall pattern of the person's responses to the target. We must note that none of the available theories offer a comprehensive overview of all the motivational factors that are critical in the sense that their absence can cancel or significantly weaken any other existing motives, whereas their active presence can boost learning behavior. Rather, different theories highlight different aspects of an extremely elaborate construct with multifarious constituents. In their analyses of motivational phenomena, therefore, researchers need to be explicit about which aspects of motivation they are focusing on and how those are related to other, uncovered dimensions of the motivational complex. 3. Motivation to Learn a Second Language Although 'motivation to learn' is already an intricate, multifaceted construct, when a target of the learning process is the mastery of an L2, the picture becomes even more complex. On the one hand, an L2 is a 'learnable' school subject in that discrete elements of the communication code can be taught explicitly. Thus, the results of studies on academic achievement motivation are of direct relevance when talking about language studies. On the other hand, language is also socially and culturally bound, and serves as the primary channel of social organization in society. This means that the mastery of an L2 is not merely an educational issue but also a deeply social event that requires the incorporation of a wide range of elements of the L2 culture. As Gardner (1985) summarizes in his seminal work on social psychology and second language learning, The words, sounds, grammatical principles and the like that the language teacher tries to present are more than aspects of some linguistic code, they are integral parts of another culture. As a result, students' attitudes toward the specific language group are bound to influence how successful they will be in incorporating aspects of that language, (p. 6)
Indeed, it was the social dimension of L2 motivation that received most attention in the research done between the 1960s and 1990s and therefore the following overview of various conceptions of L2 motivation will start by describing the social psychological approach. This will be followed by an account of the new developments in the 1990s that have completely reshaped thinking on L2 motivation. 3.1 The Social Psychological Approach The social psychological approach to the study of L2 motivation was initiated and inspired by the influential work of Robert Gardner and his colleagues (most notably Wallace Lambert and Richard Clement) in Canada. These researchers originally saw second languages as mediating factors between different ethnolinguistic communities in multicultural settings and, accordingly, considered the motivation to learn the language of the other community to be a primary force responsible for enhancing or hindering intercultural communication and affiliation. A key tenet of this approach is that attitudes related to the L2 and the L2 community exert a directive influence on one's L2 learning behavior, since—following the traditional stance in social psychology mentioned earlier—someone's attitude towards a target influences the overall pattern of that person's responses to the target. One particular strength of the social psychological approach is that Gardner, Clement, and their associates developed standardized instruments for data collection (e.g., Gardner's 1985 Attitude/Motivation Test Battery) and based their theory on firm empirical evidence. This allowed for the replication of their studies in a number of different sociocultural contexts, and the social psychological constructs they have proposed have received confirmation in several learning environments outside Canada. In order to understand Gardner's (1985) motivation theory, first consider the relationship between 'motivation' and 'orientation' (which is Gardner's term for a 'goal'). As seen earlier, the various psychological approaches differ in terms of the assumed role of goals in them: in goal theories, obviously, goals constitute the motivational foci, whereas in self-determination theory, for example, goals do not appear in the core motivation concept at all. Although Gardner's motivation theory falls into the latter category in that orientations are strictly speaking not part of 'motivation' but function merely as motivational antecedents that help to arouse motivation, ironically it is two orientations labeled as integrative and instrumental that have become the most widely known concepts associated with Gardner's work in the L2 field. Integrative orientation concerns a positive disposition toward the L2 group and the desire to interact with and even become similar to valued members of that community, and instrumental orientation pertains to the potential 527
Teaching Additional Languages pragmatic gains of L2 proficiency, such as getting a better job or a higher salary. 'Motivation' proper as conceptualized by Gardner includes three central components, motivational intensity, desire to learn the language, and an attitude towards the act of learning and language, and therefore it refers to a kind of central mental 'engine' that subsumes effort, want/will (cognition), and task-enjoyment (affect). Perhaps the most elaborate and researched aspect of Gardner's theory has been the concept of the 'integrative motive.' This is a composite construct made up of three main components, 'integrativeness' (subsuming integrative orientation, interest in foreign languages, and attitudes toward the L2 community), 'attitudes toward the learning situation' (comprising attitudes toward the teacher and the course), and 'motivation' (i.e., effort, desire, and attitude toward learning). Factor analytical studies examining data from samples in various parts of the world have again and again produced a factor made up of all, or many of, the above components, attesting to the fact that L2 motivation is generally associated with a positive outlook toward the L2 group and the values the L2 is linked with, regardless of the nature of the actual learning context. Recently Gardner, together with Paul Tremblay, has proposed a new model of L2 motivation (Tremblay and Gardner 1995) (Fig. 1), which offers an extended version of Gardner's (1985) social psychological construct. Language attitudes are still seen as the basic antecedents of motivational behavior but the model incorporates a number of new elements from expectancy-value and goal theories—goal salience, valence, self-efficacy, and attributions—as mediating variables. Thus, the model attempts to synthesize a socially motivated construct and recent cognitive motivational theories. As a second major line of research within the social psychological paradigm, Richard Clement and his associates have conducted a series of empirical studies since the 1980s examining the interrelationship between social contextual variables (including ethnolinguistic vitality), attitudinal/motivational factors, self-confidence, and L2 acquisition/acculturation processes (e.g., Clement 1980; Clement et al. 1994; Noels et al. 1996). From a motivational perspective these are particularly important in that they introduce the concept of linguistic self-confidence as a significant motivational subsystem, which is very much in line with the increasing importance attached to self-efficacy in mainstream psychological research. 3.2 The Educational Shift in the 1990s The 1990s have brought along an extraordinary boom in L2 motivation research. Dörnyei (1998) reviewed over 80 relevant L2 studies from the period, including more than 10 newly designed theoretical motivation constructs. The very fact that Tremblay and Gardner's 528
(1995) new motivation model (see Fig. 1), which was developed in response to calls for the 'adoption of a wider vision of motivation' (p. 505), does not contain the 'integrative motive' well characterizes the extent of the new wave. The renewed research vigor was due to a combination of factors. First of all, several scholars were in agreement with Crookes and Schmidt's (1991) initial call for 'a program of research that will develop from and be congruent with the concept of motivation that teachers are convinced is critical for SL [second language] success' (p. 502). There was indeed a perceived need to elaborate and extend motivation constructs in a way that they become appropriate for immediate classroom application. In order to achieve such 'education-friendliness,' the reform articles deviated from the traditional social psychological approach both in their goals and emphases, yet the significance of general motivational dispositions such as language attitudes or self-confidence was never questioned. As Oxford and Shearin (1994) have summarized: 'We want to maintain the best of the existing L2 learning motivation theory and push its parameters outward' (p. 13). The main drive behind the educational shift was the belief that motivational sources closely related to the learners' immediate classroom environment might have a stronger impact on the overall motivation complex than had been expected. Stipek (1996) describes a similar recognition in mainstream motivational psychology: Study after study demonstrates that although students bring some motivational baggage—beliefs, expectations, and habits—to class, the immediate instructional context strongly affects their motivation. Decisions about the nature of the tasks, how performance is evaluated, how rewards are used, how much autonomy students have, and myriad other variables under a teacher's control largely determine student motivation, (p. 85) In order to provide a framework within which learning-situation-specific motives could be studied, Crookes and Schmidt (1991) distinguished between various levels of motivation and motivated learning (micro, classroom, syllabus/curriculum, and extracurricular levels), thereby highlighting several paths along which subsequent research could proceed. This approach was taken up by Dornyei (1994), who also conceived L2 motivation within a framework of three relatively distinct levels: the Language Level, the Learner Level, and the Learning Situation Level. The conceptualization of the first two levels was based on a summary of research by Gardner, Clement, and their associates; the third and most elaborate dimension encompassed motivational sources associated with various aspects of the L2 classroom, such as the L2 course content, the teacher's role, and the composition and character of the learner group.
Motivation
Figure 1. Tremblay and Gardner's (1995) model of L2 motivation.
The renewed research interest in the 1990s was also stimulated by a growing recognition of the increasing gap between L2 motivation theories and the variety of emerging new concepts in mainstream motivational psychology (many of which were cognitive in nature). In a general 'paradigm-seeking' effort, L2 researchers surveyed a wide array of motivation constructs in related disciplines to draw on them in developing L2 models that would have an increased explanatory power in diverse learning contexts. For example, Brown (1994), Dickinson (1995), Noels et al. (1999), and Ushioda (1996) have highlighted the L2 relevance of various elements (e.g., intrinsic motivation, learner autonomy) of self-determination theory; Tremblay and Gardner (1995) drew on cognitive motivational constructs; and Schumann (1998) adopted a neurobiological approach
in examining motivational processes. A prime example of work done in the paradigm-seeking spirit is the taxonomy of motivational components developed by Williams and Burden (1997) (Table 1), which covers most of the relevant issues that have emerged in educational psychological research since the mid-1980s. Finally, a large-scale empirical study by Schmidt et al. (1996) has produced a parsimonious motivation construct that comprises three main components: affect, goal-orientation, and expectancy. As such, the framework appears to combine key components from all the three currently dominating motivational psychological theories: affect is associated with intrinsic motivation (in self-determination theory), and goal orientation and expectancy are linked to goal theories and expectancyvalue theories, respectively.
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Teaching Additional Languages Table 1. Williams and Burden's (1997) Framework of L2 motivation. Internal factors
External factors
Intrinsic interest of activity • arousal of curiosity • optimal degree of challenge
Significant others • parents • teachers • peers
Perceived value of activity The nature of inter• personal relevance • anticipated value of outcomes action with significant • intrinsic value attributed to the others • mediated learnactivity ing experiences • the nature and Sense of agency amount of feed• locus of causality back • locus of control reprocess and • rewards outcomes • the nature and • ability to set appropriate goals amount of appropriate praise Mastery • feelings of competence aware• punishments, sanctions ness of developing skills and mastery in a chosen area The learning environ• self-efficacy ment • comfort Self-concept • resources • realistic awareness of personal • time of day, strengths and weaknesses in week, year skills required • size of class and • personal definitions and judgschool ments of success and failure • class and school • self-worth concern ethos • learned helplessness The broader context Attitudes • wider family net• to language learning in general works • to the target language • the local edu• to the target language comcation system munity and culture • conflicting interests Other affective states • cultural norms • confidence • societal expec• anxiety, fear tations and attiDevelopmental age and stage Gender tudes
As a result of the more educational orientation, the issue of how to motivate learners, rather than what motivation is, has also received increasing attention. A growing number of publications have included discussions of motivational strategies whose purpose is to consciously generate and enhance student motivation to learn, as well as to maintain ongoing motivated behaviour and protect it from distracting and/or competing action tendencies. That is, such strategies are used to increase student involvement and to 'save' the action when ongoing monitoring reveals that pro-
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gress is slowing, halting, or backsliding (for a recent review, see Dornyei and Csizer 1998). 3.3 A Process-oriented Conceptualization of L2 Motivation If we recall the 'choice' versus 'executive' motivational dichotomy discussed earlier, we can see that recent developments in L2 motivation research have shifted the focus from general motivational dispositions (corresponding to the 'why' aspect) to 'executive' motivational influences that operate during task engagement in the L2 classroom. A logical step further along these lines is to produce a process-oriented conception of motivation which would portray motivational processes as they happen in time. Such a model could account for the dynamics of motivational change, an important consideration given that even within the duration of a single L2 course, most learners experience regular fluctuations of their enthusiasm/commitment, often on a day-to-day basis. In response to this challenge, Dornyei and Otto (1998) have recently developed a Process Model of L2 Motivation, which organizes the motivational influences of L2 learning along a sequence of discrete actional events in the chain of instigating and enacting motivated behavior. Figure 2 presents the schematic representation of the model, elaborating on the temporal axis, the Action Sequence dimension. This outlines how initial wishes and desires are first transformed into goals and then into operationalized intentions, which are seen the immediate antecedents of action; after action has been initiated, an appraisal and an action control process mediate 'executive motivation,' leading (hopefully) to the accomplishment of the goal and concluded by the final evaluation of the process. The Action Sequence dimension is complemented by a second motivational dimension, Motivational Influences, which includes all the energy sources and motivational forces underlying and fuelling the behavioral process, grouped into clusters according to the specific subphases of the action sequence they affect. The components of this dimension make up an extensive list (as the model was intended to synthesize most major theories both in mainstream psychology and L2 research) and—due to space limitations—they cannot be detailed here. 4. Conclusion
In conclusion, it seems that L2 motivation research has reached maturity and the initial research inspiration and standard-setting empirical and theoretical work coming from Canada have born fruit by 'educating' a new generation of international scholars who applied the acquired expertise in diverse contexts and in creative ways. As a result, we now have a colorful mixture of approaches to understanding L2 motivation, comparable on a smaller scale to the multifaceted motivational arena in psychology. Indeed,
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Figure 2. Schematic representation of Dörnyei and Otto's (1998) process model of L2 motivation.
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Teaching Additional Languages Learning: The Role of Attitudes and Motivation. Edward Arnold, London Graham S, Weiner B 1996 Theories and principles of motivation. In: Berliner D C, Calfee R C (eds.) Handbook of Educational Psychology. Macmillan, New York, pp. 6384 Heckhausen H 1991 Motivation and Action. Springer, New York Noels K A, Clement R, Pelletier L G 1999 Perceptions of teachers' communicative style and students' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Modern Language Journal 83: 23-34 See also: Second Language Learning: Individual Noels K A, Pon G, Clement R 1996 Language, identity, and adjustment: The role of linguistic self-confidence in the differences. acculturation process. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 15:246-64 Bibliography Oxford R L, Shearin J 1994 Language learning motivation: Brown H D 1994 Teaching by Principles. Prentice-Hall, Expanding the theoretical framework. Modern Language Englewood Cliffs, NJ Journal!*. 12-28 Clement R 1980 Ethnicity, contact and communicative com- Pintrich P L, Schunk D H 1996 Motivation in Education: petence in a second language. In: Giles H, Robinson W P, Theory, Research, and Applications. Prentice-Hall, EngleSmith P M (eds.) Language: Social Psychological Perwood Cliffs, NJ spectives. Pergamon, Oxford, pp. 147-54 Schmidt R, Boraie D, Kassabgy O 1996 Foreign language Clement R, Dornyei Z, Noels K A 1994 Motivation, selfmotivation: Internal structure and external connections. confidence, and group cohesion in the foreign language In: Oxford R (ed.) Language Learning Motivation: Pathclassroom. Language Learning 44: 417-48 ways to the New Century. University of Hawaii Press, Crookes G, Schmidt R W 1991 Motivation: Reopening the Honolulu, HI, pp. 9-70 research agenda. Language Learning 41: 469-512 Schumann J H 1998 The Neurobiology of Affect in Language. Dickinson L 1995 Autonomy and motivation: A literature Blackwell, Oxford review. System 23: 165-74 Stipek D J 1996 Motivation and instruction. In: Berliner D Dornyei Z 1994 Motivation and motivating in the foreign C, Calfee R C (eds.) Handbook of Educational Psychology. language classroom. Modern Language Journal 78: 273Macmillan, New York, pp. 85-113 84 Tremblay P F, Gardner R C 1995 Expanding the motivation Dornyei Z 1998 Motivation in second and foreign language construct in language learning. Modern Language Journal learning. Language Teaching 3: 117-35 79: 505-20 Dornyei Z, Csizer K 1998 Ten commandments for motiv- Ushioda E 1996 Learner Autonomy 5: The Role of Motivating language learners: Results of an empirical study. ation. Authentik, Dublin Language Teaching Research 3: 203-29 Wigfield A, Eccles J S, Rodriguez D 1998 The development Dornyei Z, Otto I 1998 Motivation in action: A process of children's motivation in school contexts. Review of model of L2 motivation. Working Papers in Applied Research in Education 23: 73-118 Linguistics (Thames Valley University, London) 4: 43-69 Williams M, Burden R 1997 Psychology for Language TeachGardner R C 1985 Social Psychology and Second Language ers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge the main components of all the influential approaches in motivational psychology have been validated in certain L2 contexts, thus creating a fertile ground for further developments. The renewed interest in L2 motivation can also be associated with a more general trend in applied linguistics toward adopting psychological and psycholinguistic approaches in order to understand the complex mental processes involved in second language acquisition.
Native Speaker A. Davies
1. The Native Speaker: Myth or Fact The native speaker, like Lewis Carroll's snark, is a useful and enduring linguistic myth; again, like the snark, itself a product of the debate over idealism in philosophy, it must be taken with a large pinch of salt. Linguists may have given a special place to the native speaker as 'the only true and reliable source of language data' (Ferguson 1983: vii), but there is little detailed discussion of the concept, which is often
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appealed to but difficult to track down. Full-length treatments of the topic (Coulmas 1981; Paikeday 1985; Davies 1991) have yet to attract much comment. Ferguson's argument has to do with language use rather than with language knowledge: much of the world's verbal communication takes place by means of languages which are not the users' mother tongue but their second, third or nth language, acquired one way or another and used when appropriate. This
Native Speaker kind of language use merits the attention of linguists as much as do the more traditional objects of their research. (Ferguson 1983: vii)
It is possible to agree with Ferguson's desire that linguistics pay more attention to language use without agreeing with his dismissal of the native speaker: 'In fact the whole mystique of native speaker and mother tongue should preferably be quietly dropped from the linguist's set of professional myths about language.' 2. Theoretical Issues Theoretically, the 'native speaker' concept is rich in ambiguity. It raises, quite centrally, the issue of the relation between the particular and the universal. Chomsky (see Chomsky's Philosophy of Language), as a protagonist of the universalist position, conveys to Paikeday's questioning approach about the status of the native speaker (Paikeday 1985) the strongest possible sense of the genetic determinants of speech acquisition, which, as he sees it, means that to be human is to be a native speaker. Chomsky equates language development with other normal development, finding no interest in questions about developmental states or stages, which he regards as contingent. In the same vein, Chomsky finds distinctions between synchronic states of language or languages and dialects uninteresting: 'the question of what are the "languages" or "dialects" attained and what is the difference between "native" and "nonnative" is just pointless' (Chomsky quoted in Paikeday 1985:57). Chomsky's whole argument depends on a rationalist opposition to 'incorrect metaphysical assumptions, in particular the assumption that among the things in the world there are languages or dialects, and that individuals come to acquire them' (Paikeday 1985:49). And so Chomsky must conclude that 'everyone is a native speaker of the particular language states that the person has "grown" in his/her mind/brain. In the real world, that is all there is to say' (1985:58). This is a major thread in the range of views on the native speaker, and will recur later. Chomsky's view is uninfluenced by any social factor or contextual constraint. Variety and context, he seems to argue, are trivial. This is a thoroughgoing 'unitary competence' view of language in which language use is contingent and the native speaker is only a realization of that competence at a linguistic and not a language level. For Chomsky, like many theoretical linguists, is not interested in languages: what he studies is language. 3. Educational Issues Halliday appears not to use the term 'native speaker'; however, what he says about the mother tongue is very relevant. He comments: Opinions differ regarding the uniqueness of the mother tongue... for very many people... no language ever com-
pletely replaces the mother tongue. Certain kinds of ability seem to be particularly difficult to acquire in a second language. Among these, the following are perhaps most important in an educational context: (a) saying the same thing in different ways, (b) hesitating, and saying nothing very much... (c) predicting what the other person is going to say... (d) adding new verbal skills (learning new words and new meanings) when talking and listening. It is not being suggested that we can never learn to do these things in a second language... Nevertheless, there are vast numbers of children being educated through the medium of a second language, and of teachers trying to teach them, who have not mastered these essential abilities. (Halliday 1978: 199-200)
To what extent educational disadvantage can be attributed to not being a native speaker is debatable, especially since a similar argument of lacking adequate language resources is made for certain groups of native speakers who, it has been claimed (Bereiter and Engelmann 1966), suffer from a language deficit. The basic question here is which code (whether language or dialect) one is supposed to be a native speaker of. A contrary view to Halliday's is given by the American linguist, Leonard Bloomfield, author of Language (1933) and student of Native American languages in the anthropological tradition of early twentieth-century American linguistics. Like Halliday, Bloomfield does not use the term 'native speaker' but writes instead of 'the native language': The child growing up in the province, say, in some mountain village, learns to speak in the local dialect. In time, to be sure, this local dialect will take in more and more forms from the standard language... The child, then, does not speak the standard language as his native tongue. It is only after he reaches school, long after his speech-habits are formed, that he is taught the standard language. No language is like the native language that one learned at one's mother's knee; no-one is ever perfectly sure in a language afterwards acquired. 'Mistakes' in language are simply dialect forms carried into the standard language. (Bloomfield 1970:151)
In another context, Bloomfield does refer to the native speaker: 'The first language a human being learns to speak is his native language; he is a native speaker of this language' (1933:43). Bloomfield makes the obvious point that children learn to speak as they learn to do everything else, by observation, participation, and interaction with the people around them. 4. Psycholinguistic Issues Katz and Fodor, more concerned with the relation between language and the mind, argue that 'The goal of a theory of a particular language must be the explication of the abilities and skills involved in the linguistic performance of a fluent native speaker' (1962:218).
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Teaching Additional Languages In this way, the native speaker becomes central to the interests and concerns of linguistics, with the native speaker being the relevant example of natural phenomena for scientific study. Chomsky refers to the native speaker as being both the arbiter of a grammar and (when idealized) the model for the grammar: 'A grammar,' he says, 'is... descriptively adequate to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker' (1965:24). Chomsky thereby neatly compounds one of the central ambiguities of the 'native speaker' idea, using it to refer to both a person and an ideal. Or, as Coulmas says, 'The native speaker leads a double life in Chomsky's work, (1) as a creature of flesh and blood, that is the linguist himself, (2) an idealization' (Coulmas 1981:10). Richards et al. in their Dictionary of Applied Linguistics (1985) and Crystal in his First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (1980) emphasize the importance of intuition in defining the native speaker, Crystal helpfully pointing to the need to take account of bilinguals who are native speakers of more than one language. 5. The New Englishes Tay's contribution to the discussion is original in that she comments on the status of the native speaker in relation to the so-called New Englishes, that is, the English of Singapore, India, and so on. She refers to the lack of clarity of most definitions, and notes that the two factors usually appealed to are priority of learning and an unbroken oral tradition. She comments that both are unsafe criteria; the first because of bilingualism, the second because an adult may have shifted dominance from one first language to another or because a second learned language may have had as much influence on a first learned as the other way around. Tay therefore proposes that a native speaker of English who is not from one of the traditionally native-speaking countries (e.g., the USA or the UK) is: one who learns English in childhood and continues to use it as his dominant language and has reached a certain level of fluency. All three conditions are important. If a person learns English late in life, he is unlikely to attain native fluency in it; if he learns it as a child, but does not use it as his dominant language in adult life, his native fluency in the language is also questionable; if he is fluent in the language, he is more likely one who has learned it as a child (not necessarily before the age of formal education but soon after that) and has continued to use it as his dominant language. (Tay 1982:67-68)
These views indicate the accuracy of Coulmas's statement that a tension exists between the flesh and blood and the idealization definitions. 6. Practical Issues The practical importance of the term is emphasized by Paikeday (1985), pointing to the employment dis-
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crimination against those who lack the 'ideal' native speaker attributes: 'native speakership should not be used as a criterion for excluding certain categories of people from language teaching, dictionary editing, and similar functions' (1985:88). Paikeday's own solution seems to be to separate the ideal and the operative meanings of native speaker, making proficiency the criterion for employment, and personal history the criterion for ideal membership. Such a rigid distinction is difficult to maintain when it comes to judgments of grammaticality which Paikeday wants to associate with the 'proficient user' meaning of 'native speaker' rather than with the 'ideal member' use: 'the people we refer to as arbiters of grammaticality are not really so because true arbiters of grammaticality are proficient users of languages, not just native speakers' (1985:53). The challenge which Paikeday sets is essentially which native speaker to choose, and lurking behind all such choices is undoubtedly his dilemma of whether a new model (which can be supported by acknowledged proficiency) outweighs a distant 'historically authentic' model; for example, Indian-English models or Nigerian-English models versus British or American models. However, this dilemma is just one example of the more general case. There is a dispute between the British and American models just as there is among other metropolitan models, and just also as there is between any Standard and other dialects. The important choice of a model therefore raises issues of acceptability, of currency, and of intelligibility. It is in part for this reason, that Paikeday's distinction between the 'ideal' native speaker definition and the 'operative' one is not finally tenable. Nevertheless, the distinction is of practical importance in the institutionalized activities of publishing and examining, in the written language, and of selecting radio and television newsreaders in the spoken. There has generally been consensus in favor of a model type being used. It is also usual for a particular type of native speaker (or native-speaker-like nonnative speaker) to be chosen—the prestige model. However, the prestige model has been rejected by some influential groups. In 1991, the large, international organization, Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), issued a statement (Forhan 1992) condemning any action which 'supports the exclusion of individuals who are nonnative speakers of English from employment opportunities within the profession.' The term 'native speaker' is used in two distinct (but related) senses in relation to the prevailing consensus. The first is that in some way the native speaker is taken to represent an idealized model. The second is that an individual native speaker is him/herself used as an exemplar of such a model. In academic settings, requests for native speakers to come forward (to take tests, to act as informants)
Native Speaker may cause offense. First, what is not stated is that what is typically being referred to (in the UK or USA) is being a native speaker of English; second, it is ignored that everyone is a native speaker of some code; and third, it is denied that a highly proficient nonnative speaker may also have acquired both linguistic and communicative competence and be, therefore, in terms of what is required in formal higher education, indistinguishable from a native speaker. 7. Racism What is also ignored is the racism of such remarks; what is so often meant by native speaker in the above context is the deliberate exclusion of those who are in with a chance. A Singaporean, a Nigerian, or an Indian might see him/herself as a native speaker of English but feel a lack of confidence in his/her 'native speakerness.' The counterargument is that, in all such cases, it is really up to the individual to identify him/ herself; no one else can do it. Where there is doubt, people define themselves as native speakers or as nonnative speakers of particular languages. As far as English is concerned, the problem is peculiarly one for those who belong to the postcolonial communities, such as Singapore, Nigeria, or India, where the New Englishes are in use. Membership as native speakers is largely a matter of self-ascription, not of something being given; it is in this sense that members decide for themselves. However, those who claim native-speaker status do have responsibilities in terms of confidence and identity. They must be confident as native speakers and identify with other native speakers. That is precisely what is required in acquiring any new ethnicity. 8. Related Terms To be the native speaker of a language means, in a definition cited in Sect. 3, to speak it 'from your mother's knee' (Bloomfield 1970) as your mother tongue or first language (LI). Such a definition is not straightforward and is difficult to uphold. It is not wholly clear, for example, what is meant by mother tongue and by first language. Other terms used to indicate a claim to a language by an individual are 'dominant language' and 'home language' (Stern 1983; Davies 1991). 8.1 Mother Tongue The 'mother tongue' is literally just that, the language of the mother, and is based on the reasonable view that a child's first 'significant other' is the mother. However, it is not always straightforward: the role of 'mother' may be taken by some other adult; similarly, the mother, biological or not, may provide bilingual or multilingual input for the child, either because the 'mother' is herself bilingual or because the role of mother is shared by several adults who use more than one language in speaking to the child. To what extent
the child's own developing idiolect is identified as that of the mother rather than that of the child's own peer group is a matter for empirical investigation (Ochs 1982). 8.2 First Language 'First language' refers to the language which was first learned. Again, this seems straightforward. One's first language is the language ('tongue') learned from one's mother, biological or not. However, many people live in multilingual societies, and everyone lives in a multidialectal society. In such cases, the mother tongue and the first language may be different: it may be that the mother tongue is influenced by peers as well as by parents, or it is more than one language and then it is not easy to decide which one is first; it may be that what is the first language changes over time. For example, a young child for whom Welsh is the mother tongue, and the first language in the sense of time of learning, may gradually come to use English more and more and relegate Welsh to a childhood experience: it may not be completely forgotten but is in some sense no longer as useful, no longer generative or creative, and therefore no longer first. For the large number of people in this category, the mother tongue is no longer the first or dominant language. Alternatively, such people may claim to have more than one first language. In the case of the bilingual or multilingual or dialectal mother, if it is accepted that one's mother tongue is the code of the individual mother and is not isomorphic with any one or more language, then it may be surmized that what mothers speak is either an interlanguage (Selinker 1992) or a set of semilingual codes (Martin-Jones and Romaine 1986). 8.3 Dominant Language The term 'dominant language' is linked because of the underlying assumption that what was one's first language can change over time and another code take its place as one's first language. This must be the case of the second-language child (in Africa and elsewhere) who moves through education or some other major life-change into a situation in which they use English, French, or some other language of wider communication for most if not all purposes. In such cases, it is English or French which is dominant outside the home while the mother tongue is still dominant at home. In other words, the child has more than one dominant language, each language being dominant in certain areas of life. 8.4 Home Language The 'home language' is the language of the home (and may, as with mother tongue, in reality be a mixed language or a set of languages/dialects). Home language is defined negatively in terms of what it is not, since it is perhaps easier to define the public code, which often is a recognized (and described) standard
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Teaching Additional Languages English, French, and so on. The home language then is—for many children—what is left after the public, standard code has been removed. At the same time, for some children, the standard code is also the home language. Thus, in the case of middle-class native English speakers, the home language may well be largely identical with official Standard English, which is used as the medium in schools and is taught to foreigners (this applies equally in the UK, the USA, Australia, and other metropolitan, native Englishspeaking countries). All these terms can be defined in relation to what they are not: first language in relation to a second language; dominant language in relation to the language it has superseded; home language in relation to the public official code; and mother tongue in relation to what one's peers are speaking. The term native speaker, tends to be used in each of these ways, for having language X as one's mother tongue, as one's first language, as one's dominant language, or as one's home language. 8.5 Linguistic Competence Other terms invoked as being relevant to the native speaker are 'competence,' both linguistic and communicative, and 'langue' an older term. Saussure's use of langue (Saussure 1966) was an attempt to define not the native speaker but what it is that is shared by a language community. The related notion of competence was introduced by Chomsky (1965) both to specify the knowledge of an individual which enables language acquisition to take place and also to signify the goal of linguistic theory. The notion of linguistic competence moves the argument one stage onwards, in that it seeks to answer the question of whether competence needs to assume a community langue. There are two answers to this question. The first is that competence is about idealized speakers; indeed, Chomsky's definition of linguistics as being about the idealized native speaker in a homogeneous speech community is of obvious relevance. Such an approach is not a social one; it takes no account of situation, purpose, domain, or variety. It is psycholinguistic or cognitive-scientific and linked to the computer analog for the brain. However, even so extreme and rigorous a view must take some account of limited social aspects, since any eliciting of data, and even the concept of the idealized native speaker, must mean that there is some account being taken of the speaking world. Otherwise, it would be possible for someone who does not know the language or whose speech is full of performance errors of a severe kind or who is aphasic to be used for elicitation, and clearly that is not what happens. So, even here, there is a tacit assumption that the world is made up of speech communities of more than one person. Or, to use Coulmas's image, the double life of the native speaker does
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come together on occasion; the idealization can put on flesh and blood (Coulmas 1981:10). The second answer to the question of whether competence needs to assume langue is that it does because language itself needs an explanation as to how it is that (native) speakers understand one another. In other words, what competence sets out to do is indeed to provide a description of langue. 8.6 Communicative Competence Chomsky's insistence on examining competence without social factors has been challenged by such anthropologically minded linguists as Halliday (1978) and Hymes (1970; 1989). Hymes proposed the term 'communicative competence' in order to point to the learned knowledge of cultural norms which is crucial to language use. The position taken up by communicative competence is that knowing what to say is never enough; it is also necessary to know how to say it. By 'how' here is not meant the performing of the speech, that is, getting the words out, but rather, the using of the appropriate register, variety, code, script, formula, tone, and formality. Once again, the issue for consideration is to what extent such cultural knowledge can be acquired late, and to what extent getting it right, that is, using the appropriate forms, privileges native speakers. 8.7 Second and Foreign Language The discussion above, of defining the mother tongue and the first and dominant language in opposition to, for example, the 'second language,' suggests that one might hope to define in separate and perhaps rigorous ways the second language and the foreign language. However, a second language is in fact defined in terms of a language which is learned after the first language (Stern 1983). Thus, it remains impossible to define the first language except in terms of what is earliest acquired. A distinction is perhaps useful between the language acquired by a bilingual (or multilingual) child in the home, or in an environment where more than one input is available, and that of the child who acquires a nonhome or nonintimate language in a more public setting (Romaine 1989; Hamers and Blanc 1989). Such a setting is often education, and the term second language is sometimes used to define a situation in which the child is being educated in a language medium which is not the home language. Not that the second language has to be the language of education— it may be the lingua franca of the public environment in which the child begins to grow up (e.g., English in Nepal). What seems to underlie the use of the term second language is that it indicates a command which is less than that of the first language, but stronger than that of the foreign language. Foreign languages, then, seem to be acquired in order to interact with foreigners, that is, groups out-
Native Speaker side one's native environment. That also seems to imply that a foreign language does not carry with it the kind of automatic grasp of its systems that are appealed to in terms of the first language and are suggested in some areas of the second language. A foreign language has not been, it can be surmized, internalized in the same way that a first (and perhaps a second) language has. A foreign-language speaker cannot be appealed to for authoritative pronouncements about the language's rules and its use. First-language speakers, of course, can be, and this is the problematic and very interesting issue about second languages: whether control of a second language can become as internalized as the first; whether being a native speaker and being a firstlanguage speaker (or a mother-tongue speaker) are synonymous; and whether a second-language speaker can be a native speaker of that second language. 9. Defining the Native Speaker To attempt a definition, the native speaker may be characterized in six ways. The native speaker: (a) acquires the L1 of which they are a native speaker in childhood; (b) has intuitions (in terms of acceptability and productiveness) about their idiolectal grammar; (c) has intuitions about those features of the standard language grammar which are distinct from their idiolectal grammar; (d) has a unique capacity to produce fluent spontaneous discourse, which exhibits pauses mainly at clause boundaries (the 'one clause at a time' facility), which is facilitated by a huge memory stock of complete lexical items (Pawley and Syder 1983); and in both production and comprehension the native speaker exhibits a wide range of communicative competence; (e) has a unique capacity to write creatively (and this includes, of course, literature at all levels from jokes to epics, metaphor to novels); (f) has a unique capacity to interpret and translate into the L1 of which they are a native speaker. Disagreements about an individual's capacity are likely to stem from a dispute about the standard language. In considering the extent to which the L2 learner can become a target-language native speaker, one can again consider the six criteria: (a) Childhood acquisition. The second-language learner, by this definition, does not acquire the target language in early childhood. If they do, then they are a native speaker of both LI and the target language (TL). (b) Intuitions about idiolectal grammar. It must be possible, with sufficient contact and practice, for the second-language learner to gain access to intuitions about their own idiolectal grammar of the target language.
(c) Intuitions about group language grammar. Again with sufficient contact and practice, the second-language learner can gain access to the standard grammar of the target language. Indeed, in many formal learning situations, it is exactly through exposure to a TL standard grammar that the TL idiolectal grammar emerges, the reverse of the L1 development. (d) Discourse in the Language Classroom and pragmatic control. This may indeed be a descriptive difference between a native speaker and a nonnative speaker, but it is not in any way explanatory—that is to say, it in no way argues that a second-language learner cannot become a native speaker. (e) Creative performance. With practice it must be possible for a second-language learner to become an accepted creative writer in the TL. There are, of course, well-known examples of such cases, for example, Conrad, Beckett, Senghor; but there is also the interesting problem of the acceptability to the L1 community of the second-language learner's creative writing. This is an attitudinal question, but so too is the question of the acceptability to the same community of a creative writer writing in an alternative standard language (e.g., Scots). (f) Interpreting and translating. This must be possible even though international organizations generally require that interpreters should interpret into their L1. All except (a) are contingent issues. In that way, the question of whether a second-language learner can become a native speaker of a target language reduces to whether it is necessary to acquire a code in early childhood in order to be a native speaker of that code. To answer that question is to ask a further question, about what it is that the child acquires in acquiring his/her L1. However, that question has already been answered in criteria (b)-(f) above, and so the question again becomes a contingent one. No doubt there is a need to ensure in addition a cultural dimension, that is, (b) and (c) above, since the child L1 acquirer does have access to the resources of the culture attached to the language and particularly to those learnt and encoded or even imprinted early. Still, there are always subcultural differences, for example, between the Scots and the English; different cultures with the same standard language (e.g., the German-speaking European nations); and different cultures with different standard languages (e.g., the British and the American). There is also International English, and isolated Lls in multilingual settings, for example, Indian English). Given such interlingual differences and the lack of agreement and norms that certainly occur among such groups, it does appear that the second-language learner has a difficult but not impossible task to become a native speaker of a target language. 537
Teaching Additional Languages 10. Coppieters's Results Such a conclusion is probably more sociological than linguistic or psychological. For, in addition to the tension referred to between the ideal and the fleshand-blood approaches to the native speaker, there is a further opposition between the sociological and the psychological views; they are not easily reconcilable. Coppieters points out the lack of fit in his account of a grammatical judgment experiment (Coppieters 1987). He took a group of 27 non-native adult speakers of French who had 'so thoroughly mastered French that it was no longer clearly possible to distinguish them from native speakers by mistakes which they made, or by the restricted nature of their choice of words and constructions' (1987:544). For baseline data, he took 20 native speakers of French, matched with the experimental group as far as possible. He used 107 sentences illustrating various aspects of French and asked his subjects individually for acceptability judgments. His results indicated that the two groups belonged to two different populations, with no overlap between, even at extremes. Even so, he accepted an argument in favor of identity theory (Tajfel 1981): 'A speaker of French is someone who is accepted as such by the community referred to as that of French speakers, not someone who is endowed with a specific formal underlying linguistic system.' However, for Coppieters, such an argument is strongly sociological, and, in his view, competence must include a psychological dimension. He continues: 'it is also clear that the variation between native speakers and nonnative speakers cannot simply be subsumed as a special case of the variation among native speakers: that is nonnative speakers have been found to lie outside the boundaries of native speaker variation' (1987: 545). Native speakers, reports Coppieters, 'did not need the help of an explicit context. No matter how skilful non-native speakers might be at deriving the appropriate interpretation of a sentence in context, their inability to do so in the absence of an explicit context indicates a fundamental difference between their knowledge of the language and that of native speakers' (1987: 566-67). Given the idiolectal and dialectal differences among native speakers themselves, Coppieters's claim is a strong one: his argument for cognitive rather than formal dissonance between native and nonnative speakers concerns the grammar of the standard or common language learned before the critical period (Lennerberg 1967). His view is widely shared among psycholinguists and second-language researchers (Gass and Varonis 1985). 11. The Native-speaker Myth Coppieters represents the uncompromising psychological view. According to that, the native speaker is defined by early acquired knowledge. Bartsch (1988) takes the more sociological view, allowing for the
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importance of attitude and identity. Although both views concern control of the standard language, they are probably not reconcilable. Nevertheless, the concept of native speaker is used entirely appropriately in these quite different ways. It is probable that what is most enduring about the concept has nothing to do with truth and reality, whether or not individuals are native speakers; what matters most is the enduring native speaker myth combining both knowledge and identity: in that myth, the two views have an equal role. But there are those who disagree, Birdsong (1992) disputes the claim that the learner's 'ultimate attainment' can never be equal to native speaker competence, concluding from his partial replication of Coppieters' study that 'ultimate attainment by nonnatives can coincide with that of natives' (1992: 739). Such non-natives are, of course, exceptional learners, but the fact of their success indicates that the native speaker is as much a sociolinguistic construct as a developmental one. Birdsong's conclusion is supported by Bialystok (1997) who queries the role of maturational factors in second language acquisition. Bibliography Bartsch R 1988 Norms of Language. Longman, London Bereiter C, Engelmann S 1966 Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Bialystok E 1997 The structure of age: in search of barriers to second language acquisition. Second Language Research 13: 116-37. Birdsong D 1992 Ultimate attainment in second language acquisition. Language 68: 706-55 Bloomfield L 1933 Language. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York Bloomfield L 1970 Literate and illiterate speech. American Speech 2: 432-39 Chomsky N 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Coppieters R 1987 Competence differences between native and near-native speakers. Lg 63: 544-73 Coulmas F (ed.) 1981 A Festschrift for the Native Speaker. Mouton, The Hague. Crystal D 1980 A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Andre Deutsch, London Davies A 1991 The Native Speaker in Applied Linguistics. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Ferguson C 1983 Language planning and language change. In: Cobarrubias J, Fishman J (eds.) Progress in Language Planning. Mouton, Berlin Forhan L E 1992 Nonnative speakers of English and hiring practices. TESOL Matters 2/4: 23 Gass S M, Varonis E M 1985 Variation in native speaker speech modification to non-native speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 7: 37-57 Halliday M A K 1975 Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language. Edward Arnold, London Halliday M A K 1978 Language as Social Semiotic. Edward Arnold, London Hamers J F, Blanc M H A 1989 Bilinguality and Bilingualism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Needs Analysis Hymes D H 1970 On communicative competence. In: Gumperz J J, Hymes D H (eds.) Directions in Sociolinguistics. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York Hymes D H 1989 Postscript. Applied Linguistics (special issue: 'Communicative competence revisited') 10(2): 244-50 Katz J J, Fodor J A 1962 The structure of a semantic theory. Lg39: 170-210 Le Page R B, Tabouret-Keller A 1985 Acts of Identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Lennerberg E 1967 Biological Foundations of Language. John Wiley, New York Martin-Jones M, Romaine S 1986 Semilingualism: A halfbaked theory of communicative competence. Applied Linguistics 7(1): 26-38 Ochs E 1982 Talking to children in Western Samoa. Lis 11: 77-104 Paikeday T M 1985 The Native Speaker is Dead! Paikeday, Toronto
Pawley A, Syder F H 1983 Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Naturelike selection and nativelike fluency. In: Richards J C, Schmidt R (eds.) Language and Communication. Longman, Harlow Richards J C, Platt J, Weber H 1985 Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics. Longman, Harlow Romaine S 1989 Bilingualism. Blackwell, Oxford Saussure F de 1966 (transl. Baskin W) Course in General Linguistics. McGraw-Hill, New York Selinker L 1992 Rediscovering Inter language. Longman, Harlow Stern H H 1983 Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Tajfel H 1981 Human Groups and Social Categories. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Tay M 1982 The uses, users and features of English in Singapore. In: Pride J (ed.) New Englishes. Newbury House, Rowley, MA
Needs Analysis J. L. Clark
The term 'needs analysis' in language education has generally been used to refer to the systematic attempt to discover the needs for which a learner or group of learners requires a language. Needs analysis may also extend to identifying the gap between the learner's current capability and the desired outcome. Information gathered is used as a basis for syllabus specification and course design. The term has also been used to refer to the gathering of information on the characteristics of individual learners that may affect their learning (e.g., age, motivation, expectations, preferred learning style, etc.), so that these may also be taken into account during course design and implementation. Needs analysis may take place prior to the start of a course, or it may take place during a course. The term 'needs,' however, is open to several interpretations (Dearden 1972). It can refer both to what the learner needs to have done by the end of a course, and to what the learner needs to do during a course in order to learn effectively. It can refer to stable needs or needs that emerge as learning progresses. It can refer to subjective needs felt by the learner, and to objective needs determined for learners by others, which the learner may not perceive. Different interpretations lead to different forms of needs analysis. Tyler (1949) is generally acknowledged to be the father of the ends-means approach to curriculum
planning in which target-oriented needs analysis became a fundamental prerequisite of course design. In this approach, a precourse needs analysis is conducted to establish the purposes or ends for which a particular course of learning is to be designed. Behavioral objectives are then established and turned into learning experiences, pedagogically organized as the means toward the ends. This form of precourse needs analysis is seen by many as a useful way of focusing the attention of teachers and learners on what are seen as essential goals. On-course needs analysis, however, is equally important to ensure that the learner's needs are sensitively responded to as they arise. Perhaps the ultimate goal of needs analysis is to assist learners to learn to diagnose their own needs and to respond to them, so that they develop an everincreasing capability to manage their own learning (Holec 1980). The design of the instruments to elicit the learner's language needs, and the selection of categories for the specification of what has to be learned are dependent upon the designer's beliefs about language and language learning. Reflecting differences in these beliefs, a number of precourse needs analysis instruments for identifying objective target-language needs have emerged over the years as follows: (a) register analysis to highlight particular linguistic features in texts associated with the registers the learner wishes to handle;
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Teaching Additional Languages (b) academic skills analysis to reveal what students must learn to do in order to study effectively; (c) discourse analysis of target-language use to reveal important rhetorical acts, topics, and features of textual cohesion; (d) introspective or analytical studies of what constitutes communicative competence in those who display the target language behavior; and (e) a language audit (Pilbeam 1979) to diagnose the gap between the learner's current capabilities and the skills required to carry out a specific job. Precourse needs analysis instruments designed to reveal learner perceptions of their language needs have included questionnaires, interviews, and self-evaluations, while on-course needs analysis has embraced negotiation with learners about lesson objectives, content, and teaching/learning strategies; and teacher observations and formative assessments through which to reveal learning needs as they arise. Perhaps the most rigorous needs analysis instrument developed for course design is Munby's (1978). A needs profile is drawn up identifying who the learners are, for what purposes they are learning the language, in which settings they will use it and with whom, in which medium, using which dialect, to what level of proficiency, through which activities, employing which attitudinal tones. Data obtained are then converted into a syllabus. The instrument has been criticized on several grounds. It is complex, provides more data than can be made use of, and ignores constraints arising from the context in which the course will operate. There is an underlying assumption that the specification of the ends will determine the means to get there, seeming to imply that the learner should master a limited set of specified behaviors, rather than develop an underlying
capacity to interpret and express meanings and overcome whatever difficulties might arise along the way. A more flexible instrument was developed by Richterich (1975), and Richterich and Chancerel (1980). This involves precourse data-gathering from learners about learning characteristics and language aspirations, from which a broad course outline is derived. A second fine-tuning stage of on-course needs analysis ensures that evolving needs and wishes can be taken into account. Richterich's target-oriented and learnercentered approach combining both precourse and on-course analysis seems to respond well to current theory and teachers' requirements. In the twenty-first century, it is likely that needs analysis will be designed to reveal the essence of what learners need to learn and, at the same time, to encourage learners to take an active role in the organization of their own learning. Bibliography Dearden R F 1972 Needs in education. In: Dearden R F, Hirst P H, Peters R S (eds.) Education and the Development of Reason. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Holec H 1980 Learner-centered communicative language teaching: Needs analysis revisited. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 3(1): 26-33 Munby J 1978 Communicative Syllabus Design. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Pilbeam A 1979 The Language Audit. Language Training 1(2): 4-5 Richterich R 1975 The analysis of language needs. Education and Culture 28: 9-14 Richterich R, Chancerel J-L 1980 Identifying the Needs of Adults Learning a Foreign Language. Pergamon Press, Oxford Tyler R W 1949 Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Widdowson H G 1983 Learning Purpose and Language Use. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Second Language Learning B. McLaughlin and S. Robbins
Learning a second language has been important to human beings from earliest historical times. The Sumerians of the third millennium BC used bilingual tablets in Sumerian and Akkadian to educate their children, and compiled the world's oldest known bilingual dictionaries. Bilingual tablets were used in ancient Egypt, and, in the Ptolemaic period, the upper classes in Egypt received their education in Greek. In the Hellenistic period, the majority of people in Asia 540
Minor who could read and write did so in Greek, their second language. Until the fourth century BC, bilingual education in Greek and Latin was an important part of the curriculum for Roman children. At the beginning of the third century BC, the Romans developed bilingual manuals called Hermeneumata Pseudodositheans, which were comparable to modern conversational handbooks. They contained a Greek-Latin vocabulary and a series of simple texts
Second Language Learning of a narrative or conversational character. The text included Aesop's fables, an elementary book on mythology, and an account of the Trojan war. These handbooks attempted to introduce grammatical features in a systematic order, beginning with simple structures and advancing to more complex ones. In medieval Europe, Latin was considered an international language of communication and culture. It was a living language taught for oral communication. By the Renaissance, however, emphasis had shifted from learning Latin as a practical tool for communication to learning Latin (and Greek) to develop the mind. Emphasis was placed on grammatical training with little or no attention to oral skills. This grammaticalism predominated into the twentieth century. Languages were taught in the same way as Latin and Greek: through the systematic learning of paradigms, tables, declensions, and conjugations. Like Latin and Greek, modern languages were taught as dead languages, divorced from communicative context. Students spent their time translating written texts line by line. This approach, now generally rejected, is usually referred to as the 'grammar-translation method.' Instead of this method, much late twentieth-century language teaching uses what is often called the 'direct method.' Although a number of other prominent educators made the same arguments, the best-known advocate of this method is Maximilian Berlitz, whose schools now exist in all parts of the world. Berlitz maintained that the learner must be taught as quickly as possible to think in the second language and for that reason must use that language constantly, without reverting to the first language. Exclusive stress is placed in the 'Berlitz method' on the oral aspects of the language. Teachers must be native speakers, and classes must be small (never more than 10 pupils) so that instruction is as individual as possible. Grammatical rules are not taught explicitly; instead, grammar is conveyed to the student by example and by visual demonstration. Reading and writing are taught only after the spoken language has been mastered. Like Berlitz, other advocates of the direct method took a similar point of view. According to Jespersen (1904), the pupil should be steeped in the target language and should learn grammar inductively. Because listening, practice, and repetition are the means by which children learn their first language, these processes should be employed in secondlanguage learning as well (Palmer 1940). Linguistic principles, especially phonetics, were emphasized in an effort to insure that the speaker's oral pronunciation approximated, as closely as possible, that of native speakers in the target language. Linguistic principles and phonological accuracy are especially important in the 'audiolingual method.' The linguistic principles come from 'structural linguistics,' with its emphasis on the 'contrastive analysis' of
linguistic structures of the first and second languages. This was linked to behavior notions of the learning process, which viewed language learning as involving the formation of habits via pattern practice. The goal of phonological accuracy is to be achieved through repetitive drills with audio-feedback in language learning laboratories. Like the direct method, the audiolingual approach stresses the learning of second languages in a manner that simulates first-language learning. Children do not learn their first language through translating and learning rules of grammar by rote; they learn by hearing and speaking. There has been a strong reaction against the audiolingual method in many quarters on the grounds that its theoretical foundations are suspect. As will be seen, the behaviorist assumption that language learning comes about merely through repetitive drills and pattern practice has been sharply attacked. Contrastive analysis has also been shown to be of limited practical use for language teaching because learners do not make the predicted errors. Finally, structural linguistics has been put to rout by revolutionary changes in linguistic theory. One criticism of the audiolingual technique is that it is dehumanizing, that it treats language learning as a mechanical process rather than as learning experience that involves the whole person. A number of pedagogical developments have occurred that can be grouped under the rubric of a 'humanistic approach' to second-language teaching. Examples include 'Counseling-Learning' (Curran 1976), the 'Silent Way' (Gattegno 1972), and 'Suggestopedia' (Lozanov 1979). What these techniques have in common is an emphasis on individualized instruction through an eclectic assortment of methods. Table 1 summarizes the four approaches to the teaching of second languages that have been sketched here. There are many other ways of categorizing developments in language teaching, and this division is proposed merely to orient the reader to what follows. There is a great deal of overlap between approaches and it is difficult to trace the contribution of specific theories to specific pedagogical approaches. 1. Theory in Second-language Research
This article began by examining theories that are used to justify contemporary pedagogical practice in second-language learning and teaching. Three mainstreams: learning theory, linguistic theory, and cognitive theory will be given consideration. Then the extent to which these theories have had an impact on pedagogical practice will be considered. 1.1 Learning Theory Several assumptions underlie the classic learning theory approach to language learning. First, language is learned just like anything else; the principles of general learning account for language learning. Second, 541
Teaching Additional Languages Table 1. Four approaches to second-language teaching. Grammar (Mother Tongue)-Translation: Emphasis on systematic learning of rules of morphology and syntax; rote memorization of vocabulary; line-byline translation of target-language texts into the learner's first language; oral proficiency minimized; little training in pronunciation. Direct Method: Rejection of translation and emphasis on speech; grammar learned inductively; reading and writing learned after spoken language is mastered; phonetics stressed so that pronunciation approximates that of a native speaker. Audiolingual Method: Stress is on repetitive drills and pattern practice; spoken language is primary; translation rejected; contrastive analysis guides instruction; grammar learned inductively; phonological accuracy sought through repetitive drills in language-learning laboratories. Humanistic Approaches: Individual instruction and focus on learner needs and attitudes; eclectic orientation to method; focus on oral communication; rejection of drill and practice focus of the audiolingual method.
language learning is habit formation involving imitation, reinforcement, and repetition as means of controlling behavior. Old habits get in the way of new habits. When learning a second language, the learner must acquire a new system of habits in addition to the pre-existing habits that constitute first-language competence. If old habits are similar to, or the same as, the new habits that must be learned, 'positive transfer' will occur and the result can be beneficial; if old habits are different from the new habits, 'negative transfer' occurs and learning is hindered. 7.7.7 Contrastive analysis In the field of second-language acquisition, contrastive analysis has developed as a 'theory of transfer' that attempts to predict when and where learner errors will occur and adjust language instruction to prevent those errors. Psychologically, contrastive analysis is based on classic learning theory and the notion of habits. Linguistically, contrastive analysis is based on the work of structuralist linguists such as Bloomfield and Fries. It is pedagogically oriented and motivated, as a method of teaching second languages more efficiently. In its strong form, contrastive analysis claims that all errors are the result of negative transfer and can be predicted by comparing the first language with the second and identifying differences between the two. In its weak form, contrastive analysis is a diagnostic
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tool that can be used to identify or explain the errors found in second-language learning that are the result of negative transfer. In practice, contrastive analysis involves a comparison of the learner's first language with the language to be acquired so as to specify constructions that will give the learner difficulty. Areas of difference are assumed to lead to difficulties for the learner because they lead to negative transfer and 'interference.' These differences can then be targeted in instruction with special drills and repetitions in an effort to prevent error and overcome the consequences of interference. 1.1.2 The critique The implications of the learning theory perspective are most obvious in the audiolingual method, as will be seen. However, there have been serious criticisms raised against the classic approach, especially as embodied in the notion of habit formation and articulated in the contrastive analysis hypothesis. The strong version of the contrastive analysis hypothesis cannot be maintained in the face of empirical research that indicates that the majority of learners' errors are not the result of negative transfer. The weak version of the hypothesis, which states that contrastive analysis is a diagnostic tool that helps identify or explain errors, is not useful unless predictions can be made as to when, where, and why interference between languages occurs. To be useful, contrastive analyses of languages must be based on underlying linguistic universals, rather than on surface characteristics. This argument reflects the basic reorientation in thinking about language that has occurred as a result of the 'Chomskyan revolution in linguistics,' which we shall consider shortly. However, these theoretical developments do not necessarily mean that practices based on classic learning theory have been abandoned. Many contemporary classrooms continue to employ drill-and-practice exercises, and many teachers would justify their pedagogical practices by invoking the principles of classic learning theory. 7.2 Linguistic Theory Contemporary linguistic theory makes a fundamental distinction between 'competence' (the speaker's underlying knowledge and intuitions about language) and 'performance' (how language is actually produced and comprehended). Under the influence of generative linguistics, language competence has come to be seen as an abstract system of rules that 'generate' all of the grammatical utterances of a language. Language acquisition, then, is the process of learning the abstract rules that comprise the native speaker's competence. However, because language learners are only exposed to performance, in the form of actual speech, language acquisition must involve the extraction of
Second Language Learning abstract knowledge about language from concrete examples. To explain the nature of this abstract knowledge, generative linguistics introduces the notion of 'deep and surface structure representations' of language. 'Transformational grammar' posits a number of movement/deletion rules (transformations) that operate on deep structures to produce some structural change, which is then reflected in the surface structures. Identical surface structures, however, do not necessarily share the same deep structure. For example, John is eager to please and John is easy to please. In the first example, John is the one doing the pleasing, and thus John would be the deep structure subject of please. In the second example, however, John is the one being pleased, and therefore should be the deep structure object of please. 1.2.1 The innateness of linguistic knowledge A number of considerations have led linguists to the conclusion that language acquisition is more than simple habit formation and involves some sort of innate capacity. First, there is the argument that children learn a first language at a very young age despite the obvious difficulty of extracting abstract linguistic rules from performance data alone. Second, language learners within a language community can be exposed to very different data and yet arrive at the same abstract rules. Similar arguments can be made for secondlanguage learning. To the extent that second-language learners attain native-like competence, their competence approximates that of other members of the speech community, although clearly based on different performance input/data. In addition, some evidence indicates that second-language learners pass through acquisition stages that are not only similar to those of other second-language learners but also to those firstlanguage learners of the target language pass through (Lightbown 1985). This suggests that some sort of innate mechanism is guiding second-language learners as well. Furthermore, second-language learners, like firstlanguage learners face a difficult 'projection problem.' Like children learning a first language, they have to work out abstract rules on the basis of 'deficient' data (White 1989). Several examples may make this clearer. A French speaker, learning English, must learn that in English, unlike French, an adverb cannot come between a verb and a direct object. In English we do not say The dog bit viciously the boy. Yet adverbial placement in English is relatively free, so that sentences such as The dog bit the boy viciously, The dog viciously bit the boy, and Viciously, the dog bit the boy are all allowed. A native speaker of French who assumes that English is like French in adverbial placement will not receive positive input indicating that this is not the case. Nor will this information come from
extra-linguistic sources. Therefore, the argument runs, it is unclear how such constructions are learned unless certain forms of linguistic knowledge are innate. 7.2.2 Universal grammar Advocates of the Chomskyan generative grammar approach assume that the first-language learner comes to the acquisition task with innate, linguistically specific knowledge, or 'universal grammar.' It is generally assumed in universal grammar theory that the child starts with all the principles of universal grammar available and furthermore, that all human languages conform to these principles. The child builds the best grammar available on the basis of what is cognitively possible at a particular maturational point. According to Chomsky, universal grammar provides the only way of accounting for how children are able to acquire their native language. If one assumes that children form hypotheses about their language that they then test in practice, the question of how they reject incorrect hypotheses needs to be answered. Chomsky and his followers argue that the child does not meet enough negative evidence to reject incorrect hypotheses. Nor do children produce enough incorrect sentences to test out hypotheses adequately. Hence, it is necessary to assume that children are in some way constrained in the hypotheses they form. If there are constraints on the range of hypotheses children form, it becomes possible to explain how acquisition occurs. Rather than working from inductive principles alone, the child is restricted by the constraints of universal grammar in forming hypotheses about the input. The child's task is to test the options available against input from the environment. Thus the claim is that hypothesis testing is a possible explanation once it is accepted that the child's hypotheses are limited in number and that the environment contributes triggering rather than negative evidence. Chomsky's theory sees the environment to play both a negative and a positive role. Negatively, the theory denies that the environment provides sufficient evidence for learning particular aspects of syntax without the aid of a powerful built-in grammar. Positively, the theory claims that the environment provides positive evidence to help the learner fix the ways in which universal grammar is realized in the target language. Consequently, the theory does not deny that external factors influence the course of language acquisition; the right environmental input at the right time furthers the acquisition process. 1.2.3 Parameter setting In universal grammar theory, there is involved a set of principles with certain parameters. These parameters remain 'open' until they are set by experience with the environment. For Chomsky, language acquisition is not so much a problem of acquiring grammatical rules, but rather a process whereby the learner sets the
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Teaching Additional Languages values of the parameters of the principles of universal grammar. The grammar of a language is the set of values it assigns to the various parameters. As Chomsky put it, 'Experience is required to set the switches. Once they are set, the system functions' (cited in Flynn 1985). An oft-cited example of such a parameter is the 'prodrop parameter,' which specifies that languages vary with regard to whether they allow the deletion of pronouns in subject positions, together with related phenomena such as inversion of subject and verb. English does not have prodrop because a subject is required for every sentence and the subject cannot be inverted with the verb in declarative sentences. This is not true of Spanish, however, which, as a language that allows prodrop, allows empty subjects and subject-verb inversion in declarative sentences. For example, while Spanish allows the equivalent of Is very busy for She is very busy, English does not. Another example is the principle, of 'adjacency,' according to which noun phrases must be next to the verb or preposition that gives them case. This accounts for the adverbial placement rule cited previously. In English an adverb cannot intervene between a verb and its direct object. Sentences such as Mary ate quickly her dinner are not allowed, whereas in French such sentences are permitted: Marie a mange rapidement le diner. The French option is assumed to be 'set' for the child learning French as a first language on the basis of positive evidence in the form of such sentences. Thus, the theory claims that the parameters that have been set in the first language will need to be reset or readjusted for the second language. 1.2.4 Core versus peripheral grammar Universal grammar theory maintains a distinction between 'core' and 'peripheral' grammar. Core grammar refers to those parts of the language that have 'grown' in the learner through the interaction of the universal grammar with the relevant language environment. In addition, however, it is assumed that every language also contains elements that are not constrained by universal grammar. These elements comprise the peripheral grammar and include elements that are derived from the history of the language, have been borrowed from other languages, or have arisen accidentally. Although it is thought that learners prefer to adopt rules based on universal grammar, they must also learn peripheral aspects of language. These peripheral aspects fall outside the learner's preprogramed instructions and hence are more difficult to acquire. This is not to say, however, that peripheral aspects of language are learned later developmentally. Chomsky was careful to point out that the order in which structures are learned may be influenced by the learner's 'channel capacity.' Aspects of the core grammar may be learned later than peripheral aspects because of 544
maturational processes or because of 'frequency effects.' 7.2.5 Creativity The approach to language learning that developed in the wake of the Chomskyan revolution and the advent of generative linguistics relies heavily on the view of language learning as a 'creative process.' According to this viewpoint, language learning is not determined by external forces alone, as had been suggested by learning theory. Instead, language acquisition is 'creatively constructed' within the learner through interaction with members of the speech community. Presumably, the same principles apply to secondlanguage learning, universal grammar theory postulates that second-language learning occurs as learners encounter more evidence from the second language, and set or reset the parameters of the new grammar. Universal grammar serves to constrain the hypotheses that learners make and helps them creatively construct their new knowledge of the target language through interaction with native speakers. 1.3 Cognitive Theory We turn now to a somewhat different theoretical perspective. Cognitive theory is based on the work of psychologists and psycholinguists, who have applied the principles and findings of contemporary cognitive psychology to the domain of second-language learning. The intent is to determine whether such a perspective casts light on second-language phenomena. Contemporary cognitive psychology is quite different from the behaviorism of the past. Contemporary cognitive psychology emphasizes 'knowing,' rather than 'responding.' Cognitive psychologists are concerned with finding scientific means for studying the mental processes involved in the acquisition and application of knowledge. The focus is not 'stimulusresponse bonds,' but 'mental events.' A second characteristic of the cognitive approach is that it emphasizes mental structure or organization. The argument is that human knowledge is organized and that new input is interpreted in the light of this organization. Here the field is especially indebted to Jean Piaget, the Swiss scholar who maintained that all living creatures are born with an invariant tendency to organize experience, and that this tendency provides the impetus for cognitive development. Finally, the cognitive approach, in contrast to behaviorism, stresses the notion that the individual is active, constructive, and planful, rather than a passive recipient of environmental stimulation. For cognitive psychology, any complete account of human cognition must include an analysis of the plans or strategies people use for thinking, remembering, and understanding and producing language. Within this framework, second-language learning is viewed as the acquisition of a complex cognitive
Second Language Learning skill. To learn a second language is to learn a skill. Because various aspects of the task must be practiced and integrated into fluent performance, language learning requires the automatization of component subskills. Learning is a cognitive process, because it is thought to involve internal representations that regulate and guide performance. In the case of language learning, these representations are based on the language system and include procedures for selecting appropriate vocabulary, grammatical rules, and pragmatic conventions governing language use. As performance improves, there is constant restructuring as learners simplify, unify, and gain increasing control over their internal representations. These two notions —'automatization' and 'restructuring'—are central to cognitive theory.
associative connections in long-term storage, most automatic processes require an appreciable amount of training to develop fully. Once learned, however, automatic processes occur rapidly and are difficult to suppress or alter. The second mode of information processing, 'controlled processing,' is not a learned response, but instead a temporary activation of nodes in a sequence. This activation is under the attentional control of the subject and, because attention is required, only one such sequence can normally be controlled at a time without interference. Controlled processes are thus tightly capacity-limited, and require more time for their activation. But controlled processes have the advantage of being relatively easy to set up, alter, and apply to novel situations.
1.3.1 The routinization of skills The acquisition of the skills involved in any communication task requires the assessment and coordination of information from a multitude of perceptual, cognitive, and social domains. The speaker must communicate the intended message unambiguously and must learn to obey a large number of conversational conventions. Because humans are limited-capacity processors, such a task requires the integration of a number of different skills, each of which has been practiced and routinized. Several researchers (e.g., Schneider and Shiffrin 1977, Shiffrin and Schneider 1977) have conceived of the differences in the processing capacity necessary for various mental operations in a dichotomous way: either a task requires a relatively large amount of processing capacity, or it proceeds automatically and demands little processing energy. Furthermore, a task that once taxed processing capacity may become, through practice, so automatic that it demands relatively little processing energy. In their discussion of human information processing, Shiffrin and Schneider conceived of memory as a large collection of nodes that become associated through learning. Each node is a grouping or set of informational elements. Most of the nodes are inactive and passive and, when in this state, the interconnected system of nodes is called 'long-term store.' When, because of some kind of external stimulus, a small number of these nodes are activated, the activated nodes constitute 'short-term store.' There are two ways in which these nodes may become activated: Shiffrin and Schneider called these the automatic and the controlled modes of information processing. 'Automatic processing' involves the activation of certain nodes in memory each time the appropriate inputs are present. This activation is a learned response that has been built up through the consistent mapping of the same input to the same pattern of activation over many trials. Since an automatic process utilizes a relatively permanent set of
7.3.2 Automaticity and learning In this framework, learning involves the transfer of information to long-term memory and is regulated by controlled processes. That is, skills are learned and routinized (i.e., become automatic) only after the earlier use of controlled processes. It is controlled processes that regulate the flow of information from short-term to long-term memory. Learning occurs over time, but once automatic processes are set up at one stage in the development of a complex information-processing skill, controlled processes are free to be allocated to higher levels of processing. Thus controlled processing can be said to lay down the 'stepping stones' for automatic processing as the learner gradually moves to more and more difficult levels. In this conceptualization, complex tasks are characterized by a 'hierarchical structure.' That is, such tasks consist of subtasks and their components. The execution of one part of the task requires the completion of various smaller components. As Levelt (1978) noted, speaking is an excellent example of a hierarchical task structure (Table 2). The first-order goal is to express a particular intention. To do this, the speaker must first decide on a topic and select a certain syntactic schema. In turn, the realization of this schema requires additional subactivities, such as formulating a series of phrases to express different aspects of the intention. But in order actually to utter the phrase there is also the need for lexical retrieval,
Table 2. The hierarchical task structure of speaking. First-order goal: Second-order goal: Third-order goal: Lower-order goals:
to express particular intention to decide on topic to formulate a series of phrases to retrieve lexicon needed to activate articulatory patterns to utilize appropriate syntactic rules to meet pragmatic conventions (Based on Levelt 1978.) 545
Teaching Additional Languages the activation of articulatory patterns, utilization of appropriate syntactic rules, etc. Each of these component skills must be executed before the higher-order goal can be realized, although there may be some parallel processing in real time. In order to function effectively, humans develop ways of organizing information. Some tasks require more attention; others that have been well practiced require less. The development of any complex cognitive skill involves building up a set of well-learned, automatic procedures so that controlled processes are freed up for new tasks. In this way limited resources can be spread to cover a wide range of task demands. The notion of 'capacity-free (automatic) processes' provides an explanation for improvement in learner performance. Because human learners are limited in their information-processing abilities, only so much attention can be given to the various components of complex tasks at one time. When one component of a task becomes automatized, attention can be devoted to other components of the task and what was previously a difficult or impossible task becomes possible. 1.3.3 Restructuring The integration of hierarchically ordered skills requires practice. Repeated performance of the components of the task through controlled processing leads to the availability of automatized routines. But there is more involved in learning a complex cognitive . skill than automatizing sub-skills. The learner must also impose organization and structure the information that has been acquired. As more learning occurs, internalized, cognitive representations change and are restructured. This restructuring process involves operations that are different from, but complementary to, those involved in gaining automaticity. In acquiring complex skills, such as second languages, learners devise new structures for interpreting new information and for imposing a new organization on information already stored. Cheng (1985) described this process as the result of a restructuring of the components of a task so that they are coordinated, integrated, or reorganized into new units, thereby allowing a procedure involving old components to be replaced by a more efficient procedure involving new components. Cheng gave the example of two alternative procedures for solving arithmetic problems, such as rinding the sum of ten 2s. One can solve this problem by nine addition operations; or one can learn the multiplication table and solve the problem by simply looking up the entry 210. A single multiplication operation would thus be equivalent to nine addition operations. Cheng argued that the gain in efficiency thus achieved is not the result of performing nine additions operations in an automatic manner. Nor is the gain in efficiency the result of an automatic multiplication
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operation. Rather the limitations in performance have been overcome by restructuring the task procedure. Another example Cheng gave is piano-playing. Why is it that learners have difficulty in coordinating two tasks, each of which has been automatized—such as coordinating the two hands in playing the piano? For players with some experience, combining four even notes to a measure with eight even notes to a measure is relatively easy, as is combining three even notes to a measure with six or nine even notes. But although these tasks are automatic, combining three even notes against four even notes is extremely difficult. That this task is learnable indicated for Cheng that the difficulty does not stem from any physiological incompatibility, but rather from lack of a suitably structured skill. Because of the possibility of restructuring, learning inevitably goes beyond mere automaticity. Learning involves the constant modification of organizational structures. Rumelhart and Norman (1978) identified restructuring as a process that occurs 'when new structures are devised for interpreting new information and imposing a new organization on that already stored' (p. 39). They contrasted this process of learning with (a) 'accretion,' whereby information is incremented by a new piece of data or a new set of facts, and (b) 'tuning,' whereby there is a change in the categories used for interpreting new information. In tuning, categories, or schemata, are modified; in restructuring, new structures are added that allow for new interpretation of facts. Rumelhart and Norman argued that learning is not a unitary process, but that there are different kinds of learning, one of which is restructuring. Whereas some learning is thought to occur continuously by accretion, as is true of the development of automaticity through practice, other learning is thought to occur in a discontinuous fashion, by restructuring. This discontinuity accounts for the second-language learner's perception of sudden movements of insight or 'clicks of comprehension.' At such moments, presumably, the learner can be said to understand the material in a new way, to be looking at it differently. Often learners report that this experience is followed by rapid progress, as old linguistic information and skills are fitted into this new way of understanding. Whether it is necessary to postulate different kinds of learning, as Rumelhart and Norman suggested, or whether automaticity and restructuring can be seen as different phases of a single learning process, cognitive theorists agree that there is more to learning a complex cognitive skill than developing automaticity through practice. Learning involves a reassembly and refinement of procedures of the mind. Acquisition of cognitive skills involves consolidation, refinement, and restructuring, as the learner gains increasing control.
Second Language Learning 1.3.4 Second-language learning as a complex cognitive skill According to cognitive theory, second-language learning, like any other complex cognitive skill, involves the gradual integration of subskills, as controlled processes initially predominate and later become automatic. Thus the initial stages of learning involve the slow development of skills and the gradual elimination of errors as the learner attempts to automatize aspects of performance. In later phases, there is continual restructuring as learners shift their internal representations. Although both processes occur throughout the learning of any complex cognitive skill, gains in automaticity are thought to be more characteristic of early stages of learning and restructuring of later stages. For the most part, second-language researchers have been more concerned with the development of automaticity than with restructuring, though there has been some recognition of the role restructuring plays in second-language acquisition. A number of authors have commented on discontinuities in the second-language learning process Lightbown (1985) pointed out that second-language acquisition is not simply linear and cumulative, but is characterized by 'backsliding' and loss of forms that seemingly were mastered. She attributed this decline in performance to a process whereby learners have mastered some forms and then encounter new ones that cause a restructuring of the whole system.
as it occurs in classroom settings? There are some cases where a direct link is possible; in other cases, there are similarities between assumptions and tenets in theory and language teaching, but a direct link between theory and practice would be difficult to establish.
2.1 Learning Theory and the Audiolingual Approach During and after World War II, the deployment of armed forces personnel in many countries of the world resulted in the need for intensive language programs for the US military. These programs were for essentially pragmatic reasons directed at the spoken word. New techniques were developed, and modern linguistic knowledge was applied to the practical problem of language training. In time, the method used by the military spread to universities and to the public school system. This method, which was sometimes referred to as the 'army method,' became known more widely as the audiolingual method. It stresses the use of repetitive drill as a means of teaching new language habits. Grammar is taught inductively once oral mastery of syntactic structures is acquired. Translation is proscribed and contrastive linguistics is seen as a tool for the teacher. The audiolingual method won the blessing of psychologists because the then prevalent learning theory approach regarded language learning as a process of habit development to be inculcated by various con[Restructuring] occurs because language is a complex tingencies of reinforcement. Hullian and Skinnerian hierarchical system whose components interact in nonlinear ways. Seen in these terms, an increase in error theories were invoked to justify increasing autorate in one area may reflect an increase in complexity or matization of language instruction. Even more flexible accuracy in another, followed by overgeneralization of a advocates were fond of speaking of sequential control newly acquired structure, or simply by a sort of overload of the learning process, specification of learning goals, of complexity which forces a restructuring, or at least a and the effectiveness of immediate reinforcement. simplification, in another part of the system. But the audiolingual method appealed to linguists (Lightbown 1985: 177) as well. As the field of linguistics swung around to a This provides an explanation for examples of 'U-- Chomskyan perspective and transformational gramshaped developmental functions,' where performance mar dominated the field, a number of researchers saw declines as more complex internal representations the possibility of a rapprochement between audireplace less complex ones, and increases again as skill olingual methods and transformational grammar. In time, however, it became increasingly apparent becomes expertise. There are many examples of such U-shaped functions in the literature on first-and that the audiolingual approach and generative linguissecond-language learning (see McLaughlin 1990). The tics were strange bedfellows. The Chomskyan revolt explanation for such U-shaped functions is that inte- against structuralist linguistics had attacked the fungrating large subtasks makes heavy demands on work- damental assumption of the audiolingual approach— ing memory, and hence performance is actually worse namely that language learning involved the acquiin subsequent stages than it is initially. Thus it is sition of new habits. Instead, the now dominant parapossible for increased practice to create conditions for digm viewed language as a creative process, and restructuring with attendant decrements in per- language competence was regarded as underlying formance as learners reorganize their internal rep- knowledge of abstract principles and rules. resentational framework. 2.2 The Implications of the Chomskyan Revolt 2. The Impact of Theory on Second-language 'Generative linguistics' provided a formal and funPedagogy damental distinction between deep and surface strucWhat connections can be made between theoretical ture representations of language. It developed a developments and the practice of language teaching complex and elegant system of rules and conventions 547
Teaching Additional Languages to describe language. It was not clear, however, how transformational grammar could be applied to classroom language instruction. The focus of generative linguistics is on describing the abstract system of rules that comprises a native speaker's linguistic competence. Not only is generative theory unconcerned with actual performance, it is also unconcerned with the psychological reality of this system of rules. Chomsky and his followers have been engaged in an enterprise aimed at describing linguistic rules designed to generate all and only the grammatical utterances of a language and to offer a principled account of the relationships between these rules. These rules were never assumed by linguists to be the rules used in real-life production and comprehension. In an often cited passage, Chomsky wrote: I am frankly rather skeptical about the significance, for the teaching of languages, of such insights and understanding as have been attained in linguistics and psychology ... It is difficult to believe that either linguistics or psychology has achieved a level of theoretical understanding that might enable it to support a 'technology' of language teaching. (1966 p. 37)
Linguistic theory could, however, provide the language teacher with insights into the nature of language, though it could not be used to justify particular teaching methods. Some suggested that what current linguistic theory has to offer the language teaching profession are not applications but implications. Indeed, the concept of language as a creative, generative competence has profound implications for techniques of second-language teaching. If language is creative and generative, pattern-practice drills are counterproductive. The most significant development that typifies this movement away from language learning as habit formation to language acquisition as a creative construction process is the so-called 'natural approach' (Krashen and Terrell 1983). 2.2.7 The natural approach The natural approach is predicated on the belief that communicative competence, or functional ability in a language, arises from exposure to the language in meaningful settings where the communicative intent expressed by the language is understood. Rules, patterns, vocabulary, and other language forms are not learned as they are presented or encountered, but are gradually established in the learner's repertory on the basis of exposure to comprehensible input. As in other instances of the direct method discussed earlier, rule isolation and error correction are explicitly eschewed in the natural approach. If the teacher uses a grammatical syllabus, she is likely to be teaching structures that some learners know already and that 548
are too far beyond other learners. If the teacher corrects errors, her students are not free to experiment creatively with the language. 'Creative construction' is the result of the role system-internal factors play in the acquisition process. Like early Chomskyan theorists, Krashen and Terrell posit an innate capacity for acquiring language, referred to as the 'Language acquisition device' (LAD). The LAD is assumed to aid humans in processing speech in order to be able to construct the system that underlies it. The LAD is also assumed to contain some 'universal' features of language, such as the role of word order in signaling meaning and basic grammatical relationships between items such as subject and object, so as to facilitate and speed up language acquisition. It is assumed that adults can access the same natural LAD that children use (Krashen 1982). However, as Gregg (1984) has pointed out, Krashen appears to be giving the LAD a scope of operation much wider than is normally the case in linguistic theory. Krashen seemed to equate LAD with unconscious 'acquisition' of any sort; in contrast, Chomsky—who first developed the notion of a LAD—saw the mind as modular, with the LAD as but one of various 'mental organs' that interact with each other and with the input to produce linguistic competence. According to Chomsky, the LAD is a construct that describes the child's initial state, before the child receives linguistic input from the environment. The LAD is constrained by innate linguistic universals to generate grammars that account for the input. It is not clear how the concept of LAD can be applied to an adult learner (Gregg 1984). The adult is no longer in an initial state with respect to language and is also endowed with more fully developed cognitive structures. In fact, Chomsky stated at one point that he believed that whereas first-language acquisition takes place through the essential language faculty, which atrophies at a certain age, it is still possible to learn a language after that age by using other mental faculties such as the logical or the mathematical. This suggests that for Chomsky, the ability to use LAD declines with age and that adult second-language learners must rely on other 'mental organs.' More recently, however, Chomsky has made some statements about second-language performance that seem compatible with Krashen's argument that adults and children have access to the same language acquisition device. Chomsky maintained that 'people learn language from pedagogical grammars by the use of their unconscious universal grammar' (1975: 249). If one assumes that the LAD is constrained by an innate universal grammar that enables the child or adult second-language learner to project grammars that account for the input from speakers of the target language, then universal grammar theory appears to be compatible with Krashen's notions.
Second Language Learning On closer examination, however, it is difficult to fit Krashen's notions within contemporary universal grammar theory. As Flynn (1985) noted, Universal Grammar theory is focused on abstract and linguistically significant principles that are assumed to underlie all natural languages. These principles are argued to comprise the essential language faculty with which all individuals are in general uniformly and equally endowed. Language acquisition is seen as a process of setting the values of the parameters of these universal principles, and not as a problem of acquiring grammatical rules. This is a very different enterprise from the one that concerns Krashen. Other than its recourse to the notion of LAD, the natural approach shows little direct relationship to current Chomskyan theory. Nonetheless, in spite of these differences, it can be argued that the Krashen-Terrell natural approach does reflect Chomskyan thinking about language as a generative and creative process. Generative linguists might have a different agenda, but they would certainly applaud the basic assumptions of the natural approach—that language teaching needs to move from a grammar-oriented curriculum that focuses on the correction of erroneous habits to a more communicatively-oriented curriculum that allows learners to discover the underlying rules creatively. 2.2.2 Interlanguage and developmental sequences The term 'interlanguage' was coined by Selinker (1972) to refer to the 'interim grammars' constructed by second-language learners on their way to the target language. Since the early 1970s inter-language has come to characterize a major approach to secondlanguage research and theory, and some authors use it as synonymous with second-language learning generally. In Selinker's original use of the term, interlanguage means two things: (a) the learner's system at a single point in time; and (b) the range of interlocking systems that characterizes the development of learners over time. The interlanguage is thought to be distinct from both the learner's first language and from the target language. It evolves over time as learners employ various internal strategies to make sense of the input and to control their own output. These cognitive strategies include 'transfer,' 'overgeneralization,' and 'simplification.' In contrast to Selinker's cognitive emphasis, Adjemian (1976) argued that the systematicity of the interlanguage should be analyzed linguistically as rulegoverned behavior. In this view, the internal organization of the interlanguage can be idealized linguistically, just like any natural language. Like any language system, interlanguage grammars are seen to obey universal linguistic constraints and evidence internal consistency. We may not be able to generate the interlanguage—or any language—through linguistic constructs, but we can learn something about the
second-language learner's speech by making a series of descriptions of the learner's interlanguage. Adjemian cited Corder's (1973) suggestion that research be directed at the learner's 'transitional competence'—that is, at the set of grammatical intuitions about the interlanguage that the learner possesses at a given point in time. Once knowledge is obtained about transitional competence, Adjemian saw the researcher to be in a much better position to infer the psychological mechanisms involved. For this reason Adjemian argued that analysis of the systematicity of the interlanguage should begin with the regularities observed in a large body of data and should be directed at determining the properties of the learner's grammar. This enterprise is compatible with UG thinking, but it is not clear how it relates to pedagogy. One possible application comes from recent work on 'developmental sequences' in the interlanguage. For example, Zobl (1986), assuming a uo-based approach, accounted for the relative difficulty of several secondlanguage parameters, for example, word order, subject-versus-object prominence, in terms of available processing resources. He argued that the acquisition of the target parameter is constrained by relative processing difficulty, with structure requiring fewer processing resources being acquired at an earlier stage. In a similar manner, Pienemann and Johnston (1987), invoke general, perceptually-based processing strategies to explain acquisitional stages based on implicationally-scaled data obtained from German and English second-language learners. The interesting claim is made that these hierarchically-ordered processing strategies constitute necessary—but not sufficient—constraints on the appearance of specific surface forms—for example, the appearance of the third person singular. If there are psychologically constrained developmental sequences in the interlanguage, what can be learned in the language classroom may be subject to some of the constraints that determine the course of natural acquisition. Pienemann (1989) has argued that this is in fact the case, and that instruction can only promote language acquisition if the interlanguage is close to the point when the structure to be taught is acquired in a natural setting. The learner must be ready to acquire given items—ready in the sense that he or she has already passed through the necessary preliminary developmental sequences. Pienemann's argument has important implications for language syllabus construction. Research on developmental sequences found in learners' interlanguage could be used as a guide for the ordering of the language syllabus. Unfortunately, there is little consensus on what developmental sequences exist in the interlanguage, and there is also evidence that instruction can produce deviations from the 'natural' order, even when instruction is directed at meaningful communication in natural contexts. 549
Teaching Additional Languages 2.2.3 Current UG theory As was pointed out earlier, Chomsky's is a theory of grammatical competence, not of grammatical performance. The theory is based on abstraction: To discover the properties of Universal Grammar and core grammar we must attempt to abstract away from complicating factors of various sorts, a course that has its hazards but is inescapable in serious inquiry... (Chomsky 1981:39).
The theory separates competence from performance, acquisition from development, and the core from the periphery. Each of these operations takes the inquiry further from actual language as it is used by its speakers. Furthermore, there is the question of how to make the connection from a linguistic theory of language competence to a theory of second-language learning. Chomsky is not concerned in his writings with secondlanguage learning. The burden rests on those who would apply his ideas to second language to show how the connection is to be made. What has happened to this point is that researchers have used universal grammar theory as a source of hypotheses about second-language learning. This enterprise has yielded interesting information about interlanguage development, but attention has been restricted to a relatively small set of syntactic phenomena. There is even debate about the issue of whether ug is accessible to adult second-language learners. Some theorists take the position that UG is not accessible to adult learners and that second-language learning in adulthood involves problem-solving or general learning strategies. Even those who believe that UG is accessible in adult second-language acquisition are extremely cautious when it comes to drawing applications to language teaching. Principles of UG, such as 'Subjacency,' 'Pro Drop,' or the 'Theta Criterion,' are highly abstract and are not the kinds of properties of language that language teachers currently teach—nor is it clear that they should (White 1989). The UG claim is that such properties cannot be learned; they are highly abstract universal principles that are part of the learner's competence. They are not principles to be taught; they are presupposed for learning to occur. But this does not mean that UG has nothing to say. There are potential implications for language teaching with respect to the question of what kind of evidence can be used to reset parameters (White 1989). Certain types of grammar lessons and correction in the language classroom can sometimes fill a gap not covered by positive evidence from the input to which learners are exposed. The example mentioned earlier was adverbial placement: French learners of English may need to be told that English does not allow adverbs to intervene between verb and object. Japanese learners of English may need to be told that
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English reflexives always require a local antecedent. In this sense, UG may lead to a revised 'contrastive analysis,' one based not on the structural comparison of rules, but rather on the ways that the rules exploit the same underlying principles. The UG argument is that surface properties of English stem from deeper principles and parameters, and as we learn more about these principles and parameters, it may be possible to identify surface features that will cause learners from a specific first-language background certain difficulties with a specific second-language. 2.3 The Impact of Cognitive Theory According to contemporary cognitive psychology, the learning of a complex skill, such as a second language, involves the gradual integration of lower-level skills and their accumulation as automatic processes in long-term storage. In the learning process component skills that require more mental work become routinized and thereby free up controlled processes for other functions. As automaticity develops, controlled processing is bypassed and attentional limitations are overcome. This transition from controlled to automatic processing is central to learning. 2.3.1 Top-down and bottom-up processes There are several ways that this transition can be achieved. In the jargon of cognitive psychology one can distinguish 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' processes. A top-down, or knowledge-driven system is thought to use higher-level information to facilitate the processing of incoming data. A bottom-up, or inductive system relies principally on the information carried by the input. In contrast to children, who usually do not seek out abstract, higher-level information about language, adult learners can use higher-level abstract knowledge of linguistic structure to shortcut the learning process, saving them from the trouble of generating false hypotheses about underlying rules. This does not mean that the application of cognitive theory leads to grammar-based instruction. Many adult learners can profit from bottom-up techniques that ignore explicit considerations of form and focus instead on communication. What cognitive theory provides is a way of thinking about the learning process, not prescriptions for pedagogy. There are various strategies learners can use in tackling a second language, that require differing degrees of focal attention to formal rules. Learner Strategies. A significant recent development inspired by cognitive psychology is work on learner strategies. A body of evidence in the cognitive psychology literature suggests that 'experts' use different information-processing strategies than do more 'novice' learners. Differences between experts and novices have been found in research on learning mechanisms in physics, arithmetic, algebra, geometry,
Second Language Learning computer programing, and chess. For the most part, research indicates that experts restructure the elements of a learning task into abstract schemata that are not available to novices, who focus principally on the surface elements of a task. Thus experts replace complex subelements with a single schema that allows more abstract processing. In second-language research within an 'expert systems' framework (e.g., Oxford 1986; O'Malley and Chamot 1989), the attempt has been made to specify strategies that good language learners use. The goals have been to identify strategies used by good learners and to teach them to less experienced learners. The intent has been to expand and refine the repertoire of strategies of poor learners so that they may benefit from the strategies used by 'expert' learners. It has been noted that intervention research in the training of cognitive strategies to learners in other skill areas has demonstrated that the continued choice and appropriate use of strategies in a variety of situations requires 'metacognition.' It is not enough for learners to be trained to use a particular strategy, they must also understand the significance of the strategy and be able to monitor and evaluate its use. The Role of Practice. It is often assumed that the focus of cognitive theory on the integration of skills invariably leads to the promotion of routine drills in language teaching. Indeed, the cognitive description of the learning process stresses the notion that repeated performance of the components of a task through controlled processing leads to the availability of automatized routines. However, these automatized routines should be conceptualized as higher-order plans, thought to be flexible entities that allow for integrated execution of various complex tasks. As Levelt (1978) noted, while an essential object of training is automatization of lower-level components, it is incorrect to conclude that this should be done exclusively by frequent repetition of one and the same activity. Training should involve the frequent use of a particular sentence structure in varied lexical settings, not the frequent use of particular sentences in isolation. Once automaticity is developed and controlled processing bypassed, the learner should be able to call up different lexical items and syntactic subcomponents, depending on the task. Thus the same plan can generate different realizations, depending on the lexical setting. It is also clear from the experience of researchers in the second-language field that practice does not make perfect. Even though there are acquisition sequences, acquisition is not simply linear or cumulative, and having practiced a particular form or pattern does not mean that the form or pattern is permanently established. Learners appear to forget forms and structures which they had seemed previously to master and which they had extensively practiced (Lightbown 1985).
In this view, practice can have two very different effects. It can lead to improvement in performance as subskills become automated, but it is also possible for increased practice to lead to restructuring and attendant decrements in performance as learners reorganize their 'internal representational framework.' It seems that the effects of practice do not accrue directly or automatically to a skilled action, but rather cumulate as learners develop more efficient procedures. Performance may follow a U-shaped curve, declining as more complex internal representations replace less complex ones, and increasing again as skill becomes expertise (McLaughlin 1990). 3. Conclusion
Did behaviorism or structural linguistics lead to the audiolingual approach? Did the concern with interlanguage grammars result from generative linguistics? Is the current focus on learner strategies a direct result of contemporary cognitive psychology? Did developments in humanistic psychology spawn methods of language teaching that emphasize the whole person and affective processes? The answer to these questions may be indeterminate because of the difficulties inherent in tracing intellectual genealogies. In some idealized epistemological realm, theories are developed, their predictions are tested, and the results of this empirical research are incorporated into practice. In the real world, it is more likely that practice evolves independently of theory, but uses theory as its justification. Theory and practice are typically the products of some vague and illdefined Zeitgeist. Both reflect common intellectual currents that affect the thinking of individuals with different agendas. It should be clear from the emphasis placed on them in this article that the most intellectually dynamic theories presently are those based on work in generative linguistics and cognitive psychology. They reflect two different approaches to the language-learning process. Many researchers and theorists adopt the linguistic perspective with its focus on the 'creative construction process,' and on the mechanisms and principles whereby the learner constructs an understanding of the target-language system. Many teachers, however, follow a more psychological model, and assume that if learners are required to produce predetermined pieces of language (through drills or questions-and-answers), this productive activity will lead them to internalize the system underlying the language, to the point where the system operates without conscious reflection (Littlewood 1984). This model is closest to the cognitive-psychological perspective that sees the use of a second language as a cognitive skill involving the internalization, through practice, of various informationhandling techniques to overcome capacity limitations. Skill acquisition is seen to involve the accumulation 551
Teaching Additional Languages of automatic processing through initial controlled operations that require more workload and attention. Internalized rules are restructured as learners adjust their internal representations to match the target language. This restructuring process involves the use of learning, production, and communication strategies. The difficulty with a skill model of language learning is that teaching can easily lapse into drill-andpractice exercises. The critique of the traditional approach to language teaching made by Krashen and others is that such an approach leaves little room for creative construction and places too great an emphasis on the conscious learning of rules. There is an obvious need to incorporate both the more creative aspects of language learning and the more cognitive aspects that are susceptible to guidance and training. This is likely to be the next phase in the theory of language pedagogy, and to some extent it is already happening in practice as individual teachers develop their own eclectic techniques. Bibliography Adjemian C 1976 On the nature of interlanguage systems. Language Learning 26: 297-320 Cheng P W 1985 Restructuring versus automaticity: Alternative accounts of skill acquisition. Psychological Review 92(3): 414-423 Chomsky N 1966 Linguistic theory. In: Mead R C (ed.) Reports of the Working Committee. Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, New York Chomsky N 1975 Reflections on Language. Pantheon, New York Chomsky N 1981 Lectures on Government and Binding. Foris, Dordrecht Corder S P 1973 The elicitation of interlanguage. In: Svartvik J (ed.) Errata: Papers in Error Analysis. CWK Gleerup, Lund Curran C 1976 aCounselling-Learning in Second Language. Apple River Press, Apple River, IL Flynn S 1985 Principled theories of L2 acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 7: 99-107 Gattegno C 1972 Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools: The Silent Way. Educational Solutions Inc., New York Gregg K R 1984 Krashen's monitor and Occam's razor. Applied Linguistics 5: 79-100
Jespersen O 1904 How To Teach a Foreign Language. Allen and Unwin, London Krashen S 1982 Principles and Practice of Second Language Acquisition. Pergamon Press, Oxford Krashen S D, Terrell T D 1983 The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom. Pergamon Press, Oxford Levelt W J M 1978 Skill theory and language teaching. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 1: 53-70 Lightbown P M 1985 Great expectations: Second-language acquisition research and classroom teaching. Applied Linguistics 6: 173-89 Littlewood W T 1984 Foreign and Second Language Learning: Language-Acquisition Research and Its Implications for the Classroom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Lozanov G 1979 Suggestology and Outlines of Suggestopedy. Gordon and Breach, New York McLaughlin B 1990 Restructuring. Applied Linguistics 11: 113-28 O'Malley J M, Chamot A U 1989 Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Oxford R L 1986 Second Language Learning Strategies: Current Research and Implications for Practice, Technical Report 3. University of California, Los Angeles, CA Palmer H E 1940 The Teaching of Oral English. Longmans, London Pienemann M 1989 Is language teachable? Psycholinguistic experiments and hypotheses. Applied Linguistics 10: 5279 Pienemann M, Johnston M 1987 A predictive framework of SLA (Unpublished manuscript, University of Sydney) Rumelhart D E, Norman D A 1978 Accretion, tuning, and restructuring: Three modes of learning. In: Cotton J W, Klatzky R (eds.) Semantic Factors in Cognition. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Schneider W, Shiffrin R M 1977 Controlled and automatic human information processing, vol. I: Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review 84: 1-66 Selinker L 1972 Interlanguage. IRAL 10: 209-31 Shiffrin R M, Schneider W 1977 Controlled and automatic human information processing. Vol. II: Perceptual learning, automatic attending, and a general theory. Psychological Review 84: 127-90 White L 1989 Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition. Benjamins, Amsterdam Zobl H 1986 A functional approach to the attainability of typological targets in L2 acquisition. Second Language Research 2: 16-32
Second Language Learning: Individual Differences R. L. Oxford
An understanding of student characteristics—what psychologists call 'individual differences'—is very important to successful instruction in a second or fore-
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ign language (L2). Effective teaching demands that teachers must comprehend at least some of these differences, including those typical of age and gender,
Second Language Learning: Individual as well as students' aptitude, learning styles, motivation, and personality. Such knowledge helps teachers design and tailor the activities conducted in the classroom. Without this type of understanding, L2 instruction might miss the mark. This article discusses individual differences in five major categories: (a) demographics including age and gender; (b) aptitude for learning a new language; (c) L2 learning styles; (d) L2 learning motivation; and (e) personality features that directly relate to L2 learning, including anxiety, self-esteem, tolerance of ambiguity, risk-taking, cooperation, and competition. The sixth and final section of this article consists of some tentative instructional implications based on the research. This article avoids any artificial dichotomy between learning and acquisition (for additional commentaries on individual differences in language learning, see Galbraith and Gardner 1988 and Skehan 1989; see also Learning Strategies). 1. Demographics
Two of the most salient demographic features in language learning are age and gender. 1.1 Age Age is the most commonly mentioned determiner of success or failure in learning a new language (Scarcella and Oxford, 1991). Yet no consistent research exists on the optimal age for learning a new language, although many studies have explored the topic. Two main arguments are posed in favor of learning foreign or second languages at younger ages: (a) the Chomskian cognitive-nativist argument that language learning is an innate ability that dissipates with age, and (b) the Lennebergian neurological argument that one's neural plasticity decreases with age, thus affecting language learning ability. There are also several opposite arguments, focused on the fact that in some instances older learners attain higher levels of foreign or second language acquisition than their younger counterparts. Advantages for different ages have been variously attributed to: (a) prior experience in language learning, (b) onset of formal operations or abstract thinking, (c) cognitive maturity, (d) quality of input, (e) affective factors, (f) sociocultural factors, (g) passing of a sensitive period for second language development, and (h) a succession of multiple critical periods. To resolve these differences in research conclusions, Scarcella and Oxford (1991) argue that older learners have an advantage in terms of rate of acquisition of syntax and morphology, but that ultimate fluency and nativelike pronunciation in a new language are clearly better among those who start learning it as children. Adults proceed more rapidly through the initial stages of syntactic and morphological development than children but not the later stages, and they often experience fossilization, or the permanent cessation of L2
Differences
development. Scarcella and Oxford (1991) speculate that the principles of universal grammar might be less available to adults. In sum, the weight of evidence suggests that although adults have some initial advantages in terms of rate of language acquisition, younger learners develop greater fluency, acquire more nativelike pronunciation, and pass through later steps faster than older learners, thus becoming more proficient than older learners in the long run. 1.2 Gender Unlike age, gender has received scant research attention in research on L2 development. This is astounding, considering all the research on gender differences in other areas, including native language development and use (see, for example, Maccoby and Jacklin 1974). The rare research on gender differences in the L2 area has concentrated on how people learn new languages, that is, on the choice of strategies or behaviors they employ for L2 learning. Across several L2 studies women use different learning strategies than men, report using them more frequently, and focus more on strategies related to social and communicative efforts. After strategy training, men and women show roughly equivalent frequencies of strategy use but still employ qualitatively different strategies. Obviously, more research needs to be done on gender differences in L2 learning. Gender differences in learning style, motivation, and a host of other variables await investigation, as well as gender differences in rate of attainment and in ultimate proficiency levels in particular language skills and overall. This research area has hardly been touched. 2. L2 Aptitude
The two primary, up-to-date references concerning L2 aptitude are Parry and Stansfield (1990) and Skehan (1989). Skehan provides a historical overview of the development of L2 aptitude batteries, starting with early, grammar-focused tests from the early twentieth century. The prevalent view of L2 aptitude is embodied in the Modern Languages Aptitude Test MLST, created by Carroll and Sapon in 1957. The MLAT, designed for ages 14 and above, was devised on the basis of the following four elements found in factor analyses of many initial items: phonemic coding ability (making sound-symbol linkages), grammatical sensitivity (recognizing grammatical functions of words in sentences), inductive language learning ability (identifying patterns of correspondence by reasoning and inferring from limited evidence), and rote memorization (making associations between stimulus and response). These four components are the basis of the five subtests of the MLAT: phonetic script (phonemic coding), spelling clues (phonemic coding and native language vocabu-
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Teaching Additional Languages lary), words in sentences (grammatical sensitivity, possibly to a limited extent also inductive language learning ability), number learning (rote memory), and paired associates (rote memory). Research shows that the MLAT fails to discriminate well at the higher levels. Another criticism of the MLAT is that it is highly analytic, as though language learning were based almost strictly on analytic skills without any balancing global qualities. Many of the more global language learning abilities which some current theorists deem essential for natural communication—abilities such as getting the main idea of a passage, continuing a conversation through compensation despite not knowing all the necessary vocabulary, gaining an empathy with the target culture, identifying and taking advantage of practice opportunities, guessing from contextual clues—are largely absent from the MLAT. Nevertheless, the MLAT has had moderate predictive value (0.40-0.60) in many settings, with better predictive power (0.70) for intensive courses involving heterogeneous students. One might speculate that a possible reason for this adequate statistical result is that the MLAT, when tested for its predictive power, was used to predict achievement in courses where the methodology was not highly communicative, and on tests reflecting a similar orientation. Until the mid-1970s, the prevalent instructional methodologies and achievement tests were analytically oriented (grammar-translation driven) or audiolingual (pattern drills based on stimulus-response techniques) rather than geared toward natural communication. A competitor of the MLAT for the teenage population is the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery, designed for ages 13 through to 19. This test focuses on inductive language learning ability and auditory ability, without the MLAT's additional grammatical sensitivity and rote memorization aspects. Because its scope is more limited than that of the MLAT, Skehan considers the Pimsleur to rest on a more restricted concept of L2 aptitude. Another possible competitor of the MLAT at the adult level is the Defense Language Aptitude Battery, or DLAB, which has just about the same predictive power as the MLAT but may only be useful in the limited setting in which it was developed, according to Skehan. Little research of any major significance was conducted on these batteries in the 1970s and 1980s, and sparse advancement has occurred in the L2 aptitude field outside of these batteries. Researchers have usually avoided predicting achievement in distinct skill areas, such as listening or reading, and have often skirted the global language skills in favor of analytic prediction. Types of L2 aptitude research that have been conducted include: validation studies on existing batteries, development of new L2 aptitude batteries for specific countries, exploration of the relationship between size of working memory and L2 aptitude
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(a very minimal relationship), investigations of the relationship between first language development and L2 aptitude (a moderately strong relationship), and placement of students into different kinds of L2 methodologies according to their MLAT and Pimsleur subtest scores (relatively successful). One series of British investigations found that L2 aptitude scores, which predict later L2 achievement, are themselves predictable from two main sources: (a) socioeconomic and educational factors such as social class, parental education, and native language vocabulary development; and (b) a general syntax-processing capacity (Skehan 1989). Skehan suggests that L2 aptitude assessment might be improved by dividing students into eight possible learner types (more typically called by other researchers learner styles or learning styles) according to three factors that look remarkably like some of the factors underlying the MLAT: phonemic coding ability, language analytic ability, and memory. Skehan condenses his eight types to three: the even-profiled learner, equally good in all areas; the analytic learner who breaks down language into ever smaller pieces; and the memory-based learner who deals with larger chunks of language and is therefore more global or holistic. In the late 1980s, the US government gathered a group of L2 testing specialists to a conference on language aptitude. The result is an excellent volume edited by Parry and Stansfield (1990) calling for an overall rethinking of L2 aptitude after years of relative neglect. As Parry and Stansfield note, L2 aptitude assessment is used chiefly by US government agencies for selection purposes and is hardly ever used in academia. In the Parry-Stansfield volume, each chapter author makes recommendations for improvements to L2 aptitude measurement. Carroll, the MLAT creator, suggests only minor changes in the MLAT, but other chapter authors call for more radical alterations in the L2 aptitude field. Among the suggested changes are: expanding the concept of L2 aptitude to include a variety of new predictors, such as general ability measures, learning style aspects (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile; reflective, impulsive; field dependent, field independent; thinking, feeling), learning strategies (specific behaviors), and attitudinal and motivational characteristics; expanding L2 aptitude assessment to use in academia; and using L2 aptitude measurement for many new purposes beyond mere selection (e.g., diagnosis of strengths and weaknesses, streaming or tracking students with a similar style, and remediation of style-related difficulties). Clearly the Parry-Stansfield recommendations go far beyond Skehan's suggestions, although Skehan's idea of learner types is somewhat like a rudimentary learning style profile for L2 aptitude measurement. Many new possibilities for obtaining broader L2 aptitude information and using it more effectively are
Second Language Learning: Individual Differences now on the table. It is not clear whether many researchers will follow up on these ideas, but at least one US government agency is conducting a long-term study of L2 learning with a large array of predictors such as learning styles, strategies, and general cognitive ability. This might signal the beginning of a quiet revolution in L2 aptitude assessment. 3. Learning Styles As just seen, learning styles were noted as a possible addition to L2 aptitude batteries. L2 learning styles are the general approaches students use to learn a new language. These are the same styles they employ in learning many other subjects and solving problems of various kinds. Some researchers believe that L2 learning styles can be used to match students with more appropriate L2 instructional approaches geared to their instructional needs. As noted above, a modest start has already occurred in using the subtest scores of the ML AT and the Pimsleur to place students in language classes taught with different methods; these scores provide a very rough hint of students' learning styles. Four major dimensions of L2 learning style appear to be the most important: analytic versus global; visual versus auditory versus hands-on; intuitive/random versus concrete/sequential learning; and closure-oriented versus open (Oxford 1990). 3.1 Analytic versus Global The analytic versus global dimension contrasts focusing on the details versus concentrating on the main idea or big picture. Analytic students highlight grammatical details and often avoid more free-flowing communicative activities. They focus on contrasting language features, learning rules, and dissecting words and sentences. Because of their concern for accurate details, analytic learners do not like to guess, use synonyms, or paraphrase when they do not know a particular word. They would rather look up the information and have it exactly right, rather than being content with the general communication of meaning. Their learning style often slows them down and keeps them from obtaining sufficient conversational practice. In contrast, global students like socially interactive, communicative events emphasizing the main idea. They find it hard to cope with grammatical minutiae, and they avoid analysis of words, sentences, and rules when possible. Global students are happy with compensation strategies like guessing when they do not know a word they hear or read, and in speaking or writing they feel free to use synonyms or paraphrases if they run into a communicative roadblock. Lack of concern with accuracy sometimes causes global students to fossilize, i.e., become stuck at a lower level of proficiency.
3.2 Sensory Preferences Another very significant stylistic difference highlights sensory preferences: visual, auditory, and hands-on (a combination of kinesthetic or movement-oriented and tactile or touch-oriented). Sensory preference refers to the physical, perceptual learning channels with which the student is the most comfortable. Visual students like to read and obtain a great deal of visual stimulation. For them, lectures, conversations, and oral directions without any visual backup can be very confusing and anxiety-producing. Auditory students are comfortable without visual input and therefore enjoy lectures, conversations, and oral directions. They are excited by classroom interactions in role-plays and similar activities. They sometimes, however, have difficulty with written work. Hands-on (tactile or kinesthetic) students like lots of movement and enjoy working with tangible objects, collages, and flashcards. Sitting at a desk for very long is not comfortable for hands-on learners, who prefer to have frequent breaks and move around the room. Reid (1987) found that ESL students varied significantly in their sensory preferences, with people from certain cultures differentially favoring the three different modalities for learning. Students from Asian cultures, for instance, are often highly visual, while Hispanics are frequently auditory. Many non-Western cultures value hands-on experiences, and therefore numerous students from these cultures prefer a handson learning style. 3.3 Intuitive I Random versus Concrete / Sequential Learning Intuitive/random students are able to think in abstract, large-scaled, nonsequential ways. Such students naturally distill the main principles of how the L2 operates, are often bored by concrete, step-by-step learning, and would rather take daring intellectual leaps. Concrete/sequential students are concerned with concrete facts, which they prefer to be presented in a step-by-step, organized fashion and not abstracted into principles. Concrete/sequential students are often slow and steady, making progress at their own rate but achieving goals nevertheless. Randomness and lack of consistency in lesson plans are difficult for such students to handle in the L2 classroom. 3.4 Openness versus Closure A final aspect of learning style is 'orientation to closure,' or the degree to which the person needs to reach decisions or clarity. This dimension is very closely related to tolerance of ambiguity, discussed later, and is also associated with flexibility in learning styles—the ability to shift styles when necessitated by the task. Students oriented toward closure are hard-working, organized, and planful and have a strong need for
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Teaching Additional Languages clarity. They want lesson directions and grammar rules to be clearly spelled out. Spontaneous activities are not welcomed by closure-oriented students, who prefer activities that allow preparation. 'Open learners' take L2 learning far less seriously, treating it like a game rather than a set of tasks. Openness can be a benefit in some situations, particularly those that require flexibility and the development of fluency, but it can be a detriment in other situations, such as highly structured and traditional classroom settings. 3.5 Uses of Style As mentioned above, L2 learning style might be used as a predictor (possibly as part of an aptitude battery) to help place students into classes based on methodologies that meet their learning needs. In any given classroom, the teacher might employ style data to devise classroom activities that cater to style differences among the students. Moreover, the style-informed teacher might help students expand their repertoire of behaviors beyond their 'stylistic comfort zones.' Through strategy training, students are taught to use strategies that they might ordinarily not think of employing. For instance, strategy training might help an analytic learner to reach a more global understanding of meaning and might enable a global student to communicate with greater grammatical precision and skill (see Learning Strategies). 4. L2 Learning Motivation Having just discussed learning style, we can move to motivation, another important individual difference among students. The major determiner of L2 learning success is motivation, according to Gardner (1985), who has shown through statistical path-analysis techniques that motivation strongly influences whether learners take advantage of opportunities to use the language and therefore affects ultimate proficiency levels. Motivation decides the extent of active, personal engagement in learning. Yet researchers do not understand exactly how motivation works in L2 learning. One reason for lack of clarity on the operation of L2 learning motivation is that most researchers have not defined 'motivation' adequately—or at all. Fortunately, Crookes and Schmidt (1989) have offered the following definition. Motivation is composed of internal, attitudinal factors and external, behavioral characteristics. The internal factors include: interest, relevance, expectancy, and outcomes. Interest in the subject or process is based on the learner's existing attitudes, experience, and background knowledge. Relevance involves the perception that personal needs such as achievement, affiliation with other people, and power are being met. Expectancy relates to the belief that the learner's involvement will be either a success or a failure. Outcomes are the intrinsic or extrinsic rewards felt by the learner. The three behavioral fea-
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tures of motivation are: decision, persistence, and activity level. The learner decides to choose, pay attention to, and engage in one activity but not others; persists over an extended time and returns to the activity after any interruptions; and maintains a high activity level. If any of these factors, internal or external, is missing or negative, overall motivation of the learner is weakened. For instance, a language teacher who overcorrects the student can lower the expectancy of success and thus reduce the student's willingness to pay attention or persist in learning the language. Research suggests that high L2 motivation sometimes spurs learners to interact with native speakers of the language, which in turn increases the amount of input learners receive. Motivation often leads learners to use a variety of learning strategies that can facilitate greater skill in language learning. Motivation encourages greater overall effort on the part of L2 learners and typically results in greater success in terms of general L2 proficiency. Motivation is also related to increased competence in specific language skills such as listening, reading, and speaking. Strong motivation helps learners maintain their L2 skills after classroom instruction is over. Most major researchers, such as Gardner (1985), have chosen a social-psychological orientation toward the role of motivation in L2 learning. In regard to ultimate L2 proficiency reached by learners, Gardner for many years championed 'integrative motivation'—the desire to learn a language to integrate oneself with the target culture—as better than 'instrumental motivation'—the desire to learn the language in order to get a better job or meet a language requirement. The desire to become integrated with the target culture relates strongly to the social-psychological constructs known as speech accommodation theory and Schumann's acculturation model. In recent years many researchers have disagreed with the primacy of integrative motivation (called by many terms, such as acculturation or in-group identification) in L2 learning. These theorists contend that one particular kind of motivation might not be uniformly superior in terms of ultimate L2 performance. For instance, research exists showing that instrumental motivation was more predictive than integrative motivation for language learning success in the Philippines, while integrative motivation was a stronger influence than instrumental motivation in English-speaking Canadian populations. Unfortunately, many kinds of L2 motivations have not yet been researched. Instrumental and integrative (and a more recent offshoot called assimilative) motivation are not the only types of L2 learning motivation that exist. For instance, some people learn languages for the fun or intellectual challenge of the process—what might be called entertainment motivation—rather than for instrumental profit or for socially integrative purposes. Some L2 learners view their
Second Language Learning: Individual Differences goal to be simply communicating with native speakers, rather than integrating with them, assimilating totally into their society, or reaping some kind of career reward. Humanistic psychology, basic drive theory, and other theoretical approaches might enlighten the study of L2 learning motivation. 5. Personality Features Relevant to L2 Learning A number of important personality features affect L2 learning for different individuals. These features include: anxiety, self-esteem, tolerance of ambiguity, risk-taking, competition, and cooperation. 5.1 Anxiety In L2 learning, as elsewhere, anxiety is a state of apprehension or fear that relates to negative attitudes and low morale. Motivation to learn suffers because L2 learning is perceived to be an unpleasant task. Low motivation leads to poorer performance, which results in still greater anxiety. The kind of anxiety ordinarily found in the L2 classroom is situational or state anxiety rather than the more permanent, ingrained trait anxiety (see especially Horwitz and Young 1991). It is common for L2 researchers to distinguish between 'facilitating anxiety' and 'debilitating anxiety.' However, some recent L2 investigators have concluded that 'facilitating anxiety' is only useful for very simple learning tasks. This conclusion rules out most of L2 learning. For this reason—and also because the term 'anxiety' as commonly used carries only negative connotations—it is preferable to use the term 'anxiety' to refer only to debilitating anxiety. While a certain amount of positive tension might be helpful to L2 learners, any true anxiety is likely to be detrimental to them. Many kinds of language activities can generate performance anxiety, depending on the student's learning style or skill level. Speaking in front of others can be anxiety-provoking for introverted or visual learners. For some students, writing, reading, or listening can also create fear, depending on their learning style preferences and their ability in these areas. The classroom structure can be a source of anxiety. In traditional L2 classrooms, students fear they will receive the teacher's negative criticism in front of the whole class and will thus appear stupid; they therefore experience anxiety. Conversely, a highly open, fluid, communicative classroom structure can heighten anxiety for students who want detailed, structured tasks that do not require interpersonal communication. Anxiety can come from a fear of, or from the actual experience of, culture shock, that is, the loss of culturally recognized signs and symbols of communication. Culture shock involves some or all of these symptoms: emotional regression, panic, anger, selfpity, indecision, sadness, alienation, 'reduced personality,' and physical illness. However, if handled effectively, culture shock can become a cross-cultural
growth experience. Anxiety is also related to low motivation based on negative attitudes—when the L2 learning process is perceived to be forced, irrelevant, style-conflicting, or unsuccessful. Anxiety can be diagnosed through anxiety inventories and is often readily observable to teachers and researchers. Signs include: (a) general avoidance: 'forgetting' the answer, showing carelessness, cutting class, coming late, arriving unprepared, avoiding eye contact, withdrawing from conversations, keeping quiet when interruption would be more natural, giving monosyllabic or noncommittal responses, and avoiding social interaction; (b) physical symptoms: squirming, fidgeting, playing with hair or clothing, nervously touching objects, stuttering or stammering, using physical masking behaviors (smiling, laughing, nodding), being physically unable to reproduce sounds, or experiencing a headache, tight muscles, tension, or pain; and (c) other signs, such as overstudying, being perfectionistic, protecting one's image, competing excessively, or being excessively self-effacing. It is necessary to consider the background culture of the learners to determine whether anxiety is present or some particular cultural value is reflected. L2 anxiety can be lessened through relax: ation, music, laughter, games, and a number of other techniques. 5.2 Self-esteem Student self-esteem is very important in the L2 classroom. Self-esteem is a self-judgment of worth or value, based on feelings of 'efficacy,' a sense of interacting effectively with one's own environment. Efficacy implies that some degree of control exists within oneself. If a person's 'locus of control'—the place one attributes control of one's life—is totally external (e.g., fate, luck, chance, the government, God, the Devil) as opposed to at least partially internal, then self-esteem often becomes a problem, particularly in the L2 classroom. Just like anxiety, self-esteem can be a trait (an inherent personality characteristic) or a state (related to a particular situation). Global self-esteem, which arises when the person is at a mental age of eight and can directly affect (and can be directly affected by) L2 learning, is based on two factors: (a) self-perceptions of competence in various broad areas, such as language learning in general, academic success as a whole, athletics, social interaction, physical appearance, and conduct, and (b) a personal assessment of the importance of each of these areas. Global selfesteem can suffer if the student does not do well in an area that he or she considers very significant. Research shows that learners with high global self-esteem maintain positive evaluations of themselves by assessing themselves and the world positively, even if (or especially if) that assessment is not accurate. Thus, to feel consistently good about oneself, positive self-
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Teaching Additional Languages delusion might be better than brutal self-honesty. L2 performance often improves when the learner makes a globally positive self-assessment, though this assessment might be inaccurate. Situational self-esteem is much more specific. It relates to a specific situation, event, or activity type. A person can feel good about himself or herself globally or generally yet at the same time experience low self-esteem in a particular situation or environment. For instance, an L2 student can feel globally efficacious in language learning but have lower selfesteem in the area of speaking. Research shows that unsuccessful L2 learners have lower self-esteem than successful L2 learners. Whether this affects their overall self-esteem or only their situational self-esteem partly depends on how important L2 learning is to the individuals involved. 5.3 Tolerance of Ambiguity Tolerance of ambiguity is the acceptance of confusing situations. L2 learning is full of ambiguity and uncertainty about meanings, referents, and pronunciation, so a degree of ambiguity tolerance is essential for L2 learners. Research indicates that students who are able to tolerate moderate levels of confusion are likely to persist longer in L2 learning than students who are overly frightened by the ambiguities inherent in learning a new language. Too much tolerance of ambiguity might lead to unquestioning acceptance and cognitive passivity. Students who do not need immediate 'closure,' i.e., who can deal with some degree of ambiguity, often appear to use better (more communicatively-oriented) L2 learning strategies than students who require rapid closure. The degree of ambiguity tolerance significantly predicts students' choice of many (although not all) learning strategies. 5.4 Risk-taking Ability Students who fear the frequent ambiguities of L2 learning often suffer reduced risk-taking ability. Research suggests that it is more useful for L2 learners to take moderate but intelligent risks, such as guessing meanings based on background knowledge and speaking up despite the possibility of making occasional mistakes, rather than taking no risks at all or taking extreme, uninformed risks. L2 students who fear ambiguity or whose selfesteem is low frequently 'freeze up,' allowing their inhibitions to take over completely. Decreases in risktaking frequently occur when students feel extreme discomfort in the L2 classroom. Students who avoid risks are stalled by actual or anticipated criticism from others or by self-criticism that they themselves supply. When they do not have enough practice, their language development becomes seriously stunted.
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5.5 Cooperation Cooperation in L2 learning comes in many forms, including working in tandem with the teacher, with fellow students, and with native speakers who are not connected with the classroom situation. Cooperating with peers in the L2 classroom is a special instance of cooperation. It involves a cooperative task structure, in which group or team participants work together on aspects of the same task, and sometimes a cooperative reward structure, in which participants receive a common reward for their efforts. Cooperative learning groups foster a sense of 'positive interdependence' and mutual support (Slavin 1983). In L2 learning, cooperation has the following demonstrated benefits: stronger motivation, greater achievement, increased satisfaction for teachers and students, more language practice, more feedback about language errors, and greater use of varied language functions. Cooperation drives many recent language teaching methods and approaches, such as community language learning and the natural approach. Additional advantages of cooperation in general educational research include higher selfesteem and confidence, decreased prejudice, and increased altruism and respect for others. But cooperation is not always second nature to L2 learners, especially in the ESL setting. Reid (1987) found that ESL students typically do not choose to work in cooperative groups and do not know about the benefits of cooperative learning. Their native cultures sometimes fail to provide extended experiences of students working together on common projects or goals. 5.6 Competition Excessive competition in the L2 classroom typically results in anxiety, inadequacy, guilt, hostility, withdrawal, and fear of failure. The phenomenon of L2 competition has been only lightly studied (see groundbreaking work by Bailey 1983). 6. Tentative Instructional Implications Concerning Individual Differences in L2 Learning
The research findings above suggest some possible, tentative implications about individual differences in L2 learning. Further research will be needed to validate these implications, which are directed at both teachers and students. First, age differences in L2 learning performance are expectable, and students might effectively be made aware of these differences as they plan their L2 learning goals. However, age differences could unnecessarily become an excuse for language teachers to limit the challenges presented to students, or for older L2 students to give up too easily. Neither one of these outcomes would be a helpful use of data on age differ-
Second Language Learning: Individual Differences Second, gender differences in L2 learning might be larger and more significant than teachers realize. Teachers might consider paying increased attention to cultural differences in gender roles as related to students' L2 learning performance. Students might become more aware of the possible effect of gender on their behaviors in learning a new language and might need to compensate occasionally. Third, L2 learning aptitude is undergoing a revitalization and redefinition. L2 teachers might benefit from paying attention to this quiet revolution, which might result in a much wider variety of uses of L2 aptitude information. Students could also gain much from knowing about their 'differential aptitudes' in various aspects of language learning. Fourth, it might be helpful for teachers to assess and understand their own learning and teaching styles and become aware of the styles of their students. Thereby, teachers would be better able to spot any style conflicts and to help learners stretch beyond their 'stylistic comfort zone.' Students might find information about their personal style to be valuable in L2 learning. They might seek activities and environments suitable to their particular learning needs. Fifth, L2 teachers might focus more clearly on heightening L2 learning motivation by making sure the material and the tasks are communicative, nonthreatening, exciting, relevant, appropriately challenging, capable of stimulating successful performance, and presented according to students' favored learning styles. Teachers could also improve student motivation by helping to reverse any negative attitudes and stereotypes. L2 students might improve their own L2 learning motivation by seeking situations and materials that are perceived as useful, relevant, and interesting. Sixth, by becoming aware of potential signs of anxiety, teachers might improve the classroom climate. It is important to keep in mind, however, that certain behaviors that indicate anxiety in one culture might simply be normal behavior in other cultures. L2 anxiety can be decreased through testing fairly, avoiding sarcasm, addressing students' favored learning styles, developing positive self-talk and relaxation strategies, using cooperative learning structures, employing diaries or emotional checklists, establishing L2 support groups, and setting realistic goals. Both teachers and students might take action to reduce anxiety in the classroom, once the signs become known. Seventh, teachers might consider assisting L2 students in developing their self-esteem through realistic, positive assessment of progress. Students might influence their own self-esteem privately through goal-setting and self-assessment. Eighth, tolerance of ambiguity and risk-taking ability, can be developed with L2 teacher assistance. Acceptance of ambiguity and development of risktaking ability sometimes require overt discussion with
the whole class or private counseling outside of class. Teachers might want to give students the tools, such as compensation strategies (e.g., guessing, paraphrasing, gesturing, controlling the topic), to help them take reasonable risks. It is up to the students themselves to use these tools. Ninth, teachers must reduce any dysfunctional competition and encourage cooperation in the classroom. Cooperation enhances communicativeness. A variety of specific cooperative learning structures exist that enable all students to take part in communicative language development effectively. These structures include, among others, jigsaw, teams-games-tournaments, and numbered heads together (see, for example, Slavin 1983). Students might emphasize the cooperative aspects of their classroom involvement and specifically work to diminish their competitive urges for the sake of better L2 learning. 7. Summary
This article has synthesized some of the key individual differences in L2 learners. These differences include demographics, aptitude, learning style, motivation, and personality features. The array of student factors is immense—just as great as the array of teacher factors. Concern for the individual in the communicative classroom is essential if real proficiency is the goal. Bibliography Bailey K. N 1983 Competitiveness and anxiety in adult second language learning: Looking at and through the diary studies. In: Seliger H W, Long M H (eds.) Classroom-Oriented Research in Second Language Acquisition. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Crookes G, Schmidt R 1989 Motivation: Reopening the research agenda. University of Hawaii Working Papers in ESL 8(1): 217-56 Galbraith V, Gardner R C 1988 Individual Difference Correlates of Second-Language Achievement: An Annotated Bibliography. University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario Gardner R C 1985 Social Psychology and Second Language Learning: The Role of Attitudes and Motivation. Edward Arnold, London Horwitz E K, Young D J 1991 Language Anxiety. PrenticeHall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Maccoby E E, Jacklin C N 1974 The Psychology of Sex Differences. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Oxford R 1990 Language learning strategies and beyond: A look at strategies in the context of styles. In: Magnan S S (ed.) Shifting the Instructional Focus to the Learner. Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Middlebury, VT Parry T S, Stansfield C W 1990 Language Aptitude Reconsidered. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Reid J M 1987 The learning style preferences of ESL students. TESOL Quarterly 21: 87-111 Scarcella R, Oxford R 1991 The Tapestry of Language Learn-
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Teaching Additional Languages ing: The Individual in the Communicative Classroom. Heinle and Heinle, Boston, MA Skehan P 1989 Second Language Learning: Individual Dif-
ferences in Second-Language Learning. Edward Arnold, London Slavin R 1983 Cooperative Learning. Longman, New York
The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language Gerry Abbott
The term 'English as a Foreign Language' (EFL) implies the use of English in a community where it is not the usual means of communication, 'English as a Second Language' (ESL) being used where the language has important social functions in the community—as a medium of education or jurisdiction, for example. Both aspects are included in the American term TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), which is ousting its British equivalent, ELT (English Language Teaching). The label EAL (English as an Additional Language) is now also used in educational contexts emphasising the value of the learner's first language. All these terms contrast with 'English as Mother Tongue' (EMT) or 'English as First Language' (ELI). Though this article will concentrate on EFL, the other aspects cannot be entirely excluded. It will first review the major reasons for the phenomenal increase in the teaching and use of English worldwide and illustrate uses in the 1990s of EFL as an international language. Some developments in the teaching profession (henceforth TEFL) and its associated industries are then described. The final sections deal with three issues likely to be of continuing concern: issues of education, culture, and intercomprehensibility. 1. The Diffusion of English The first extant textbook for foreign learners of English was written for French Huguenot immigrants by Jacques Bellot, himself a Huguenot. It was published in London in 1580 at a time when English, according to Bellot's contemporary John Florio, was 'worth nothing past Dover' and even within Britain was not understood everywhere. Since then the use of English has spread throughout the world until at conservative estimates, in the late twentieth century, there are 300 million mother tongue speakers, a similar number of ESL users and a further 100 million fluent EFL speakers. The development of TEFL since Florio's time is chronicled in Howatt (1984). The sheer quantity and distribution of English speakers (see Crystal 1987: 358-59) are directly attributable to the rise of two successive world powers, Britain and the USA. The administration of the British Empire's largely
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multilingual territories necessitated the use of a common language, and in most cases English was the only feasible choice. Although the use of the vernacular was encouraged in the first years of primary schooling, the selective secondary schools usually drew multilingual groups from much wider catchment areas. English was therefore inevitably chosen as the medium of instruction. By the time the British Empire had been dismantled the foundations of the 'English Empire' had been laid. The British Council and the BBC continued the diffusion of English and the USA, by the mid-twentieth century a formidable world power, had her own reasons for encouraging the world to learn English— reasons which were largely ideological. A decision to teach exotic languages to armed forces personnel during World War II had given an impetus to foreign language teaching approaches which were then applied to English, Fries (1945) being especially influential. The ensuing Cold War prompted the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute to employ applied linguists to produce courses in languages of strategic importance, and the success of the first Sputniks further stimulated this activity. The Center for Applied Linguistics was established and the export of English was supported by the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Peace Corps, and the Voice of America radio transmissions. The growing international status of English was not simply the result of a quest for Empire and a crusade against totalitarianism. Immigration into America, Britain, Australia, and Canada also acted as a spur to domestic ESL provision, which in turn influenced TEFL methodology. However, the emergence of English as an international language probably owes more to a phenomenon observed long before in Bengal. 2. English as an International Language West (1926: 107) had noted that in the publication of books on technical subjects not only was the combined production of Britain and the USA almost 50 times larger than the local output, but also the continuing expansion of technical knowledge published in English
The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language would outpace any attempt to translate it into Bengali. For countries not technologically developed, English was already an invaluable means of access to new scientific, medical, and technical information. By 1980 more than two-thirds of the world's scientists were writing in English and of all the world's electronically stored information, 80 percent was in English (Crystal 1987: 358). Since the First World/Third World development gap appears to be widening, this function of English will probably continue to grow (see Languages for Special Purposes: Pedagogy). Improvements in the technology of travel brought commerce and tourism to a point where a single common language was needed, and the world chose English. Advances in electronics produced global networks for sound and vision providing instant access to the world's news: in repressed societies British, American, and Australian news in English was relied upon for its accuracy. Politically, English became the international language of protest and economic development. 2.1 Restricted Englishes Restricted forms of English were established for international operational purposes. The speed, volume, and geographical range of modern transport systems had necessitated internationally agreed ways of ensuring that traffic flows were as efficient and hazard-free as possible. In international civil aviation a common language was needed for air crews and ground control staff to exchange messages, and English was the obvious choice. However, natural languages contain potential ambiguities which in certain circumstances could lead to fatal misunderstandings. The instruction 'Go ahead,' intended to mean 'Proceed with your message,' had on one occasion been interpreted by a pilot as 'Continue your present course,' and his aircraft had crashed. It is therefore a carefully restricted English called 'Airspeak' which, by international agreement through the United Nations, is used by today's world airlines (see Robertson 1987). Controlling heavy traffic in sea lanes and responding rapidly to mariners' calls for help present fewer problems now that there is an internationally agreed language of ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore radio communication, a disambiguated English called 'Seaspeak' (see Weeks et al. 1988). With the linking of the UK to Europe by means of the Channel Tunnel, another restricted English was needed for the police forces at each end to use when communicating by telephone. The operational English called 'PoliceSpeak' was introduced in the mid-1990s. 3. TEFL as a Profession and as an Industry The increasing international dependence upon English as a working language enhanced not only the size but also the status of the TEFL profession in those countries where it is the mother tongue. Here the
world's growing need for well-trained teachers was catered for by the establishment of specialist TEFL postgraduate courses, up to doctorate level, both for nationals of the various countries seeking such assistance and for mother-tongue speakers of English wishing to teach EFL/ESL overseas. This in turn necessitated the recruitment of suitably experienced and qualified academic staff. The incessant demand for tuition in EFL led to a massive growth of provision in the private sector, a development encouraged by US/UK economic policies in the 1980s. In the UK, quality-control systems were set up to award recognition only to establishments found to be of satisfactory standard; participation in such schemes is voluntary, however. Some recognized private institutions undertake teacher education and other high-level training activities both at home and abroad, as well as direct language teaching. 3.1 Publishing On both sides of the Atlantic, publishers hastened to add TEFL to their repertoires or to expand their existing lists. By the 1990s they were producing a plethora of textbooks, books for teachers, workbooks, visual aids, sound and video cassettes, and computer software. The publication of such materials was in itself a multimillion dollar international industry in which some textbook-writers became millionaires. 3.2 Testing The higher education systems of these countries also began to cater for a growing number of applicants from overseas, especially from the Third World, who had to pursue their various fields of study through the medium of English. There was consequently a need not only to provide training in the use of English for academic purposes (EAP; see Languages for Special Purposes: Pedagogy) but also to develop reliable methods of assessment which would determine for each applicant the amount and nature of the tuition needed. The best known of these standardized tests were the TOEFL used in America and the IELTS developed by the British Council. Another highly profitable industry arose from a demand for certificates of proficiency that would help the holders to obtain employment or promotion, or even to become EFL teachers themselves. In the UK, so many examining boards established their own tests at various levels of proficiency that, in order to help learner, teacher, and employer alike, the English Speaking Union commissioned a framework (Carroll and West 1989) to facilitate comparison of the tests in terms of level, content, and coverage. 3.3 Anglocentrism A perhaps inevitable consequence of the activity mentioned above was a tendency towards 'anglocentrism,' a tendency to assume that what was suitable for the 561
Teaching Additional Languages privileged circumstances of a school in Los Angeles or London was suitable for use in Venezuela or Vietnam. The modern communicative movement in language teaching was largely developed in circumstances in which well-trained and well-paid teachers taught highly motivated students in smallish groups able to move about in spacious well-equipped classrooms, and usually had access to reprographic facilities and secure storage space. It was sometimes forgotten that, in a worldwide perspective, these were unusually privileged circumstances and that communicative methods had to be modified, sometimes severely, in less favored conditions. Though there has been a resurgence of interest in the issue of large classes, there has been no breakthrough in the problem of how to deal satisfactorily with classes of, say, 200 students—a quite normal feature of TEFL in Pakistan, Burma, and elsewhere. A welcome development which may counteract anglocentrism was the establishment of professional organizations far from the 'anglocenter.' Teachers' associations such as the USA-based TESOL, TESL Canada, and the UK-based IATEFL were at one time balanced only by RELC (SEAMEO Regional Language Centre) in Singapore, and CIEFL (Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages) in Hyderabad, and even these were not run by teachers. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the setting up of EFL teachers' associations in various parts of the world. Examples include MELTA (Malaysian English Language Teachers' Association) in Kuala Lumpur and SPELT (Society of Pakistan English Language Teachers) in Karachi. Enthusiasm and commitment are often such that the groups produce their own journals and organize national and even international conferences. 4. EFL as Education
Although state school TEFL in many parts of the world benefited indirectly from the lively professional activity outlined above, research and development tended to focus on postschool rather than in-school needs—in contrast to the ESL context, in which a great deal of useful school work was done (see Language Across the Curriculum). In 1971 the Council of Europe asked a team of applied linguists to devise specifications for the teaching of languages in the EC member states; the objective was to provide, for those whose employment involved crossing European linguistic borders, syllabus components that were comparable whatever the language being learnt. The outcome was an inventory based upon the predictable workaday language needs of such citizens. This inventory, compiled with working adults in mind, was merely copied when a subsequent specification for schools was produced. While TEFL in the 1970s and 1980s saw great advances in the identification and use of the particular 562
language forms and functions needed in a given higher education course or occupation (see Languages for Special Purposes: Pedagogy, Needs Analysis), no comparable energy was devoted to the development of a rationale for EFL as a school subject. Where adults have current language needs that are analyzable and imminent needs that are predictable, the EFL learner in school usually has neither; the younger the learner the more TEFL becomes TENOR (the child having 'No Obvious Reason' for studying English) and the more important are one's educational aims in teaching the language. Stern (1984:10) rightly pointed to 'a lack of contact among applied linguists with curriculum theory in general educational studies.' The uneducative content of many an EFL textbook was often cited as a case in point. Too often the books contained inconsequential passages, frequently about pseudotypical characters ('The Smith Family'), followed by mindless exercises comprising lists of sentences, unrelated except for the grammar point they illustrated. Suggestions for a more educative content were put forward and some have begun to materialize in school teaching materials. They include: teaching another subject through English, as in ESL contexts; imparting facts that are considered important as general knowledge; using the nature of language and communication as a subject of study; and using the pupils' own preoccupations as lesson material. Last, but by no means least in a world of increasing multiculturalism and widening interdependence, such educational objectives as 'awareness of world problems' and 'tolerance of cultural difference' may well prove at least as important as merely linguistic aims. If so, EFL programs in the world's schools will be required to play their part; but for that to happen, TEFL needs to be incorporated into a sound framework of educational theory in which it is the needs of the child as a developing person, rather than the demands of the state and the employer, that are paramount. 5. EFL and Culture
To the applied linguist as to the anthropologist, a 'culture' is the sum of learnt systems shared by and defining a social group; it is not limited to the fine arts that the West associates with Culture, an abstraction with a capital C, but embraces all the group's methods of ordering and expressing its way of life, including its use of language, facial expression, and gesture. One normal consequence of teaching any natural language, therefore, is the imparting of elements of the culture that the language reflects. Given the scale of EFL teaching and use, it is not surprising that in many areas of the world uneasiness has been expressed concerning the transmission of Western culture. Cultural transmission may take place in at least three ways in the language classroom: as lesson content it may be intentional, incidental, or inherent.
The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language 5.1 Intentional Transmission If the passages, dialogues, and illustrations in an EFL program have an EMT setting, for example, 'An American Family' or 'The British Queue,' it may be assumed that the material is an intentional cultural component of the learning program. (If on the other hand the textbook material were to depict local children in local settings conversing in faultless English, the lack of authenticity would elicit ridicule. Finding appropriate settings can be a problem.) Intentional content may either be left to speak for itself or discussed, through the MT if need be, in contrast to a corresponding component of the learner's culture (e.g., 'Boarding a Bus in London and Lahore'). Texts representing 'high culture' may also be used. EFL programs in the former USSR, for instance, included study of certain poems by Robert Burns and selected passages from Dickens, Jack London, and Hemingway, at which point English Literature was deemed to stop—a reminder that 'culture' includes 'ideology.' 5.2 Incidental Transmission The expatriate teacher, as a native speaker of English, has a worldview laden with cultural values different from those of his students. These include preconceptions about morality, education, and classroom behavior which color everything that happens in a class, however unaware the teacher may be that this is happening. Educational authorities may prefer local staff to such guest teachers for this reason. Also included here, though some might prefer to view it as intentional cultural transmission, is the linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior demanded of even local teachers by syllabuses aiming at communicative competence (see Intercultural Discourse}. For example, to ask a young woman student or teacher to express strong emotion and to accompany her utterances with body language typical of an EMT community will be seen in Southeast Asian societies as a very embarrassing cultural imposition. On the other hand, learning what to expect in the foreign culture, and learning what to avoid doing, are seen as helpful. People of certain Asian cultures about to depart for the UK will be happy to learn not only how to form grammatically correct questions in English but also that certain questions (How old are youl How much do you earn?) are not used on first acquaintance. Comparisons of the MT rules for communicative competence and the English equivalents may improve EFL programs in this respect. 5.3 Inherent Transmission It has long been accepted that one cannot learn a language without imbibing some of the cultural information it embodies. It was for this reason that regimes diametrically opposed to EMT cultural values used language teaching texts that were merely party ideology
translated into English, simple words such as correct being made to take on new meanings, and democracy meaning opposite things in the two camps. In Eastern Europe, where it was often necessary in public to use a Stalinist dialect which contradicted everyday realities—a situation that has been labeled 'political diglossia'—effects similar to schizophrenia were reported. Applied linguists agree to differ on how far one's mother tongue influences the structure of one's thinking processes, but few would deny any causal connection. It seems unlikely that learning to use EFL would greatly influence the mentality of the learner unless English came to replace the mother tongue. However, it has been suggested (Abbott 1992) that Third World perceptions of the benefits accompanying a command of English may, by undermining indigenous cultures, inhibit the development process. 5.4 Cultural Imperialism Any of these aspects of cultural content in EFL lessons may be seen as neoimperialism, depending on the particular circumstances—the real or perceived intentions of the teacher, the wishes of the students, the views of their parents, the ideological stance of the education authorities, and so on. There is certainly a danger that some communicative activities might be seen as assimilationist ('You should behave more like us'); common sense and cultural sensitivity are needed on the part of both materials writer and teacher. 5.5 Theoretical Basis for Culture Learning Though there is a great deal of cross-cultural experience in the TEFL profession, there is as yet no single coherent basis of theory into which culture learning can be fitted. Indeed, different authorities have assumed bases as various as cultural anthropology and social psychology, and as all-inclusive as semiotics (see Byram 1986 for a summary of the position). Meanwhile, the uneasy feeling in many quarters thatthe promotion of TEFL is a form of cultural imperialism will probably continue to present problems (see Phillipson 1992 for a concerted attack on British practice in this respect). 6. aIntercomprehensibility
The Englishes mentioned above (Sect. 2.1) are artificial in that they are deliberately restricted codes which specify the phraseology to be employed in predicted occupational circumstances. However, the sheer variety of natural Englishes is seen by some as problematic. 6.1 Natural Englishes Quite apart from the varieties that constitute 'English' in the minds of its native speakers and which Kachru (1985) labels 'the inner circle,' there are also what he calls 'the outer circle' and 'the expanding circle' of Englishes. The outer circle comprises all those forms 563
Teaching Additional Languages of English such as Indian English or Nigerian English which, though not indigenous and not the users' mother tongues, have become 'institutionalized' (i.e., part of the nation's working life) and 'nativized' (i.e., modified by the local cultures and thus more comfortable and efficient as vehicles for intranational messages). Kachru's 'expanding circle' consists of truly foreign Englishes such as Japanese English and Iranian English. Given that nonnative speakers of English already outnumber its native speakers and that the quantity of international communication in English within and between the outer and expanding circles is increasing, there is a continuing need to ensure intercomprehensibility. There remains the overarching question: Does such a vast field lend itself to applied linguistic activity at all? On the other hand, the ever-increasing power of computers may simplify some problems of intercomprehensibility. For instance, in the late 1990s there exists a simultaneous voice translator which can 'hear' English and print Mandarin. Such developments may also raise the status of translation as a teaching technique in TEFL. 6.2 The Learning-model Question In the expanding circle, the need to have an inner circle standard form of English as a learning-model has not seriously been questioned, Europe traditionally opting for British English and 'received pronunciation' (see Pronunciation). In outer circle countries, however, it has been proposed that the standard form of each nativized English should serve as the national model. Nigerians, for example, who rightly regard English as their own (it is their national language), might well find this policy attractive for reasons of national identity and pride. It has been objected that since all nonnative Englishes whether nativized or foreign are subject to mother-tongue interference (see Contrastive and Error Analysis) they would, in the absence of a shared model, be pulled in different directions, thereby threatening intercomprehensibility. The issues are discussed in Bailey and Gorlach (1982). This is as yet an unresolved issue among applied linguists. Where international intelligibility is the aim, there may have to be a high degree of commonality among the models used, and at present only the mother-tongue standard Englishes of the inner circle can satisfy this requirement. The image of nonmother-tongue Englishes held in orbit by the gravitational force of mother-tongue standard Englishes may at first seem neoimperialist; but this maintenance of an optimum distance from the center may be justifiable not primarily because proximity to the center is important but because the greater the radius, the greater the distance between the nonnative Englishes.
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It will probably be necessary, as with the dialects of any language, for these Englishes to differ considerably in their vocabularies and to differ somewhat in their grammars. But if this is the case and if intercomprehensibility is to be assured, each variety of English may need to maintain a similar number of systematic phonemic contrasts. Another advantage of such a policy would be the maintenance of a reasonably close relationship between the spoken Englishes and the orthography of English, which allows very little variation in spelling. Though education, culture, and intercomprehensibility have been addressed separately above, they are of course not discrete phenomena in the practice of TEFL. Since attitudinal factors are a significant influence in language learning, the successful education of English-users, whether native or nonnative speakers of the language, will include the promotion of positive intercultural attitudes which in turn will facilitate mutual understanding across linguistic boundaries. Bibliography Abbott G 1992 Development, education and English language teaching. English Language Teaching Journal 46(2): 17279 Bailey R W, Gorlach M 1982 English as a World Language. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Bellot J 1580 Le Maistre d'escole anglois: The English Scholemaister. Henry Dizlie, London (facsimile reprint 1967, Scolar Press, Menston) Byram M 1986 Cultural studies in foreign-language teaching. Language Teaching 19: 322-36 Carroll B J, West R 1989 ESU Framework: Performance Scales for English Language Examinations. .Longman, Harlow, UK Crystal D 1987 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Fries C C 1945 Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Howatt APR 1984 A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Kachru B B 1985 Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle. In: Quirk R, Widdowson H G (eds.) English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Phillipson R 1992 Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford University Press, Oxford Robertson F 1987 Airspeak: Radiotelephony Communication for Pilots. Prentice-Hall, London Stern H H 1984 Review and discussion. In: Brumfit C J (ed.) General English Syllabus Design. Pergamon Press, Oxford Weeks F et al. 1988 Seaspeak Training Manual. Pergamon Press, Oxford West M 1926 Bilingualism (with special reference to Bengal). Government of India, Central Publications Branch, Calcutta
SLA (Second Language Acquisition) Lexis: Acquisition P. Meara
The acquisition of lexis has only become a question of interest to applied linguists since the early 1980s. The position in the 1990s is that lexis has been unduly neglected in the past, and is due for a reevaluation, but as yet, this reevaluation has not got very far. Two basic questions about the acquisition of lexis will be addressed in this article. The first is: what strategies do learners use to acquire words, and which of these strategies are efficient? The second question changes the focus of enquiry from the learner's acquisition of words, and asks instead: what happens to a word once it is acquired? How is it integrated into a learner's existing stock of words? Almost all the extant applied linguistic research has dealt with the first of these questions. 1. How Do Learners Acquire Words?
Research on the strategies that learners use to acquire new words suggests that in any group of learners, a wide variety of strategies will be found. On the whole, however, better learners adopt a wider range of strategies for learning than less successful learners. Good language learners tend to take responsibility for improving their own vocabulary, while less successful learners do not. Within this general framework, there are two main types of acquisition strategy: conscious learning and incidental learning. The bulk of the research that has looked at vocabulary acquisition has concentrated on the conscious acquisition of words. There are obvious reasons for this: in general, it is easier to compare methodologies if one can control the variables easily, and this has led to a large number of studies which have compared various methods of learning foreign language vocabularies. The basic research method is for two groups of students to learn a list of words; one group uses an experimental method, while the other uses what is generally referred to as a 'traditional' method, but in practice, usually consists of scanning a list of L2 words and their translation equivalents. The scores of the two groups are then compared. A large number of
studies of this type have been published, and almost all of them are very unsatisfactory. The two exceptions to this criticism are an outstandingly good, but apparently little-known study by Lado et al. (1976), and a large group of studies run by Levin and Pressley (see Meara 1983 and 1987 for summaries of this work). Lado, et al's work is a series of detailed experiments on the effects of different presentation methods on vocabulary acquisition, and Levin and Pressley's work consists of a large number of experiments on the applications of mnemonic imagery techniques to the acquisition of vocabulary. The essence of this work is that the more a learner interacts with a word s/he is trying to learn, the more likely it is that the word will be acquired. Levin and Pressley's work in particular suggests that it is possible to learn very large vocabularies very quickly by constructing vivid visual images that link the L2 target word with an L1 equivalent via an L1 word resembling the L2 target word in sound. There is some considerable disagreement among language teachers about what to do with this finding, and how to integrate it into a syllabus, but there is no serious disagreement about the effectiveness of the method in its own terms. One of the main shortcomings of the type of research outlined in the preceding paragraph is that it has focused attention on the acquisition of vocabulary divorced from use or from real context. Many of the subjects tested in the methodological comparisons were not real language learners, the time-scale studied was short compared to the time it takes to learn a language, and the vocabularies learned were actually quite small in comparison to what a real language learner has to acquire to become fluent. There is a serious shortage of good research that has looked at the behavior of real language learners acquiring vocabularies over a long time-scale. A rather different approach to the acquisition of lexis, which avoids some of these problems is to study the way real language learners acquire the meanings of new words in context. The preferred method for 565
Teaching Additional Languages studying this process is the use of think-aloud techniques, where learners, usually in pairs, discuss the possible meanings of unknown words that they have found in texts. These discussions are tape-recorded and transcribed, and then analyzed for evidence of inferencing. In general, the best work in this area shows that learners are able to infer the meaning of a sizeable proportion of the unknown words they meet in texts. Good learners are able to use a wide range of contextual clues to work out what an unknown word must mean. Less adept learners tend to stick with surface phonological or orthographical clues, and are less able to use clues provided by discourse structure, sentence structure, and so on. Nation has argued that it is possible to teach learners good guessing strategies which can improve the number of words they can guess correctly. Teaching this kind of strategy is important because it is now recognized that no language course can cover all the vocabulary that a learner needs to know by overt instruction, and that some method other than overt instruction must account for most of the words a learner acquires in an L2. This leads on to the question of whether lexis can be acquired incidentally rather than consciously. Research on this question is almost nonexistent in an L2. There is, however, some very good L1 research that is relevant. Nation reports research showing that there is a fairly high probability of L1 learners picking up new words after hearing them read aloud in stories. The pick-up rate was even higher if the reader was able to gloss new words as they occurred. Nagy and Herman (in McKeown and Curtis 1987) suggest that passive exposure to L1 via reading is able to account for almost all the new words acquired in the teens. Their argument goes as follows: given the available information about the amount of material that typical teenagers read in the course of a year, and the proportion of words in this material that they are not likely to know, it is possible to estimate how many unknown words a typical reader is likely to meet in the course of a year's reading. It is also possible to determine empirically the likelihood of a reader being able to infer the meaning of one of these unknown words, and the likelihood of this meaning being retained beyond the immediate context. When all these figures are put together the prediction is that an average reader will acquire about 1000 new words each year—a figure that is broadly in line with empirical work on vocabulary growth in teenage L1 speakers. It would be relatively easy to replicate this work in an L2, and to do a systematic study of the factors that affect the take-up rate of L2 words encountered in meaningful contexts. One would perhaps expect learners to be less good at inferring word meanings, but better at retaining those that were inferred successfully. It is not known how this prediction agrees with what actually happens. There are no normative
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data on vocabulary growth in L2 speakers, and this makes comparisons with L1 speakers impossible. Some of Nation's (1990) work on estimating vocabulary size looks as though it might provide standard tools for assessing vocabulary growth in the not too distant future. 2. Acquired Words: Their Integration and Use
So far, the learner has been the focus of attention of the research reviewed: what the learner did to acquire words; the effectiveness of the method. It is possible to shift the focus of the question, however, and to concentrate instead on the thing that is learned. This shift produces a completely different set of questions—questions that have typically been asked by psychologists rather than by language teachers and applied linguists. These questions concern the structure of the lexicon, and they have typically been investigated by comparing the way bilinguals and monolinguals behave on simple psychological tasks involving word skills. This research enables the development of tentative answers to questions such as: do bilinguals have a single, integrated lexicon, or two more or less separate ones?; and, more generally, how is the L2 speaker's lexicon structured relative to that of his L1? Many applied linguists will be familiar with a distinction that used to be made between compound bilinguals and coordinate bilinguals. Compound bilinguals were typically learners, often children, who had acquired two languages in a single situation. Coordinate bilinguals were learners, usually adults, who had acquired their two languages at different times, and in different settings. It was sometimes argued that compound bilinguals had a single, integrated lexicon, while coordinate bilinguals had two largely separate lexicons. This distinction is not now widely used, but still informs the way some applied linguists think about lexis. During the late twentieth century, psychologists have become interested in the relationship between bilingualism and the structure of the brain. There is now a very large body of experimental research on this topic, much of it based on analyses of bilingual aphasics, and much of it attempting to show that the lexicon of the L2 is more strongly supported by the right hemisphere of the brain than by the left. Most of this research is inconclusive, though there is some evidence that cognate words, and other items where transfer is possible from L1 to L2, may be stored rather differently from L2 words which are completely unrelated to LI items. However, a lot of this work is based on people's ability to recognize individual printed words, and because of this, it is not seen as addressing problems of immediate practical interest to language teachers. It is, furthermore, difficult to interpret these data because the experiments are generally closely tied to particular models of the mental lexicon,
Phonology in Second Language Acquisition and the implications of these models are often not well-understood even by experts, let alone by the interested general reader. It is probably safe to assume that the structure of the lexicon in one's L1 does affect the way that one acquires words in an L2, and that, insofar as the lexicon is concerned, at least, being bilingual in English and French, or English and Dutch, is not the same thing as being bilingual in English and Arabic or English and Japanese. It follows from this, that the lexical tasks facing an Arab learning English, for instance, will be very different from the tasks that face a Chinese speaker learning French, or a German speaker learning Quechua. A second reason why this literature is difficult to generalize to L2 learners is that most of it has been concerned with the performance of high-level bilinguals, whose lexical skills are well-developed, and whose lexicons are very large. The lexical problems experienced by less advanced nonnative speakers, particularly beginners, are often very severe, but at the same time, performance on some well-known words can be almost as good as that produced by native speakers. This suggests that it is a mistake to look at the learner's L2 lexicon as a single undifferentiated whole. Instead, researchers need to think about L2 lexicons as containing many different types of words— some fully integrated into the learner's verbal repertoire, others more marginal. Much of the literature on vocabulary acquisition assumes that there are basically two types of words— active vocabulary and passive vocabulary.-In practice, this classification is probably too crude to be of much real use. Most learners will readily classify words in their L2 into half a dozen or so categories, ranging from words they are completely sure about, through words they are less sure about and words they know they once knew, but have now forgotten, to words they are sure they have never met. Words seem to move around fairly freely between these different states—an L2 learner may be able to use a word easily today, but next week it may have retreated to the edge of competence, and three weeks later, for no apparent
reason, it may come readily to mind when required. In as much as applied linguists use explicit models of lexical development at all, the models which are in use in the early 1990s do not take account of this fluctuation: they tend to assume that the learner's lexicon is a rather static thing, and that learning new words simply involves activating passive vocabulary, and adding new items to the stock of active words. This widely accepted view of the L2 lexicon is clearly an oversimplification, but at the moment it is not clear what sort of model could profitably replace it. 3. Conclusion
Corder once said that applied linguistics was rather like gardening: if one provided the right conditions the flowers would grow, and the applied linguist's job was to specify the right conditions for the growth to take place. A great deal of research in the 1990s on the lexicon is rather like this. It is fine as far as it goes, but rather limited in the sorts of questions it asks. What is really needed is the equivalent of a biochemistry of vocabularies: a framework that will allow questions to be asked about how vocabularies grow, what makes stable structures in lexicons, how these structures vary from one individual learner to another, and how they interact with other aspects of second language competence. See also: Vocabulary in Language Acquisition. Bibliography Carter R, Nation I S P (eds.) 1989 AILA Review 6: whole volume McKeown M G, Curtis M E (eds.) 1987 The Nature of Vocabulary Acquisition. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Meara P M (ed.) 1983 Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy in a Second Language, vol. 1. Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research, London Meara P M 1987 Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy in a Second Language, vol. 2. Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research, London Nation I S P 1990 Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. Newbury House, New York
Phonology in Second Language Acquisition A. R. James
Mastering the sounds of a new language is by common consent one of the most difficult tasks facing the foreign language learner. Popular opinion has it that getting rid of an 'accent' in the second language is almost impossible, at least for adults. Having 'a foreign
accent' is for most people a matter of speaking the new language using the pronunciation patterns of the native language. Some of the central issues raised in the field of second language phonology will be addressed in this article. These include whether learn-
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Teaching Additional Languages ing a new set of pronunciation patterns is all that is involved in acquiring the sound system, that is, the phonology, of a second language; whether adults can indeed learn the sound system of a second language; and exactly which factors (including the first language) impede or facilitate the learning of the new phonology. 1. What is Learnt in a Second Language Phonology 1.1 Articulatory (and Perceptual) Patterns The most obvious task facing the learner is to develop a new mode of pronunciation. This involves gradual mastery of a different set of articulatory and perceptual patterns from that used in the native language. Although certain sounds as such may be familiar from the native language or other languages, other sounds are likely to be quite different. For example, an English-speaking learner of French comes across the sounds [p t k f v s z l m n], [f] (sh in English ship), and [3] (s in English measure) in the foreign language, similar versions of which are present in the learner's own language. However, sounds like [y] (Fre u in lune), [0] (Fre eu in feu), and [5] (Fre on in boh) are also met, which are not familiar from English. Even so, all sounds of the second language (L2), whether familiar or not, in all their combinations have to be realized via a new set of articulatory patterns (and their associated perceptual representations). The articulatory patterns of the L2 are of course not just a matter of displacing the tongue, lips, soft palate, etc. from one sound to the next, but are themselves subject to the stress, rhythm, and intonation characteristics of the new language. Thus, for the English-speaking learner of French, 'getting the pronunciation right' equally involves making sure that the stress on words, phrases, and sentences is on the last syllable in each case, that the rhythmic and intonational focus of the language is also on the last syllable of phrases and sentences, and that individual syllables are produced with far fewer length distinctions than they are in English. In other words, the pronunciation 'skill' part of learning the phonology of a second language requires the gradual development of a new and complex set of sensorimotor patterns of the speech organs and control over their displacement in time and space. 1.2 A Phonological System Perhaps contrary to popular belief, learning new articulatory movements is not all that is involved in acquiring the sound system of a second language. The learner also has to develop some systematicity in the sounds acquired, over and above their actual physical realization. In order to learn a new language system, it is also necessary to discover its underlying sound regularities, or phonology, in the narrower sense of the term. This means learning, for instance, which are the distinctive sounds or phonemes of the new language, \vh\chfeatures characterize and distinguish them, how
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their forms vary according to context (i.e., as allophones), and in which combinations they can occur (i.e., the phonotactics of the language). In addition, the learner must acquire knowledge of word-stress rules and of those stress and intonational features which distinguish phrase and sentence units of the L2. Thus, the Dutch learner of English has to learn that /g/ is a phoneme in the L2 (which it is not in the L1, although [g] does occur as an allophone in the language), that is, that it can distinguish words, as in /g/ versus /k/ in game versus came, and dog versus dock, and that the features which distinguish /g/ from other phonemes in English involve the properties [voiced] and [velar], etc. He also has to learn, for example, that /g/ can occur in syllable-initial combinations only with following /w/, /j/, /r/, and /1/ as in Gwen, argue, grey, and glow, and that the phonemic distinction between /g/ and /k/ is effectively neutralized in initial three-consonant clusters such as /skr/ in screw, etc. 1.3 A Phonetic Representation These two aspects of sound structure, the purely physical or 'skill' element and the abstract or 'knowledge' element, are related in the learning task by the phone tic values of sounds. Developing a phonetic representation means establishing a set of values which express the phonological features of the sound system in such a way that they can be directly related to physical substance, that is, enable the more abstract properties of sounds to be converted into actual articulatory (and perceptual) realization. Again, each language encodes its phonological substance differently: whereas in French the distinctive feature [voiceless] for /ptk/is phonetically realized as [unaspirated/short-lag voice onset time (voT)], in English the same distinctive feature for /p t k/ is realized variably as [aspirated/longlag voT] when these sounds occur syllable-initially; [unaspirated/short-lag VOT] when following /s/ initially, as in spear, steer, skier; and [glottalized] in syllable-final position, as in sip, sit, sick. The third task facing the L2 learner is, then, to construct phonetic representations for the sounds and sound patterns of the new language via which the articulatory (motor) and perceptual (sensory) patterns necessary for the actual pronunciation of the language can be related to the more underlying systematic relations obtaining between them. 2. Adult Acquisition of a Second Language Phonology 2.1 Biological Influences It is widely believed that children can acquire the sounds of a foreign language more readily than adults, and indeed there is research which supports this, at least as far as the development of articulatory and perceptual abilities is concerned. Concerning the development of knowledge of an L2 phonological
Phonology in Second Language Acquisition system, however, it might be argued that adults share an advantage over children, since they are able to apply maturer cognitive capacities to the establishing of underlying relations between sounds. But even with articulatory and perceptual abilities, adult learners are not always at a disadvantage. It has been shown, for instance, that in early stages of L2 pronunciation learning, adults make more rapid progress than children. The argument which supports the 'Joseph Conrad syndrome,' that is, that postpubertal learners can rarely, if ever, achieve a nativelike pronunciation in the second language, rests largely on the 'critical period hypothesis' (Lenneberg 1967). Lateralization of cortex function occurring around puberty inhibits subsequent attempts at mastery of the sound patterns of a new language (Scovel 1989). However, at least as far as sound discrimination abilities in the L2 are concerned, it would seem that poorer performance by adults as opposed to children is to be ascribed to the fact that older learners tend to process the L2 signal linguistically in terms of their L1 auditory/acoustic patterns, whereas younger learners are more capable of auditory processing of the signal without reference to already developed L1 linguistic patterns. Whether this may be interpreted as evidence for an absolute loss or deterioration of perceptual abilities with postpubertal learners is a matter of debate. 2.2 Social-Psychological Factors It is a commonly shared feeling among learners of new languages that pronunciation is somehow a more sensitive area socially and psychologically than other levels of language structure such as syntax and vocabulary. Developing a set of new sound patterns involves taking on another 'language ego' to an extent not experienced in developing a new syntax or a new lexicon, for example. Individual and social pressure may variously inhibit or facilitate this L2 pronunciation proficiency. Attitudes to pronunciation in both the native culture and the foreign culture play an important role in the learning process by partly determining the level of proficiency wished to be attained. Cultures vary in the extent to which a 'good' pronunciation of both native languages and foreign languages is valued. For example, Japanese and French cultures in general lay greater value on a near-native pronunciation by foreigners of their languages than Dutch culture, whereas the latter lays greater value on the 'correct' pronunciation of foreign languages than the former. These cultural differences influence the acquisition behavior of the native learners of foreign languages and the foreign learners of the native language. Equally, the learners' own attitudes to the society and culture of the people whose language is concerned have been shown to be highly significant in determining L2 pronunciation success.
Type and degree of motivation for learning the second language are as much an important determinant in pronunciation acquisition as with other areas of language development, perhaps even more so. The greater the desire to immerse oneself in the foreign society and culture, the greater the pronunciation level likely to be reached. Personality variables such as empathy, intuition, self-esteem, and the 'flexibility of ego boundaries' have been shown to correlate positively with a learner's ability to acquire accurate L2 pronunciation. 3. Perception and Production
Mention has been made in Sect. 1.1 above of the fact that learning 'the phonology' of a second language includes, most obviously, the development of new sensorimotor (articulatory and perceptual) speech patterns. However, this raises the questions of how production and perception abilities are related in L2 speech acquisition and of whether it is indeed the case, as is generally assumed, that perception is always ahead of production in development, that the accuracy of the latter presupposes accuracy of the former, and that the two skills are closely interrelated. Research on the developmental relation between perception and production in L2 learning presents an inconclusive picture. While perception and discrimination abilities are shown to be ahead of production capacity on certain tasks, the opposite is true on other tasks in the L2. Studies of a wide range of adult second language learners with differing L ls and L2s show varying results as to the relative predominance of perception versus production attainment. One conclusion, therefore, to be drawn from the research is that perception and production abilities in the foreign language are certainly not inextricably related, but rather develop as quasi-independent linguistic skills. However, the one way in which perception and production abilities are related is via the phonetic representation (see Sect. 1.3) of the sounds of the new language. The phonetic representation of sounds mediates not only between their properties as abstract entities of an underlying phonological system and as concrete instances of articulated and perceived 'sound,' but also between their realization in production and perception modalities. Developing perception and production skills in a foreign language, then, involves gradually refining control over the sensory and motor interpretation of an L2 phonetic model sound or 'prototype.' The extent to which perceptual and production accuracy diverges is not so much a product of any inherent relation between these skills, but rather of other factors, such as the extent to which the L2 phonetic prototype coincides with equivalents in the LI. The learner, in other words, develops perception and production abilities relative to a particular processing-neutral L2 phonetic norm. 569
Teaching Additional Languages 4. Structural Influences on Second Language Phonology 4.1 The Role of the First Language In the popular view, the influence of the native language is omnipresent in second language sound learning. Indeed, the learner's task is seen by some as the systematic elimination of L1 influences over time. While it is true that the sound structure of the L1 manifests itself in the learning of the L2 in a more immediately obvious way than, for example, the syntactic structure of the L1, it is certainly not the case that the influence is random. Research has shown that L1 structure affects the developing L2 sound structure under certain conditions. However, only some sound entities are subject to this selective L1 influence. Whereas patterns of articulation and perception, sound sequencing (phonotactics), and stress and intonation inevitably carry over from the native to the foreign language, certainly in early stages of learning, what has been shown to be subject to differential influence from the L1 is the establishment of the phone types of the L2. All things being equal, it seems that those sound types of the L2 which are phonetically similar to those of the L1, that is, which share major characteristics but differ in minor ones, will be subject to a greater amount of L1 influence than those which are either identical to or completely different from sound types of the L1. To give an example, the influence of L1 Dutch on L2 English will be greater in the case of [e] as in well (a similar, but not identical, phone type in the two languages) than with L2 [ae] as in cat (different) or L2 [I] as in bit (identical). It has also been generally shown that LI influence is relatively greater with 'lower' (i.e., phonetic/articulatory-perceptual) levels of sound structure than with 'higher' (i.e., purely phonological) levels. 4.2 The Mechanisms Relating L1 and L2 Sound Structure in Acquisition Saying that degrees of similarity between L2 and L1 phones are criterial in establishing the degree of L1 influence on the developing L2 sound structure presupposes a means and mechanism by which the structures are compared in learning. In common with the study of other areas of L2 acquisition, theories of second language phonology attribute to the learner a selective capacity to employ the resources of his L1 in acquisition. However, while the physical substance of the speech signal inevitably constrains the hypotheses which a learner makes as to the nature and comparability of L2 phone types encountered, the learner nonetheless 'chooses' to transfer his L2 sound type or not. In other words, 'transfer' of L1 structure in sound learning is as much a cognitive mechanism of acquisition as a behavioral one. With reference to the above, degrees of similarity 570
and difference between sound types of the L2 and L1 are significantly a matter of learner judgment and of change in this judgment as the learner's own L2 sound system evolves. However, the learning processes employed in second language phonological acquisition are not necessarily the same as those attributed to the child mastering the sounds of his mother tongue. What the child has in terms of vocal versatility, the adult to a large extent compensates in terms of cognitive skill. However, by and large, the learning model remains the same, that is, acquisition proceeds by testing hypotheses as to the nature of the target sound structure, constrained on the one hand by the physical substance involved, but informed on the other by the linguistic resources available in what has been learnt already, namely the L1, and in the developing L2 itself. An example of 'generalization' of L2 knowledge in phonological acquisition, that is, of using the linguistic resources already established in the foreign language to 'solve' a particular L2 sound 'problem,' would be the L1 French speaker's assumption in English that all instances of [p], [t], and [k] in initial (cluster) position are aspirated, leading to the well-attested mispronunciations of speak as [sphi:k], stand as [sthaend], skin as [skhm], etc. L1-based transfer and L2-based generalization are considered, then, to be the two main learning processes or strategies in sound acquisition, as much as they are assumed to be present in other areas of second language acquisition. 4.3 The Developmental Dimension The degree of structural influence, and with it the role of transfer as a processing strategy, varies in the course of L2 speech acquisition. As at the syntactic or lexical level, the effects of transfer seem to be more obviously present at earlier rather than later stages of acquisition, at least as far as phone realization is concerned. As acquisition proceeds, the influence of the L1 and the mechanism of transfer give way gradually to other influences that shape the developing L2 phonology; such as the mechanisms ('developmental processes') associated with the acquisition of the mother tongue. Developmental processes are those presumably inherent phonological strategies which one finds operating in earlier child language, such as devoicing of word- and syllable-final obstruents, consonant cluster simplification, nonweakening of unstressed syllables, etc. However, the relative influence over time of transfer and developmental processes remains very much subject to the compatibility of L2 and L1 sound structures as assessed by the learner. For instance, as far as phone types are concerned, the closer a particular L2 sound is judged to be to an L1 'equivalent,' the more likely it will be open to transfer effects and the less to developmental effects—bearing in mind that compatibility judgments themselves will change over time.
Phonology in Second Language Acquisition 4.4 Contextual Influences A number of generalities may be observed concerning the influence of context on the acquisition of L2 sounds. For example, all things being equal, stressed syllables are produced more accurately than unstressed syllables and initial consonants more accurately than final consonants. This itself may be evidence for the earlier acquisition of the former elements in question. However, studies have shown that virtually any L2 phone which does not have an LI equivalent is acquired in a particular contextual order. By and large, consonants in the L2 are acquired first in a prevocalic environment and last in an environment in which they cooccur with consonants similar to them in 'place' and 'manner of articulation'. Extrapolating from these findings to the acquisition of L2 English [θ] (th as in thank) by learners who have no [0] in their LI, one expects that [θ] in thank will be acquired before [9] in bath before [6] in through before [9] in months. Furthermore, context in the sense of the activity engaged in when producing L2 speech has been shown to be a significant determinant of the realization of L2 phones. Comparisons of the degree of accuracy produced for various 'new' L2 sounds in different speech activities demonstrate that the more 'formal' the task (e.g., word-list reading as opposed to free speech), the more targetlike is the realization. 4.5 Typological Factors The role of structural influences on second language phonology, as will be clear from the discussion, is a matter of the interplay of L1-L2 compatibilities and 'general' preferences in sound structure realization. These 'general' or typological characteristics of sound systems influence L2 phonological acquisition to varying extents. Sound types which occur less frequently in the languages of the world, that is, which are typologically 'marked,' are indeed likely to present more difficulty in the L2 and/or be acquired later (than those sounds which are not thus 'marked'). For example, as with children learning English as their mother tongue, foreign speakers of English will, all things being equal, have greater problems with typologically marked sound types such as [9] and [6], that is, th as in thing and that, than, for example, [t] and [d] as in ten and den. However, not only particular sound types, but also sound contrasts, sound combinations, and syllable types have been shown to be subject to markedness considerations in second language phonological acquisition. For instance, those sound contrasts which are positionally marked in the L2 are more 'difficult' to acquire than those which are unmarked, on condition that they are not present in the LI. Thus, the voicing contrast between obstruents in word-final position in English as an L2 (e.g., /p/ versus /b/ in cap
versus cab, or /s/ versus /z/ in loose versus lose) will be more difficult to acquire for learners than the same contrast word-medially or word-initially, because typologically the contrast at final position is most marked. Similarly, if reduction of consonant clusters is a feature of L2 learning, then such reduction will not violate typological markedness relations: Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners may reduce final consonant clusters in English since the LI has none, but they will never produce combinations such as fricative + fricative or stop + stop, since these combinations are typologically marked. Thus, for the final cluster [1st] in whilst, if reduction occurs, say from three to two consonants, it will be to [Is], [It], or [st] or similar combinations, but never to [tt], [dt], [ss], or [zs], for example. Concerning syllable types, however, there is little evidence to show that typological markedness is overall a dominant factor in L2 acquisition. In cases where a second language has a more complex syllable structure than the LI, for example, allowing syllable-final consonants and consonant clusters as opposed to a simple consonant + vowel (CV) combination, learners' renderings of the new structures are more influenced by LI transfer than by any general preference for a CV, that is, typologically unmarked syllable type. In conclusion, then, it seems that the influence of typological factors on second language phonology is very much subject to similarity measures between the L2 and LI, and that the compatibility of the sound structures of the two languages in contact is in fact the most important determinant in shaping the developing L2. See also: Pronunciation.
Bibliography Flege J E 1988 The production and perception of foreign language speech sounds. In: Winitz H (ed.) Human Communication and Its Disorders. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Hammarberg B 1988 Acquisition of phonology. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 9: 23-41 Ioup G, Weinberger S (eds.) 1987 Interlanguage Phonology. Newbury House, Rowley, MA James A 1988 The Acquisition of a Second Language Phonology. Narr, Tubingen James A, Leather J (eds.) 1986 Sound Patterns in Second Language Acquisition. Foris, Dordrecht Leather J, James A (eds.) 1990 New Sounds 90: Proceedings of the Amsterdam Symposium on the Acquisition of Secondlanguage Speech. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Leather J, James A 1991 The acquisition of second-language speech. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 13: 30541
Lenneberg E 1967 Biological Foundations of Language. Wiley, New York Scovel T 1989 A Time to Speak. Newbury House, Rowley, MA 571
Teaching Additional Languages
Second Language Acquisition: Conversation S. M. Gass
Learning a second language involves the learning of the grammar rules of that language, along with vocabularly items and correct rules of pronunciation. It is commonly assumed that putting those rules to use in the context of conversation is a natural extension of grammar acquisition. Such a view implicitly assumes that language use, including the way a 'good conversation' progresses, does not vary from a first language situation to a second language situation. It further assumes that all that would be needed to successfully converse in a second language would be to plug in the correct forms to say the same thing as one does in one's native language. This article deals with characteristics of second language conversations, focusing on ways in which native language use differs from second language use in conversations. There are two possible ways in which non-native speakers may act differently from native speakers in a conversation. First, because of their lack of competence, conversations involving non-native speakers may be similar to those which occur in distorted communication (those situations in which normal message transmission and/or reception is obstructed, for example, by loud noise, static on the telephone). Second, they may incorrectly apply conversational rules which are valid in their native language to conversation in a second language. This article only considers the first type of difference. In the discussion, attention is paid to the interrelationship of second language use (conversation) and language learning. 1. Native Language Use versus Second Language Use
In most conversations the discourse progresses in a smooth fashion, with each person responding to what was just said, or, less commonly, to what was said slightly further back in the conversation. When participants in a conversation share a common background (social/cultural) and/or language, turn-taking among participants proceeds smoothly. Barring loud noises, inattentiveness, etc., participants in a conversation have full understanding of what has been said and of how their contribution to the conversation fits in with previous contributions (theirs or others). The following example illustrates a typical native speaker conversation: Ben: Ethel: Ben:
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You have to... u h . . . uh—Hey, this is the best herring you ever tasted. I'll tell you that right now. Bring some out so that Max could have some too. Oh, boy.
Max: Ben: Ethel: Ben:
Bill: Ben: Max: Ethel: Ben: Ethel: Ben:
I don't want any. They don't have this at Mayfair, but this is delicious. What's the name of it? It's the Lasko but there's herring snack bits and there's reasons why—the guy told me once before that it was the best. It's Nova Scotia herring. Why is it the best? 'Cause it conies from cold water. 'Cause coldwater fish is always... [?] when they... u h . . . can it. Mmmm. Cold-water fish is— Oooo, Max, have a piece This is the best you ever tasted. (from Tannen 1986: 106)
In the preceding example, each person takes a conversational turn fully understanding what has preceded. Ben, Bill, Max, and Ethel all know that they are talking about the particular herring they are eating and that the comments refer to how good it is. Had Max not commented on the canning of the fish, but about a movie he had seen, the others would perhaps have perceived this apparent change of topic as somewhat out of place, and therefore, odd. In fact, it is likely that the conversation in such a case would have come to a halt until the participants were able to sort out what was happening. This is not to say that all parts of native speaker conversation are grammatical, or complete, but it does suggest that the norm is for participants to be fully aware of where their contribution fits in to the emerging conversation. In conversations in which there is not shared background, or in which there is some acknowledged 'incompetence' (e.g., incomplete knowledge of the language being spoken, or lack of knowledge of the topic—as in a doctor speaking with a patient), the conversational flow is marred by numerous interruptions, as in the following example, in which the effect of conversing with a non-native speaker is seen primarily in the speech of the native speaker. (NS = native speaker) NNS: NS: NNS:
speaker;
NNS = non-native
There has been a lot of talk lately about additives and preservatives in food. How— —a a a lot, a lot of talk about what? uh. There has been a lot of talk lately about additives and preservatives in food. Now just a minute. I can hear you—everything except the important words. You say there's been a lot of talk lately about what [inaudible]
Second Language Acquisition: Conversation NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS:
—additive, additive, and preservative, in food— Could you spell one of those words for me, please A-D-D-I-T-I-V-E Just a minute. This is strange to me. hh -uh'in other word is P-R-E-S-E-R-V-A—oh, preserves preservative and additive -preservatives, yes, okay. And what was that— -what was that first word I didn't understand? OKAY in— —additives? OKAY. —additives and preservatives yes ooh right... (from Gass and Varonis 1985: 41)
When participants lose their 'conversational footing,' as in the above example, they often compensate by questioning particular utterances (you say there's been a lot of talk lately about what?) and/or requesting conversational help (could you spell one of those words for me?). In other words, they 'negotiate' that which was not understood. Negotiation of meaning of this sort allows participants to maintain, as well as possible, equal footing in the conversation and provides the means for participants to respond appropriately to one another's utterance and to regain their places in a conversation after one or both have 'slipped.' 1.1 Negotiation of Meaning Reference was made above to 'negotiation of meaning.' This refers to those instances in conversation in which participants need to interrupt the flow of the conversation in order for both parties to have full understanding of what the conversation is about, as in the preceding example. In conversations involving non-native speakers of a language, particularly those with low proficiency, negotiations of meaning are frequent, at times occupying a major portion of the conversation. The example below is an illustration.
J: S: J: S: J: S: J: S: J: S: J: S:
J = native speaker of Japanese S = native speaker of Spanish And your what is your mm father's job? My father now is retire retire? yes oh yeah But he work with uh uh institution institution Do you know that? The name is... some thin like eh control of the state. aaaaaaaah Do you understand more or less? State is u h . . . what what kind of state? It is uhm
J: S: J: S: J: S: J: S: J: S: J: S:
J: S: J: S: J: S: J: S: J: S:
Michigan State? No, the all nation No, government? all the nation, all the nation. Do you know for example is a the the institution mmm of the state mm of Venezuela ah ah had to declare declare? her ingress English? No. English no (laugh)... ingress, her ingress Ingress? Ingress, yes. I-N-G-R-E-S-S more or less Ingless Yes. If for example, if you, when you work you had an ingress, you know? uh huh an ingless? yes uh huh OK yes, if for example, your homna, husband works, when finish, when end the month his job, his boss pay—mm—him something aaaah and your family have some ingress yes ah, OK OK more or less OK? and in this in this institution take care of all ingress of the company and review the accounts OK I got, I see OK my father work there, but now he is old (from Varonis and Gass 1985a: 78-79)
In the preceding lengthy conversation, the speakers spend the majority of their time in straightening out the meaning of words, specifically the words 'retire,' 'institution,' 'state,' and 'ingress' (income). In conversations involving nonproficient nonnative speakers, exchanges of the sort exemplified above are frequent, with a considerable effort going into resolving nonunderstanding as opposed to exchanging ideas or opinions (the typical material of conversation). 1.2 Miscommunication Miscommunication differs from nonunderstandings. It occurs when the speaker and hearer do not interpret the spoken message in the same way. In fact, when non-native speakers do not negotiate, the result is often confusion and/or miscommunication. In the following conversation that situation can be seen exactly. A native speaker of Spanish, studying English in the USA, called a store to inquire about the price of a TV set. However, he did not realize that when he looked up the telephone number in the telephone book, he had looked up numbers for TV repair shops. NS: NNS: NS: NNS:
(NS = native speaker; NNS = non-native speaker) Hello Hello could you tell me about the price and size of Sylvania color TV Pardon? Could you tell me about price and size of Sylvania TV color PAUSE
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Teaching Additional Languages NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS:
NNS: NS:
NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS:
NNS: NS:
NNS: NS:
NNS: NS: NNS: NS:
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What did you want? A service call? uh 17-inch huh? What did you want a service call? or how much to repair a TV? yeah TV color 17-inch OK SILENCE Is it a portable? uh huh What width is it? What is the brand name of the TV? ah Sony please We don't work on Sonys. or Sylvania Sylvania? uh huh Oh, Sylvania OK. That's American made. OK All right. Portables have to be brought in hm hm And there's no way I can tell you how much it'll cost until he looks at it. hm hm and it's a $12.50 deposit OK and if he can fix it that applies to labor and if he can't he keeps the $12.50 for his time and effort. hm hm How old of a TV is it? Do you know off hand? 19-inch How old of a TV is it? Is it a very old one or only a couple years old? oh, so so The only thing you can do is bring it in and let him look at it and go from there. new television please Oh you want to know SILENCE how much a new television is? yeah I want buy one television. Do we want to buy one? yeah Is it a Sylvania? Sylvania TV color Well, you know even, even if we buy 'em, we don't give much more than $25 for 'em. By the time we fix 'em up and sell 'em, we can't get more than hm hm $100 out of 'em time we put our time and parts in it Is it 17-inch? Well, I don't... the only thing I can tell you to do is you'd have to come have to come to the shop. I'm on the extension at home. The shop's closed SILENCE 19-inch? you don't have? Do we have a 19-inch? yeah No, I've got a 17-inch new RCA
NNS: NS:
OK. Thank you. Bye Bye. (from Varonis and Gass 1985b: 332-33)
This conversation differs markedly from the previous example in that here there was no negotiation, although there are indications throughout (pauses, silence) that the native speaker realizes that there is some confusion. The non-native speaker replies with appropriate English forms (uh huh, OK) leading the native speaker to believe, at least initially, that they were both discussing the same topic (according to the non-native speaker, the purchase of a TV set and according to the native speaker, the repair of a TV set). Because speakers did not spend conversational time negotiating, the result was a conversation which consisted of exchanges involving miscommunication from beginning to end. 1.3 Foreigner Talk When native speakers of a language speak to a nonnative speaker of that language, speech adjustments are commonly made. These adjustments reveal speech patterns that would not ordinarily be used in conversations with native speakers. A change from the norm when speaking with nonnative speakers is known as 'foreigner talk.' It shares features in common with what is known as 'caretaker speech,' the language spoken to young children. Some of the most salient features of foreigner talk are: slow speech rate, simple vocabularly, repetitions and elaborations, paucity of slang and idioms. Below are two examples: NNS: NS: NNS: NS:
How have increasing food costs changed your eating habits? Well, we don't eat as much beef as we used to. We eat more chicken and uh, pork, and uh, fish, things like that? Pardon me? We don't eat as much beef as we used to. We eat more chicken and uh, uh pork and fish... We don't eat beef very often. We don't have steak like we used to. (from Gass and Varonis, 1985: 48)
In this example, taken from a survey on food and nutrition, as a result of the non-native speaker's indication of nonunderstanding (Pardon me?), the native speaker reassesses the non-native speaker's ability to understand. The changes made reveal a restatement (the first two sentences) following by repetition (We don't eat beef very often) and an elaboration (We don't have steak like we used to). From the same survey comes the following example: NNS: NS: NNS:
How have increasing food costs changed your eating habits? Uh well that would I don't think they've changed 'em much right now, but the pressure's on. Pardon me?
Second Language Acquisition: Conversation NS:
I don't think they've changed our eating habits much as of now... (from Gass and Varonis, 1985: 51)
As in the previous example, the native speaker attempts to clarify the original statement by making the utterance more explicit as a result of the nonnative speaker's indication of nonunderstanding (changing 'em to our eating habits). 1.4 Modification of the Conversational Structure Not only is the form of the speech produced by native speakers modified, but also the structure of the conversation itself shows differences. Michael Long was the first to point out that conversations involving nonnative speakers exhibited forms which did not appear to any significant degree when only native speakers were involved in nondistorted conversations. For example, confirmation checks (is this what you mean?) or comprehension checks (do you understand? do you follow me?) are peppered throughout conversations in which there is a nonproficient non-native speaker participant. Furthermore, different kinds of questions are asked. The examples below come respectively from two native speakers of English and from a native speaker and a nonnative speaker of English. NS! : Ns2:
(NS = native speaker; NNS = non-native speaker) What do you think of Michigan? It's nice, but I haven't gotten used to the cold weather yet.
NS: Do you like California? NNS: Huh? NS: Do you like Los Angeles? NNS: Uhm... NS: Do you like California? NNS: Yeah, I like it. (from Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991: 120-21)
In the first example, the conversation proceeds in step-wise fashion; in the second, there is an indication of nonunderstanding (Huh?), with the result being a narrowing down of the topic (California > Los Angeles) followed by a final repetition of the original question. These conversational tactics provide the nonnative speaker with as much information as possible as she attempts to ascribe meaning to the native speaker's stream of sounds. Yet another frequent modification in the discourse of native speakers has to do with the types of questions native speakers ask. In the following example the native speaker asks an 'or-choice' question. That is, the native speaker not only asks a question but also provides the non-native speaker with a range of possible answers. NS:
(NS = native speaker; NNS = non-native speaker) Well, what are you doing in the United States? Are you just studying or do you have a job?
NNS:
Or... No. I have job (from Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991: 122)
In all of the examples discussed in this section, the effect of modifications (whether intentional or not) is to aid the non-native speaker in understanding. This reduces the burden for the non-native speaker in that they are assisted by others in understanding and in producing language appropriate to the situation. 1.5 Discourse Differences Besides the obvious differences of grammar, pronunciation, and vocabularly, there is yet another dimension which differentiates native speaker from non-native speaker speech in conversation. Even when native speaker speech is entirely grammatical, there are subtle features which may mark a speaker as nonnative. Non-native speakers and native speakers of a language often select different material to describe. For example, work conducted by Tomlin (1984) showed that when asked to describe a segment of a movie, native speakers usually provide a description of the main events of the story-line and then supplement their descriptions with events which are not central to the story-line. On the other hand, non-native speakers only reported significant events and omitted mention of the nonsignificant ones. Thus, the descriptive content differs depending on whether descriptions are given in the native or the second language. In terms of actual language forms selected, when providing a description of a visual scene, native speakers differentiate between expressions using the future tense, such as you will see or you will find and those without the future tense, such as you see. The former type of expression is used when giving specific instructions (On the board, you will find two girls playing. Move one to the bottom), whereas the latter is used when attempting to determine whether the other person's attention is focused on the relevant object (You see where the two sides intersect?). In non-native speaker speech, this distinction is frequently blurred. Both future tense and nonfuture tense are used for both functions. 2. Second Language Conversation and Learning Outcomes An important aspect of language learning is what is known as 'metalinguistic awareness.' This refers to the ability to consider language not just as a means of expressing ideas or communicating with others, but as an object of inquiry. Thus, making puns suggests an ability to think about language as opposed to only using it for expressive purposes. Similarly, judging whether a given sentence is a grammatical one in one's language or translating from one language to another requires a person to think about language as opposed to engaging in pure use.
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Teaching Additional Languages The ability to think about language is often associated with increased ability to learn a language. In fact, bilingual children have been shown to have greater metalinguistic awareness than monolingual children (see, for example, Bialystok 1987). Non-native speakers in a classroom setting often spend more time on metalinguistic activities than on activities of pure use. This takes place, for example, when studying rules of grammar or memorizing vocabulary words. Much classroom activity in earlier language teaching methodologies engaged learners in just this type of 'consciousness raising.' However, there are other ways in which increased metalinguistic awareness can take place. To relate this specifically to the earlier discussion of negotiation, learners are made aware of errors in their speech (whether in grammar, pronunciation, content, or discourse) through the questioning that often goes on in negotiation. In other words, negotiation is what makes learners aware that there is incongruity between the forms they are using and the forms used by the native speaking community. In order to respond to an inquiry of nonunderstanding, the non-native speaker must modify their output. For this to take place, the learner must become aware of a problem and seek to resolve it. Hence, the extent to which second language learners are able to think about the language they are producing and the language they hear, the greater the possibility they will be able to make appropriate modifications to their speech. While there is limited evidence as to the longrange effects of these modifications, one can presume that negotiation, because it leads to heightened awareness, ultimately leads to increased knowledge of the second language. For example, in the following exchange, the non-native speaker never produces the correct form, but is made aware of a pronunciation problem.
NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS: NS: NNS:
NS:
(NS = native speaker; NNS = non-native speaker) and they have the chwach there the what? the chwach—I know someone that— What does it mean? like um like American people they always go there every Sunday yes? you know—every morning that there pr-that -the American people get dressed up to got to um chwach oh to church—I see (from Pica 1987: 6)
As a first step to learning, a learner must be aware of a need to learn. Negotiation of the sort which takes place in conversation is a means to focus a learner's attention on just those areas of language which do not 'match' with those of the language being learned. This allows learners to begin the long process of internal modification of the structure of their second language.
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See also: Speaking in a Second Language; Intercultural Discourse; Communication Strategies. Bibliography Bialystok E 1987 Words as things: Development of word concept by bilingual children. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 9(3): 133-40 Day R R 1986 Talking to Learn: Conversation in Second Language Acquisition. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Gass S 1997 Input, interaction, and the second language learner. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ Gass S, Mackey A, Pica T 1998 The role of input and interaction in second language acquisition. Modern Language Journal 82(3): 290-307 Gass S M, Madden C (eds.) 1985 Input in Second Language Acquisition. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Gass S M, Varonis E M 1985 Variation in native speaker speech modification to non-native speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 7(1): 37-57 Gass S, Varonis E 1994 Input, interaction and second Language production. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16: 283-302 Larsen-Freeman D, Long M H 1991 An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research. Longman, London Long M 1980 Input, interaction and second language acquisition. (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, CA) Long M 1981 Input, interaction and second language acquisition. In: Winitz H (ed.) Native Language and Foreign Language Acquisition. New York Academy of Sciences, New York Long, M 1996 The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In: Ritchie W, Bhatia T (eds.) Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Academic Press, San Diego Long M H 1983a Native speaker/non-native speaker conversation and the negotiation of comprehensible input. Applied Linguistics 4(2): 126-41 Long M H 1983b Linguistic and conversational adjustments to non-native speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisitions: 177-93 Pica T 1987 Second-language acquisition, social interaction, and the classroom. Applied Linguistics 8(1): 3-21 Sharwood Smith M 1988 Consciousness raising and the second language learner. In: Rutherford W, Sharwood Smith M (eds.) Grammar (Mother Tongue) and Second Language Teaching. Newbury House, New York Swain M 1985 Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensive output in its development. In: Gass S, Madden C (eds.) Input in Second Language Acquisition. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Swain M 1995 Three functions of output in second language learning. In: Cook G, Seidlhofer B (eds.) Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics: Studies in honour of H. G. Widdowson. Oxford University Press, Oxford Swain M, Lapkin S 1995 Problems in output and the cognitive processes they generate: A step towards second language learning. Applied Linguistics 16: 361-91 Swain M, Lapkin S 1998 Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French immersion students working together. Modern Language Journal 82(3): 32037.
Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories Tannen D 1986 That's Not What I Meant. Morrow, New York Tomlin R 1984 The treatment of foreground-background information in the on-line descriptive discourse of second language learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 6: 115-42
Varonis E M, Gass S 1985a Non-native/non-native conversations: a model for negotiation of meaning. Applied Linguistics 6(1): 71-90 Varonis E M, Gass S 1985b Miscommunication in native/nonnative conversation. Language in Society 14: 327-43
Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories K. R. Gregg
The orthodoxy for this period is usually summed up in the term 'contrastive analysis (CA) hypothesis' (see Contrastive and Error Analysis). This hypothesis held that insofar as the native language (LI) and the second language (L2) were similar in their surface syntax or phonology, the L2 would be easily acquired—given appropriate training and reinforcement—and where there were differences acquisition would be difficult. Efforts were, of course, made to refine the hypothesis, but by and large CA was really more of a central assumption than a hypothesis, and research was geared more to illuminating it than to testing it. CA was seriously challenged once the implications of Chomsky's critique of behaviorism and structuralist grammar came to be felt within the field of SLA. Following similar work in first language acquisition, a number of SLA researchers began investigating the acquisition of English grammatical morphemes, and found what appeared to be a regular acquisition order irrespective of LI. This suggested the operation of some sort of universal process of language acquisition, 1. Historical Background and cast doubt on the CA hypothesis. In opposition to Although interest in second languages goes back to CA, the 'creative construction (cc) hypothesis' was put Babel, it is not necessary to trace the roots of SLA forward, claiming that SLA was a process not of habit research as a scientific discipline further back than formation but of grammar construction mediated by World War II, and the wartime and postwar interests an internalized language acquisition device (LAD), and in foreign language teaching. From the 1940s to well that the effects of the LI on SLA were minimal. (For a into the 1960s, the dominant theoretical position on classic expression of CA, see Lado 1957; for a comprelanguage learning reflected the dominance of behavi- hensive cc position see Dulay et al. 1982.) The best articulated and most ambitious cc position orism in psychology, and of structuralism in linguistics. Briefly put, it held that language learning, whether of was developed by Krashen, in what was often referred a first or second language, is a form of habit forma- to as the Monitor Theory. The Monitor Theory tion. In this sense there was no theory of SLA as such, claimed that SLA is essentially the same as first given that no reason was seen for anything other than language acquisition, in that the same LAD operates in a general learning theory for all types of learning. SLA the same way in both children and adults; that given research concentrated on identifying the sources of sufficient comprehensible input, the LAD operates to difficulty of habit formation for a learner of a second acquire an L2 step by step in a universal natural order language; 'difficulty,' of course, being defined in terms of acquisition; and that failure to achieve native-like of degree of success or failure in producing native-like competence in an L2 is attributable to affective factors such as motivation. Although extremely influential at utterances in the second language. Any normal human being acquires a language, with ease, unconsciously, and without instruction. Yet it is very difficult for many adults to acquire a second language, even with painstaking effort and expert instruction. Only the lucky few attain sufficient proficiency to pass for natives. The task of a second language acquisition (SLA) theory is to explain why this is so; to provide an accurate description and explanation of the process of second language acquisition. The task has barely been begun, and there is as yet no such thing as a theory of second language acquisition. It will be the burden of this article, then, not to present a theory or theories, but rather to discuss the conceptual and empirical problems facing theory construction in this field, and to introduce current approaches to the construction of an adequate theory. (For more detailed accounts of empirical research in specific areas of SLA, see Syntax in Second Language Acquisition; Phonology in Second Language Acquisition; Second Language Acquisition: Conversation; Lexis: Acquisition; and Semantics.)
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Teaching Additional Languages first, the Monitor Theory was soon shown to suffer from major theoretical and empirical shortcomings, and the theory was generally abandoned by the mid1980s (see also Krashen). One of the main failings of the Monitor Theory was that it did not take into account current linguistic theory as a component of SLA theory. It is only since the mid 1980s that SLA researchers have begun to apply systematically the insights of linguistic theory, especially theories of generative grammar, to the question of SLA, and it is at this point that SLA research can be said to have matured to a degree where it is possible to talk about serious attempts to construct a viable SLA theory. These attempts are discussed below in Sect. 2, but first it is necessary to clarify just what is at stake in constructing a theory of second language acquisition. 2. SLA Theory: Goals and Problems A theory is a set of statements intended to provide an explanation for some phenomenon; it is an attempt to answer a 'why' or a 'how' question. A successful theory gives a satisfying answer; an unsuccessful one gives a less than, satisfying answer. The question of what criteria of satisfaction are to be used is an extremely vexed one, on which there is very little agreement. Nonetheless it is necessary here to make a few rough preliminary distinctions in order to assess proposed SLA theories. First of all, it is necessary to distinguish between explanation, description, and prediction. Accurate description of a phenomenon is of course a desideratum; but it leaves the phenomenon unexplained. A complete description of the stages of acquisition, if there were one, would not be an explanation of the process of acquisition, although it would make clear what it is that is to be explained. However, there are cases where the distinction between description and explanation blurs: for instance, it can be argued that the ungrammaticality of a given sentence type is explained by appealing to a principle of 'universal grammar,' which just is a description of the appropriate constraint (see Sect. 2.2). Again, it is possible to predict a given phenomenon without being able to explain it correctly (as with preCopernican astronomy), or to explain it without being able to predict it (as with earthquakes). In SLA, for instance, there is a well-attested series of stages of negation through which L2 learners of English pass. The stages have been carefully described, and one can predict what a given learner's negative utterances will look like at any given stage, but there is still no satisfactory explanation of these stages. A good deal of current SLA research is, necessarily, descriptive work devoted to clarifying the nature of the phenomena to be explained, without necessarily proffering explanations of what is described.
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2.1 The Domain of an SLA Theory Given that an SLA theory should be explanatory, not just descriptive, what should it explain? What is the proper domain of an SLA theory? The acquisition of a second language, presumably, but there's the rub: it is not clear to what extent, if any, second languages are acquired. In first language acquisition theory, one starts with the fact that acquisition is complete and universal; to all intents and purposes every human acquires a first language. This fact, formulated as the 'learnability condition', is a fundamental constraint on theory construction, a constraint that is of great benefit to theorists, since it drastically limits the kinds of theories to be entertained. For instance, a theory that appeals to imitation or instruction can be eliminated out of hand for, even if examples of both can be found, it is clear that neither imitation nor instruction is universal; for that reason alone such a theory can be rejected outright. In SLA theory, however, the learnability condition manifestly does not obtain, which makes the SLA theorist's job much more difficult. It might be claimed, for example, that instruction is necessary, and that it is precisely only those learners who had sufficient instruction who reach native-like proficiency. But not only does the inapplicability to SLA theory of the learnability condition complicate theory construction by increasing the number of possible explanations, it also complicates the question of just what is to be explained. Where LI acquisition theory has to explain acquisition, it would seem that SLA theory has to explain both acquisition and failure to acquire, or else it has to deny the existence of any successes (the failures seem to be undeniable). The domain problem does not stop there, however. Even granting that the domain of SLA theory is the acquisition of an L2, it is not clear what is involved in the term 'acquisition.' Older, CA-style explanations would not even have spoken of acquisition, but rather of learning or habit formation, and they would have limited themselves to the utterances produced by L2 learners: what is now referred to as performance. The shortcomings of this approach to delimiting a domain have been clear since Chomsky (1965): even if an L2 learner's acquisition is totally different from that of an LI learner, SLA involves the acquisition of knowledge, or competence. An L2 learner does not acquire utterances, but rather the (often incomplete) knowledge of structure and meaning underlying utterances. Accordingly, an SLA theory should explain what it is L2 learners know about the L2, and how they come to know it. 2.2 Explanation in SLA Theory—Performance versus Competence The consequences of adopting L2 competence as the domain of an SLA theory are profound. For one thing, defining the domain to include competence increases
Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories the explanatory burden of the theory, and thus raises the standards for evaluating the theory's adequacy. The explanation of the acquisition of linguistic knowledge is dependent on a theory of linguistic knowledge; which is to say that an acquisition theory depends essentially on a linguistic theory. But this means that in part the explanation offered by the SLA theory will not be the type of causal explanation usually taken to be typical of theories, but rather something more like a functional explanation (or functional analysis) wherein a learner's complex knowledge of language is explained by being described; that is, by being broken down into simpler components (such as principles and parameters of universal grammar) and their interactions. On the other hand, while an acquisition theory is a theory of the acquisition of knowledge, it is also a theory of the acquisition of knowledge. In explaining acquisition, it must appeal to some sort of causal explanation. In other words an SLA theory must detail the mechanism by which a learner moves from a state of not knowing x to a state of knowing x, where x is some aspect of an L2. Where the commitment to explaining competence entails a description, not of the types of utterances produced at different stages by a learner, but rather of the linguistic knowledge imperfectly and partially reflected by such utterances, the commitment to explaining the acquisition of that knowledge requires a description of the mechanism that moves the learner from stage to stage, if there are stages, or along the learning continuum if there are not. This dual commitment—to explaining both competence and its acquisition—acts as a severe constraint on the types of SLA theory that can reasonably be entertained. It forces the theorist to go beyond elaborating the conditions under which SLA takes place. A few examples of SLA research will illustrate the insufficiency of many of the most common approaches to second language acquisition. For instance, a number of SLA researchers, influenced in part by trends in sociolinguistics, are interested in the problem of how and why a given learner's synchronic production varies according to task or situation: a learner may say he speak English or he speaks English, and the variability may or may not be systematic. The problem is simply that there is no reason to believe that the causes of variation in production—such variables as attention, interlocutor, discourse function, and linguistic context have been suggested—have any connection with the causes of acquisition. Insofar as production can be taken as evidence for acquisition (see Sect. 5), variable production of a given form only indicates that more than one variant has been acquired; and determining the causes of variation in the learner's output presupposes, rather than explains, the acquisition itself. Again, many SLA researchers stress the importance of the communicative context of most L2 learning,
and try to establish the discourse characteristics of successful SLA (see Discourse in the Language Classroom', Intercultural Discourse', Communication Strategies). In some cases, the claim seems to be that, for instance, certain forms of input or feedback from a native-speaker interlocutor are in some way causes of SLA. However, no concrete proposals have been put forward to explain how modified input would lead to the internalization of an L2 grammar. In other cases, however, the goal is explicitly not explanatory, but rather descriptive and predictive; the reasoning behind such research is that given the need for comprehensible input, it is worth trying to find out what discourse or input factors contribute to comprehensibility. Such research is not only useful but for many practical purposes sufficient; nonetheless it does not explain how an L2 is acquired. Still another major field of L2 research centers on the relation between SLA and linguistic universals, or language typology. In particular, there is a good deal of SLA research that makes appeal to the concept of markedness, as defined within a system of language typology. Marked forms or structures are those that are rarer in the world's languages, or in some intuitive sense more complex, than their unmarked counterparts. So, for instance, of the six logically possible orders of Subject (S), Object (O), and Verb (V) in a simple declarative sentence, OVS would be a marked order, while the SVO of English or the SOV of Japanese would be unmarked. Preposition-stranding (as in English Who are you talking to?} is quite rare among the world's languages, hence marked, while piedpiping (To whom are you talking?) is unmarked. The concept of markedness has enabled SLA researchers to make highly specific predictions about acquisition, although these predictions have not necessarily been confirmed. For instance, it is often claimed that marked forms will be harder to acquire than unmarked forms, at least ceteris paribus, and consequently where both forms appear in the L2, the unmarked will be acquired first. Or, where structures form a so-called implicational hierarchy—where if a language has x it will have y, but not necessarily the reverse—it is often claimed that the L2 learner will acquire those structures in the hierarchical order, from unmarked (y) to most marked (.x). To take one interesting example, there evidently is a hierarchy of noun-phrase positions that can be relativized: if a language can relativize indirect objects (the woman who(m) I sent the message to) it can also relativize direct objects (the man I love) and subjects (the dog that bit me); if it can relativize genitives (the man whose wife you met) it can relativize the other three, and so on. It has been predicted that L2 learners of English would have increasing difficulty in producing relative clauses as one moves down the hierarchy from unmarked to marked. The claim has been largely, although not perfectly, borne out, but regard-
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Teaching Additional Languages less of the experimental results the question is, what does this explain about SLA? Noun phrases corresponding to English the man than whom I'm taller are not possible in most of the world's languages, which is to say that such a relative noun phrase is marked; but the fact that a structure does not exist in most of the world's languages is hardly likely to cause difficulty for someone acquiring the structure in a language where it does exist, any more than acquisition of a given structure in a given language should be facilitated by the frequency of that structure's occurrence in other languages. Since marked forms are generally less common than unmarked, an acquisition order that parallels the markedness order might be attributable simply to, say, comparative frequency in input. But in such a case 'markedness' has very little explanatory value; it is simply another term for 'infrequency.' On the other hand it is sometimes the case, as with English preposition-stranding, that the marked form is overwhelmingly the most common form in the input. If typological markedness were itself a causal variable in SLA, greater difficulty in acquiring prepositionstranding would be expected, despite the wealth of input, than in acquiring piedpiping, which, however unmarked it may be in the world, is extremely rare in English. Empirical research suggests that this is not in fact the case; but even if it were, the acquisition of English preposition-stranding would not be explained —only the conditions for acquisition would be partially described. In order to make markedness an explanatory concept in an SLA theory, it is necessary to define markedness in such a way as to connect it with learning mechanisms within the individual learner. Typological markedness is basically a statistical concept, defined across individuals and across languages; it is not at all clear what causal role it could play in an acquisition mechanism.
acquisition. For instance there are likely to be differences (b) between the nature and amount of input received by a 1-year old child and an adult, and these differences may have an effect on the acquisition outcome. Perhaps the most important input difference may be that so-called negative evidence—that is, explicit evidence as to the ungrammatically in the TL of a given structure—is essentially absent from LI input, whereas it is often available in L2 input, especially in the case of formal L2 instruction. Whether this difference is important or not is a subject of some disagreement. More interesting perhaps is the difference in (c); an adult begins the acquisition of a second language already equipped with a great deal of knowledge—of the world, of languages, and preeminently, of the LI—and it is hard to imagine how this knowledge could not have some effect on acquisition. As for (d), there is controversy within LI acquisition theory as to whether these mechanisms mature over the course of childhood acquisition, and within SLA theory as to whether they degenerate or even disappear afterwards. There are various ways a theorist can manipulate the relative importance of these parameters; for instance, the mechanism in (d) may be assumed to be dedicated to language acquisition, as it is by theorists who employ some concept of universal grammar, or to be general-purpose, as perhaps most other SLA theorists would claim. If the TL is thought to be sufficiently simple, which was probably the case for most early acquisition theorists, the learning mechanisms can be that much simpler. Or if the input is taken to be highly rich and explicit—as seems to be the position of many discourse-oriented SLA researchers—it can be posited that the initial knowledge state of the learner is correspondingly less complex. There are limits, however, to the freedom one has in weighting these variables: there is overwhelming evidence, for instance, of the extreme complexity of natural languages, which calls 2.3 A Learnability Approach to SLA Theory into question any acquisition theory that relies on Construction overly simple learning mechanisms or puts too much If the goal of an SLA theory is to describe and explain faith in input as a teaching device. This learnability approach is utilized by a number the acquisition of L2 knowledge (as well as the failure to acquire such knowledge), such learner-external of SLA researchers who, while working within the same approaches as outlined above can only play a secon- framework and sharing many of the same assumpdary role in theory construction. An SLA theory is a tions, nonetheless differ among each other sharply in psycholinguistic theory, one that focuses on the indivi- interesting ways. The common ground may be outdual learner. Learnability theory is one way of focus- lined as follows: (a) The TL (L2) is highly complex. Further, it can ing on the internal workings of the language learner, best be represented by a generative grammar, of by manipulating the four basic components that play the sort provided by, say, Government Binding a role in acquisition: (a) the target language (TL); (b) Theory, or lexical functional grammar. the input that the learner actually receives in the (b) The input vastly underdetermines the TL gramcourse of acquisition; (c) the linguistic or other relevant mar, which is to say that the linguistic knowknowledge the learner brings to the learning task; ledge represented by the grammar transcends and (d) the learning mechanism(s) that the learner is the input. equipped with. (c) Therefore the learner must bring to bear on There are of course differences in the nature of the input internalized knowledge of a highly these four variables between first and second language 580
Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories 3.1 Theism: L2 Acquisition = LI Acquisition The claim that SLA is mediated by UG would at first glance seem to have certain points in its favor. For instance, it is often claimed in support of the theist position that in the absence of UG, which constrains the learner's hypotheses, the L2 learner would be expected to violate UG. It has often been either claimed or taken as a working assumption that the language of the L2 learner—what is known as the learner's 3. Universal Grammar in SLA: Theists and Deists interlanguage—is itself a natural language. In terms Most SLA theorists working within the learnability of late twentieth-century linguistic theory, this is to framework agree that some form of universal gram- say that interlanguages do not violate UG. (UG of mar (UG) is an essential element of language acquisi- course does not cover everything in language; errors tion. UG consists of a set of universal principles which like he speak English or / have a book blue are not UG drastically constrain the set of possible hypotheses violations.) And indeed it would seem that interthat can be entertained by the (LI) language acquirer. language grammars are never 'crazy' grammars; Some of these principles are universal in the strictest learners do not seem to use rules calling for movement sense, in that they are necessarily instantiated by any of the nth word in a sentence, for example, or for human language. Some principles are universal in the mirror-reversal of word order. To this extent at least sense that gender-specific biological functions are uni- there seems to be support for the idea of UG actively versal in the human species; they are universal across mediating SLA. all languages that instantiate them, but irrelevant to On the other hand, once the explanatory role of languages that do not. Languages that do not instan- theory is taken into consideration, there is a major tiate the principle also do not violate it. problem with SLA theism: if UG is at work in SLA, why Finally, and perhaps most interestingly for SLA does it do such a poor job? If the learnability condition theory, some principles, known as parameters, vary applied to SLA—that is, if all adults acquired an L2 in specific limited ways, for instance the order of head with the ease, rapidity, and completeness of children and complement. Parametric variation accounts for acquiring an LI—the theist claim would be much the major type of variation across languages. A prin- more convincing. Indeed, the burden of proof would ciples and parameters theory also provides a more clearly be on the deists. But in fact perfect L2 acquisiuseful, psycholinguistic definition of markedness: a tion is the exception not the rule. At a minimum the marked parameter setting is one that requires input theist is obliged to provide an explanation for the to be chosen. Not all parameters have markedness widespread failure of L2 learners to acquire. One values, but for those that do, the unmarked value is explanation that has been offered (as seen above with the default value, the one that will be chosen by the Krashen) is that affective factors such as motivation learner in the absence of evidence in the input that or attitude toward the L2 either reduce input or reduce that value is inappropriate. the effectiveness with which input is processed. A The question for SLA theory is, what is the role of rather interesting different proposal is that, while UG UG in SLA? Clearly, at least two neatly contrasting is indeed active, other more general learning mechpositions are conceivable, and indeed held: UG func- anisms are also at work in the adult, and these conflict tions in SLA just as it does in LI acquisition; or, UG with UG, whereas in the child UG works unimpeded. ceases to function once an LI is acquired in childhood. So far there has been no detailed proposal made to The latter claim accords to UG the sort of role substantiate either of these suggestions, so it is hard Enlightenment deism gave to God, that of the deus to evaluate them empirically at present. abscondidus, who having once created the universe, Assuming for the moment that there was a satislets it run on its own without any interference. UG, in factory explanation of failure to acquire, how much this view, having produced the individual grammar of weight does the mere absence of UG violations in interthe learner, retires from the scene to let that grammar language have? Practically speaking, of course, the do its work. The former position sees UG in a more absence of 'crazy' grammars would offer cold comfort traditional not-a-sparrow-falls theistic light; UG itself to the learner: since no natural language violates UG, is still active in the adult, both in constraining the and yet most natural languages are mutually incomadult's knowledge and use of his LI and also in guid- prehensible, it should theoretically be possible to ing the acquisition of an L2. Despite the theological acquire an interlanguage while at the same time being terminology introduced here, these are empirical totally incomprehensible and uncomprehending when claims, susceptible of empirical testing. Sects. 3.1 and using it. More specifically in terms of SLA theory, it is 3.2 explain how they have been tested; it may be that open to the deist to respond to the theist that the both positions are too extreme, and that middle conformity of the interlanguage to UG is solely a result of the LI, not of UG. It appears that one is entitled to ground will have to be found. abstract and subtle sort; simply extrapolating from input will not do. The differences among the various proponents of learnability-oriented SLA theories are outlined below, along with discussion of the problems facing the various positions.
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Teaching Additional Languages expect stronger claims from the theists, and one way of framing such stronger claims is provided by the concept of parameters. For example, given an LI and an L2 that differ with respect to a given parameter—in other words, the LI and the L2 have different parameter settings—there are different possible claims a theist might wish to make. For instance: (a) Strong theism: The learner starts at zero, with UG in its initial state; the LI has no influence. Thus the L2 learner fixes the parameter setting in the same way as a native speaker of the L2 would. (b) Weak theism: The learner starts with the LI grammar, but is able to make the appropriate adjustments in parameter settings thanks to the operation of UG. With respect to (a), it might be thought that given such clear evidence as foreign accents or those Lirelated syntactic errors that textbooks warn against, such a position would be an obvious nonstarter. It must be remembered, however, that the theist claim is not that there is no LI influence, or transfer as it is often called, but only that the LI parameter value will not influence the learner's setting of the parameter in the L2. In any case it can be said that there is no empirical support for strong theism. It might be added that (a) presents conceptual problems, in that it is not clear how learners could ignore their LI knowledge when first encountering L2 input. The similarities and differences between strong and weak theism can be summed up as follows: (a) any truly universal principle should be evident in the interlanguage, either because of the direct influence of UG (strong theism) or perhaps because of transfer from LI (weak theism); (b) any principle instantiated only in the L2 should be acquired (given sufficient appropriate input); (c) there either may be (weak theism) or will not be (strong theism) a sequence (from inappropriate to appropriate) in the acquisition of parameter values that differ between the LI and L2; (d) negative evidence, such as explicit instruction, should not be necessary. 3.2 Deism: The Fundamental Difference Hypothesis The theist position is based on the claim that even if L2 acquirers do not attain the level of native speakers, they nonetheless do (often) acquire a sufficiently complex and subtle knowledge of the L2 to require, as in LI acquisition, appeal to UG for a source of explanation. To this the deist replies that in so far as such knowledge is attained, it can be explained by the effects of UG through the LI (see Bley-Vroman 1989 for a deist position). The essential argument is that in order to explain the noticeable differences between LI acquisition and L2 acquisition, the most important being
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the inapplicability of the learnability condition in the latter, it makes sense to assume that UG does not directly operate in SLA. (Deists often appeal to the claim that there is a critical period, usually thought to end roughly at the onset of puberty, after which Lllike language learning is biologically impossible.) Where LI acquisition involves UG on the one hand and a language-specific learning mechanism on the other, the deist claim is that in SLA, UG survives only as specifically instantiated in the LI, and that in the place of a language-specific learning mechanism the L2 acquirer must rely on general learning mechanisms, such as hypothesis-testing, inductive and deductive reasoning, analogy, and so on. Such mechanisms are not capable of producing the kind of competence found among all native speakers; but that very insufficiency can be used in SLA theory to account for failure to acquire an L2. It can also be used to explain the variation in L2 proficiency, since humans do vary widely in, say, their hypothesis-forming abilities. On the other hand, since UG is still in an indirect sense available, there is a possible explanation for those SLA successes that seem to transcend the capabilities of general learning mechanisms. 4. Testing Hypotheses in SLA Theory Of course, phrased this loosely, the appeal of the deist position can easily appear to be undermined by its apparent lack of falsifiability: if a learner is successful it is because of UG via the LI, if unsuccessful it is because UG is not available. This danger is avoidable, however, once the deist claims are made more specific. 4.1 Refining Predictions Deists and theists make conflicting claims about the function of UG in SLA; these claims can be made more explicit by phrasing them as testable predictions about the L2 knowledge acquired by learners. Both sides would agree that any truly universal principles (such as structure dependence) will be manifest in the learner's interlanguage, as will any principles that obtain in both the LI and the L2 (such as subjacency in English and French). Thus in order to distinguish between theism and deism empirically, one of the following two situations needs to be investigated: (a) a given principle is instantiated in the L2 but not the LI, and hence the LI can be eliminated as a source of L2 knowledge of this principle; (b) a given parameter is set differently in the LI and the L2. (Logically, a third possible case is where a principle is instantiated in the LI but not the L2. A theist would claim of course that the principle would not manifest itself in the interlanguage; but on the other hand the deist is not committed to claiming that the learner would carry over the principle in a situation where it is totally irrelevant. There is no need for a deist to claim, for example, that an English-speaker learning Korean will
Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories try to observe the constraints imposed by subjacency on wh-movement, despite the fact that there is no whmovement in Korean.) Actually, these claims need to be refined even further. Given that input is also one of the factors affecting the learnability of an L2, input must also be eliminated as a potential source of information about the principle or parameter. The head-position parameter, for instance, governs the order of head and complement, and has two values, head-initial and head-final. Even where the LI and L2 differ in values (as in Japanese and English), it should be immediately evident from very simple input what the order is, and hence the successful acquisition of English head positions by a Japanese learner can hardly be telling evidence against deism. Similarly, the so-called prodrop parameter distinguishes inter alia between languages which permit and forbid deletion of pronoun subjects (for instance, Spanish and French, respectively). A French speaker learning Spanish will soon encounter large numbers of subjectless sentences, which should enable him to set the parameter to the L2 value (at least with respect to this aspect of the parameter). Thus what is necessary is a situation where the four elements of the learnability approach (see Sect. 2.3) can be applied in such a way that both the input and the learner's LI (and extralinguistic) knowledge can be eliminated as sufficient causes of acquisition of a given L2 form, as defined by linguistic theory, leaving UG as the only logical source of explanation. The difference here is that the element of preexisting knowledge is further refined, and divided into LI knowledge and knowledge of UG. It may be worth noting that one effect of this approach is the formulation of a highly precise CA hypothesis, one anchored firmly in linguistic theory.
English learner (LI or L2) know what generalizations are overgeneralizations? The problem can be posed in this way: There are countless situations where two grammars stand in a subset/superset relation to each other, whether those grammars are of two different languages or two possible versions of one language. (Properly speaking, it is the sets of sentences generated by the two grammars that are in such a relation.) For instance, a grammar that permits both overt and deleted pronoun subjects is a superset of one that permits only overt pronouns; a grammar that permits both preposition-stranding and piedpiping is a superset of one that permits only piedpiping; a grammar that permits relative pronoun deletion is a superset of one that forbids it. If a learner starts with the subset hypothesis—for example, the assumption that subject pronouns are not deletable— and the target grammar is actually the superset, there should be no problem, since superset sentences should be in the input. But if the learner incorrectly hypothesizes the superset grammar, nothing in the input itself should lead to a revision of that hypothesis. This problem does not seem to arise in LI acquisition, a fact which has led to the claim that children in the course of acquisition follow some sort of 'subset principle' that keeps them from overgeneralizing. In SLA theory, it would seem that a strong theist would have to claim that the principle works for adults too; the evidence is clearly against that claim. For instance, Spanish-speaking learners of English quite often have an extremely difficult time avoiding pronoun deletion, and Japanese learners of English often interpret reflexive pronouns much more widely than English in fact permits (so that, for example, they would take John wants Bill to abase himself as ambiguous). This evidence does not, however, necessarily vindicate deism against weak theism; after all, both the subset language and the superset language conform to the constraints of UG. Rather, as White suggests, the difference between LI acquisition and SLA may lie not in the nonavailability of UG in SLA, but in the failure of learning mechanisms like the subset principle to operate. Needless to say, the question of the role of UG in SLA is still open, and much work still needs to be done (for detailed discussion see White 1989). But it is clear that the existence of a well-articulated linguistic theory developed with an eye to learnability offers the hope of finally constructing a cogent SLA theory.
4.2 Controlling for Input; the Subset Principle What does it mean to say that one has eliminated input as an explanation of the acquisition of a principle or parameter setting? Obviously SLA cannot proceed without L2 input, and thus in this sense input cannot be eliminated. What input itself cannot do, however, is tell the learner what is not possible in the target language. For instance, both Spanish and English permit sentences with pronoun subjects. Nothing in the input of sentences with overt subjects, however, tells the learner that pronoun deletion is forbidden in English, or permitted in Spanish. Of course the Spanish learner (LI or L2) will hear subjectless sentences, and 5. A Note on Method the English learner will not (or not in those situations There is no direct way to observe or measure L2 where they are permitted in Spanish). But absence knowledge. This fact has led some SLA researchers to from the input (even assuming that the learner can conclude that L2 competence theories are unempirical, notice such an absence) is not a sufficient condition and to restrict themselves to observable behavior, or for a learner to exclude a rule or structure from the performance. Such a conclusion is unwarranted, and developing grammar; if it were, no generalizations such a restriction is self-defeating. It is true that would be possible. The question is, how does the knowledge itself cannot be observed, but it is just
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Teaching Additional Languages as true that energy or mass or evolution cannot be observed. What can be done is observe linguistic performance, under both natural and experimental conditions, and infer from performance to competence, precisely where inference can be made to nothing else. This is simply to say that performance is evidence for a theory, not the object of the theory. The evidence for an SLA theory may come from any of a wide variety of experimental tasks and observational situations. Not all methods are appropriate at all times, and not all have the same utility; what they have in common is that the data they produce are all performance data. But just as the behavior of a falling feather does not refute a theory of gravitation, so no given performance data are necessarily a refutation of a hypothesis about competence. This does not make SLA theory unempirical, but it does make theory construction harder than mere observation and classification.
rate focus gained by a UG theory is that the domain of inquiry is necessarily narrowed. It may very well turn out that no unified theory of SLA is possible; for instance, it may turn out that there is no essential difference between learning the Japanese word for cockroach and learning the population of Chicago, which if true would mean that at least part of L2 learning is subsumed under a general theory of learning. The future development of SLA theory is not yet clear, and indeed one of the major tasks facing theorists is the delimitation of the domain of the theory that awaits construction. Bibliography
Bley-Vroman R 1989 What is the logical problem of foreign language learning? In: Gass S M, Schachter J (eds.) Linguistic Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Chomsky N 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT 6. SLA outside of UG Press, Cambridge, MA This article has concentrated on the role of UG in SLA, Dulay H, Burt M, Krashen S 1982 Language Two. Oxford University Press, New York and the role of UG in a theory of SLA, for two related reasons. First, although one's linguistic competence, Ellis R 1985 Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford University Press, Oxford LI or L2, is not only complex but wide-ranging, the Flynn S, O'Neil W (eds.) 1985 Linguistic Theory in Second kind of knowledge that UG theories of language try Language Acquisition. Kluwer, Dordrecht to account for is certainly central and indispensable. Gregg K R 1989 Second language acquisition theory: The Second, it is only in the area where UG is relevant that case for a generative perspective. In: Gass S M, Schachter J rich and detailed theories (that is, theories of UG) are (eds.) Linguistic Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge currently available. Consequently, it is much clearer what is at stake in this area with regard to a potential Krashen S D 1982 Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Pergamon Press, Oxford SLA theory. Still it should not be forgotten that L2 knowledge Lado R 1957 Linguistics Across Cultures. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI includes a great many areas that are either unrelated Larsen-Freeman D, Long M H 1991 Introduction to Second or only indirectly related to UG. UG-oriented SLA Language Acquisition Research. Longman, London theorists do not (or do not yet) make claims about the McLaughlin B 1987 Theories of Second-Language Learning. acquisition order or difficulty of English grammatical Edward Arnold, London morphemes, or about the acquisition of indirect White L 1989 Universal Grammar and Second Language request forms. The price one pays for the more accuAcquisition. John Benjamins, Amsterdam
Second Language Acquisition: Sign Language J. G. Kyle
Despite the expectation that proficiency in all languages is achieved in a rather similar way, there are certain features which make sign languages different from spoken languages. First, they are realized in a different medium—that is, visual-spatial, rather than auditory-oral; and second, sign languages develop in children whose parents are initially unable to use the language with them—90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents. 584
The characteristics of sign language itself are adequately described in other contributions and it can be seen that the grammar of sign language is very different. Just as it has taken linguists rather longer to focus on spoken language acquisition after they have examined the structures and functioning of languages, so it is that there has been relatively little study of sign language acquisition. One of the reasons has been the lack of situations where the recording can take place.
Second Language Acquisition: Sign Language Deaf children who will develop sign language occur in only one in 2000 births, and those born into deaf families (deaf children with deaf parents—dcdp) occur perhaps once in 40000 births. The natural language situation of parent passing on the language to the child is rare. Studies of individual children are still the norm and continuous studies of five children from an early age (e.g., Ackerman et al. 1991) are large. Where it has been possible to record deaf children from an early age a number of striking findings can be reported. 1. Joint Reference The ability of a hearing parent to discuss an object or event while a child is observing, is an important feature of interaction in infancy and early childhood; if a deaf child engages with an object, however, the communication channel (visual) is cut off. Research by Kyle et al. (1988) suggests that deaf mothers overcome this problem by signing rather less than hearing mothers speak, but also by referring to objects prior to engaging with them. So in a task, which involves directing the child's gaze, deaf mothers characteristically refer to the object when they have eye contact with the child and then point to it. While the child is looking, the mother does not communicate and only as the child's eye contact is returned, is any further information provided by the mother. The purpose of this sort of interaction, which appears very limiting by hearing-speaking standards, is to establish attention routines such that much more extended interaction and turn-taking can occur in the second year as language develops. It is noticeable that hearing mothers of deaf children do not naturally develop this skill. 2. Motherese Just as one can detect baby talk in hearing interaction, similar characteristics are found in the interaction with dcdp. Signs are lengthened in duration, extended in space, and manipulated in space (perhaps to increase attention); signs are displaced from their normal location to locations appropriate to the child's attention, for example, the mother will sign key concepts on top of a picture book. Signs can also be made 'on the child' and manipulated as in a game, for example, the sign DUCK (made by opening and closing the hand in the manner of a duck's beak) can be used as if the imaginary duck was pecking at the child. One further significant feature is that not only does the mother model signs for the child, she can model the signs on the child—she takes the child's hands and moves them in an appropriate way for that sign. 3. Emerging Signs Just as with hearing children, signs begin to emerge reliably around one year. There is considerable variation in this in even the few studies which have been
reported (Bonvillian et al. 1983, Harris et al. 1987; Kyle et al. 1988). Some deaf children are reported as signing prior to one year and others do not produce the first sign until 17 months. Because of the relatively few home situations which have been studied, it is not obvious whether this variation is random within a norm or whether there are specific interaction factors in the home. First signs tend to be object signs (seen around 11 months of age, Ackerman et al. 1991) although in the earliest stage these are difficult to distinguish from gestures (hearing children also gesture and these can be detected from 15 months—Acredolo and Goodwyn 1988). These early signs are poorly articulated in terms of handshape, location, and movement. Parents interpret the sign from the context and frequently provide a correction. It appears that signs are prelexical (as with words; see also Nelson and Lucariello 1985) until around 16 months of age when they begin to be generalized and where overextension can be noted. 4. Sign Combinations As with words in hearing children signs come to be combined, but appear to pass through an intermediate stage prior to emerging as two-sign combinations. This intermediate stage is one of bracketing. In this, dcdp combine single signs with points, that is, a gesture signifying a location, usually made with the index finger as: POINT SIGN POINT or SIGN POINT SIGN
before they move to sign1 sign2. At this time the signs begin to develop into twoand three-sign utterances. However, it would also seem that sign utterances tend to be shorter than corresponding length of utterance in words. This may be partly due to the fact that the signs are more densely packed as units, but it is also likely to be a function of the relatively shorter conversation length possible for a young child when he/she has to engage in eye contact throughout the exchange. 5. Question Development An interesting feature of sign competence is the use of question forms. Sign languages generally have whforms, but are most likely to indicate questions by the use of non-manual markers (notably use of eyebrows). Initial work on the acquisition of question forms suggests that deaf children and their caregivers tend to avoid such question marking and the only distinguishing feature of a question appears to be the 'terminal hold'—the holding of the last sign for an extended period while maintaining eye contact. One possible explanation is that deaf children tend to learn the emotive connotations of the face before they learn its use for nonmanual grammar. Early sign questions if marked by knit brows would be interpreted
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Teaching Additional Languages emotionally by the young child. As a result question marking in the early stages has to adopt a different framework. 6. Gesture to Sign Notable in the research is an examination of the continuity-discontinuity debate, whereby gestures can be considered to lead naturally into signs (speech) or are seen to diverge from the beginning. Petitto (1986) has reported the development of the gesture for self, prior to the development of the signs for i and YOU. The gestural stage of indicating self is generally a period of correct use, but the child then passes through a period of misattributing the sign i to others, and YOU to self. Only gradually does the child emerge from this 'confusion' to produce the correct signs for I and YOU. From the findings of Volterra (1983) which indicate that hearing children, while able to use gesture, do not progress to the stage of combining referential gestures (which deaf children do), we can see how sign language acquisition work casts some light on the roots of language development. 7. Sign in School Beyond this period there has been more concern with the applied field of education as the deaf child will be admitted into educational programs from as early as two years of age. Although one can see the sophisticated use of sign by dcdp, there can be significant problems for deaf children in hearing families. Here it is often the case that 'sign supported speech' forms are used by the hearing adults around the child. Hoiting and Loncke (1990) have analyzed the typically atypical language learning situation of the deaf child. Characteristically it incorporates language input from both sign and speech and also may be presented in forms which mix both. Nevertheless, they conclude that the cognitive-linguistic system of deaf children is more linked to sign language than to spoken language. Deaf children do separate spoken forms from sign forms from an early age and peer interaction is most often sign dominated. In an examination of sign competence in deaf children in school programs where sign was used, Kyle (1990) reports a pattern which indicates learning over time in the program, but disappointing levels of mastery of sign grammar. Features such as the use of spatial grammar (location of actions, objects, and people in space) and movement parameters (where movement and direction indicate aspect and person of the verb) are incompletely understood by deaf children up to the age of 10 years (although this does not apply to dcdp who are more advanced). Since a great deal of early interaction will deal with objects and story sequences this could prove to be a significant obstacle to learning. In effect, in the programs studied, the sign acquisition of the children was not adequate as a result
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of the nature of the input by adults—a fact also reflected in Johnson et al. (1989). Loncke et al. (1990) also investigated the acquisition of grammar in dchp (deaf children with hearing parents) in contrast to dcdp. They found problems in the former's use of morphosyntactic operations, while the latter seem to incorporate them in their signing from the age of 6 years onwards. Sign development can be seen to reach levels comparable to spoken language but the process whereby this point is reached differs between deaf and hearing children. In most education systems at present, only those from deaf families are likely to achieve natural sign competence at a rate comparable to hearing children. It can be expected that components of sign morphology and syntax will be acquired rather late (at school rather than at home) by the majority of deaf children. See also: Deafness and Sign Language Instruction. Bibliography Ackerman J, Kyle J G, Woll B, Ezra M 1991 Lexical acquisition in sign and speech. In: Lucas C (ed.) Sign Language Research: Theoretical Issues. Gallaudet University Press, Washington, DC Acredolo L, Goodwyn S 1988 Symbolic gesturing in normal infants. Child Development 59: 450-66 Bonvillian J D, Orlansky M D, Novak L L 1983 Early sign language acquisition and its relation to cognitive and motor development. In: Kyle J G, Woll B (eds.) Language in Sign. Croom Helm, London Harris M, Clibbens J, Tibbits R, Chasin J 1987 Communication between deaf mothers and their deaf infants. In: Griffiths P, Local J, Mills A (eds.) Proceedings of the Child Language Seminar. University of York, York Hoiting N, Loncke F 1990 Models of acquisition and processing of multilingual and multimodal information. In: Prillwitz S, Vollhaber T (eds.) Current Trends in European Sign Language Research. Signum, Hamburg Johnson R, Liddell S, Erting C 1989 Unlocking the Curriculum. Gallaudet Research Institute, Washington, DC Kyle J G 1990 BSL Development, Final Report. Centre for Deaf Studies, Bristol Kyle J G, Woll B, Ackerman J 1988 Gesture to Sign and Speech, Final Report to ESRC. Centre for Deaf Studies, Bristol Loncke F, Quertinmont S, Ferreyra P 1990 Deaf children in schools: More or less native signers. In: Prillwitz S, Vollhaber T (eds.) Current Trends in European Sign Language Research. Signum, Hamburg Nelson K, Lucariello J 1985 The development of meaning in first words. In: Barrett M D (ed.) Children's Single Word Speech. Wiley, New York Petitto L 1986 Knowledge of language in signed and spoken language acquisition. In: Woll B (ed.) Language Development and Sign Language, ISLA Monograph. Centre for Deaf Studies, Bristol Volterra V 1983 Gestures, signs and words at two years. In: Kyle J G, Woll B (eds.) Language in Sign. Croom Helm, London
Semantics
Semantics N. Dittmar
'Semantics' is the study of word-internal, referential, and compositional meaning of verbal expressions. Whether they are children or adults, the linguistic and communicative tasks of learning are quite similar for all second language learners: (a) They need content words in order to communicate, and they need to communicate in order to get access to content words and grammatical meaning; this can be called the 'learning paradox.' (b) In order to satisfy the fundamental 'referential,' 'communicative,' and 'personal' functions of language use, the learner needs the expressions for semantic concepts like time, space, modality, quality, specificity, causes, conditions, etc. and a 'functional semantic framework for schematizing experience'. This is partly cognitive work, since some of the concepts exist in the second language (LI), but not in the first language (L2), and vice versa. (c) In order to use language economically and efficiently, learners have to stabilize the expressibility of basic communicative functions by 'grammaticalization'; this implies in an elementary stage of learning that the learner finds out appropriate, polyfunctional candidates for the expression of their intentions that have to be elaborated and differentiated by semantic functions and grammatical form, for example, 'come' or 'go' for the semantic field of locomotion without any further verbal differentiation, the negator 'no' and/or the connective 'but' for the semantic field of'adversativity', and so on (see Skiba and Dittmar 1992). Whether learners acquire an L2 in a natural context ('SLA [second language acquisition] without explicit teaching') or in a classroom setting ('tutored SLA'), the acquisition of semantics proceeds on-line by the application of verbal knowledge in 'real' interaction. The dynamics of the acquisition of semantic concepts involves the supply of words (lexical items) to semantic fields, the constraining of competing words and phrases to their 'conventional' meaning, and the organization of recurrent semantic representations by stable grammatical devices. A learner using the invariant form come as a covering form ('candidate') for the list of expressions for 'movement' in a language or as a marker of requests (performative use) in combination with other verbs (come take ...), overgeneralizes the meaning of this verb applying it in polyfunctional ways for 'go,' 'take,' 'make,' 'drive,' etc. Constraining overgeneralized forms to their habit-
ual meaning and developing grammatical devices for specific semantic functions is the essential semantic challenge for the learner. 1. 'Semantics' and First Language Acquisition (FLA) Based on cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, the acquisition of meaning has been described in most detail for FLA (Clark and Clark 1977:407-514; Wode 1988:134-78, 217-25). Semantic aspects of FLA deal with the world of experience that is organized by the mind 'in categories such as persons, objects, events, actions, states, times, places, directions, and manners. Prepositional structures are composed of elements representing entities of these sorts...' (Levelt 1989:74). FLA starts with single words and their global, context-specific ('protosemantic') meaning in a wide range of primarily pragmatic functions. In developing words within 'semantic fields,' their meaning components (shape, color, form, quality, quantity, etc.) are acquired to establish cognitive boundaries and contrasts between them. The first 'holophrastic' stages (chunks of words, ritual expressions) are followed by two-word utterances, so-called 'pivot' constructions that show the fixed position of an element P in S (a small stock of items), where other elements (X) vary freely and appear in a wide range of different words (three basic patterns: P'+X, X + P2, X + X). In this 'pivot' stage, the following semantic functions are acquired: presence versus absence, existence versus nonexistence, reappearance, agent and action, object and action, possessor and possession, localization and attribution. The stage of three and more word utterances is dominated by processes of 'grammaticalization' (morphosyntactic elaboration of the verbal and nominal groups). 2. 'Semantics' and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Most of the studies in SLA have focused on the acquisition of verbal means to represent semantic fields. Other research has given preference to a 'cognitive approach' to meaning which is concerned with the conceptual side of grammar. This mapping of form onto function will be considered below in more detail. 2.1 Focus on 'Interlanguage' The standard paradigm in SLA is the description of learner varieties 'outside the classroom' with a focus on 'learning under natural conditions' of communication (without explicit teaching), with an emphasis on cross-sectional studies in the 1970s (cf. Klein and Dittmar 1979) and on longitudinal research
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Teaching Additional Languages in the 1980s (cf. Perdue 1982; Dittmar and Terborg 1991). Instead of errors being perceived as derivable and predictable from static structural contrasts between two 'a priori grammar' descriptions (term coined by Hopper 1987), they came to be seen as creative learner constructions and as part of natural transitions from one stage of learning to the next in approximating the 'target language' (TL) via a continuum of forms and functions constrained by psychoand sociolinguistic factors (cf. Klein 1986). Studies in 'contrastive semantics' (numerous in Eastern countries) are thus excluded from this article because they do not take acquisitional processes into account.
in the lexicon). These examples suggest that the children learned one semantic representation with two phonological shapes. However, there is also a good deal of evidence against this explanation (see Hatch 1983:66-7). For the time being, no clear conclusion is possible from these results. The findings need further study. Whereas bilingual children learning two languages simultaneously manifest many 'overextensions' of meaning along semantic feature lines, adult L2learners seem to be more cautious. Kellermann holds that transfer from LI to L2 is a basic, systematic mechanism and that it relates to the psychological reality of 'coreness' for lexical items. In several studies 2.2 Form versus Function on the learning of French, English, and German by Words and forms are not 'autonomous' as some lin- Dutch students, Kellermann found a strong corguists seem to suggest, but they have communicative relation between 'coreness' and transferability. 'Howfunctions (cf. Pfaff 1987). Studying the semantics of ever, when searching for the attributes of coreness, he learner varieties means describing the mapping of found that concrete meanings are not necessarily all forms/expressions onto semantic concepts that have more transferable than abstract meanings, so coreness particular communicative functions in the course of is not simply concrete versus abstract. High imagery the learning process. The distinction between 'form' also might be an attribute of coreness, since it corand 'function' is necessary because many forms can related with judgments of coreness... Kellermann be found in SLA that do not have the meaning of the found no simple relationship between linear distance corresponding target language and thus are 'over- away from core and transferability' (see Hatch generalized,' or simply are 'different' or 'deviant' (see 1983: 73, where the reader will also find an overview for empirical evidence Dittmar 1981, 1984; Stut- of Kellermann's studies). Further research is needed to evaluate these hyterheim and Klein 1987). The basic questions within this framework are, then, these: What are the verbal potheses. candidates for expressing a certain 'semantic concept'? What are the formal and grammatical devices 2.4 'Operating Principles': The Semantic Strategies Model that are developed within these 'semantic concepts' in the course of the learning process? SLA learners seem to acquire some structures before others because of the 'operating principles' they apply 2.3 Bilingual Lexicon to L2. Starting to talk in a 'pragmatic mode' (charDo bilinguals have two different semantic rep- acterized by 'polysemy' and 'parataxis' of content resentations, one for table and another for tarabeeza, words, avoidance of grammatical codification) learor do they have only one single underlying rep- ners pass through a stage where they organize semresentation for two words? Or do they add to a rep- antic coherence in utterances by strategies of resentation of table a phonological variant which leads information processing (given information precedes to tarabeeza in Egyptian Arabic? The second per- new information, expect the first N-V-N sequence to spective is supported by some observational studies be agent, action, and object, etc.); there is evidence of children learning two languages simultaneously, that semantic insecurity (caused, for example, by the which were made in the first decades of the twentieth competition between two verbs) impedes the process century. Ronjat reports that Louie, a French and Ger- of grammaticalization (cf. Skiba and Dittmar 1992). man bilingual, began giving word pairs at 20 months The passage from the 'pragmatic mode' to the 'syn(oeil—Auge; oui—jd). In his process of acquiring two tactic mode' (grammaticalization) seems to be 'operlanguages, Louie continued—at the stage of 36 mon- ated' by semantic strategies. Some basic organizational principles of 'polyths—to elicit equivalents: having learned gefullte Tomaten 'stuffed tomatoes' in German, he asked his father functional' meaning which learners apply are the folin French Comment tu dis, toil 'how do you say' in lowing: (a) Give preference to that expression which is semorder to elicit tomates farcies. antically marked over one that is less marked. Leopold's child, Hildegard, also elicited word pairs, (b) Approximate as closely as possible the relevant but from time to time she adapted the pronunciation features of the target item. to that of the other language, or she created a parallel (c) Select from among the appropriate expressions form, for example, Butterfliege from 'butterfly' for those German Schmetterling (see Hatch 1983:64-74 for an (i) relating to your native language; account of Ronjat, Leopold and other investigations
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Semantics (ii) occurring most frequently in everyday communication; (iii) with a broad rather than narrow semantic field; (iv) that can fulfill many communicative functions (cf. Dittmar 1981:151; Pfaff 1987: 84 uses the term 'principles of plurifunctionality'). Klein (1986) adds 'principles of semantic coherence': (d) Place elements that belong together semantically as close as possible together ('principle of semantic connectedness'). (e) Place orienting elements (information as to place, time, and modality) at the beginning of the utterance ('principle of orientation', see Klein (1986:94) for these and other principles). Many researchers in SLA are concerned with the intriguing question of how the learner progresses from the linguistic product of an elementary utterance to that of a more elab-orated utterance. 'Semantic' and 'cognitive strategies' seem to explain the process of this progress. The learner's task in overcoming semantic (lexical) gaps in communication constitutes a special case of 'semantic processing.' 'The gaps can take many forms—a word, a structure, a phrase, a tense marker, an idiom. Our attempts to overcome these gaps have been called "communication strategies'" (Bialystok 1990:1). 'Communication strategies' (in opposition to 'learning strategies') have been investigated in numerous empirical studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Bialystok (1990) examines the current definitions and research findings.
ish boy and an 11-year old Polish girl for 18 months (see Dittmar and Kuhberg 1988). (d) The Berlin project 'The Grammatical Elaboration of Elementary Learner Varieties' investigates the 'natural' acquisition of German as L2 by Polish migrants over a period of 24 months (five male and three female subjects). Among other aims, detailed observations were made in these three studies concerning the acquisition of semantic concepts like 'temporality,' 'locality,' and 'modality.'
2.5.7 Temporality The referential areas 'time' and 'space' are two domains which are very basic to success and failure in communication. SLA studies benefited from excellent theoretical frameworks for their empirical descriptions. The most advanced studies in semantics of SLA have been done on temporality. The Heidelberg data gathered in the 1970s (cf. Klein and Dittmar 1979; Dittmar 1981) showed that a morphologically based tense analysis of elementary and elaborated learner varieties of German does not adequately describe the semantic emergence of temporality in the lexicon and in discourse. Changes over time were not only expressed by verb morphology, but also by the discourse principle of the natural order of events and specific lexical items like calendaric expressions, prepositional phrases, etc. The acquisition of verbal expressions within the semantic concept 'temporality' has been described in depth by the ESF project (Bhardwaj, Dietrich, and Noyau, =BDN, 1988). The comparison of the tem2.5 Semantic Concepts: Longitudinal Studies Longitudinal studies of semantics in SLA are the most poral acquisition sequences of five target languages by learners of six source languages is based on an advanced investigations: (a) Huebner (1983) studied the 'natural' acquisition explicit, theoretical frame of analysis distinguishing of English by an adult Hmong speaker for one 'types of temporality' (tense, aspect, aktionsart), 'temyear recording his 'interlanguage' every three poral reference' ('theme,' 'relatum,' 'relation'), 'embedding in time-aspect,' and 'discourse structure.' weeks. (b) The European Science Foundation (ESF) pro- Based on the categories of this outline, the learning ject 'Second Language Acquisition by Adult of temporality has been described at the elementary, Immigrants' (cf. Perdue 1982) investigated intermediate, and advanced level of the learners' proundirected SLA of four informants each of two ficiency. From this rich body of research the answers different source languages learning one of the to three basic questions are selected for consideration following target languages: Dutch, English, here: French, German, and Swedish for 30 months (a) How are temporal relations expressed? (one source language (SL) was shared by a pair 'The time of utterance is the basic relation in locating of target languages (TL)): matters in time' (BDN 1988:505). The first expressions are adverbials (now, today) expressing partial or total simultaneity. The first grammaticalized Target languages tense distinctions are past versus nonpast (differences English German Dutch French Swedish in the morphological marking according to source language). 'Anaphoric relations' appear very early Punjabi Italian Turkish Arabic Spanish Finnish Source languages and are mostly indicated by indirect means (principle of natural order). It seems that the earliest anaphoric (c) Kuhberg studied the SLA of an 11 -year old Turk- means express the relation AFTER, expressions of 589
Teaching Additional Languages BEFORE follow. Linguistic means for the relation SIMULTANEOUS are learned very late. At least temporal verb morphology is developed by all learners, but some do not develop tense contrasts. Bound morphemes occur first as tense markers, auxiliaries come later (p. 506). It is true for all target languages that tense markers occur with particular classes of verbs under specific 'favorable semantic and formal conditions' (p. 506). (b) Embedding in time 'The organization of temporality in early L2 does not entail explicit indication of temporal referentiality, let alone aspect differentiation... referentiality proceeds from implicit to lexical and from there to grammatical devices' (BDN 1988:507-08). It is interesting that learners with an LI which has aspect acquire the corresponding target language means before learners where this is not the case. (c) Internal temporal features as typical of L2 acquisition by children Are these observations also valid for children who acquire temporal relations in a second language? Similar developmental stages have been found by Dittmar and Kuhberg (1988), but there are the following striking differences: (i) Both children acquire inchoative, durative, iterative, and continuative actionality very early. (ii) Both children learn within a time span of 8-12 months complex morphological markings of the verbal tense system (the Turkish boy starts with striking 'aspectual' features). (iii) Discourse organizational principles do not play such an important role as in adult SLA. Dittmar and Kuhberg (1988) isolate four functional-semantic phases in the learning process: lexical and implicit-pragmatic; grammaticalizatipn; lexical and grammatical elaboration; close approximation to the target language. 2.5.2 Spatial relations How learners organize 'spatial meaning' has been described by the ESF project in various publications. The overall results of the study are presented in Becker, Carroll, and Kelly ( = BCK 1988). The 'frame of analysis' is inspired by the work of Piaget and made concrete by the following categories of spatial reference which cover all linguistic means found in the learner varieties: (a) reference to the locomotion of movers (persons/vehicles); (b) reference to the relocation of objects (causative movements; (c) reference to the path of a movement; (d) reference to the spatial relations existing between theme and relatum at source/goal; to name a few examples: 590
- topological relations (containment, interiority, neighboring, contact, distant, exteriority); - projective relations (verticality, left/right, in front of/behind). One important result of the study is that learners fall into two groups with respect to 'reference to locomotion': learners of French on the one hand and learners of Dutch, English, and German on the other. 'While the former group applies a number of verbs of locomotion at the earliest stage of acquisition, the latter starts with one form which is not even systematically realized in all appropriate contexts' (BCK 1988:367). The group learning German, Dutch, English starts with a simple verb for move, without differentiation of 'motion' and 'direction'; more specific expressions have to be encoded by combinations of verb and spatial deictic particles (prefixes of the verb). These particles occur late because they have a complex formal structure (word order rules, etc.). 'In opposition to this, learners of French encode both MOTION and PATH/DIRECTION incorporated in the verb' (BCK 1988:367). Learners of German, for example, begin the acquisition of expressions for MOTION and DIRECTION by raus 'out of,' weg, fort 'away,' auf, oben 'up,' unten 'down,' zurtick 'back,' and combine these spatial particles (later) with simple verbs of motion like gehen 'go,' kommen 'come,' or machen 'make.' The following examples show the differences between the target languages German and French for: S/HE IS GETTING ONTO A BUS/TRAIN
(1)
Source language Moroccan-Arabic Target language French
Source language Italian Target language German
Zahra: le garqon entre le bus 'the boy enters the bus'
Gina: Kommen auch der Mddchen und oben dies *'camion* 'come also the girl and up this truck' Tino: Sie geh schnell oben der Zug 'she go fast up the train'
S/HE IS CLIMBING ON A CHAIR Zahra: monter avec la chaise 'climb with the chair'
(2)
Gina: geh oben de stuhl 'go up the chair' Tino: er geh oben eine stuhl 'he go up a chair'
'To sum up, one can say that the learner's access to reference to locomotion is guided by characteristic encoding procedures of the target languages. At a semantic micro-level, LI-influence could well inter-
Semantics vene in the semantic organization of the repertoire' (BCK 1988:369). Another area that was compared crosslinguistically concerned 'reference to causative motion' which is encoded in verb stems; therefore, learning processes cannot be divided up into a 'path of lexicalization' and a 'path of morphological verb coding.' That is to say that morphological information and meaning of the verbs cannot be separated. 'It is rather the intransparency of causative verbs in context that provides the biggest stumbling block... A goaloriented causative expression may leave the motion implicit or very unspecifically encoded and still be successful' (pp. 370-71). The learners of the target languages German and Dutch had specific difficulties with the causative verbs stellen, setzen, legen 'put, set, lay down.' It is still a matter of debate whether the German utterance Der Schlussel steckt in der Tiir and its French version la cle est sur laporte mean the same thing ('the key is in the door'), although the local relations are expressed by quite different verbal means (German in = CONTAINMENT, INTERIORITY; French sur — CONTACT). Does learning a second language involve cognitive differences? Slobin (1991:23) holds that the languages that 'we learn in childhood are not neutral coding systems of an objective reality' and agrees with Wilhelm von Humboldt who wrote in 1836 (quoted in 1988: 60): To learn a foreign language should therefore be to acquire a new standpoint in the world-view hitherto possessed, and in fact to a certain extent this is so, since every language contains the whole conceptual fabric and mode of presentation of a portion of mankind. But because we always carry over, more or less, our own world-view, and even our own language-view, this outcome is not purely and completely experienced.
Early 1990s research using a similar methodological approach as for the description of the learning of 'temporal' and 'spatial relations' is being conducted into the acquisition of verbal means for the concept of 'modality.' The discovery of sequences in the acquisition of lexical and grammatical means in the field of modality is a challenge in identifying appropriate fieldwork techniques (the marking of 'propositional attitudes' by modal expressions is not necessarily obligatory in utterances and is often very subjective), and for identifying an explicit description (there is no unified theory of the basic modal categories). A good overview of the descriptive problems and the acquisitional sequences in learning the means for 'deontic' and 'epistemic' modality is found in Dittmar and Terborg (1991) and Skiba and Dittmar (1992). 3. Conclusion
Important progress has been made in SLA descriptions of semantics. The preferred areas of analysis are those which are well elaborated in linguistic theory and
widely explored in FLA. There has been a fundamental change in research from cross-sectional to longitudinal types of developmental studies. This change in paradigm was only made possible by leaving the classroom as the privileged research area and looking at learning within natural contexts. Indeed, SLA has adopted similar methods to FLA. It should not be feared that these trends diminish attention to improvements in foreign language learning under controlled conditions. So much can be learnt from deeper insights into learning and communication strategies and into factors that affect successful learning (input, data processing, the role of the structure of source language and target language, etc.) that, in the long run, teachers in applied linguistics will profit from these detailed studies. A number of issues in SLA semantics may be suggested as requiring further work: (a) How do the particular semantic domains work together in order to accomplish coherence in utterances? There is intensive research on temporality and locality; more should be done on 'reference to persons,' 'modality,' and the semantics of 'verbal predicates.' How do these domains interact with each other in learner varieties at different stages? (b) How do semantic processes interact with discourse principles? The systematic work on semantics reported in this article should be combined with the detailed pragmatic and interactive microanalyses of 'exolingual communication' (the discovery of communication and learning strategies in the process of on-line interaction between native and nonnative). (c) How does the construction of semantic fields interrelate with individual and social experience? In what respect do 'cognitive processing' and 'cultural norms' filter the learning process? Do they have 'additive' or 'subtractive' effects on the learning product? Bibliography Becker A M, Carroll M, Kelly A ( = BCK) (eds.) 1988 Reference to Space. European Science Foundation (ESF), Strasbourg Bhardwaj M, Dietrich R, Noyau C ( = BDN) (eds.) 1988 Temporality. European Science Foundation (ESF), Strasbourg Bialystok E 1990 Communication Strategies: A Psychological Analysis of Second-language Use. Blackwell, Oxford Clark E V, Clark H H 1977 Psychology and Language. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York Dittmar N 1981 On the verbal organisation of L2 tense marking in an elicited translation task by Spanish immigrants in Germany. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 3(2): 136-64 Dittmar N 1984 Semantic features of pidginized learner varieties of German. In: Andersen R W (ed.) Second Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Newbury House, Rowley, MA
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Teaching Additional Languages Dittmar N, Kuhberg H 1988 Der Vergleich temporaler Ausdrucksmittel in der Zweitsprache Deutsch in Lernervarietaten zweier elfjahriger Kinder mil den Ausgangssprachen Polnisch und Tiirkisch anhand von Longitudinaldaten. In: Ullmer-Ehrich V, Vater H (eds.) Temporalsemantik. Niemeyer, Tubingen Dittmar N, Terborg H 1991 Modality and second language learning: A challenge for linguistic theory. In: Ferguson Ch, Huebner T (eds.) Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory. Benjamins, Amsterdam Ellis R 1985 Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford University Press, Oxford Gutfleisch I, Rieck B O, Dittmar N 1979 Interimsprachenund Fehleranalyse: Teilkommentierte Bibliographic zur Zweitspracherwerbsforschung 1967-1978. Linguistische Berichte 64:105-42 and 65:51-81 Hatch E M 1983 Psycholinguistics. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Hopper P 1987 Emergent grammar and the a priori grammar postulate. In: Tannen D (ed.) Linguistics in Context: Connecting Observation and Understanding. Vol. XXIX, Series Advances in Discourse Processes. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Huebner T 1983 The Acquisition of English: A Longitudinal Analysis. Karoma Publishers, Ann Arbor, MI Humboldt W von 1988 (trans. Heath P) On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Klein W 1986 Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Klein W, Dittmar N 1979 Developing Grammars: The Acquisition of German by Foreign Workers. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Levelt W J M 1989 Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Perdue C (ed.) 1982 Second Language Acquisition by Adult Immigrants: A Field Manual. European Science Foundation, Strasbourg Pfaff C W (ed.) 1987 First and Second Language Acquisition Processes, Cross-Linguistic Series on Second Language Research. Newbury House, Cambridge, MA Skiba R, Dittmar N 1992 Pragmatic, semantic and syntactic constraints and grammaticalisation: A longitudinal perspective. Studies in Second Language Acquisition Slobin D 1991 Learning to think for speaking: Native language, cognition, and rhetorical style. Pragmatics 1(1): 7-25 Stutterheim C von, Klein W 1987 A concept-oriented approach to second language studies. In: Pfaff C W (ed.) Tarone E, Frauenfelder U, Selinker L 1976 Systematicity/variability and stability/instability in interlanguage systems. In: Brown H D (ed.) Papers in Second Language Acquisition, Proc. 6th Annual Conf. on Applied Linguistics, University of Michigan, January 30-February 1,1975. Research Club in Language Learning, Ann Arbor, MI Wode H 1988 Einfiihrung in die Psycholinguistik: Theorien, Methoden, Ergebnisse. Max Hueber Verlag, Ismaning/Munich
Syntax in Second Language Acquisition M. A. Sharwood Smith
Research into the syntactic development of second language learners had a slow start but is now a fast developing area. In the 1970s, when second language acquisition studies really got under way, the emphasis was first laid on morphological phenomena. This obviated the need for sophisticated linguistic analysis and, in particular, allowed comparisons between second language behavior and the linguistic patterns already documented and discussed in current first language (mother tongue) studies. Now, work on syntax has become a growth area and linguistic theory as well as psycholinguistic principles are being applied to the problem of learner development and learner performance in second language (L2) syntax. Key issues include (a) the feasibility of particular linguistic and psychological theories to explain L2 phenomena and, more specifically; (b) the way in which learners pass through given stages of syntactic development; (c) to what extent correction and explicit knowledge or rules can affect that development; and finally, (d)
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whether hypotheses that are based on L2 research involving a small number of world languages are still relevant when applied to the learning of a much greater range of structurally diverse grammatical systems. 1. Early Research Early L2 studies based on behaviorist psychological principles embraced all areas of the language, including syntax. The theory predicted in a straightforward way that, where the learner mother tongue and target languages syntax differed, mother-tongue syntactic habits would show up in the form of 'interference.' Just as a particular accent would characterize a speaker whose mother tongue was, say, German, so that same learner's syntax would betray German characteristics where it diverged from the L2 norm. Hence if German learners of English attempt to form a question with, say, 'who' then they will initially follow their German syntactic habit and say
Syntax in Second Language Acquisition 'Who likes chocolates?' This habit, when carried over to English, should result in an English sentence which is, as it were 'by accident,' perfectly correct. However, in other questions, the German habit will lead to interference as, for example, where English requires the auxiliary 'do' as in 'Where does the woman go?' In this case, Germans should follow the German pattern and produce the incorrect *'Where goes the woman?' To some degree, these predictions were borne out but actual error analyses generally showed that somewhat less than half the errors could be accounted for in this way. 'Somewhat less than half is, of course, far from being a satisfactory result for this particular theory. The problem is how to account for the other systematic errors, that is, where a simple mother-tongue interference explanation will not do. Clearly, despite its common-sense appeal, the current theory of the time was not enabling researchers to predict the majority of syntactic errors. Research on learner syntax has since focused on what stages learners go through and on how to interpret as much of their systematic syntactic behavior, native-like or nonnative-like, as is possible. In the course of the 1970s, attention was turned to the development of interrogation and negation. Although the effects of first language influence could not be ruled out, stages of development were discovered for L2 learners which were strongly reminiscent of stages found for the development of the same structure in mother-tongue acquisition, again chiefly with reference to English. For example, learners typically begin with intonational questions retaining a statement order ('You are happy?'). Whwords, when they appear in initial position do not, at first, force an inversion of subject and verb ('What you want?' as opposed to 'What do you want?'). Again, negators tend to occur outside the main sentence structure ('No Mike want it') or at least prior to the verb phrase (T no can see him') only later moving inside the auxiliary-plus-main verb complex ('Mike does not want it,' 'I cannot see him'). Preverbal negation was also noted by Hyltenstam in the early Swedish of migrant workers whether or not their mother tongue allowed this construction (Hyltenstam 1977). This research, that is, investigations into interim stages of acquisition, fuelled speculation that the course of L2 development was much more like mother-tongue development than had hitherto been suspected, and despite the apparent absence of guaranteed uniform success as far as L2 development was concerned. At the same time, findings show that the kind of stages learners go through suggests that it is still important to talk separately of second language learner development. This is because the patterns of development are not necessarily identical to those recorded in first language acquisition. The influence of the mother tongue does seem to play some role in
L2 acquisition, either trapping learners for a delayed period in some interim stage (Zobl 1978) or helping to shape some particular interim structure in the learner's performance. It often happens in L2 research that some results are shown to be misleading or at least ambiguous. For example, Jansen et al. (1981) showed that Turkish learners of Dutch used a Turkish' verbfinal order in their Dutch (main clauses). A potential explanation based on solely mother-tongue influence was undermined by the finding that Moroccans also followed this order. If they had followed their own Arabic (non verb-final) order, they would have produced a correct construction. Nevertheless, the patterns of relative speed or delay in given stages suggested, for example, by Zobl were also manifest in this study indicating an interaction between mother tongue influence and a developmental order common to all L2 learners. 2. Current Developments
Today, work is proceeding into various aspects of L2 syntax using different linguistic and psychological models that are more sophisticated than the early model derived from habit formation theory. As far as linguistic theories are concerned, more recent versions of Chomskyan grammar have attracted much attention (Cook 1988). The two most obvious advantages provided by this theory are the degree of linguistic precision it offers and, more especially, the explicit link with the phenomenon of language acquisition. Here, linguists try to solve the riddle of how children who are trying to build up a mental grammar of the language around them are guided to the correct solutions without the benefit of instruction. This implies, in particular, the nonavailability of constant correction of error (see Lexicology). Researchers pursuing this line of investigation have been encouraged to consider whether the innate language acquisition capacities that Chomsky claims to underlie the processing of language data by the young mother-tongue learner are also available to the L2 learner. In other words, if the child is helped by a narrowing down of the vast range of logically possible options for making sense of the linguistic data (input), it is possible that L2 learners might be similarly limited and helped. To the extent that this might be so, the expectation is that the developing grammars of second language learners will show just those typical features that characterize the grammars of natural languages (according to the aforementioned theory). It would also be expected that certain logically possible rules and principles would not underlie these developing grammars. These would be rules which, according to the theory, natural languages could not contain. For example, one would not expect structure-independent rules (rules that make no reference to the structural elements like 'noun phrase' within the sentence): for instance, one would find no learners following a rule which went 'questions 593
Teaching Additional Languages are formed by inverting the third and fourth word,' i.e., simply involving counting elements irrespective of what grammatical function was performed by those elements. In this way, L2 learners, like children, would not make sense of new languages by making just any kind of generalization. Also, it is to be expected that older learners would be insensitive to evidence showing them what was not possible in the target language, for example, correction by the teacher. If they were building mental syntax like children they could not rely on an outside agency telling them that some rule they had devised was not in fact a correct one. In this way, L2 learners, like young children, would not only manage without correction when working out the basic makeup of the target grammar, they would not even be able to make proper use of the information correction provides. This also goes for explicit knowledge about how the grammar works. Knowing the rules for forming a passive from the evidence provided by correction and by consciously studying the grammar would be as useless as, say, knowing the principles of bicycle riding as far as instructing the rider's balance mechanisms to keep the bicycle on a straight course are concerned. In this way, the possibility that there are two types of grammatical knowledge has become generally recognized, namely intuitive knowledge o/the grammar and explicit, theoretical, or 'metalinguistic' knowledge about the grammar (see contributions to Rutherford and Sharwood Smith 1988). Whether these two types of knowledge can somehow interact or whether they remain totally separate, whatever area of grammar is in question, is still the object of lively debate. Parameter-setting, in Chomsky's model, provides one way of limiting the creative generalizations which the child, and, by hypothesis, the L2 learner might make and which, without sensitivity to correction, would lead to all kinds of permanent error. Part of syntax can be reduced to particular choices to be made with regard to specific sets of options. For example, the learner must decide whether the target language places its heads initially or finally in phrases. It will help the learner if the automatic expectation is that the position of the head is consistently initial or consistently final. This expectation will be useful both in learning languages which conform to it and languages which do not. A language which places head nouns second in the noun phrase as in, for example,'... red miir as opposed to '... mill red' might be expected to place relative clauses modifying a head noun like 'mill' before the noun as in: ' . . . which we know mill' as opposed to '... mill which we know' (see Flynn 1986). English, here, goes completely against these expectations as these examples show. Except for a small set of adjectives, French is more typical, that is, more consistently head-initial. The translation equivalents of the above examples conform neatly to expectations '... moulin rouge' (initial head NOUN + ADJ) and '...
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moulin que nous connaissons' (initial head NOUN + relative clause). If a learner, instead of running through a large range of possibilities could, on encountering and noticing a particular single example like 'moulin rouge,' more simply set a given parameter, then they could work out in one go a range of syntactic facts tied to that particular parameter (e.g., position of adjectives versus nouns, relative clauses, and nouns). Where the language was inconsistent, English being one example, the counterevidence would show up clearly in the data. Learners, exposed to examples defying their expectations, would be able to fine-tune their grammar accordingly. They would, in principle, need no correction beyond what the input itself provides. Researchers have asked themselves the question whether L2 learners approach the evidence provided by the target language input as young mother-tongue learners would, that is, with an open mind, or whether their own mother tongue plays some role in delaying or otherwise inhibiting the acquisition of the L2. The L2 learner might logically, where possible, assume that the particular parameter-setting selected for the LI also obtains for the new language being acquired. If so, this might cause special problems. Hilles, using proposals by Hyams regarding the prodrop or 'null subject' parameter, noted that learners of a language which allowed empty subject positions where the identity of the subject is easily understood ('Is a dog here,' 'Is good,' 'Comes today') have difficulty acquiring a language where the subject position, under most circumstances, must be filled ('There is a dog here,' 'She is good,' 'He comes today'). Her research suggests that such learners have to 'reset' the prodrop parameter which, according to the theory in question, lies behind this particular phenomenon. The intriguing feature of such a theory is that it links up syntactic phenomena which would normally appear quite unconnected. For example, languages where the specific setting of this parameter creates the possibility of missing subject noun phrases also lack auxiliary verbs. The pro-drop parameter, it has been claimed, links these apparently unrelated features of the grammar (missing subjects and auxiliary verbs). If evidence of one feature is noticed, then the learner ought to be able to grasp the implications and reset the parameter accordingly. Changes would then be expected in the other associated area of the learner's syntax. Hilles's evidence indeed suggests that when learners with a prodrop language like Spanish and who are learning non-prodrop English, begin to show evidence of grasping the obligatory nature of NP in subject position, they also show a growth in the acquisition of the verbal auxiliary system. The evidence that triggers this insight appears to be the acquisition of such subject position fillers as the expletive 'there': ('There is a dog'), forms which exist in the 'subject-filling' English system but not in the Spanish system which
Syntax in Second Language Acquisition theoretical in nature but nonetheless valuable for future research (Greenberg 1974). Linguistic markedness has been widely used to investigate ease and difficulty in second language syntactic development. Using principles proposed based on an analysis of many world languages, it has been suggested that linguistic phenomena may be divided up into more marked and less marked such that the more marked and less frequently found features could be less frequent precisely because they posed extra learning difficulties. Marked features are supposed to be less learnable because their structural properties and their comparative rarity suggest it. Some features are implicational so that if a language has prepositions, for example, and also has movement, then prepositional phrases will be able to move together as in, for example, wh-questions ('To whom am I talking?'). Some but all languages of this type allow the separation or 'stranding' of the preposition (' Who am I talking /o?'). By this reasoning, stranding in a language implies the presence of the nonstranded option, and stranding is therefore more marked. This notion of learnability is based on an analysis of many existing languages and is different from Chomskyan learnability which is based on the presumed insensitivity of young mother tongue learners to correction: here unmarked means 'in the evidence provided by native speakers,' that is, 'learnable from the input' (see discussion in Comrie 1981). Hence, depending on the theoretical linguistic model adopted, a given syntactic phenomenon might, in principle, be interpreted as marked or unmarked. And even where two different markedness theories both classify some phenomenon in the same way, the reasons given will be totally different. Eckman proposed a 'markedness differential hypothesis' in which interference from the mother tongue would depend on whether or not the learner had to learn a more marked version of some area of the language (Eckman 1977). It would not simply depend on the LI and the L2 being different. To give a concrete example from syntax, if the most dominant basic (main declarative clause) word order evident in the world's languages was SVO (Subject Verb Object), this would define the unmarked variant. This would mean that learners of SOV languages acquiring, say, 3. Different Ways of Viewing the Relevance of English, an unmarked (SVO) language would have Linguistic Markedness less difficulty than their counterparts, that is, those Although Chomskyan-based research has attracted a English learners of an SOV language who would be great deal of attention recently, it would be a grave trying to learn a language whose syntax was more error to conclude that it completely characterizes cur- marked. Researchers (e.g., Eckman 1977; Gass 1979) have rent findings in SLA syntax. Indeed, since UG related questions by no means determine the whole of syn- used the 'noun phrase accessibility hierarchy' protactic acquisition, it is important that other posed by Keenan and Comrie (1977) as a basis for approaches are tried out. Apart from earlier work investigating markedness in L2 learning. The 'accessidone using other models, especially Greenbergian uni- bility hierarchy' hypothesis suggested that there were versals, there is much available to readers of the litera- different degrees of learning difficulty possessed by the ture of a more fact-finding nature, that is, less various ways of forming relative clauses. Keenan and has no problem with empty subjects. This trigger is the crucial evidence that alerts the Spanish learners (subconsciously) to the dangers of leaving subject position empty even where the meaning is absolutely clear with such a filled subject. And, as they begin to use expletives, they also begin to develop a verbal auxiliary system (more properly 'lexically filled aux') which the theory in question links with the null-subject phenomenon. The question of whether second language learners have access to the principles of universal grammar (UG) may be most effectively tested by seeing if learners who have had no use for a particular parameter when building a grammar for their mother tongue later encounter a language where such a parameter is indeed relevant and necessary. One example would be Korean. Korean learners do not have to take syntactic movement into account when building a mental grammar of their mother tongue: Korean word order does not, for example, signal basic syntactic distinctions such as the difference between questions and statements. This means that general principles limiting movement that are part of UG will not be drawn on in the acquisition of Korean. Korean learners will consequently encounter an entirely new situation in English. The issue is whether they will automatically be able to limit the scope of moved elements in the syntax of English and thereby exhibit a sensitivity to limitations on movement which are deemed to be part of UG and as such crucial guidelines for the child learner of English as a mother tongue. Or, alternatively, whether they will show insensitivity and make all kinds of wild guesses about how movement works in English. Work by Flynn using Japanese and English has already raised this question with regard to head direction (see, for example, Flynn 1986). This topic has been investigated more recently by Schachter who claims to show that Koreans do not show such sensitivity and therefore do not give evidence of being like mother tongue learners of English (see Schachter 1990). The accessibility of second language learners to UG and the right way of investigating developing syntactic competence within this framework remains a hotly debated issue.
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Teaching Additional Languages Comrie proposed that certain options automatically implied other options such that, for example, if a language allowed the relativization of a direct object ('The dog [DIRECT OBJECT of "love"] that I loved'), it would allow relativization of a subject noun phrase ('The dog [SUBJECT of "loved"] who loved you') but not vice versa. In the same way, the relativization of a indirect object ('the door on which you painted a picture') implies, then, that the language also allows the previously two mentioned options. There was, then, some L2 researchers suggested, a hierarchy of difficulty to be associated with such implicational chains of possibilities: if Y exists in a language, therefore possibility X exists. If X exists, then possibility Y does not necessarily have to exist. For L2 researchers like Gass, this suggested that a learner might have difficulty in going from a language that allowed fewer marked possibilities to a language that allowed more. This is another example of how linguistic theory may be used to modify the original interference (or 'contrastive analysis' theory of the behaviorists; see Contrastive and Error Analysis), where straight difference between the two languages of the learner (source and target) would imply learning difficulty. In this case just mentioned, the target language may be different in that it allows fewer possibilities in the hierarchy but would in fact be quite easy to learn. Research on the implicational hierarchy has yielded suggestive results but nothing definite. One obstacle faced by researchers applying linguistic theory is that the theory itself changes. Hence opinions differ about the validity of the prodrop parameter as originally stated by Hyams, or the adjacency parameter or Keenan and Comrie's NP accessibility hierarchy. Upsets in the theory force a reconsideration of research based on that theory. Nevertheless, L2 researchers have followed the changes and later studies may (and certainly have) used later versions of the particular model or hypotheses in question. Also, syntactic studies which lead to results that are undermined by new interpretations of theory still provide useful database for future research. White and others investigating the prodrop parameter have had to consider the theoretical question of which option (if any) is marked. Markedness in UG research crucially depends on evidence in the input. By hypothesis, the learner assumes the unmarked option until evidence in the input forces a reconsideration. If the learner assumes prodrop in advance, it is important that there is evidence in the input that alerts him or her to the fact that the target language disallows empty subjects in the grammar. Under this scenario, prodrop is assumed to be unmarked. But not all researchers agree: the opposite claim has been made. More recently researchers have seen null-subject as a part of a different parameter entirely (Jaeggli and Safir 1989). Again, White in her study of the interruption of verbs and direct objects
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allowed in French grammar but disallowed in English ('He loves now the cat') first applied the notion of adjacency. Later on, she adopted a different approach to the question and a different relevant parameter (White 1989). 4. Processing Models Research on L2 syntax has also proceeded without specific reference to complex linguistic models although these have later been used to examine the results. Typical of this approach is the ZISA project carried out in Germany looking at the acquisition of German by immigrants from various language backgrounds. Much focus has been laid on findings regarding word order acquisition. The data shows an apparent steady move through various word order stages beginning with the default or 'canonical' SVO pattern. It should be stated clearly that word order here refers to surface word order and not the underlying order typical of Chomskyan theory. Here, an apparently stable order was discovered in the acquisition of German word order whereby learners irrespective of language background seemed to begin with the canonical order placing adverbial outside this SVO complex and then moved on to later stages where this canonical order could be manipulated. The first explanations of this L2 order of development were in terms of assumed ease of processing. The learner first develops the ability to manipulate elements in the syntax using simple operations before being able to go on to more complex operations (see below). This language processing explanation competes with arguments on some facets of linguistic theory. The processing approach has been advanced, for L2, by Pienemann (1987). The explanation is that it is processing complexity which determines the order of development. It would appear that, given the canonical order as the starting point, when manipulation of the order takes place, it is first easiest to place new elements, typically adverbial, externally, in initial or final position ('Today I see John,' 'I see John today'), harder to move elements from the outside in (or vice versa) and harder still to move around internal elements, that is, inside the sentence. These processing laws, it is claimed, dictate the fixed order of acquisition schematically represented below, X being the element that is added or manipulated and ' ' being a space abandoned by X the reader may care to think of X as, for example, a time adverbial like 'often' and the rest of the utterance as 'John may miss his train' (see Fig. 1). Pienemann has been particularly concerned to explore the implications of this processing approach for teaching. In one study (Pienemann 1987), he asks the question whether natural learning processes in L2 acquisition (which are seen to operate in an immigrant situation, for instance) will also show up in the classroom and indeed can be affected by formal instruc-
Syntax in Second Language Acquisition
Figure 1. Processing complexity and stages of acquisition.
tion. Pienemann's claim is that, where certain fixed stages have been established by research, you can teach a structure only when the learner is developmentally ready, that is, has gone through the appropriate stages en route to the target structure in question and has therefore acquired the processing prerequisites. The effect of teaching can only be to speed up acquisition at specific points in the learner's acquisitional career and not to enable the learner to jump stages or go through them in a different order. In a copula-inclusion experiment with immigrants, teaching was shown by Pienemann to be successful in promoting a decline in nonnative omission of the copula, the point being that when the learner has shown they can produce the copula sometimes, they are ready for instruction. Even in this situation there is some doubt: one subject, Monica, interviewed 9 months after the copula experiment showed a rise in omission to 34 percent (backsliding). It seems that instruction cannot disrupt the natural acquisitional order but it can speed up full command of a structure given the learner is naturally ready for it. With regard to the role of grammar teaching with those learners not continually exposed to the language of native speakers, Pienemann found that formal instruction also seemed to make no inroads into a natural order which emerged in his Australian learners of German as a foreign language. 5. Elicitation Methods
Methods for investigating L2 syntax depend very much on the theoretical approach adopted. Much use has been made of grammaticality judgment tests of various kinds following the Chomskyan line, the aim being to investigate the learner's underlying intuitions and tap as directly as is possible his or her underlying 'competence.' Other methods look more at production on the basis that what the learner actually produces is what counts, not so much what he or she recognizes or perceives. There is a general recognition that all
methods are flawed in one way or other. Linguistic judgments are beset with various kinds of problems such as what exactly is being judged (which linguistic features of a test sentence) and what the subject is counting as a criterion (probability of cooccurrence, stylistic elegance, prestige versus nonprestige forms, formal versus informal style). Judgments of this kind are as much a matter of performance as production tests. The claim is, nonetheless, that production places more demands on the learner and is thus likely to give a possibly over conservative picture of their real intuitions about the target language. Again, if no distinction is made between competence and performance, then production tests where the learner is focused on getting the message across rather than on sounding correct emerge as being more reliable since they are not beset by problems such as the ones mentioned above. It also means that syntactic variation that occurs in syntactic behavior of L2 learners may be interpreted without reference to a failure to let a less variable competence shine through in performance. Production tests involving translation are useful for controlling for meaning but are suspected by some for artificially provoking transfer from the learner's mother tongue. 6. Future Perspectives
A vast amount remains to be done in the study of L2 syntax. This should involve developments in theory and an increase in the coverage of what is generally felt to be syntax. Even if UG as currently understood were shown conclusively to be directly relevant to the acquisition of nonnative syntax, it only covers certain areas of the grammar. It can therefore never hope to serve to explain all acquisitional grammatical phenomena. Also, future work seems bound to continue to investigate other languages than English to gain more generality for theoretical claims postulated on the basis of one or two languages alone. For example, with the general European interest in migrant worker language development, detailed work has started on the acquisition of a number of languages, the Nijmegen-based European Science Foundation project being a prime example of this. Changes in linguistic theory will most certainly be reflected in new approaches to old problems such as interrogation and negation. The research on null-subjects provides an excellent example of how a given linguistic theory can be applied to L2 development, how changes in the theory can affect the approach to a given problem and how controversy may arise on to whether such a phenomenon can really be explained as a matter of syntax, or whether it is really more a problem of pragmatics. In cases where the particular linguistic approach in use allows for it, L2 findings in syntax may even affect linguistic theory itself. Finally, advances in theories of language processing will certainly affect the advance of the new trend in L2 597
Teaching Additional Languages research which involves looking more specifically at the processing aspects of L2 syntactic behavior. In this connection, it is likely that computer modelling will become a useful technique to show how L2s are processed both in the making of more precise claims about how the current mental grammars of given learners are accessed in real time as well as in making claims about how those grammars are structured and restructured over time. In particular, theoretical advances in other fields such as linguistics and psychology should help researchers to analyze systematic variability in performance, already a well-established topic of debate in the literature (Gass et al. 1989). If research has now conclusively shown that L2 syntactic acquisition is a complex process controlled in part by deep-seated processes which are hard to manipulate, every theory so far proposed to account for such processes remains highly controversial. Bibliography Comrie B 1981 Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. Blackwell, Oxford Cook V 1988 Chomsky's Universal Grammar. Blackwell, Oxford Eckman F 1977 Markedness and the contrastive analysis hypothesis. Language Learning 27: 115-330 Flynn S 1986 A Parameter-Setting Model of Second Language Acquisition. Reidel, Dordrecht Gass S 1979 Language transfer and language universals. Language Learning 29: 327-44
Gass S, Madden C, Preston D, Selinker L 1989 Variation in Second Language Acquisition. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, OH Greenberg J 1974 Language Universals: A Historical and Analytic Overview. Mouton, The Hague Hilles S 1986 Interlanguage and the pro-drop parameter. Second Language Research 2: 33-52 Hyams N 1986 Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters. Dordrecht, Reidel Hyltenstam K 1977 Implicational patterns in interlanguage syntax variation. Language Learning 27: 383-411 Jaeggli O, Safirk 1989 The Null Subject Parameter. Kluwer, Dordrecht Jansen B, Lalleman J, Muysken P 1981 The alternation hypothesis: The acquisition of Dutch word order by Turkish and Moroccan foreign workers. Language Learning 31:315-36 Keenan E, Comrie B 1977 Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. LIn 8: 63-99 Pienemann M 1987 Determining the influence of instruction on L2 speech process, (Unpublished manuscript, University of Sydney) Rutherford W, Sharwood Smith M 1988 Grammar (Mother Tongue) and Second Language Teaching. Newbury House, Rowley Schachter J 1990 On the issue of incompleteness in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 6: 94124 White L 1989 Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition. Benjamins, Amsterdam Zobl H 1978 The formal and developmental selectivity of LI influence on L2 acquisition. Language Learning 30: 43-57
Text J. House
For centuries, 'texts' have played a crucial role in traditional foreign language teaching. In the early stages of communicative language teaching (see Second Language Teaching Methods), however, work with written texts was largely ignored due to the emphasis placed on creative oral language use. In the 1990s communicative language teaching has gained general acceptance, a more balanced view stressing the importance of all skills prevails—not least because of the influence exerted by studies in the fields of 'textlinguistics,' cognitive text processing models, 'discourse analysis,' functional theories of language and text, and 'contrastive rhetoric.' The purpose of this article is to give a brief outline of these approaches. 1. Rhetoric, Text, and Discourse: Clarification of Terms
Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, has since Aristotle been viewed as the means whereby language is tailored
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to situation and addressee(s). As a 'system for producing texts,' rhetoric traditionally comprised several phases: that of inventio, in which the ideas suitable for a set purpose and audience are discovered in one's mind; the dispositio, whereby these thoughts are ordered to fit the speaker's intention; the elocutio, which lies at the heart of the art of rhetoric, involving the realization of ordered chosen thoughts via semantically and stylistically appropriate linguistic expressions; and the two performative phases—memoria and pronuntiatio concern how the speaker is to commit the speech to memory and, finally, deliver it effectively. As the importance of the written word continuously increased following the invention of movable type, the importance of these last two phases decreased, and indeed later the entire classical tradition of rhetoric declined, not least due to changing assumptions of man's nature, such that the Aristotelian view of man as an ultimately rational being
Text capable of logical argument and deductive reasoning gave way to more psychologically informed views, for example, behavioristic or Freudian ones. However, interest in a 'new rhetoric' has arisen (e.g., Nash 1989), and, as part of this development, links with studies in linguistics and stylistics, speech act theory, linguistic pragmatics, and theories of persuasion and argumentation have been actively sought and acknowledged. From an applied linguistic viewpoint, the renaissance of rhetoric in the form of cross-cultural rhetorical studies (see Sect. 4) is also of particular relevance. Just as views on the notion of rhetoric have changed over time, so too have the concepts text and discourse undergone fluctuating senses inside different linguistic schools. Structural linguists took up the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole, and focused on the former, thus being able to ignore the messy reality of real language behavior and the study of actual texts and/or discourse; transformational generativists operating with the related dichotomy between competence and performance did the same. According to such views of language, sentences were the basic units of linguistic description, and units beyond the sentence such as paragraphs, etc. were left to stylistics and literary analysis. However, linguistic philosophies taking a more integrated view of the relationship between language system and language use, between linguistic and social niceties, developed concurrently, as for "example in British Contextualism, in which literary and linguistic analyses have traditionally been undertaken simultaneously, or as in the Prague School of Linguistics with its theory of functional styles. According to such views of language, the significant units of communication are texts or discourses, rather than sentences. As to the terms 'text' versus 'discourse,' an opposition is often set up between discourse studies focusing on performance, spoken language, and description, and textual studies focused more on competence, written language, and theory. However, there is no absolute opposition between these terms, and either term may be used to embrace both, that is, as the umbrella term for suprasentential stretches of language-in-use. 2. Approaches to the Analysis of Text and Discourse Three research strands can be differentiated which have contributed to an improved understanding of the nature of text and discourse phenomena: (sentencebased) textlinguistics; cognitively oriented studies of text/discourse processes; and interactionally oriented discourse analyses. 2.1 Textlinguistics Both written and spoken texts are examined in the framework of textlinguistics, one strand of which was developed in Germany in the 1960s by Peter Hart-
mann and his disciples; in the UK the work of Halliday and Hasan (e.g., 1976) was influential. A text is, on this understanding, a stretch of language, the structure of which is constituted in accordance with purely linguistic criteria such that the 'textuality' of a text results from the connectedness or 'cohesion' of individual textual units. Textlinguistic studies focus on the regularities of intersentential linkage, for example, reference, substitution and ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion, and further on semantic relations which 'enable one part of text to function as context for another' (Halliday and Hasan 1989: 48). Other areas of intensive research within textlinguistics are the distribution of information as theme and rheme or topic and comment, that is, as old information (known per se or mentioned before) and new information (for the addressee), and related studies of the syntactic and other devices used to produce marked word order patterns. Various lexical, syntactic, and phonological means of achieving alternative arrangements have been described and questions about the underlying motives for such rearrangements have been asked. Given, for example, that in English the unmarked word order is subject-verb-object, what motivates the use in specific texts of object-fronting, subject-deletion, or pronominal restatement, and other marked patterns? The answer is often to be found in extralinguistic constraints, such as, for example, the nature of the activities described in textual instructions such as cooking recipes. As concerns the identification of 'textual units,' the typographically distinct paragraph is a unit whose nature and structure have been widely discussed, especially in the context of composition teaching. Further, a distinction has been made between 'formal' text units (e.g., cohesive devices such as pronouns), 'semantic' textual units (such as 'macropropositions' derived from basic underlying propositions through generalization, deletion, and construction) and 'functional' or 'pragmatic' text units (e.g., the lists provided by classical Greek rhetoricians or speech act categories). The connections between such text units is an area worth researching, especially as it seems likely that specific patterns of text units forming the so-called textual macrostructure may typically occur in certain 'text types' and styles (see Sect. 3). 2.2 Cognitive Models of Text and Discourse Processing As opposed to the textlinguistic approach, in which the methodology of sentence analysis is often simply extended to the level of text, cognitively oriented studies of text/discourse have a psychological rather than a linguistic basis. Texts are viewed in terms of the 'cognitive processes' underlying text production and comprehension. The notion of textual macro-
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Teaching Additional Languages structures has played a crucial role in attempts to model such processes. Characteristic of this research strand is its dynamic view of a text as being part and parcel of human psychological and social activities (Givon 1993). The nature of a text is not to be found in the text itself as a static, independently existing artifact, rather it resides in the types of actions human beings are capable of performing with it as a communicative event. Over and above being a set of structures, texts are realized as outcomes of problem-solving 'cognitive procedures.' Researchers in this paradigm draw on models of human cognition such as those developed in Artificial Intelligence. Especially influential have been models of semantic relationships in the form of scripts, plans, schemata, or frames. The focus has moved, during the course of the 1980s, from cognitive representation to dynamic processing, a concern with 'strategies of discourse comprehension and production' (van Dijk 1997). Most influential are models of cognitive networks in which mental activities are seen as being processed 'in parallel' rather than in a linear fashion. The ground for such a view is neurological. The field of cognitive text science is a highly productive one in contemporary text and discourse research. (For an overview, see Graesser and Gernsbacher 1997.) 2.3 Discourse Analysis This approach also goes beyond the establishment of formal links inside texts, viewing 'texts'—whether single-source monologic or multiple-source dialogic ones—as the negotiated communicative achievements of two (or more) participants (for a comprehensive overview of the field see van Dijk 1997). The historical roots of discourse analysis are manifold: classical rhetoric, and the interdisciplinary approaches of Russian formalism, French structuralism, and semiotics. In the early 1970s discourse analysis began to establish itself as a discipline, inspired by theoretical and methodological developments in a variety of disciplines: sociolinguistics with its emphasis on language variation and the role of the social context; speech act theory as developed by Austin, Searle, and Grice, who looked upon verbal utterances as forms of social action and cooperative achievement, such that when sentences are used in a specific situational context, the speaker's intentions, and his relations with the hearer should be taken into account as added features of meaning; anthropology, where research on the 'ethnography of speaking' linked up with linguistics and stylistics; interpretive sociology and 'conversation analysis' with its concern for everyday talk occurring naturally in social interaction—all these played their part. Foci inside conversational analysis include the characterization of conversational moves and their sequencing, the mechanisms underpinning turn-taking, the nature of con-
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versational repair and face work, how conversations are opened and closed, and where, when, and why routine formulas are used. Discourse analysis, as the interdisciplinary search for the mechanisms of discourse constitution and coherence, was given prominence in the UK by the Birmingham school, especially Sinclair and Coulthard's (1975) pioneering study of 'classroom interaction.' Their model comprises a rank structure featuring lesson, transaction, exchange, move, and act. Acts correspond to speech acts, and a finite catalog of such acts, which were found to be used by teachers and pupils, was set up. These acts regularly combine to form moves, then moves combine to form exchanges, with the classic teaching exchange being of the form Opening-Answer-Follow-up. An important theoretical contribution to the analysis of 'spoken discourse' is Edmondson (1981), which developed an analytic scheme for analyzing everyday talk as a form of interactional negotiation, in which a speaker both expresses his own thoughts and makes a contribution to the ongoing talk. The model provides for an inventory of categories of speaker meaning, a finite set of interactional moves, and details some discourse strategies and 'gambits' (e.g., you know, well), which function as discourse lubricants. 3. Functional Theories of Language and Text The importance of the total environment enveloping a text has been captured by the anthropologist Malinowski in the concept of 'context of situation' further developed by Firth (1957)—the concept embraces the human participants in the situation, their verbal and nonverbal actions, the effects of these actions, and other relevant features, objects, and events. Further descriptions of the context of situation, in which a text is functional, are in terms of 'field' (the general sense of what the text is about), 'tenor' (capturing the interpersonal relationships and roles involved), and 'mode' (referring to the particular part the language used in the text plays, e.g., if spoken or written medium is used). Such distinctions have influenced the concept of 'register,' that is, variety of language according to use. Register is a semantic concept referring to configurations of meaning typically connected with particular situational constellations of field, mode, and tenor. Register analysis was put to good use in stylistic analysis by Crystal and Davy (1969). Their model provides a set of'situational dimensions,' such that the text's linguistic expressions are related to its 'actional space' and situational environment. More recently, studies of registers and register variation have been considered from broader sociolinguistic perspectives (Biber and Finegan 1994) and related to analyses of "genre" (Bhatia 1993). In register analysis, text types are isolated on the basis of attempts to relate text and context such that both are mutually predictable. Other means of dis-
Text tinguishing different text types are through invoking the concept of 'function of language.' Many different views of functions (or uses) of language have been proposed, for example, by Biihler, Jakobson, Morris, Britton, and Halliday. Although they seem to vary greatly, a basic dichotomy between an 'informative' (cognitive) function—that is, language used for talking about things—and the 'me and you' use of language for expressing what I feel and do in influencing others, is to be found in all such functional classifications. Classifications of language functions have often been used to set up 'text typologies,' following the simple equation 'one function—one type,' for example, expressive texts and advertisements are thought to have a dominant 'me and you' function. Preferable to this simplistic equation seems a view of a text as being multifunctional: rather than assuming that a text has a predetermined function, each text should be treated as an individual 'case' to be viewed in its particular context of situation and culture. However one distinguishes between 'text' and 'discourse,' the distinction between written and spoken 'texts' remains important. A multitude of studies have been undertaken examining the different linguistic and conceptual mechanisms whereby products in these two mediums work as unitary wholes, that is, achieve cohesion and coherence (e.g., Halliday 1989). Differentiations of simple written and spoken codes into more 'complex' mixtures of the two (e.g., written to be read aloud) have been proposed, with distinguishing features such as relative lexical density, grammatical complexity, completeness and well-formedness of sentences, presence of subjectivity markers, and levels of redundancy. Clearly, spoken and written texts differ in terms of degree of potential addressee participation, and degree of premeditation. The structure and overall organization of a text varies according to the way in which time constrains its revision. In general, however, in the 1990s, it is claimed that written and spoken texts are more closely related than had traditionally been assumed, in that the 'overt' interaction in spoken dialogues, in which meanings are negotiated by a constant shift of perspectives in the ongoing interaction, is also 'covertly' present in written singlesource texts. Further, increasingly sophisticated technological means of conserving formerly transient speech, and of recording spoken speech as written text, or vice versa, make the contrastive dichotomy of oral versus written text less absolute than ever. 4. Contrastive Rhetoric and Contrastive Discourse Analysis
Cross-cultural comparisons of texts and investigations of attitudes towards specific text types are fields of research which are becoming increasingly popular,
especially from the applied perspective of the teaching of writing (e.g., Clyne 1987; Purves 1988; Connor 1996). Research methodologies include comparisons of texts written by members of the two cultures in terms of cohesive devices, textual organization, presence of reader or writer perspective, and effectiveness judgments by expert raters from the two cultures. Findings suggest, for example, differences between the logical, 'linear sequencing of texts' in English, and the presence of parallel constructions, circularity (topics being examined from different angles), digressions, excursions, and parenthetical amplifications in Semitic, Oriental, and Romance languages, and in Russian. Comparisons, for example, of structural constraints (logical development, focus, use of transition markers) in Hindi, Korean, or Japanese texts and English ones from different registers also suggested an Anglo-Saxon preference for linear topical movements, as opposed to a tendency toward more spiral, circular, anecdotal, and convoluted arrangements of textual parts in the contrasted languages. The 'culture-specificity of discourse structuring' is exemplified by Clyne (1987) for the closely related languages English and German. Clyne examined how academic written texts are developed in terms of their main and ancillary arguments, the relative length of various sections (symmetry), and whether parallel text segments are structured in the same order (uniformity). German academic discourse tends to be less linear and hierarchically organized, less symmetrical and continuous, but rather full of theoretical digressions. English academic texts thus seem closer to nonacademic texts than German ones, and in English academic texts most of the onus for facilitating understanding seems to fall on the writer, whereas in German—with writers being more concerned with theory and knowledge presentation—the onus falls on the reader (a similar distinction has been made in connection with comparisons between Japanese and English texts). The hypothesis is supported for English and German in a number of contrastive discourse analyses comparing oral dyadic discourse enacted by German and English speakers in parallel everyday interactions (House 1996). German speakers tended to be more 'self-oriented,' and focused more on content than on their interactional partners, whereas English speakers appear to be more 'interpersonally oriented' in their discourse behavior. These findings were confirmed in further contrastive studies using different data and methodologies. Contrastive discourse analysis is a field of research which is obviously relevant for foreign language and translation teaching (House 1997), and could produce socially relevant findings and insights, showing, for example, how discourse preferences may underpin 601
Teaching Additional Languages ethnocentrism, racism, or plain everyday intolerance Firth J R 1957 Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951. Oxford University Press, Oxford and misunderstanding. See also: Intercultural Discourse; Writing in a Second Language; Writing: Second Language Pedagogy. Bibliography Bhatia V 1993 Analysing Genre. Longman, London Biber D, Finegan E 1994 (eds.) Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register. Oxford University Press, Oxford Clyne M 1987 Cultural differences in the organization of academic texts: English and German. Journal of Pragmatics 11: 211-47 Connor U 1966 Contrastive Rhetoric. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Crystal D, Davy D 1969 Investigating English Style. Longman, London Dijk T A van 1997 (ed.) Discourse in the Language Classroom Studies. A Multidlsciplinary Introduction, 2 vols. Sage, London Dijk T A van, Kintsch W 1983 Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. Academic Press, New York Edmondson W 1981 Spoken Discourse. A Model for Analysis. Longman, London
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Given T 1993 Coherence in Text, Coherence in Mind. Pragmatics and Cognition 1: 171-227 Graesser A, Gernsbacher M A 1997 (eds.) Discourse in the Language Classroom Processes after Two Decades (Special Issue). Discourse in the Language Classroom Processes 23 Halliday M A K 1989 Spoken and Written Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford Halliday M A K, Hasan R 1976 Cohesion in English. Longman, London Halliday M A K, Hasan R 1989 Language, Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Oxford University Press, Oxford House J 1996 Contrastive Discourse Analysis and Misunderstanding: The Case of German and English. In: Hellinger M, Ammon U (eds) Contrastive Sociolinguistics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin House J 1997 Translation Quality Assessment. A Model Revisited. Narr, Tubingen Nash W 1989 Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion. Blackwell, Oxford Purves A 1988 (ed.) Writing Across Cultures. Issues in Contrastive Rhetoric. Sage, Newbury Park, CA Sinclair J McH, Coulthard R M 1975 Towards an Analysis of Discourse. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Second and Foreign Language Pedagogy ASTP B. Spolsky
The popular history of modern language teaching assigns a major role to what is still sometimes called the 'Army method'. When in the early 1940s, the US Army started to prepare for a global war, it was persuaded by university administrators starved of male students to set up the Army Specialized Training Division, with three missions: to train medical personnel, to produce military engineers, and to train specialists with competence in all the areas and languages of the world in which the US armed forces might operate. The first Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) language courses began in April 1943, with 15,000 noncommissioned trainees at 55 different colleges and universities. The language curriculum was based on the Intensive Language Program of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), started two years before to teach 'unusual' languages. Reflecting not just practical needs but also the ideological revolt of American structural linguists against the focus on teaching literary languages, the objective of the ACLS curriculum was control of the spoken vernacular. The Army program welcomed this. Any methodology was acceptable, provided that the teaching was 'intensive,' which meant about 15 hours a week of direct classroom instruction. An official evaluation a year later concluded modestly that the results 'while by no means miraculous, were definitely good, ... and very generally gratifying to the trainees themselves.' Wherever the program was well conducted (and the report did not specify how many institutions met this criterion), many trainees developed ability to express themselves with fluency and to understand native speakers in normal conditions. The program was, however, suspended in 1944, after one year, to provide infantry reinforcements for the fighting in Europe. There is no evidence that the Army used the ASTP trainees as language specialists.
There were, however, other programs set up by the US Army and Navy to teach Japanese, which seem to be the predecessor of the current major language teaching enterprise of the US Defense Language Institute. After the war, some US universities decided to reform their language instruction, citing the ASTP experience as justification for increasing initial language teaching from 3 hours a week to 10. In spite of the limited diffusion of its principles and practices to regular college teaching of foreign languages, the ASTP experience was influential in reasserting an emphasis on teaching the spoken language that had been lost in the USA in the 1930s. See also: Intensity. Bibliography Agard F B, Clements R J, Hendrix W S, Hocking E, Pitcher S L, van Ernden A, Doule H G 1994 A Survey of Language Classes in the Army Specialized Training Program. Commission on Trends in Education (of the Modern Language Association of America), New York Angiolillo P F 1947 Armed Forces' Foreign Language Teaching: Critical Evaluation and Implications. S F Vanni, New York Barnwell D 1992 Foreign language teaching and testing during World War II. Dialog on Language Instruction. 8(1,2): 29-34 Commission on Trends in Education of the Modern Language Association of America 1944 Foreign languages and the army program. Hispania 27: 382-83 Keefers L E 1988 Scholars in Foxholes: The Story of the Army Specialized Training Program in World War II. McFarland and Company, Jefferson, NC Spolsky B 1995 The impact of the Army Specialized Training Program: A reconsideration. In: Cook G, Seidelhofer B (eds.) For H.G. Widdowson: Principles and Practice in the Study of Language: A Festschrift on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday. Oxford University Press, Oxford
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Teaching Additional Languages
Content-based Instruction (CBI) J. Crandall
1. Introduction
Literature, grammar, situations, functions, notions, and tasks: all have served as the focus of second and foreign language instruction. Recently, however, because of a number of factors, that focus is increasingly likely to be academic in nature, with academic concepts, discourse, and skills occupying a central place in the language classroom. The focus may be limited to one content area (for example, English related to history or psychology for university students) or it may be expanded to several content areas (for example, a unit of the rain forest which integrates social studies, science, and mathematics into language instruction for younger learners). It may entail an infusion of academic topics and texts into the language classroom to broaden the discourse and increase motivation for foreign language learners, or it may require wholesale linguistic and instructional adaptation of a content course or academic program so that second language learners can acquire academic concepts at the same time as they are learning the medium of instruction. In professional or vocational contexts, it may be focused on developing one language skill (for example, scientific writing or oral briefing skills) or provide second language learners with a means of acquiring a new occupation. While CBI most likely exists in second language contexts where there is widespread use of an official, national, or additional language for education, it also exists in foreign language contexts, even when there is limited immediate use of the language being studied. It is also more frequently encountered as student proficiency or educational level increases, but it is increasingly common in primary school contexts where students need access to instruction through another language, either through bilingual programs or programs in which another language serves as the medium. All of these involve some type of content-based instruction or CBI, a term which has been said to represent at one time 'a philosophical orientation, a methodological system, a syllabus design for a separate course, or a framework for an entire program of instruction' (Stryker and Leaver 1997:5). Instructional strategies within the CBI classroom are similarly varied, ranging from the traditional focus on vocabulary development or drills to the more contemporary communicative, constructivist, or humanistic approaches. Although CBI comprises a range of philosophies, program models, and instructional strategies (as well 604
as terms to denote it, including 'integrated language and content instruction,' 'content-centered learning,' and 'sheltered instruction'), most CBI classes share a set of essential features, which include: (a) Learning a language through academic content, focusing attention on meaning and use of the language outside the language classroom; (b) Engaging in activities, which use both authentic and adapted oral and written texts, tasks, and tests from academic disciplines; (c) Developing proficiency in academic discourse, especially written language skills related to specific academic genres such as summaries or reports; and (d) Fostering the development of effective learning strategies (or study skills) such as taking notes, paraphrasing, or predicting and confirming while reading. The following discussion will explore: (a) The rationale for content-based instruction, (b) Program models for second and foreign language contexts, (c) Instructional strategies for integrating language and content instruction, (d) Assessment strategies, (e) Teacher education for content-based instruction, and (f) Current and needed research. 2. The Rationale for Content-based Instruction
Content-based instruction is not new. It has its roots in efforts to promote reading and writing skills in the first language through programs of language across the curriculum (writing across the curriculum and reading in the content areas); in second language immersion programs for children; in vocational and special purpose language programs for university students and adults; and in university academic language programs, where an emphasis on academic skills (especially reading and writing) has led to the use of texts from other disciplines. However, because of a number of factors, what was only an interesting curriculum idea in the 1970s and 1980s has become a major approach to both second and foreign language teaching and learning in the 1990s. These include a variety of factors outside language teaching and learning, as well as a number of theoretical considerations from within second language learning, sociolinguistics, and cognitive psychology. A number of sociopolitical factors have encouraged the development of CBI. These include:
Content-based Instruction (CBI) (a) The increasing linguistic diversity in many instructional settings; (b) The increasing use of a second or additional language (often English) as a medum of instruction for at least some portion of a student's education, ranging from the use of reading materials from that language to instruction through that language; (c) The increasingly early introduction of foreign languages in many countries; (d) The increasingly rapid development of new information and the ability to access that information through the Internet and other technology; and (e) The growth of international alliances and trade agreements. Because of the spread of English and its use in technology transfer, information exchange, global commerce, and air and sea travel, much of the early work in CBI focused on ways of providing access to English for these purposes. However, the growing number of international alliances and trade agreements (e.g., the European Union, the North American Free Trade Alliance (NAFTA), the Pacific Rim and Southern Cone agreements) have encouraged the development of proficiency in languages other than English. The unprecedented speed by which new knowledge is created and the almost instantaneous access to that knowledge provided by communications technology has created an increased need to access that information in the language of transmission, rather than waiting for its translation into local languages, when the information may be out of date. Increasing numbers of students around the world are participating in at least some portion of their education through a second or other language. They may be asked to read texts in another language (though discuss and write about these through their first language) or be immersed in another language for that education. While this is most prevalent at the tertiary level—especially in scientific, technical, or professional disciplines—the increasing number of bilingual schools around the world at primary and secondary levels has also sparked an interest in CBI. Moreover, in preparing for tertiary level use of another language, secondary schools especially are introducing more academic content, texts, tasks, and talk in their language classes. In language learning theory, the shift to increasing contextualization and a focus on communication and meaningful language use have helped support CBI. The application of sociolinguistic theory to language teaching in the communicative approach; the application of second language acquisition research by Krashen (1982), Swain (1993), Cummins (1981), Collier (1992), and others to second language instruction for academic purposes; and applications of con-
structivist educational theories of Vygotsky (1962, 1978) and others to sociocultural approaches to language teaching and learning (Lantolf, 1994; Lantolf and Appel, 1994) have all helped foster increased attention to CBI. Central to both communicative language theory and the second language acquisition theories of Krashen, Swain, and others is the importance of a focus on meaningful and relevant language use, in addition to, or in place of, the traditional focus on grammatical form. The communicative approach expanded the goals of language teaching from the development of grammatical competence to the ability to use the language appropriately and effectively in relevant genres (communicative, strategic, and discourse competence) outside the language classroom. Krashen, Swain, Cummins, and others have all argued for immersion of students in increasingly complex meaningful activities, each at a slightly higher level than the previous one, as a means of acquiring second language proficiency. What is needed for Krashen is access to comprehensible, meaningful input (linguistic input just beyond the learner's current proficiency level) in a relatively anxiety-free learning environment. That theory has been augmented recently by Swain's studies of Canadian immersion programs, which found that while students acquire both content and receptive language skills through immersion, they also need attention to productive language skills (speaking and writing) through comprehensible output. In addition, studies of academic achievement in second language contexts by Cummins and Collier have found that second language learners need substantial time to develop the academic language proficiency to achieve at levels comparable to first language learners, even though they may appear to be orally proficient within one or two years. According to Cummins, second language learners need adapted instruction if they are to move from the relatively early development of social language (referred to also as Basic Interpersonal Communications Skills, BICS) used in informal, interpersonal (and usually oral) exchanges, to the more cognitively and linguistically complex language needed for success in academic settings, particularly through reading and writing (referred to variously as academic language, Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, CALP). Although content teachers may wish that students would develop substantial academic language and literacy before participating in their content classes, the dilemma is that the only way to acquire academic language is through engagement in tasks using that language, but only if it is made comprehensible through instructional adaptations, with sufficient opportunities provided for students to interact and negotiate meaning through that language. A subsequent section will describe CBI instructional strategies in more detail, but broadly speaking, these involve an increase in the sources of understanding
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Teaching Additional Languages outside the linguistic text (through pictures, demonstrations, or gestures) and a reduction in the linguistic and cognitive complexity of the text (through the addition of graphic organizers, adaptations in the discourse, or adaptations in the ways in which the text is used). CBI also provides an appropriate context for the development of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies needed for academic classrooms. CBI is also consonant with constructivist approaches to education (especially Vygotsky's notion of the Zone of Proximal Development) and their application in sociocultural theories of second language learning, which engage learners in negotiating meaning with more knowledgeable peers or teachers in successively more complex problem-solving task (Lantolf, 1994; Lantolf and Appel, 1994). In effect, together these theories conclude that effective language instruction requires sufficient comprehensible and developmentally appropriate input and functional and communicative output, provided within a context that is cognitively challenging and emotionally supportive, with opportunities for interaction and negotiation through the language. CBI offers an instructional approach in which input, output, and context can be maximally effective for second language acquisition. 3. Instructional Models for Second and Foreign Language Contexts
Although second and foreign language instructional models are sometimes similar, there is sufficient difference in their design to consider them separately. 3.1 Second Language Instructional Models Within second language contexts, a number of instructional programs have been described. These include: (a) Learning a language by studying through it (immersion approaches) (Edwards et al. 1984; Milk 1990). (b) Focusing student attention on underlying knowledge and discourse structures of academic texts (Mohan 1986; Tang 1993). (c) Developing students' learning strategies (the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach, CALLA (Chamot and O'Malley 1994). (d) Focusing on holistic language development through integrated thematic units (CantoniHarvey 1987; Enright and McCloskey 1988). (e) Developing academic language, skills, and discourse through the use of texts, tasks, and themes drawn from other content areas (Crandall 1987; Spanos and Crandall 1990; Short 1991). (f) Focusing on the development of tasks, themes, and topics (the six T's approach, Grabe and Stoller 1997).
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Essentially, if one considers the focus of instruction (language or content) and the instructor (language, content, or both), there are three basic approaches: (a) content-based language instruction, (b) sheltered content instruction, and (c) paired or adjunct instruction (Crandall 1993; Brinton et al. 1989). In content-based language instruction, a language teacher infuses academic concepts and language into the language classroom through tasks, texts, themes, or topics drawn from other content areas (Spanos 1990; Crandall 1993). Instruction may be focused on one academic area (e.g., a unit on photosynthesis or governmental structures) or more broadly on several content areas, often through the use of thematic units which integrate concepts and discourse (e.g., units on migration, pollution, archaeology, etc.). The language teacher can include both 'content-obligatory language' (language essential to an understanding of content material') and useful 'content-compatible language' ('language that can be taught naturally within the content of a particular subject matter and that students require additional practice with') (Snow etal. 1989). In sheltered or (language-sensitive) content instruction, a teacher of another discipline adapts instruction (using the kinds of strategies discussed below) to accommodate language learners' limited proficiency in the language of instruction and to make it possible for them to learn through a language that they are still acquiring (Crandall 1987; Brinton et al. 1989). Sheltered instruction has been offered at all levels, but it is particularly needed in secondary school settings, especially with second language learners with limited prior schooling or literacy (Crandall et al. 1998). Although initially designed for classes comprised of second language learners, the approach is also used in mixed classes of proficient speakers and language learners. The objective or sheltered instruction is to make academic concepts accessible through another language, but students' language proficiency also increases (Edwards et al. 1984; Milk 1990). The third approach pairs a language and a content teacher, either through co-teaching in the same classroom or through paired courses which share both students and content. For example, in many tertiary programs, students who are still learning the language of instruction of a core course, such as psychology, history, or sociology, are enrolled in a special ('adjunct') language course paired with that core course. Using texts drawn from the content course, as well as a number of other materials and tasks, the language teacher focuses primarily on the reading, writing, or other language demands of the content course. This approach is especially common with large numbers of language minority students, as well as in contexts where foreign language skills are encouraged across the curriculum (Snow and Brinton 1988; lancu 1993).
Content-based Instruction (CBIj 3.2 Foreign Language Instructional Models Attempts to promote foreign language learning and use among students in other disciplines have led to a number of program models which integrate foreign language learning with academic content. Many of these are similar to the second language program models described above. The effort may be as modest as incorporating small segments of foreign language texts within the standard foreign language course (content-based language instruction) or as extensive as using the language as the medium of both text and instruction (sheltered or immersion education). Paired foreign language models also exist. (A number of program models are described in Krueger and Ryan 1993; Straight 1994; and Stryker and Leaver 1997.) While some foreign language CBI is found in secondary level classes, it is much more likely to be encountered at the tertiary level. Examples of the most common tertiary level models include: (a) Providing readings selected from a number of disciplines (often related to cultural history, film, or literature) in an advanced language course. (b) Providing special sections of an intermediate or advanced language course focused on issues and texts related to specific fields such as business, journalism, or engineering. (c) Studying a content course through the medium of another language. Courses related to the history politics, culture, or literature of speakers of that language are usually taught by language instructors, but business, economics, sociology, or other courses may be taught by a content teacher with extensive foreign language proficiency. (d) Adding readings from another language to a content course taught by a content specialist with proficiency in the other language or team taught by both a language and a content teacher. Through CBI, foreign language students have access not only to more breadth and depth in their academic discussions and writing, but also to a wider range of discourse than is usually possible in the traditional foreign language classroom. 4. Strategies for Integrating Language and Content Instruction Sheppard (1997:30) describes content-ESL in primary and secondary classrooms in the United States as 'a melange of strategies and methodologies, materials and activities, policies and practices,' encompassing cooperative learning, whole language, language experience, the natural approach, total physical response, as well as drills, role-plays, and other activities encountered in traditional language classrooms. However, among this melange, it is possible to identify
patterns of instructional strategies that are used to implement CBI. They include a variety of grouping strategies to encourage interaction and support among learners, task-based or experiential learning strategies to reduce the reliance on language for learning complex concepts, strategies to increase interaction with written text, and strategies to promote the development of thinking, problem-solving, and study skills. It may be useful to think of these strategies in terms of the two continua identified by Cummins as contributing to the difficulty of academic language: the degree of cognitive complexity of the information and the degree to which sources other than language are available to assist in understanding that information (context-embeddedness). To promote the development of academic language, teachers need to embed progressively more complex tasks or texts in contextually-rich settings, in effect, making academic language contexts more like those characteristic of the less complex and more readily acquired social language. Instruction which proceeds through progressively more complex problem-solving activities, with scaffolding or support provided by increased context, can serve as a bridge to the development of progressively more complex academic language proficiency, similar to support provided a learner as she moves through progressively more complex Zones of Proximal Development. Using these two continua, it is possible to analyze and describe a range of instructional strategies used in content-based classrooms (many of which will be familiar to traditional language classrooms). 4.2 Strategies to Increase Context In academic texts, much of the content is conveyed specifically through the language, with relatively little assistance from pictures or graphs or links to the students' own experiences. To increase the context, reducing the reliance on language (while at the same time providing a means by which that language can be understood and acquired), a content-based language instructor or sheltered content instructor might do the following: (a) Build lessons around themes, (b) Use pictures or visuals, (c) Demonstrate meaning, (d) Engage students in experiential learning or project work, (e) Link oral and written language. 4.2 Strategies to Decrease Complexity Academic texts (oral and written) and lectures tend to be dense, both in terms of their information'load as well as in their discourse structure. They are characterized by the presence of critical, low-frequency vocabulary and complex syntactic structures such as passive voice, conditional clauses, lengthy nominal 607
Teaching Additional Languages phrases, and relative clauses with changes in givennew or topic-comment relations. In order to assist students in understanding the meaning of these texts, as well as providing access to the language in which they are embedded, a number of strategies have been identified. These include: (a) Activate prior knowledge, (b) Pre-teach critical vocabulary, (c) Use graphic organizers to represent knowledge structures (Mohan 1986), (d) Simplify texts, reducing structural and lexical complexity, (e) Break down information into smaller chunks, (f) Encourage student negotiation of meaning through cooperative learning, jigsaw activities, or peer teaching, (g) Provide oral and written access to information, (h) Teach cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. 5. Assessment Strategies Assessment presents a dilemma for CBI, especially in the content-based language classroom, where attempts to separate conceptual understanding from linguistic proficiency have proven quite difficult. One answer to this dilemma has been to increase the sources and types of assessment beyond paper and pencil tests to include journal entries, oral responses to questions or reports, demonstrations of understanding, and student projects. Checklists or inventories have also been developed which teachers can use to note individual student mastery of concepts or structures. These alternative assessments are especially important in sheltered content courses, where limited language proficiency may mask or hide the student's real level of content knowledge. In high-stakes, standardized tests, such as end-of-course or graduation examinations, accommodations to both the question and answer sections of the test—including the use of bilingual dictionaries, the provision of simplified directions or additional time for the test, and the substitution of oral for written responses—all offer suggestions on alternative assessment strategies for CBI. Another approach frequently used in co-teaching or adjunct programs has been to assign primary responsibility for assessing language development to the language teacher and the conceptual understanding to the content teacher, with the recognition that such separation is an artificial one and only partially possible, since any assessment or academic writing or discussion necessitates some consideration of the ideas being expressed, just as any assessment of academic understanding through written examinations or oral discussions necessitates some consideration of the ways in which ideas are expressed. Potentially more productive are assessment strategies
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which involve collaborative analysis and discussion by both teachers. (See Short 1993; Turner 1997; and Weigle and Jensen 1997 for further discussion of CBI assessment issues.) 6. Teacher Education for CBI Teacher education represents another complex issue for CBI. Both language and content teachers need access to specialized training to enable them to effectively combine language and content instruction. For language teachers, this involves becoming more knowledgeable about the other courses students at their institutions will be taking; for content teachers, it involves learning some of the strategies language teachers use to increase sources of understanding (including most of those described above). Some educational jurisdictions in states or countries with large numbers of second language learners require this specialized training for most elementary and secondary school teachers (for example, Florida or California in the United States or Australia) as do some universities which teach through a foreign language. In addition, some innovative integrated teacher education programs exist which bring together language and science or social studies teachers in collaborative projects (Kaufman 1997), as do some teacher development programs for university faculty who teach large numbers of language minority students (Snow 1998), but such specialized training is still relatively rare in teacher preparation programs. Peterson (1997) indentifies only 10 among the 171 TESOL teacher education programs in the United States that list separate courses on integrating language and content. As a result, most teacher education for CBI occurs after teachers leave their preservice teacher education programs, through in-service workshops or seminars or informally through collaboration among language and content teachers (Sheppard 1997; Crandall 1998). Successful in-service teacher development usually involves at least some of the following: (a) opportunities for peer observation and feedback, (b) joint curriculum and lesson planning, (c) collaborative teacher inquiry or classroom-centered research, and (d) collaborative or team teaching. For CBI to be successful, teachers need sufficient time to co-plan curriculum and instruction. In some secondary school programs, second language learners are assigned to one group of teachers, who are given time to develop thematic units or carefully coordinated content-based language and sheltered classes. In university programs, cross-curricular opportunities for observation of acknowledged expert teachers or long-term experimentation of strategies with the assistance of a more experienced teacher has proven successful. As linguistic diversity in classrooms and the use of second or additional languages as a medium of instruction increases around the world, the need for a more integrated teacher
Content-based Instruction (CBI) education program which brings together language and other subject matter teacher candidates in collaborative instructional theory and practice, increases. (See Crandall, in press, for further discussion of current practices and future needs in teacher preparation for CBI at elementary, secondary, and tertiary levels.) 7. Current and Needed Research
Research into the effectiveness of CBI is limited, as is the case with most research related to approaches to foreign or second language learning, since identifying comparable groups for experimental research is very difficult. However, those studies that have been undertaken suggest that CBI helps second language learners to develop academic language skills at the same time as it provides access to academic concepts and improves academic achievement. For example, research from Canadian immersion programs (Lambert and Tucker, 1972; Swain 1988) and from Canadian and American university programs (Edwards et al. 1984; Milk 1990) report high levels of language proficiency as well as content mastery. The effectiveness of adjunct programs at the university has also been demonstrated (Snow and Brinton 1988; Guyer and Peterson 1988; Brinton et al. 1989; lancu 1993). Guyer and Peterson (1988:104) found that second language learners with lower proficiency in the medium of instruction did better with an adjunct course than students with higher proficiency who lacked that support, perhaps because 'the connections and expectations of the specific academic culture and discipline were made explicit' to the students through that course. CBI has also been found to produce higher levels of reading proficiency and academic achievement (pass rates) than traditional language instruction (Kasper 1997). Recently, CBI has also been found to promote student motivation, engagement in research and class discussion, and development of conversational and writing skills in secondary school programs in second language contexts. Research has also been undertaken to identify the most important academic language tasks students face in second language contexts in universities, especially those in which English is the medium of instruction. Especially fruitful are studies of academic writing demands (see Snow 1998 for a review of several of these). Most CBI, whether in second or foreign language contexts, is restricted to students at intermediate levels of proficiency or above. However, a number of researchers and language educators have suggested that academic content be infused into language instruction at a much earlier period, perhaps from the beginning, especially through the use of thematic units or paired instruction and some initial studies of sheltered classes with students at various levels of proficiency, including beginners, suggests that sheltering
instruction is one means of providing access to the core curriculum and fostering language development in contexts where mother-tongue or bilingual instruction is not possible. While some research has also suggested that teachers make more modifications for classes of students with lower language proficiency, the research is still quite limited (Trites 1997, cited in Snow 1998). More classroom-based research studies, similar to those undertaken by Short (1994) in middle school social studies classrooms, will also help to understand those features of academic discourse and instruction which are most problematic for language learners and the adaptations which are most helpful. There is an urgent need, however, for much more research, both quantitative and qualitative, describing the effects of CBI on learners of all ages and levels of proficiency, in both second and foreign language contexts. The recent set of longitudinal studies undertaken by Kasper (1997), which follow university students for several semesters after their participation in a CBI course, is a model which needs replication. Also needed are studies documenting the effects of CBI teacher development programs on faculty attitudes and instructional practices, such as those conducted by Snow and her colleagues (see Crandall in press for a review).
Bibliography Brinton D M, Snow M A, Wesche M H 1989 Content-Based Second Language Instruction. Harper and Row, New York Cantoni-Harvey G. 1987 Content-Area Language Instruction: Approaches and Strategies. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA Chamot A U, O'Malley J M 1994 The CALLA Handbook: Implementing the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA Collier V P 1992 A synthesis of studies examining long-term language-minority student data on academic achievement. Bilingual Research Journal 16: 187-212 Crandall J A (ed.) 1987 ESL through Content-Area Instruction. Prentice-Hall Regents/Center for Applied Linguistics, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Crandall J A 1993 Content-centered instruction in the United States. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 13: 111-26 Crandall J A 1998 Collaborate and cooperate: Teacher education for integrating language and content instruction. English Teaching Forum 36: 2-9 Crandall J A in press The role of the university in preparing teachers for a linguistically diverse society. In: Rosenthal J W (ed.) The Handbook of Undergraduate Second Language Education: English as a Second Language, Bilingual, and Foreign Language Instruction for a Multilingual World. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Crandall J A, Bernache C, Prager S 1998 New frontiers in educational policy and program development: The challenge of the underschooled immigrant secondary school student. Educational Policy 12: 719-34 Crandall J A, Tucker G R 1990 Content-based language instruction in second and foreign languages. In: Anivan S (ed.) Language Teaching Methodology for the Nineties.
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Teaching Additional Languages SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, Singapore, pp. 8396 Cummins J 1981 The role of primary language development in promoting educational success for language minority students: A theoretical framework. In: California State Department of Education (ed.) Schooling and Language Minority Students: A Theoretical Framework. California State University, Los Angeles, pp. 3-49 Echevarria J, Graves A 1998 Sheltered Content Instruction: Teaching English-Language Learners with Diverse Abilities. Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA Edwards H P, Wesche M, Krashen S, Clement R, Kruidenier B 1984 Second language acquisition through subject matter learning: A study of the sheltered psychology classes at the University of Ottawa. Modern Language Review 41: 268-82 Enright D S, McCloskey M L 1988 Integrating English. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA Grabe W, Stoller F 1997 A 6t's approach to content-based instruction. In: Snow M A, Brinton D M (eds.) The Content-Based Classroom: Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content. Longman, White Plains, NY, pp. 78-94 Grabe W, Stoller F 1997 Content-based instruction: Research foundations. In: Snow M A, Brinton D M (eds.) The Content-Based classroom: Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content. Longman, White Plains, NY, pp. 158-74 Guyer E, Peterson P W 1988 Language and/or content? Principles and procedures for materials development in an adjunct course. In: Benesch S (ed.) Ending Remediation: Linking ESL and Content in Higher Education. TESOL, Alexandria, VA, pp. 91-110 lancu M 1993 Adapting the adjunct model: A case study. TESOL Journal 20-24. Kasper L F 1997 The impact of content-based instructional programs on the academic progress of ESL students. English for Specific Purposes 16: 309-20 Kaufman D 1997 Collaborative approaches in preparing teachers for content-based and language enhanced settings. In: Snow M A, Brinton D M (eds.) The ContentBased Classroom: Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content. Longman, White Plains, NY, pp. 17586 Krashen S 1982 Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Pergamon, Oxford Krueger M, Ryan F (eds.) 1993 Language and Content: Discipline- and Content-Based Approaches to Language Study. D C Heath, Lexington, MA Lambert W E, Tucker G R 1972 Bilingual Education of Children. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Lantolf J (ed.) 1994 Sociocultural theory and second language learning. Special issue, The Modern Language Journal 78. Lantolf J, Appel G (eds.) 1994 Vygotskian Approaches to Second Language Research. Ablex, Norwood, NJ Milk R D 1990 Preparing ESL and bilingual teachers for changing roles: immersion for teachers of LEP children. TESOL Quarterly 24: 407-26 Mohan B A 1986 Language and Content. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA Peterson P W 1997 Knowledge, skills and attitudes in teacher preparation for content-based instruction. In: Snow M
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A, Brinton D M (eds.) The Content-Based Classroom: Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content. Longman, White Plains, NY, pp. 158-74 Sheppard K 1997 Integrating content-ESL: A report from the front. In: Snow M A, Brinton D M (eds.) The ContentBased Classroom: Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content. Longman, White Plains, NY, pp. 2234 •Short D J 1991 How to Integrate Language and Content Instruction: A Training Manual (2nd ed.). Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC Short D J 1993 Assessing integrated language and content instruction. TESOL Quarterly 27: 627-56 Short D J 1994 Expanding middle school horizons: Integrating language, culture, and social studies. TESOL Quarterly 28: 581-608 Snow M A 1998 Trends and issues in content-based instruction. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 18: 24367 Snow M A, Brinton D M 1988 Content-based language instruction: Investigating the effectiveness of the adjunct model. TESOL Quarterly 22: 553-74 Snow M A, Met M, Gensee F 1989 A conceptual framework for the integration of language and content instruction. TESOL Quarterly 23: 201-17 Spanos G 1990 On the integration of language and content instruction. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 10: 22740 Spanos G, Crandall J A 1990 Language and problem solving: Some examples from math and science. In: Padilla A M et al. (eds.) Bilingual Education: Issues and Strategies. Sage, Newbury Park, CA Straight H S (ed.) 1994 Languages Across the Curriculum: Invited Essays on the Use of Foreign Languages throughout the Postsecondary Curriculum. State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton (Out of print but available through ERIC as ED 374 646) Stryker S B, Leaver B L (eds.) 1997 Content-Based Instruction in Foreign Language Education: Models and Methods. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Swain M 1988 Manipulating and complementing content teaching to maximize second language learning. TESL Canada Journal 6: 68-83 Swain M 1993 The output hypothesis: Just speaking and writing aren't enough. The Canadian Modern Language Review 50: 158-64 Tang G M 1992 The effects of graphic representation of knowledge structures on ESL reading comprehension. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 14: 177-95 Turner J 1997 Creating content-based language tests: Guidelines for teachers. In: Snow M A, Brinton D M (eds.) The Content-Based Classroom: Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content. Longman, White Plains, NY, pp. 187-200 Vygotsky L S 1962 Thought and Language. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Vygostky L S 1978 Mind and Society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Weigle S C, Jensen L 1997 Issues in assessment for contentbased instruction. In: Snow M A, Brinton D M (eds.) The Content-Based Classroom: Perspectives on Integrating Language and Content. Longman, White Plains, NY, pp. 201-12
Fluency and Accuracy
Fluency and Accuracy I. S. P. Nation
Traditionally a distinction has been made between activities which have the goal of accuracy of language use and activities which have the goal of fluency of language use. Accuracy activities include substitution drills, sentence joining exercises, dictation, and reading with questions. Fluency activities involve meaning focused communication using language that has been practiced in accuracy work. Accuracy and fluency activities can focus on reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Instead of a two-part distinction, Skehan (1996) makes a three-part distinction between accuracy, complexity, and fluency. Although the learning conditions needed for the development of accuracy and fluency are largely different, their knowledge bases may be very similar. 1. Accuracy Accuracy refers to how closely learners' language resembles accepted standards. 'Accepted' is deliberately vague because teachers and learners have a variety of standards to choose from. Accuracy is a matter of degree and researchers usually do not expect learners to achieve 100 percent accuracy when charting language development. Errors can occur for a variety of reasons. These include incorrect language knowledge, developing and changing language knowledge, and performance pressure such as excitement, time pressure, cognitive load, or nervousness. In order to be accurate in their creative language use, learners need to have a well-developed language system. This can come from having useful input which is appropriate to the learners' stage of development (Pienemann, 1989), input that the learners pay attention to (Schmidt, 1990; Ellis, 1994), and the need to produce language (Swain, 1985). Feedback on errors and direct study of language forms can contribute to accuracy, but only indirectly. 2. Fluency Fluency involves making the best use of what is known under normal time constraints. The most obvious sign of fluency is speed. This is usually measured in words or syllables per minute as when measuring reading speed or speaking speed. The other most noticeable sign is uninterrupted performance, which may be measured by counting hesitations in speaking, or regressions in reading. Lennon (1990) observed changes in speaking fluency over a six-month period and found that changes were observed in speech rate, filled pauses per T unit, and T units followed by a pause. Lack of fluency can have several causes. These include a strong concern for accuracy, poorly organized
or unstable language knowledge, lack of practice, and performance pressure. The ways in which fluency develops show the underlying relationship between accuracy and fluency. Schmidt (1992) reviews a range of theories of fluency development which draw on two major kinds of development—strength and organization. Developing strength is like following the same well-beaten path. By using the same items over and over again, they become more readily accessible. Using organization involves working out the most effective way of arranging the parts of a task. One example of this is McLaughlin's (1990) theory of restructuring. Learners can become faster and faster at using the language they know until they reach a high degree of automaticity. At that point, no further improvement is possible without restructuring the knowledge base. So, restructuring occurs with an initial drop in fluency. But, as a result of further practice using the restructured knowledge, higher levels of fluency can be reached. Pawley and Syder's (1983) proposal of a dual storage system can be seen in this way. They propose that appropriateness (a feature of accuracy) and fluency depend on the storage of preconstructed clauses and sentences. By being able to draw on these existing forms, language users save a lot of processing time and thus can speak more appropriately with native-like selection and more fluently than they could if they had to construct the clauses from smaller units. This storage of units larger than words, what Miller (1956) calls 'chunking', can be seen as a result of restructuring. Evidence for this can be found in research by Towell et al. (1996) who found more fluent learners to be using longer uninterrupted language units than less fluent learners. Fluency development activities should use only known language features, should be meaning focused, should provide quantity of language use, and should involve some pressure to perform at a faster than normal rate. These include speed reading, continuous writing with an emphasis on quantity, 4/3/2 where a learner gives the same talk three times to a different listener but with less time for each delivery (Arevart and Nation 1991), and listening to stories. Fluency activities should make up about one quarter of a course. Increases in fluency are usually accompanied by increases in accuracy and complexity (Arevart and Nation 1991).
Bibliography Arevart S, Nation IS P1991 Fluency improvement in a second language. RELC Journal 22(l):84-94 611
Teaching Additional Languages Ellis R 1994 The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford University Press, Oxford Lennon P 1990 Investigating fluency in EFL: A quantitative approach. Language Learning 40:387-417 McLaughlin B 1990 Restructuring. Applied Linguistics 11:113-28 Miller G A 1956 The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63(2):81-97 Pawley A, Syder F H 1983 Two puzzles for linguistic theory: Nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In: Richards J C, Schmidt R W (eds.) Language and Communication Longman, London, pp. 191-225 Pienemann M E 1989 Is language teachable? Psycholinguistic experiments and hypotheses. Applied Linguistics 10: 52-79
Schmidt R 1990 The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics 11:129-58 Schmidt R 1992 Psychological mechanisms underlying second language fluency. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 14:357-85 Skehan P 1996 A framework for the implementation of taskbased instruction. Applied Linguistics 17:38-62 Swain M 1985 Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In: Gass S M, Madden C G (eds.) Input in Second Language Acquisition. Newbury House, Massachusetts, pp. 235-53 Towell R, Hawkins R, Bazergui N 1996 The development of fluency in advanced learners of French. Applied Linguistics 17:84-119
Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language) D. Larsen-Freeman
Over the years, second language educators have alternately favored pedagogical approaches to grammar which begin by focusing on grammatical structures, and those which initially emphasize communication. In the former, students systematically encounter more and more complex structures, building up or synthesizing their knowledge of the target language grammar as they proceed. In the latter approaches, structural complexity is not strictly controlled. Instead, grammatical structures are isolated and dealt with as they arise in the service of communication. These days it is the approaches which start with communication which are preferred. It is worth noting that some modern applied linguists question whether explicit attention should be given to grammar at all. Rather, they expect second language learners to absorb the rules of grammar unconsciously while they are engaged in communication, much as children absorb the rules of their native language. Most educators, however, agree that second language learning is facilitated by directing student attention to specific grammatical features of the target language. This view is reinforced by language students themselves, who are often eager to study grammar because they perceive its acquisition as necessary to language mastery. Above all, it should be understood that whether or not one begins with students communicating, the ultimate goal of second language teaching is to have students be able to use the language for communicative purposes. Thus, the teaching of grammar is a means to an end, not an end in itself. If students
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could recite all the grammar rules but fail to deploy them when communicating, grammar teaching would be considered a failure. Teachers of grammar must be concerned with the content of what they teach and the process, that is, the way they teach it. Consequently, grammar pedagogy needs to be informed by what is known about the nature of language (linguistics) and about how languages are acquired (psycholinguistics). Linguistic and psycholinguistic considerations will be treated in turn below. 1. Linguistic Description Developers of grammar teaching materials draw on different schools of linguistic thought to arrive at the most comprehensive description of the target language possible. Thus, from a linguistics standpoint, pedagogical grammar materials are eclectic. And, as the goal of language teaching is not to teach abstract rules of competence but to get students to comprehend and produce language meaningfully, the materials are more performance-based. Due to learnability requirements, they are also simplified. Such materials typically do not reflect the full complexity of native language behavior. Yet, while they are not as complex as theoretical linguistic descriptions, they often exhibit a broader scope. Grammar teaching cannot be restricted to presenting the formal properties of structures if learners are to be able to use grammar to achieve meaningful communication. Grammar teaching would be less than successful if students could produce, say, the present participle form of the verb
Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language) but not know what it means or when to use it. Thus, the goal of grammar teaching must be to enable students to produce grammatical structures accurately, meaningfully and appropriately. In order to foster accuracy, meaningfulness, and appropriateness in the use of grammar structures, linguistic descriptions of form, meaning, and use are needed. The pie chart below (Fig. 1) depicts these three dimensions present in all languages, with the arrows suggesting their interconnectedness: 1.1 How is a Grammar Structure Formed? The form of a structure in a pedagogical grammar is first described in terms of its constituents: the morphemes and words which comprise it. For example, it can be said that the English present progressive 'tense' consists of some present tense form of the verb BE and the present participle, the bound morpheme -ing. Second, the description of the form is extended to its syntax or where it fits in a sentence. As an SVO language, English places verbs following subjects and before objects. The BE verb, which is an auxiliary verb, would follow all other auxiliary verbs, save the passive BE. The -ing participle is discontinuous; that is, it exists apart from the BE verb and in the active voice is attached to the main verb, as in: She is read/«g a book. In a question form, the BE verb and subject are inverted: Is she reading a book? and in the negative, the not is placed after the BE, often in contracted form: She isn't reading a book. A final fact relevant to the form of a grammatical structure has to do with its distribution, or the total set of contexts in which it can occur. The present progressive, for instance, can generally only be used with dynamic verbs, not stative verbs such as know, like, or own. A common error made by English learners is to overgeneralize the -ing form and apply it to stative verbs, as in: *He is knowing the answer. 1.2 What Does a Grammar Structure Mean? The meaning of a structure in a pedagogical grammar may be of two types: lexical or grammatical. Lexical meanings are found in dictionary definitions for members of certain grammatical categories such as prepositions (on, in, by), phrasal verbs (look up, run across, give up), or modal verbs (should, might, will). Single grammar structures do not have lexical meanings as such, but instead have grammatical meaning: a conditional states a condition and a result, for example. In the case of a present participle, a structure we
have already examined, it may be said that it ascribes to an action the meaning that it is in process and therefore incomplete. The incompleteness is manifest in different ways, depending upon the semantic category of the verb. With punctual verbs, the present participle signals iteration (The wind is banging the shutter); with durative verbs, duration (They are studying linguistics), or it can signal a temporary, as opposed to an enduring, state of affairs (cf. Steven is living with his parents; Steven lives with his parents). Thus, the grammatical meaning of the present participle varies somewhat depending upon the verb to which it is attached but, in general, conveys that the activity is in progress and therefore incomplete. This is its grammatical meaning, regardless of the tense of the BE verb. 1.3 When is the Grammar Structure Used? The use of a structure as described in a pedagogical grammar refers to its appropriateness either to a social context or to a linguistic discourse context. Often a number of grammatical structures will convey roughly the same meaning but will not all be equally appropriate to the context. For example, when a host is trying to be especially courteous, it is more polite in English to make an offer using the past tense form of the verb and something rather than anything (cf. Did you want something to eat? Do you want anything to eat?). Phrasal verbs are considered more appropriate in an informal context than their single-word counterparts (cf. The man got up before dawn; The man rose before dawn). Sometimes even one form of the same structure is more appropriate than another on a given occasion. Thus, for example, the fronting of the preposition in a relative clause is considered more appropriate in a formal context (cf. The person with whom I am speaking is a former colleague; The person whom I am speaking with is a former colleague). Students must be made aware of the necessity for choosing among grammatical structures in order to satisfy the appropriateness demands of the context. The same criterion of appropriateness applies when choosing grammar structures to use in linguistic discourse. The passive voice is preferred over the active in a particular discourse framework when the theme, as opposed to an agent, is in focus (cf. The statue of David was disfigured; A man disfigured the statue of David); and the use of the definite article the (as opposed to the indefinite articles a or an) is appropriate when a noun phrase has already been introduced (cf. I took the book (i.e., the one you recommended) out of the library yesterday; I took a book out of the library yesterday). To continue with our example of the present participle, one consideration of use would specify when it is appropriate to use the present progressive, as compared with the simple present, to report future events (cf. The train leaves tomorrow; The train is leaving tomorrow).
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Teaching Additional Languages
Figure 1. The three dimensions of language.
In short, in order for language students to be able to use grammar structures accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately, the content of grammar teaching must not only deal with the form of grammar structures but also their meaning and use. How this content is imparted needs to be informed by psycholinguistic considerations. It is to these we turn next. 2. Psycholinguistic Considerations
As time and student attention are limited in the classroom, considerations of a psycholinguistic nature must be drawn upon in order to use the allotted time most effectively. Grammar teachers may be unable to deal comprehensively with all that is known about the target language grammar; therefore, they must select what is most important for students to assimilate. An aid in this endeavor is the recognition that typically one of the three dimensions of form, meaning, and use for any given structure affords groups of students the greatest challenge. 2.1 Defining the Challenge
What is likely to be difficult for a given group of language students is that aspect of the target language
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which is most inherently complex. The difficulty is compounded if the grammar of the students' native language is likely to interfere with the learning of the target language structure. For example, for most learners of English, the forms and meanings of the English tense-aspect system are fairly easy to learn. What is problematic, however, is to learn when it is appropriate to use each. Distinctions between the past tense and present perfect or be going to future and will future are but two notorious examples of the many which cause much perplexity among students learning English as a second language. The fact that the distinctions themselves are not always clearcut (with some overlapping functions and inconsistencies) is not helped by the fact that there is no one-to-one functional correspondence between English tenses and those of other languages. How the target language and native language conceptualize temporality can be fundamentally different and, of course, the grammatical devices used to instantiate the conceptualizations can be divergent as well. The experienced teacher of English grammar then knows that the students' long-term challenge in mastering the English tense-aspect system will be in their learning when to use each tense.
Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language) With English phrasal verbs, it is a different matter. Here the fact that each verb and particle combination yields a unique, often unpredictable, meaning will lead even the most observant student awry. How is the hapless student to know that slow down and slow up are virtually synonymous? Then, too, few languages in the world have structures comparable to two-word or phrasal verbs. Thus, the learning challenge of the tense-aspect system lies in its overlaps and inconsistencies, whereas the learning challenge of phrasal verbs resides in the fact that little generalizing is possible and prior knowledge (of the meaning of the verb and particle when they are not used in combination) is often misleading. These factors which contribute to difficulty in learning are not unique to the learning of English. It is the responsibility of teachers of all languages to be sensitive to the areas of a grammar structure which create obstacles to learning. It is also important to recognize that the three dimensions of language (form, meaning, and use) are not learned in the same way and should, therefore, not be taught in the same way. Getting students to produce grammatical forms accurately, for instance, is likely to require a great deal of meaningful repetition before the pattern is internalized. When the meaning dimension is being taught, it is crucial that students have an opportunity to forge a bond between a particular structure and its real-world representation or a native language equivalent. With use as the challenge, it is important that students work with language at the discourse level, that is, with oral or written text: dialogues, paragraphs, riddles, songs, etc. Students should be presented with a choice between two structures for a given context, where they can receive feedback on the appropriateness of their choice. (Specific examples of techniques which address the three different dimensions will be offered in Sect. 2.3 below.) 2.2 Selection and Sequencing At a more global level, grammar teachers must be concerned with the selection and sequencing of grammatical structures. What is selected will be determined by the purpose for which the language learning is undertaken. The grammar structures taught in a basic language survival course, for example, would differ in principled ways from those included in a course preparing students to deal with academic subject matter. In addition to selection, the matter of sequencing is also of concern. Even if teachers are not approaching grammar teaching with a preordained grammatical syllabus, certain of the structures which arise in communication will be designated to be taught before others. Typically the grading of linguistic structures has been accomplished by adhering to certain prin-
ciples, among which are relative linguistic simplicity, frequency of occurrence, communicative utility, and contrastive difficulty for speakers of a particular native language. While pedagogical sequences are still often based on such principles, an additional factor has received attention of late. This consideration has to do with psycholinguistic evidence that learners apparently must learn to perform certain grammatical operations before they can be expected to acquire others. Evidence adduced from studies of the acquisition of German and English, for instance, has revealed that students will first learn to move sentence internal elements to initial or final position in the sentence (e.g., She is reading a book -» Is she reading a book?) before they learn sentence internal permutations (e.g., We handed in our term papers last week -> We handed our term papers in last week). Such observations have led to the conclusion that natural processing constraints restrict what is learnable at any one time, and hence efforts to teach structures beyond which learners are capable of processing will prove futile. This is a strong claim and one that requires further empirical validation. If the findings are corroborated, the implications for the sequencing of grammatical structures are enormous. At this point, all that can be said with any degree of certainty is that pedagogical sequences are at best superfluous and at worst obstructionist if they do not coincide with any natural learning order which may exist. One final point that should be made with regard to sequencing is that although learners may develop certain grammatical operations before others, it is not the case that learners tackle one grammatical structure, practice it until it is fully acquired and then proceed to begin anew with another structure. The learning of grammar structures does not take place by aggregation. Rather, the process can be characterized as a gradual one, involving the mapping of meaning and use on form. Even when learners appear to have acquired a particular structure, it is not unusual to find backsliding occurring as new structures are introduced. In light of this psycholinguistic evidence, many educators feel that employing a linear grammatical syllabus makes little pedagogic sense. One solution is to ensure that the grammatical syllabus adheres to a spiraled, rather than linear, sequence. Students encounter the same structure again and again, albeit with a focus on different aspects. An alternative solution that has been proposed is to replace a grammatical syllabus with a meaning-based syllabus, such as one that engages students in problem-solving tasks. Then students' attention can be 'focused on form' when the need presents itself and the teacher determines that students are ready to learn a structure (Doughty and Williams 1998). 615
Teaching Additional Languages 2.3 Manner of Instruction The very first step in working on a grammatical structure that has been deemed learnable is to draw students' attention to it. This might take place through various 'input enhancing' strategies such as providing learners with texts in which the target structure is frequent and/or highlighted in some manner. This is often followed by a presentation in which the teacher attempts to develop students' explicit understanding of the rules governing the target structure. This is accomplished by either a deductive or an inductive 'consciousness-raising' strategy (Ellis 1998). In accord with a deductive strategy, the grammar teacher presents a pattern or a rule to students and then provides sufficient examples until satisfied that it is understood. In an inductive approach, students are first given examples of a given structure, typically embedded within a text, be it a specially constructed dialog or some sample of authentic text such as an excerpt from a newspaper. Students are then encouraged to induce the target language rule or generalization. Sometimes the rule is never formally articulated, remaining implicit, a tactic in keeping with the previously stated goal of not teaching the grammar rules themselves but rather using them to encourage students to bring their linguistic behavior in increasing conformity with the target language. Psycholinguistic evidence has not demonstrated the superiority of one of these strategies over the other; however, in general, deductive strategies are thought to be more effective when the rules are convoluted, and probably not especially useful when learners are young. For children, in particular, the formal explication of the rule would probably obfuscate more than elucidate. Furthermore, an inductive strategy has the advantage of allowing a teacher to determine what it is that students already know about a given structure and what remains to be clarified and reinforced. For these reasons and because students possess different learning styles, most teachers will make use of both strategies during the course of instruction. Once the grammar structure has been introduced, the practice phase ensues. Students practice the new rule or pattern with exercises which are first tightly controlled and later of a freer nature. Grammar drills that are meaningful, not rote, are used for working on the form of a grammatical structure initially. A chain question and answer drill might be employed, for example, in order for students to practice the form of yes/no questions, short answers, and simple statements in English: Teacher: Student A: Student B: Student C:
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Are you from Guatemala? No. I am not. I am from Ecuador. Are you from Japan? Yes. I am. Are you from the Phillipines? No. I am not. I am from Malaysia.
While such drills are highly restrictive, they do allow for abundant repetition of the target structure. For freer practice which would address the formal challenge, grammar games are useful. With games, the vocabulary and information load are much less constrained, but production of the target structure is still necessary. An example of a game which teachers use to practice question formation is 'twenty questions,' wherein students must guess something the teacher or a classmate is thinking of by posing a series of up to 20 yes/no questions. When dealing with a meaning challenge, an example of a controlled exercise is one in which students are asked to perform some simple action in response to a command. For instance, after the teacher models the actions, students would be asked to carry out a routine such as 'stand up, sit down, turn around,' etc. in order to associate a meaningful action with a phrasal verb. A freer practice exercise that would work to reinforce a meaningful bond is a problem-solving task. A typical task is one containing an information gap. Each student in a pair receives one-half of the information necessary to solve a problem. Only by pooling the information they have been given can the problem be solved. Students might, for example, be charged with the task of identifying the buildings on a town map. One student in the pair has a map in which one-half of the buildings are labeled; the other student has an identical map, except for the fact that the other half of the buildings are labeled. By asking and answering each other's questions, the students should be able to complete the maps, while practicing the meaningful use of spatial prepositions (next to, behind, across from, etc.). A common controlled exercise designed to work on the dimension of use is one in which students are asked to make a choice which depends on contextual factors. Students might be asked, for example, to fill in the blanks in a text where they would need to supply the appropriate verb tense. A freer practice exercise that would work well on appropriateness in social situations is the use of structured role plays. In a role play students are asked to act as if they had taken on someone else's identity and to do so in accordance with the appropriate degree of politeness or formality. A role play where one student is asked to give advice to another student, initially as if the other student is the first's employer and then as if a spouse, would give students practice in using modal verbs appropriately. When students have demonstrated some dexterity with the target structure, the final productive or communicative phase of a grammar lesson takes place. In this phase, learners engage in more open-ended, less controlled activities. The aim during this phase is to have students use the structures they have been practicing in as natural and fluent a manner as possible. Because there are relatively few constraints, however, there is no guarantee that students will choose to use the target structures at all.
Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language) Examples of communicative activities which would permit the students to work on one of the three dimensions of grammar would be interviewing one's fellow students about their hobbies (to practice the form of questions), giving one's fellow students recipe directions (to practice using certain connectors—e.g., first, then, after that—meaningfully) and to ask students to write a paragraph about an invention (to practice the use of the passive voice).
2.4 Teacher Feedback
An extremely important component of any approach to teaching grammar is that students receive feedback on the accuracy, meaningfulness, and appropriateness of the language they produce. Psycholinguistic evidence has shown that when students initially grapple with target structures, the forms that they produce are nontarget-like at first (and many persist in this manner for some time). The nontarget-like productions of learners are due to many factors, two common ones being the influence of similar, but not identical, structures in the native language and forms which result from students' applying a rule beyond what the language allows, as in the example we cited earlier of the use of the present participle with stative verbs (*I am knowing the answer). It is widely acknowledged that teacher feedback is invaluable in providing students with negative evidence that will allow them to revise their hypotheses about the target language rules and ultimately to bring their performance into alignment with the target language. Further, it is recognized that feedback from the teacher is most helpful when the error the student has committed is systematic (i.e., results from a misunderstanding of a rule and is pervasive, not merely a slip) and when the correction is selective, taking the purpose of the activity and the learner's affective needs and stage of development into account. There are many strategies that teachers adopt to provide students with evidence that what they have just produced is incorrect. These range from the teacher's explicitly calling attention to the error and providing the correct form or rule, to the teacher's reformulating or 'recasting' the student's utterance into correct form, to the teacher merely repeating the student's ill-formed utterance with a rising intonation in an attempt to get the student to self-correct. No one strategy has been demonstrated to be more effective than the others.
3. Future Investigation
What has been presented here is a fairly conventional view of grammar pedagogy. The presentation will conclude with three proposals which could have a significant impact in the future on the way second language grammar is taught.
The first proposal stems from the concern that traditional grammatical sequences do not reflect what is known about language acquisition. Recall the earlier point that language acquisition does not take place through linear aggregation but is more of a metamorphic process which is represented in students' production by increasing grammaticization (Rutherford 1987). It has been suggested that an approach to grammar teaching more in keeping with the acquisition process would be one where grammar teachers would help students achieve an understanding of general principles of grammar (e.g., how to modify basic word order) rather than concentrating on their remembering structure-specific rules in the target language. Investigation into the nature of the grammaticization which takes place and further identification of the general principles will be necessary in order to evaluate the efficacy of this approach. The second proposal relates to the fact that what is crucial for language learners to know is how grammar functions in alliance with words and contexts to create meaning (Widdowson 1990). The objection to current practice is, therefore, that grammatical structures are given primacy over lexis, with words being introduced merely to exemplify a grammar structure. What has been suggested instead is that a reverse order may be more beneficial—that is, that learners start by being taught target language words and then be shown how they need to be modified grammatically to be communicatively effective. The third on the list is less a proposal and more an awareness. It has been increasingly apparent that much of what contributes to (at least) initial fluency in a second language is not mastery of grammar rules but rather the learner's control over a number of prefabricated or formulaic chunks of language. For example, when a learner of English first uses 'How are you?' it is not likely that the question is the result of the application of English question formation rules. It is much more likely that the learner has memorized it as a whole phrase. Whether later these chunks are analyzed from patterns to creative language use or whether they remain in a learner's repertoire as holophrases forever is a matter of current debate. Future investigation is clearly needed in this area, not only for the light it will shed on the acquisition process but also for the potentially challenging implications it will have for second language grammar pedagogy.
Bibliography Celce-Murcia M, Hilles S 1988 Techniques and Resources in Teaching Grammar. Oxford University Press, Oxford Celce-Murcia M, Larsen-Freeman D 1999 The Grammar Book, 2nd edn. Heinle & Heinle, Boston, MA Doughty C, Williams J 1998 Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 617
Teaching Additional Languages Ellis R 1998 Teaching and Research: Options in Grammar Teaching. TESOL Quarterly 3: 39-60 Larsen-Freeman D 1991 Teaching grammar. In: Celce-Murcia M (ed.) Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, 2nd edn. Newbury House, New York Rutherford W 1987 Second Language Grammar: Learning and Teaching. Longman, London Rutherford W, Sharwood-Smith M (eds.) 1988 Grammar
(Mother Tongue) and Second Language Teaching. Newbury House, New York Ur P 1988 Grammar (Mother Tongue) Practice Activities. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Widdowson H G 1990 Aspects of Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Wilkins D A 1976 Notional Syllabuses. Oxford University Press, London
History of Second Language Teaching A. P. R. Howatt
Languages are successfully acquired in infancy by a process that does not require any help or intervention that could be described as 'teaching.' If additional languages are needed later in life, they too can be acquired in more or less the same way, again without teaching, though the results tend to be more mixed. Untutored language acquisition—'picking languages up'—is a feature of polyglot communities around the world and there are many instances when something of the kind has been deliberately included in teaching programs. Examples include acquiring Greek from Greek-speaking slaves in Roman households, the modern 'au pair' arrangement or the 'year abroad' for the undergraduate. John Locke's (see Sect. 3.3) advice in 1693 (Axtell 1968) on hiring native-speaking tutors followed the same principles; school foreign-language assistants are paler examples of the same argument. Modern 'immersion' programs, for example, the Bilingual Education Program in Canada, attempt to apply the ideas on a nationwide scale. The issue in this article is whether language teaching in a more orthodox sense has a role and, if so, what it is. The short answer is: whenever society wants skills which human beings are not equipped by nature to acquire unaided. In language there are two instances of such needs. First there are the skills that involve the written language. All literate civilizations since deep antiquity have made provision for appropriate training in reading and writing. Sometimes, as in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, for instance, the primary purpose of such instruction was preparation for the priesthood, but elsewhere the aims were linked to secular administrative functions. Second, teaching is required when foreign languages are learned in orthodox classrooms with a teacher and a set of textbooks, that is, when language teaching takes on some of the features of literacy instruction. The 'inbuilt' language-acquiring capacities of human beings are not designed for such circumstances and, although excellent results are achieved,
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planned language learning of this kind favors 'bright' students who are good at coping with organized education. How these 'natural' capacities can best be activated in the average classroom has been an important theme in the history of language teaching. 1. The Classical Period 1.1 Greece The transformation of the Homeric legends from an oral tradition to a set of written texts, some time around the eighth century BC, was the first decisive step towards the creation of a civilization which has been transmitted without significant interruption down to the twentieth century. With the coming of a literate society, it was essential that educational practice should rise to the challenge. The new social order of Periclean democracy in the fifth century BC demanded specialist language skills of high quality which would prepare future citizens both to appreciate the great literary texts, particularly Homer, and to employ their oratorical eloquence in the service of the state. Both Plato and Aristotle contributed to the design of a curriculum beginning with good writing (grammar), then moving on to effective discourse (rhetoric) and culminating in the development of dialectic to promote a philosophical approach to life. The expansion of Hellenistic influence from the late fourth century BC onwards centered on Alexandria and its famous library where, it could be said, grammatical analysis in something like its modern sense was born around 100BC in the work of Dionysius Thrax who identified a set of eight 'parts of speech': noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb, and conjunction (Robins 1951:39-40). This set, with minimal changes, was later applied to Latin which it suited fairly well, and in due course was imposed with less justification on the vernacular languages of Europe. The Thrax grammar is a short practical manual of some 15 pages which concentrates on morphology and phonology. The lack of a syn-
History of Second Language Teaching tactic description was rectified in the work of another Alexandrian Apollonius Dyskolos (second century AD) who in turn was the model for Priscian's Latin grammar in the sixth century AD (see Sect. 2.1) which carried the classical tradition on to the modern world. 1.2 Rome Greek education was rooted in the study of the mother tongue. By contrast Roman education was bilingual. For all educated Romans the Greek language and culture were sacrosanct even after Greece was conquered in the second century BC. Greeks were brought to Rome as slaves but typically were entrusted with responsibilities which were not given to others. For instance, they were employed by well-to-do families to talk to the children so that Greek was acquired as a second language alongside Latin. Latin became a written language quite early (probably some time in the seventh century BC) when the Romans acquired the Greek alphabet via the Etruscans to the north of Latium (Sampson 1985:99-119). Elementary education—conducted at home if the family had the resources—began with basic literacy in both Greek and Latin: the letters were learnt by heart (both the names and their phonetic values), followed by syllables and, finally, words. The next phase was devoted to grammar (again in both Latin and Greek) as a preparation for the study of the poets. Finally, the course moved on to rhetoric and the training of practical eloquence in the arts of oratory, in particular the skills of public debate and persuasion (Bonner 1977). Except in very privileged circles pupils were unlikely to possess many texts personally so oral teaching methods were dominant: reading aloud was common, as was learning-by-heart followed by recitation, and listening to lectures as the teacher explicated the set texts. Pupils often worked from materials prepared by the teacher derived from the major authors such as Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC) whose De Lingua Latina is a reasonably successful application of Greek linguistics to Latin (Robins 1951: 50-57). Among the commonly used texts on oratory were Cicero's (106-43 BC) De Oratore (55 BC) and Quintilian's (ca. 35-100 AD) De Institutione Oratoria (96 AD) which contained a comprehensive review of the place of language in education and included this comment on the balance between Greek and Latin: 'I prefer that a boy should begin with the Greek language because he will acquire Latin, which is in general use, even though we tried to prevent him [.. .but...] the study of Latin ought therefore to follow at no long interval and soon after to keep pace with the Greek,' (Monroe 1902:453-54). 2. The Medieval Period 2.1 The Early Middle Ages: 400-1200 AD The partition of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD created a linguistic division between east
and west Europe with cultural consequences that have persisted into modern times. The subsequent collapse of Rome itself under the impact of barbarian invasions in the fifth century AD not only hastened the disappearance of Greek from the west, it threatened the existence of Latin and the educational traditions it sustained. Ultimately, it was the protection of the Church that ensured the survival of western Christendom and its allegiance to the Latin language. The task was facilitated by a textbook produced by a fourth-century Latin teacher in Rome called Aelius Donatus, the tutor at one time of St Jerome. The book was in two parts, the first being a practical introduction to the language for beginners called De partibus orationis, ars minor which, as the title indicates, taught the basic parts of speech. It was organized as a sequence of catechetical questions and answers which the pupils had to learn by heart before being tested, for example: How many parts of speech are there? Eight. What? Noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, participle, conjunction, preposition, interjection. [...] What is a noun? A part of speech with case signifying a person or a thing specifically or generally. (Huntsman 1983:72)
The second book was a more advanced work, Ars grammatica or Ars major, which was later superseded by Priscian below. Donatus was the model for classroom grammars of Latin and other languages for well over a thousand years and its survival was of considerable cultural significance. Donatus himself was a native speaker of Latin and a witness to the civilization that was swept away in the Dark Ages. Without his work the maintenance of the Latin of Rome as a unifying force in medieval Europe would have been very much more difficult. In the eastern empire, Latin became a foreign language and its future rested on the work of teachers such as Priscian of Caesarea who worked in Constantinople in the sixth century AD. He wrote a largescale grammar, Institutiones grammaticae consisting of 18 books organized into the four sections of language study which were to persist until modern times: orthography (the study of letters and their pronunciation); prosody (syllables and versification); accidence (words); syntax (clauses or sentences). The Institutiones were intended for advanced students or teachers and they became the standard texts in the universities from the twelfth century onwards. In addition to Donatus and Priscian, there were other works which made a mark. For instance, around 1000 AD there was a set of Latin textbooks by Aelfric, Abbot of Eynsham, which consisted of a Grammar (Mother Tongue), a Glossary, and a Colloquy designed to contextualize the new vocabulary in a series of dialogs. Of particular interest is Aelfric's con-
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Teaching Additional Languages cern for the details of everyday life, which shows that Latin was not merely the language of learning and devotion (Garmonsway 1947; see 34-327). Colloquies were one way of making Latin more palatable for youngsters. Another was versification, which became popular around 1200. Two examples have survived: the Doctrinale puerorum of Alexander de Ville Dieu in Normandy, a grammar in 2,650 hexameter lines, and a longer work, Grecismus by Evrard de Bethune, which taught Latin words of Greek origin (Orme 1973:89-90). The special role of Latin grammar in medieval education was partly a matter of practical need—the Church required priests and clerks trained in the language. It was also a consequence of educational theory: following the arguments of the Ancients, in particular Varro's Nine Books of Disciplines, education was organized into a curriculum of seven subjects, the so-called seven liberal arts (two of Varro's disciplines, medicine and architecture, were dropped as being too specialized). The seven were further subdivided into a group of three with a linguistic base called the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and a more advanced group of four based on mathematics called the Quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (Wagner 1983). The schools had responsibility for grammar (i.e., 'good writing') and sometimes basic arithmetic. The remaining subjects were followed in the universities which began in Italy (Bologna), France (Paris), and England (Oxford) from the mid-twelfth century onwards. 2.2 The Later Middle Ages: 1200-1500 AD The teaching of Latin continued to dominate the scene as it had for centuries, though there were glimmerings of an interest in the teaching of vernacular languages but as yet these were largely individual initiatives outside the schools. Any move to advance the educational cause of languages other than Latin was out of the question until they could lay claim to a serious body of literature composed in a suitably elevated style. After the Norman conquest of England in the eleventh century, Latin replaced Anglo-Saxon as the language of formal written documents (the Domesday Book of 1086, for instance, was written in Latin), while for a time a form of diglossia existed with French as the high variety and English as the low one. However, French fell away as the Angevin lands in France were lost and by the thirteenth century there were signs that the literate classes needed to be taught correct French grammar. A rhyming vocabulary was written around 1270 by Walter of Bibbesworth and by 1400 French was a clearly foreign language and teaching was required. There were numerous public complaints of poor standards, and students at Oxford, for instance, were required to translate new Latin words into
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French as well as English, 'lest the French language be altogether lost' (Orme 1973:72-74). During the fifteenth century practical teaching manuals ('manieres de langage') started to appear in the form of dialogs in French (typically with an English gloss) depicting situations in which the language might be needed. These included schoolroom scenes in manuals aimed at children or conversations relating to travelling, buying and selling, and other business transactions for the growing numbers of merchants. One of the earliest books produced by Caxton after setting up his printing press in Westminster was a collection of language teaching dialogs (ca. 1480-83) which offered: Rygt good lernyngfor to lerne shortly frenssh & englyssh (Lambley 1920:43) (see Caxton, William). 3. The Early Modern Period
3.1 The Sixteenth Century As printing spread throughout Europe, dictionaries, polyglot word lists, dialog manuals, and other aids to foreign language learning began to circulate in considerable numbers. Language teaching was also becoming a profitable activity for enterprising native speakers. French as the emerging lingua franca of secular Europe was in particular demand and for a short time in the late sixteenth century there was a thriving community of Huguenot refugees teaching in London. The best known was Claudius Holyband (De Sainliens) who ran a school that taught French in addition to the obligatory Latin. He wrote a number of substantial textbooks including The French Schoolemaister (1573) and The French Littelton (1576). Jacques Bellot wrote the first manual for teaching English as a foreign language, The English Schoolmaster (1580), and John Florio, translator of Montaigne, contributed two dialog manuals for teaching Italian (Lambley 1920). The grammar schools were not impressed by the rising popular interest in vernacular languages, nor were they responsive to the excitement created by the revival of learning following the rediscovery of the literature of the ancient world. Classical humanism was led by figures of great stature such as Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) but they moved in high circles and had little impact on the everyday conduct of education. It needed the intervention of Henry VIII of England himself to introduce a new Latin grammar, the so-called Royal Grammar written by William Lily and others. The hegemony of Latin in the schools also survived the upheaval of the Reformation in spite of the importance that vernacular translations of the Bible held for the Protestant side. Calls for a mothertongue education system by educators such as Richard Mulcaster (ca. 1530-1611) went unheeded (see Muleaster, Richard). The old grammar grind rolled on into yet another century.
History of Second Language Teaching 3.2. The Seventeenth Century Outwardly language education changed little in the seventeenth century but new ideas were evolving which would bear fruit in the development of a modern curriculum in the next century. For instance, Francis Bacon's (1561-1626) approach to learning in which the physical world ('things') took precedence over language ('words') greatly influenced the thinking of one of the great educators of history, the Moravian Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), who attempted to put Bacon's insights into practice in an elaborate, but uncompleted, curriculum of Latin studies. His most significant contribution to language teaching was his Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658) which used pictures to present 'things' to children before they learnt the Latin 'words' associated with them. Comenius's criticisms of the empty verbalism promoted by traditional language teaching was echoed by many later reformers including John Locke (16321704; see Sect. 3.3) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (171278). Outside the mainstream of classical education there was a growing private market for foreign languages among the intellectuals of Europe who had previously relied on the universality of Latin as the language of scholarship. Some modern subjects were not discussed in Latin at all and, although French could claim to be the new lingua franca, it was not exactly a neutral code but the mother tongue of the most powerful Catholic nation in Europe. Countries speaking minority languages (e.g., England at this time) had to work hard to make themselves heard. One of the best early grammars of English as a foreign language, John Wallis's Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1653), was written in Latin so that Europeans could learn English and in turn could read Protestant theology written in English. 3.3 The Eighteenth Century The privileges of the established Anglican Church were restored with the monarchy in 1660 and as a result the education system it controlled gradually sank into moribund inactivity. The grammar schools were neglected while the universities were concerned only to perpetuate their vested interests. Developments elsewhere, however, compensated for this decline. Growing middle-class affluence meant that more resources were put into education at home. It became easier, for example, to hire native-speaking tutors from whom the children could acquire foreign languages in the manner recommended by Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693): 'People are accustomed to the right way of teaching that language [i.e., French], which is by talking it into children in constant conversation, and not by grammatical rules' (Axtell 1968:266). Locke goes on to say that the same natural methods should be used for Latin and his text is shot through
with undisguised frustration at the tenacious hold that Latin had on the education of England. He did not want to see it abandoned, but the way it was taught— by teaching grammar first—was indefensible: 'if grammar ought to be taught at any time, it must be to one that can speak the language already' (Axtell 1968:279). His conclusions echoed those of Comenius: 'the learning of Latin, being nothing but the learning of words, [is] a very unpleasant business both to young and old' and he exhorts the teacher to 'join as much other real knowledge with it as you can, beginning still with that which lies most obvious to the senses, such as is the knowledge of minerals, plants and animals' (Axtell 1968:280-281). Locke was mainly concerned with education at home. Of more lasting importance was the development of a new system of private schooling that gained in strength throughout the century. The educational monopoly of the Anglican Church had forced nonconformists to establish their schools illegally but in time they came to be tolerated and created a network of schools initially known as 'dissenting academies' devoted to a modern curriculum based on the teaching of the mother tongue and the promotion of practical skills founded on an understanding of mathematics and the natural sciences. The Classical languages were often available but modern languages were more consistent with the new ideology and French was usually on offer. In his study of eighteenthcentury education, Nicholas Hans looked at 28 private academies in all parts of England. English and mathematics were taught in all of them; French in 17; Latin in 15. The most popular practical skills were navigation (18 schools), accountancy (20), and drawing (21) (Hans 1951:67). The teaching of the mother tongue was the principal beneficiary of the academy movement and helped to create a market for substantial studies that contributed to the definition of Standard English, including Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Robert Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), and John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791). 4. The Nineteenth Century
4.1 Language Teaching in Schools The increase in modern language teaching in schools in Britain was also experienced elsewhere in Europe and prompted the development of a methodology which suited the needs of school classes of varying abilities rather than individual students. Language teaching had hitherto been based on an all-purpose manual typically consisting of a grammar section, a set of dialogs and prose texts, and a glossary. It was up to the pupil, with or without a tutor, to decide how all this material was to be used. For schools, what was needed was a more systematic method which worked
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Teaching Additional Languages in the same way all the time. The new approach organized the grammar in a series of small steps arranged in a logically graded sequence, introduced new vocabulary in restricted amounts and practiced each step thoroughly in specially written sentences for translation. The textbook which pioneered the new design was Praktische franzosische Grammatik (1783) by J. V. Meidinger (1756-1822). It was very successful (there were 15 editions by 1799) and became the model for the future. It was not until much later, after the method had been pushed to excess, that it was labeled the 'grammar-translation method' by its detractors. The growth of modern languages in the private sector was seen as a threat to the classical curriculum of the traditional ('public') schools which had revived somewhat in the early nineteenth century. They were for the most part boys' schools and taught little else but the Classical languages. They were quick to stigmatize modern languages as soft options suitable only for girls. The special relationship they enjoyed with the universities in terms of entrance arrangements, bursaries, and prizes gave their prejudices a cutting edge of real power. The practical effect of this pressure was that modern language teachers tried to disarm the criticisms of the Classicists by aping their methods with elaborate displays of grammatical rule-making, long lists of obscure 'exceptions,' a heavy emphasis on worthy literature, and an almost total neglect of the spoken language. The simplicity of the early 'grammar-translation' courses was destroyed in this misguided attempt to placate the opposition. The universities set up the final obstacles by succeeding in blocking modern languages until they were stiffened by the addition of philological studies. Suitably reassured, Cambridge introduced a Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos in 1886 and Oxford followed suit with an Honours School in 1903. Distortions of this kind were commonplace all over Europe and when the Reform Movement burst into life in the 1880s, it too was international (see Sect. 5). 4.2 Language Teaching to Adults Consumer demand for foreign languages grew steadily throughout the nineteenth century. Middle class education expanded in the industrialized countries, where urbanization stimulated a self-help ethos among those aspiring to 'rise in the world' and a 'gift for languages' was a highly regarded accomplishment. Also, the railways and steamship lines facilitated mass travel and the ability to speak foreign languages was a genuine practical asset. The publishing opportunities that these developments offered were obvious and various adaptations of Meidinger's methods appeared. An author would come up with a formula for a textbook series (typically described as a 'method') which, if successful, would be repeated in all the major languages. Two
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authors, both of German extraction, best represent this phase of language teaching commercialization. Franz Ahn (1796-1865), a language teacher from Aachen, published the first prototype of his 'method' in 1834. He settled on the title A New, Practical and Easy Method of Learning and in his unassuming way he delivered the goods. His books were clear, simple, and short. The grammar was set out in small steps and the vocabulary load was light. His translation exercises were carefully designed to practice the new points and students could expect to get through the course quickly. A key was available, underlining the importance of self-instruction in the adult market. Ahn's main rival, H. G. Ollendorff (1803-65), began a year later in 1835 with his model A New Method of Learning to Read, Write and Speak a Language in Six Months which was 'adapted' to all the languages of Europe over the next 30 years. Unlike Ahn's, his courses were substantial, with lengthy vocabulary lists and copious translation exercises using an extraordinary pseudoconversational format which made them the favorite target for 'pen of my aunt' jokes. The following practices irregular plurals in French (e.g., oiseaux 'birds,' matelas 'mattresses,' and marteaux 'hammers'): Which mattresses has the sailor?—He has the good mattresses of his captain. What has your boy?—He has his pretty birds. What has the baker?—He has our fine asses. Has he our nails or our hammers? (Ollendorff 1857:27)
Similar series, not all grammar-translation courses but all using variants of self-instructional techniques, included Toussaint-Langenscheidt, Gaspey-OttoSauer, Assimil, Hugo, Hossfeld, and many others. 5. The Reform of Language Teaching The reform of extreme grammar-translation practices in language teaching began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It took two superficially similar forms which were in fact unrelated. One was the selfstyled Reform Movement in European schools which was backed by new ideas in phonetics and psychology. Another was limited to the adult sector and was more extreme: grammar and translation were abolished and replaced by guided conversation activities exclusively in the foreign language. It was closely linked to the Berlitz schools. The public did not distinguish between the two and understandably labeled both of them the 'Direct Method.' 5.1 The Reform Movement By the 1870s it was evident throughout Europe that much was wrong with foreign language teaching: it was boring, excessively literary and antiquarian, unrelated to the real world, and generally unsuccessful.
History of Second Language Teaching There had been numerous individual attempts at reform all of which had failed but the Reform Movement was different; it grew from a coherent philosophy and offered new teaching methods based on the principles of phonetic science. Phonetics was the 'indispensable foundation' for all language study according to Henry Sweet (1845-1912) whose Handbook of Phonetics (1877) provided the basic introduction to the subject and whose Practical Study of Languages (\ 899) was the ultimate statement of what the Movement had tried to achieve. In 1882 Wilhelm Vietor (1850-1918), then a young teacher of English in Marburg with a background in phonetics, under the pseudonym Quousque Tandem, published a fierce condemnation of current practice in Germany called Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren, ('Language teaching must change direction!'). Victor's enthusiasm with the authority of Sweet behind it gave the Reform Movement a flying start and it soon attracted the interest and allegiance of the most talented language teachers and phoneticians in Europe (see Vietor, Wilhelm). An early member was Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), from Copenhagen, who was later to become the most distinguished European Anglicist of his generation. His How to Teach a Foreign Language (1904) summarized the Movement's methodology in a short and influential handbook. In Britain, W. H. Widgery (1856-91) did much to promote the new ideas among ordinary school teachers. France was represented by Paul Passy (1859-1940; see Passy, Paul Edouard), a committed language teacher who saw the new ideas with their stress on speech as an approach which would benefit all children, not merely the highly literate minority. In 1886 he founded the Phonetic Teachers' Association which eventually became the International Phonetic Association (IPA) (1897) and, from 1889, published a journal Le Maitre Phonetique. He wrote widely on phonetics (e.g., Passy 1906) and spoken language generally. He was also the author of an article which appeared as a supplement to Le Maitre Phonetique in May 1899 called De la Methode Directe dans l 'enseignement des langues vivantes. This was the first time that the label 'Direct Method' (see Sect. 5.2) had been used and it stuck, though not all the European reformers accepted all its implications. Passy has a particular importance for the history of applied linguistics in Britain as the man who taught phonetics to Daniel Jones in 1905-6 (Sect. 6; see also Jones, Daniel). The basic principles of the Reform Movement were: the primacy of the spoken language which should be taught with the assistance of phonetically transcribed texts; the replacement of isolated sentences by coherent texts; and the use of the foreign language in class. The Movement did not stimulate a revolution in language classrooms but it did place certain new ideas on the agenda and they were picked up again when
more progressive attitudes emerged later in the twentieth century. 5.2 The Direct Method The heart of the Direct Method is the 'no translation' principle which derived from the theory that acquiring a second language was the same process as acquiring the first. The teacher's task was to create a foreignlanguage environment in which 'direct' associations were forged between objects in the outside world and the words and expressions of the new language. Unlike the Reform Movement (see Sect. 5.1), the Direct Method did not use connected texts for question-andanswer work. It used simple conversations, e.g., What is this?—It is a coat. What colour is it?—// is brown, which gradually built into more complicated sequences. The influence of Pestalozzi's object lessons was evident here. The Direct Method has always been linked to the Berlitz schools and, indeed, their founder Maximilian Berlitz (1852-1921) built his empire, starting with a school in Providence, Rhode Island, USA in 1878, on two basic principles: first, his teachers were native speakers; second, they were expressly forbidden to use the student's language in the classroom. His courses were always practical and there were no grammar lessons. This attracted many students who needed to learn a foreign language but were afraid to try because of failure at school. Berlitz schools (there were nearly 50 by 1900) and their many imitators made a genuine contribution to the development of adult language education which was not always sufficiently appreciated.
6. English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics The cause of reform in language teaching was pursued in the 1910s at London University by Daniel Jones (1881-1967) and his colleagues, including Harold Palmer (1877-1949) who had run a language school in Belgium before being forced to flee in 1914. In 191516 Palmer gave a successful series of public lectures on language teaching methodology in which he attempted to marry the best of the Reform Movement (oral methods based on connected texts using applied phonetics) and the best of the Direct Method (practical use of the spoken foreign language in the classroom). The lectures became the basis for a major publication, The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages (1917, the same year as Jones's seminal English Pronouncing Dictionary) and it was later distilled into his best work, The Principles of Language Study (1921). In 1922 Palmer accepted a post in Japan and left to set up a research center, the Institute of Research in English Teaching (I RET), in Tokyo where he continued to develop his ideas for a linguistically sound oral method of language teaching (see Palmer, Harold Edward).
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Teaching Additional Languages Equally important was Palmer's work on vocabulary control, an interest he shared with Michael West, an inspector of schools in Bengal who had experimented with simplified readers based on limited vocabulary lists in the mid-1920s. By the late 1930s West and Palmer had returned to Britain and cooperated on a series of textbooks entitled the New Method. Their plans were interrupted by World War II but resumed after 1945, culminating in the publication of the inter war research in The General Service List of English Words (1953), edited by Michael West (Palmer had died in 1949). Palmer's former colleague in Tokyo, A. S. Hornby, the first editor of the journal English Language Teaching (1946 onwards), brought many of their ideas to fruition in a series of publications, beginning with the world-famous Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (1948) and continuing with a pedagogical grammar (Hornby 1954) which identified the basic patterns and structures for a teaching syllabus for a course (Oxford Progressive English for Adult Learners, 1954) which contextualized this material and presented it for classroom use (see Hornby, Albert Sidney). The work of Palmer, West, and Hornby established English Language Teaching (ELT) as an autonomous branch of language education, run by and, in the first instance, for native-speaking teachers. British work was consistent with contemporary developments in the USA though the two had different roots. The American tradition in descriptive linguistics which had grown up with Edward Sapir (18841939) and Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) came into direct contact with language teaching in a large-scale project initiated by the military in 1942-43. The Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), used the informant-based techniques of linguistic fieldwork summarized by Bloomfield in An Outline Guide for the Practical Study of Foreign Languages (1942) to provide the raw materials for teaching the combatant languages included in the program. Following the precepts of the then-dominant behaviorist psychology, dialog memorization, pattern drills and other habitformation exercises were the favored methods. Procedures of this kind became known as 'applied linguistics' and the discipline was recognized in 1948 in a new journal called Language Learning—A Quarterly Journal of Applied Linguistics. The ASTP itself was short-lived but a similar approach had already been pioneered by Charles C. Fries (1887-1967) at the English Language Institute (ELI), University of Michigan. As Fries himself explained (Fries 1945), the basic aim was to create short (3-month) courses of intensive foreign-language habit-formation exercises which would lay the groundwork for conversation, reading, composition, and so on. Palmer had suggested something similar in 1917—a limited period of intensive drilling leading to 624
automatic fluency. In both cases the idea proved to be an illusion. The hoped-for habitualized effortlessness never materialized so that 'pattern practice,' as Fries and his successor at ELI Robert Lado called it, became more extended and elaborate until it came to dominate the whole teaching course. At that point a new technology was adopted, the language laboratory which, it was claimed, would transfer 'all the drudgery' to the machine leaving the teacher free to do more interesting things and the method was relabeled the Audio-lingual Method. In the 1960s, Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar replaced both neo-Bloomfieldian structuralism and behaviorism and the post-war linguistics-driven bandwagon in language teaching methodology in the USA came to a shuddering halt. The fallout spread to Britain but there was a European alternative produced by CREDIF (Centre de Recherche et d'Etude pour la Diffusion du Francais) in France in the late 1950s: a course for adult learners of French as a foreign language called Voix et images de France (1959). Known as the Audiovisual Method, the approach used a simpler and cheaper technology than the language laboratory, namely a filmstrip with a synchronized tape recorder. It was adopted in 1963 as the starting point for a large project supported by the Nuffield Foundation to devise materials to teach French in British primary schools. The experiment was less successful than had been hoped but it reawakened an interest in foreign language teaching and provided the starting point for new ideas in the 1970s and 1980s. 7. Communicative Language Teaching
The Audiovisual Method was built on the idea of representing situations in which language was used and getting pupils to act such situations out and suggest new ones. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) took this one stage further and provided the basis for a widespread movement in language teaching loosely held together by the notion that language is a system of communication and language pedagogy must therefore promote communicatively effective behavior in learners by developing their 'communicative competence.' What could be called 'mainstream' CLT started with a Council of Europe project chaired by John Trim, the aim of which was to create a Europe-wide language teaching system with comparable courses and tests throughout the continent. A specialist team produced two basic ideas that proved widely influential: language teaching should start from an analysis of the learner's needs (Richterich 1972); course syllabuses should be based on semantic categories related to those needs, including the relevant concepts (notions) and uses of language (functions) (Wilkins 1976).
History of Second Language Teaching The project organized this material into a series of 'levels' with the so-called Threshold Level' as the crucial intermediate one at which the learner should be able to move to independent study. This Threshold Level was then specified for the languages of the Council, for example, Threshold Level English in 1975, Un niveau-seuil in 1976, and Kontaktschwelle in 1980. Needs analysis was also to the fore in the design of courses for specialist groups such as business personnel, scientist, and research students, giving rise to a new category of language teaching called Language for Specific Purposes (LSP). Courses in English (ESP) grew rapidly from the mid-1970s onwards with the work of H. G. Widdowson (e.g., Teaching Language as Communication, 1978) being particularly prominent. CLT is the latest in a line of approaches to language teaching that have tried to bring some of the features of 'natural' language acquisition into the classroom, partly in the search for improved results generally, partly in response to the needs of new audiences who wanted straightforward practical skills. Harnessing the supposed power of 'natural' language acquisition processes has been something of a 'holy grail.' The Reform Movement stressed the spoken language; the Direct Method introduced monolingual ('no translation') methods based on activities ('no grammar'); Palmer and Hornby in the UK and Fries and Lado in the USA put their faith in intensive habit formation, based on the structural patterns of the language; audiovisual methods emphasized language in situations which were elaborated by the CLT movement with their notions and functions. None of these suggestions taken in isolation brought a complete solution. However, they represent a consistent pattern of change over a long period and there can be little doubt that, in general terms, foreign language lessons today are better experiences for more people than they were in the nineteenth century. There is still a long way to go but some of the priorities seem clear. Effective language acquisition, like effective communication, involves meaningful individual choice. One possible implication is the extension of collaborative group work with voluntary participation (e.g., Brumfit 1984); another is to abandon the orthodox textbook which imposes uniformity and devise language-using tasks which encourage exploration (e.g., Prabhu 1987); yet another is to promote greater learner self-confidence (e.g., Stevick 1980). Another priority is to increase the amount of 'exposure' that individuals receive from their courses (e.g., Krashen 1981); this was the notion behind the 'immersion' programs in Canada where for a period children did all their schoolwork in the second language. Ideas such as these may become more prominent, but one lesson of the past is that judicial eclecticism is
likely to be more rewarding than dependence on one insight, however convincing it appears to be. See also: Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories.
Bibliography Axtell J L (ed.) 1968 The Educational Writings of John Locke. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Bantock G H 1980 Artifice and Nature 1350-1765. Studies in the History of Educational Theory, vol. 1. Allen & Unwin, London Bonner S F 1977 Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny. Methuen, London Brumfit C J 1984 Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching: The Roles of Fluency and Accuracy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Fries C C 1945 Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Garmonsway G N (ed.) 1947 Aelfric's Colloquy, 2nd edn. Methuen, London Hans N 1951 New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London Hornby A S 1954 A Guide to Patterns and Usage in English. Oxford University Press, London Howatt APR 1984 A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Huntsman J F 1983 Grammar. In: Wagner D L (ed.) The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN Krashen S D 1981 Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Pergamon Press, Oxford Lambley K 1920 The Teaching and Cultivation of the French Language in England during Tudor and Stuart Times. Manchester University Press, Manchester Marrou H I 1956 A History of Education in Antiquity. Lamb G (transl.). Sheed & Ward, London Monroe P 1902 Source Book of the History of Education for the Greek and Roman Period. Macmillan, New York Ollendorff H G 1857 A New Method of Learning to Read, Write and Speak a Language in Six Months, adapted to the French, 7th edn. Whittaker, London Orme N 1973 English Schools in the Middle Ages. Methuen, London Passy P 1906 Les Sons du Frangais. Firmin Didot Societe des Traites, Paris Prabhu N S 1987 Second Language Pedagogy. Oxford University Press, Oxford Richterich R 1972 A Model for the Definition of Language Needs of Adults Learning a Modern Language. Council of Europe, Strasbourg Robins R H 1951 Ancient and Mediaeval Grammatical Theory in Europe. Bell, London Sampson G 1985 Writing Systems. Hutchinson, London Stevick E W 1980 Teaching Languages: A Way and Ways. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Wagner D L 1983 The Seven Liberal Arts and Classical Scholarship. In: Wagner D L (ed.) The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN Wilkins D A 1976 Notional Syllabuses. Oxford University Press, Oxford
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Teaching Additional Languages
Immersion R. Lyster
Immersion is a form of bilingual education in which students, whose first language (LI) is usually spoken by the majority of the population, receive part of their subject-matter instruction through the medium of a second or foreign language (L2) and part through their LI (Genesee 1987). The term immersion was first used in this sense by Lambert and Tucker (1972) to describe their investigation of an experiment in bilingual education that was implemented in 1965 in St. Lambert, a suburb of Montreal in the Canadian province of Quebec. English-speaking parents in this community were concerned that the traditional L2 teaching methods that prevailed at the time would not enable their children to develop sufficient levels of proficiency in French to compete for jobs in a province where French was soon to be adopted as the sole official language. Parents had reservations about enrolling their children in francophone schools and the latter were reluctant to admit large numbers of English-speaking children. Consequently, parents developed instead what came to be known as an early total immersion program. This innovation was based on the rationale that young children are naturally predisposed to learn language through early exposure to the language in message-oriented contexts. Lambert and Tucker's (1972) longitudinal investigation of this initiative examined two groups of English-speaking children who were taught exclusively through the medium of French in kindergarten and grade 1 and then mainly in French (except for two half-hour daily periods of English language arts) in grades 2-4. The widely disseminated results were extremely positive with respect to the children's language development in both LI and L2 as well as their academic achievement and affective development. Consequently, other immersion programs spread quickly in the Montreal area, then across the rest of Canada, and were modified in some contexts to include alternative entry points and variable proportions of instruction in LI and L2. Immersion programs have since been developed to teach various languages in a wide range of contexts around the world. 1. Core Features of Immersion Educational instruction that entails a home-school language switch is not new. The teaching of subject matter through the medium of an L2 can be traced back as early as 3000 BC to Sumer where speakers of Akkadian studied Sumerian and its cuneiform method of writing in order to become scribes; they did so in part by studying other subjects such as theology,
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botany, zoology, mathematics, and geography through the medium of Sumerian (Germain 1993). Comparable practices of adopting a written variety as the medium of instruction to the exclusion of the home vernacular have tended to be the rule rather than the exception in the history of education: for example, Latin in Western Europe until a few hundred years ago and classical Arabic in Muslim countries today. Likewise, Western imperial powers imposed their languages on colonies so that a language such as English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, or Spanish became the medium of instruction in schools not only for the colonizers but also for certain social classes of the colonized. Many children today continue to experience a home-school language switch simply because their home language, which may or may not have its own standard written form, lacks majority status and/or prestige in the community. What distinguishes the foregoing contexts from immersion education is their lack of instructional support for the students' LI. Such contexts, where individual minority language students find themselves without any LI support and most likely with a majority of native speakers of the target language, tend to be regarded as submersion classrooms. Conversely, in immersion classrooms, students typically share as their LI a majority language that is used socially (outside as well as inside the school), administratively (to communicate with parents and even with students), and academically (as a medium of instruction, increasingly so as students advance through higher grade levels). Swain and Johnson (1997) enumerated a total of eight such features that help to define immersion education: (a) The L2 is used as a medium of instruction in subject-matter classes. (b) The immersion curriculum (consisting of subjectmatter classes such as mathematics, science, and geography) parallels the local LI curriculum. (c) Overt support exists for the LI, first and foremost in the form of positive attitudes towards it and also, at some stage, in the form of language arts instruction and often as a medium of instruction in subject-matter classes. (d) The program aims for additive bilingualism so that, by the end, the L2 proficiency of immersion students is high, although not usually native-like, and their LI proficiency is comparable to that of nonimmersion students who have followed the same curriculum in their LI. (e) Exposure to the L2 is largely confined to the class-
Immersion (f) Students enter with similar (and limited) L2 proficiency. (g) The teachers are bilingual. (h) The classroom culture is that of the local LI community. Each of these defining features is viewed by the authors as a continuum; a program in which each feature is implemented to its fullest would thus represent a prototypical immersion program. The term immersion has also been used since the first half of the twentieth century to refer to highly intensive language classes involving the study of an L2 as a subject, usually for several hours a day and several weeks at a time (Ouellet 1990); this use of the term immersion can still be found in the promotional campaigns of some private language schools. The term has been used as well to refer to situations whereby language learners immerse themselves in the target language and culture, usually temporarily and often as they work or study, by going to live in the target community. In the field of educational linguistics, however, the more recent denotation of the term immersion, as used by Lambert and Tucker, has been retained, but not without some criticism that it may not be the most accurate term to identify a homeschool language switch in L2 classrooms that tend to be remote from the target culture and to exclude native speakers of the target language (e.g., Bibeau 1982). 2. Program Types Other features of immersion are variable and have led to a wide range of program types. Immersion programs are typically classified according to (a) the proportion of L2 relative to LI in the curriculum and (b) the grade level at which the program begins. In total immersion, 100 percent of the curriculum is taught through the medium of the L2; the immersion is likely to be total, however, for only 2 or 3 years because some instruction in LI is inevitably introduced. In partial immersion, a minimum of 50 percent of the curriculum is taught in the L2. Genesee (1987) specified that programs providing less than 50 percent instruction through the L2 should generally not be regarded as immersion; however, examples of programs not meeting the 50 percent requirement yet referred to as immersion can be found (Johnson and Swain 1997). With respect to entry points, typical immersion programs tend to be classified according to three types. Early immersion begins at kindergarten or grade 1 (age 5 or 6) and normally involves, in the case of total immersion, the teaching of literacy skills first in the L2, followed by the introduction of instruction in LI literacy in grades 2 or 3; in the case of early partial immersion, literacy training tends to occur simultaneously in both languages from grade 1 on. Middle immersion begins at grade 4 or 5 (age 9 or 10) and late
immersion begins at grade 6, 7, or 8 (age 11, 12, or 13). Middle and late immersion programs thus include students already schooled in LI literacy and usually exposed to some instruction in the L2 as a regular subject. By far, the most popular program in Canadian as well as some other contexts (e.g., Finland, Spain, United States; see Sect. 3) is the early total immersion option. Immersion programs tend to be housed in dualtrack schools, that is, schools that offer both an immersion and a regular nonimmersion program. Although evaluation studies have recorded higher L2 proficiency levels for students enrolled in immersion centers (i.e., schools that offer only the immersion program; see Lapkin et al. 1981), dual-track schools continue to be the norm. Other alternative program types include double immersion, two-way immersion, and postsecondary immersion. Double immersion programs use two non-native languages for curricular instruction, for example, French and Hebrew for English-speaking children in Montreal (Genesee 1987). Two-way immersion programs (also known as bilingual immersion or two-way bilingual programs) integrate an equal number of language-minority and language-majority children and provide curricular instruction in both the minority and majority languages, for example, Spanish and English are used as immersion languages in classes that integrate Englishspeaking and Spanish-speaking children in the United States (Rhodes et al. 1997). Postsecondary immersion programs provide 'sheltered' classes for L2 learners studying a university subject such as psychology through the L2 (Burger et al. 1997). Given all possible combinations with respect to entry point, proportion of L2 relative to LI, number of immersion languages, and type of school setting, in addition to the selection of subjects to be taught through the immersion language(s), immersion programs may vary considerably in order to meet the needs and wishes of local communities. For example, in the Montreal area alone, where the first early total immersion program began in 1965, as many as 43 programmatic variations have since been identified (Rebuffot 1998). 3. Range of Contexts A wide range of international contexts have adapted immersion to meet local educational needs (Johnson and Swain 1997; Rebuffot 1993). Swain and Johnson (1997) identified four general contexts in which immersion programs have developed: (a) Immersion in a foreign language, for example: English immersion in Hungary; immersion in French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and Indonesian in Australia; immersion in Japanese, French, and German in the United States. (b) Immersion for majority-language students in a
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Teaching Additional Languages minority language, for example: French immersion in Canada; Swedish immersion in Finland; Spanish immersion in the United States. (c) Immersion for language support and language revival, for example: Catalan immersion and Basque immersion in Spain; Welsh immersion in Wales; Ukrainian immersion in Canada; immersion in indigenous languages such as Mohawk and Cree in Canada, Maori in New Zealand, and Hawaiian in the American state of Hawaii. (d) Immersion in a language of power, for example: English immersion in Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa. Although some categories inevitably overlap, they help to illustrate the extent to which immersion has become associated with an increasingly wide range of functions in various contexts—some of which resemble the sociopolitical context of the St. Lambert experiment and others that differ considerably. Interestingly, evaluation studies of immersion programs from a wide range of contexts tend to support the results of the Canadian studies. Because the vast majority of evaluation studies have been conducted in Canada, it is primarily to these that subsequent sections refer. 4. Academic and Linguistic Outcomes Evaluation studies of immersion programs, overall, have yielded fairly consistent and positive results with respect to academic and linguistic outcomes (Genesee 1987; Rebuffot 1993; Swain and Lapkin 1982). The academic achievement of immersion students in subjects they study through the L2 is similar to that of nonimmersion students studying the same subjects in LI; however, late immersion students, with limited previous L2 instruction, may experience a temporary lag. Immersion students' LI development is found to be equivalent or superior to that of nonimmersion students, although early immersion students unsurprisingly experience a temporary lag in LI literacy skills until up to a year after language arts instruction in LI has been introduced. With respect to L2 proficiency, research has clearly demonstrated that immersion students, regardless of program type, develop much higher levels of proficiency than do nonimmersion students studying the L2 as a regular subject (i.e., for one period per school day). Immersion students develop (a) almost nativelike comprehension skills as measured by listening and reading tests; and (b) high levels of fluency and confidence in using the L2, although their production skills are considered non-nativelike in terms of grammatical accuracy, lexical variety, and sociolinguistic appropriateness (Harley et al. 1990). Studies of immersion students with learner characteristics that are disadvantageous with respect to academic and linguistic abilities (Genesee 1992) found
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that such students (a) demonstrate the same levels of LI development and academic achievement as similarly disadvantaged students in nonimmersion programs and (b) achieve higher levels of L2 proficiency than nonimmersion students studying the L2 as a regular subject. In early (but not late) immersion, belowaverage students achieve the same levels of L2 proficiency in speaking and listening comprehension as average and above-average students. 'Program comparisons indicate that early total immersion programs yield better results than early partial immersion programs. Overall, early immersion students tend to develop higher levels of L2 proficiency in comparison to middle or late immersion students, although the differences are not as great as one might expect. Some advantages have been found for early immersion students on measures of fluency involving message-oriented tasks and on-line language use (e.g., oral interviews). Students from middle and late immersion programs may catch up with early immersion students in writing tasks and other measures requiring knowledge of formal language features. Some studies have shown that differences between early and late immersion students disappear altogether at the university level, although these findings need to be interpreted with caution, because late immersion programs attract a self-selected, academically successful group that may easily catch up with early immersion students during secondary school (Wesche 1993). For this reason, early immersion has been considered to be a more accessible option for a wider range of students. 5. Social-psychological Outcomes Social-psychological studies comparing immersion and nonimmersion students are summarized by Genesee (1987). The studies confirm that immersion programs develop additive as opposed to subtractive bilingualism in that immersion students' perceptions of their ethnic (LI) identity are as positive as those of nonimmersion students. The studies also reveal that, in comparison with nonimmersion students, immersion students perceive less social distance between themselves and native speakers of the target language. With regard to attitudes towards the target language and its native speakers, immersion students develop more positive attitudes than do nonimmersion students, although this trend is found more consistently with younger than with older students. Although many French immersion students in the Canadian context remain geographically remote from the target community, this is not the case in Montreal where studies have been able to compare immersion and nonimmersion students with respect to L2 use outside the classroom. In comparison to nonimmersion students, immersion students reported that they were (a) more comfortable and confident when using the L2 with native speakers, (b) more likely to
Immersion respond in the L2 when addressed in the L2, and (c) less likely to avoid situations in which the L2 would be spoken. However, immersion students were not more likely than nonimmersion students to actively seek opportunities for L2 exposure by watching television, listening to the radio, or reading books in the L2. Groups of immersion and nonimmersion students in Montreal both indicated that they perceived a noticeable lack of motivational support from the target community for their learning of French L2. Genesee found that the more students believed that native speakers wanted them to learn the L2, the greater was their L2 proficiency and the more frequent was their use of the L2 in a variety of social situations. This finding illustrates how intergroup factors outside the school setting can influence the development of L2 proficiency in complex ways. Many studies propose that more contact with native speakers would enhance the L2 proficiency of immersion students. More opportunities for contact between immersion students and native speakers, however, do not necessarily ensure more positive attitudes. Theriault (1993) found that immersion students from the primarily Englishspeaking province of British Columbia had more positive attitudes towards learning French L2 and towards its native speakers than did immersion students from the bilingual setting of Montreal in Quebec. 6. Immersion Classrooms With respect to actual classroom processes, initial conceptualizations of instruction in immersion emphasized the parallels between LI and L2 acquisition and the notion that young students would learn the L2 incidentally as they learned other school subjects taught through the L2. Teaching content to learners not yet proficient in the language of instruction, however, clearly requires strategies unlike those used in LI context. More in line, therefore, with theories of second langauge acquisition (SLA) and communicative language teaching (e.g., Krashen 1982, 1985), experienced immersion teachers attest to their reliance on negotiation of meaning techniques to transform subject matter into comprehensible input for L2 learners. These techniques are described by Met (1994). The goal of teachers at the beginning of any type of immersion program is to enable students to comprehend content presented through the L2. To do so, teachers use extensive body language, realia, visuals, manipulatives, and other contextual clues. Immersion teachers ensure predictability and repetition in daily instructional routines and draw extensively on their students' background knowledge to aid comprehension. They build redundancy into their lessons by using repetition, paraphrase, exemplification, definition, and synonymy to give students many chances to understand the language. In the beginning grades,
immersion teachers may modify their speech by speaking more slowly and emphasizing key words or phrases; they may use simpler vocabulary and less complex grammatical structures. Immersion teachers need also to help students get their meaning across and do so by encouraging them initially to use both verbal and nonverbal means of communicating. Teachers can make rich interpretations of immersion students' attempts to communicate by responding with various reformulations and expansions that also serve as confirmations and confirmation checks. As students expand their productive repertoire, teachers ask them to clarify or to further develop their statements, thereby increasing the students' opportunities to use the L2 and to refine their productive skills. Some observational studies of French immersion classrooms, however, revealed that opportunities for sustained talk by immersion students were infrequent and that teachers' provision of corrective feedback was also infrequent as well as confusing (Allen et al. 1990). Other observational studies showed that, when teachers did provide corrective feedback, they tended to use recasts, that is, implicit reformulations of students' nontarget output (Lyster and Ranta 1997). The teachers' use of implicit corrective feedback can be seen as well tuned to the focus on meaning in immersion classrooms. However, precisely because of the focus on meaning, the implicitness of recasts makes them difficult for students to notice in immersion classroom discourse (Lyster 1998a). That is, recasts fulfill discourse functions other than corrective ones in that they provide or seek confirmation or additional information related to the learner's message. These functions are identical to those motivating the teachers' even more frequent repetition of well-formed learner utterances. Moreover, immersion teachers use many positive feedback moves (e.g., 'Yes, that's right!') to respond to the content of learners' messages, irrespective of well-formedness. Consequently, there is much linguistic ambiguity in immersion classrooms from the perspective of young L2 learners whose language production, whether well- or ill-formed, is equally likely to be followed by teacher moves that appear to confirm or approve the content of the message. Such ambiguity may be an inevitable characteristic of message-oriented immersion classrooms where the L2 is learned primarily through subject matter. However, such ambiguity may restrict the continued development of target language accuracy by making it difficult for learners to test their hypotheses about the L2 with some degree of reliability. A tendency for L2 development to level off has indeed been observed, particularly once immersion students have acquired a language repertoire that sufficiently meets their communicative needs in the classroom. For this reason, researchers have called into question the features of immersion pedagogy that over-emphasize comprehensibility and the expression
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Teaching Additional Languages of meaning at the expense of form. Swain (1985) proposed that comprehensible input alone is insufficient for successful L2 learning because comprehension allows learners to process language semantically but not necessarily syntactically. She argued in favor of frequent opportunities for student production along with useful and consistent feedback from teachers and peers that would push learners to be more accurate in their output. Swain (1988) argued further that subjectmatter instruction generates functionally restricted input and, thus, does not on its own provide adequate exposure to the L2. For example, analysis of audio recordings revealed only rare occurrences of conditional and imperfect verb forms in classroom input; it is indeed well attested that students fail to master or even use these forms after several years in French immersion. Consequently, immersion teachers need to draw students' attention to particular form-function relationships in contexts that allow students to hear and to produce language in its full functional range. Immersion teachers can do so by drawing on proactive and reactive approaches to L2 instruction (Rebuffot and Lyster 1996). 6.1 Proactive Approach A proactive approach involves planned L2 instruction that is designed to draw attention to language in meaningful contexts. One way that immersion teachers do this is by planning for the systematic integration of language and content instruction (Met 1994). For example, immersion teachers need to identify content-obligatory language (i.e., language that students need to know in order to learn the content; see Snow et al. 1989), which may then become the primary focus in langauge arts lessons. This contentbased approach to L2 instruction provides substantial exposure to contextualized language use and promotes primarily lexically-oriented learning; the learning of less salient morphosyntactic features of the L2, however, is not necessarily ensured (Harley 1994). Consequently, immersion teachers need also to use a proactive approach to design communicatively-based activities in contrived yet meaningful contexts that enable students to notice and use a wide range of L2 features that may otherwise not be used or even noticed (Harley and Swain 1984). Harley (1993) proposed that L2 features that may benefit from such attention are those that (a) differ in nonobvious or unexpected ways from the LI; (b) are irregular, infrequent, or otherwise lacking in perceptual salience in the L2 input; (c) do not carry a heavy communicative load. A series of experimental studies undertaken in French immersion classrooms demonstrated that a proactive instructional approach can benefit students' interlanguage development, in varying degrees, in areas known to be difficult for classroom learners of French L2: namely, aspect (Harley 1989), the con-
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ditional mode (Day and Shapson 1991), sociostylistic variation (Lyster 1994b), verbs of motion (Wright 1996), and grammatical gender (Harley 1998). Instructional treatments in these studies promoted the perception or use of specific target features in a variety of genres (e.g., legends, scientific reports, newspaper articles, informal letters, invitations, childhood albums, novels, role-plays, student-made dictionaries) and through cooperative learning activities as well as language games and exercises that also aimed to encourage the perception or use of the target features. Still other studies have demonstrated that immersion teachers can design collaborative tasks, again from a language perspective, which students complete in dyads in ways that enable them to work together using the L2, notice areas of language difficulty, and collaboratively find solutions (Kowal and Swain 1994, 1997; Swain and Lapkin 1998). A proactive approach does not aim to replicate decontextualized grammar lessons; indeed, these have been observed in immersion classrooms and their effectiveness questioned (Swain 1996). It appears that some immersion teachers have a tendency to separate language teaching from content teaching, considering attention to language form in the history or mathematics class to be inappropriate and thus delaying attention to form until the language arts class. Yet sudden injections of decontextualized grammar teaching, emphasizing the learning and categorizing of forms rather than relating these forms to their communicative functions, appear to have little effect in immersion classrooms where the learners' exposure to the L2 has been primarily message-oriented. 6.2 Reactive Approach Immersion teachers also draw attention to language as they interact with students during the course of instruction, whether it be in language arts or subjectmatter classes. This reactive approach to L2 instruction is relatively unplanned insofar as it occurs in response to students' language production during teacher-student interaction. SLA theorists argue that L2 learners rely on semantically contingent speech as a primary source of positive and negative L2 data; for this reason, some argue that interaction should be the driving force behind L2 pedagogy (e.g., Long 1996). A reactive approach to L2 instruction includes the provision of corrective feedback in response to students' nontarget output. Based on observation and analysis of teacher-student interaction in several immersion classrooms, Lyster and Ranta (1977) classified corrective feedback that enables students to repair their own nontarget output or that of their peers as the negotiation of form. This includes at least four interactional moves (elicitation, metalinguistic clues, clarification requests, and repetition of error) that immersion teachers use during communicative interaction to draw attention to students' nontarget
Immersion use of the L2 by returning the floor to students with cues to reanalyze their nontarget utterance. Lyster (1998a) argued that the negotiation of form may serve to improve the lexical and grammatical accuracy of students in immersion classrooms where interactional exchanges fulfill a variety of communicative functions that do not otherwise provide opportunities for students to notice their nontarget use of the L2. Corrective feedback that provides learners with alternative rephrasings of their nontarget output, such as recasts, tends to be more frequent in immersion classrooms but delegates a rather passive role to students and may serve ambiguously as confirming and approving moves. A reactive approach is used not only to draw students' attention to their nontarget output, however, but also to provide or elicit information about other relevant form-function relationships in the L2 during teacher-student interaction related to content. Observational studies by Lapkin and Swain (1996), Laplante (1993), and Lyster (1994a, 1998b) illustrated how four immersion teachers in grades 1, 4, and 8 drew their student's attention to language in this way by means of various questioning and feedback techniques during science or language arts lessons. These studies provide insight into the double role of immersion teachers who teach both language and content. They also reveal solutions to a conundrum well known to immersion teachers; namely, how to emphasize content and, at the same time, provide clear information about language.
appropriate resources and effective strategies that will promote greater accuracy while maintaining a central focus on communication. The ways in which classroom processes interact with social-psychological factors, such as immersion students' awareness of the target community as well as the latter's perception of immersion, also merit further investigation. See also: Bilingual Education.
Bibliography Allen P, Swain M, Harley B, Cummins J 1990 Aspects of classroom treatment: Toward a more comprehensive view of second language education. In: Harley B, Allen P, Cummins J, Swain M (eds.) The Development of Second Language Proficiency. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 57-81 Burger S, Wesche M, Migneron M 1997 'Late, late immersion': Discipline-based second language teaching at the University of Ottawa. In: Johnson K, Swain M (eds.) Immersion Education: International Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 65-84 Bibeau G 1982 L 'education bilingue en Amerique du Nord. Guerin, Montreal, PQ Day E, Shapson S 1991 Integrating formal and functional approaches to language teaching in French immersion: An experimental study. Language Learning 41: 25-58 Genesee F 1987 Learning through Two Languages: Newbury House, Rowley, MA Genesee F 1991 Second language learning in school settings: Lessons from immersion. In: Reynolds A (ed.) Bilingualism, Multiculturalism, and Second Language Learning. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 183-202 Genesee F 1992 Second/foreign language immersion and atrisk English-speaking children. Foreign Language Annals 7. Conclusion 25: 199-213 Genesee (1991) proposed that there are at least three Genesee F 1998 A case study of multilingual education in Canada. In: Cenoz J, Genesee F (eds.) Beyond Bilingualism: lessons from immersion that are relevant to L2 Multilingualism and Multilingual Education. Multilingual instruction in other school settings: namely, that an Matters, Clevedon, UK, pp. 243-58 effective L2 program (a) integrates content and lan- Germain C 1993 Evolution de I'enseignement des langues: guage instruction, (b) encourages extensive inter5000 ans d'histoire. CLE International, Paris action, and (c) incorporates explicit and systematic Harley B 1989 Functional grammar in French immersion: A classroom experiment. Applied Linguistics 10: 331-59 planning for language development. Research continues to explore the interplay among these three 'les- Harley B 1993 Instructional strategies and SLA in early French immersion. SSLA 15: 245-59 sons,' asking questions about how best to ensure Harley B 1994 Appealing to consciousness in the L2 classcontinued L2 development in classrooms where the room. AIL A Review 11: 57-68 L2 is learned primarily through subject-matter Harley B 1998 The role of form-focused tasks in promoting instruction and communicative interaction. child L2 acquisition. In: Doughty C, Williams J (eds.) Focus on form in classroom second langauge acquisition. Immersion provides a rich context for research into Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 156-74 innovative ways of teaching and learning an L2 and has thus generated hundreds of published research Harley B, Cummins J, Swain M, Allen P 1990 The nature of language proficiency. In: Harley B, Allen P, Cummins studies. Many studies have served specifically as proJ, Swain M (eds.) The Development of Second Language gram evaluations whereas others have been more proProficiency. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. cess-oriented investigations that contribute to the field 7-25 of educational linguistics in ways that are relevant Harley B, Swain M 1984 The interlanguage of immersion students and its implications for second language teaching. to both theory and practice. Although confined to a In: Davies A, Criper C, Howatt A (eds.) Interlanguage. classroom, immersion replicates a naturalistic setting Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, pp. 291-311 more than most other types of L2 classrooms insofar Johnson K, Swain M (eds.) 1997 Immersion Education: Interas the L2 is used purposefully for the study of other national Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Camsubjects. Precisely because of this message-focused bridge orientation, immersion pedagogy is in search of Kowal M, Swain M 1994 Using collaborative language pro-
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Teaching Additional Languages duction tasks to promote students' language awareness. Language Awareness 3: 73-93 Kowal M, Swain M 1997 From semantic to syntactic processing: How can we promote metalinguistic awareness in the French immersion classroom? In: Johnson K, Swain M (eds.) Immersion Education: International Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 284-309 Krashen S 1982 Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Pergamon, New York Krashen S 1985 The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. Longman, London Lambert W, Tucker R 1972 The Bilingual Education of Children: The St. Lambert Experiment. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Lapkin S, Andrew C, Harley B, Swain M, Kamin J 1981 The immersion centre and the dual-track school: A study of the relationship between school environment and achievement in a French immersion program. Canadian Journal of Education 6: 68-90 Lapkin S, Swain M 1996 Vocabulary teaching in a grade 8 French immersion classroom: A descriptive study. CMLR 53: 242-56 Laplante B 1993 Strategies pedagogiques et enseignement des sciences en immersion fran9aise: Le cas d'une enseignante. CMLR 49: 567-88 Long M 1996 The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In: Ritchie W, Bhatia T (eds.) Handbook of Language Acquisition, Vol. 2: Second Language Acquisition. Academic Press, New York, pp. 413-68 Lyster R 1994a La negotiation de la forme: Strategic analytique en classe d'immersion. CMLR 50: 446-65 Lyster R 1994b The effect of functional-analytical teaching on aspects of French immersion students' sociolinguistic competence. Applied Linguistics 15: 263-87 Lyster R 1998a Recasts, repetition, and ambiguity in L2 classroom discourse. SSLA 20: 55-85 Lyster R 1998b Immersion pedagogy and implications for language teaching. In: Cenoz J, Genesee F (eds.) Beyond Bilingualism: Multilingualism and Multilingual Education. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK, pp. 64-95 Lyster R, Ranta L 1977 Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. SSLA 19: 37-66 Met M 1994 Teaching content through a second language. In: Genesee F (ed.) Educating Second Language Children. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. "159-82 Ouellet M 1990 Synthese historique de I'immersion franqaise au Canada suivie d'une bibliographic selective et analytique. Centre international de recherche sur le bilinguisme. Quebec City, PQ Rebuffot J 1993 Le point sur I'immersion au Canada. Centre Educatif et Culturel, Montreal, PQ
Rebuffot J 1998 Aspects recents de Pimmersion en francais au Canada: Vers le renouvellement de la pedagogic immersive. In: Arnau J, Artigal J (eds.) Immersion Programmes: A European Perspective. Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona, pp. 685-92 Rebuffot J, Lyster R 1996 L'immersion au Canada: contextes, effets et pedagogic. In: Erfurt J (ed.) De la polyphonic a la symphonic. Méthodes, theories et faits de la recherche pluridisciplinaire sur le français au Canada. Leipziger Universitätsverlag GmbH, Leipzig, pp. 277-94 Rhodes N, Christian D, Barfield S 1997 Innovations in immersion: The Key School two-way model. In: Johnson K, Swain M (eds.) Immersion Education: International Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 265-83 Snow M, Met M, Genesee F 1989 A conceptual framework for the integration of language and content in second/foreign language instruction. TESOL Quarterly 23: 20117 Swain M 1985 Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In: Gass S, Madden C (eds.) Input in Second Language Acquisition. Newbury House, Rowley, MA, pp. 235-53 Swain M 1988 Manipulating and complementing content teaching to maximize second language learning. TESL Canada Journal 6: 68-83 Swain M 1996 Integrating language and content in immersion classrooms: Research perspectives. CMLR 52: 52948 Swain M, Johnson K 1997 Immersion education: A category within bilingual education. In: Johnson K, Swain M (eds.) Immersion Education: International Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1-16 Swain M, Lapkin S 1982 Evaluating Bilingual Education: A Canadian Case Study. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Swain M, Lapkin S 1998 Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French immersion students working together. MLJ 82: 320-37 Theriault C 1993 L'influence du milieu linguistique sur les attitudes d'Anglophones en immersion franpaise. CONTACT 12: 3-11 Wesche M 1993 French immersion graduates at university and beyond: What difference has it made? In: Alatis J (ed.) Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1992: Language, Communication and Social Meaning. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, pp.208-40 Wright R 1996 A study of the acquisition of verbs of motion by grade 4/5 early French immersion students. CMLR 53: 257-80
Intensity K. Reeder
Intensity of L2 instruction was studied initially from the point of view of sheer time spent studying the target language, and Carroll (1975) concluded that
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the best predictor of L2 learning was amount of instructional time provided. However, studies of different models of immersion education in French
Language for Special Purposes: Pedagogy for non-Francophone Canadians examine differential accumulated hours of instruction as well as age of onset of L2 experience, and note that sheer amount is not in a simple linear relationship with proficiency outcomes (Swain 1981; Cummins 1983). Similarly, studies of age and rate of L2 acquisition show that these factors interact in complex ways (Krashen et al. 1979). Partly because instructional time is a notoriously difficult construct to define from a psycholinguistic viewpoint, more finely differentiated approaches to understanding the relationship of intensity to L2 outcomes have begun to emerge. In addition to amount of time allocated, researchers have begun to investigate the organization of that time independent of its quantity in response to Stern's conceptualization of the problem (1985). Studies of 'compact formats' of French as an L2 instruction featuring shorter courses with higher time intensity show some benefits in literate performance as well as more positive self-assessments and attitudes regarding productive skills over standard core French models emphasizing longer courses with lower time intensity when number of instructional hours are held constant (Lapkin et al. 1998). A third theme underlying recent work in intensity of L2 education has been the use of a broader spectrum of L2 outcomes. Most recent work has shown that a multivariate approach to L2 proficiency is essential in order to illuminate the relationship of time to L2 learning. Turnbull et al. (1998), in an extensive survey of graduates from different models of immersion education programs, show that an early start on L2 experience in immersion education settings yields benefits in spoken language outcomes, but not necessarily in literate outcomes. Future studies will continue to differentiate the spectrum of L2 competence to encompass pragmatic and discourse outcomes increasingly. Not only will L2 outcomes be more precisely differentiated in future work on the relationship between time allocation and L2 learning, but also the actual quality of delivery of those hours will probably be
shown to interact critically with the sheer quantity of L2 experience. Teachers in immersion education formats, for instance, spend less time proportionately teaching the target language and relatively more time teaching in the target language, using curricular content as prime vehicle for promotion of L2 learning (Swain and Lapkin 1982). Clearly what educators do with a given allocation of time may turn out to be as important as how many hours they spend promoting L2 learning overall. Understanding interactions amongst time (quantity, organization) and task (curricular content selection, participant interactions) variables may well set the research agenda for multivariate studies of carefully differentiated L2 outcomes. Such studies will enable policymakers to make increasingly well informed decisions about selecting from competing models of second language teaching and learning which differ in time and intensity. Bibliography Carroll J 1975 The Teaching of French as a Foreign Language in Eight Countries. Wiley, New York Cummins J 1983 Language proficiency, biliteracy and French immersion. Canadian Journal of Education 8(2): 117-38 Krashen S, Long M, Scarcella R 1979 Age, rate and eventual attainment in second language acquisition. TESOL Quarterly 13: 573-82 Lapkin S, Hart D, Harley B 1998 Case study of compact core French models: Attitudes and achievement. In: Lapkin S (ed.) French Second Language Education in Canada: Empirical Studies. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp.3-30 Stern H 1985 The time factor and compact course development. TESL Canada Journal 3(1): 13-27 Swain M 1981 Time and timing in bilingual education. Language Learning 31(1): 1-13 Swain M, Lapkin S 1982 Evaluating Bilingual Education: A Canadian Case Study. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Turnbull M, Lapkin S, Hart D, Swain M 1998 Time on task and immersion graduates' French proficiency. In: Lapkin S (ed.) French Second Language Education in Canada: Empirical Studies. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp. 31-55
Language for Special Purposes: Pedagogy A. Johns
The principal tenet of specific purposes language teaching (LSP) is that of 'specificity': each pedagogical situation and each group of learners is considered to be new and different. Ideally, a unique curriculum and
collection of classroom activities is designed for each group of students and teachers in every new context. No single approach, no new or old orthodoxy, is appropriate for all pedagogical situations. Thus, cen-
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Teaching Additional Languages different curriculum from beginning students whose understanding of domain-specific language is limited. Students who can read and write proficiently in their first languages will be enrolled in courses quite unlike those for students who are semi-illiterate. Students and professionals enter an LSP program with theories of how language is learned, for example, including memorization, reading aloud, or drilling. These theories must also be considered in the development of teaching plans. Related to the learners' theories of language learning are their perceptions of the student/teacher role relationship. Some learners feel that the teacher is 'the boss' and should therefore be in sole control when it conies to determining what should be taught and how it should be presented. Other learners are comfortable with more consultative classroom organization, such as that found in collaborative learning, Whole Language Teaching and many communicative teaching environments. There is a long history in LSP of examining students' 1. Specific Features of Pedagogical Contexts Several aspects of the 'specificity' focus required in LSP needs and expectations; these are central conare critical to curriculum development and pedagogy. siderations in LSP curriculum development. They can First is the role of the target language in the situation be divided into three categories: cultural-educational, in which it will be taught, that is, the sociolinguistic personal and individual, and academic/occupational. context. The broadest interpretation of this principle Some LSP practitioners argue that the personal and is that an LSP course in a foreign language situation individual factors should be the primary focus of LSP will have to be taught differently from one in a second teaching, that one must start with students' present language situation. English for Academic Purposes needs and interests, taking into account their anxieties (EAP) in China, for example, will have considerably and differences in learning styles, and emphasizing the different objectives and classroom activities than EAP pedagogical appropriateness of activities for specified in the USA, UK or another English-speaking country. learners. Others argue that with professionals and LSPS also differ in terms of client populations and advanced academic students, in particular, academic target-language features. Immigrant workers in and occupational goals, often long-term, should be second language situations often study the languages the primary considerations. Additional concerns entail the preparation, theories of the workplace (also called 'vocational languages'). In a foreign-language context, LSPS tend to be con- and proficiencies of teachers within a given pedacentrated in academic or international areas, the latter gogical context. Teachers who have been educated in of which include professional languages for nego- linguistics or language teaching pedagogy are often tiation and trade and the languages of the air and sea. able to cope with a syllabus that is much more Related considerations include the history and poli- demanding than teachers who have been prepared in tics of a target language in a pedagogical context. In literature or another field—or who have had little North Africa, for example, the history of the com- preparation. Many teachers, especially in a foreignpetition between French and English and the political language context, follow a single theory of language implications for studying each language influence LSP teaching such as Grammar-Translation or 'intensive situations in public secondary schools and univer- reading.' Others have heard about certain methsities. Since most languages of wider communication odologies and practices such as 'communicative have been the tongues of colonial powers or of privi- language teaching,' but do not understand the prinleged classes, the LSP curriculum is often considered ciples and theories on which these approaches are to be political and is often scrutinized for cultural and based. Plans for LSP teaching curricula must consider teachers' backgrounds and theories; otherwise, the political content by government officials. The nature of the students within a specified context teachers may attempt to defeat the purposes of the is also a prime consideration. Their proficiencies and curriculum designers. In addition, there are many LSP teachers in the world their experiences with the target language as well as their first language experiences and backgrounds are whose proficiency in the target language is quite central to educational planning. For instance, pro- limited. Again, the choice of syllabus and language fessionals in business, engineering and the sciences activities will have to be adapted for the language already conversant with the languages of their pro- skills of the teachers, as well as for the students in the fessions in LI should experience a considerably program. tral to LSP pedagogy must be the determination of the unique characteristics of each teaching/learning situation, and the exploitation of these characteristics for development of syllabuses, of classroom activities, and of evaluation and assessment. Good LSP curricula and teaching require skills, research techniques and sensitivities that are not necessarily characteristic of 'general' language classrooms; for in LSP, the authentic world must be brought to the students, and they must learn to interact with the language as it is spoken and written in target situations. Thus, LSP teachers and curriculum designers are much more accountable than 'general' language teachers. They must be more flexible and willing to negotiate with both experts in the target situation and with the students, who are often quite familiar with the target language situation.
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Language for Special Purposes: Pedagogy Like students, teachers have visions of student/ teacher role relationships. They, too, can believe that teachers are obligated to take the sole responsibility for classroom decision-making and learning. For these reasons, teachers must be an integral part of LSP curriculum development and training. If they do not accept the aims of a more learner-centered LSP program, for example, there may be conflicts between curriculum design intentions and classroom outcomes. Another issue regarding teacher preparation and attitudes is unique to LSP: because all LSP teaching targets specific purposes settings and languages, many teachers are uncomfortable with their teaching assignments. In English for Specific Purposes (ESP), for example, the majority of the curricula deal with science and technology; however, most ESP (and LSP) teachers have been educated in the humanities. Some experts believe that the teachers' fears can be overcome when they realize that their job is to teach about language and not about content. However, others are concerned that teachers who do not understand the concepts, methods and aims of the specific purpose community (for example, of science) may become estranged and return to what they know, for example, the teaching of 'general' English from an easy-to-follow textbook. Besides taking the various actors (i.e., teachers, students, politicians) within the pedagogical context into account, the LSP curriculum designers and instructors must study the nature of the oral and written language for which students are being prepared, and the role of the discourse identified in the sociocultural contexts in which students will be working or studying. Here, authenticity is the key to appropriate LSP pedagogy. There are differences of opinion as to the meaning of authenticity; however, in much of the world, the term refers to real, unmodified oral and written discourse taken from the context in which students will be using the target language. In order to understand the authentic nature of discourses, or genres, pedagogies must link the language produced with the communities in which it functions. The real-world role of a text or discourse and its purpose and audience must be integral to an understanding of LSP curricula. Because of the specificity of LSP teaching, new curricula and approaches must be constantly developed. Thus good LSP pedagogy varies widely from country to country, from professional and occupational to academic life, and, within a specific area, from school to school and class to class. However, no approach can be isolated from other language teaching or from second language acquisition research. It must be acknowledged that there are trends in LSP teaching, influenced principally by 'general' teaching methodologies, by technology, and by language processing and learning theories. It will be the purpose of the remainder of this discussion to identify and discuss some of these trends.
2. Current Trends
2.1 Learner-centered Approaches As was mentioned in Sect. 1, attention to the nature of learners is central to modern LSP teaching, as it is to much of 'general' language instruction. In its most extreme form, a learner-centered approach is based upon the principle that learning is totally determined by the nature and will of the students (Hutchinson and Waters 1987). When discussing learner-centered pedagogies, it is essential to examine the issues of learner prior knowledge, language processing, and conceptions of tasks that influence classroom practices. Exploiting learners' prior knowledge and experience is central to an understanding of a learner-centered pedagogy. Work in schema theory, based upon the connectionist view of language acquisition, has assisted teachers in developing pedagogies that draw upon students' knowledge of the content of the lesson (content schemata) and of the structure of the authentic discourses (formal schemata) (Carrell 1983). When preparing for a language activity, students are given questions and activities that draw upon their often extensive first language schemata and experiences with the world, thus motivating interest and promoting familiarity with the demands of the task (see also Reading in a Second Language}. Learners also come to the classroom with specific styles for approaching learning, that is, 'cognitive, affective and physiological traits that are relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with and respond to the learning environment' (Reid 1987: 87). Some researchers focus upon perceptual styles or learning channels: the visual, auditory, kinesthetic and tactile. Others are interested in ability to deal with ambiguity, noting that learners may be convergent, that is, seeking closure or resolution (a style encouraged by math and sciences) or divergent, those who enjoy evaluation, criticism, and problem-solving (often students from the humanities and social sciences). Learners also have preferences for classroom organization, for example, many of the learners in LSP contexts are field-independent, that is, they would prefer to complete a project alone rather than in a group. In addition to styles, strategies for completing tasks are considered in a learner-centered curriculum. One of the most complete and well-developed systems of strategies appears in publications by Chamot and O'Malley (1986: 17). In their scheme, strategies can be divided into these categories: Metacognitive strategies: including executive processes for learning, monitoring one's comprehension and production, and evaluating how one has achieved an objective. Cognitive strategies, in which the learner interacts with the material to be learned by manipulating it mentally or physically. Social-affective strategies, in which the learner either
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Teaching Additional Languages interacts with another person in order to assist learning, or uses some kind of affective control to assist learning (see Learning Strategies).
members may share values and aims that are realized in a number of different languages. In genre-based approaches, students are immediately exposed to exemplars of genres written in the Closely related to the issue of strategies is that of target language from within identified discourse comlanguage processing. From the 1980s, interest in the munities. Through instruction or induction, students relationship between first and second language pro- identify the purposes, macrostructures and linguistic cessing has grown, both in reading and in writing. Of features of these genres and relate their findings to the particular interest are the studies of process transfer by purposes of the genres within the discourse communisecond-language writers in specific purpose situations. ties. For example, St John (1987) discovered that Spanish How is this done in classroom practice? One exscientists writing in English were able to draw exten- ample may suffice. In academic purposes settings, stusively from their prior knowledge of content and dents (or teachers) can act as ethnographers, research article form. They were therefore able to con- interviewing experts and collecting realia from the centrate upon their principal concerns: precise target setting. If the community is a group of interlanguage and the development of specific article national agronomists, for example, students interview sections. These and others' insights into the processing practicing agronomists to identify those genres that of written texts have led to curricula that prepare LSP are central to the community, for example, academic students for reading and writing by assisting them in articles, dissertations, and newsletters. They compare activating the appropriate schemata, in drafting texts various exemplars for a number of elements, for examand revising, and in helping them to consider audience ple, macrostructure, grammar, lexicon, and metand purpose as they comprehend and produce text. adiscoursal features. The discourses they have In learner-centered approaches, course design and analyzed then become the texts for the LSP class, as teaching often become negotiated, dynamic processes, students attempt to produce their own versions and since needs, expectations, and student resources vary to compare them with the texts by experts. Thus, in a with each group and within a single course sequence. genre-based class, the sequence of activities is (a) This does not mean that students are in total control, expert interviews, (b) collection of genres, (c) genre by any means. However, it does suggest that LSP tea- analysis, (d) preliminary conclusions about genres' chers must take into account student learning styles, purposes and features, (e) student genre production, strategies and language processing approaches. And, and (f) evaluation by experts. since research indicates that students benefit from expanding their strategies repertoire and from 2.3 Task-based Approaches developing a metacognitive awareness of their text processing, LSP teachers should assist students in 'Task' is—and probably will remain—ill-defined in becoming more flexible and more aware of their own the literature, yet the concept has become increasingly important to LSP, for it meets criterial demands and learning styles and approaches. can be suitable for either a learner-centered or a genrebased approach. In learner-centered curricula, tasks 2.2 Genre-based Approaches are seen either as learner actions or as learner repWhereas some curricula begin with the nature of the resentations of tasks. 'Doing' or action tasks are learners and are designed to expand upon learner stra- related in a manner much like the behavioral objectegies and metacognition, others are sensitive to the tives of the 1950s: 'Learners will use Wh-questions in discourse community in which the learners will be controlled drills,' or 'Learners will identify the main functioning, e.g., an international business, an aca- points of a text.' Though dated, these 'doing' tasks demic department, a tourist agency, or a factory. In continue to provide structure and guidance for many these genre-based curricula, the discourses from the curricula. A more current expansion on the 'doing' target speech community are studied, preferably by concept comes from the Notional-Functional the students themselves, in terms of text roles in the language teaching advocates. For them, 'doing' can target context; for the structure, styles and purposes be divided into three categories: an action sequence, a of discourses are defined by the communities in which notional-functional description, and a list of teaching points. An action sequence might be 'A person arrives they operate (see Swales 1990). A discourse community is a group of likeminded at a party'; the description, 'Meeting strangers, intropeople with common goals and shared ways of looking ductions, first names,' and the teaching points would at the world. Members communicate with one another be Tm Mohamed. She's Maria. I would like you to through a variety of genres that serve the community's meet my wife' (Corbel 1985: 78). A learner-centered task definition of the early 1990s, purposes, e.g., faxes, E-mail, newsletters, research articles, reports, and memos. Though discourse com- 'task representation,' originates in the writing process munities may produce the majority of genres in a literature. In this realization, the manner in which the single language (e.g., English) in many of the sciences, learners mentally represent a task which they are given
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Language for Special Purposes: Pedagogy is central to learner success or failure. Thus, if learners misconstrue the audience or context for a writing task, they will find it difficult to produce an acceptable written product. Likewise, if the learners misread a text because their mental representation is not consistent with that of the text writer, their comprehension will not be complete. Others speak of abilities rather than actions as central to task completion. They list as objectives phrases such as the following: 'Students will develop the ability to assimilate new concepts and information associated with a specific subject,' 'They will be able to use linguistic resources to perform x task,' or 'They will understand particular modes of inquiry within a community.' As can be seen from the last of the two definitions discussed, 'task' has become an important term both to learner processing studies and to understanding the demands of the target discourse community and its genres. Doyle (1979) has developed an appealing, global definition to guide pedagogues:
The technological demands of LSP settings include as basic a skill as typing and advanced skills in communication and programming. To meet these demands adequately, many LSP settings are computer labs in which students network to collaborate or peer review their writing, or use the computers to communicate with members of worldwide discourse communities.
4. Evaluation of Curriculum and Teaching In LSP, evaluation leads to change. The inadequate LSP curriculum is one that is overwritten or inflexible; the appropriate curriculum provides for change and input by all of those involved in its success. Because the curriculum must be specific to students' needs and their target discourse communities, teachers and students continually review the goals and purposes of their courses. Students are given opportunities to reflect upon the value of a particular classroom activity or text, in terms of their own learning styles and processes and their understanding of program goals. They can be asked, for example, whether they The term "task" focuses attention on three aspects of understood the purposes of what was being taught, students' work: (a) the products (or genres) students are whether they already know how to do an activity, to formulate, (b) the operations that are to be used to generate the product, i.e., the process, (c) and the givens, whether an activity provided appropriate variety or the resources available to students in accomplishing the focus, whether it assisted them in gaining understanding of the tasks they must perform, and whether tasks. (Doyle 1979: 163) they believe that they could transfer the task or use the texts in real world settings. These are some of the definitions of task that are Teachers can also keep reflective evaluations, jourinfluencing LSP teaching and curriculum development. nals of what went well and what did not. They might Because of the plethora of definitions and because ask themselves some of the following questions as they there is no agreement upon task difficulty or break- are involved in curricular revision: 'Were the needs down of tasks into mini-moves, introducing and sequ- assessments accurate and complete?' 'What do we still encing of tasks in a curriculum is problematic. need to find out about students or about the target Nonetheless, task-based approaches, considered more community?' 'Are the materials, methods, and activiauthentic and holistic than notional/functional or ties appropriate to the newest assessment of student other alternatives, have been embraced by key figures needs?' 'What changes should be made?' 'Are in the LSP movement. resources for teachers and students appropriate?' 'Where can we get additional resources?' 'Are learner 3. Technological Influences strategies adequate?' 'What alternative strategies New definitions of literacy have begun to appear in should we be encouraging?' 'Do learners attend reguthe literature which will have a major impact in the larly, apply themselves, and practice outside of class?' twenty-first century upon the understanding of LSP 'If not, why not?' teachers' roles and instructional aims. The computer is both widely available and can be used for many 5. Student Assessment different purposes, including word processing. Student assessment is another issue that is central to Because of this, it has become a necessary literacy the success of a curriculum, especially in ESP programs, tool in the lives of many LSP students, whatever their which are highly accountable. Though testing is an academic or professional/vocational goals. Thus com- area of LSP that has been generally neglected, much puter literacy, involving word processing and, in some can be done to demonstrate student abilities and cases, programming, is a fundamental aim in many knowledge. One important area of assessment, LSP courses. Car mechanics must not only find the especially in learner-centered curricula, is of self. Sevmechanical problems, but they must input the exact eral types of self-assessment measures are suggested terms to cue an appropriate output. Businesspeople in the literature, depending upon the goals of the must read and exploit printouts, access bulletin assessment process. There are, for example, selfboards, and make use of networks to communicate assessments of writing or reading, in which students are asked to reflect upon the success of their with their colleagues worldwide. 637
Teaching Additional Languages approaches to particular texts. There are attitude and motivational assessments as well. Peer assessment is also central to the learning process; students can be asked to consider criteria for discourses, then to evaluate the written or spoken work of their colleagues. More traditional tests are for placement, proficiency and achievement, all of which are somewhat suspect within the LSP community. There are a number of reasons for these suspicions, the principal ones being that it is very difficult to test students on the realworld tasks that they will be performing in discourse communities for these tasks are very complex and task-graders are generally not target community experts. Nonetheless, tests do exist, principally because it is necessary to demonstrate student progress to clients and administrators. Perhaps the bestknown and most universal LSP examinations are for English: the American TOEFL, which is designed to predict general academic success, and the British Council ELTS modular test, in which various forms are available for students in a number of academic disciplines (e.g., physical, social, medical sciences) (see Language Testing). Because specific purpose language teaching requires specific purpose testing, however, the best assessments take place at the local level. One promising area of assessment comes from the Portfolio Movement, an important contribution to the teaching of writing. Student portfolios, developed over time, contain student- and teacher-selected exemplars of work that is central to course objectives. Throughout the course, students reflect upon their portfolio entries, another method for self-assessment and evaluation of growth. One example of portfolio for general academic purposes students is this: through questionnaires and interviews with subject specialists, students and faculty determine the generic tasks that appear to cross disciplines and therefore to be required in some form by all the faculty, e.g., evaluative summaries, notetaking, critical responses to readings, and analysis of data. Then throughout the LSP course, students complete these tasks and select and reflect upon task examples in their portfolios. Teachers evaluate these tasks using specific, task-based criteria. When the term is over, the students have evidence for the academic faculty of their ability to perform the generic tasks assigned.
be dealt with and individuals from target discourse communities (e.g., subject specialists) who must be consulted. Though this article has touched upon some current trends in LSP, there are many LSP courses throughout the world that do not reflect these trends. In many foreign language settings, such as in China and Japan and in parts of Latin America, there continues to be a strong emphasis upon analysis of microfeatures of texts without concern for the discourse communities in which the texts are written. Pedagogies result that are more typical of the 1960s than of the late twentieth century (Swales 1985). In many parts of the world, learner-centered methodologies are not deemed appropriate, either by the political/educational leadership or by the students. Though the understanding of technology is vital in many areas of the developed world (e.g., in the European Community), its use has barely touched other regions. In some learning contexts, subject or professional specialists are easily accessible. In others, teachers with an LSP mandate are working in relative isolation. Nonetheless, the ideal of LSP remains: a pedagogy must consider student styles, strategies, expectations and needs seriously. It must consider, as well, the target language use contexts, in order to develop a syllabus and teaching practices that are specific to a new learning situation. See also: Language for Special Purposes. Bibliography
ALSED-LSP Newsletter. The LSP Centre, Dalgas Have 15, DK20000, Copenhagen, Denmark Belanoff P, Dickson M 1991 Portfolio Grading. Heinemann/Boynton-Cook, Portsmouth, NH Carrell P L 1983 Some issues in studying the role of schemata, or background knowledge, in second language comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language 1: 81-92 Chamot A U, O'Malley J M 1986 The Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach: An ESL Content-based Curriculum. National Clearinghouse for Bi-lingual Education, Rosslyn, VA Corbel C 1985 The action sequence approach to course design. Prospect (Australia) 1: 75-90 Doyle W 1979 Classroom tasks and students' abilities. In: Review of Research in Teacher Education 5: 163-98. Peacock, Itasca, IL English for Specific Purposes: An International Journal [Formerly ESP Journal]. Pergamon Journals, New York 6. Conclusion ESP in the Classroom: Practice and Evaluation 1988 ELT Documents 128. Modern English Publications in association Hutchinson and Waters, in their influential work with the British Council, Oxford (1987), speak of ESP (and LSP) as chance-taking approaches, the 'Wild West of ELT.' They also claim Fachsprache [LSP Journal]. Wilhelm Braumuller, Vienna that LSP is the most demanding of language-teaching Hutchinson T, Waters A 1987 English for Specific Purposes: A Learner-centred Approach. Cambridge University Press, experiences for everyone involved. Because there are Cambridge no orthodoxies as guides, teachers are faced with Johns AM 1991 English for Specific Purposes (ESP): Its evolving curricular challenges. Because the teacher is history and contributions In: Celce-Murcia M (ed.) Teachobligated to prepare the students for the real world, ing English as a Second or Foreign Language, 2nd edn. Newbury House, New York there are new realms of knowledge and skills that must
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Listening: Second Language Pedagogy Kaplan R B (ed.) 1986 Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 7 (Languages and the Professions). Cambridge University Press, New York Kennedy C, Bolitho R 1984 English for Specific Purposes. Macmillan, London Nunan D 1988 The Learner-centered Curriculum. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Reid J M 1987 The learning style preferences of ESL students. TESOL Quarterly 21(1): 87-111 Richards J C 1990 The Language Teaching Matrix. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Robinson P C 1979 ESP (English for Specific Purposes): The Present Position. Pergamon Press, Oxford
St John M J 1987 Writing processes of Spanish scientists publishing in English. English for Specific Purposes 6(2): 113-20 Swales J M 1985 Episodes in ESP. Pergamon Press, Oxford Swales J M 1990 Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Tickoo M L (ed.) 1988 ESP: The State of the Art. Anthology Series 21, SEAMED Regional Language Centre, Singapore Williams R, Swales J, Kirkman J (eds.) 1984 Common Ground: Shared Interest in ESP and Communication Studies. ESL Documents Series 117, Pergamon Press (and the British Council), Oxford
Listening: Second Language Pedagogy N. F. Whitney
Since the early 1960s, rapid developments in understanding the nature of listening and its role in second language learning have helped to revolutionize teaching materials and methods. Yet it is worth remembering that listening has been a feature of language learning and teaching for a very long time. When children are learning their first language, the ability first to hear and then to listen to what is being said is vital. The same is true of learners of a second or foreign language. For example, it is clear that very young children who are learning a second or foreign language, either informally at home or more formally at school, typically have to depend on their ability to listen well before they are able to exploit their capacity to speak, read, and write. For older learners too, the role of listening is equally well established. Adult second language learners have always been obliged to listen to their teachers' instructions and explanations, even if they are not always given in the language being taught. And learners of all ages have always depended on listening to their teachers in order to get some idea of what the language being taught actually sounds like, or is supposed to sound like. 1. Listening as a Skill Listening is important in second language pedagogy not only because it is something that learners inevitably do, but also because it is considered to be a skill in its own right. In the 1960s, teachers were taught to think in terms of there being four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They were traditionally thought of as the two 'active' skills (speaking and writing), and the two 'passive' skills (listening and reading).
The proposition that there are four separate language skills which can be divided into active and passive skills has been very influential. It has helped teachers to understand why, for example, some students seem to be better at speaking than reading. It has helped teachers to organize their teaching units in different ways, and to think of language learning and teaching not just as one monolithic, almost mysterious, process, but as a series of separately identifiable components. And as far as listening is concerned, its status as a separate skill has gradually given teachers the opportunity to focus on particular activities which before had been either taken for granted or hardly developed at all. Researchers' understanding of listening as a skill has been largely influenced by two fields of inquiry: research into second language acquisition and theories of comprehension. Since the 1980s, there has been an increasing interest in experiments which simulate the comprehension of language, though much of the research work involving listening has focused on the comprehension strategies of native speakers of English, and not of people for whom English is a second or foreign language. In all events, experimental work on listening has tended to conclude that central to any definition of listening as a skill is the notion that listening involves learners understanding units larger than the sentence; using knowledge of the world; using their experience of what typical 'listening texts' sound like and contain; and exploiting a variety of inferencing and other strategies that help them to interpret what is heard. Listening strategies have in their turn been described as processes, or subskills which may involve, for example, remembering, guessing, anticipating,
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Teaching Additional Languages predicting, and while listening, revising and updating one's understanding in the light of personal experiences and of new information being heard. Rost (1990) identifies 22 skills involved in the listening process. His list—there are many others—includes perceiving and discriminating sounds in isolated words; deducing the meaning of unfamiliar words; identifying the speaker's intention; transferring information from a spoken source to some other form, for example, to written notes; and providing appropriate feedback to a speaker. So, contrary to the characterization in the 1960s of listening as a separate, indivisible, passive skill, the tendency in the 1990s is to think of listening as something that is bound to occur in combination with reading, writing, and speaking; that itself consists of a series of describable subskills; and that requires real effort and active participation from the learner. Therefore, as even the simple example in Fig. 1 illustrates, the vast majority of listening activities are not confined to teaching or testing the listening skill in isolation, and they may require a great degree of concentration and attention to detail. 2. Traditional Listening Texts and Exercises In the 1950s and 1960s, before the identification of listening as an apparently separate skill, there was a general assumption that the main purpose of listening was to develop the students' 'perception' of the language being learned. To that end, listening texts were often regarded as an opportunity to provide specially crafted, model instances of the language being
taught, while listening exercises, where they existed at all, were not required to be very different from the sorts of activities that students were doing in the other, nonlistening parts of their courses. In many respects, the choice of texts and exercises used for listening were at that time not so different from those used in the teaching of reading comprehension, and typically included blank-filling exercises, true/false exercises, and multiple choice questions. In traditionally designed listening materials, there is another implicit assumption that if students can improve their perception of the second language by listening to it, then their ability to speak the language will also improve. In the 1960s, the role of listening as an aid to pronunciation was greatly supported by the fashionable structuralist linguistic theories of the time. Contrastive analysis was very popular, and a great deal of attention was given to comparing and contrasting the meaningful sound segments (phonemes) in different languages. So, taking their cue from linguistic theory, early listening activities required students to listen very carefully indeed to sound segments and their variations (e.g., [p] in pie versus [b] in buy; but also aspirated [ph] in pie versus unaspirated [p] in spy). All the taped material was specially written, and carefully delivered by speakers—invariably male— chosen for the clarity of their diction and their suitability as model speakers of the language. In traditional listening activities (which remain very common in the 1990s), listening texts are typically short, and exercises are limited in range. The listening script—the text—frequently consists of little more
Figure 1. This listening activity also involves reading and writing. The exercise calls for active concentration and attention to detail on the part of the learner (Richards 1990:15, 68).
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Listening: Second Language Pedagogy O Say these words after the recording or your teacher. 1. am cat back hand bad 2. came late wake rain made 3. car last glasses bath half 4. saw tall walk talk all Figure 2. The very simplest kind of traditional listening exercises often focus on the student's ability to perceive and then to say sounds. In addition, this exercise deals with the complex relationships between sounds and spelling (Swan and Walter 1984:59).
than groups of words and phrases designed to improve the perception and pronunciation of individual sounds and, as Fig. 2 illustrates, sometimes also to help students appreciate the relationships between sound and spelling. The most common instruction to students is to 'Listen and after which they might be asked to match what they hear with a written version of the spoken material; or to perform some simple discrimination task, also with reference to written material. For example, they might be asked to listen to (and often at the same time to read) word groups such as sea leaf pear tea leap, and then be instructed to identify the odd one out (pear). Clearly, this kind of listening activity is closely allied to the teaching of pronunciation. Materials such as Ship or Sheep? (Baker 1982a) and Tree or Three? (Baker 1982b), much of which focuses on the learner's ability to discriminate between utterances which are only minimally different from each other, remain very popular in the 1990s. Students may also be presented with material in which the focus is not on individual sounds, but on stress, rhythm, and intonation. Thus, generations of students who are learning British English have been asked to listen to and to discriminate between question tag sentences such as She's a teacher, isn't she! \, said with falling intonation, and confidently expecting agreement; and She's a teacher, isn 't she? /, said with rising intonation, and indicating relative uncertainty. In the UK, the continuing need to record this kind of listening material for secondary school courses, where question tags and intonation often figure largely on syllabuses, has meant that all the major publishers tend to use the same small number of actors who have learned to reproduce such sentences and intonation patterns on demand. Even the longest of traditional listening texts rarely consists of much more than one or two specially written paragraphs, the main point of which is usually to provide further examples of a grammatical point, usually a verb tense, that is being taught. Such listening texts include an artificially high incidence of any particular grammatical point, for example, the present perfect tense: she has been', he has not seen', they have
taken, and are frequently used by the teacher as an opportunity for some simple comprehension work, or as a prompt for a class dictation. 3. A Demand for Authenticity, and for Tasks In the mid- and late 1970s, traditional approaches to the teaching of listening were greatly influenced by a shift of emphasis in the theory and practice of second language pedagogy, by advances in technology, and by commercial pressures. The publication of Wilkins's Notional Syllabuses (1976) and the work on language functions promoted by, among many others, the Council of Europe, created an immediate demand for language materials that focused not only on linguistic forms, but also on why people use language, for example, to apologize, to explain, to describe. This gave rise to an increased demand for real instances of such language uses. Teachers increasingly expressed a preference for recordings of real and especially authentic language which, ideally, had been recorded live, or at least with real people. Fully scripted listening materials were suddenly out of fashion. Semiscripted or rehearsed scripts were allowable only if, like lectures or speeches, they would be designed and delivered that way in real life. To be fully authentic, listening materials, it was felt, should be unscripted, spontaneous, and natural. The argument was that students should be exposed to real conversations and to everyday speech in the target language, taken from a variety of real-life contexts, and uttered by real people of different ages and speaking with different accents. Furthermore, the exercises for students should themselves reflect real-life tasks. These might involve, for example, identifying a speaker's purpose (to explain, to describe, to apologize, and so on), listening for gist, distinguishing a point of view, following instructions, completing a form, giving or taking advice, or taking notes. As the example in Fig. 3 shows, the emphasis on such listening materials is less on language forms and more on the information carried by texts: that is, on their content. The impetus provided by the shift from structurally based pedagogy toward functionally based pedagogy gave listening a tremendous boost. Within a very short time, listening materials were freed from the constraints of having to be closely tied to the language forms of general language courses. Materials specifically devoted to listening began to appear (e.g., Underwood 1975,1976,1979). A listening component was felt to be an essential ingredient of any general language course, and in the 1980s, publishers began to produce 'skills series,' which typically consisted of separate materials for each of the four language skills, at four levels. Although many of the exercises in listening materials were still essentially traditional in design, the listening texts themselves were often fresh, original, interesting in their own right, and not spoken 641
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Figure 3. A good example of a task-based listening and notetaking activity. Both the text and the exercise reflect aspects of the real world. Having been assigned a role, in this case that of someone enquiring about car hire details, the student's focus is on understanding the content and not the form of what is being said (Blundell and Stokes 1981:24).
by professional actors. The situations depicted in materials resembled those of real life, and learners could identify with them. 4. A Compromise
In practice, however, the goals of authenticity and task-based activities have proved harder to achieve than many teachers (and especially full-time teachertrainers) at first realized. In the first place, it is extremely difficult to record fully authentic material, and there are ethical problems involved in using material which has been secretly recorded. Second, although radio would seem to be an ideal source for listening material, it is often difficult to get permission to use such material in classes. Third, genuine tasks are not all that easy to come by, if only because in most classroom situations involving listening, the students are not participants in the original context: more 642
typically, they are listening in, or overhearing, or acting as silent witnesses. To that extent, the second language learner's role as a 'genuine' listener is invariably a restricted one. Also, fully authentic material often includes phenomena (pauses, hesitations, interruptions, periods where several voices speak at once, difficult accents, impenetrable idioms, rapid changes of direction in the topics being discussed, intrusive background noise) which in practice create problems for both teachers and learners. Traditional listening materials usually dealt with these issues by ignoring them altogether, with the result that in such materials, very little of the text is redundant: students have to listen very carefully to everything, in order to prove that they have understood what they have heard. Functional or communicative listening materials tend to operate the other way. In their attempt to be realistic and authentic, those recordings often include a lot of material that is not pertinent to the tasks in hand, or that deliberately misleads or distracts the careless listener: in such cases, students must grasp only the relevant information, and discard the rest. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. Having to listen to everything and to catch every detail helps learners to concentrate, but it also imposes a great strain on them, and does not really reflect how people listen in real life. Traditional listening materials do not always acknowledge the fact that in real-life listening situations, people constantly select from what they hear the things that they need or want to know. At the other end of the scale, having to listen to relatively long stretches of unscripted material can reflect some real-life situations, but it can also be tiresome, especially if the learner has not been given a very active listening role, or is just not interested in the topic or the task in question. So, although the case for students being required to listen to authentic texts seems unassailable, the reality is that they often find such material difficult to hear well or to understand, and they stop listening. Unfortunately, some teachers interpret the learner's impatience and refusal to listen as an inability to understand. One response to the difficulties presented by authenticity has been the slogan: 'grade the task and not the text.' The argument is that the naturalness and complexity of the original authentic text can be retained, but that in order to make the material accessible to teachers and learners, the tasks should be relatively straightforward. It is for that reason that some materials consist of relatively elaborate texts and transcripts, linguistically far beyond the range of students, but tempered by allegedly easy questions such as 'How many people are speaking?' or 'Does the speaker sound angry?' The difficulty with this approach is that though such tasks may be considered relatively simple, they are often not very useful or interesting, or directly concerned with the content of the text.
Listening: Second Language Pedagogy Another response, and one favored by most commercial textbook writers, has been to compromise. Most contemporary listening activities, especially those to be found in general language courses, strike a balance between the highly controlled texts and exercises of traditional materials on the one hand, and the open-endedness of authentic materials and tasks on the other. There is still a tendency to claim that listening materials are 'authentic': the pressure to make such claims is very great. But in many cases, the listening work is either fully or semiscripted, and the speakers are more often than not specially briefed, or professional actors. That is particularly true of the increasing range of materials for primary and secondary school foreign language students, most of whom greatly prefer their listening work to be combined with watching videos. In practice, therefore, most people who prepare listening materials have realized that it is not just the format or the structure of the text and task that counts, but also the level of interest that their content actually generates among learners. In other words, although listening material can be well designed and theoretically sound, unless its subject matter engages the interest of the learners, it will not work. Students find it more difficult to tolerate poorly constructed or uninteresting listening activities than they do poorly constructed or uninteresting reading activities. 5. Factors Affecting the Evaluation of Materials and Methods
Teachers know to their cost that it is impossible to evaluate listening materials on sight. They have to be used, and that takes time. In her survey review of listening materials, Kellerman (1992) considers the technical quality of recordings, the themes developed in materials, the transparency and appropriateness of accompanying exercises, the inclusion or otherwise of helpful teacher's notes (which should include a readable transcription of all listening material and suggestions for further activities), and any special claims made by materials. Kellerman notes correctly that, of all the claims made about contemporary listening material, the most common is that the recordings are authentic. But, as she points out, this is not always the case. Another comment frequently made about listening materials is that they tend to test rather than to teach. It is true that a comparison of so-called teaching material, with explicitly designed testing material such as that produced for the TOE examination (taken by foreign students who wish to study at American universities) or the Cambridge First Certificate intermediate level examination (e.g., Field 1983) shows that there are more similarities than differences between the two sorts of product. There are some listening materials which do try to 'teach' students to listen, and to do well in listening tests (e.g., Rixon
1988). But on the whole, the differences between materials that allegedly teach and those that actually test listening are often slight. For most practical purposes, the most important differences involve the degree of attention paid to the learner's responses: in tests, the responses really do count. It is also said that listening materials often focus too much on the 'product' and not the 'process' of listening. In the late 1980s, it was fashionable to make a clear distinction between product and process, and to argue that of the two, the language learning process was the more important, and the one to be developed. To some extent, listening materials which deal explicitly with subskills such as listening for gist, or which ask students to explain how they completed particular tasks, may be said to be dealing more with the process of listening (i.e., what goes on in the student's head) than with the product (i.e., the learner's visible or audible response to listening tasks, or, more prosaically, the answers to exercises). But more than that, it is difficult to see how, in practical terms, listening materials, teachers, and learners can get much closer to what is essentially hidden from view. The truth is that the mechanism of the listening process is not yet fully understood. For teachers and learners, one of the greatest difficulties with listening materials is that the design of listening exercises is not always fully thought through. Kellerman (1992) gives several instances: of grids whose layout does not coincide with the sequencing of information on the recording; of gap-filling exercises that seem to perform no purpose; and of activities which are far beyond the range of the student. Good materials, on the other hand, are those in which it is perfectly clear to both the student and the teacher what is expected of them, and in which the prelistening, listening, and postlistening activities can be completed in reasonable time. 6. Teacher Competence and Listening
Another problem is that many teachers have not been specially trained to handle listening activities. There are some very good theoretical books about listening (e.g., Brown and Yule 1983; Anderson and Lynch 1988), and some very helpful practical books (e.g., Ur 1984; Underwood 1989) which try to compensate for that lack of training. But in most cases, teachers learn to teach listening by a process of trial and error, and experimentation. The best advice for teachers is to allow plenty of preparation time both for themselves and their students, and to practice dealing with the combination of the students' book, the teachers' notes, and the cassette. For the teacher's preparation time to be fully effective, a clear transcript of the listening material is needed, and the teacher needs to be able to juggle with the student's materials, a teacher's guide, a cassette, an answer guide, and the class itself. To do that well
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Teaching Additional Languages requires a lot of practice, a good deal of confidence, and reliable material. Teachers and learners also need to know how long the different phases of a listening activity are likely to take, because in practice it turns out that many listening activities take up much more time than anyone (including, it would seem, the materials writer) had allowed for. Most second language lessons in the world are quite short, and conducted by nonnativespeaking teachers working in difficult circumstances. Whereas native speakers of a language (who dominate the thinking behind nearly all listening material, and who produce nearly all of it) can tolerate so-called natural language spoken at normal speed, some nonnative-speaking teachers and their students are threatened by recorded material which is too fast and too complex. So, for listening activities to be built into many lessons, they need to be clearly defined, carefully managed, interesting, and not too long. Unfortunately, not all listening materials take full account of these constraints, with the inevitable result that, notwithstanding many teachers' best efforts, a great deal of listening work done in second language work is probably less effective than it might be. Bibliography Anderson A, Lynch T 1988 Listening. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Baker A 1982a Ship or Sheep? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Baker A 1982b Tree or Three? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Blundell L, Stokes S 1981 Task Listening. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Brown G, Yule G 1983 Teaching the Spoken Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Field J 1983 Cambridge First Certificate English Practice: Listening Comprehension. Macmillan, London Kellerman S 1992 Survey review: Recent materials for the teaching of listening. English Language Teaching Journal 46(1): 100-12 Richards J 1990 Listen Carefully. Oxford University Press, Oxford Rixon S 1988 Successful Listening for First Certificate. Oxford University Press, Oxford Rost M 1990 Listening in Language Learning. Longman, London Swan M, Walter C 1984 The Cambridge English Course, Book 1. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Underwood M 1975 Listen to This. Oxford University Press, Oxford Underwood M 1976 What a Story! Oxford University Press, Oxford Underwood M 1979 Have you Heard? Oxford University Press, Oxford Underwood M 1989 Teaching Listening. Longman, London Ur P 1984 Teaching Listening Comprehension. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Wilkins D 1976 Notional Syllabuses. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Phonetic Pedagogy J. C. Catford
By 'Phonetic Pedagogy' we refer to two distinct, but related, activities. These are: first, the teaching of phonetics as such; and second, the application of phonetics to the teaching of pronunciation. Phonetics is an essential discipline for all of those who are concerned with various aspects of the study of spoken language, including students of linguistics, languages, anthropology, speech pathology, and other branches of 'speech science.' The second topic is particularly relevant to the teaching of foreign or second languages, although it is not without importance in relation to the teaching of the mother tongue. 1. The Teaching of Phonetics
The aim in teaching phonetics, by which we mean general phonetics, and not the phonetics of a par-
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ticular language, is to equip the student with a knowledge of the principles and the categories used in the description and classification of the sounds of speech. The 'knowledge' ultimately required is both theoretical and practical—theoretical, in that the student must clearly understand the entire range of processes by which speech sounds are produced—and practical, in that the student must be able to identify, analyze, describe, transcribe, and produce virtually any speech sound that is presented to him. Much can be learned by working in a phonetics laboratory, particularly one in which instrumentation is available for the study of both the physiology and the acoustics of speech. Indeed, hands-on experience with instrumental phonetic investigation is virtually essential in advanced phonetics courses. It is, however,
Phonetic Pedagogy desirable to start with a thoroughly practical and noninstrumental approach to the analysis of speech sounds through the introspective analysis of the processes of speech production. This is not merely a method of acquiring practical skills: it is also the best way of becoming acquainted with phonetic theory. The student who has only read about the processes of speech acquires a merely theoretical knowledge of phonetic taxonomy. Even if his main interest is the instrumental analysis of speech, it is essential for him to acquire this kind of intimate acquaintance with phonetic categories. Students of instrumental phonetics who lack this deep subjective experience of phonetic processes run the risk of misinterpreting their instrumentally acquired data. The practical aim in the teaching of phonetics is the inculcation of an analytic ability. That is to say, it is expected of an advanced student of phonetics not that he can merely 'globally' identify any sound. It is, rather, the ability to listen to (and produce) sounds, including sounds that he has never heard before, and to identify the components that enter into their production. That is to say, he must be able to answer such questions about a consonantal type of sound as: 'Is it pulmonic, glottalic, or velaric? Is it egressive or ingressive? Is it voiced, voiceless, whispered, murmured? Is it bilabial, labiodental, retroflex, uvular, pharyngal, epiglottal? Is it aspirated or unaspirated?' etc., or with respect to any vowel: 'Is it unrounded or rounded? Is it close, close-mid, open-mid, open or intermediate? Is it front, central, back, or intermediate? Is it nasalized, retroflexed, rhotacized, pharyngalized?' etc. The competent student of phonetics must also be able to make accurate judgments of differences in the duration of sounds, of relative pitches, of relative 'stress' (independently of duration or pitch differences), and so on. It would seem obvious that the first requirement for the student of phonetics would be the cultivation of a 'good ear,' that is, training in auditory discrimination. It is true that 'ear-training' plays an important part in the education of phoneticians; nevertheless, it has long been recognized that the best way to acquire the required analytic skill, and at the same time, a thorough knowledge of phonetic theory, is actually to produce sounds, and to become familiar with their manner of production through introspective analysis of the processes going on in one's own vocal tract. Much of this kind of analysis is best carried out in silence, since auditory sensations generally mask the proprioceptive and tactile sensations of articulation. Thus Sweet (1877:17-19), in dealing with the practical mastery of vowels says: Whispering the vowels will be found a great help in analyzing their formation. After a time the student will be able to recognize each vowel solely by the muscular sensations associated with its formation: he will be able to say to himself, 'Now my tongue is in the position for (i),'
'Now I have changed (i) into (ih) [IPA i]' &c., while not uttering the slightest sound, confident that if voiced or whispered breath is allowed to pass through the mouth the required sound will be produced.... After acquiring a full command of the separate vowels, the student should begin to compare them with one another, and note their relations The tongue positions may be compared in various ways. It is very instructive to run through a whole series either horizontally or vertically, shifting the tongue with uniform speed from one extreme position to the other.
Later (pp. 20-21) he emphasizes once again the importance of 'organic training' as opposed to ear training. Those who try to learn new sounds by ear alone, without any systematic training in the use of their vocal organs, generally succeed only partially. Even in those exceptional cases in which a naturally quick ear... enables a linguist to acquire an accurate pronunciation of foreign languages by imitation alone, his knowledge is little better than that of a parrot, for he is unable to record the sounds he has learned, or to teach them to others, and the results of his labours perish with him.... There can be no question that flexible organs well trained together with only an average ear, will yield better results than even an exceptionally good ear without organic training.
These century-old observations and recommendations of Sweet are still valid, as contemporary practical teachers of theoretical phonetics know from experience. They were also to some extent confirmed by a rather tentative experiment in which 'exotic' vowels and consonants were taught to two groups of students, one group being given purely auditory instruction (a form of ear-training) and the other being given purely organic instruction, that is, being induced to pronounce the 'exotic' sounds by passing systematically from known to unknown articulatory postures and movements. Those who had been given the purely articulatory instruction performed significantly better not only in tests of production of exotic sounds, but also in tests of the auditory discrimination of sounds—significantly so with respect to vowels (Catford and Pisoni 1970). In addition to theoretical knowledge and analytical skill the student of phonetics has to learn the use of a phonetic notation, very commonly that of the International Phonetic Association. Generally the phonetic symbols are learned progressively as the student learns, both theoretically and practically, the categories of phonetic theory. The phonetic characters and diacritics are most effectively acquired in step with theory, as representing intersections of phonetic categories, rather than symbols representing particular sounds. A fairly consistent modern example of the application of the principles of phonetic pedagogy outlined here is Catford (1988).
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Teaching Additional Languages 2. The Teaching of Pronunciation
When the International Phonetic Association was founded in 1886, the principal concern of its members was the application of phonetic theory and phonetic transcription to the teaching of languages, and this concern was reflected in its original title: The Phonetic Teachers' Association. The founders of the association, Passy (France), Victor (Germany), Jespersen (Denmark), Sweet (England), and Lundell (Sweden) were at first mainly concerned with the teaching of English but very soon the interests of the Association broadened to encompass the teaching of other languages. It was clear to these pioneers that the teaching of pronunciation should be based on the same principles as those underlying the teaching of phonetics. Sweet (1899:5) referred to the fallacy of imagining that pronunciation can be learned by mere imitation. This,' he says, 'is as if fencing could be learned by looking at other people fencing.' The student of a foreign language must be taught to discriminate clearly between the various sounds of the language he is learning, and between these foreign sounds and those of his own language, and that this must be done by careful auditory and articulatory training. To quote Sweet again (1899: 6): It is evident that both the organic and the acoustic sense must be cultivated: we must learn both to recognize each sound by ear and to recognize the organic positions by which it is produced, this recognition being effected by means of the accompanying muscular sensations.
And he goes on to say (p. 7): The first step is to isolate the sounds and to keep them unchanged in all combinations and under all the various conditions of quantity and stress (accent)... the next step is to learn to analyze the formation of the familiar sounds. This analysis must be practical as well as theoretical. The great test of the practical command of such a distinction as breath and voice is the power it gives of deducing unfamiliar from familiar sounds.
At the same time the use of phonetic transcription was advocated, as a means of reminding the student when to use the sounds he had learned to recognize and produce. The strict application of phonetic methods, involving rigorous ear training, articulation training, and the use of phonetic transcription was for long generally accepted and widely practiced particularly in Europe. Its success depended upon having teachers who had themselves undergone rigorous phonetic training, and one of the most successful and influential centers for such training and for the application of phonetics in language teaching was, and still is, the Department of Phonetics at University College in London. Daniel Jones, the founder and long time head of the University College Department, outlined the application of phonetics to foreign language teaching in these words (Jones 1938):
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The process of learning to pronounce a foreign language demands 'phonetic analysis,' which in turn forms the basis of 'phonetic training.' By 'phonetic analysis' is meant determining in sufficient detail the nature of the sounds of the foreign language, and the usage of the language in the matter of length, stress and intonation. 'Phonetic Training' is the method of causing the language learner to perform the necessary speech actions; , it includes (a) ear-training (fn. By frequent dictations of meaningless words made up of sounds of the foreign language.); (b) exercises for the organs of speech; (c) learning which are the appropriate sounds to use in given words and sentences; (d) learning to utter sequences of sounds with correct length, stress and intonation.
At the present time, less emphasis is placed upon the teaching of pronunciation, and with the development of technology for the electronic recording and manipulation of sound, more reliance is often placed upon auditory training than articulation training. The importance of audition is emphasized, for example, by the 'verbotonal' method of pronunciation correction. This system, which involves acoustic filtering, the presentation of foreign sounds in prosodic contexts which supposedly enhance their acoustic characteristics etc., was based on techniques developed for the rehabilitation of the hard of hearing by Professor P. Guberina at the University of Zagreb in the 1950s (see, e.g., Landercy and Renard 1976). Unfortunately, language teachers today more often than not lack rigorous phonetic training, and this seems to be particularly true of teachers of English as a second language. In addition, it is sometimes assumed that 'the application of phonetics to language teaching' means merely the use of phonetic transcription, but this is a naive and incorrect view. 'The application of phonetics' means using, where possible, the knowledge and skills of the phonetician. It includes: basing pronunciation teaching on precise description of sounds; using silent articulation and introspection about articulation; developing new sounds on the basis of known sounds; and including the utilization of dialectal pronunciation, interjectional noises, and so on. A number of suggestions along these lines, as well as other modern views on the teaching of pronunciation, though not all dealing with the application of phonetics, are to be found in Morley (1987).
Bibliography Catford J C 1988 A Practical Introduction to Phonetics. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Catford J C, Pisoni D 1970 Auditory vs. articulatory training in exotic sounds. The Modern Language Journal 54(7): 477-81 Jones D 1938 The aims of phonetics IPA. Supplement to Le Mattre Phonetique Jan-Mar Landercy A, Renard R 1976 Observations sur les fondements
Pronunciation acoustiques et perceptifs de certains precedes du système verbo-tonal. Revue de phonetique appliquee 39-40 Morley J (ed.) 1987 Current Perspectives on Pronunciation. Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Washington, DC
Sweet H 1877 A Handbook of Phonetics. Clarendon Press, Oxford Sweet H 1899 The Practical Study of Languages. Dent, London (Republished 1964 Oxford University Press, London)
Pronunciation D. Porter
While it is a commonplace for writers in the field of second or foreign language (henceforth L2) teaching to describe their chosen topic as 'a neglected area,' there is no topic which better fits this description than the teaching of pronunciation. Not only has it received very little attention in pedagogical theory since the heyday of behaviorism in language teaching, but many materials writers and language teachers either make only the most cursory gesture in the direction of pronunciation teaching, or—in contrast to other aspects of language—do not deal with it at all. This may be because of low expectations of achievement, views on poor return for effort expended, views on the equal validity of different accents, views on the low priority of pronunciation in a communicative approach to language teaching, fear of a complex and little-understood area of language—or any combination of these. This survey will consider the scope of pronunciation as it appears in second language teaching, views on the appropriacy of teaching it, objectives of pronunciation teaching, and methodological issues. Through this account of the way things are, it is to be hoped that suggestions will emerge for the way things might be. Examples are given from English (as a foreign language), but the arguments are applicable to all languages. 1. The Appropriacy of Pronunciation Teaching While language teachers will usually accept that it will be necessary for most learners to acquire a new pronunciation—to some extent at least—for the L2, the view is regularly expressed by a minority of language teachers that it is actually ethically wrong, linguistically misconceived, socially undesirable or politically undesirable for L2 pronunciation to be taught beyond the bare minimum necessary for intelligibility. These views are rarely to be found in print, but may be strongly held, and account for the reluctance of some teachers to involve themselves in pronunciation teaching. Arguments about unethicality center on assertions that pronunciation, more than any other aspect of language, is a sensitive and intimate expression of a
speaker's self-image. Any attempt to modify a person's pronunciation—even when that pronunciation is in a new language—will, it is felt, imply a value judgment of the speaker him- or herself, and such judgments are unethical, as well as being unconducive to effective language learning. A rather different view is that it is unnecessary, and possibly undesirable, to teach an L2 pronunciation, in just the same way as some would consider it to be unnecessary and possibly undesirable to teach an alternative pronunciation of the mother tongue. It is in the nature of language that there will be a variety of different accents for any single language: different accents have equal validity, regardless of whether they are determined socially, regionally—or, it is argued, by reason of different mother tongues. In this view, then, to require learners to change or modify their accents when speaking either LI or L2 is to ignore the natural variability inherent in language, and so is linguistically misconceived. The use of a particular accent will frequently be laden with sets of cultural values associated with those who normally use that accent. In a society where a second language is widely used, one or more secondlanguage accents specific to that society will usually develop. In such circumstances, the use of an accent normally associated with mother-tongue speakers of that language may imply—or be taken as implying— a rejection of the society and culture of those who use second-language accents. Thus a Sri Lankan teacher might propose to take British English 'received pronunciation' as a model for her learners, but if that (in Sri Lanka) essentially alien accent were perfectly acquired by her learners, they might run the risk of being ostracized by the society around them: 'Who do they think they are?' In these circumstances it would be reasonable to regard attempts to change a secondlanguage accent into a mother-tongue-user accent as socially undesirable. On an individual level, particular learners might not wish to lose an LI accent which instantly characterizes them in a way that they are proud of, for example, 'When I speak English, I want people to notice that I
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Teaching Additional Languages am Greek!' So long as the speaker is easily intelligible, should the teacher urge this learner to lose all linguistic trace of her Greekness when speaking English? Such assertions of cultural identity and independence may have political significance: while the English 'language' may be a practical necessity, a British or American 'accent' may call up unfortunate overtones of present or past political subservience. For this reason, some teachers in some countries actively discourage learners from attempting to acquire a native-like L2 accent. 2. The Scope of Pronunciation Teaching
Perhaps the most widely held assumption in pronunciation-teaching materials and related pedagogical discussion is that the acquisition of an appropriate L2 pronunciation consists in the acquisition of a productive proficiency in the L2 phonological system or systems. Attention is focused on the ability to perceive and produce the segmental (individual sound) and suprasegmental (stress and intonation) contrasts deployed by the language, and to do this in ways which in some degree approximate to native-speaker practice, or which are in some other way recognized as acceptable or correct. Acceptability or correctness in pronunciation is thus concerned with articulation and sound production (physiological and acoustic matters) on the one hand, and on the other hand with the realization of individual contrastive units through the various articulations and sounds appropriate in a given language to the pronunciation contexts in which the units occur (matters of conceptual organization). Pronunciation difficulties may be of either type, and either type may impair intelligibility, but the great weight of effort in pronunciation teaching is currently placed on the physiological and acoustic aspects of pronunciation. This leaves the undeniably important aspect of the conceptual organization of sounds relatively neglected. In the case of intonation, efforts are normally made to relate contrastive patterns of pitch and pitch movement to various types of meaning. Difficulties in the systematic relation of intonation to meaning have led many (see Crystal and Quirk 1964) to include much more than systematic variation in pitch in accounts of the ways in which meaning is conveyed by suprasegmental means. Features such as loudness, huskiness, breathiness, pause, rhythmicality, variation in pitch range, etc., in total generally characterizable as 'tone of voice,' are also involved. Indeed, it has frequently been remarked that native speakers have a particular, distinctive physiological 'set' which characterizes their speech as a whole and goes well beyond the production of particular sounds and contrasts. Tone of voice and physiological set have however been largely neglected in pronunciation pedagogy, perhaps largely because of the great range and variety of fea-
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tures involved, and because of the difficulty in accounting for their systematic use. Finally, and going beyond questions of phonological systems, most—but not all—L2 learners are already literate in another language, usually their mother tongue (LI). As the L2 is usually taught in its written form from an early stage, it is to be expected that the L2 pronunciation will to some extent be affected by the sound-spelling relationships to which the learner is accustomed in the other language—as also by a growing awareness of patterns in sound-spelling relationships in the L2. Teaching materials frequently relate pronunciation to spelling patterns in the L2, but the effect on L2 pronunciation of LI patterns, though clearly important, is rarely taken into account. 3. Phonology and Phonetics in Pronunciation Teaching
Overwhelmingly, pronunciation teaching materials are based on a 'phonemic' (or 'tonemic,' in the case of intonation) account of the phonology of spoken language. What is to be acquired is understood and presented in terms of contrastive units of sound (the phonemes, indicated by letters between sloping brackets—e.g., /i/—and the tonemes), and sequences of these units. The fact that these phonemes are essentially abstract, while a given unit is actually pronounced in different ways in various specifiable contexts, tends not to be thoroughly or systematically dealt with. However it is often precisely this detail— the phonetics of the language—which distinguishes native from nonnative pronunciation. Thus the RP pronunciation of the vowel in the word school and of the vowel in the word scoop are not the same, but they do not contrast. Both are realizations of the same phoneme /u/; one type of realization occurs before 'dark 1'—the kind of T sound that comes at the end of the word school—while the other occurs in any other context. A learner with only one type of sound for /u/ in the LI is likely to produce that sound in English in both school and scoop—after all, both have the same vowel phoneme—and consequently will sound nonnative-like, because of lack of attention to phonetic detail. 4. Which Pronunciation?
While there are many native-speaker accents of English, very few appear in teaching materials. Thus for British English it is only the accent known as 'received pronunciation,' or 'RP,' which is taught, underpinned by such authoritative works as Gimson (1962) or the perhaps more accessible Roach (1983). Moreover, one among the many curious features of RP is that, although it is the only British accent regularly taught in EFL/ESL, only a small minority of British native speakers actually speak it in a pure form (although far more speak an approximation to it). As an unfortunate side effect of this, people who arrive in Britain having learned English in other countries often find
Pronunciation that although they are readily understood when they speak, they cannot themselves understand what is said to them in reply. 5. The Goal of Pronunciation Teaching While the goal in other aspects of L2 learning will usually be to approximate as closely as possible to native-speaker proficiency, most language teachers are satisfied with the lesser goal of 'comfortable intelligibility' (Kenworthy 1987) for the acquisition of pronunciation, that is, just that level of proficiency in pronunciation which will allow the learner to be understood without difficulty in those situations where there is likely to be a need or wish to use the L2. This utilitarian satisfaction with a lesser goal may derive from the kinds of view of appropriacy described above, from a communicative focus on the message rather than on the vehicle for its expression, or simply from a conviction born of experience that it is simply not cost-effective in the classroom to aim to achieve anything more. It should be noted that this is a teacher-held view which is not necessarily held by the learners themselves—at least not when they begin their language-learning career. What evidence does exist about what the learners themselves want suggests that many may begin with considerably higher aspirations, although teacher expectations eventually take their inevitable toll on learner achievement. 6. Methodological Issues 6.1 Learning versus Practice It is important in any discussion of language learning to distinguish between learning and practicing. Learning is concerned with moving from a state of not knowing something, or how to do something, to a new state of knowing something, or knowing how to do it, however tentative and shaky the new knowledge might be. Practice, however, is concerned with exercising the newly acquired knowledge in order to strengthen it and to make it more readily and effectively deployable. Clearly both learning and practice will be necessary in the acquisition of an L2. It has to be admitted, however, that many pronunciation-teaching materials and activities confuse learning with practice, focusing heavily on repetitive practice activities in the implicit or explicit belief that learning will result. Thus an exercise that requires the learner to tick words which have a particular stress pattern can only be done if the stress patterns have already been learned; such an exercise is concerned with practice, and it should not be expected that it will result in learning. 6.2 Modeling and Imitation It would seem to be a sine qua non for successful pronunciation learning that the learner should be exposed to examples of correct pronunciation of the target sounds or sequences. Not surprisingly, then, by far the commonest pronunciation-teaching procedure
consists in a teacher—or tape recording—speaking the target sounds or sequences as models for the learners to imitate. Where the typical sequences of phonemes in the L2 are similar to those in the mother tongue, and where particular phonemes are realized in the same way in both languages, a learner proceeding on the hypothesis that the two languages are pronounced in the same way will achieve satisfactory results. However, where the L2 has sounds which do not exist in the mother tongue, simple exposure to those sounds may not be sufficient to achieve the desired results; the learner may simply not know how to articulate the target sounds, or may even not recognize that these sounds are distinct from ones with which he is familiar in his mother tongue. Alternatively, the problem may be not so much one of articulation, but more of understanding the different types of sequences of sounds in the L2. For example, T and 'r' sounds exist both in English and in Japanese, but whereas in English these sounds represent separate phonemes, distinguishing between otherwise identical words (read and lead, Henley and Henry), in Japanese they are contextual variants of a single contrastive unit. Under these circumstances, given the right phonetic context, a Japanese learner of English is likely to pronounce an /!/ where an /r/ would have been expected. It will clearly be insufficient to simply model the 'correct sounds' for the Japanese learner, as the learner is already producing reasonable approximations to the target sounds. It is rather the 'contrastive nature' of the two sounds in English which needs to be learned and operationalized; the learner will presumably not acquire such an abstract concept simply through imitating models of the target sounds in isolation or in sequences. 6.3 Diagrams Modeling and imitation will often not be enough in themselves; other teaching strategies will need to be deployed. It will often be the case that a learner will be able to hear the distinctive nature of the sound which he has to produce, but will be at a loss when it comes to knowing how actually to produce it. In an attempt to help the learner with this problem, many materials offer diagrammatic displays of the necessary articulation—showing the positioning of the vocal organs as a whole, the shape of the lips, the contour of the surface of the tongue in the oral cavity, patterns of pitch-movement, etc. While such diagrams are undoubtedly of some help to some learners in the production of some sounds—particularly sounds involving visible contacts and movements involving the lips and teeth—it will not always be easy for the learner to translate readily such visual information into actual positions and movements of the appropriate vocal organs. Most difficult are articulations which involve different characteristic tongue shapes, for example, the vowels or clear versus dark /!/. A
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Teaching Additional Languages diagram will show clearly how the articulations of typical realizations of /e/ and /ae/ differ, but such knowledge 'about' pronunciation will not necessarily translate into the necessary production ability. 6.4 Explanations Verbal explanations such as:
6.6 Reception and Production It is generally felt that before a learner can be expected to 'produce' acceptable pronunciation, he must be able to 'recognize' it. Teaching materials will commonly introduce a new pronunciation target through various forms of recognition task, for example: Read the two short conversations below, and listen to the recording.
In /i/ the tongue is pulled up a little closer to the roof of the mouth, and is a little more fronted, than in /i/
1. 'Hertford 31453.' 'Adam?' 'No, this is George.' 2. 'What's your name?' 'Adam.'
In British English 'RP,' the sound /r/ is only made before a vowel
Adam is a question in the first short conversation. The voice rises. Adam? In the second short conversation, Adam is a statement. The voice falls. Adam.
or:
serve the same function as diagrams; they seek to help the learner to internalize the psychokinetic processes involved in the production of target sounds, or the new way in which the L2 organizes sounds, by presenting those processes, etc., in another medium—this time verbal. Here again, such explanations can be very helpful in some cases for some learners. This is particularly true where the articulation concerned or the processes involved are quite unlike anything in the learner's previous experience (e.g., the /h/ sound in house or unhappy, or the dropping of the underlined /t/ sound in 'mashed potatoes' or 'postman'). Nevertheless the problem remains that such explanations 'about' pronunciation phenomena will not necessarily be readily converted to productive ability in the learner. It may be that verbal explanations tend to be more useful with older and more academically inclined learners. 6.5 Elicitation from the Learner In order to side-step the problems with diagrams and explanations noted above, and recognizing that presenting a model pronunciation for the learner to imitate will not necessarily lead to successful imitation, practitioners of the method known as 'silent way' attempt to elicit the desired sounds directly from the learner. This is done through a process first of encouraging the production of sounds which have something in common with the target sound, and then getting the learner gradually to 'shape' these sounds until they reach acceptability. Where this method works, it has the additional advantage that the new sound is first encountered by the learner in his own production, so that there is no debilitating feeling that 'I can't make that sound.' Of course, such a procedure is suitable only for the achievement of particular articulations and consequent sound qualities; thus while it could be used to develop an awareness of the difference between a clear /!/ and a dark /!/, it will not in itself help the learner to understand that both are representations of the same phoneme.
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Now listen to the remaining words and expressions, and decide whether they are questions or statements. Write a question-mark after the words if they are questions, or underline them if they are statements.
While this might seem a logical arrangement, it is not inevitable. The reader will note that the 'silent way' procedure described above reverses the procedure, placing production first. 6.7 Sounds in Isolation versus the Flow of Speech Many teachers and materials initially present sounds—particularly vowels—in isolation. It may be that this is done as a means of avoiding the distraction of surrounding sounds, some of which may themselves pose problems for the learner. There are two major areas of objection to this practice, one practical and one principled. As regards practicality, the learner may simply not hear the characteristic quality of some consonantal sounds unless they are embedded in a context—the most extreme case being a glottal stop— while vowels and other continuants are frequently distorted when pronounced in isolation. Then in principle there seems little point in presenting in isolation sounds which hardly ever occur isolated, particularly as these sounds are frequently modified according to their phonetic context. In fact the presentation of sounds in isolation may encourage the erroneous view in the learner that each contrastive unit—each phoneme—is realized by only one sound, regardless of context. On grounds therefore both of practicality and of phonological principle it would seem essential that sounds should be presented and practiced in contexts at least one word long. Where the concern is with phenomena affected by longer sequences, such as weak forms, assimilation, elision, rhythm or intonation, then longer contexts should be presented. 6.8 Updating Methodology in Pronunciation Teaching It is a striking feature of current pronunciation teaching that while methodology for teaching the rest of language has undergone many revolutions over recent years, with the ramified implications of 'functional,'
Pronunciation 'humanistic,' 'learner-centered,' 'skill theory,' and 'communicative,' etc. approaches being worked out in a myriad teaching applications, methodology for teaching pronunciation has remained with a few partial exceptions largely uninfluenced. Whether for the development of receptive or productive abilities, it continues to rely heavily on drills and other repetition exercises involving words, phrases, sentences or dialogues, with the normally unspoken assumption that productive facility and mastery will emerge from frequent repetition. One side effect of this reliance on repetition for pronunciation purposes is that the learner is often required to produce totally abnormal utterances— frequently uncontextualized—containing excessively frequent occurrence of the—presumably problematic—target sounds, for example: 'Paula saw her naughty daughter fall in the water.' The trainer tried to trick Tracy!'
These are in essence tongue twisters and, as is wellknown, tongue twisters cause problems with the repeated sounds rather than helping the speaker to pronounce them more accurately or fluently; the teaching material here is more difficult to deal with than natural language! The possibilities for methodological exploration and creativity offered by an attempt at thoroughgoing application to pronunciation teaching of any of the approaches mentioned above, however defined, are immense. This is not the place for a thorough exploration of these possibilities, or for a definitive account of these approaches. It could nevertheless be nothing less than provocative and fruitful to consider the implications in this respect of such notions— commonly occurring in other domains of language teaching—as focus on meaning, using language for a purpose, learner-centeredness, learner-independence, appropriacy in language and language use, plentiful exposure to authentic language use, motivation, learning as an ongoing process beyond the confines of the classroom, taking account of students' wants and needs, and finally, and very importantly, learning to use language rather than learning about language. 6.9 The Teaching I Learning Sequence In the very limited literature written with a thoughtful interest in the pedagogic aspects of pronunciation teaching (e.g., Kenworthy 1987; most of the articles in Morley 1987) one can recognize a repeatedly expressed concern with a number of distinct phases in the teaching-learning process. The distinction between learning and practice has already been noted. Whatever form the practice takes, it may itself be divided into an earlier phase in which the learner pays careful conscious attention to (monitors) the pronunciation aspect of spoken language production, and a later more lightly monitored phase, shading eventually into
free unmonitored language use. Then the point at which the mysterious alchemy of actual learning occurs may be seen as preceded by various activities designed to help it happen. Thus there might be an initial phase of sensitization to features of pronunciation in general together with measures designed to build the learner's confidence in his own ability to produce different accents, followed by activities raising awareness of the existence and nature of specific areas selected for attention. This breakdown could thus be seen as offering something like a seven-phase pedagogic sequence: (a) Sensitization to pronunciation in general, and confidence-building; (b) Raising awareness of the existence of specific problems; (c) Raising awareness of the nature of the specific problems; (d) The specific pronunciation feature is learned; (e) Close monitoring; (f) Light monitoring; (g) Free unmonitored speech. The opportunities for methodological innovation which such a sequence of prelearning, learning, and postlearning phases offers, particularly when married to the concepts mentioned in the previous section, remain to be developed. Of course, not all teachers would in any case wish to work through the full sequence for all learners and all learning targets. Many teachers, for many learners, would wish to work on specific pronunciation problems only as they occurred, and only to the extent that comfortable intelligibility was achieved. This might require working through only a part of such a sequence. But the awareness which the sequence embodies of pronunciation teaching and learning as strategy and developmental process represents, in the opinion of the writer, an important step in bringing pronunciation teaching into line with the rest of modern language teaching. 7. The Future
There is some evidence of increasing interest among teachers, methodologists and materials writers in L2 pronunciation and its teaching. The state of the art is however so underdeveloped that no new coherent approach is to be expected for some time. Nevertheless it is to be hoped that an awareness of the current problems and potential areas for development outlined in this article will serve to initiate productive new thinking in this field. See also: Phonology in Second Language Acquisition. Bibliography Crystal D, Quirk R 1964 Systems of Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features in English. Mouton, The Hague Gimson A C 1962 An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. Arnold, London
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Teaching Additional Languages Kenworthy J 1987 Teaching English Pronunciation. Longman, Harlow Morley J (ed.) 1987 Current Perspectives on Pronunciation:
Practices Anchored in Theory. TESOL, Washington, DC Roach P 1983 English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Reading: Second Language E. Williams
Since there is no universally approved method of teaching a second language, and since even the teaching of first language reading is a matter of contention, there is inevitably a lack of consensus on the teaching of reading in a second language. Furthermore, the phrase 'the teaching of reading' is itself ambiguous in the context of second-language pedagogy. On the one hand, it may refer to the teaching of initial reading in the second language. On the other hand it may refer to teaching aimed at improving the reading comprehension and general reading skills in the second language of those who have already learned to read in that language. As far as English as a second language is concerned, most attention, in terms of research effort and material production, has been devoted to the latter concern, namely improving the second language reading of those already able to read in it. 1. The Teaching of Initial Reading in a Second Language There are a variety of approaches to the teaching of initial reading in a second language, which largely derive from first language approaches. Thus in countries where English is used as a medium of initial education the methods of teaching reading will generally involve any, or a combination of phonic, whole word, whole sentence, or 'language experience' approaches. (A brief characterization of these approaches follows. For more detailed treatment, see Reading Teaching: Methods.) The phonic method proceeds from the conventionalized 'sound values' of letters—the letter c being given the value 'kuh' /ka/ for example, and the word cot being analyzed to the pronunciation 'kuh' 'oh' 'tuh' /kg/, /D/, /ta/ and then synthesized to cot /kot/. The main advantage of this approach is that it enables learners to 'build up' by saying aloud, and hopefully recognizing, words that they know but have not previously met in printed form. It is sometimes referred to as the 'phonetic' method, although it makes no use of phonetic symbols. One obvious dis652
advantage is the lack of consistent letter-sound relationship in English. In the whole word or whole sentence methods learners are presented with whole words, phrases or sentences, which they are expected to memorize through repetition, and recognize as wholes. The claimed advantage of this is that it facilitates rapid recognition of whole units, rather than depending on a laborious letter-by-letter strategy, and, as such, that it approximates more closely to fluent proficient reading. The disadvantage of the method is that it does not help learners to work out for themselves words that they have not already met in print. The method is sometimes referred to as the 'look-and-say' method, or the 'global' method. In first language initial reading, learners are often able to use their own knowledge of syntax and vocabulary to help them decode. Thus, native English beginner readers would be able to recognize about in the sentence This rabbit is fussy about his food, although they might have difficulty in decoding the word about if it were presented in isolation. That native speakers have this knowledge of their language has been incorporated into the pedagogy of first language reading, where it is sometimes called the 'language awareness' or 'linguistic' method. In practice most initial teaching of reading in English as a first language employs a combination of the above methods, this often being referred to as the 'eclectic' method or approach. In second language pedagogy the selection of a particular approach to initial reading is complicated by the fact that learners may be: (a) nonreaders in any language; (b) readers in their own language which has the same script as the second language (e.g., English learners of French; Pakistani learners of Arabic); (c) readers in their own language which has a different script from the second language (e.g., Chinese or Arab learners of English). Despite doubts as to the efficacy of the procedure, there are many situations where children who cannot
Reading: Second Language read in their first language are taught a second language, and how to read in that language, simultaneously. Such is the case of many excolonial countries in Africa, and of minority groups generally. In such cases, the teaching methods are generally taken from the first language procedures used by the excolonial power, or those used by the majority group. Such learners have to learn to read in the fundamental sense of appreciating that the marks oh paper represent language, and the conventions by which this is achieved. In the case of learners who are already literate in their own language, and where it has the same script as the second language, then many teachers assume that the reading skills will transfer from the first language to the second, with some ad hoc attention normally given to letter-sound relationships that differ markedly from those of the LI (the pronunciation of the letter r as /R/ for English learners of French, for example, or the pronunciation of the letters th as /θ/ or /5/ for those learning to read in English). Such concerns are not strictly speaking to do with reading (if 'reading' involves a concern with understanding) but with attributing sounds to letters. The fact that many learners of English who are literate in a Roman script (e.g., French, Spanish, German) learn to read in English with little or no overt attention given to initial reading as such is evidence for a degree of transfer at this level. In those instances where the learners are literate, but in a script that differs from that of the second language there is generally a systematic attempt to teach the conventional sound-letter relationships of the target language (assuming the script attempts to represent segments—other types of writing may present difficulties). This is typically followed by the reading aloud of words and simple sentences. A further variable in second language initial reading is the degree of proficiency of the initial readers in that language. Clearly, in this context, methods of initial reading that depend on the learner having prior language knowledge (such as a native speaker child could be expected to possess) would have to be very cautiously adapted, for the obvious reason that beginner language learners, by definition, have only limited familiarity with the second language. If reading is defined as a process of perceiving and deriving meaning from what has been written, then it is obviously an activity that can be, and normally is, carried out silently. In first language pedagogy, reading aloud is primarily a means of checking that the learner knows how to read, and of assessing progress at the early stages. In second language pedagogy however, even when it has been established that learners know how to read, they are often required to read aloud as a means of practicing pronunciation, although this is a questionable method because of the 'interference effect' of the written forms.
2. Improving Second Language Reading
While recognizing that reading is a highly integrated task, this section will, for ease of reference, deal with the following areas: text, reader, interaction between text and reader, and teaching approaches. 2.1 Text The principal sources of texts for second language learners are: texts in the language course book, which are generally intended to improve the learner's language by exemplifying particular structures or vocabulary items; texts in reading comprehension books, often aimed at improving both language and reading skills; longer texts such as short stories, intended to provide opportunities for extensive reading, usually done out of class. The latter texts will be referred to as Readers (capitalization denoting reference to texts, rather than persons). As far as language difficulties are concerned (bearing in mind that they are not the only difficulties readers face) research into text difficulty has looked at the contribution of both structure and vocabulary. To pose the question of whether vocabulary is a greater problem to learner readers than structure, in an absolute sense, is misguided. The answer will depend upon the relationship between texts and readers, and vary from case to case. There are broadly speaking three ways of tackling readers' language difficulties. One is to teach more language, the second is to teach strategies to cope with language difficulties. The first may be impractical and also uneconomical of time and effort, if the learner does not need to know the whole of the language. On the other hand the strategies for coping with difficulties (e.g., using dictionaries, analyzing the morphology of words, or attempting to guess words from context) may be time consuming and unsuccessful in given instances. In practice, most second language pedagogy attempts both to teach language and to teach 'coping strategies.' The third procedure, which attempts to avoid rather than remedy the problem of poor comprehension arising from language difficulties, is to select texts where language is controlled according to putative notions of simplicity. Vocabulary for such simple (or simplified) texts is usually selected according to a vocabulary list (e.g., West 1953), where the frequency of words is provided from the most common to the least common. Many publishers have produced series of Readers graded according to such word counts, with the lowest grade using only the most common 1000 words, the second grade the most common 2000 words, etc. Of course, there is no reason to suppose that high frequency words will be conceptually easier than low frequency words; the argument is that they will be more useful, since a fairly consistent research finding is that approximately 80 percent of the total number
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Teaching Additional Languages of words in most written texts in English come from the 2000 most common words. The syntax of such simple texts is graded according to notional criteria of simplicity, with much attention given to the verb phrase. The present tense, for example, will appear before the past, the nonprogressive before the progressive, etc. Thus, They spend a lot of money will appear before A lot of money was being spent (see Second Language Teaching Methods). Despite the fact that the psycholinguistic validity of such graded progression has been questioned, and indeed that the relative complexity of certain structures is difficult to assess, graded text is the norm for most coursebooks, and the use of graded Readers is widespread. Some specialists in English as a second language, however, eschew simplified text, and insist upon 'authentic text' which usually refers to texts not specially produced for language learners. Proponents of authentic texts (e.g., Grellet 1981) argue that they are more motivating, and that language difficulties can be overcome by grading the task rather than simplifying the text. It is also suggested that simplifying a text may actually make it more difficult to understand if the number of linguistic and extralinguistic clues are reduced, and further that learners are best taught to cope with 'real world' texts by having experience of them in the classroom. In an alternative, less frequent interpretation, authentic text is defined not by the writer's intention, but solely by reference to the reader's response. Here any text, whether written for language teaching purposes or not, that readers find appropriate to their purpose—which may or may not correspond to the writer's intention—is 'authentic' for that reader. This interpretation is pedagogically useful to the extent that it highlights that the reader's response is more important than the provenance of the text. It is widely accepted that the way in which a text is organized will affect the quantity and the ordering of what is recalled. Thus narrative text organized in chronological sequence, and descriptive text organized in a unidirectional sequence, are more readily recalled than text not so sequenced. Whether discourse structures are culture bound, such that readers from certain cultures are conditioned to expect certain text organizations, with consequent problems if their expectations are not met, is a much-vexed question for which there is no decisive evidence. 2.2 The Reader The commonsense notion that the more linguistically difficult the text, the more linguistically competent the reader needs to be finds general support. However, the reader's prior nonlinguistic knowledge is also regarded as an important element in understanding a text. The role of prior knowledge in L2 reading has been investigated using the notion of 'schema' (a
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schema is an abstract structure representing concepts stored in memory—more simply, it refers to what a reader already knows about a given topic). Research upon the effect of schemata on reading suggests that given adequate language ability, a reader with appropriate background knowledge (e.g., on an academic topic, or a cultural issue) is generally a more effective reader (see Carrell et al. 1988). 2.3 Interaction of Reader and Text The term reading style is now reasonably well established as a descriptive label for the reader's behavioral response to text. The reading style is motivated by the reader's purpose, and mediated by the accessibility of the text to the reader. The styles most commonly identified in current work in second language reading are skimming (rapid reading to establish the general content of a text), scanning (rapid reading to locate a specific point), intensive reading (slow reading directed at complete understanding), and extensive reading (relatively rapid reading, typically carried out for pleasure). These are low level constructs, established on the basis of observable behavior (notably speed of reading, degree of re-reading, 'skipping' of text). Observable responses to reading which are characteristic of extremely intensive reading include regressive eye movement, an excessive number of eye fixations per line, very long fixations, and various forms of subvocalization (from silent 'mouthing' of words to outright reading aloud). These were once regarded as obstacles to comprehension but are now increasingly accepted as symptoms, rather than causes, of poor comprehension (cf. Alderson and Urquhart 1984). Further, it has been claimed that, although subvocalization increases when subjects read in a second language, any attempt to suppress subvocalization leads to loss of comprehension (Gibson and Levin 1975). It would therefore appear reasonable to suggest that subvocalization and other manifestations of an extremely intensive style, may be hot only symptoms of difficulty, but also means of overcoming difficulty. They should therefore not be prematurely suppressed, but should disappear as the learner becomes a more fluent reader—and at the same time more proficient in the language—through practice. One cannot therefore speak of'good' reading speeds in second language reading in an absolute sense. There is, however, a widespread belief that second language readers read more slowly than they need to, this being possibly the effect of too much reading aloud, or of too much intensive reading. A further cause may be insufficient practice of reading (in the first as well as the second language) especially if the learner comes from a cultural background where reading is nonexistent or unusual. With respect to the terms skill and strategy, both research literature and teaching material display con-
Reading: Second Language siderable terminological inconsistency. In principle, one may distinguish the terms by defining a skill as an acquired ability, carried out largely subconsciously (e.g., rapid, automatic word recognition), whereas a strategy is a conscious procedure carried out in order to solve a problem (e.g., phonic 'sounding out' when faced with an unfamiliar word). In practice, however, the distinction is often difficult to make. In second language pedagogy, as in first, much of the debate concerning reading skills arises from whether reading is to be regarded as a holistic ('unitary') process, or a process made up of discrete and therefore separately teachable skills. Further, if the discrete skills view is accepted, then what are the relevant skills, and what is the relationship between them? Many different lists of the reading skills of LI readers have been drawn up, some based on empirical work, others on armchair speculation. The oft-cited taxonomy of Barrett lists five reading skills: (a) literal comprehension; (b) reorganization of the ideas in the text; (c) inferential ability; (d) evaluation; and (e) appreciation. Although the notion of discrete reading skills has always been attractive to educationalists, there has been considerable doubt as to their psychological validity. No two lists of reading skills are identical, but casual inspection suggests that the skills which feature in them might be grouped roughly into 'language related' skills, and 'reason related' skills. The former relate to knowledge of orthographic conventions, vocabulary and syntax, and the latter primarily to inferences made on the basis of information from the text, or from the reader's general knowledge. The product of the reading process, in terms of the reader's comprehension whether in first or second language, has also been a source of some disagreement. Neville and Pugh (1982: 9) make the point that 'the output of reading i s . . . difficult to capture, since what is achieved from (real life) reading with comprehension is often a modification of the conceptual system.' At the more superficial level of the reader's immediate understanding, the question is whether a text is best regarded as having a single immanent meaning, or as consisting of a set of cues from which different readers will draw different meanings. That different readers will create different meanings from the same text is beyond dispute. This raises the question of whether all meanings are to be regarded as equally valid, as opposed to equally justifiable. In short, the debate is between those for whom the text's meaning is an 'ideal' interpretation (which is not necessarily every reader's objective, and with which every reader may not agree), and those for whom the text's meaning is a personally satisfying interpretation (see Urquhart 1984). The debate has practical implications for reading in second language pedagogy, in that current techniques of assessing reading comprehension are based on the notion of 'correct interpretation.'
2.4 Teaching Approaches An enduring distinction in second language pedagogy is that between intensive reading and extensive reading. Extensive reading refers to a relatively rapid style of reading, typically of longer texts which are judged to be within the language proficiency of the reader. There are only a few tasks or comprehension exercises associated with the texts, and there may be none at all. Extensive reading is typically, though not necessarily, associated with graded Readers. An important factor in extensive reading is that, as few or no tasks are set, then the motivation for reading—in terms of interest or enjoyment—should come from the reader. In order to maximize such motivation, extensive reading is often organized in self-access mode with a classroom library. Extensive reading is claimed to be important not only because of the view that one becomes a good reader through reading, but also because it is claimed to improve language proficiency, especially vocabulary. However, some doubts are now voiced on the general effectiveness of extensive reading programs (Urquhart and Weir 1998), particularly where the language of the books may be too difficult. Intensive reading refers to extremely careful reading, where the aim is complete comprehension of the text. Texts for intensive reading are generally short, at a language level judged to be slightly above the readers' proficiency, and with a high proportion of task items. In order to complete the tasks the reader may have to resort to word-by-word reading or frequent re-reading. The principal aims of intensive reading are to provide input and practice in the second language and also practice in reading skills and styles. Materials for intensive reading often advocate a three stage approach with a prereading preparatory stage, a second reading stage, and a third post-reading stage. The majority of current reading comprehension books in English as a second language contain both traditional and innovative approaches, traditional here referring to comprehension questions based upon a text. The purpose of such comprehension questions has been queried in recent years. They can only check comprehension selectively, and there is no evidence that they directly help comprehension. In fact, their true function seems to be to ensure that the readers actually read the text (although it is often possible to arrive at correct answers either by repeating, without understanding, the relevant section of text, or by using appropriate knowledge of the world). One of the most frequent features of recent second language reading comprehension books is the prereading activity. Some books suggest elaborate activities involving group work, discussion, or writing, while others simply suggest predicting the content of the text from the title. In theoretical terms such activities constitute attempts to activate the students' schemata; they may also provide language preparation, motivation and variety in the classroom activity.
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Teaching Additional Languages Research suggests that activation of prior knowledge does tend to improve comprehension. Despite the inconsistency of the evidence for distinct reading skills, they too figure prominently in reading materials. Materials writers now regularly incorporate such exercises as guessing the meaning of unknown words, recovering pronoun reference, inference, and prediction. The emphasis on guessing word meaning is supported by research which claims that a willingness to guess is characteristic of good learners and readers. However, there is evidence that skilled readers in their first and second language find it impossible to guess more than a small proportion of words, and obviously inaccurate guessing can have negative effects on comprehension. Some reading comprehension books stress the importance of ignoring certain unknown words, a procedure supported by research suggesting that fluent readers typically ignore rather than guess unknown lexis—again, there is clearly a limit to which words and how many words may be ignored. Inferring is another skill which receives attention in many books. The term generally refers to the reader coming to conclusions that are not explicitly stated in the text, but for which the text provides evidence. Tasks requiring the identifying of reference are again very common, usually practiced through a question such as What does this refer to? As far as second language reading programs are concerned, most specialists favor a combination of intensive and extensive reading components. It should be remembered, however, that while intensive and extensive are convenient terms for referring to opposite ends of a reading-style continuum, and to materials intended to promote those styles, the fact is that in reality, and irrespective of how the materials are labeled, readers adopt their style to suit their immediate purposes (e.g., reading intensively whenever they have difficulty in understanding). A notable feature of reading in second language pedagogy is that the theoretical positions embodied
in the texts and tasks of reading have tended to come from outside the classroom—from psychology (behaviorism, cognitivism), from linguistics (structuralism), or from applied linguistics (functionalism, discourse analysis). Reading pedagogy has not in general been grounded in the observation of classroom practice. The role of the teacher, apart from that of managing the activities provided in the material, has received little attention. There has been little published research into longitudinal studies of initial reading in a second language (but see Wallace 1988) and few published longitudinal evaluations of classroombased attempts to improve reading comprehension. See also: Reading in a Second Language. Bibliography Alderson J C, Urquhart A H (eds.) 1984 Reading in a Foreign Language. Longman, London Carrell P L, Devine J, Eskey D E (eds.) 1988 Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Day R R, Bamford J 1998 Extensive Reading in the Second Language Classroom. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Gibson E J, Levin H 1975 The Psychology of Reading. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Grellet F 1981 Developing Reading Skills. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Neville M H, Pugh A K 1982 Towards Independent Reading. Heinemann, London Nuttall C 1996 Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language, rev. edn. Heinemann, Oxford Urquhart A H 1984 The effect of rhetorical ordering on readability. In: Alderson J C, Urquhart A H (eds.) 1984 Urquhart A, Weir C J 1998 Reading in a Second Language: Process, Product and Practice. Longman, London Wallace C 1988 Learning to Read in a Multicultural Society. Pergamon Press, Oxford West M P 1953 (ed.) A General Service List of English Words. Longman, London Williams E, Moran C 1989 Reading in a foreign language at intermediate and advanced levels with particular reference to English. Language Teaching 22(4): 217-28
Second Language Teaching D. A. Wilkins
A language may be termed a 'second' or 'foreign' language according to its status either for the individual who speaks that language or for the society in which that language is spoken. In both cases that status may change in the course of time. It is therefore
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inevitable that the classification of a language as second or foreign is frequently neither clear-cut nor stable. In this article the relation between a first and a second language will be considered, then the distinction between a second and a foreign language for
Second Language Teaching the individual will be examined, and finally the social status of languages and notions of second or foreign language teaching, in particular, will be reviewed. 1. First and Second Language
There is no strict definition of what it means to speak of an individual's first language. The language may be first in the sense of either first-learned or dominant among the person's several languages. This dominance in turn may be psycholinguistic, if competence in one language is more extensive and the language processing more efficient than in others, or social, if one language is required more extensively for communicative use. Although the stereotype may be of a person whose first-learned language remains the psycholinguistically and socially dominant language, in practice there are many people in whom a language has become dominant which was not their firstlearned language. Infant bilinguals may also constitute a special case in that by developing two languages simultaneously, they may be said to have either two first languages or no first language at all. The term second language is used in contrast to first language in any of its senses above. However by far its most widespread use is in contrast to first-learned to refer to any language learned subsequently to the first(-learned), whatever the circumstances of the learning. In this sense it is commonly encountered in such phrases as second-language learning or secondlanguage teaching and is used where the user does not necessarily wish to differentiate second from foreignlanguage learning or teaching. 2. Second and Foreign Language in the Individual
The difference between a second and a foreign language for an individual depends entirely on the circumstances in which the language was learned. Someone who is learning a language wholly in a classroom or self-instructional environment is said to be learning a foreign language, whereas someone who additionally has contact with at least some communicative use of the language outside the classroom or indeed is learning wholly from contact with such uses of the language is said to be learning a second language. The latter is often perceived as the most natural way to learn a language and is frequently referred to as second-language acquisition. Once an individual's language system has reached stability and scarcely develops any further, whether the system is complete or not, the distinction between foreign and second language becomes largely irrelevant. Although in ordinary use of language it is common to speak of someone who has reached this stage as having a certain proficiency in a foreign language, in the academic literature it is more common to speak of an individual's second language.
3. Second and Foreign Languages in Society
Whether a person is learning a language as a second or foreign language will depend substantially but not entirely on the status of the languages in the society as a whole. At one extreme, though such examples are difficult to find, there are states where only one language is spoken and where all other languages are therefore foreign languages. Japan is commonly cited as coming close to this state. At the other extreme are the many kinds of multilingual state within which what is a second language for one person may be a first language for someone else. One example would be Switzerland where multilingualism is institutionalized and has long historical roots. Another would be countries like the USA and, particularly in recent years, many European countries where immigration has created important linguistic minorities. Between the two extremes come the numerous countries where an external language (often a language like English or French and designated as a 'language of wider communication') has functions in, for example, the media, the courts, and in government administration and may indeed be used as the medium of education at some levels in spite of the fact that there is no significant number of native speakers of that language in the community. This is the case of many of the postcolonial states of Africa and elsewhere. The need to distinguish between teaching a language as a foreign language and teaching it as a second language originates in the belief that a different pedagogy is required if the target language is simultaneously being used as the medium of instruction for other parts of the curriculum. In this case the rest of the curriculum provides valuable language learning experience and language teaching as such can be dedicated to language education of the kind normally associated with the first language. Where the target language is clearly a foreign language and no experience of the language outside the language class is available, a pedagogy has to be adopted which ensures that the language is made accessible to the learner under conditions that optimize learning. This has usually been taken to mean that the learner should be exposed to the language system in some structured way (see Second Language Teaching Methods). The factors at work in multilingual societies are so diverse that the simple opposition of foreign and second language rarely proves more than a startingpoint for discussion of an appropriate approach. French may be a second language both for a Wolofspeaking child in Senegal and for a similar child living in a major French city, but far more linguistic support is available through normal communicative uses of language in France and one would expect this to be clearly reflected in the child's progress in learning the language and in the role of that language subsequently. To contrast two other cases, Switzerland may be a multilingual state but nonetheless
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Teaching Additional Languages German may be a foreign language for many Frenchspeaking children in Switzerland because, in spite of its status as an official language, it is not used as a medium of instruction in the French-speaking part of Switzerland and children may have no occasion to use it or come into contact with it socially. On the other hand English has no status as a second language in Holland, but the availability of English through the media in particular is such that there is substantial extracurricular support for the learning of the language and in some respects the conditions are more favorable for language learning than in some more obviously second-language situations. It is clearly necessary to look closely at the linguistic environment of a language learner in order to understand to what extent and in what ways the situation is one of foreign or of second-language learning. It is
unlikely that the bald use of these labels would survive such a close examination. In any case it should be noted that the methodological trend in foreignlanguage teaching in recent years has been to try and introduce more features of natural language use into the foreign-language classroom, thereby blurring the opposition of second- and foreign-language teaching. See also: Bilingualism, Individual; Multilingualism; Bilingualism, Societal. Bibliography Christophersen P 1968 Second Language Learning. Penguin, London Davies A 1991 The Native Speaker in Applied Linguistics. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Grosjean F 1982 Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Second Language Teaching Methods W. T. Littlewood
A second language can be learned without the help of teaching. Many immigrants acquire the language of their new country without formal instruction, provided they are sufficiently motivated and are exposed to it in the right conditions. However, especially in the case of adult immigrants who have to cope with a wide variety of communicative needs soon after arriving in their new country, the right conditions often do not arise naturally or do not allow learning to occur quickly enough. Also, people often want to learn a foreign language in their own home country, where natural learning conditions cannot arise at all (see Second Language Teaching). In cases like this, learning situations have to be created artificially, most often in classrooms but also by other means such as self-study courses. Consequently, there immediately arise a whole range of decisions about what kind of language people need to learn (see Needs Analysis), how their courses should be designed, and what experiences they need to be offered them in order to stimulate learning. It is with decisions of this last kind—about the most effective ways of stimulating learning in classrooms— that the field of language teaching methodology is chiefly concerned. 1. The Nature of Language Teaching Methods
Like many other terms in language teaching, 'method' is used in a variety of different senses by different writers. It is therefore necessary first to define how it 658
is used in this article. In Sect. 1.1 its meaning will be compared with that of the similar term 'methodology.' Section 1.2 will then elaborate on this definition by looking in more detail at some general characteristics that methods share. This will provide the basis for considering, in the sections that follow, specific language teaching methods. /./ Methodology and Methods in Language Teaching In its most common usage, the term 'language teaching methodology' refers to the general field of enquiry into how teachers can best facilitate language learning in classrooms. For example, somebody might be described as a 'specialist in language teaching methodology' or a 'language teaching methodologist,' meaning that the person makes a special study of the problems involved in teaching languages in classrooms and the various solutions that have been proposed. In this sense of the term, it is clearly distinct from 'method.' There is another usage, however, in which the meanings of the two terms begin to overlap. In this second sense, 'methodology' refers to the collection of principles and procedures that make up a particular way of teaching. For example, it might be said that a teacher 'uses a traditional methodology' or that a person is 'still trying to devise an appropriate methodology' for a particular group of learners. In using this term rather than 'method,' the frequent implication is that the principles and procedures are
Second Language Teaching Methods integrated into a flexible framework, perhaps unique to a particular teacher or situation, rather than into a tightly-prescribed system for teaching. Since the 1970s, there has been a move away from tightly prescribed systems for teaching (see Sect. 3 below) and consequently the term 'methodology' is now often considered more appropriate than 'method.' As this last comment indicates, the term 'method' usually implies a fully worked-out system for teaching which, in the perceptions of the language-teaching community, exists independently of any particular teacher who may try to apply it in the classroom. It is in this sense that the 'grammar-translation method' or the 'audio-lingual method' may be spoken of. Both of these terms can be identified with a defined system of principles and practices, which can be explained and discussed by methodologists, embodied in coursebooks and applied by teachers. No two teachers will apply a method in exactly the same way in the classroom, because there are so many other factors involved in the act of teaching, but this does not alter the fact that the method exists as an identifiable entity. This does not necessarily mean that a method is fixed and static. There is often considerable debate about details and individual teachers who profess to use the same method will differ in their interpretation and implementation of it. However there will still be a clearly identifiable core of principles and practices by which the method can be identified. 1.2 The Components of Language Teaching Methods In order to conceptualize what a teaching method is, it is useful to think first of a continuum from the most abstract to the most concrete. At the abstract end of the continuum there are theories and beliefs about language, learning, and education. These define the nature and meaning of the essential elements in the activity of teaching: the language to be learnt, the learning process and the educational purposes of the enterprise. In themselves, however, they do not contain any indications about how we should actually teach. At the other end of the continuum there are specific materials and learning activities in classrooms. These constitute the point where real learning experiences are offered to real learners. However they cannot be offered randomly: some kind of conceptual framework is required for selecting and organizing them, so that they provide the kinds of conditions which are consistent with accepted views about language, learning, and education. So far, then, a set of theories and beliefs have been enumerated from which no practical implications have yet been drawn, and a set of concrete learning activities which still need to be organized into a coherent conceptual framework. The language teaching method supplies this conceptual framework, by specifying the pedagogical principles and procedures by
which theoretical conceptions can be converted into acts of teaching in the classroom. A three-stage continuum linking theory with practice may therefore be envisioned: (1) theory which exists independently of teaching, (2) principles and procedures for teaching which are consistent with this theory, and (3) specific acts of teaching which put these principles into operation. Since the first stage is not yet oriented toward the classroom and the third is subject to the unique interpretations and adaptations of individual teachers, it is the second stage which gives a method its defining identity. It is at this stage that the method specifies and justifies the kinds of input that learners need to receive, the kinds of activity they need to engage in, and the kinds of feedback they require about their own performance. A seminal article by Anthony (1963) assigns the label 'method' to this second stage alone, calling the first stage 'approach' and the third 'techniques.' However, it is now common to adopt the framework proposed by Richards and Rodgers (1986), who use the term 'method' to refer to the whole continuum from theory to practice and the labels 'approach,' 'design,' and 'procedures' for the individual stages. In this article 'method' will be understood in this more comprehensive sense. The next sections look at some of the methods that have determined the nature of language teaching in the twentieth century. Section 2 describes the search for the 'right' method which lasted until about 1970 and created the tradition on which most present practice is based. Section 3 considers the years since 1970, when teachers have been attracted by the less prescriptive framework for teaching which is generally called the 'communicative' approach. Section 4 looks at some alternative methods which have been proposed. The emphasis is on the principles and practices of the different methods rather than on historical detail. Readers who are interested in the latter can find it in Howatt 1984, Kelly 1969, and Titone 1968. Further discussion of the principles and procedures that the various methods embody can also be found in Larsen-Freeman 1986, Richards and Rodgers 1986, Rivers 1981, and Stern 1983. 2. The Search for the Right Method
For a large part of the twentieth century—until about the early 1970s—there was a strong belief among teachers and methodologists that there must be a 'right' method of teaching languages. It was only a question of searching until it was found. The search for this right method has dominated much of the recent development of language teaching. It has also led to the emergence of most of the key issues and practical procedures that determine the character of language teaching methodology today. Specific periods of this search are often associated with the dominance of specific language teaching 659
Teaching Additional Languages methods. Although there is usually an element of truth in these associations, the reality of the world of language teaching is always much more complex and varied. When a new method emerges, it does not simply replace the ones that preceded it. Even if it gains widespread acceptance, its diffusion is gradual and it does not reach every part of the language teaching world. There is no reason why it should, since there may well be countries where its demands conflict with the educational tradition. Even in those countries where it achieves a high degree of public recognition, there is no way of knowing what proportion of the teaching force actually adopt it in their classrooms or—perhaps most significant of all—to what extent many teachers adapt its principles and practices in crucial ways so that it suits their established teaching style. Thus, statements of the kind 'method X became dominant at time Y' involve a high degree of idealization. In reality there will be an immense variety of versions of method X in different classrooms round the world, an equally immense number of classrooms in which method X has not made an appearance at all, classrooms where the teacher is using their unique blend of method X and method Y, and indeed many classrooms where the teacher is just about to adopt the very method that, elsewhere, method X is rendering obsolete. With these words of caution, we will now look at five methods which have gained a high degree of dominance at different times and in different parts of the world, usually with the support of influential bodies such as government agencies and publishers. These are the grammar-translation method, the direct method, the structural-situational approach, the audio-lingual method, and its close relation, the audio-visual method. The principles and practices associated with these methods, as well as the issues which have been raised in debating them, continue to exert an important influence today.
2.1 The Grammar-translation Method The grammar-translation method has proved to be extremely tenacious. Throughout most of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, it has dominated classrooms in large parts of the world. Even when it has become obviously unsuited to the practical needs of learners, it has maintained its grip in many quarters and, indeed, can still be found in classrooms today. Its popularity is not surprising, since it fits well into the academic traditions of formal schooling. Indeed, in the days before the growth in world-wide communication established the need for foreign language learning on a large scale, one of the most important achievements of the grammartranslation method was that it helped teachers to persuade educational authorities that foreign language
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learning could be an intellectually challenging and therefore academically respectable activity. As its name suggests, the starting point for the method is the grammar of the language as it is presented in grammar books. This grammar, with its paradigms and rules, constitutes the main subjectmatter to be taught in the language lessons. Learners must memorize the paradigms, understand the rules, and learn to apply them in (mostly written) exercises. Often a lesson might introduce a large area of grammar at once (e.g., all personal pronouns or all the forms and uses of the perfect tense) and there are usually also long lists of vocabulary to be learnt, so that heavy demands are made on the learners' ability to understand and memorize complex new material. Language learning often bears more resemblance to the learning of mathematics than to language learning as it occurs outside the classroom. It can prove to be beyond the capacities of many less academicallyinclined learners and, since the learning is cumulative, once they begin to fall behind they can soon become irretrievably lost. The main learning activity is translation, either from or into the foreign language. This is supplemented by grammar exercises (e.g., changing the tenses of verbs or inserting the correct forms of pronouns), dictation and, in due course, essay-writing. A characteristic of these activities is that they demand conscious attention to the retrieval and accurate use of the foreign language forms. Translation into the foreign language, in particular, contains a high element of conscious problem-solving, because the texts are usually composed or selected not for their intrinsic interest but for the linguistic difficulties they present. It should be clear from this description that, apart from reading texts, the grammar-translation method has little place for foreign language communication in the classroom. The main vehicle for classroom interaction is the mother tongue. Many people who have learned through this method (including the present writer) can remember how the preparation for the oral examination at 16+ consisted of a few lessons at the end of the course. In addition, since much of the language in a grammar-translation course consists of artificial sentences which have been constructed to illustrate grammatical points, it is different in many ways from the language used in authentic communication situations. As a result, learners often find themselves in great difficulty if ever they are expected to perform in the foreign country. The grammar-translation method was developed at a time when a comparatively small proportion of language learners would expect to visit the foreign country. At least in secondary schools, therefore, its primary aim has not been to produce fluent users of the foreign language. It has had other aims: in particular, to encourage mental discipline, develop
Second Language Teaching Methods intellectual skills, and lay the foundations for further study of the foreign language, culture, and literature. Those who have engaged in this further study have usually gone to the foreign country as part of their later training and it is at this stage that their knowledge of the system of the language has been activated for the purposes of communication. The achievements of the grammar-translation method should not be underestimated, since it succeeded in opening up new worlds of experience and thought to many generations of such students. At the same time, those whose confidence and interest in foreign language learning have been painfully undermined bear witness to the shortcomings of the method. Nor should the fact be ignored that it cannot satisfy the practical needs of the vast majority of present-day language learners. 2.2 The Direct Method Alongside the academic tradition represented by the grammar-translation method, there is a long tradition of teaching which recognizes the fact that most learners need to use the foreign language for practical purposes. There is consequently a strong line of methods with a correspondingly practical and experiential basis. One such method is the direct method, which is familiar to many people under the name of one of its foremost proponents, Maximilian Berlitz. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century the 'Berlitz Method' has spread with his schools to most parts of the globe and is still in widespread use. Whereas the grammar-translation method upholds the academic conventions of formal schooling and applies them to foreign language learning, the direct method looks outside school and draws its inspiration from another language learning experience which is almost universally successful: children learning their mother tongue. Its 'directness' lies above all in its attempts to replicate key features of this experience by enabling learners to acquire the foreign language from direct exposure to it. The learners' own mother tongue is eliminated totally as a mediator of learning in the classroom and they are immersed in a 'bath of language,' from which they can absorb the new structures and vocabulary through live contact. Oral interaction between the teacher and the class is the dominant mode of learning. The interaction is mainly in the form of a structured conversation in which the members of the class are exposed to large amounts of language from the teacher and use it themselves by responding to questions. Particularly in the early stages, these question-and-answer sequences are carefully controlled so that they contain the structures and vocabulary to be learned and introduce the learners to language of increasing complexity. For example, the early lessons might begin with the learners answering the question 'What is this?' with a single word ('A pen'), then with the form 'It is a pen,' which can later be expanded to 'It is a blue pen.' Soon they
can answer the question 'Is it a pen?' with 'No, it is not a pen, it is a book,' and so on. Later the language will become less context-bound, more use will be made of reading texts as a source of language, and the oral sequences will allow more scope for creative expression. In sharp contrast to the grammar-translation method, grammar is not explained in the direct method. The teacher uses new grammar in contexts which should make clear its form and meaning. The learners are expected to 'induce' the patterns from these examples and begin to use them in response to the teacher's questions. Both for new patterns and for vocabulary, the teacher conveys meaning mainly through the nonlinguistic context (gestures, objects, and pictures) but also through association with language that is already known. The aim of these procedures is to establish direct associations between language and concepts, without any interference from the mother tongue: the learners should 'think in the foreign language' from the very beginning. The spread of Berlitz Schools around the world is testimony to the success that the direct method has enjoyed when conditions for it have been appropriate. The first of these conditions is naturally a teacher who is fully fluent in the foreign language (ideally, a native speaker). The second is a lively approach which can maintain the interest and motivation of the class, since the method depends on their continuous concentration on the language and their active participation in the interaction. This active participation is obviously easier to produce with small groups of premotivated learners (e.g., adults) than with large groups of 'captive' learners at school. In the latter situation, the method makes great demands on the teacher's energy and inventiveness. Unless the teacher has these qualities, children with less motivation or learning ability sometimes find themselves drowning in the language bath rather than learning from it. It is difficult to put any method into a compartment which sets it apart from the others and this is especially true of the direct method. Thus, a distinct line cannot be drawn between this method and a number of others, which share its emphasis on active use of the foreign language but allow more flexibility on such issues as the provision of grammatical exercises or mother-tongue equivalents. Some writers use the term 'direct method' to include these variations, while others use labels such as (in different settings) the 'Compromise Method,' the 'eclectic method,' and the 'oral method' (see Hawkins 1987 for a description of some of the adaptations that the direct method has undergone in UK schools during the twentieth century). An eclectic practitioner of the direct method in its broad definition could be indistinguishable in many aspects of classroom practice from a practitioner of the structural-situational approach, which is discussed in Sect. 2.3. 661
Teaching Additional Languages 2.3 The Structural-Situational Approach The principles of the structural-situational approach (which is often also known as 'situational language teaching' or the 'oral approach') began to take firm root in the UK tradition of English language teaching from the 1920s onward. They received their most powerful initial expression in the works which Palmer wrote for language teachers and their influence is still clearly evident in late twentieth century course-books and classrooms. The scaffolding for the structural-situational approach is provided by the main sentence patterns and structural words of the language. These are ordered into a graded sequence in such a way that each item builds upon previous ones and, step-bystep, the learner is able to internalize the basic system of the language. An example of how this grading can work in the early stages was given in the description of the direct method in Sect. 2.2. The structural-situational approach is based throughout on a rigorous sequencing of this kind. At the same time items of vocabulary are introduced according to considered criteria such as frequency, usefulness, or teachability (see also Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy). The first step in the actual teaching method is to devise a situation which will enable the teacher to introduce a new pattern and demonstrate its meaning. For example, if the new pattern is the present perfect tense, the teacher might ask a student to clean the blackboard and then say to the class 'Look! Nuria has cleaned the blackboard!' Further examples involving different people and action-verbs will follow. The teacher will probably ask the learners to imitate the models provided and then begin to ask questions about what the class have seen, such as: 'What has Nuria cleaned?,' 'Has she cleaned the desk?,' 'Who has opened the door?' and so on. Pictures and short texts are also often used to create situations in which the pattern can be presented and practiced. The aim is to find a sufficient variety of contexts to enable the learners to internalize the pattern and use it fluently themselves. When they have learned a number of patterns in this way, they will also be able to take part in more creative kinds of practice, in which they have to exploit the various aspects of their language knowledge in order to express less predictable meanings. In this way new patterns are integrated with the old into an increasingly comprehensive system for expressing meanings. As with the direct method, question-and-answer practice is the major learning activity. However, many other forms of oral and written practice are also used. These include pattern drills similar to the ones that form the backbone of the audio-lingual method (see Sect. 2.4 below) as well as less teacher-controlled activities such as practice in groups and pairs, roleplays, games, written exercises, and reading. Thus, although the role of the teacher is still clearly a 662
demanding one, the range of activities that is available for achieving variety and maintaining interest is wider than with the direct method. Since it has formed the basis for teaching in a large number of situations over the world, this approach has been enriched with an impressive repertoire of technical refinements. It was Palmer's conviction that language learning is a 'habit-forming process' and this view is reflected in the various forms of intensive practice that the structural-situational approach involves. It is also reflected in the importance attached to accuracy in the use of grammar and pronunciation. However the approach also has a strong cognitive element, which is expressed especially in two central principles. The first is its insistence that learners should perceive the patterns that underlie the language they are learning and use them creatively themselves. The second is its emphasis, at all stages of the learning process, on the importance of the meanings that language conveys in situations. Both of these features distinguish it from the more extreme forms of the audio-lingual method, which will be discussed in Sect. 2.4. The structural-situational approach has a firm core of principles and procedures but it is also tolerant of a wide range of additions and variations to suit the needs of different learners, teachers, and situations. In this respect it anticipates the more flexible approach to language teaching methodology that is widely accepted today. 2.4 The Audio-lingual Method In its heyday the audio-lingual method enjoyed unprecedented support from official bodies and publishers, notably in the USA. It originated during World War II as the so-called 'Army Method,' which was devised by American linguists in order to equip American personnel with the language skills that were suddenly urgently required. This urgency is reflected in the intensiveness of the method. After the war its main principles and procedures were adapted to other language teaching situations and given the label 'audio-lingual method.' For almost two decades it was widely believed (especially in the USA) that this method was based on such secure linguistic and psychological foundations that it must point the way towards the final scientific solution to the problems of language teaching. This has proved not to be the case for the method as a whole but many of its procedures still belong to the day-to-day repertoire of language teachers. American linguistics in the 1940s was dominated by the theories and procedures of structural linguistics. One of the most important of these procedures was 'constituent analysis.' This enabled sentences to be analyzed into their constituent parts in such a way that each part represented a 'slot' which could be occupied by alternative items. To take a simple example, the sentence The man has caught the ball could be
Second Language Teaching Methods analyzed initially into the three parts (1) The man, (2) has caught, and (3) the ball. Alternatives that could fill the first slot would be other animate nouns such as the girl or John, slot (2) could be occupied by various verbs such as has found or has bought, and slot (3) mainly by inanimate nouns such as the book or the pencil. These various possibilities could be represented in a 'substitution table': The man The girl John
has caught has found has bought
the ball the book the pencil
By selecting different combinations of items from each slot, 27 different sentences can be created, all based on the same 'pattern.' The same basic language material can also be used in a number of different but related patterns, such as the interrogative (Has the girl bought the book!) or the passive (The pencil has been found by John). This approach to language was joined by the learning theory that dominated psychology at the time: behaviorism. According to behaviorism, language is a form of behavior and learning is a process of habitformation. When applied to patterns such as those above, the theory results in the teaching procedure for which the audio-lingual method is most widely known: the pattern drill, in which the learners are required to use whatever pattern is currently being taught in order to give correct responses to stimuli from the teacher. For example, the language material above could for,m the basis for a 'substitution drill' in which different items (as cued by the teacher) are simply inserted into the appropriate slot (here S = stimulus, R = response): (Model: S: R: S: R:
The man has caught the ball) The girl... The girl has caught the ball ... the pencil The girl has caught the pencil (and so on).
It could also provide the basis for various kinds of 'transformation drill' in which sentences based on one pattern are transformed into another: S: R: S: R:
The man has caught the ball Has the man caught the ball? The girl has bought the pencil Has the girl bought the pencil? (and so on).
Since the period coincided with the spread of the tape-recorder and later the language laboratory, the stimulus would most often be provided by a recorded voice rather than a live teacher. In the language laboratory, learners could also record their responses and compare them with the correct versions provided on the tape. The claim was made that 'the tape never grows weary of repetition' but it was often forgotten
that the learners themselves could quickly grow weary of it. The audio-lingual method stresses the primacy of speech over writing and this is reflected in its other central procedure: the use of dialogs for the presentation of new language. These dialogs are also imitated and memorized ('mim-mem' techniques, where 'mim' is short for 'mimicry') and provide another means for the formation of language habits. The learners may later practice the dialogues with variations and take part in more creative forms of role-playing in similar situations. A fundamental principle of the audio-lingual method is that language items should be 'overlearned' to the point where they can be produced automatically and with total accuracy in response to appropriate stimuli. Because the learners' mother tongue is expected to interfere with the formation of correct habits, structures which contrast in the two languages are repeated and drilled with particular intensity. This emphasis on accuracy and intensive drilling means that a lot of time is spent in practicing individual pieces of language and comparatively little in more creative kinds of practice, where the learners have to select from their total language repertoire and the opportunities for errors are correspondingly high. This neglect of the creative aspects of language use has led to the most frequent and destructive criticism leveled against the audio-lingual method: that it enables learners to produce 'parrot-like' responses to specific stimuli but not to engage in real communication, where they have to express the personal meanings which arise in the course of interaction. In the late 1960s the audio-lingual method came under increasing attack not only for practical reasons (notably the one just mentioned and the boredom that it often creates) but also for the inadequacy of its theoretical basis. Its central assumption that language learning is a process of habit-formation was challenged by the supporters of Noam Chomsky, who emphasized the cognitive basis of language learning and language use. Their main argument was that, since people can create and interpret sentences they have never encountered before, language use must be based on a system of mental rules rather than a set of behavioral habits. Similarly, learning a language is a matter of internalizing rules rather than imitating habits. There followed an important controversy which led (in most quarters) to the recognition that language learning involves both habits and rules. An important state-of-the-art article by Carroll (1971) describes it as a process of 'cognitive habit-formation,' a term which parallels the view amongst psychologists of skill-acquisition that all skills have a cognitive as well as a behavioral basis. Carroll notes that the same balance between cognitive and habit-forming aspects of learning is a feature of Palmer and his tradition (see Sect. 2.3). His suggestion that one characteristic of 663
Teaching Additional Languages effective teachers, whatever method they profess, is an instinctive ability to achieve an appropriate balance between these two dimensions of learning, would draw agreement from most teachers and methodologists today.
be adapted to different situations. This attitude, which has coincided with the emergence of important new ideas about the nature of language and learning, has led to the shaping of what has come to be known as the 'communicative approach.'
2.5 The Audio-visual Method The audio-visual method adopts many of the same principles as the audio-lingual method. In particular it draws its main psychological inspiration from behaviorism, so that learners spend a lot of time in habit-forming activities such as repeating dialogues and performing pattern drills. It is distinguished from the audio-lingual method mainly by the central role that it gives to situation and meaning. As its name suggests, the core materials of an audiovisual course are a set of audio-tapes and accompanying visuals, usually filmstrips. The visuals are intended to create a situational context for the language and to represent the meanings of individual utterances in the dialogs. They also help the learners to remember the language by associating it with concrete images and serve as stimuli for them to reproduce it. When the language of a dialogue has been memorized, the teacher is expected to 'exploit' it by engaging the learners in other kinds of oral activity, especially question-and-answer sequences. In this respect it links in not only with the audio-lingual method but also with the direct method and the structural-situational approach, in which oral practice based on situations and visuals is also a common teaching technique (see Sects. 2.2 and 2.3 above). It is significant that the audio-visual method reached its most widespread popularity in Europe, where it took its place in the same tradition as the direct method and the structural-situational approach. Like the audio-lingual method in the USA, the audio-visual method in Europe (especially the UK and France) was heralded as the definitive answer to the problems of language teaching but, by the end of the 1960s, it had failed to yield the universal results that were hoped for.
3.1 Principles of the Communicative Approach At the core of the communicative approach is a more thoroughgoing analysis than previously of the nature of communication and the role that language plays in it. This is accompanied by new insights into the processes that enable people to learn a language. This section will first take a brief look at these background developments, since they are crucial to understanding what has taken place in the field of language teaching methodology. Communication has been the recognized goal of most previous language teaching methods. However, it has usually been assumed (implicitly or explicitly) that the route to this goal is simply through mastering the structures and vocabulary of the language, that is, through achieving 'linguistic competence.' Developments in linguistics have led to the formulation of the notion of 'communicative competence,' which includes linguistic competence but goes beyond it. The notion helps to explain why so many learners have achieved poor levels of communicative ability through structure-based methods. Analyses of communicative competence reveal the complex relationship that exists between structures and meanings, especially when we consider not only the conceptual meanings of sentences but also the communicative functions they perform in situations. For example, an apparently straightforward declarative sentence such as The door's open could function as an explanation ('that's why it's so cold'), a reassurance ('don't worry, you'll be able to get out'), a request ('close it, please'), and in many other ways, depending on the situation. Conversely, a request could be expressed not only through the above sentence but also more directly through, for example, Would you mind closing the door] or simply Close the door, please. The selection of one form rather than the other is governed by linguistic factors, situational factors, and conventions of social appropriacy. In order to communicate both effectively and appropriately, learners must therefore be aware of the links between language forms and all aspects of meaning (conceptual, functional, and social) and also be able to express and interpret specific links in specific situations. Moreover, it is not enough to learn to do this for individual utterances. Communication is a process of interaction, in which meanings are developed and negotiated over longer stretches of discourse. It is therefore necessary to learn ways of structuring information and creating cohesive links over longer stretches of writing, ways of opening and closing conversations, ways of disagreeing without producing confrontation, and so on.
3. The Communicative Approach
By the beginning of the 1970s, in many parts of the language-teaching world, a period of disappointment and disorientation had set in amongst those who were active in seeking to improve language teaching methods. There was also a feeling that the search for the right method was futile in any case: there are so many individual differences amongst learners, situations, and teachers that they could not possibly all be served by one single teaching method. This belief has led teachers and methodologists to begin to explore how they can base their teaching on a more flexible framework of principles and procedures, which is less prescriptive than a fixed method and can
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Second Language Teaching Methods These issues are explored further in Brumfit and Johnson (1979), Brumfit (1984), and Richards and Schmidt (1983). As well as this extended notion of what communicative competence entails, the communicative approach also draws on a broader conception of learning (Littlewood 1992; Lightbown and Spada 1999). The model of learning that underlies most previous methods is based on the conception of language learning as a form of skill learning. Items of language are isolated by the teacher and taught as 'part-skills'; the learners practice them separately in order to make them as automatic as possible; they also engage in 'whole-task' practice in which they have to integrate the separate items in order to communicate. In the communicative approach this model remains valid but it is joined by a view of learning as a process of natural growth. Studies of second language learning in natural settings and analyses of the kinds of error made in classrooms provide evidence that learners have their own active mechanisms for making sense of language input and constructing their own system. The main conditions for the operation of these natural mechanisms include exposure to large amounts of language and motivation to use it for real communication. An important function of language teaching methodology is therefore to provide opportunities for the learners to process the language through this kind of natural exposure and use. As well as specific teaching procedures, this also requires a supportive classroom environment in which the learners will feel ready to engage in spontaneous interaction with the teacher and each other. 3.2 Practice of the Communicative Approach The communicative approach benefits from the rich history of language teaching and does not reject in principle any learning activity that might increase the communicative ability of a particular group of learners. This pragmatic flexibility, together with the emphasis that the approach places on the importance of individual differences, means that it tolerates a wide range of variation in classroom implementation. However, there are some common features of practice which derive from its basic principles. The most important practical feature of the approach is its insistence on the active role of the learners in the classroom. The demands of communication mean that they must learn not only to respond but also to initiate. The demands of the learning process mean that they must become actively involved with the language. There is, therefore, a large proportion of 'learner-centered' and 'task-based' activities, in which the learners operate outside the direct control of the teacher (Legutke and Thomas 1991; Nunan 1998; Willis 1996). For example they may interact in pairs in order to practice the language for important communicative functions, read auth-
entic texts in order to perform a comprehension task, engage in group discussion in the foreign language or carry out a project on a chosen topic. In the structural-situational approach (see Sect. 2.3), the learners use language mainly to express information that is already known to the teacher and the other learners (e.g., to describe visuals that everybody can see in any case). This means that the language has conceptual meaning but no communicative function (see Sect. 3.1; also Widdowson 1978) and the learners have insufficient opportunities to incorporate it into their own communicative system. A particularly important feature of the communicative approach is that it tries to provide such opportunities by developing a wide repertoire of activities in which the learners use language for a communicative purpose. In the domains of speaking and listening, these range from simple informationexchange activities (e.g., communicating information about train times in order to complete a timetable) to discussion, problem-solving tasks, and role-plays (Littlewood 1981). There are equivalent techniques for reading and writing (Harmer 1991; Ur 1996). In what Howatt (1984) calls the 'strong' version of the communicative approach, communication activities of this kind take up nearly all the learning time. In the 'weak' version, which is adopted more frequently and stands more closely in line with the inherited languageteaching tradition, they are an important component within an overall framework which also includes 'precommunicative' activities such as the controlled practice of structures or communicative functions. The extended conception of the conditions for learning which underlies the communicative approach has important implications for the role of the the teacher. As a 'facilitator of learning' in the broadest sense, the teacher no longer performs exclusively as an instructor who has knowledge and skills to impart. Depending on the nature of the activity, the teacher may also act as an animateur, who stimulates an activity and then withdraws (e.g., from a role-play); as a cocommunicator, who adopts an equal role in the interaction to that of the learners (e.g., in a discussion); or as a counselor, who is available to help and advise (e.g., in project-based activity). The nature of the feedback which the teacher gives to the learners about their performance also varies according to the purpose of the activity. For example, if the main focus is on the practice of specific forms, the teacher may correct the learners' performance in the familiar way. However, there are many activities in which the focus is on the expression of meanings and the main yardstick for success is effective communication. In this case, the teacher may withhold formal correction, either completely or until later. This also has important implications for evaluation and testing (see Language Testing).
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Teaching Additional Languages This diversity in the teacher's role has been reinforced by work in the area of 'learner autonomy' (Benson and Voller 1997; Dickinson 1987; Little 1991). This work explores ways of enabling the learners to become increasingly independent of the teacher, both as language users and as learners, so that they cannot only communicate freely but also assume responsibility for their own learning, inside and outside the classroom. 4. Alternative Methods
The communicative approach has introduced many important innovations but it can still be clearly located within the mainstream tradition of language teaching methodology. It draws on the collective experience of this tradition and recognizes many of its well-established principles and techniques. In the way it is usually implemented, it also keeps to the familiar framework of presentation, practice ('pre-communicative' activity), and creative use ('communicative' activity). Some teachers believe that the problems of language teaching demand more radical solutions and have proposed alternative methods which depart from the main tradition. Although they have been followed only in a small number of teaching situations and often in comparatively favorable circumstances (e.g., small groups of adults), the discussion which they have provoked and the issues which they have raised have exerted an important influence outside their immediate spheres of operation. Here six such methods will be described briefly. The first three (Sect. 4.1) aim to apply directly to the language classroom the insights which have been gained from observing natural language acquisition outside the classroom. The other three (Sect. 4.2) build partly on insights from humanistic psychology and seek ways to involve the 'whole person' in the language learning experience. 4.1 Acquisition-based Approaches Section 3.1 demonstrated that the communicative approach adopts a wider view of learning than previous methods and recognizes the importance of natural learning processes. The approaches described in this section draw more radical conclusions from the natural learning experience: they propose that teachers should stop trying to control the learning process itself and concentrate instead on creating conditions in which natural processes can operate. The Total Physical Response Approach is based on the observation that children learn a lot of their first language through responding to commands. In the same way the foreign language course can be organized around commands of increasing degrees of complexity. At first, for example, they may take the form of simple imperatives (Sit down! Open the book!) in situations where the learners can be helped to under-
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stand the meaning through gestures and watching each other's responses. Later the learners have to understand more complex forms in order to know what they should do, for example: If Mary is wearing a white blouse, take John's smallest book and put it near the window! The need to respond physically ensures that the learners process the language and construct their own language system. They are not forced to produce language themselves but, eventually, the desire to speak emerges naturally. This same idea that learners develop an internal system through understanding a lot of language ('comprehensible input') also lies at the heart of the Natural Approach. In the view of its main proponents (Krashen and Terrell 1983), only the language that people acquire through natural processes can be used for spontaneous communication. The language that is learned as a result of conscious instruction performs only a subordinate role as a means of 'monitoring' our production and increasing its accuracy. In the classroom, teachers should therefore concentrate on exposing learners to vast amounts of comprehensible input by involving them in situations of communication. As with the Total Physical Response Approach, speech should be left to emerge naturally, when the learners are ready. The reduction of the role of conscious learning is taken still further by what Prabhu (1987) calls 'Communicational Teaching.' Prabhu argues that teachers' attempts to present language in organized sequences, explain it, or correct the forms that learners produce can actually impede learning, since these conscious ways of dealing with language do not necessarily bear any resemblance to how the learners need to organize the system in their own minds. Language activity should therefore always be 'meaning-focused,' so that the learners can engage their natural mechanisms and develop their own system. Prabhu's proposal for implementing this is to organize learning around series of problem-solving tasks which must be carried out through language. The learners are given feedback about their success in the task but not about the accuracy of the language they use. 4.2 Humanistic Approaches Another feature built into the communicative approach is its acceptance that learning is influenced strongly by affective factors such as motivation and a sense of being involved as a whole person in the classroom. The first two 'humanistic' methods described in this section attach special importance to creating conditions which satisfy the learners' affective needs. All three try to induce the learners to engage their whole selves in the learning process. Their principles and procedures are discussed in more detail in Stevick (1990). Community Language Learning, which derives from ideas in counseling-therapy, sees foreign language
Second Language Teaching Methods learning as a potentially stressful and threatening experience. The classroom must therefore provide learners with a warm, supportive network of human relationships, in which they feel accepted and ready to commit themselves. This is achieved by engaging a group of 6-12 learners in a special kind of conversation. At first, they speak only in their first language and a 'language counselor' (who sits outside the circle of the group) provides simple foreign language equivalents. Later, the learners produce utterances themselves in the foreign language, helped if necessary by the teacher-counselor. Periods of 'reflection' enable learners and teacher to work together on the language that has emerged. A major priority is to maintain the learners' sense of security and allow them to retain the initiative in the learning process. The learners' sense of security is also a major consideration in Suggestopedia, which draws its rationale from the psychology of 'suggestion.' The underlying belief is that human beings are capable of learning vast amounts of material easily but that they grow up with the misconception that learning is difficult. This creates anxieties and tensions which constitute psychological barriers to learning. Teaching must therefore find ways to bypass these barriers through various suggestive techniques and so liberate the unused learning resources which lie deep in the personality. First, a situation is created in which the learners feel completely relaxed and confident. They are given new identities to encourage them to shed their everyday worries and expectations. Then, against a background of baroque music (which uses exactly the appropriate rhythms to penetrate the subconscious realms) and with a special kind of intonation, the teacher reads out foreign language dialogs for the learners to understand (with the help of mothertongue equivalents) and memorize. The dialogs can later serve as a basis for other kinds of language work such as role-playing. The Silent Way sets out to encourage learners to exploit their full learning potential in different ways. The most characteristic teaching aid in the method is a set of cuisenaire rods around which the use of the foreign language is centered. After introducing language into the learning group (e.g., I am giving the blue rod to Peter, accompanied by the appropriate action), the teacher intervenes as little as possible. As the learners use the language with each other, the teacher gives signals as to its acceptability and requires them to make new attempts when appropriate. However, the teacher avoids providing them with correct versions, since they are expected to focus all their mental energy on the language and develop their own inner criteria for its use. Likewise, with the soundcharts that accompany the method, the teacher points to letters which represent different sounds of the language and silently asks the learners to re-shape their own attempts to reproduce them, until they
approximate as closely as possible to the foreign language sounds. Although the Silent Way is usually classified as a 'humanistic' approach, it expects a different kind of engagement from the other two: one which is based on intense mental concentration rather than on a relaxed sense of well-being. 5. Conclusion By means of language teaching methodology, teachers intervene into the natural course of learners' language development by controlling key aspects of their experience. These key aspects determine the questions to which answers have to be found. For example, teachers have to decide what kinds of input the learners should receive at particular times (spoken or written language? extensive texts or short samples which exemplify key features? authentic language or language that has been devised specially for teaching? etc.). They must decide how the learners should be asked to process this input (simply understand it? respond to its content? analyze it? repeat and memorize it? manipulate it in drills and exercises? etc.). They must decide what other tasks the learners should be asked to perform through language (engage in discussion or role-playing? solve problems? exchange information? report on experiences? etc.). Finally, they must decide what kinds of feedback they should provide about the learners' performance (correct their errors? respond to the messages they express? give information about their success in specific tasks? etc.). This article has presented some of the answers that have been proposed to these questions in the context of different methods and approaches. As regards the individual classroom, however, no two teachers will recognize exactly the same set of answers to the same set of questions. At the individual level, therefore, the boundaries between methods become blurred. A teacher may adopt, for example, most of the techniques associated with the communicative approach but continue to use translation exercises associated with the grammar-translation method. In this way every teacher makes their unique synthesis of the answers that are made available by the long tradition of language teaching and, perhaps, offers some new solutions as well. Language teaching methodology has been an arena for debate and experimentation for many centuries and yet it still generates as many questions as answers. Indeed, one outcome of the intense activity since the 1970s has been that the full complexity of all the factors involved is now acknowledged—and how little is really understood about them. Nonetheless, because language teaching is a practical activity which must produce measurable results, each teacher has to find provisional answers to the basic questions and convert these answers into a framework for action. The combination of these two factors—the multitude of ques667
Teaching Additional Languages tions, together with the pressure to find ever more satisfactory answers—will ensure that the debate and experimentation continue unabated. Bibliography Anthony E M 1963 Approach, method and technique. English Language Teaching 17:63-67 Benson P, Voller P (eds.) 1997 Autonomy and Independence in Language Learning. Longman, London Brumfit C J 1984 Communicative Methodology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Brumfit C J, Johnson K (eds.) 1979 The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Carroll J B 1971 Current issues in psycholinguistics and second language teaching. TESOL Quarterly 5:101-14 Dickinson L 1987 Self-Instruction in Language Learning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Harmer J 1983 The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman, London Harmer J 1991 The Practice of English Language Teaching, 2nd edn. Longman, London Hawkins E W 1987 Modern Languages in the Curriculum, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Howatt APR 1984 A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Kelly L G 1969 25 Centuries of Language Teaching. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Krashen S D, Terrell T D 1983 The Natural Approach. Pergamon Press, Oxford Larsen-Freeman D 1986 Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, New York Legutke M, Thomas H (eds.) 1991 Process and Experience in the Language Classroom. Longman, London
Lightbown P, Spada N 1999 How Languages Are Learned, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford Little D 1991 Learner Autonomy: Definitions, Issues and Problems. Authentik, Dublin Littlewood W T 1981 Communicative Language Teaching: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Littlewood W T 1992 Teaching Oral Communication: A Methodological Framework. Blackwell, Oxford NunanD 1988 The Learner-Centred Curriculum. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Palmer H E 1922, repr. 1964 The Principles of Language Study. Oxford University Press, Oxford Prabhu N S 1987 Second Language Pedagogy. Oxford University Press, Oxford Richards J C, Rodgers T S 1986 Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Richards J C, Schmidt R W (eds.) 1983 Language and Communication. Longman, London Rivers W M 1981 Teaching Foreign-Language Skills, 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Stern H H 1983 Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Stevick E W 1990 Humanism in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Titone R 1968 Teaching Foreign Languages: An Historical Sketch. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Ur P 1996 A Course in Language Teaching: Practice and Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Widdowson H G 1978 Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford University Press, Oxford Willis J 1996 A Framework for Task-based Learning. Longman, London
Speaking: Second Language Pedagogy M. Bygate
Paradoxically, proficiency in speaking is often assumed to be the central aim of foreign language courses, and yet the methodology for teaching oral proficiency is not always clearly distinguished from more general aspects of language pedagogy. This article first briefly considers this paradox; it then looks at the nature of the pedagogy of oral language processing, the pedagogy of oral discourse, and concludes with a discussion of the role of the teacher. 1. Oral Proficiency in Foreign Language Teaching
The many methods that have been devised for teaching foreign languages have generally concentrated on oral proficiency as a means of learning language forms, rather than as a particular type of language proficiency to be learnt in its own right. Some meth668
odologies use oral processing to promote repetition and memorization, while others use it as a medium for eliciting and comprehending new language items presented by the teacher. Some methodologies concentrate on the language for use in different situations, while others concentrate on the language of politeness and interaction. Few have elaborated detailed syllabuses for the development and assessment of oral skills, comparable, say, to those developed for teaching reading and writing. In spite of the tendency to confuse oral activities with general pedagogical aims, most methodologies nonetheless generally contain activities which in fact lead learners to practice different oral skills, albeit often without explicit organization. The methodologies that have been used, however, have differed
Speaking: Second Language Pedagogy in focus in terms of their view of the nature of language and of language learning. The first major difference has been as to whether language courses in general— and oral skills in particular—should aim to conform to the target language in terms of grammatical rules and lexico-grammatical expressions, or whether language is essentially a tool for creative selfexpression, in which the rules of grammar are seen as a reference point rather than a straitjacket. Directly related to this controversy has been the debate over whether language learning is principally a matter of learning to conform via a process of repetition, familiarization, and routinization, or whether it is largely a process of learner-directed exploration. This article takes the view that both elements are necessary—the routinization of foreign norms as a target for language use, and the exploration of individual preferences for modes of expression: routinization and exploration, conformity and creativity are inevitable features of language learning and language use. The problem of oral language pedagogy is how to promote fluency and accuracy across these fundamental dimensions. The focus, then, is on the question: what types of exercises can be used to develop oral fluency and oral accuracy, first of all as distinct from written proficiency, and then, in terms of developing a mastery of oral discourse skills? 2. Exercises for Oral Language Processing Oral language processing involves the formation of communicative intentions, in the form of plans, and their subsequent realization through speech (Levelt 1989). The plans include the message content to be communicated, and the language needed to convey it. Since this process is unscripted, the speaker is mainly involved in piecemeal elaboration of messages, and their eventual execution. In this, spoken language differs from written language in two key ways: first, it is fragmented; and second, it is contextualized. The pedagogy of spoken language first needs to provide practice in these two dimensions if the mastery of spoken language skills is an objective of the course. 2.1 Fragmentation Whereas written language usually consists of fully formed, and possibly quite elaborate sentences, spoken language characteristically uses a wider variety of syntactic units, often much smaller than the sentence. Short phrases are frequently employed (Carter and McCarthy 1997; Chafe 1982). In addition, editing is overt in speech, in contrast to writing, where such processes are covert as far as the finished product is concerned. Thus, repetition, reformulation, selfcorrection, false starts, pauses, and hesitations are all present. Speakers are not expected to perform without such features even in their first language: dysfluent speech should not be discouraged in the second language classroom either. Such features occur nat-
urally precisely because speech is improvised. Planning time is limited, plans change during execution, and so time needs to be gained through these devices if the flow of speech is to be maintained. For the same reason, phrases (as opposed to full syntactic sentences) are often used where they are communicatively adequate. Thus, exercises for oral language development need to allow for the presence of such features. A basic requirement therefore is for such exercises to require the unscripted use of oral language. Authentic features of speech which arise through lack of planning time will only occur if speech has to be planned afresh during the activity. Drill exercises therefore are not appropriate activities for providing practice in this dimension of speech production. Task exercises (drill exercises and task exercises are further described under Sect. 3 below) on the other hand tend to involve the use of unscripted speech, and thus are more likely to encourage the occurrence of fragmentation features. 2.2 Contextualization The second basic feature of spoken language is that it is generally to some extent contextualized. Generally, speakers have the opportunity to refer directly to all participants in the discourse, as well as to physical and temporal features of the situation. Thus, speakers will require the use of first and second person pronouns, demonstrative pronouns and adjectives, and deictic adverbs (Chafe 1982). Contextualization is also a reason why spoken language tolerates far more ellipsis than written language: the context, and the presence of the interlocutors, make it possible for speakers to achieve greater economy, given that misunderstandings can always be clarified if understanding has been compromised. Finally, context also tends to have an effect on the occurrence of a number of verb forms, notably the present progressive and present perfect aspects. Task exercises will typically encourage the use of such forms, along with the use of future constructions and the imperative, in language used to organize and monitor the progress of assigned tasks. 2.3 Drills and Speech Production Whereas drills can practice the production of particular language forms and patterns, and the formulation of specific linguistic contrasts in the target language, they are nonetheless clearly insufficient in terms of providing adequate practice of the use of these features within the context of normal communicative speech production. It is worth reviewing the reasons for these shortcomings: (a) It is in the nature of drills that they require the use of a cued form, rather than the formulation of a particular message. The learner is given a model sentence, and then required to produce
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Teaching Additional Languages sentences with similar patterns given a new cue word. The result is that the learner can quite easily produce a formally correct required response without actually thinking about the meaning, or any of the other things that speakers have to attend to during normal speech. The response is cued by the model plus a new stimulus, shortcutting the need for attention to meaning. (b) In most drills the message is also preselected: the learner is not being required to select a message and then to find a way of expressing it. Instead, the message is predetermined by the cues which indicate the required response. (c) The syntactic form of the message is also predetermined by the cues, so that the speaker does not necessarily have to choose the appropriate structure and elaborate it during speech. (d) During drills the speaker is not having to respond to an interlocutor, nor ensure that an interlocutor is understanding. (e) The point of a drill is to emphasize speed of response. The pausing of natural speech is thus discouraged by the rhythm of the exercise. The limitations of drills are thus multiple, and indicate why teachers and students are frequently frustrated by the artificiality and lack of transfer of drill practice. On the other hand, the very limitations of drills are their strength: drills permit the controlled practice of certain aspects of oral proficiency, by relieving the learner of a number of decisions which might overwhelm him and impede performance. Nonetheless, natural language processing is not to be found in the context of controlled drills, nor for that matter in other similarly controlled exercises such as reading aloud, or the production of memorized dialogues. Normal speech involves the improvised use of language in real time to communicate the speaker's own messages, as they are planned, for sharing with a specific interlocutor. Whereas drills can be useful to help the automation of lower level lexico-grammatical and phonological skills, their use does not extend to the practice of lower level skills in the context of higher level decisions. It is this realization which has considerably altered the pedagogy of spoken language in recent years. 2.4 Oral Language Proficiency: An Integrated View The teaching of oral proficiency has come to be seen as the development of a skill in which two fundamental elements need to be integrated—relative accuracy in the use of features, and relative fluency in their deployment. 2.4.1 Accuracy Accuracy can be defined as the dimension relating to the clarity, appropriacy, and correctness of a particular message in relation to the interlocutors
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involved and a given linguistic norm (this definition differs from that proposed by Brumfit 1984). The success of a message is affected by its selection, formulation, and comprehensibility of execution, always bearing in mind the age and background of the interlocutor(s). This dimension then covers the use of grammar, pronunciation, as well as the use of vocabulary and the selection of appropriate expressions, discourse markers, and register. For pedagogical purposes, it is important to bear in mind that undue emphasis on grammatical and phonological accuracy can have two effects: first, it can divert attention from the selection of lexical or idiomatic expressions. And second, if it results in a disproportionate amount of criticism, it can discourage learners, since grammatical features are often the parts of languages which are at one and the same time the hardest to learn, and offer the least obvious return for effort expended, due to their relative redundancy (George 1972; Van Patten 1996). A broader emphasis is, thus, generally favored amongst methodologists and teacher educators, for example, Skehan (1998); Willis (1996); but see Loschky and Bley-Vroman (1993) and Bygate (1999) for an alternative view. 2.4.2 Fluency Fluency is the ability to choose, formulate, and execute the expression of messages in reasonable time. What is reasonable in terms of time can vary according to context, intention, preparation, and level of proficiency of the learner. In any case, even in first language situations the speed of delivery can vary according to conditions or contexts: in an important interview, technical debate, or presentation, speakers may well speak at a more measured pace than during casual conversation in the lunch queue. Practice will also often give rise to improved fluency, even where performance is routine rather than verbatim (Fillmore 1979). There is, therefore, a possible trade-off between fluency and accuracy: slower performance may be more accurate in various ways than quicker production of speech. Teaching and assessment therefore need to consider fluency under different conditions to develop and assess a learner's proficiency. Thus, speech, like all use of language, is to a large extent a type of skilled behavior. This means that typically accuracy and fluency increase in direct proportion to the simplicity and/or familiarity of a given task. Scripted tasks are thus simpler to perform than unscripted tasks. Cued tasks are likely to be simpler than uncued tasks. Patterned tasks are likely to be easier than unpatterned ones. Closed tasks, involving a single pathway or approach, with a single unambiguous goal, are simpler than open tasks, offering a range of possible pathways, and a range of possible solutions. Tasks involving several interlocutors are
Speaking: Second Language Pedagogy likely to be more complicated than tasks involving few participants. Short tasks are likely to be easier than long ones. And prepared, rehearsed, or otherwise familiar tasks are likely to be simpler to perform than unfamiliar ones. This view lends support to the widespread notion that practice activities can be usefully organized to help learners by providing support in various ways (such as cuing, patterning, scripting, repetition, and chorus work) in the early stages. Littlewood (1981) stresses the value of precommunicative activities. Rivers and Temperley (1978) suggest the need for 'skillgetting' as well as 'skill-using' activities. And Harmer (1983) distinguishes between 'practice' and 'communication' activities, while Brumfit (1984) argues for the use of accuracy activities and fluency activities— any activity being a potential focus for either dimension. The provision of various kinds of support for learners still leaves plenty of scope for learners to practice on more complex activities, which is the theme of the next section. 3. Pedagogy of Oral Discourse In the preceding section, it was shown that oral language pedagogy needs to take into consideration the conditions of oral language production, so that exercises provide practice in the kinds of language processing typical of speech. The skill of oral language production can be roughly represented by the diagram in Fig. 1:
Figure 1. A basic model of speech production, cf. Levelt 1989.
In addition to this, however, clearly an oral syllabus needs to involve learners in the exercise of this skill in a range of different contexts and for a multitude of different purposes in which they are likely to have to use speech: oral discourse can vary considerably in structure and content, showing characteristics quite distinct from those of written language, and the pedagogy of oral language needs to take this potential range into consideration when attempting to meet the needs of different learners. The characteristics of oral discourse have been usefully separated into two main dimensions: transactional features, and interactional features (Brown and Yule 1983). 3.1 Transactional and Interactional Features The term 'transaction' refers to the information focus of the discourse. Transactional discourse typically
includes macrodiscourse types, such as description, narration, instruction, and explanation. These discourse types can characteristically form extended chunks of discourse, although they may also make up quite short passages of speech, indeed short turns. The 'interactional' dimension, on the other hand, relates to the aspects of the discourse which are negotiated by the interlocutors. Negotiation can be overt, or covert, and can cover a number of features, such as the participation and understanding of the interlocutors, and the topic of the discourse. These two dimensions will be looked at more closely. (The term 'interaction' is being used slightly differently here from the way it was employed by Brown and Yule 1983.) 3.7.7 Transactional features of oral discourse Transactional language, the language of information content, focuses on the communication of information. Descriptions, for example, may present information about people, places, objects, buildings, institutions, works of art, food, etc. Instructions will explain how to follow recipes, rules, directions, administrative procedures, laws and regulations. They may include instructions for use of appliances, and the highway code. Narrations may involve stories, historical accounts of events and journeys, accidents, diary reports, and news reports. Process descriptions, another form of transactional discourse, tend to report experiments or describe processes of production. Comparisons, a further type of transactional discourse, will often relate two descriptions or narrations or sets of instructions in order to identify similarities and differences, advantages and disadvantages. Transactional language will tend to involve repeated use of particular verb forms, especially simple verb forms. Noun group reference—the use of definite articles, often combined with adjectives and postmodifying clauses or phrases—often needs to be managed clearly and unambiguously. Time or sequence markers in the form of adverbial adjuncts or conjuncts, will also often be important. Transactional language is conveniently practiced by the use of factual prompts—genuine or fictitious, pictorial or verbal. Pictures or diagrams are often used to give rise to story telling, descriptions, comparisons, historical narratives, and instructions. Indeed, the use of diagrams and pictures to cue speech (or indeed to prompt written language) is one of the simplest and most far-reaching developments in language teaching generally since the invention of drills. A key element of transactional discourse is that it is of importance to the listener. Oral exercises therefore commonly create an 'information gap': the listener needs to listen to the speaker in order to obtain some information which has been deliberately omitted from the listener's materials. Simple examples of information gap activities can be found in Matthews and
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Teaching Additional Languages Reid (1981), and Littlewood (1981). The use of materials for more extended transactional discourse is demonstrated in Brown and Yule (1983), and in Bygate (1987). 3.1.2 Interactional features of oral discourse Interactional features of discourse are always present in speech—just as speech is impossible without some information content. Interactional features, however, are those which arise from a need to negotiate the development and success of the discourse with the interlocutors. The participation of the interlocutors is an essential aspect of oral interaction, and this includes turntaking (who speaks for how long and when), which is often straightforward, but can often involve interruptions, politeness markers, and the use of backchannels. A second aspect of speech participation is the adoption and distribution of different speech roles. In teacherclass interaction one danger is that the teacher always adopts the same central role in the interaction, while the students always have to act in a different, more peripheral role. In real life, speakers need to be able to act in a range of roles—as active listener, as main raconteur, as seeker of information, as explainer and guide. These different aspects of oral interaction may not need to be explicitly taught, but they may need to be practiced in different exercises (McCarthy 1991). In addition to participation in the interaction, speakers need to be able to negotiate the selection of topics and ensure mutual understanding. Topic selection involves the use of the ability to change or develop a topic of discourse. Negotiation of understanding, on the other hand, involves the ability and skill of checking that one has understood the message, or checking that one's interlocutor has understood, and clarifying where necessary (Yule and Tarone 1991). Finally, interactive features include interpersonal speech acts, such as agreeing, disagreeing, greeting, questioning, apologizing, and the ability to handle different degrees of formality. Activities which are likely to provide practice in the interactive dimensions of oral discourse clearly need to involve students in activities requiring clarification of information; varying kinds of formality; the need to cooperate on tasks, and to exchange opinions as well as information; and participation in interaction with differing numbers of interactants in a range of different roles. Transactionbased activities can clearly provide practice in 'a number of these features. However, some activities, perhaps at more advanced levels of proficiency, may need to involve participants in discussions, debates, and a variety of activities using different formats, but allowing a wide range of choice of topic and opinion. 3.1.3 Summary Identification of transactional and interactional dimensions of language enables course providers to
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identify a range of potential needs that courses might hope to meet. In recent years a number of different types of oral exercises have been developed to meet these needs. Such exercises can be used systematically to vary the amount of support that learners receive on tasks, and to provide a range of different discourse types which learners can be required to practice and explore. The following section provides a brief outline of the principal types of exercises that have been produced, together with an indication of how they can contribute to developing some of the different aspects of oral proficiency that have been identified above. 3.2 Exercise Types for Oral Discourse Oral exercises can conveniently be grouped into four kinds: drill exercises; task exercises; dramatizations; and project exercises. Each kind of exercise can be used at any level of proficiency, and can be used to develop transactional and interactional skills, as needed. Since the complexity of an exercise is a function of the number of decisions and amount of information to be processed by the speaker, drill exercises are by definition the least complex, all other things being equal, while projects are potentially the most complex. Drill and task exercises are cued at the time of performance, whereas dramatizations are not. Projects are essentially cued by the speakers themselves. In the case of drills, the cue is at the level of the sentence, whereas in task exercises the cue is at the level of task. The following subsections will look at each of these exercise types in turn. 3.2.1 Drill exercises Drills can be used to practice the production of transactional language in particular, since they typically provide the opportunity to manipulate minimally distinctive elements of the language. This frequently means practicing features of verb tense, aspect, and concord; clause and sentence structure; and noun inflections and modifications. These features are commonly associated with the notional base (Wilkins 1976) of the language. Drills can also be used however to practice the production and formulation of a range of speech acts of an interactional nature, as well as a number of turntaking gambits, and exchange patterns and adjacency pairs (such as greetings, invitations and responses, apologies and responses). Drills can be scripted or unscripted. Scripted drills are most common, and are generally published in the form of prerecorded tapes. Unscripted drills can also be found. These can be information gap drills (such as Matthews and Reid 1981, in which several of the exercises are utterance-focused rather than taskfocused) or noninformation gap drills, in which pictures are used as a stimulus for a series of utterances of a given type (e.g., Harkess and Eastwood 1976,1981).
Speaking: Second Language Pedagogy 3.2.2 Task exercises Task exercises are cued activities using either nonverbal or verbal support. They are by definition unscripted, and set a task which learners complete by a sequence of exchanges. An example of a task exercise would be a 'picture differences' activity in which speakers have to identify the differences between two pictures, of which each speaker can only see one. Information has to be pooled orally. Such tasks can be more or less controlled. At the least they involve selection of an appropriate message to carry out the task (e.g., a question or a statement), and an appropriate formulation (selection of effective vocabulary items), and judgment of whether the selections have been successful. Simple task exercises involve a minimum of different utterance types repeated throughout the task: a 'picture differences' task might involve a repeated series of questions and answers, or a series of parallel descriptive utterances, all in the simple present. More complex task exercises will involve a wider range of utterance types. For example, a prioritizing task, in which participants have to select their preferred candidate for a post, will involve the elicitation and expression of opinions, and the coordination of the overall task to ensure that it has been properly completed. In all cases, task exercises can encourage the development of routines, as speakers increase their familiarity with the requirement of the task and of useful language for completing it. With increasing familiarity, speakers can improve their efficiency in selecting and formulating messages, so that accuracy and fluency can increase in turn. Typical examples of task exercises are the following: Games:
Guessing games Association games
Tasks:
Comparison and contrast tasks Instruction tasks (directions; describe and draw, etc.) Combining tasks Sequencing tasks (picture stories) Organizing tasks Prioritizing and selecting tasks
Examples of tasks can be found in Ur (1981), Willis (1995), and Yule (1997). The main feature of game tasks is their emphasis on formulation skills (notably lexical accessing). Association games tend not to impose turntaking restrictions, or restrictions in the selection or sequencing of particular ideas. In addition they tend not to involve information transfer, and thus tend to leave the distribution of speech roles and exchange patterns very free. However, some attention to preceding utterances may be necessary if any line of coherence is built into the task. In contrast, guessing games generally function within a rule system (e.g., '20 questions') which
imposes some kind of exchange structure and speech role on the participants. In other respects guessing games are similar to association games in imposing relatively few restrictions on propositional sequencing. Whereas games generally define the nature of individual turns, tasks define a problem and leave the participants to talk their way toward a solution. For this reason tasks require the speakers to adopt speech roles in order to set up a series of exchanges. The kinds of exchanges selected may be a function of the proficiency of the learners, which can affect the length of turns that they are able to handle productively and receptively. A further feature of tasks is that they will tend to require more use of metadiscoursal language than games—that is, language for organizing who should do what; to check on progress; and to decide whether the task is being done correctly, and whether it is completed. Constraints on topic selection and turntaking are largely imposed by the task, in particular by the way information is distributed to the participants. This only becomes an area for active decision-making in the more complex tasks, and in projects. Recent work has explored the possibility of using tasks to direct learners' attention to different aspects of their performance, and to lead them integrate their attention to meaning and to form. Skehan (1998) suggests that tasks can be manipulated to lead students to focus on accuracy, complexity, or fluency, and Bygate (1996, 1999) finds that task repetition can encourage learners to shift their attention from a focus on meaning on first performance, to a greater focus on form on subsequent performances. These findings cast a clearer light on the processes of oral language development. 3.2.3 Dramatizations The possible scope of dramatizations is considerable, and it is not the purpose of this article to explore the pedagogical use of dramatizations in any detail. They are, however, commonly used, and it is therefore appropriate to briefly review the justifications for their employment. Dramatizations involve the representation of a situation, with the students adopting roles other than themselves. Dramatizations are cued replications of a situation, either improvised or carefully rehearsed. The cue may be the mention of a prototypical scene from daily life; it may be a video or audio-taped extract; it may be a picture or a series of sound effects; it may be a news report or short story, or it may involve the improvisation of variations on a simple theme. The purpose is to enable the students to rehearse language, or to explore linguistic variants—either for a common social situation, or else to help understanding of culturally unusual situations.
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Teaching Additional Languages The more elementary the learners, the less they are expected to say, and the greater the likely emphasis on rehearsal prior to performance. More advanced learners, on the other hand, are more likely to use dramatization to explore linguistic variations in humanly more complex situations. With advanced learners, the emphasis may be more on performance than on rehearsal, and may lay more stress on the range of improvisations by different participants. The cultural rationale behind the use of dramatizations is the notion that the use of a foreign language can for some learners resemble a form of impersonation or character-acting. By the same token, methodologists who argue that foreign language teaching should avoid leading learners towards 'acculturation' (i.e., membership of the target language community) or encouraging them to resemble speakers of the target language, tend not to favor the use of dramatizations, and prefer to encourage the use of other exercise types (e.g., Brumfit 1984). At the very least, dramatizations can be seen as a useful way of combining rehearsal and performance around a single theme. 3.2.4 Projects Projects, the fourth kind of oral exercise, are real or simulated tasks involving some factfinding and some form of oral report and discussion. They often involve the use of writing, and are used to encourage the integration of spoken and written activities. Simulated projects will involve the settling of some problem in a fictitious place or imagined community. Participants are themselves with their own personalities but will usually adopt some social role, such as social worker, businessman, shopkeeper, bank manager, headmaster, reporter, parent, and so on. The task may be to solve a planning problem involving local amenities—traffic, leisure, business development, the environment. Nonfictitious projects are similar but involve realworld problems in the learner's community. Learners will adopt roles which are discourse-related—for example, chairperson, presenter, secretary, audience, discussant, interviewer, questioner, rapporteur. The use of language in project exercises includes the language of planning and organizing of roles and tasks; the organization and preparation of information and opinions; the organization and running of small and large group sessions; and the communication of information and negotiation of meaning that this involves. Thus projects naturally engage the use of interactional and transactional language, the handling of all kinds of referential language, and the use of interactive conventions. In so doing, learners practice the strategic use of language for a wide range of purposes. As with task exercises, projects can be seen as requiring learners to develop their own language rou-
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tines for carrying out a range of different but recurring purposes. The fact that similar needs recur in the context of different exercises provides a systematic basis for the two principles of learning outlined earlier— that of repetition and exploration—to occur meaningfully under conditions of normal communication. The open nature of such tasks, their unscripted nature and the freedom learners have in deciding what language to use to get the tasks completed, does not imply a lack of overall control or sense of direction on the part of the teacher. Although unscripted tasks require a lack of teacher control while students carry out the tasks, they can nonetheless be selected for particular language purposes; students can be monitored during performance by the teacher; and many tasks can be repeated by groups once they have been completed—either in whole or in part—to enable teacher and students to evaluate the use of the target language. Tasks can also be carried out under the evaluative eye of a member of the group: evaluation should be built into the use of such tasks so that students carry them out with a purpose, and develop their own ability to monitor their language while using it. 4. Conclusion The pedagogy of language always requires an outline of objectives, in the form of a syllabus, and the selection of a range of exercises and activities which will help to achieve those objectives. The unscripted use of speech for transactional and interactional purposes forms the nub of any oral language course. The specific objectives for any given course can be selected from a wide range of possible purposes and conventions. And the methods available for implementing them have been outlined. The key to oral language pedagogy, however, is the recognition of the possibilities of balancing repetition and exploration, not just in scripted exercises, but also in unscripted tasks. See also: Speaking in a Second Language. Bibliography Brown G, Yule G 1983 Teaching the Spoken Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Brumfit C J 1984 Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Bygate M 1987 Speaking. Oxford University Press, Oxford Bygate M 1996 Effects of task repetition: Appraising the developing language of learners. In: Willis J, Willis D (eds.) Challenge and Change in Language Teaching. Heinemann, London Bygate M 1999 Task as context for the framing, reframing and unframing of language. System (forthcoming) Carter R, McCarthy M 1997 Exploring Spoken English. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Chafe W 1982 Integration and involvements in speaking, writing and oral literature. In: Tannen D (ed.) Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy. Ablex, Norwood, NJ: pp. 35-53
Starting Early Fillmore C J 1979 On fluency. In: Fillmore C J, Kempler D, Wang W S-Y (eds.) Second Language Learning: Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behaviour. Academic Press, New York George H V 1972 Common Errors in Language Learning. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Harkess J, Eastwood J 1976 Cue for a Drill. Oxford University Press, Oxford Harkess J, Eastwood J 1981 Cue for Communication. Oxford University Press, Oxford Harmer J 1983 The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman, London Levelt W J M 1978 Skill theory and language teaching. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 1(1): 53-70 Levelt W J M 1989 Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. MIT, Cambridge, MA Littlewood W T 1981 Communicative Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Loschky, Bley-Vroman R 1993 Grammar and task-based methodology. In: Crookes G, Gass S M (eds.) Tasks and Language Learning: Integrating Theory and Practice. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, Avon: pp. 123-67 Matthews A, Reid C 1981 Tandem. Evans Brothers, London McCarthy M 1991 Discourse in the Language Classroom
Analysis for Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Rivers W M, Temperley M S 1978 A Practical Guide to the Teaching of English as a Second or Foreign Language. Oxford University Press, New York Skehan P 1998 A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford University Press, Oxford Ur P 1981 Discussions that Work. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge VanPatten B 1996 Input Processing and Grammar Instruction. Ablex: Norwood, NJ Wilkins D A 1976 Notional Syllabuses. Oxford University Press, London Willis J 1996 A Framework for Task-Based Learning. Longman, London Yule G 1997 Referential Communication Tasks. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ Yule G, Tarone E 1991 The other side of the page: Integrating the study of communication strategies and negotiated input in SLA. In: Phillipson R, Kellerman E, Selinker L, Sharwood Smith M, Swain M (eds.) Foreign/Second Language Pedagogy Research. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, Avon: pp. 162-71
Starting Early J. L. M. Trim
The optimum age for learning a second or foreign language has been a matter of controversy for many years, some holding that early bilingualism is deleterious to mental development, others that young minds are peculiarly suited to language learning. More recently, the excessive fears and hopes raised by the two extreme positions have given place to a more measured evaluation of positive and negative factors in the light of the particular individual and social context in which the first and second languages are learnt and a clearer understanding of the conditions for success. At the same time theoretical discussion has been largely overtaken by events. 1. Earlier History of The Issue Throughout history, social elites have attached a high value to their children acquiring competence in the dominant language of culture or power of the time at as early an age as possible. At the other end of the social scale, the children of work immigrants and refugees have had to insert themselves into schools conducted monolingually in the language of the state concerned. In neither case has the starting age been seen as a problem until very recently. On the other hand, public education across Europe concentrated in
its early stages on basic literacy in the state language and numeracy. Modern foreign languages were taught, if at all, in the shadow of the classical languages and were generally confined to secondary schools. In the first half of the twentieth century many psychologists opposed early bilingualism as being deleterious to the cognitive development of the child and leading to 'semilingualisirf, neither language being fully mastered. This belief, which can still be heard, caused great anxiety among parents in mixed marriages. It rested on rather slender evidence, which conflicted with the direct experience of linguists from a bilingual background and with later research. However, the argument was used to justify monolingual primary education. 2. The 'Critical Period' Hypothesis In the years following World War II, heightened awareness of the need for foreign languages brought pressure for an earlier start to language instruction. In the 1950s and 1960s the first impetus came from dissatisfaction, especially in the United States, with the poor results of formal instruction in secondary education. Belief in the greater efficacy of early language learning was reinforced by neurophysiological
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Teaching Additional Languages research. Lenneberg (1966) observed that despite the great variety of conditions all children appeared to learn whichever language they were exposed to in infancy in the same development sequence at roughly similar ages. The process appeared to be closely related to rapid brain development over the first 3-10 years after which language became 'markedly lateralized' [in the left hemisphere] and 'internal organisation established irreversibly for life.' Between the age of 11 and 14 'foreign accents emerge' and in midteens to seniors 'acquisition of second language becomes increasingly difficult.' Chomsky (1965) considered that the ability of children to acquire the grammar of any language on limited exposure to language in use could only be explained by their possession of a 'language acquisition device' (LAD), a kind of 'mental organ' in which the universal design features of language were represented. Bringing these ideas together, many psychologists held that LAD operated only during a 'critical period' during which any language could be acquired by simple exposure without formal teaching, which could only interfere with learning. Later learning was different in character, arduous and leading only to limited competence. 3. The Period of Disillusion The experimental introduction of foreign languages as a subject into the primary school curriculum in Europe and North America (FLES) in the 1960s using audiovisual methods was undertaken with high expectations but limited success. In particular, a major longitudinal experiment in Britain in 1963-70 was strongly supported, then carefully monitored and evaluated by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). Its report (Burstall et al. 1974) confirmed that the introduction of French into the primary school curriculum from the age of 8 had no negative effects on the work of the school. In other respects the findings were disappointing. By the age of 14 pupils starting at 8 showed no significant superiority to those starting at 11 except in respect of accent. Tests of constituent skills indicated that older learners were more efficient than younger ones. The report concluded that 'the weight of the evidence has combined with the balance of opinion to tip the scale against possible expansion of the teaching of French in primary schools' (Burstall et al. 1974). The discussion of these findings in three Council of Europe seminars, Reading 1967, Wiesbaden 1973, Copenhagen 1976, as well as similar conclusions reached in Carroll's (1975) report on French in eight countries, virtually ended further experimentation for more than a decade, despite the positive outcome of a more carefully planned and executed project in Germany. The conditions for success identified in Copenhagen (clarity of aims and objectives; appropriate materials and equipment; sound teacher training as well as knowledge of the language; continuity between primary and
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secondary levels; societal support) seemed impossible to guarantee. In Europe, attention switched to achieving communicative proficiency for all pupils between 11 and 16 years of age. In USA, FLES declined. In excolonial states and minority communities the pressure for primary education to be in the mother-tongue increased. In Canada immersion programs continued with strong government support and largely positive 'results, which showed that for well-motivated majority language speakers, immersion at school in a second or foreign language could achieve near-native receptive competence in it with no adverse effect on subject knowledge, proficiency in the mother-tongue, or on cognitive development which in fact benefited from greater awareness and mental flexibility. 4. The Turn of the Tide The tide turned again in the late 1980s under strong parental and employer pressure responding to the need for intensified international communication in a situation of accelerating globalization. Socioeconomic realities swept aside theoretical and even practical reservations as the determinants of public educational policy. Primary education was made a key sector in the Council of .Europe Project 'Languages for European citizenship,' with 10 workshops organized between 1991 and 1995. Italy was a pacemaker. In 1992, following successful experiments in Tuscany and Venetia, a foreign language was made compulsory from the age of 8. By 1997, Eurydice reported that English was being taught in primary schools (though not to all) in virtually all non-English speaking EU, EFTA, and CEEC countries covered by its statistics, and French to substantial numbers in Belgium (Flemish region), Luxembourg, UK (Scotland), Portugal and Romania. Fourteen countries were reported to be in the process of lowering the starting age below the age of 8. Almost all 25 countries profiled by IEA (1996) report an early start in a foreign language as a significant trend in those countries in which the language does not already enjoy established second language status in primary education. Even the United States reports 'a decided increase in the numbers of elementary schools offering language classes over the last 15 years'. The federally funded National Standards Project 'is strongly recommending language programs that start early in primary school.' 5. Present Trends and Future Prospects The present situation is characterized by convergence towards 'additive' plurilingualism. This is seen as a highly flexible lifelong process, in which many languages may be involved, each contributing to a greater or lesser extent to an individual's plurilingual competence. In such a perspective, the question of starting age dissolves. The question whether foreign languages should be taught and if so at what age is superseded by another: given that languages will be present
Ulpan throughout education, how do we best ensure that the conditions for success are fully met? See also: Age in Second Language Learning. Bibliography Burstall C, Jamieson M, Cohen S, Hargreaves M 1974 Primary French in the Balance. NFER, Windsor Carroll J B 1975 The Teaching of French as a Foreign Language in Eight Countries. Wiley, New York
Chomsky N 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Cummins J, Swain M 1986 Bilingualism in Education. Longman, New York Eurydice 1997 Key Data on Education in the European Union. European Communities, Luxembourg Lenneberg E H 1966 The natural history of language. In: Smith F, Miller G A The Genesis of Language: A Psycholinguistic Approach. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Ulpan B. Spolsky
The mass immigration to Israel once it became an independent state in 1948 challenged existing approaches to Hebrew teaching because the new immigrants came without any selection on the basis of health or employability or previous study of modern Hebrew. For those who went into agriculture or unskilled work, it was probably enough to pick up spoken Hebrew in their daily life. But for professional or academic adult immigrants, successful integration into the workforce required more structured learning. The answer was the Ulpan (plural, ulpanim), a program of intensive instruction in modern Hebrew. The word 'ulpan' in Talmudic Aramaic meant custom, training, instruction, or law, and in modern Hebrew, it means a studio. The inspiration for the ulpan was the Armed Services Training Program (see ASTP) which in 1943-4 had taught spoken languages to American soldiers, but it immediately developed its own defining characteristics. The first ulpan opened in 1949 at a residential immigrant absorption center, with two classes of 25 pupils. The teachers added songs and excursions to a conversational approach that emphasized the national ideology and acculturation. The model was quickly accepted. Soon, there were another 120 residential ulpanim. Altogether, between 1948 and 1968, some 120000 people, 10 percent of the arriving adult immigrants, studied in ulpanim, and the program has continued as demanded by changing rates of immigration. For immigrants, the program, sponsored at first by the Jewish Agency and now by the government, was without cost. New immigrant pupils also received free accommodation and living expenses. A number of patterns developed, the most common being the residential ulpan, a full-time 5-month course. Graded classes of about 25 pupils, with students from many language backgrounds, met 5 hours
daily, receiving a total of 530 hours instruction. A second pattern was the kibbutz ulpan, started to meet the labor problems of kibbutzim. The ulpan model was also adopted by Israeli universities for summer programs for foreign and new immigrant students. In the towns, there were nonresidential ulpanim, less intensive than residential ulpanim. The advanced ulpan, offering a higher level of continuing instruction, has become popular among recent immigrants. Two recent innovations are ulpanim for elderly immigrants and vocationally-oriented ulpanim for immigrants from the former Soviet Union with skills in a trade. In July 1995, in dealing with the heavy immigration from the former Soviet Union, there were nearly a thousand ulpan classes under the supervision of the Ministry of Education, 10 000 pupils in basic ulpanim, 900 in kibbutz ulpanim, 9000 pupils in advanced ulpanim and 4000 pupils in ulpanim for older immigrants. All pupils were adult immigrants who had arrived in the last 3 years. The ulpan developed as the response to an emergency, and while there has been some institutionalization, and a new curriculum has recently been developed, teachers largely apply their own methods. There is a widespread belief that the ulpan has contributed to the integration of immigrants and to their ability to speak Hebrew, but the absence of formal evaluation makes it difficult to assess the full impact. How much did the immigrants learn in class, and how much outside? How much better did the 10 percent who attended ulpanim do than the rest, who had to make do without? These are questions that call for research. Nonetheless, the fame of the successful revitalization of Hebrew has made the ulpan model attractive to language revival programs in other parts of the world.
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Teaching Additional Languages Bibliography Haramati S 1972 Shitat ha-ulpan (The Ulpan Method). In: Fischler B (ed.) From the Workshop. Council for the Teaching of Hebrew, Jerusalem Ministry of Education 1971 Twenty Years of the Kibbutz Ulpan. Ministry of Education, Jerusalem Mittelberg D, Ari L L 1992 Social Integration and Jewish
Identity of Young Russian Immigrants in Kibbutz Ulpanim. Center for Research in the Kibbutz and the Collective Ideal, Haifa Nir R, Blum-Kulka S, Cohen A 1978 The Instruction of the Hebrew Language in the Intensive Ulpan in Israel. Ministry of Education and Henrietta Szold Institute, Jerusalem Schuchat T 1990 Ulpan: How to Learn Hebrew in a Hurry. Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem
Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy P. J. Scholfield
In considering vocabulary pedagogy the focus is on the contribution of the course writer and classroom teacher to the development of a language learner's vocabulary, rather than on what is known about the learner's own part in the process (see Lexis: Acquisition). However, effective pedagogy will be that which takes account of the learner, and there are various ways in which modern vocabulary teaching can do this. Though teachers in the field have always been aware of the importance of vocabulary, it was for a long time neglected in professional discussion of language teaching. In the early 1990s it has become a focus of attention once more, and the vocabulary element in a language course—the 'lexical syllabus'—is now widely regarded as crucial. Yet there do remain differences of opinion about how far it is possible or desirable to handle vocabulary as a component in a language course separate from grammar, and so on. In the following account the discussion on vocabulary will necessarily be somewhat divorced from other aspects of language teaching. The main phases in its pedagogical treatment will be reviewed, using English as the example target language. 1. What is Vocabulary? Teachers typically include under this term words that belong to the major parts of speech: nouns like book, decision; verbs like eat, understand; adjectives like red, interesting; and adverbs like sadly. Other words like the, should, in, and more are usually regarded as not 'vocabulary words,' but rather as belonging with the treatment of grammar. Second, though teaching vocabulary is often thought of as teaching 'words,' what is usually meant, for pedagogical purposes, is a unit that is in some ways less and in some ways more than a word. Most words have more than one meaning, and many also occur in set/idiomatic phrases, etc: for example, break occurs in a basic physical meaning (as in I broke my leg) but also in less tangible senses like that in Let's
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break for lunch; further it occurs with distinct meanings in phrases like break down (verb and noun). Typically these would not all be scheduled to be taught at once, but come up at separate times in a course— that is, the useful teaching units are each sense/phrase separately, not the word break considered as a whole. Third, if a word, even thought of in terms of one sense/phrase at a time, is to become part of the 'active' vocabulary of learners (i.e., actually used, not just 'passively' understood when it happens to occur), then there is rather more to know than just a spelling linked to a meaning. To be fully equipped to use break just in its basic sense learners need to know its pronunciation, irregular inflected forms (broke, etc.), that it is applied to objects like cup and leg but not paper, that it is stylistically neutral (unlike fracture), and so forth. The term 'word' shall be used in this article to mean a vocabulary item in the way just outlined (see also Lexicology). 2. Selecting What Vocabulary to Teach Before any vocabulary teaching occurs, some principled choice is commonly made (usually by the course writer) of which words should be dealt with at any given point in a course, which should be left till later, and which left out entirely. This issue looms particularly large in vocabulary teaching since languages contain so many words that even native speakers do not know them all. Over the years many criteria have been proposed as the bases for vocabulary selection. Mostly they relate to one or other of two aspects of words which may be characterized as their 'price' and their 'value.' Price here refers to ease/difficulty of teaching or learning and value to importance or utility for the learner. Though it has been argued that the teacher should seek bargains wherever possible (words that are both important and easy to learn), it is apparent that often one cannot have both at once (e.g., go and woman would on any criteria be important, useful English words for a learner, but come at some cost as they
Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy both have irregular inflected forms—went and women). Ease is often a criterion relied on in a beginners' course, where it can be argued that learners are faced with so many new things at once in the area of sounds, grammar, and perhaps orthography that simplifying the vocabulary element is a valuable relief. Thus the words introduced may be short, regular in spelling and inflection, and with concrete meaning easily demonstrable in the class (e.g., dog, desk, red, proper names of students and countries). Another way in which words can be easy is where they resemble in a helpful way words that the learners already know in other languages. For example, for the German learner of English man is easier than child because the German for the former is Mann but for the latter is Kind (which if anything is confusing as it does not mean the same as English kind). For mai^y learners whose native languages (unlike German) are not connected with English, 'international' words like taxi and burger may already be familiar. Ease can also be realized in a more general way by choosing for a course situations and topics which are familiar to learners by virtue of their age, cultural background, etc., so that although the words will be new, the concepts they label will be known. After initial teaching, though the teacher's handling of vocabulary will always need to be informed by an understanding of factors that make particular words easy or difficult for particular learners, most often the basic selection decision will be made on some other criterion. Commonly an effort is made to identify vocabulary that is important for particular target learners in some way, and the leading considerations are discussed below. Where learners have definable language needs (see Needs Analysis), the teacher can immediately limit the area of vocabulary that may be relevant. An example would be Arabic learners of English destined to be air traffic controllers (see Language for Special Purposes), though for many learners the main need will be less well-defined 'survival' in common situations, for example, visiting countries where the target language is spoken. If the teacher wishes to maximize use of the target language in class, then the vocabulary of classroom management and textbook instructions is a clear need (e.g., repeat, page, and exercise). A definable need for most learners is the ability to cope with standard examinations that have to be taken. If these are based on published lists of words (as, for example, GCSE French for English schoolchildren), then the selection is ready made for the teacher. If they are not (as, for example, the Cambridge examinations for foreign learners of English), then the teacher must attempt to gauge the kind of vocabulary required. Ideally, learners will be able to judge such needs for themselves, and so contribute to the selection of what words to learn on a continuing basis.
The other commonest 'importance' criterion is frequency, particularly where precise learner needs are unclear: the most important words of a language are deemed to be those that the learner will meet most often. Often 'range' is invoked as well—more important words are those that occur in more different contexts and varieties of English. Word frequency counts exist for most major languages and many language courses make use of them. However, it has come to be realized that frequency is no substitute for learner need. Whatever collection of language material frequency lists are based on, they tend to agree on the words that are most frequent, and so are relevant for the first few years of second/foreign language teaching. However, they disagree on the frequencies of midand low-frequency words, where it seems to matter very much what sort of language material made up the corpus in which the word frequencies were counted. In fact it has proved difficult to find any reliable guide to the most important vocabulary at intermediate and advanced level where learners are studying another language with 'no particular purpose.' Though other criteria (such as the 'coverage,' 'availability,' and 'familiarity' of words) have been put forward, what often happens in the situation just described is that courses fall back more on topics and consequent vocabulary that they think will interest the learner. For example, for teenagers, units might be based round pop music or a spy story, and to an extent learners can be invited to choose their own vocabulary to learn, on the basis of individual interest. 3. How Much Vocabulary to Teach
The number of words that learners can reasonably be expected to learn varies tremendously in relation to variables such as age, level, and motivation of learners, whether the learners meet and use the target language in the community or only in language lessons in school, the nature of the words (e.g., their ease again), etc. Thus it makes no sense to lay down a dogmatic universal figure. Nevertheless, a figure of around 8-10 new words per class lesson is often quoted as a crude average, based on teachers' collective experience. What is more important is that teachers often find that course materials or other sources of targetlanguage input to the learner overestimate the number of new words they can cope with. An important part the teacher can play here is to filter the words, or indeed teach learners to filter them themselves, using some of the selection criteria described above. Already some courses distinguish between new words in a lesson that are to be learnt for future productive use, and so should attract more effort, and those that it is only worth remembering for when they will be met passively. Teachers can reflect this distinction in the elaborateness with which they present and practice the words (Sects. 4 and 5). In addition the concept of
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Teaching Additional Languages 'throwaway vocabulary' is useful—words not worth the learner trying to remember at all. These may have to be summarily glossed if they are of local importance for a particular reading passage or lesson, but need not be bothered with further. 4. Initial Teaching of New Vocabulary A key moment in vocabulary teaching is when a new word is introduced to learners for the first time. At the very least one meaning of a word and its spelling and/or sound shape must come across. Spelling is readily given, but sound shape may present difficulties. For example, for English it may need to be decided whether a British or US pronunciation should be offered, or some other standard (e.g., Indian English). Teachers or coursebooks may employ phonemic transcription to convey sound, but often an audible model is desirable as well (on tape if the teacher is not a native speaker). However, the biggest problem usually is how to convey the meaning. There are three broad ways of explaining the meaning of a word—by nonlinguistic means, via translation, and via the target language. All have their pros and cons, and teachers need to check carefully that the meaning has been conveyed, whichever combination of means they use. The nonlinguistic, 'ostensive' approach (pointing at objects, miming, using pictures, etc.) is valuable in initial teaching, especially where the teacher does not speak the learners' native language. However, it tends to take more time than a translation, and is not suitable for the many words that do not have a concrete meaning. Translation has always been popular with many teachers, though for a time language-teaching methodologies such as the 'Direct Method' strove to outlaw it (see Second Language Teaching Methods). It has the advantage of speed and likelihood of being more definitely understood by the learner than the other approaches. Also such translation need only be done once .when the word first occurs—it does not necessarily entail extended memorization and practice of translation equivalents. Often teachers, struggling to mime or construct a simple target-language explanation, find learners interpreting their efforts in terms of a translation anyway. However, there are opportunities for misunderstanding arising from the fact that many words do not translate one-to-one between languages. Explanation via the target language itself takes a multitude of forms. It can be done via synonyms, opposites, or by putting the word in a linguistic context that defines it in some periphrastic way. The last may take the form of a conventional dictionary-like definitional paraphrase (e.g., favorite means 'most loved') or it may come in one of a variety of more colloquial forms (e.g., If something is your favorite that means you like it the best or My favorite color is one I like the best or There's nothing Hike better than apples.
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They are my favorite fruit). The conventional form is briefer, and ostensibly presents a phrase that substitutes for the word defined, but it often seems harder for learners to decode than the unconventional forms, which, though wordier, offer the unknown word and its explanation in a fuller context showing how it is used. Obviously none of these can be used until learners have acquired a modicum of the target language. New words may crop up in a variety of circumstances in teaching—in passages for reading comprehension, in taped listening material, in thematic tables or arbitrary lists in course materials, and so forth. Teachers may wish to impose other groupings through practice later (Sect. 5). A further issue is when to explain new words—before or after the learner meets them in such lesson material? Preteaching some key words may make a subsequent task more amenable, but if it is uncertain which words are going to be unknown, it might be better to wait until problems arise. Connected with this issue is the point that if all new words are always pretaught, the learner is robbed of the chance to develop the self-help substitutes for having word-meaning explained (see Sect. 7 below). The teacher can decide not to explain some new words at all, and perhaps instead supply extra examples of the word in use, or helpful pictures, if the basis for guessing is thin in the original context. Finally, there is very much more to knowing a word in the full sense than just the three aspects so far mentioned (Sect. 1). Often these more detailed aspects will not be dealt with on first meeting a word, but will be introduced by the teacher when the word recurs, or left to be soaked up by learners from repeated exposure to the word in use or discovered by being corrected when they try to use the word and get something wrong. 5. Follow-up Practice of Vocabulary Good initial presentation is only a first step in the teaching of vocabulary. The readiness with which new words are forgotten is only too well-known, and there is much that the teacher and course writer can do to prevent this. It is clear from research on memory that one essential for the effective retention of vocabulary by learners (but by no means the only requirement) is that the words must recur. Too often course materials fail to do this 'recycling' beyond the unit in which the new word first arises. Here the teacher can step in by keeping track of the important vocabulary from past lessons and ensuring that it comes up again in a variety of ways in language activities not just a week later, but months later. The range of activities that teacher or coursebook can use as media for the recycling of vocabulary is vast. At one end of the scale are games and exercises that focus on words overtly separated from other aspects of language, and often practice specific aspects
Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy of words only. For example, an anagram game ('Spot the word hidden in tofo'} focuses just on the spelling of words in isolation, whereas a crossword puzzle involves both meaning and spelling, and a synonym discrimination task ('What's the difference between He deceived her and He put one over on her?') focuses on the finer connotational and stylistic overtones of words. Many games/exercises have been devised to practice vocabulary in semantically related groups (e.g., opposites or thematic sets like 'means of transport'), as there is evidence from learning research that native speakers store words in the mind linked in these ways: for example, 'Spot the odd word out' requires identification of words as members of a set or not, and a task like 'Disagree with the statement / love dancing' evokes opposites. At the other extreme are tasks which closely simulate real-life use of language to communicate, and in which words connected with a common situation are practiced entirely coincidentally, in naturalistic contexts—for example, where learners role-play visiting the doctor, or search for accommodation for a hypothetical visit to the target country, using authentic advertisements. A new addition to the teacher's armory for vocabulary practice is the computer (see Computer-assisted Language Learning). Many vocabulary-related activities are computerized versions of games and exercises like those described above—for example, Hangman and gap-filling. They have the advantage that many can be used by the learner in self-access mode outside the class, and so be an additional rather than replacement source of practice. Many of the activities described above are ones that the teacher can encourage learners to do for themselves. This is all the more important since in many teaching situations there is limited time in class to spend on vocabulary, and much of the follow-up learning has to be left to the learner outside the class. Essential guidance here can include showing learners how to keep a useful record of new words in a booklet or on cards, with examples of their use, not just the word and a translation, and perhaps with words of related meaning grouped together. They can also be shown how to develop effective mnemonic techniques and strategies to help themselves memorize and retain vocabulary. 6. Checking on Learners' Vocabulary
Teachers want to check on learners' vocabulary from time to time for a variety of reasons. They may want to identify what recently taught words they have misunderstood or failed to retain, so that remedial work can be done, or they may be interested in how many words learners know, as a feature of their general proficiency, so they can be placed in a class of a suitable level. Vocabulary is also tested in standard examinations for certification purposes. The means by
which vocabulary is formally tested often resemble the sort of practice materials outlined above, though multiple-choice gap-filling items are particularly popular—for example, The sea is very thick/ deep/profound (see also Language Testing). Another way in which all teachers check on learners is informally, by their errors, as they occur in whatever the learner writes or says. Such errors may reveal problems with any of the aspects of words (Sect. 1), and may or may not be explicable as due to first language interference. For example, This watch does not walk well shows walk clearly used in the wrong meaning—either because the learner is French and the word marcher in French, properly translated in this context as function or work, would be translated in others as walk, or because walk and work sound similar within English. The handling of errors like this should not necessarily be judgmental. Making errors and being corrected is an essential part of vocabulary learning, and in some cases learners realize they may be wrong but are determined to try and express a message nevertheless, something that the teacher would often approve of. A rather different sort of check focuses not on error but use: for instance the number of different words used by learners per 100 words written in compositions on the same topic gives an idea of the richness of the vocabulary they each have at their disposal. Aspects of vocabulary error and use like these can be explicitly brought to the attention of learners, so that they become more aware, and can 'monitor' their own output better. 7. Teaching Vocabulary Survival
Teaching often goes on in situations where the precise vocabulary needs of learners are uncertain (Sect. 2), so it is impossible for the teacher to ensure that learners are introduced to all the words they will ever need in any future use of the language (whether in exams or 'real' communication). This unpredictability is deliberately heightened where the teacher wants learners to read and hear 'authentic,' unsimplified language and to convey what they themselves really want to say when they speak or write, rather than stay within the confines of course material. Further, learners may be unable to recall a word, or some crucial aspect of it, when needed, even though they have at some time been taught it (e.g., the learner may realize the word he/she needs is stop, but may not be sure of the correct complement construction it takes— whether one says He stopped to run or He stopped running). Hence attention, in the 1990s, is often paid not only to teaching actual words 'directly,' but also to teaching the skills that enable learners to manage successfully when they find themselves lacking the vocabulary they need. Study of learner behavior reveals a number of strategies that learners use spontaneously in these situ-
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Teaching Additional Languages ations, of which some are more successful than others, and hence should be encouraged selectively by the teacher (see Communication Strategies). To help with this problem in reading, the teacher can make learners more aware of when it is a good idea just to skip unknown words, when to try and guess (or 'infer') the meaning, and when to resort to a dictionary or ask someone; this is dependent on the apparent importance of the word for the message, the availability of clues to guess from, purpose of reading, etc. It is known, for example, that overuse of the dictionary can totally fracture the flow of the reading process. Further, learners' actual guessing skills can be developed. One way is by making sure they know common morphological elements and structures of words of the target language. For example, learners of English will benefit from being familiar with the ness suffix, as it makes regular derived nouns from many adjectives. If learners have some knowledge of simple adjectives, they will then decode on their own (and go on to learn) nouns such as happiness, redness, and greatness whenever they crop up for the first time. Another way is by work on exploiting contextual clues. For example, suppose collapse were the unknown word in the sentence The wind grew stronger and the huts began to shake and collapse: to be able to get close to the meaning of collapse from this context, the learner has to be made alive to the factual clue in the first subject of the sentence (What do we know wind does to huts?) and to the fact that and often links two events that follow each other, and are not just coordinate. This will not be so easy if learners are forced to read material where the density of new words is excessively high. In speaking or writing, again the teacher can point to the advantages and disadvantages in different circumstances of learners simply 'avoiding' a topic where they do not know the word, or are uncertain about some aspect of how to use it, as against attempting a paraphrase, using a better-known simpler word, or resorting to the dictionary/asking someone. It is known, for example, that in a situation where the dictionary and personal appeal are ruled out and accuracy is at a premium, avoidance can actually be the best policy (If in doubt, leave it out); but if getting the
message across is the main thing, then a paraphrase will be better, even though it may sound odd. There is scope for developing learners' paraphrasing abilities, both by making sure they know the useful general words round which paraphrases can be built (e.g., thing, way, kind of), and by giving them tasks where avoidance would be sure to be detected (e.g., telling a story from pictures). In both reception and production the most accurate information will be obtained if the learner either appeals to a better speaker of the language, or refers to a dictionary. Teachers can help with the former by making sure learners are equipped with the language needed to elicit the information they may want: for example, How do you spell... ?, What does... mean? They can help with the latter by making sure good learners' dictionaries are available and showing learners how to get the most out of them. Learners have to be able to use the target language alphabetical order fluently, and to be made alive (e.g., via targeted exercises) both to the shortcomings of pocket bilingual dictionaries and the wealth of valuable information in good monolingual dictionaries for learners, which often is not sufficiently used. Bibliography Carter R 1987 Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy. Applied Linguistic Perspectives. Allen and Unwin, London Carter R, McCarthy M 1988 Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy and Language Teaching. Longman, London Coady J, Huckin T (eds.) 1997 Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Gairns R, Redman S 1986 Working with Words: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge McCarthy M 1990 Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy. Oxford University Press, Oxford Meara P M (ed.) 1983, 1987 Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy in a Second Language, vol. 2. Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research, London Nation ISP 1990 Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. Newbury House, NY Rivers W M, Temperley M S 1978 A Practical Guide to the Teacher of English as a Second or Foreign Language. Oxford University Press, New York Schmitt N, McCarthy M (eds.) 1997 Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Writing: Second Language Pedagogy T. Hedge
The amount of literature produced since the 1970s on the pedagogy of second language writing has been substantial and is testament to renewed interest in a 682
hitherto taken-for-granted area of language use and language development. Such interest is indicative of the value accorded to this activity, both for learning
Writing: Second Language Pedagogy purposes in educational spheres and for transactional purposes in social and professional spheres. It is also acknowledgment of the difficulty experienced by writers in expressing themselves accurately and appropriately in a second language. The concern to develop an effective pedagogy for second language writing has been particularly strong in educational contexts where the second language is the language of the classroom and of examinations and where it thereby performs a gate-keeping function. Students able to manipulate the written language effectively are those who pass through the gate to greater opportunities in learning and in life. There is also a strong body of opinion that writing in education is a major means of learning. It is a problem-solving activity in which students generate and organize their own arguments and clarify ideas to themselves as they try to communicate them clearly to their readers. Alternatively, writing may involve the assimilation, interpretation, and reformulation of other people's ideas and the formation of individual opinions. Writing can therefore be viewed as an instrument in the process of learning, and effective writing pedagogy may have the crucial function of facilitating learning. This view of writing as thinking, as discovery, as more than recording, is termed the 'process' view. Its focus is on the writer and the types of strategy used during the process of composing. It has provided an important addition to the more traditional 'product' view, in which focus has been on the written product and its characteristics. It is possible, then, to build a framework for writing pedagogy by distinguishing two areas of interest: the writer and the writing. Research has provided insights into the composing processes of writers. It has also provided models for the analysis of written products. Current pedagogy seeks to integrate these two aspects of writing, process and product. It is an integrated pedagogy which is applicable in principle to all groups of learners, though the particular focus may vary according to age, language proficiency, stage of writing development, and purposes for writing in a second language. 1. The Process View of Writing The process view is that writing is the result of employing cognitive strategies to manage the composing process, which is a process of exploration and gradually developing organization. It involves setting goals, generating ideas, organizing information, selecting appropriate language, drafting, reviewing, revising, and editing. It is a complex activity which for many second language writers is difficult. The issue for pedagogy, in fact, is whether composing strategies can be taught, and the process approach strives precisely to do this. It focuses on providing support during the process of writing. The exact nature of that support depends
on the nature of the students and their reasons for writing. The primary aim of the process approach is to help students to gain greater control over the cognitive strategies involved in composing. Research yields useful insights into the strategies used by a 'successful' writer in producing a text of good quality and can thereby inform the design of supportive pedagogic activity. There appear to be a number of activities engaged in by a good writer. /./ Planning Activities First, good writers concentrate primarily on overall meaning and organization of a text and engage in planning activities. The amount of planning varies from relatively spontaneous writing, for example, a postcard or an informal letter, to carefully planned writing, for example, an academic essay for assessment or a difficult memorandum. The process of planning varies from the formulation of a brief mental checklist to detailed note-making. However, planning is subject to review at any point during writing as writers critically evaluate the emerging text and generate new ideas and plans. If pedagogic procedures are to support planning, a primary requisite is to involve students in the writing of whole, contextualized pieces of communication, essays, letters, reports, or, with younger learners, short descriptions, stories, and so on. Practice in writing clear, correct sentences, the aim of many traditional classroom exercises, is only one aspect of writing. Current pedagogy also places emphasis on practice in developing and linking information, ideas, and arguments through a longer text. Another perceived need is to give students support in developing effective planning strategies. Take an example from a college-level second language classroom, in which students of economic geography have been given the title: What are the factors which would be taken into account by a manufacturing company when deciding whether to use rail haulage or road transport?
A first step in pedagogy could be to encourage students to work in pairs and arrive at an understanding of the task by questioning and clarifying the meaning of key expressions and deciding on the exact nature of the information needed to fulfill the task. A second step could be elicitation from the class by the teacher of points for content, and collation of these on the blackboard. As a third step, before students begin drafting, individuals could prepare a logical organization of points to compare with a partner. Take a second example from the second language syllabus of a school classroom. Students have the task of preparing a description for a tourist brochure of a local festival. The pedagogic sequence below would
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Teaching Additional Languages support the composing process in the ways suggested in the diagram: Step 1 Ask students to brainstorm for 4 minutes • individually, jotting down ideas for the content of the brochure. Step 2 Elicit suggestions from • the class and write them • on the board, demonstrating how to group randomly suggested items into topics Step 3 Discuss labels with the • class for the topics as they have emerged, for example, origins of festival, public celebrations, family customs, etc. Step 4 Ask students in pairs to • add information to each identified topic. Step 5 Pool ideas in a class plenary session and build appropriate vocabulary for the task. Step 6 Ask students to suggest a logical sequence for the topics.
clarifying aims generating ideas
grouping ideas structuring them into an initial plan
identifying categories for the overall organization
adding detail to the emerging structure selecting appropriate language planning a coherent sequence
In this way, classroom activities take students through an effective planning process and the strategies of brainstorming ideas, imposing a structure, making notes, ordering information, etc. It gives initial support in what will eventually be an individually undertaken process. 1.2 Awareness of Audience A second characteristic of successful writers is that they are aware of their readers. Most of the writing undertaken in the real world is done with a particular reader in mind: a tutor, a friend, or someone occupying a role in an institution, for example, an editor, a public relations officer, an examiner. Knowing who the reader is provides us with a context for the writing which determines what is appropriate content and style in the writing. In order to produce an appropriate text, a student writer needs to answer the following questions: Who am I writing to? What do I need to say? How can I make my writing accessible to my reader?
Helping student writers to develop this sense of audience is another task for the teacher. In educational writing the audience is the tutor and the student's task is to learn the appropriate style, to learn the correct conventions for essays, abstracts, and bibliographies,
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and to learn how much knowledge to assume in the reader and how much information to make explicit in the text. These are all points for instruction and practice. With less mature writers, who may not have developed a sense of audience in their first language, writing teachers can create audiences and build an awareness of the reader. Sometimes the teacher can become a more personal audience as a reader of student journals or as correspondent in an exchange of letters. Sometimes the teacher can set up roles in class in which students, for example, exchange letters of invitation and replies. Sometimes students can write to real audiences, both inside the school, with stories for younger students or class magazines for publication among peers, or outside the school, with letters of enquiry to organizations in which the second language is spoken. Collaborative writing also provides students with readers and critics of their work among their peers. This can be set up informally by encouraging students to work in groups, sharing and exchanging drafts for comment, or it can be formally structured by asking students to write different parts of a text within a group and then to make the result a coherent whole. Of primary importance, however, in any writing task, is that an audience is specified and that the task fulfills a communicative purpose, whether real or simulated. 1.3 Reviewing and Revising A third characteristic of successful writers is that they move from thinking to writing to revision but also move backwards and forwards between these processes. Drafting is often interrupted as writers stop to review, to see how the text is emerging, to revise plans, to develop new ideas, and to restructure. It also seems to be the case that successful writers concentrate first on getting the meaning clear and leave details of accuracy in spelling, word order, and grammar until the final editing process. Teachers are now concerned to find ways of encouraging students to improve their own work through self-monitoring, exchanging work for peer review, conferencing with the teacher, class revision of selected drafts, proofreading exercises and reformulation procedures. Conferencing, for example, has become a popular technique. As students work on their writing, the teacher can engage in conversation with individuals about work in progress. Through questioning and elicitation the teacher can support the student writer in organizing ideas, can extend the student's thinking about the theme, and can assist with selection of appropriate language. Conferencing, as with the other activities mentioned, aims to encourage students to see writing as something that can be improved and to view revision as an integral part of the process of writing.
Writing: Second Language Pedagogy 2. The Product View of Writing The process approach has emerged from recent research into strategies used by writers during the process of composing. The product approach has its origins in the traditions of rhetoric and has been characterized in several ways. It has involved the study of model texts in order to raise students' awareness of the features of texts. It has often involved practice of these features, such as the use of passives in the description of a process, in sentence level exercises or in the development of a paragraph. And it has involved a pedagogy which analyzes student writing after the text has been produced in order to diagnose and assess strengths and weaknesses. Traditional marking systems for the 'product' have also tended to focus on accuracy as the primary criterion for 'good' writing. This traditional product-oriented approach has evolved more recently into a pedagogy in which insights from the study of text still have substantial significance but with a rather different application, one which integrates with the process approach. Analysis of written discourse cannot reveal the processes involved in composition. However, it can produce possibilities for description and evaluation, and both of these have their place in second language pedagogy. 2.1 Describing the Product Analyzing the products of writing can contribute to pedagogy in a number of ways. 2.1.1 Defining the range One can observe the range of writing products particular groups of students need to produce and the ways in which one form differs from another. For example, the conventions and style of a formal letter differ from those of an informal letter, and both may differ from similar texts in the student writer's first language. The issue for teachers is to define the writing purposes of the student group. To do this, one can consider the language environment of the learners: whether they are learning a second language in order to live, study, and work in the second language context; or whether they are learning a foreign language with little current need for it in their home context and thus a restricted set of writing needs. Teachers can then decide on relevant goals for classroom writing in relation to types of personal and professional writing, selecting among: (a) personal writing, for example, diaries; (b) study writing, for example, notes and summaries; (c) public writing, for example, letters of enquiry, application, etc.; (d) creative writing, for example, poems, stories; (e) social writing, for example, invitations, personal letters;
(f) institutional writing, for example, academic essays, professional reports. In this way teachers can design a relevant writing program specific to the needs of student writers. 2.7.2 Describing discourse organization One can observe the ways in which the overall organization of texts differ according to the purpose for which they were written. Patterns can be clearly defined within written discourse in which smaller units of meaning combine to form longer stretches of discourse. The smaller units, rhetorical functions, perform identifiable functions such as defining, narrating, explaining. These smaller units combine to form rhetorical patterns as can be seen in the extract below. Here a definition is followed by a classification which provides us with information on the basis of classification and the members of each class. The latter are then described and examples are given: Plastics are a group of materials which consist of a combination of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and other elements. The basis for distinction between the two main classes available to engineers is their behavior when heated. Those which soften when heated and become rigid when cooled again are called thermoplastics. Examples are nylon, PVC and...
The issues are whether such sequences are relatively predictable and whether a range of consistent patterns exists and is available for exploitation as teaching devices. Certainly patterns are not rigid. Within certain conventions it is possible to be flexible and create patterns according to the purpose of the writing. For example, a description of a person involving physical appearance, character, and social background, might begin with any one of these according to which is more important or interesting to the writer, to the readers, or to the purpose for writing the description, for example, to describe a new friend, to introduce a new character in a story. This raises the issue of whether we take a reductionist approach and present basic patterns to learners, raising awareness at the same time of how and why the patterns might vary. Second language pedagogy has moved in various directions. First, there is an attempt to draw the student writer's attention to different patterns through class analysis of texts. Second, there is an attempt to build awareness of discourse organization appropriate to the task in hand while supporting students through the planning process. To take an example, the task given earlier to compare road haulage and rail transport must be organized in a logical way to highlight effectively contrasts and comparisons. In thinking about the topic, points for content will occur randomly to students and will need to be structured. Fig. 1 could usefully be presented as a possible framework to elaborate.
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Teaching Additional Languages
Figure 1
While the suggested plan should not be seen as a straitjacket but something to be reviewed and revised as content develops, a task of this type can consciously develop students' understanding of how ideas can be structured to fulfill a particular communicative purpose. It is common now to find teaching materials which follow a syllabus through which students explore various discourse types in turn, for example, process description, cause and effect, problem-solution, contrast and comparison, and classification. Third, students can be encouraged to improve their plans through a question and answer technique. For example, students can be asked to write a report of an accident. After they have produced initial drafts, they work in pairs. One student presents his draft while the other challenges with questions, obliging his partner to omit or add detail. The questions, suggested by the teacher, or elicited from the class, derive from the schema for a report, for example: Who was involved? What exactly happened? What was the cause? Who was responsible? What was the outcome? The questioning leads to clarification of what a reader would want to know, would help to determine the inclusion and order of information, and generate a clearer discourse organization. 2.1.3 Describing features of coherence A third area of study from which pedagogy draws insights is that concerned with explaining coherence in a text by analyzing the linguistic features which link meaning across sentences and paragraphs within an overall structure. Cohesive devices are the means by which parts of a text are linked as logically related sequences. Pronouns, for example, can be used for reference back to a previous noun phrase as in On the contrary, they could not decide what to do. Conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs have logical functions as well as grammatical ones, making clear the meaning relation of the connection. For example, however in However, they went on to make some criticisms signals a contrary or concessionary statement to follow. Such devices clarify the developing thread of meaning which the writer is trying to communicate. Differ686
ent types of text require different degrees of complexity in sentence structure. An informal letter might use sentences loosely coordinated with and and but. An academic essay might use subordinate clauses and link meanings with conjunctive adverbs such as nevertheless and despite. Direct instructions may take the form of simple sentences as in Do not forget to cancel the newspapers. Instructional information may use more complex structure as in If you forget to cancel the newspapers, their build-up on the porch might signal your absence and could result in a break-in during your absence. Students need to exploit cohesive devices and use appropriate degrees of complexity in their writing. A survey of current pedagogy would suggest that teachers help students in the following ways. First, extensive reading provides students with language tools for the effective drafting of their own texts. As they observe the use of cohesive ties in published texts and texts produced by their peers, they may begin to acquire and use them in their own writing. Second, controlled writing tasks, with a focus on specific linguistic features, may be useful for some students, but not necessarily all. The kind of accuracybased class exercises which ask students to combine sentences by creating subordinate clauses or by using certain cohesive ties, can raise awareness but not all students will be able to transfer from this type of practice to their own writing. Current pedagogy prefers practice within the fluency context of writing a whole text. For example, in the task discussed in Sect. 1.1 to compare road and rail transport, teachers can present ties such as while, whereas, and on the other hand, during prewriting activities, explaining their functions and the grammatical restrictions on their use. Then, as students read each other's drafts, they can be encouraged to ring around cohesive ties to assess whether partners are using them appropriately and accurately. 2.2 Evaluating the Product An approach which attempts to build awareness in student writers that discourse organization should be appropriate to the communicative function of the writing, and that a range of cohesive devices should link meaning in a syntactically appropriate text implies that appropriateness, range, and complexity might be useful criteria for the assessment of writing. Earlier pedagogic approaches placed value on accuracy as the primary criterion of good writing and it was not uncommon to find marking strategies among teachers for simply indicating or correcting errors of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. However, if student texts are viewed as functionally and linguistically meaningful within the context of the task set, then criteria for evaluation must be based on more
Writing: Second Language Pedagogy than accuracy. The following task might serve as an example: You see an advertisement about a sponsored walk for charity. Write a letter to a friend, persuading him/her to take part with you and make arrangements to train together.
Here it would be possible to apply any or all of the following criteria in evaluating the letter: adherence to the conventions of the letter format; completion of all parts of the task; an appropriate range of rhetorical functions; coherence; range of vocabulary; appropriate complexity of syntax; and accuracy in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Such criteria are the focus of current professional debate. For the classroom teacher the issues are to select criteria relevant to the age, conceptual development, and language development of their students; also to find ways in which to apply the criteria in feedback which will indicate to students how they are developing in their writing ability. 3. An Integrated Pedagogy for the Future
Pedagogy attempts to exploit aspects of both process and product approaches. The degree to which these are integrated depends partly on the goals of writing and partly on the intellectual and developmental needs of learners. For example, teachers of commercial correspondence may find the use of models and a focus on the linguistic features of these specialized texts most effective. With younger learners, on the other
hand, an approach which emphasizes awareness of audience and the need to develop a range of styles might be preferred, while learners at secondary school may need a carefully integrated approach which both refines their composing strategies and raises awareness of discourse features and organization. There is much lively debate among educators on the many issues relating to process and product approaches and examples in the literature of creative pedagogic procedures. These will undoubtedly develop in accordance with available resources. For example, the use of computers for drafting and revising will undoubtedly progress to the wider use of electronic mail systems to encourage student communication across the world. Most significantly, there is clear evidence of teachers using insights from research to evolve a more effective pedagogy for supporting the writing development of their learners. Bibliography Brookes A, Grundy P 1990 Writing for Study Purposes. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hamp-Lyons L, Heasley B 1987 Study Writing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hedge T 1988 Writing. Oxford University Press, Oxford Hudelston S 1988 Writing in a second language. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 9: 210-22. Pery-Woodley M-P 1991 Writing in LI and L2: Analysing and evaluating learners' texts. Language Teaching 24(2): 69-83 White R V, Arndt V 1991 Process Writing. Longman, London
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Testing Foreign Language Testing R. Kelly
Foreign language testing is primarily concerned with assessing ability to use new languages for communication. This article therefore focuses on the testing of genuine communicative ability as manifested in reading, listening, writing, and speaking under authentic conditions in a language other than the mother tongue. 1. Some Definitions
The term 'foreign language,' when used in educational discourse, is ambiguous. In European applied linguistics and language teaching circles, it serves as the general descriptor for languages other than the mother tongue. In the American tradition 'second language' is the generic term used. But in both traditions there is also a finer distinction made in which a foreign language is considered foreign if it is learned largely in the classroom and is not spoken in the society where the teaching takes place. A second language, on the other hand, is one that is spoken in the community where the student resides and so may be picked up, or acquired, in everyday social contacts. Non-Englishspeaking immigrants to the United States would, in this classification system, be acquiring English as a second language. Natural second language acquisition may also be accompanied by formal tutoring in the language. Many language scholars distinguish acquisition from learning: 'acquisition' is applied to the process of learning first and second languages naturally, through exposure, without formal tuition, while 'learning' is reserved for the formal study of second or foreign languages in classroom settings. It is also common to distinguish the relatively effortless process of second language acquisition by children from the less successful second language acquisition by adults. It is necessary to bear these distinctions in mind in reading the literature on language teaching and testing. There are important substantive issues reflected in the different terms. Different demands apply to the testing of first language acquisition, for research and therapeutic purposes, of second language acquisition and learning and of foreign language learning. These tests in turn differ in many ways from tests of first language
learning, which measure those aspects of language and its use that are taken up in formal educational curricula. 2. Requirements on Tests
Tests of any kind must satisfy two broad sets of demands: they need to conform to the canonical criteria established for measuring instruments and also accord with some defensible definition of the knowledge or abilities being measured. As measuring instruments tests must be (a) reliable, that is, produce consistent scores; (b) efficient or practicable, that is, be capable of being used in the contexts for which they were intended, given limitations of time, resources, and expertise; and (c) valid, that is, measure just that knowledge or those abilities that they purport to measure. In most contemporary language courses, the general goal of learning and thus the criterion for test validity is not language but rather the ability to communicate in the new language. The term 'language test' will, thus, be shorthand for 'test of ability to communicate in the specified language.' The criterion of validity connects measurement theory with definitions and theories of the knowledge or ability in the domain of interest; lack of a clear conception of what is meant by historical understanding or language-using ability results in little chance of writing valid tests to measure them. In all kinds of testing, but particularly in language testing, there is a tension between the demands of reliability and efficiency on the one hand and validity on the other. 3. The Communicative Use of Language
Assessing the validity of a language test, formally or informally, presupposes the existence of some defensible model of communication: a language test is valid with respect to a given model which, itself, may be of doubtful validity or adequacy. The question immediately arises: what would count as a satisfactory model of language in use? The detailed specification of such models is the object of much theorizing, research, and experimentation in linguistics and there is no domi-
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Testing nant model. Most scholars would, however, accept the following broad characterization as fundamental to present understandings of the communicative use of language and hence as a common point of reference for questions of test validity. Communication is an activity—an event in space and time—that occurs in a particular social setting in a particular culture, more precisely, in a particular subculture, which may transcend national boundaries: consider the international subcultures of academic discourse and business communication. The communicative event is therefore subject to general and specific social and sociolinguistic conventions that obtain in the subculture. Language encounters are conducted against assumptions of shared background knowledge, which may be private to the participants, specialized—take knowledge of computing, as an example—or widely available in the community. They also take place under the general assumption of coherence: it is assumed that the message conveyed by the uttered words is intended to make consistent or coherent sense in some possible world (Grice 1975; Sperber and Wilson 1986). The highest level linguistic unit of communication is not the sentence but the text, that is, a set of spoken or written utterances linked through linguistic devices and intended as the representation of some coherent message. The message that a text, or part of a text, is intended to convey is merely evidenced in, and not fully determined by, the words uttered. The speaker's or writer's intentions will always need to be inferred with reference to evidence other than the linguistic text, narrowly conceived. This is so because the linguistic evidence provided by the text is inadequate. It is also, as Keenan (1978 p. 162) points out, inherently vague: 'Human languages are, by nature, imprecise. That is, we claim that human language must be imprecise in order to permit efficient communication.' Being apt for all purposes, languages are specific to none. Therefore, comprehension requires that the appropriate context-specific senses of grammatical and lexical signals be computed ad hoc and revised as more of the text is processed and previous hypotheses about the speaker's or writer's goals and intensions are altered or rejected. In this view, the listener's and reader's task and, therefore what listening and reading tests purport to assess, is to interpret a spoken or written text in order to reconstruct a message that is at once possible, given the linguistic import of the text, and consistent with the comprehender's estimate of the utterer's intentions and background knowledge of the domain of discourse. Familiarity with the domain of discourse includes knowledge of strategies of communication and argumentation commonly used, of values assumed by participants in such discourses, of the inferences typically expected, of the kinds of coherent connections that are likely to be implied, and so on.
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Comprehension is thus a dynamic activity, depending on the processing of both linguistic and nonlinguistic information and the negotiation of the senses of linguistic items and utterances with respect to current high- and low-level interpretations of the ongoing discourse. For a speaker or participant in a conversation, where roles of speaker and listener are constantly exchanged, and for those who develop tests of speaking and conversational ability, the task of making the message available to others is also a complex activity. At the minimum it requires that the speaker takes into account the hearer's or reader's assumed state of knowledge in order to encode, according to the semantic rules of the language being used, sufficient meaning in the spoken or written utterances for the audience to reconstruct the full intended message. In the typical case, where all participants in a spoken encounter have speaking rights, in a conversation, seminar or discussion, for example, but not in a lecture, speakers may learn through direct query or inference that they have been misunderstood, or not fully understood. Correction of misinterpretations is then possible and usual. In other cases, where the speaker is engaged in extended monologue to strangers, in public lectures and speeches, for example, it is a very difficult task, mastered by a few native speakers, to construct a text that satisfactorily conveys the intended message without benefit of feedback on the audience's interpretation. Writing, and especially writing intended for wide and diffuse publication is particularly demanding both for the writer and the test developer. Not only must writers manipulate the language: they also need to engage in a dialogue with the absent audience and predict and shut off possible misinterpretations of what is intended. A important source of difficulty for the writer, whether native speaker or language learner, is that a written text is stripped of the crucial information provided by intonation, stress, and paralinguistic devices, voice quality, rhythm, pace and so on (Laver 1970), which the limited resources of punctuation and orthographic devices cannot replace. Moreover, a finished piece of writing in the real world is typically the result of many editings and may even have been evaluated by others in prepublication versions. An authentic simulation for testing purposes of the long, complex task of real world writing is, it is clear, probably impossible to capture. There are many other factors impinging upon the act of communication which govern what participants may or should do in ordinary language use and which test developers need to take note of. Whether producing or interpreting language, people need to pay attention to style and levels of formality, to deal with the conflicting goals of others, and adjust their contributions to the ongoing discourse accordingly. In the normal course of events, speakers may evade, dis-
Foreign Language Testing semble, hint, avoid issues and, as listeners, pay more or less attention to the information content of discourse and weigh speakers' attitude and tone more or less heavily. From the test developer's perspective it is worth noting that speaking and writing manifest themselves in the production of written and spoken texts directed at others. It is for the intended audience to judge whether or not the speaker or writer has succeeded in achieving whatever intentions he or she may have. Even in casual conversations among native speakers, communication failure is common enough to be considered normal, and has generated a vast literature on 'repair' and 'negotiation' (see Scheinkein 1978). In the case of written publications, the number of defensible interpretations that competent readers may reconstruct of a given text is large: attendance at seminars and conferences provides ample proof of this. The assessment of reading and listening pose different problems for the test developer. Reading and listening are, essentially, internal acts, that are inherently open-ended and result in a mental state called comprehension, which, in the real world, has no necessary external manifestation. 4. Tests of Communicative Ability
Much of the above is applicable to communication and the testing of communicative ability in any language, including the mother tongue. The most important characteristics of communication for testing second and foreign language proficiency, abstracted from the general characterization above, are as follows: (a) In most cases, language courses aim at enabling students to use the new language for certain communicative purposes. Hence, the general goal of learning and the basic requirement for test validity is not testees' knowledge but their capacity for performance: their ability to undertake certain kinds of authentic communication tasks. (b) Communication is a 'real word' activity, carried on apart from scholarly and commonsense understandings of it. Scholarly knowledge is incomplete and no doubt incorrect in many cases, while commonsense notions of language are frequently wrong. The language teacher and tester are thus attempting to develop or measure the abilities underlying a common, everyday phenomenon without a thorough understanding of all the dimensions of the task. In this way language teaching and testing contrast with what may be called 'book subjects,' such as physics or history. Physics may attempt to describe the physical universe, but the subject physics is limited to what has been set down in books about the universe. Language tests, however, are expected to measure the as-yet-not-understood performance, or act, of
communicating, not present imperfect understandings of it as reflected in current linguistic theories and textbooks. (c) First languages and the basic principles of oral communication are learned naturally, without formal tutoring and may be guided by some innate propensity that directs infants along some natural 'syllabus' (Horrocks 1987). Therefore, language teaching and testing deal not only with a natural phenomenon (language and its use) but also, in the case of oral and aural proficiency in the first language, with a natural syllabus. There is no such natural, specific propensity for the learning of physics or history. In the case of second language acquisition by adults, it is a matter of debate whether there might be a natural, typical progression in the acquisition of the language system like that assumed for first language acquisition (Pienemann and Johnston 1987). Consequently, in those cases where the natural process of second language acquisition has not been confused by formal tutoring, the content of tests of second language proficiency will have to be decided upon according to the findings of empirical research into the natural progression not on the basis of logic or estimations of difficulty (Brindley 1986 pp. 5455, McNamara 1991 p. 12). Moreover, an important movement in foreign and second language teaching (the communicative approach) argues that classroom learners ought to be exposed to such a natural syllabus (Pienemann and Johnston 1987), with similar consequences for the development of tests of achievement in second and foreign language learning. (d) Language use is a multidimensional activity, calling on general cognitive and communicative abilities over and above linguistic proficiency. Before a test constructor attempts to develop a reasonable test of ability to communicate in a foreign language, it is necessary to be sure that the testees are capable of meeting the cognitive and communicative demands of the test tasks in their first or dominant language. (e) As a real world activity, communicative performance, particularly in the case of second and foreign language learners, may be adversely affected by unsystematic 'performance conditions,' especially in speaking and listening (Kelly 1981). These include rate of utterance, level of background noise, overlapping contributions of different speakers, familiarity with the accent(s) used, and so on. Tests administered in ideal conditions may therefore overpredict genuine communicative performance. (f) There is no general agreement about the successful manifestation of language proficiency. What counts as acceptable or good enough in reading, aural comprehension, writing or speaking on a 691
Testing given occasion cannot be absolutely decided upon. As Davies puts it, the 'no-nonsense approach,' which holds that, though it might not be possible to understand fully language and verbal communication, it is at least possible to recognize 'success, fluency and proficiency when we observe them' simply 'will not do, because observers do not necessarily agree with one another' (Davies 1990 p. 4). Moreover, in the case of comprehension, this difficulty is intrinsic. The construction of defensible interpretations of spoken and written texts is, essentially, open-ended, posing serious dilemmas for the development of reading comprehension tests (Sarig 1989) and also for the evaluation of test compositions and essays (Cumming 1990). Barnwell (1989), in a limited study, showed that there were considerable differences between testing experts' and naive native speakers' ratings of foreign students' conversational ability in Spanish. This raises the intriguing possibility that, if the judgement of naive native speakers is the de facto criterion in real world communicative performance, the interrater reliability of testing instruments may be an artifact of tests, not a characteristic of genuine communicative encounters. This is certainly the case at advanced levels of performance for both native speakers and language learners, when woolly notions of communicative effectiveness, style, and defensible, high-level interpretation are invoked, as they often are outside testing contexts.
experts in optical physics, a test of their Russian which measured only language ability in the narrow sense may accurately predict their ability to read the scientific literature on optical physics in Russian, given the reasonable assumption that the testees have, and can deploy, the other cognitive resources demanded. However, the same test may be invalid as a test of the same ability if administered to English-speaking undergraduates studying Russian or even Russian-speaking schoolchildren. Indeed, as second and foreign language users will already have acquired communicative proficiency in at least one other language, there is a temptation to assume that second and foreign language tests need only to measure the crucial difference: the ability to produce or comprehend sentences in the language being learned or acquired. This was the implicit assumption behind the old grammar-translation approach to language teaching and the assessment of proficiency and achievement. It is, however, a dangerous assumption for both teaching and testing. There is no guarantee that the mastery of production and interpretation of context-free sentences will be reproduced in authentic language use where processing is required on many different levels simultaneously, even in the case of the English-speaking scientists mentioned above. Moreover, grammar-vocabulary tests of the traditional kind will have disastrous washback effects, especially if used in large-scale examinations (Skehan 1991 p. 8). 5. Validity
Unique problems arise in language teaching and testing because of the characteristics of communication. For example, it frequently turns out that second and foreign language learners are expected to undertake communication tasks in the new language that they have not experienced in their dominant language. Typically, overseas university students face a double difficulty: that of using language at a higher level than they have previously experienced and doing so in a new, imperfectly mastered language. Even in the case of advanced native speakers' communicative ability, as manifested in written essays, may well be seriously affected by the difficulty of the concurrent cognitive processing, as Taylor (1986) claims. On the other hand, the multidimensional, integrative nature of communication may be a benefit rather than a difficulty. It may allow a reader with detailed knowledge of a particular domain to supplement an imperfect command of a language to arrive at satisfactory interpretations of specialized texts and even to surpass lay native speakers. This being so, testers may use relatively simple tests that measure only some of the abilities and knowledge required for a particular task in those cases where they know that the other capacities are in the possession of the testees. If, for example, the testees were English-speaking
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Understandably, an important concern—perhaps the most important concern—of language testing since the latter half of the 1980s has been that of validity, particularly construct validity. 5.7 Constuct Validity Construct validity is the degree to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure or, as Bachman (1990 p. 36) puts it: 'the relationships between performance on language tests and the abilities that underline these performances.' Realization of the central role of validity and dissatisfaction with current models of language and communication has led Skehan to hail the publication of Bachman's (1990) model of 'communicative language ability,' as a 'milestone in language testing' (1991 p. 15). Though not all will share Skehan's enthusiasm for Bachman's model in its detailed presentation, his work is a major contribution to language testing, and teaching, and meets a long felt need for such a model as a focus for research both on language-using ability and the valid testing of that ability, and may well be useful in developing mother tongue language tests. Another reason for the insistence on the need for defensible models of language and the reinstatement of construct validity as the central criterion of test
Foreign Language Testing adequacy is that in the past validity has been sacrificed to the demands of reliability and efficiency.Alderson and North (1991) hold that concerns about test reliability have dominated to the extent that 'fairness [sc. reliability] may be achieved at the expense of worthwhileness [sc. validity])' (intro.). Skehan (1991) argues that the preference for efficient, reliable item types of the indirect kind (such as multiple choice and cloze items) in language testing has been at the cost of validity and has led to the neglect of 'integrative or direct testing techniques' (p. 6). The present unsatisfactory state of affairs should cause no surprise. Interest in the broader aspects of communicative language in linguistics has come to the fore only since the 1980s. Moreover, construct validity is difficult to achieve in practical terms. In the simplest case, the construct validity of a test can be guaranteed only when the test exercises are authentic simulations of the real world task. These, as has been shown, are difficult to reproduce efficiently in any large scale testing exercise, where time, resources, and expertise are limited. Even if valid elicitation exercises are devised, there remains the problem of assessing and judging test-takers' performances, particularly in production. The question of sampling further compounds the logistical problem: given that there is an unlimited number of potential communication tasks, the tester has to gather sufficient evidence of testees' ability to enable significant generalizations from the test data to the real world (Skeham 1991 p. 15). Finally, there is no external criterion of validity that can safely be invoked in the case of language tests (Bachman 1990 p. 56; Davies 1990 p. 2). The notion of construct validity is internal, circular, and dependent on the particular model of communication invoked. Subjective judgments of naive native speakers appear to be unreliable and objective criteria confound language and communicative ability with other factors. For example, to set up an arbitrary number of successful overseas graduates from university as an external criterion for the validity of a test of English for academic purposes will not do, simply because native speakers of English fail at university for reasons other than linguistic or communicative ability and, moreover, some overseas students find ways of compensating for inadequate language ability to succeed in their studies. Still, the notion of construct validity and simulation of authentic tasks is important: construct validity is the fundamental notion in testing. Where circumstances permit, for example, when testing the achievement or proficiency of small groups, test exercises that simulate more or less fully and accurately authentic communication tasks are to be preferred, not least because of their good washback effects. Moreover, the notion of construct validity serves as a brake on the cavalier use of efficient, reliable item
types without serious examination of the relevance of the test data to authentic language-using ability. 5.2 Direct and Indirect Test Items Language testing, like language use, is a real world activity and needs to take account of practical limitations. Alderson and North (1991 p. xiv) describe the severe modifications that were necessary for 'logistical and financial reasons' to a national test of English as a foreign language that was originally developed with theory-based validity as the controlling concern. The necessary compromise in most large-scale testing is to develop batteries of test items that are efficient, reliable, of high concurrent and predictive validity, and in the case of large scale examinations, with good washback effects. Such tests will use items that vary in their degree of directness and integration. In language testing parlance, a 'direct test item' is one that simulates some aspect of genuine language use and thereby elicits from testees a skill that is an integral element of the constellation of abilities that underlie communicative capacity. Asking test-takers to read a sentence in the test language and to indicate their comprehension of it in some efficient way is an example of a direct test, at least as far as elicitation goes. An indirect test item on the other hand is one which does not simulate any real world language activity or any aspect of one but, apparently, taps genuine language-using abilities or at least correlates highly with direct tests of communicative ability. The cloze test, in which candidates attempt to replace words deleted systematically from written texts, is perhaps the best example of the indirect item type. There is no claim that performing on a cloze test in any way mirrors real world language behavior, but it does appear that cloze tests 'measure aspects of second language competence' (Chapelle and Abraham 1990 p. 121). It is clear that the only reasons for developing indirect tests are those of efficiency and reliability. 5.3 Integrative and Discrete Point Items Item types are also classified on a separate dimension whose end points are labelled 'integrative' and 'discrete' (or 'discrete point'). The test of sentence comprehension mentioned above is at once direct and discrete in that it measures only part of the set of abilities that underlie comprehension. The cloze test item on the other hand is at once indirect and integrative: it taps a number of abilities (referred to as grammatical, textual, and rhetorical competence by Chapelle and Abraham [1990 p. 121]), but does not elicit genuine communicative behavior. It is around these two dimensions that current research in language testing revolves. Genuine language use is integrative ('multidimensional') and, trivially, direct, in that it involves the direct use of communicative abilities. Direct, integrative item types are thus nearest to authentic use, at least in what they 693
Testing elicit, but pose problems of efficiency and of reliability even in relation to the assessment of low-level skills, for example, the use of context-appropriate vocabulary. Indirect tests suffer from continuing doubts as to their validity. Discrete point items, whether direct or indirect, produce results that may overestimate performance when genuine multilevel or integrative communication is the criterion. Successfully juggling one ball five times is somewhat easier than juggling five balls once. 6. Progress in Testing Despite the intrinsic difficulties mentioned, there are interesting developments in language testing. (a) Indirect group tests of writing. Skehan (1991 p. 16) reports on a test battery that allows for the efficient group testing of both reading and writing ability which, thought based on indirect items, has 'impressive statistical qualities' and 'convincing communicative features.' (b) Empirical research into learner difficulties. Weir's (1988) work on the development of tests to measure the communicative proficiency of non-English-speaking university students shows the importance of empirical research into the precise details of testees' communicative needs as part of test development. His research provides a detailed description of the language difficulties reported by students and their tutors and reveals many unexpected findings. The upshot for language testing is that the efficiency of direct tests can be improved if first-hand knowledge of the precise areas of difficulty for testees can be discovered and made the focus of testing. The efforts of Weir are part of a larger movement in testing research and development that emphasizes building in the validity through content and task validation rather than the collection of post factum statistics as a means of interpreting and correcting imperfections in the test and test-taking processes. (c) Test-taking processes. It is often incorrectly assumed that the tester can control the mental processes of test-takers. Interesting research has been undertaken into test-taking processes and strategies in reading tests (Alderson 1990) and listening comprehension tests (Buck 1991). In both studies the tests required short answer responses to comprehension questions and both researchers used protocols of introspective and retrospective observations by testees on their test performances. Their subjects revealed that often they understood the text but not the test items, that the techniques which they used to arrive at their responses were not those that the items were intended to elicit, that some of their answering strategies were unlikely to be used in genuine comprehension, and that in many cases they were unable to write down their understanding through lack of English.
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Moreover, testing experts who commented on the tests frequently disagreed about what precise subskill a given item could be held to measure. Further problems, predicted by the model of communication given above, were found in scoring the tests; in particular, that 'comprehension is not simply 'on' or 'off as Buck puts it, so that some finely grained marking scale needs to be used in the interests of validity. (d) Tests, washback, and learning. An encouraging trend in test production, particularly in the case of influential, national and international tests, is the acceptance of responsibility for the washback effects of tests on learning. Hogan (1992) reports that examination preparation for the widely used IELTS (International English Language Testing System) can indeed be undertaken without detriment to worthwhile language learning. Davies (1990 p. 24) takes a similarly optimistic view and claims that as the washback effect is inevitable, it is for test developers to consider this factor as being just as important as the other measurement criteria in deciding on the form their instruments will take. 7. Conclusion The intrinsic difficulties in assessing communicative performance and the perennial problem of reconciling validity with reliability and efficiency lead to the prediction that progress in foreign language testing will be slow. Even a passing familiarity with the current state of language testing is enough to provide convincing evidence that current tests rarely simulate the complexities of genuine communication set out in the general model given above. One fruitful source of progress might be closer cooperation between researchers and professionals concerned with mother tongue testing and those in foreign language testing. Despite the large area of common concern, the two fields continue on separate paths, for accidental rather than intrinsic reasons. Foreign language test developers are likely to have a background in linguistics, applied linguistics, and foreign language learning, while mother tongue testing has largely been the province of general purpose measurement experts whose disciplinary background is likely to be education, psychology, or psychometrics. See also: Language Testing; Language Testing: Fundamentals. Bibliography Alderson J C 1990 Testing reading comprehension skills (Part Two): Getting students to talk about taking a reading test. A pilot study. Reading in a Foreign Language. 7(1): 465-504 Alderson J C, North B 1991 Introduction. In: Alderson J C, North B (eds.) 1991 Language Testing in the 1990s: The Communicative Legacy. Macmillan, London
Language Testing Bachman L 1990 Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford University Press, Oxford Barnwell D 1989 'Naive' native speakers and judgements of oral proficiency in Spanish. Language Testing 6(2): 15263 Brindley G 1986 The Assessment of Second Language Proficiency: Issues and Approaches. National Curriculum Research Centre, Adelaide Buck G 1991 The testing of listening comprehension: An introspective study. Language Testing. 8(1): 67-91 Chapelle C, Abraham R 1990 Cloze method: What difference does it make? Language Testing 7(2): 121-46 Gumming A 1990 Expertise in evaluating second language compositions. Language Testing. 7(1): 31-51 Davies A 1990 Principles of Language Testing. Blackwell, Oxford Grice H P 1975 Logic and conversation. In: Cole P, Morgan J (eds.) 1975 Syntax in Second Language Acquisition and Semantics, Vol. 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press. London Hogan M 1992. So your students have to sit the IELTS test? EA Journal 10(1): 13-16 Horrocks G 1987 Generative Grammar. Longman, London Keenan E 1978 Some logical problems in translation. In: Guenthner F, Geunthner-Reutter M (eds.) 1978 Meaning and Translation: Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches. Duckworth, London
Kelly R A 1981 Aspects of communicative performance. Applied Linguistics 2(2): 169-79 Laver J 1970 The production of speech. In: Lyons J (ed.) 1970 New Horizons in Linguistics. Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK McNamara T 1991 Test dimensionality: IRT analysis of an ESP listening test. Language Testing, 8(2): 139-59 Pienemann M, Johnston M 1987 Factors influencing the development of language proficiency. In: Nunan D (ed.) 1987 Applying Second Language Acquisition Research. National Curriculum Research Centre, Adelaide Sarig G 1989 Testing meaning construction: Can we do it fairly? Language Testing, 6(1): 77-94 Scheinkein J (ed.) 1978 Studies in the Organisation of Conversational Interaction. Academic Press, New York Skehan P 1991 Progress in language testing: The 1990s. In: Alderson J C, North B (eds.) 1991 Language Testing in the 1990s: The Communicative Legacy. Macmillan, London Sperber D, Wilson D 1986 Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford Taylor G 1986 Errors and explanations. Applied Linguistics 7(2): 144-66 Weir C 1988 Communicative Language Testing: With Special Reference to English as a Foreign Language, University of Exeter, Exeter
Language Testing B. Spolsky
In ordinary conversational usage, the felicity condition for a question is that the person addressed can be expected to have some information which the person asking the question does not know but is entitled to know. As Searle (1969) pointed out, examination questions are quite different, for the asker knows the answer, but the answerer might not. The questions in tests are better thought of, then, not as requests for information so much as requests for performance. A language test, accordingly, can be defined as someone (a tester) causing by some means (the test method) someone else (a test taker or candidate) to perform some language related behavior (the linguistic content of the test), in order to assess (score, mark, grade) the performance, the result to be interpreted and used by some person (test user) for some specific purpose (test ends or goals). In order to understand the principles that underlie the possible choices of language testing methods, including the kinds of items and the means of scoring that may be used, it is valuable to clarify first the other factors listed above: the participants, the purposes, and the contents. 1. Participants The participants in language testing are the tester, the test taker, and the test user.
First, the tester. Foreign language teachers prepare, administer, and interpret tests that they give to their own students. (For guidance for language teachers on how to prepare tests, see Lado 1961, Henning 1987, Hughes 1989.) Tests are also developed and administered by private or semi-governmental or governmental testing agencies, such as the Educational Testing Service (New Jersey), the various Local Examinations Boards in the UK, CITO in Holland, and Ministries of Education or their testing agencies throughout the world. In these cases, the test is often the work of a team, with separate groups of people responsible for developing the test, for administering it, and for scoring and reporting the results. Language testers are, ideally, trained professionally in applied linguistics and in psychometrics, the two academic disciplines which inform the field. A number of organizations constitute an international community of language testers. An irregular series of meetings on language testing that started in the USA in 1967 was formalized about 1980 into the annual Language Testing Research Colloquium; the International Association of Applied Linguistics has had a Scientific Commission on Language Tests and Testing since 1972; regional testing groups were formed in Germany in 1979 and in Israel in 1983; there have been regular annual meetings of Soviet language testers in
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Testing Estonia since about 1983; a professional and academic journal with the name Language Testing has been published since 1984; and there are proposals to establish an international professional association. Test takers may be students in schools or other instructional programs, applicants for training or for positions that require foreign language skills, or persons seeking certification of language proficiency for their work. Candidates who do not have previous experience with the testing method (that are not 'testwise') are usually at a slight disadvantage; some programs and books offer specific preparation for tests, and carefully designed tests usually include a practice session. Studies have been made of the possibility of language tests being biased in favor of or against certain culturally-different groups (Chen and Henning 1985), but little evidence of significant bias has been found in standardized tests. Candidates may be tested individually, in small groups or in masses. The test user is the person or agency that makes direct use of the interpretation of the results. Foreign language teachers use tests that they have prepared for the control and assessment of the effect of their instruction and to encourage and monitor learning. National and local educational bodies use tests to ensure that a set curriculum is followed and to assess the standards achieved in school work. Universities and other educational institutions use language tests to assess the proficiency and predict the readiness of applicants to benefit from instruction given in the language. Public and private organizations use language tests to assess the linguistic competence of present or potential employees. Foreign language teaching institutions use tests to place students at an appropriate level in the courses they offer. In self-assessment, the subject may fill each of these three roles. In self-rating, the test-takers place themselves on an ability scale; in self-reporting, they say whether they know some word or other item or whether they can perform some linguistic function. While there are problems of error in self-assessment, in that a test taker might not know his or her own ability, or might willfully misinform, the motivational and pedagogical values are high (Oscarson 1989). 2. Purposes There are many possible purposes for language testing, each of which affects the nature of the test. Any one test may have multiple ends. As Henning (1987) suggests, it is impossible to consider the validity of a test without a clear statement of its purpose. One common goal in using tests and examinations is to control the instructional process by making clear what abilities are to be acquired and what material is to be learned. Foreign language teachers use tests to induce students to learn specific material. Foreign language departments in universities and schools use
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tests to guarantee uniform standards in the multiple classes offered at a single level and to be sure that all teachers follow the same curriculum. National or regional examination agencies such as Examination Boards in England or Ministries of Education in much of the world use examinations or tests to keep control of the curriculum. In these approaches, the specification of the content of the examination is the curriculum itself. As a result, the so-called backwash effect (see Hughes 1989) is of primary significance; the most important result of the test is its effect on instruction. Changes in the examination are changes in the curriculum. Undesirable backwash effects may occur when preparation for the examination causes students to concentrate on unwanted skills, such as memorizing possible essays or practicing multiple choice techniques. In contrast, language tests are often intended first and foremost to reveal the results of instruction. In this feedback function, the test is intended to inform the teacher or the student about the student's progress. An educational institution or individual teacher or researcher may also use language tests for the evaluation of the effects of a program, with the emphasis on group rather than individual progress. Sometimes, a pre-test is given to decide the beginning level of the groups being studied (a placement test), tests are given during instruction to provide formative evaluation (diagnostic tests), and at the end of the course to provide a post-test or summative evaluation (an achievement test); the differences in students' scores between the pre- and post-test can then be used as evidence of the effects of various teaching strategies. Language tests of this kind can form part of more elaborate programs of evaluation. Other language tests serve as part of regular examination batteries to recognize and signify levels of achievement at the close of the various cycles of an educational system. The results of these tests can also be used for admission to some more advanced kind of instruction. This is appropriate when the next level of instruction requires knowledge of a foreign language, such as in countries that switch from teaching in the mother tongue at primary levels to teaching in a language of wider communication at the secondary level, or where knowledge of a language of wider communication is required for university study. A foreign language test or examination administered at the end of the cycle of secondary education is often a major factor in determining admission to tertiary education. Governmental bodies and private employers use tests to certify achievement of predetermined levels of foreign language proficiency. Thus, the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State developed in the 1960s an elaborate method of assessing the foreign language competence of employees; similarly, the Canadian government has developed language tests for civil servants expected to be
Language Testing bilingual; and many corporations need to be able to check the ability of prospective employees to function in various languages. More specially, with the increase of university and other advanced students studying in countries other than their own, a number of screening tests have been developed to assess proficiency in foreign students applying for admission. The best known of these are probably the US-based Test of English as Foreign Language (Spolsky and Oiler 1979; Spolsky 1990b) and the UK International English Language Testing Service battery (Alderson 1988; Criper and Davies 1988). Two other testing purposes relate to admission. One is to predict how well a student will do at language learning; this is a foreign language aptitude test (for fuller details see Skehan 1989); and the other is to determine at what level to place a student in a multilevel language course (a placement test). A placement test may also be used to find out which material needs to be taught, in which case it is also a diagnostic test. Language tests are also used as part of various kinds of research, such as psycholinguistic studies of language processing and language learning (Bachman 1988), sociolinguistic studies of language spread and attrition (Spolsky 1988), and educational studies of language teaching methodology. In some circumstances, language tests have been used to determine eligibility for voting. In other cases, language test results have been presented in court to show why an accused person should not have been expected to have understood material presented in another language. The purposes described above determine in large measure the time focus of the language test. An achievement test tends to be backward looking: it asks how well the defined curriculum has been learned. A placement or diagnostic test is more present looking; it asks how to make immediate changes in instruction. A proficiency test is typically future oriented: it attempts to predict how the candidate will perform in some future situation. The achievement test relates to a completed piece of curriculum; the placement or diagnostic test to existing curricular options; and the proficiency test to some future activity that will require language ability but is not related to a specific language teaching situation.
3. Who Benefits?
When the aim of a test is questioned, it is relevant also to ask who benefits from it. A diagnostic test offers advantages of efficiency for learner, teacher, and educational system. This is also true of placement tests. Admissions tests protect admitting institutions and student-funding agencies from too high a failure rate. Similarly, certification tests benefit the individuals who pass the test and the agencies that hire them; they
also serve to control access to certain professions and thus to protect existing professionals. A related issue is monetary cost and benefit. Candidates may themselves pay the cost of the test, or the cost may be covered by the agency interested in the results. These costs may range from virtually nothing (in the case of a teacher-administered classroom test) to several hundred dollars (as in the case of a language proficiency battery administered in a Canadian university that requires bilingual competence for tenure in some of its positions). Large-scale language tests and examinations provide major sources of income for the testing agencies: in 1986-7, TOEFL passed the 500 000 mark in the number of candidates taking the test annually, and numbers continue to grow. Similarly, over 200000 candidates take the University of Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate English as a Foreign Language examinations each year. 4. The Linguistic Content (Performance)
The specific language behavior that is elicited by the test is of course related in many ways to the goal of the test. The content of a language test is in one sense the language as a whole. The question, what does it mean to know a language, remains a central issue not just in language testing but also in linguistic theory. In practice, however, a test can sample only a limited part of language behavior, so that the basis for the sampling is of critical importance. A first important distinction, proposed in a classic paper by Carroll (1961), is between tests which look to test knowledge of discrete points of linguistic knowledge and those which aim at integrative skills. In the first of these approaches, the tester starts from the assumption that knowing a language means knowing a large number of linguistic units and rules: words, meanings of words, grammatical and morphological patterns and rules, phonological and phonetic units and rules. Any aspect of language that can be identified structurally is a potential item for this kind of testing. The candidate's knowledge of these discrete points is assessed by selecting a representative or a random sampling. How this works is most obvious in the area of vocabulary, where lexical items can be selected from a vocabulary frequency list. Knowledge itself can be considered as ability to recognize an item or rule, ability to generalize about it verbally, ability to use it in a focused situation (as in a grammatical test item), and actual use in unfocused situations (in writing or in speech); each of these must be tested in different ways and may turn out to vary independently. The second or integrative approach to language testing is functional. It involves describing a number of communicative functions that a candidate can be expected to perform in the foreign language, ranging from the more simple (acknowledge a greeting, buy a
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Testing loaf of bread) to the most elaborate (write an essay, make a speech in favor of some position). These functions may be listed (as in the European notionalfunctional syllabus—see van Ek 1975) or described and ranked (as in the Interagency Language Roundtable Language Skill Level Descriptions—Lowe (1982)—or the ACTFL Proficiency GuidelinesAmerican Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language 1986). There is a useful first level of distinction to be made between tests of the so-called four skills—understanding speech, speaking, reading and writing. A language test may concentrate on one or combine two or more of these skills. Much more elaborate schemata have been proposed for describing and testing communicative performance (Carroll 1980) or ability (Bachman 1988), which involve breaking down the trait to be tested into its various components. Carroll selects skills from Munby's (1978) syllabus and shows how tests can be developed for each relevant skill. Bachman proposes that communicative ability is made up of language competence, strategic competence and psychophysiological mechanisms. Within language competence, he distinguishes four basic competences— grammatical, textual, illocutionary, and sociolinguistic—each of which is made up of a number of smaller and testable components (e.g., vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and phonological or graphemic for grammatical). A third approach has been to attempt to tap some theoretical overall proficiency through using some specific technique (the cloze test, the dictation with or without added noise) that is assumed to depend on a theoretical concept of expectancy (Oiler 1979) or reduced redundancy (Spolsky 1971). This approach, encouraged by the fact that various methods of testing foreign language proficiency correlate very highly, assumes that there is sufficient generality in.foreign language proficiency across skills and items to mean that some techniques will tap overall ability. In aptitude testing, the general approach is to seek evidence of the existence of specific abilities (memory, musicality, analysis, phonetic coding) believed to be fundamental to explaining individual differences in language learning (see Carroll 1962; Skehan 1986). 5. Testing Methods Given the complex mix of testers and test users, of potential candidates and purposes, and of the knowledge and abilities to be tested, it is not surprising that there exists a multitude of language testing methods. Following Bachman (1988), test method facets can be analyzed in a number of different dimensions. Most simply, one can ask about the testing environment, the way the test tasks are arranged and presented (rubric), the information in the test to which the test taker responds (the question or test itself, variously called stimulus or input), the performance that is elic-
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ited (the response), and the relation between the question and the performance. Closely related but requiring separate consideration are the methods of scoring the performance and of interpreting the results. Various features of the physical environment of the test can have desired or undesirable effects on the results: it can be given in a familiar or an unfamiliar place, by people known or strange to the candidates, in comfortable or uncomfortable surroundings. One can easily imagine the consequences of being asked to take an oral foreign language test in front of an imposingly dressed unfriendly person speaking the foreign language fluently, or of being expected to listen to an aural comprehension test presented through a faulty record player in a large hall with windows open to street noise. Similarly, the test rubric might easily introduce interference: unclear or insufficient time allocation, uncertainty about the relative weight of the parts, and confusion caused by the language or form of the instructions are all potential sources of irrelevant problems that the test taker might face in the case of an inadequately prepared test. The test question (input) which elicits the behavior and the required answer (response) are two crucial aspects of the test method. Much the same sort of questions can be asked about the method of eliciting and the behavior to be performed. Two elaborated frameworks for description of language testing methods have been proposed by Clark (1972) and by Bachman (1988). First, one can ask whether question or response is linguistic or nonlinguistic. A picture to be described orally or in writing is an example of a nonlinguistic prompt; a map to be drawn on the basis of understanding spoken or written instruction is an example of a nonlinguistic performance; each of these might reasonably be part of a foreign language test. Writing a story is linguistic, checking a box is nonlinguistic. One kind of nonlinguistic response, the physical marking of an answer sheet that can later be scored by a machine, lends itself to the most efficient scoring when there is a large number of candidates. It should be noted that while the observed action called for is not linguistic, there is a presumption of internal linguistic processing that permits it. There is a related distinction to be made between constructed, openended responses, where the candidate is expected to create a sample of language behavior, and multiplechoice (or true-false) selected responses, where the candidate selects one of a number of offered responses and indicates the correct or best answer, or which of several underlined words or phrases is incorrect. The introduction of the 'objective' or 'American' type of question was for a long time resisted in British and European testing, but during the late twentieth century seems to be widely accepted as both more efficient and psychometrically more sound; at the
Language Testing same time, there has been a renewed questioning in testing circles of the validity of multiple-choice items. A second facet of testing method is the channel that is used for question and response: is the question written or spoken, presented by recording or live? Is the answer to be written or spoken, presented live or to be recorded? Written questions can be fairly cheaply prepared in multiple copies. The presentation of spoken material creates greater technical problems if one wishes to be sure that all candidates hear the same presentation. For large-scale national examinations, radio may be used; for international tests, tape recordings are now common. Answers are most easily recorded for later scoring when they are written, but oral answers may be recorded—the first use of recording of oral language examinations appears to be that made by J. Roach for the Cambridge Local Examinations Board in 1944 (see Roach 1945; Spolsky 1990a). If a question or response is linguistic, one can ask whether it is to be in the foreign or the native language. For instance, the question could be a text in the foreign language and the task could be to write or talk about it in the native language; or conversely, the question could be an instruction in the native language to do something in the foreign language. At one stage, a favored method of testing foreign language ability was to present a passage in either the foreign or the native language to be translated into the other; for some time now, this has been believed to be a different and more complex skill. Similarly, research has shown that writing a summary of a passage in a foreign language taps more than language skills and is very difficult to score with any reliability. Fourth, one could ask about the directness or authenticity of the question and the task set: how close is it (given the inevitable artificiality of a testing situation) to normal communicative language behavior (see Bachman 1988 for a somewhat different view). On this dimension, a grammar test or a cloze test is remote and inauthentic, a conversation test or a letter to be written is potentially more natural. Real life testing is possible, as in the planted encounter or the ethnographic approach (Spolsky 1985); the former is a method used by sociolinguists and social psychologists to elicit examples of normal language behavior by asking some socially accepted question in a public place (e.g., 'Where is the railway station?' or 'Where is the women's shoe department?') and recording the answers; the latter involves training foreign language classroom teachers to observe and record students' natural language use over a long period of time (Rivera 1983). Given the high cost and restricted focus of real life methods, it is more usual to attempt to emulate real life in the testing procedure. The kind of oral interview developed by the Foreign Service Institute (Jones 1979) and imitated in modified form in many other *
oral batteries is an example of this. One might consider a test direct when there is a match between the mode and channel of the test method and the mode and the channel of the ability being measured: thus, an oral interview is a direct measure of speaking ability, a written composition of writing ability. 6. Item Types There are many different kinds of items: the following describes some of the more usual (see Hughes 1989). The basic structure of a multiple choice item is a stem (a question or an incomplete sentence) and a number of options (the incorrect options are called distractors), one of which is the desired answer. With multiple choice items, some allowance is usually made in scoring for the possibility of guessing. Writing good items is an art; once an item is written, it needs to be pre-tested on a group of test takers similar to those who will take the test in order to determine its level of difficulty and its discriminating ability. Items tested in this way may be placed in item banks from which tests are later built. Item banks are particularly useful in building computer adaptive tests (see Henning 1987). Multiple choice items are used in indirect tests of what are believed to be components of more general abilities; in a multiple choice test of writing ability, for instance, a test taker might be asked to decide which option would be stylistically most acceptable, or which contains a grammatical error, or which would be the best continuation of a passage of prose. In a cloze test, a certain number of words at random, in a fixed ratio, is replaced in a passage by a blank; the test taker is expected to write that word (or, in another approach, any grammatically and semantically acceptable word) in the blank. One modification that is becoming common is to delete selected words rather than randomly. Another modification is the C-test, a cloze in which the second half of every second word is deleted. Once test takers have overcome initial distress with the novelty of these two methods, the technique appears to provide useful results. A third technique intended to give some evidence of overall ability is the dictation. Dictation was originally and is sometimes still used primarily as a test of spelling and punctuation, but research showed its usefulness as a measure of comprehension of a foreign language (see Oiler 1979). Writing ability may be tested most directly by setting the candidate a task to be accomplished in writing in the foreign language. There has been criticism of the general essay, where it is difficult for the examiner to distinguish between a candidate's creativity (usually not being tested) and writing ability. The solution is to set more focused tasks: to provide for instance some information (a map, a timetable, a sales catalogue) and require the candidate to write a letter passing on some of the information in it. Face-to-face tests of oral ability face a similar need to move attention from
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Testing content to language. Techniques used include the oral interview, the group discussion, the prepared talk, and role playing. Reading ability may be tested in a number of different ways, depending in part on one's definition of what is involved in comprehension (does it for instance include the ability to make inferences from the text?). Reading tests involve the selection of one or more passages to be read, and a number of tasks to be carried out. Selection of the passage involves deciding on genre, style, difficulty (sometimes quantified as the frequency level of the vocabulary) and topic. As comprehension of a passage depends as much on familiarity with the topic as on knowledge of the language, it is important to provide a good sample. A decision needs to be made whether to focus on general or specific material: research shows the difference in results when candidates are given passages to read selected from their own field of study or from more neutral material. Reading comprehension may be tested with multiple choice questions, with sentence completions, or with short or long open-ended questions (these last two also testing writing ability). Questions may focus on various sub-skills of comprehension: obtaining specific information, getting the gist, recognizing the tone, following the argument, making inferences; or they may look at some of the sub-components of these skills: giving the meaning of words, identifying the referents of pronouns, appreciating the significance of grammatical choices. Aural comprehension (listening ability) is tested in part in oral interviews. It may also be tested specifically using techniques not unlike those for reading comprehension, with the difference that the passage to be understood is presented aurally, live or by tape (or video). Passages chosen may be short extracts from lectures or talks, or rehearsed or natural samples of conversations. Questions are usually written, and tasks follow the same model as for written comprehension. 7. Scoring Once the behavior has been elicited, it must be scored and the score interpreted. The scoring may be intuitive and subjective, as when a teacher reads over an essay written by a student and assigns a grade to it on the basis of previous experience and personal judgment, or it may be more explicit and objective, as when there is only one acceptable answer to each question. Intuitive judgments can be made more objective, as when essay markers work with a scoring guide or are trained to agree on standards; objective scoring can be made more flexible, as when open-ended answers are permitted. In what has been characterized as the period (or approach) of traditional (or pre-scientific) language examinations (Spolsky 1977), the underlying philosophy of testing was to assume full confidence in 700
the authorized judgment of the person appointed as examiner. As long as there was only one examiner, no problems became apparent, but with the increasing use of multiple examiners, issues of reliability and standardization of the scores they gave were raised (Hartog and Rhodes 1936). The answer, first discussed for oral foreign language tests by Roach (1945) and elaborated in Clark (1978), was to develop methods of moderation or of judge training. In scoring a response produced by the test-taker that forms a piece of connected speech or writing, various techniques are used. When the emphasis is on accuracy (as in a dictation, or sometimes in free writing), the score may be obtained by deducting a point for each error from a possible total mark. Rating scales or schedules permit a degree of objectivity in subjective marking. They generally assign marks for defined areas (e.g., spelling, mechanics, grammar, vocabulary, organization, creativity, relevance, interest) and may provide points on a scale for each (e.g., native-speaker like grammatical accuracy, minor usage errors, serious grammatical errors but comprehensible, many serious errors leading to incomprehensibility). The weight to be given to each area may vary. (Hughes 1989 gives examples of a number of scales.) A number of methods may be used to improve the objectivity of the test scores. One is use of a scale. A second is to select raters carefully and give them training in how to use the scale. A third is to use at least two independent raters for each scoring: their ratings may be averaged, or a third rater may be called in to adjudicate when their ratings disagree. The fourth is to set up a system of moderation, where the ratings are randomly checked by a senior examiner. A quite different answer is involved in the modern or scientific approach to language testing, dominated by structural linguistics (with its interest in listing all the items which made up knowledge of a language) and by psychometrics with its well developed theory of the measurement of human abilities. (For a fuller discussion of measurement in relation to foreign language ability, see chapters on the topic in Bachman 1988, or Henning 1987.) The theory holds that it is possible to measure human abilities in much the same way as measuring other characteristics such as height or weight. To do this with any reliability, one needs to have a theory of the nature of the ability, a method of eliciting a behavior that represents the ability, and an explicit procedure for assigning a rating to that ability. Measurement theory, which is built on a fundamental axiom that the ability being measured is unidimensional (otherwise, it can be described but not reduced to a single measure), has been particularly concerned with controlling and excluding irrelevant sources of erroneous measurement that will make the test unreliable. For example, there is evidence that
Language Testing human judges vary among themselves and make different judgments at different times; the concern of psychometric techniques is to reduce this kind of random or identifiable source of error to the minimum. The techniques are most highly developed with tests with a large number of multiple choice items, where error can be identified by statistical techniques. Classical measurement theory aims to establish what proportion of the observed score of a test is to be attributed to non-relevant factors, assumed to be unsystematic or random variation in the scores. The most common approach is to look for evidence of internal consistency in the test itself by comparing the scores on randomly-split halves of the test: the higher the correlation, the more the two parts of the test can be assumed to be measuring the same thing. In the late 1980s and 1990s, foreign language testers have started to consider the implication of an alternative theory of measurement of human abilities called latent trait (or item response) theory. There are various analytical models in this theory, the oneparameter or Rasch model being strongly supported by some testers. These models provide a method of quantifying the probability of the patterns of responses of individual items and individual persons given the overall pattern of responses in an administration of a test. They make it possible to estimate the difficulty of an item and the ability of a test taker. For more detail on both classical and latent trait theories of reliability, see Henning (1987) or Bachman (1988). 8. Interpreting and Using Test Results
When the language behavior has been scored reliably, the score still needs interpretation. Some tests carry automatic interpretation: a mastery test, for instance, where each mistake shows something that needs to be relearned, or an assessment procedure using a guideline where the assessment is already worded as an interpretation. In other cases, interpretation is needed to determine such points as pass and fail, levels of honors, or estimates of future language-related performance. Basic to interpreting the results of a test is an understanding of its validity. Measurement theory has developed a large number of methods for identifying the validity of the test score, that is for being confident that it represents the particular ability that has been postulated. No one approach establishes validity, which is rather the sum of a number of approaches. Content or face validity refers to the extent to which the test appears to an observer or to the test taker to be a representative sample of the ability it is supposed to be measuring. For example, an oral interview is likely to be considered a valid measure of spoken ability; a cloze or multiple-item test to be a questionable measure of writing ability.
Concurrent validity is the extent to which a test correlates with other measures. In validating measures like the cloze and the multiple-item test of writing ability, their high correlation with essay tests was considered by some testers to justify their use. Predictive validity, as the name suggests, is the extent to which the scores on a test correlate with some later criterion, such as how well entrance examinations correlate with results at the end of courses. In practice, this is hard to establish, both because there are many other factors that affect success in a course, and because the entrance examination has already been used to limit the candidates admitted to the course, thus reducing the spread of scores (and so the evidence of correlation). Construct validity involves finding evidence that the various abilities (or constructs) that are assumed by the theory to exist can be shown empirically. One might for instance postulate that comprehension ability is made up to two separate constructs, vocabulary ability and grammatical ability, and the test should show the distinction. Following one approach to construct validity, a number of studies using the multitrait-multimethod matrix have attempted to explore the relationships between the traits or abilities being measured and the methods used to measure them. More recently, a number of studies have focused on the process of test taking, asking candidates to report on the way in which they decided how to answer the questions; these studies have sometimes revealed that test takers use strategies quite unlike the processes that are intended to be tested. There are two fundamentally distinct approaches to interpreting the score of a candidate in a test, the one by reference to the performances of other candidates (the norm-referenced test that has been ideally standardized on a large number of candidates), and the other by reference to the content or level of performance (the criterion-referenced test). (For further discussion, see Cziko 1982, and Bachman 1988.) A large-scale test like TOEFL or IELTS is norm-referenced and standardized. Each form of the test has the same content; alternate forms are carefully compared and there are equating questions to make sure that the standard does not vary from year to year. Each test administration follows the same set of procedures. Each item has been pretested, and its general characteristics (its difficulty level and its ability to discriminate among candidates) has been determined with a similar population of candidates before the test is made up. The measurement characteristics (reliability and validity) of the test have been and are continuously checked, the distributions of scores received by equivalent groups of candidates are known, and statistical methods are used to ensure that a score on any one form of the test is representative of the ability level of scores on earlier administrations of the test. 701
Testing The scores provided by a norm-referenced test still need further interpretation: for TOEFL, a series of validation studies made it possible to suggest, for candidates from a specific country in a given field of study at a specific institution, how adequate their English will be when they receive a certain TOEFL score. Similar studies were made of IELTS (Criper and Davies 1988). As suggested by their purpose, norm-referenced tests are built to show the largest possible differences between individual candidates. Criterion-referenced tests on the other hand are intended to assign candidates to a limited number of levels of ability or knowledge. One approach is to assume that there is a continuum of skill ranging from none to mastery, and then to describe in some way the levels in between. The Absolute Language Proficiency Ratings developed by the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State (Wilds 1975) set as the highest level the ability of an educated native speaker of the language, and then set five lower levels, with the lowest including abilities one might find in a beginner or tourist, and the third level defined by abilities that would allow a diplomat to function efficiently in the foreign country. From this scale have been developed the Interagency Language Roundtable scale (agreed to and used by US government agencies—Lowe 1982) and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Proficiency Guidelines (adapted as suitable to describe the range of abilities expected in US college students—ACTFL 1986). 9. Post-modern Language Testing The traditional and the modern approaches to language testing continue to be used, sometimes in opposition and sometimes in comfortable or uncomfortable partnership. Foreign language testers have started, in the early 1990s, to question the rigidity of both approaches—the reliance on the authoritarian intuitive examiner on the one hand, or on the equally authoritarian psychometrist on the other. The traditional approach produces superficially valid tests the reliability of which is questionable; the modern approach produces reliable tests that seem to try to reduce to unidimensionality the multidimensional competence that is believed to make up language proficiency. Post-modern language testing aims to take the best of each. It starts with a recognition of the ethical requirements of testing, the need for testers to share with test users responsibility for the kinds of decisions made with test results (Spolsky 1981, 1984). It accepts the need for careful analysis of the specific purposes of a test, and for the design of tests that meet these specifications. It accepts the need to make procedures of test preparation, scoring, and interpretation fully explicit and open to inspection by test takers and users. It recognizes the value of professional standards for testing. It encourages the combination of discrete
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point and integrative tests. Most of all, it recognizes the limitations of using a single method for foreign language testing, or of relying for important decisions on a single test. Major institutional tests have been changing in relation to these pressures. The Test of English as a Foreign Language, originally set up after a meeting in 1961 at which the need for integrative testing was stressed, operated for two decades with only multiplechoice items; in the last few years, it has developed tests of writing and speaking that require the assessment of writing samples and speech produced by the candidate. A traditional examination like the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English finally introduced some objective items in the 1970s and has undertaken recent changes to increase the psychometric reliability of the test. Postmodern language tests emphasize communicative ability: national foreign language tests that were once only written now regularly include assessment of oral ability. The functional emphasis has led to attempts to capture sociolinguistic as well as grammatical ability and to recognize the need for appropriately controlled variation rather than just accuracy. Strong arguments are being presented to replace single scores, with their misleading and unwarranted claim that foreign language proficiency can be measured on a single dimension, with more complex profiles, that throw the weight of interpretation on the test user. Multiple measures are becoming preferred. At the same time, there is an increasing emphasis for the need to bring testing under control of the teaching process rather than vice versa. Good formative diagnostic testing, it has been pointed out, provides needed feedback to learner, teacher, and institution on the effectiveness of the learning-teaching process, and provides the basis for useful evaluation. With all this practical relevance, foreign language testing continues to set important challenges to linguistic theory, as it continues to seek answers to the two fundamental research questions, what does it mean to know a language, and what does it mean 'to know how to use a language. Bibliography Alderson J C 1988 New procedures for validating proficiency tests of ESP: Theory and practice. Language Testing 5(2): 220-32 American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages 1986. ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, New York Bachman L F 1988 Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA Carroll B J 1980 Testing Communicative Performance: An Interim Study. Pergamon Press, Oxford Carroll J B 1961 Fundamental considerations in testing for English language proficiency of foreign students. In: Testing the English Proficiency of Foreign Students. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC Carroll J B 1962 The prediction of success in intensive foreign
Language Testing: Alternative Methods language training. In: Glazer R (ed.) Training Research and Education. The University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA Chen Z, Henning G 1985 Linguistic and cultural bias in language proficiency tests. Language Testing 2(2): 155-63 Clark J L D 1972 Foreign Language Testing: Theory and Practice. Center for Curriculum Development, Philadelphia, PA Clark J L D (ed.) 1978 Direct Testing of Speaking Proficiency: Theory and Application. Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ Criper C, Davies A 1988 ELTS Validation Project Report. The British Council/University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, London Cziko G A 1982 Psychometric and edumetric approaches to language testing: Implications and applications. Applied Linguistics 2(1): 27-44 Davies A 1990 Principles of Language Testing. Basil Blackwell, Oxford Ek J A van 1980 Threshold Level English (in a European unit/credit system For Modern Language Learning by Adults), publ. for Council of Europe, by Pergamon Press, Oxford Hartog P A R , Rhodes E C 1936 An Examination of Examinations, being a summary of investigations on comparison of marks allotted to examination scripts by independent examiners and boards of examiners, together with a section on a viva voce examination. Macmillan, London Henning G 1987 A Guide to Language Testing: Development, Evaluation, Research. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Hughes A 1989 Testing for Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Jones R L 1979 The FSI oral interview. In: Spolsky B (ed.) Advances in Language Testing J: Some Major Tests. Center for Applied Linguistics, Arlington, VA Lado R 1961 Language Testing: The construction and Use of Foreign Language Tests: A Teacher's Book. McGraw-Hill, New York Lowe P Jr 1982 ILR Handbook on Oral Interview Testing. DLI/LS Oral Interview Project, Washington, DC Munby J 1978 Communicative Syllabus Design. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Oiler J W Jr 1979 Language Tests at School: A Pragmatic Approach. Longman, London Oscarson M 1989 Self-assessment of language proficiency: Rationale and applications. Language Testing 6(1): 1-13 Rivera C (ed.) 1983 An Ethnographic/Sociolinguistic
Approach to Language Proficiency Assessment. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, OH Roach J O 1945 Some Problems of Oral Examinations in Modern Languages: An experimental approach based on the Cambridge Examinations in English for foreign students, being a report circulated to oral examiners and local examiners for those examinations. Local Examinations Syndicate, Cambridge Searle J R 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Skehan P 1986 The role of foreign language aptitude in a model of school learning. Language Testing 3(2): 188-221 Skehan P 1989 Second Language Learning: Individual Differences in Second-Language Learning. Edward Arnold, London Spolsky B 1971 Reduced redundancy as a language testing tool. In: Perren G E, Trim J L M (eds.) Applications of Linguistics: Selected Papers of the Second International Congress of Applied Linguistics, Cambridge, September 1969. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Spolsky B 1977 Language testing: Art or science. In: Nickel G (ed.) Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Applied Linguistics, vol. 3. Hochschulverlag, Stuttgart Spolsky B 1981 Some ethical questions about language testing. In: Klein-Braley C, Stevenson D K (eds.) Practice and Problems in Language Testing 1. Verlag Peter D. Lang, Frankfurt Spolsky B 1984 The uses of language tests: An ethical envoi. In: Rivera C (ed.) Placement Procedures in Bilingual Education: Education and Policy Issues. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, OH Spolsky B 1985 The limits of authenticity in language testing. Language Testing 2(1): 31-40 Spolsky B 1988 Tests in sociolinguistics. In: Ammon U, Dittmar N, Mattheier K J (eds.) Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, vol. 2. De Gruyter, Berlin Spolsky B 1990a Oral examinations: An historical note. Language Testing 7: 158-73 Spolsky B 1990b The prehistory of TOEFL. Language Testing 7: 98-118 Spolsky B, Oiler J W Jr 1979 The test of English as a Foreign Language. In: Spolsky B (ed.) Advances in Language Testing 1. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC Wilds C 1975 The oral interview test. In: Spolsky B, Jones T L (eds.) Testing Language Proficiency. Center for Applied Linguistics, Arlington, VA
Language Testing: Alternative Methods K. Smith
Alternative assessment refers to the use of methods other than traditional tests and examinations. In this approach, assessment is not restricted to a uniform test given at a specific place and time, and designed for
all subjects. Alternative assessment might take place outside the classroom or even the institution at various points in time, and the subjects being tested may be asked to present their knowledge in various ways.
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Testing Testing language proficiency in this way is not restricted to the exact measurement of outcomes of learning, but involves assessing the process and the practical application of the language learning. 1. Why Alternative Methods? Learning today is no longer considered the direct transmission of information from a teacher or textbook to a learner. Rather, the learner is seen as actively constructing personalized knowledge by using information from various resources. The process is personal and individual, and so the new knowledge attained by each learner is unknown to the teacher or test designer. At least three parts of this process cannot be constrained: the sources of information, the processing of the new information, and the learners' preferred ways of organizing and presenting it. In the case of language learning, the learner is exposed to the target language not only by the teacher and the textbook, but through a rich variety of other sources of which television, internet, films, songs, and native speakers are only a few. There are individualized ways of learning language, depending on the personality of the learners. Some learners are good at taking formal tests and perform well under examination conditions, whereas others prefer to show evidence of their achievement by preparing, without the. stress of a formal test, a written or recorded example of it. A single uniform test given to a group of learners at a single time and place cannot give a full picture of the richness and variety in individual learning. Hence the notion of alternative methods was developed. 1.1 Language Proficiency Oscarson (1997) defines proficiency as the accumulated knowledge achieved in a formal course and in uncontrolled learning situations. Achievement is the product of a language course, whereas proficiency refers to a wider concept which includes what has been learned outside the specific course. If proficiency is to be tested, the test cannot be restricted to the syllabus of a specific course. Language acquired outside the course must be included in the testing. This part of language proficiency is otherwise unknown to the tester. 1.2 Language Ability Bachman (1990) and Bachman and Palmer (1996) define language ability to include both language knowledge and strategic competence. Language knowledge includes organizational knowledge and pragmatic knowledge. Organizational knowledge is what is traditionally tested, as grammatical knowledge and textual knowledge, whereas pragmatic knowledge relates to functional and sociolinguistic knowledge. Strategic knowledge can be seen by how the learner handles a language-related task, deciding what needs to be done, 704
assessing the difficulty level, and planning how to do it. Some parts of this ability can be measured: spelling, use of grammar structures, lexical knowledge, reading comprehension. A traditional test can measure this objectively and reliably. However, other aspects of this ability cannot be measured. These include creativity in writing and speech, successful communication, full comprehension. Alternative testing methods attempt to assess this part of language ability. 2. Purposes of Testing Tests serve a variety of purposes. Gipps (1995) suggests three main reasons for testing learners: certification, accountability, and the support of the learning process. The first function might partly be served by a traditional external examination. There is a standard body of knowledge that all learners graduating from a specific course might be required to have in order to be granted a certificate. But a traditional test is limited in the abilities it can assess. Alternative testing methods are needed to provide full information about the learner's abilities to use language knowledge in a wide variety of situation. For accountability, too, one needs more information about the extended proficiency of the learners than a traditional standardized examination can provide. Especially for support of the learning process, there is a need for testing approaches which provide informative feedback to both learners and teachers about weaknesses and strengths. This is formative assessment, which derives from Scriven's (1967) distinction between formative and summative functions of educational evaluation. Formative testing provides regular real-time feedback to the learner during the learning process, making the learner a responsible active partner. 3. What are Alternative Testing Methods? Alternative testing methods can be used for formative as well as summative purposes in a specific context, serving a group of learners or an individual learner. Four different methods will be discussed in this article: self-assessment, portfolio assessment, project assessment, and take-home tests. This list of alternative testing methods is not meant to be exhaustive, for the approach assumes that creativity is possible. The methods described assess what the learner is able to do with the language, his or her language performance. Performance testing is an integral part of alternative assessment approaches. McNamara (1996) distinguishes between strong and weak performance tests. In the strong sense, actual language behavior in a real life situation is assessed. If the task is to order the delivery of a meal on the telephone, the assessment is based on the fact that the meal arrives at the right place. In the weak sense, the main focus of assessment is on the language component of the task, such as the correct use of register, vocabulary,
Language Testing: Alternative Methods and grammar. Most performance tasks have been assessed in this manner, but alternative methods assume direct testing of performance in the strong sense of the concept. 3.1 Self-assessment The defining characteristics of self-assessment are that learners: identify standards or criteria to apply to their work, and make judgments about the extent to which they have met those criteria/standards (Boud 1986, p. 5). Self-assessment in language learning is a relatively recent concept, mainly recommended for formative testing. The main advantage of self-assessment lies in its educational values, in improving the learning strategies of the learner, and strengthening the learner's metacognition. Self-assessment has been used for placement purposes (LeBlanc and Painchaud 1985; van Dieten 1989) with various levels of success, and found to have a Pearson Correlation Coefficient ranking of r = 0-50-0-60 and higher (Blanche and Merino 1989) with other more traditional testing methods such as teacher assessment and external testing. Various instruments have been used with selfassessment, the most successful instruments being those which are keyed to a specific langauge task situation in a specific setting. Oscarson, one of the first to study self-assessment in language learning, found 'Can do statements' very successful. An example is: Imagine that you meet an English-speaking person from another country. He/she does not know anything about you and your country. Indicate your estimated command of the language by putting a cross in the appropriate box (yes or no) for each statement: 'I can tell him/her where I was born' 'I can explain my home to him/her' (Oscarson 1978, p. 55). Another approach is to list situations in which language is needed, and ask subjects to report their ability to perform on a scale with clearly specified standards. Ongoing self-assessment can be provided by using a diary in which the learner sets personal goals for the week to come and assesses to what extent these goals have been achieved. The nature of the goals can be defined in terms of number of new vocabulary items to be required, the mastery of specific structures, oral communication in which the target language is used, reading of target language books or stories, etc. Research on self-assessment indicates that its accuracy is influenced by age, level, and cultural background, but not by gender. 3.2 Portfolio Testing A portfolio is 'a purposeful collection of student work that tells a story of the student's efforts, progress or achievement in (a) given area(s). This collection must
include student participation in the selection of portfolio content; the guidelines for selection; the criteria for judging merit; and evidence of student reflection' (Arter and Spandel 1992). The portfolio is a learning tool as well as an assessment tool. The basic principles of the portfolio are: (a) The learner is involved in choosing what is to be put into the portfolio. (b) The learner is allowed to revise the work after formative feedback from the tutor. (c) The learner is required to assess the work, thus becoming aware of personal development. (d) There is a required part of the portfolio in which all learners have to provide evidence of having mastered a core body of knowledge. (e) Evidence can be presented in various forms, such as written work, audio, and video recordings. (f) The portfolio needs to be assessed by more than one rater if it is to be used for summative assessment. Portfolio testing is a subjective method of testing and the main problem lies in its reliability. Any standardization makes it more objective and reliable, but reduces its flexibility. The compulsory part of the portfolio contains the assignments for all pupils. There is also a list of assignments, all related to the course, from which the learners choose a set number of tasks to include in their portfolio. 3.3 Project Testing: Individual and Group In project testing the learners are given a theoretical or practical project to work on. The former might be a comparison of the use of various structures in newspaper language, or the examination of the role of female characters in the works of a specific author. The task is developing a new written text on basis of information collected from other sources. Criteria and standards for assessment have to be known to the learners before the start of the project. Following the principles of the alternative assessment approach, learners should be involved in setting the standards. The work of developing the standards can be a learning and formative testing exercise in itself. Practical testing projects are those which require the learner to use the target language outside the classroom. This might take the form of giving directions to tourists, or learning about the target culture by interviewing speakers of the language within the learners' own community. Projects can be presented as video recordings and assessed by multiple raters, according to prespecified criteria and standards. Project testing can be done individually or in groups. If the latter, it is necessary to decide how the assessment will be done, whether by assigning a group mark, or as a combined mark, one for the product (group mark) and one for the individual learning process. The latter requires an individual group member to present evidence of the
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Testing personal learning process with the project, usually in the form of an individual report in spoken or written form. 3.4 Take-home Tests In spite of the name, take-home tests are not restricted to home, but are taken outside a controlled testing situation, with the use of resource material permitted. The test focuses on what the learners know. The aim of a test may be to examine the learner's comprehension of a text, but at a level decided by the subjects and not by the test designers. In applying this test design, the tester does not look for standardization. On the contrary, the format of the test allows for individuality, not only in levels, but also in the choice of what langauge to present as evidence for comprehension. The main advantage of the test lies in its formative strength, it provides information about the learner's attitude to and comprehension of a selfchosen text. There is no intention to look for reliability or content validity related to specific material taught. This type of test has, however, personal construct validity, it reflects comprehension as the learner has chosen to present it. Examples of such test items are presented in the following: (a) The learner chooses a text to work on (it can be out of a selection of texts worked on in class or recommended by the teacher). (b) The learner explains the reason for choosing that text (at more advanced levels, this could be done in the target language, if not, then in LI). (c) The learner lists facts from the text according to personal choice. (d) The learner lists vocabulary items found difficult and explains how the difficulties were overcome. (e) The learner lists vocabulary items, metaphors, idioms, etc. found easy, enjoyable, useful, and provides explanations. (f) The learner chooses a grammatical structure found in the text and explains why the writer might have chosen to use it. (g) The learner chooses a character from the text and tells the story from the point of view of the chosen character. (h) The learner chooses a character and asks questions about the chosen character's point of view. (i) The learner gives the answers that might be anticipated the chosen character would give. This alternative method of testing comprehension is based on a taxonomy of comprehension from a surface level of reproducing facts, making inferences about what the writer might have intended to say in the text, to evaluating the opinions or actions of the characters. It examines the learner's level of linguistic mastery and comprehension.
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4. Conclusions Alternative methods in language testing are not meant to replace the external examination which has many advantages. A traditional examination reflects a specific program, applies required publicly agreed upon criteria, and serves as basis for comparison of learners. Its design must meet criteria of validity and reliability. Alternative methods of testing provide richer information about language ability than is available in a single external examination. This information is essential to the learner and the teacher during the learning process, and also complements the information provided by summative tests. The tests used in the classroom for formative purposes are often copies of an anticipated external examination. Subsequently, only one aspect of the learner's language ability is examined and assessed. Alternative methods are best used to complement more traditional testing methods by providing as much information about the learner as possible for summative purposes. And even more for formative assessment. Such a model of testing is more likely to incorporate information about the learning process as well as the learning outcome. Bibliography Arter J A, Spandel V 1992 Using portfolios of student work in instruction and assessment. Educational Measurement, Issues and Practices 11(1): 36-43 Bachman L F 1990 Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford University Press, Oxford Bachman L F, Palmer A S 1996 Language Testing in Practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford Blanche P, Merino B J 1989 Self-assessment of foreign language skills: Implications for teachers and researchers. Language Learning 39(3): 130—40 Bond D J 1986 Implementing Student Self-Assessment. Higher Educational Research and Development Society of Australia, University of New South Wales, Kensington, NSW Gipps C 1995 Beyond Testing. Palmer Press, London van Dieten JAM 1989 The development of a test of Dutch as a second language: The validity of self-assessment by inexperienced subjects. Langauge Testing 6: 30-46 LeBlanc R, Painchaud G 1985 Self-assessment as a second language placement instrument. TESOL Quarterly 19(4): 673-87 McNamara T 1996 Measuring Second Language Performance. Longman, New York Oscarson M 1978 Approaches to Self-Assessment in Foreign Language Learning. Council of Europe, Council of Europe Cooperation, Strasbourg Oscarson M 1997 Self-assessment of foreign and second language proficiency. In: The Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Vol. 7 (Language Testing and Assessment). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, MA, pp. 175-87 Scriven M 1967 The methodology of evaluation. In Stake R E (ed.) AERA Monograph Series on Curriculum Evaluation No. 1. Rand McNally, Chicago, IL
Language Testing: Fundamentals
Language Testing: Fundamentals A. J. Kunnan
Language testing is concerned with the assessment of mother tongue, second, and foreign language ability from both theoretical and practical points of view. The theoretical issues that concern the field include questions regarding the components of language ability and the characteristics of test tasks and test takers, ways in which validity and reliability of tests can be better estimated, and the applicability of newer quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques. More recently concerns such as fairness and ethics and professional standards for language testers have also received much attention. On the practical side, the field is concerned with finding new and better assessment procedures and ways of harnessing modern technology in new assessments. 1. History 1.1 Early History Although many language testers consider the field of language testing to have formally begun in the early 1960s, language tests were in use long before. In his book, Measured Words which presents the history of the field, Spolsky (1995) points out that the first political modern language test was the Shibboleth test as recorded in The Book of Judges in The Bible. This test was a single-item, objective, oral, phonological test, individually administered and the 42000 who failed it were slaughtered on the spot. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, formal examinations in Prussia, France, and Germany played a role in controlling schools and selecting civil servants, and in Britain, Oxford and Cambridge Universities started examinations with public oral disputations and then added written examinations. In the US, written examinations were introduced at Harvard University in the mid-nineteenth century. In the first half of the twentieth century, language tests gained in stature in the US as the Army Alpha tests were instituted after the US entered World War I and Cambridge University in Britain began to administer the Certificate of Proficiency and the First Certificate tests in English. 1.2 Discrete-point Testing and Integrative Testing The 1940s brought rising academic status marked by research studies conducted at US universities. Spolsky reports that this period saw the first two Ph.D. dissertations on language testing: Vilareal's Test of Aural Comprehension in 1947 and Lado's Measurement in English as a Foreign Language in 1949. Lado was soon acknowledged as the leading testing specialist of this
period. His philosophy was to choose test items on the basis of contrastive analysis with a view to include language features that would have difficulty for foreign language learners. In addition, Lado's approach focused on language components such as pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary separately in the multiple-choice format, leading this approach to be known as 'discrete-point testing.' In 1961, Carroll suggested in a keynote paper that though Lado's approach was valuable and well grounded theoretically, it needed to be supplemented with tests measuring skills of speaking and writing and understanding listening. This approach came to be known as 'integrative' testing. 1.3 Performance Testing Along with the notion of integrative testing came other notions like 'direct,' 'functional,' 'authentic,' and 'performance' testing following the theoretical advances of Hymes' (1972) communicative competence and performance. But it was the notion of performance testing that emerged from among the new notions. This type of assessment is concerned with language assessment in context along with all the skills and not in discrete-point items presented in a decontextualized manner. In addition, test takers are assessed on what they can do in situations similar to 'real life.' Shohamy (1995) discusses the advances made in performance testing by noting the variety of procedures used such as open-ended constructed responses, problem solving and essay tasks, portfolios, and simulations of real world problems. An early performance test was the English Language Testing Service that is now the International English Language Testing Service administered by the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. Another example of a performance test is the Occupational English Test developed for the use of health professionals who are immigrants or refugees to Australia who want to be medical practitioners (see McNamara 1996). 2. Models of Proficiency From the very beginning of the field, language testers attempted to understand the components of language proficiency. Of the many models proposed, three major models of language proficiency will be discussed here. 2.1 Skills and Components Model The first major model, the 'skills and components' model, was proposed by Lado (1961) in a grid form 707
Testing with language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) crossed with language knowledge and components (phonology/graphology, structure, vocabulary, rate, and general fluency). The 4x4 grid's 16 different cells (see Harris 1969) were considered independent; thus requiring test developers to construct 16 separate tests for full coverage. The Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency and the early versions of the Test of English as a Foreign Language are the best examples of tests that followed this model. Attempts to expand this model were first made by Carroll (1961) who called for 'integrative testing' and by Cooper (1968) who suggested the inclusion of variety or social context in the model as in his view language knowledge components vary as a function of social contexts. But all these models were considered seriously inadequate, as they did not recognize the full context of language use. Subsequent work by Halliday (1976) on language functions and Hymes (1972) on communicative competence clearly demonstrated the inadequacies of this model. 2.2 The Pragmatic Model Though Carroll's call for 'integrative testing' was perhaps the earliest argument for integrated tests, it was almost two decades before such a view was actively promoted. Oiler (1979) too argued that there are problems with discrete-point tests and, to counter these problems, he proposed a pragmatic test model. He defined pragmatic tests as procedures or tasks that cause test takers to process sequences of elements in a language that conform to the normal contextual constraints of that language and which require test takers to relate sequences of linguistic elements via pragmatic mappings to extralinguistic context. Oiler first promoted dictation and cloze procedures as examples of pragmatic tests and later included tests of productive oral communication and essays and writing tasks that meet the criteria of pragmatic tests. Along with the notion of pragmatic tests, Oiler hypothesized that language proficiency is indivisible or unitary and not divisible as discrete-point testers had suggested in the past. A flurry of empirical research that followed applied complex and powerful statistical procedures such as the multitrait-multimethod and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. After much empirical research and debate (see Oiler 1983), the strong version of Oiler's unitary hypothesis was considered untenable but a weaker version was supported and acceptable to most researchers. This middle-ground position claims a multicomponential view of language proficiency, that there is a general component or variance common to all aspects of lanugage proficiency and that a smaller component or variance is unique and shared only by some aspects of language proficiency. 2.3 The Communicative Model The next model, the communicative model, was first presented by Canale and Swain (1980) and sub-
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Table I. Areas of language knowledge. Organizational knowledge (how utterances or sentences and texts are organized) Grammatical knowledge (how individual utterances or sentences are organized) Knowledge of vocabulary Knowledge of syntax Knowledge of phonology/graphology Textual knowledge (how utterances or sentences are organized to form texts) Knowledge of cohesion Knowledge of rhetorical or conversational organization Pragmatic knowledge (how utterances or sentences and texts are related to the communicative goals of the language user and to the features of the language use setting) Functional knowledge (how utterances or sentences and texts are related to the communicative goals of language users) Knowledge of ideational functions Knowledge of manipulative functions Knowledge of heuristic functions Knowledge of imaginative functions Sociolinguistic knowledge (how utterances or sentences and texts are related to features of the language use setting Knowledge of dialects/varieties Knowledge of registers Knowledge of natural or idiomatic expressions Knowledge of cultural references and figures of speech Source: Language Testing in Practice (Bachman and Palmer 1996)
sequently revised by Bachman (1990) and Bachman and Palmer (1996). Bachman's model of 'communicative language ability' can be seen as an elaboration and refinement of the Canale and Swain model. As shown in Table 1, Bachman identifies the areas of language knowledge by categorizing and organizing language components into organizational and pragmatic knowledge, and further dividing organizational knowledge into grammatical and textual knowledge and pragmatic knowledge into functional and sociolinguistic knowledge, respectively. These knowledge areas are then broken down further into narrower components. This model is a conceptual one and does not have empirical support for all the areas and components as yet. Nevertheless, it is a model that has been laid out clearly for assessment researchers to refute, refine, or accept based on logical or empirical research. 3. Test Qualities Test developers and researchers have used several test qualities to help monitor and control the quality of tests and testing practices. The most important ones will be discussed here.
Language Testing: Fundamentals 3.1 Validation Validation of tests has been a concern since the 1960s when test developers and researchers followed the 1954 and 1966 Standards for Educational and Psychological Tests and Manuals developed by the American Psychological Association (APA). The Standards outlined five types of validity: face-content validity, criterion-related validity, predictive validity, concurrent validity, and construct validity. This fragmented approach was revised in the 1985 APA Standards that asserted that validity is a unitary concept and although evidence may be accumulated in many ways, validity always refers to the degree to which that evidence supports the inferences that are made from the scores. In addition, the Standards cautioned that the inferences regarding specific uses of a test are validated, not the test itself. Along these lines, Messick (1989) proposed a unified framework of validity with multiple facets: test interpretation and test use crossed with evidential and consequential biases. Although this unified framework has been widely accepted by researchers and today is the cornerstone for most validation research, not all parts of this framework have received equal emphasis. The primary focus has been on test interpretation with evidential basis and the methods for collecting evidence for the validation argument in this focus include test content analysis by expert judges, test dimensionality analysis, and item or task analysis and testing hypotheses. Test use with consequential basis has begun to interest researchers in recent years. These researchers are interested in investigating the effects of test-taker characteristics such as native language and culture, background knowledge, ethnicity, gender and age, opportunity to learn, the effect of testing on instruction termed washback, and overall consequences of tests and testing practice. The most popular quantitative approach to construct validity is ex post facto correlational design that allows researchers to investigate (a) the relationship among scores on different sections of a test with the purpose of understanding the construct of the test, and (b) the relationship among test scores and testtaker characteristics. The specific approaches used include liner exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Two qualitative approaches that have emerged recently are verbal protocol analysis and conversational analysis. The former approach is used to confirm test-taking processes by collecting introspective or retrospective from test takers. The latter is used to understand the spoken discourse produced in oral interviews and other forms of speaking tests. Two new volumes edited by Cumming (1996) and Kunnan (1998) show the range of empirical studies that have used these approaches. 3.2 Reliability and Generalizabilty The traditional conceptualization of reliability of tests is that it is distinct from validity but a necessary con-
dition for validity as opposed to a more current view that reliability is one type of evidence for construct validity. Viewed either way, reliability is a critical test quality and when researchers use the classical true score (CTS) measurement model, the focus of reliability is on consistency of measurement and errors of measurement or unreliability. The specific emphases are on consistency (internal consistency of testtakers' performance on the different sections of a test and rater consistency of ratings of oral interviews or written essays), stability (test-retest reliability) and equivalence (parallel forms reliability). Such investigations are particularly relevant for norm-references (NR) test scores. Another model for investigating the effects of different sources of measurement error in test scores is the Generalizability theory (G-theory, see Bachman 1990). This model extends the CTS model as researchers can specify and estimate the sources of error or variance that are of particular concern in a test. G-theory can be directly applied for investigations of reliability or dependability for criterionreferenced (CR) test scores as norm-referenced estimates are generally inappropriate. These investigations can help CR test development by estimating the dependability of the domain score and of mastery or nonmastery classifications based on cut-off scores. But these models have some limitations; for example, they do not provide an estimate of a test taker's individual ability and the estimates of both reliability and generalizability are sample dependent. A current model that is able to overcome these limitations of CTS and G-theory models is the group of item response models based on Item Response Theory (IRT). This theory is based on the concept that a test taker's expected performance on a test item is a function of both the level of item difficulty and the test taker's level of ability (see Bachman 1990). 3.3 Fairness and Ethics Although the concepts of fairness of tests and testing practices have generally been addressed as part of the validation process, two fairness concerns presented by Kunnan (2000) are worth noting. They are (a) do test score interpretations have equal validity for different test-taker groups as defined by such characteristics as age, gender, race, ethnicity, native lanugage and culture, physical or physiological impairment, and opportunity to learn, and (b) do test score interpretations bring about social equity, such as access to higher education, employment, immigration, citizenship, certification, or career advancement. In other words, in the first concern the focus is on test score interpretations of individual tests and in the second concern the focus is on how test score interpretations of individual tests work in a society. Leading a symposium on ethics in language testing, Davies (1997) writes that 'the motivation behind the 709
Testing ethics symposium was the growing feeling among scholars in language testing that challenges as to the morality of language testing were increasing both within and outside the field' (p. 235). He adds that the papers 'explore ethicality in language testing. Should testing specialists be responsible for decisions beyond test construction? Who decides what is valid? Does professionalism conflict with 1) public and 2) individual morality? Other issues explored relationships with various stake holders, conflict between fairness and face validity, the relationships between bias and fairness, washback, and the politics of gatekeeping' (p. 236) (see Ethics in Educational Linguistics). 4. Current Developments 4.1 Computer-based Testing The most important development has been the rise of computer-based technology. The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) administered by Educational Testing Service, Princeton (USA) has launched its computer-based test in 1998 in many parts of the world phasing out their paper-and-pencil version. However, there are many worrying questions for the TOEFL and for other agencies that are administering computer-based tests: for example, do test takers need to have computer familiarity to be successful (in addition to the language abilities being tested)? Do computer-based tasks in reading tap the same cognitive processes as in the paper-and-pencil version? Do writing tasks performed on the computer change the writing process? Do raters rate writing performances on computer differently from the paperand-pencil version? Will computer-based tests be affordable and be accessible to test takers? And, what will the impact of such tests be on test takers and test users? Many of these have not been satisfactorily answered as yet but computer-based testing seems to be upon us, and therefore we need to have these questions answered soon. 4.2 New Resources In addition to the advances discussed in Sect. 4.1, new resources have kept the field growing. Two resources in the form of a glossary and a dictionary are extremely useful first publications. The Multilingual Glossary of Language Testing Terms prepared by the members of the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE 1999) was designed to provide equivalent terminology related to language testing in all languages of Europe. The languages covered in this first edition are Catalan, Danish, German, English, Spanish, French, Gaelic, Italian, Dutch, and Portugese. This work also exists on CD-ROM and work is in progress to add Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Greek. The Dictionary of Language Testing prepared by Davies et al. (1999) fills a clear need for both language 710
testers with different levels of expertise as well as potential language testers. The Dictionary has about 600 entries; each listed under a headword with crossreferences within entries and references to other entries. 5. Future Challenges In summary, the field has seen tremendous growth since the 1960s. It has become a discipline in its own right and has its own research agenda. Language test developers and researchers today are better equipped as they have a better conceptual framework and better technical tools to analyze test data. There are many challenges though that the field has to meet in the next decades. These challenges can only be met well by continuing to make progress in understanding the nature of language proficiency and performance tests and by understanding and using newer analytical approaches and newer technology. For example, we need to understand newer quantitative analytical approaches such as nonlinear factor analysis, rulespace methodology, tree-based regressions, and scaleanchoring approaches as they may provide new ways of examining test data. We also need to understand newer technology such as speech recognition, computer-based ratings, and web-based testing as they may influence test development. Alongside these developments, the future of the field will also depend on our understanding of the role of tests and testing practices and their impact on instructional and educational systems and on community and society at large. This will certainly be among the biggest challenges. Bibliography Association of Language Testers in Europe 1999 Multilingual Glossary of Language Testing Terms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Bachman L F 1990 Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford University Press, Oxford Bachman L F, Palmer A 1996 Language Testing in Practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford Canale M, Swain M 1980 Theoretical basis of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1: 1-47 Carroll J 1961 Fundamental considerations in testing English proficiency of foreign students. Testing the English proficiency of foreign students. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC 31-40 Cooper R 1968 An elaborated language testing model. In: Upshur JA, Fata J (eds.) Problems in Foreign Language Testing. Language Learning, Special Issue Number 3: 1572 Cumming A 1996 (ed.) Validation in Language Testing. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Davies A 1997 The limits of ethics in language testing. Language Testing 14: 235-41 Davies A, Brown A, Elder C, Hill K, Lumley T, McNamara T 1999 Dictionary of Language Testing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Language Testing: Impact Halliday M A K 1976 The form of a functional grammar. In: Kress G (ed.) Halliday: System and function in language. Oxford University Press, Oxford Harris D P 1968 Testing English as a second language. McGraw Hill, New York Hymes D H 1972 On communicative competence. In: Pride J, Holmes J (eds.) Sociolinguistics (pp. 269-93). Penguin, Harmondsworth Lado R 1961 Language Testing. McGraw-Hill, New York Kunnan A J (ed.) 2000 Validation in Language Assessment. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ Kunnan A J in press (ed.) Fairness and justice for all. In: Kunnan A J (ed.) Fairness and Validation in Language Assessment. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
McNamara T 1996 Measuring Second Language Proficiency. Longman, London Messick S 1989 Validity. In: Linn R (ed.) Educational Measurement (pp. 13-103). American Council on Education/Macmillan, New York Oiler J W Jr 1979 Language Tests at School. Longman, London Oiler J W Jr (ed.) 1983 Issues in Language Testing Research. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Shohamy E 1995 Performance assessment in language testing. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 15: 188211 Spolsky B 1995 Measured Words. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Language Testing: Impact E. Shohamy
1. Definition
The impact of language tests is a relatively new topic in language testing. It is situated within the growing interest in the study of the use of tests that includes values, motivations, and consequences of tests and such topics as the rationales and intentions for introducing tests, the political and social messages they convey, and the effects and consequences that they have for education and society. The impact of language tests, sometimes called washback or backwash, refers to behavioral changes that occur in education and society as a result of test use. Education impact focuses on changes in educational matters such as curriculum, teaching methods, teaching and learning strategies, material and courseware, assessment practices, and the content of instruction. Societal impact is concerned with changes in domains such as selection, gatekeeping, ideology, ethics, fairness, and morality. One of the first scholars to draw attention to the topic of test impact was Messick (1989, 1991, 1996) who argued that test consequences should be incorporated into a unified concept of validity. Because the social values served by the intended and unintended outcomes of test interpretation and use both derive from and contribute to the meaning of the test scores, appraisal of the social consequences of the testing is also to be seen to be subsumed as an aspect of construct validity, and construct irrelevance, (p. 251)
Within the narrower area of language testing, Spolsky (1995, 1997) demonstrated that from the beginning
language tests were used for their impact and especially for political, social and educational control. Latham (1877) decried the 'encroaching power' of examinations to take over the syllabus and direct what happens in the classroom. 2. The Process and Use of Impact
The impact of tests derives directly from their power. Tests are powerful because they lead to momentous decisions effecting individuals and programs. They are often used as disciplinary tools. There are a number of structural features that made tests so powerful. They are conducted by authoritative and unquestioned judges or are backed by the language of science and numbers. They have impressive written documentation, and they are commonly administered by powerful organizations. Foucault (1979) noted that tests are used to quantify, classify, judge, standardize, scale, and assert authority; they discipline, and serve to collect the data that is used to build disciplines (as the beginning of regular medical examinations in hospitals provided the knowledge base to build the discipline of medicine). Madaus (1991) pointed out that tests provide a powerful social technology deeply embedded in education, government, and business. It is this unlimited and unchallenged power of tests and their centrality in the lives of individuals and educational systems that is responsible for the impact they have on individuals who must comply with their demands in order to succeed. Those who are affected by tests struggle to 711
Testing maximize their score on a test, driven by their fear of the harmful effects of failure. Test-takers will change their regular way of behavior in order to earn the mark that will grant them entrance into choice institutions. Given the impact of tests, administrators see them as a method of making policy. Education policymakers, principals, teachers, and others in authority believe that the introduction of a test can cause changes in behavior of individuals and program. They, therefore, use tests to create the changes that they want to occur. Four aspects of test impact have been studied. The first relates to terminology; the second concerns classification of impact as good or bad; the third is research into the nature of impact, and the fourth examines related ethical issues. 2.1 Terminology At least three other terms are used frequently to refer to phenomena associated with changes in behavior as a result of test use: washback, consequence, and effect. These terms often are used interchangeably, although some language testers propose distinctions. The term 'effect' often is used to encompass washback, impact, and consequences. A distinction between washback and impact has been proposed by Hamps-Lyons (1997) who claims that washback refers to the effect and influence that the introduction of tests have on the educational context, while impact is a broader term referring to the effects on education and society as a whole. For her, 'impact' is broader than 'washback' and refers more to high-stakes assessment. In the USA claims about the impact of tests extend their influence well beyond the classroom, into school-wide or school district behaviors, on the educational system as a whole, and even on to society as a whole, and it is not usually to hear and read, claims about the negative impact of tests and testing on specific subsets of the school populations;.. .(p. 297)
Wall (1996), as well, believes that washback needs to be differentiated from impact, which she sees as a broader term referring to the influence of a test on pedagogy, curriculum development, and educational policy. Washback refers to the influence the test has on the classroom, where 'teachers and learners do things they would not necessarily otherwise do because of the test' (Alderson and Wall, 1997: 117). McNamara (1997) views washback as the extent to which a test influences teaching and learning. For him, a good test is one having a positive influence on the teaching and learning process. Tests, then, are connected to educational reform. Messick mainly used the term consequences encompassing all three but with a stronger focus on ideological values. His inclusion of the consequences of tests in validity led to the term 'consequential validity'. Messick notes that washback is only one 712
kind of testing consequence that needs to be weighed in evaluating validity, and testing consequences are only one aspect of construct validity. Discussing this, Hamps-Lyons (1997) argues that what is needed is a view of test influence that would fall between the narrow one of washback and the all-encompassing one of impact. Such a view seems to be accessible through Messick's redefinition of construct validity (1989, 1994) which he applies to applied linguists' concept of 'washback' by placing washback within the consequential aspect of construct validity (1996: 242), which he describes as include[ing] evidence and rationales for evaluating the intended and unintended consequences of score interpretation and use in both the short- and long-term... [and] unfairness in test use, and positive or negative washback effects on teaching and learning (Messick, 1996: 251). Another term associated with impact is systemic validity (Fredriksen and Collins, 1989). This refers to the introduction of tests into the educational system together with additional variables that constitute the learning and instructional system. A test becomes a part of a dynamic process in which changes in the educational system take place according to feedback obtained from the test. Terms associated with the effect of tests on learning are 'measurement driven instruction', the notion that tests can drive learning, and 'curriculum alignment' which implies that a curriculum is modified according to test results. 2.2 Types of Impact In classifying types of impact, the most common criteria are who is responsible for test impact and whether the impact is good or bad. Hamps-Lyons (1997) argues that the responsibility for impact goes far beyond the testers: The impact of assessment and the expectations laid upon it spread all the way out to the society as a whole; it is not only test developers whose work has 'impact'; it is also testing agencies who make policy and economic decisions about the kinds of testing to support and the kinds that will not be supported; it is textbook publishers, who make economic decisions about the kinds of textbooks teachers and parents will buy to 'ensure' their children are ready for the test; it is school districts, boards and ministries of education, and national or federal governments who bow to pressure to account for the progress of pupils and the value-added effect of education, (p. 298)
Most of the research on impact has focused on one type, washback, while substantially less work has been done on the impact of tests on society. Within washback Alderson and Wall (1993) present 15 versions of washback hypotheses which they claim need to be examined. A test, they suggest, can influence teaching, learning, what teachers teach, how teachers teach, what learners learn, how learners learn, the rate and sequence of learning, and the attitude to the content
Language Testing: Impact and methods of teaching and learning. They explore the concept by asking 'How directly, according to the washback hypothesis, do tests bring about change in teaching and learning?' (1993: 18). A simplistic view, they claim, would assume that the fact of a test having a set of qualities is sufficient in itself, by virtue of the importance of tests in most societies, to bring about change. However, this assumption takes little account of other factors in the educational setting which may also influence teaching, such as the teachers' basic competence and their understanding of the principles underlying the test and levels of resources within the school system. They propose a refinement to the simple washback hypothesis by distinguishing content of teaching from methodology used and teaching from learning and emphasize the need to consider the impact of a test not only on teaching and learning but also on attitudes, materials, and effort. They further claim that to establish washback and to understand its nature one must consider other factors such as personality (e.g., the need of achievement, fear of failure) as well as the consequences of performance in the test and the learners' perceptions of those consequences. A number of researchers ask if washback is good or bad. Alderson and Wall argue that a 'good' test (i.e., reflecting the aims of the syllabus and its content and method) will produce positive washback; a 'bad' test (if it does not fit the syllabus and method) will produce negative washback. Considering examinations as a necessary and effective means of ensuring that the curriculum is put into effect and of introducing innovations, washback can be beneficial (Alderson, 1986). However, Ferman (1998) disagrees. The washback hypothesis which assumes that teachers and learners do things they would not necessarily otherwise do because of a test, also implies that a 'poor' test could conceivably have a 'good' effect if it made the learners and teachers do 'good' things by increasing learning. To the extent that hard work and good intentions on the part of teachers and students are desirable, then any test, good or bad, will have a beneficial washback only provided it increases learning activities and intentions, and makes teachers and learners work harder. Yet, Spolsky (1995) argues that the inevitable outcome of examinations is to constrain and narrow the educational process. Once the content of an examination has been bruited it becomes a more or less precise specification of what knowledge or behavior will be rewarded (or will avoid punishment). No reasonable teacher will do other than focus his or her pupils' efforts on the specific items that are to be tested; no bright pupil will want to spend the time on anything but preparation for what is to be in the examination. The control of the instructional process then is transferred from those most immediately concerned (the teacher and the pupil) to the examination itself. (1995: 17)
Those who agree, argue that the harm of centralized examinations springs from the constraints they impose upon curricula, teachers and students. Their almost inescapable bias is to encourage the most mechanical, boring, and debilitating forms of teaching and learning (Oxenham, 1984). Washback, it can be seen, can have both negative and positive effects on educational practices, independent of the quality of the test. 2.3 Research on Impact Research on impact of language tests is relatively new and has started to appear since the late 1980s. Most of the research examines studies of individual cases where tests are used continuously or when new tests are introduced with the specific purpose of creating impact. Research on impact is difficult as there is often no base line for comparison. Impact takes a long time to observe and is often not visible to the researcher, occurring outside the domains which the researcher examines. The most important research finding that has emerged points to a very complex reality, especially in the cases of high-stakes tests. Alderson and Hamps-Lyons (1996) found that the influence of the test on TOEFL preparation classes (which they compared with non-TOEFL preparation classes by the same teacher) is more complex than a simple theory of washback would predict. Watanbe (1996) reports a similarly complex picture emerging from a study of the impact of University entrance tests in EFL in Japan. Wall (1996) analyzed the wide range of factors modulating the washback of a progressive test reform in a traditional educational system in Sri Lanka. Similarly, Cheng (1998) found that a new test of English in Hong Kong successfully changed the content of instruction but had a limited effect on the method of teaching and learning. Shohamy (1993, 1994) examined the impact in Israel of three newly introduced national tests in reading comprehension, Arabic, and English as a Foreign Language. All three tests had impact, but it was spread in a number of directions, largely dependent on the nature of the test and the specific content tested. In all the three tests there was diversion of educational attention to areas that had not been previously explicitly taught. The Arabic test led to an increase in the teaching of specific vocabulary and the shortening of the time devoted to the alphabet, the addition of an English oral test lead teachers to devote more attention to oral language in the classroom, and the reading comprehension test teaching led to a new focus in instruction. Teachers reported that the test had caused them to pay attention to the topic being tested. The teaching methods and new materials produced became 'test-like' and identical to the tests. In comparing the intended impact of the policymakers with the actual impact, different patterns occurred. Sometimes the impact was clear, but a low
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Testing stake test seems not capable of bringing any change. Shohamy (1998) and Shohamy et al. (1996) compared two different tests introduced within the Israeli educational system. In a low stake test of Arabic, the long term impact was minimal while relatively minor changes to a high stakes test of English as a Foreign Language had a major impact. The degree of impact seems to be dependent on a number of factors— whether the test is of high or low stake, the relevance of the subject to the policymakers and the public, the rate of failure (high rate of failure receives more attention from the public and media), and the status of the subject (little impact with low status subjects). The studies revealed that teachers as well as students believed that tests are very effective tools for creating impact in the classroom. Administrators believe that tests are crucial for assuring high quality, noting that without the test the proficiency level, rate of progress, number of students, and the prestige will drop significantly.
2.4 Ethical Issues Issues of ethicality with regards to test impact related to the impact of tests on different groups of test-takers, the use of impact by decision makers as a covert way of making policy, and the unintended effects of tests. The impact of tests on such groups as minority and immigrants and effects of gender is of particular concern (Valdez and Figueroa, 1994). Test bias, the way in which test items work differently for particular subgroups of test candidates, has long been an issue in testing, and sophisticated psychometric techniques such as differential item functions to detect it have been developed. Elder (1997) showed that these techniques involve questions of values in the choice of the criterion adopted as benchmark in the group comparison, so that bias depends on definition of the test construct, defined in political terms. In terms of the creation of impact by the decision maker as a covert way of making policy, there is a need to note that the use of tests for creating impact often is interpreted as an unethical way of making policy, creating a parallel system, does not work, undemocratic way of making policy. Teachers and students are often unaware of the changes of policy through tests. They are not involved in preparation of tests. They are imposed on them without their having had any input. They become servants of the system, and their authority is challenged. Often it has been claimed that tests have an impact beyond what is expected. Foucault (1979) notes that the tool of tests allows those in power to frighten, deter, blame, justify previous decisions, impose sanctions, standardize, classify, and categorize. Shohamy (1993) showed how tests were used by principals to
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judge and punish teachers and to blame them for students' failure. A number of strategies have been introduced in order to minimize the unethical behaviors as a result of test impact. Critical language testing refers to the need to examine the use of tests, within a broader social and political critique of aspects of testing as a social and institutional practice. It focuses especially on their intended and unintended impacts, their ethical dimensions, and their uses as a disciplinary tool and suggesting other, more democratic ways of testing that are not subject to the strong power that testers and those who introduce tests have. The development of Codes of good testing practices is another strategy that is being currently developed to contribute to good practice of language testing. The development of Codes of professional ethics for language testers aims to draw attention. See also: Ethics in Educational Linguistics, Language Testing: Users and Uses.
Bibliography Alderson J C, Hamp-Lyons L 1996 TOEFL preparation courses: A study of washback. Language Testing 13: 28097 Alderson J C, Wall D 1993 Does washback exist? Applied Linguistics 14: 115-29 Cheng L 1997 How does washback influence teaching? Implications for Hong Kong. Language in Education 11(1): 3854 Davies A 1997 Demands of being professional in language testing. Language Testing 14: 328-39 Elder C 1997 What does test bias have to do with fairness? Language Testing 14: 261-77 Foucault M 1979 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, New York Fredriksen J R, Collins A 1989 A system approach to educational testing. Educational Researchers 18(9): 27-32 Hamps-Lyons L 1997 Washback, impact and validity: Ethical concerns. Language Testing 14: 295-303 McNamara 1997 Messick S 1994 The interplay of evidence and consequences in the validation of performance assessments. Educational Researcher 23(2): 13-23 Messick S 1996 Validity and washback in language testing. Language Testing 13: 241-56 Shohamy E, Schmidt S D, Ferman I 1996 Test impact revisited. Washback effect over time Language Testing 13: 298-317 Wall D 1996 Introducing new tests into traditional systems: Insights from general education and from innovation theory. Language Testing 13: 334-54 Wall D 1998 Impact and washback in language testing. In: Clapham C M, Corson D (eds.) Language Testing and Assessment. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 291-302 Watanabe Y 1996 Does grammar translation come from the entrance examination? Preliminary finding from classroom-based research. Language Testing 13:318-33
Language Testing in Mother Tongue
Language Testing in Mother Tongue D. Spearritt
Language testing in the mother tongue may take various forms. Tests may be of the discrete-point type, measuring aspects of language such as grammar, punctuation, spelling, vocabulary, and pronunciation, or they may be measures of integrated language skills. Since proficiency in communication is a prime objective of the teaching and testing of the mother tongue, language tests are discussed under the headings of the integrated language skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Consideration is given to the different types and different purposes of tests within each of these categories, and to the ways in which they have evolved during the twentieth century. 1. Reading The predominant form of reading in schools in the 1900s is oral reading, students generally being given a mark for their oral reading performance. Where comprehension was assessed, students would be asked to answer specific questions by recalling what had been read or referring back to the text. Standardized tests of reading such as Monroe's Standardized Silent Reading Tests began to appear about the 1920s, reflecting the increasing emphasis being given in schools to silent reading after 1910. The 1920s and 1930s saw the development of many standardized tests of silent reading in the United States in a format which has continued to the present day and has been adopted in many countries. In effect, the format requires the student to read a passage and then answer multiplechoice questions to demonstrate their level of comprehension. Gates, for example, in his Silent Reading Tests (1926), tested the skills of (a) reading to appreciate general significance, (b) reading to understand precise directions, (c) reading to note details, and (d) reading to predict the outcome of given events. The widespread acceptance of multiple-choice testing as a valid measure of reading comprehension received support from later research studies (e.g. Vernon 1962, Clark 1973). Vernon found no differences in the abilities tested by multiple-choice and "creative response" tests of reading. Technical improvements in the development of multiple-choice reading tests after the 1950s included a much wider range of stimulus material (e.g., poems, plays, letters, and newspaper articles) and the pretesting of items to ensure that few, if any, students who had not read the stimulus material cold select the correct answers. One of the concerns about reading comprehension tests was whether the passages or text were of a suitable level for the students for whom they were intended. The comprehensibility of the text was
defined in terms of the proportion of the correct answers readers could give to questions based on the texts. Readability formulas, such as the Flesch, DaleChall, and Klare formulas, incorporated features of text that were likely to affect its comprehensibility; they included such features as average sentence length, number of syllables in a 100-word sample to estimate vocabulary complexity, proportion of concrete to abstract references, and the proportion of the text words in a standard word frequency list. The formulas continue to be used, but in a supplementary role only, since many other characteristics of both the text and the reader influence comprehensibility. In 1953, Taylor introduced the cloze procedure as a means of validating scores obtained by readability formulas. He applied the Gestalt notion of 'closure' to the completion of a written or spoken test from which certain words had been deleted (Taylor 1953). The cloze procedure was a significant development in the assessment of reading comprehension in that it provided not only an estimate of the readability of a text, but also a measure of each student's comprehension of the text. In its standard form, every nth word of a passage is deleted, and the student is required to write in the missing words. Cloze tests are widely used for testing reading comprehension both in the mother tongue, and for second and foreign language learners. Although they appear to depend more on context and linguistic cues than do multiplechoice tests, the two types of test have generally been found to measure the same types of skills. This may result, however, from limiting investigations to reading tests; when cloze tests are included in factor analytic studies comprising measures of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, they tend to measure skills involved in reading and in writing, whereas multiplechoice tests measure only reading skills (Spearritt 1980). Like the Gates' test outlined above, many reading tests incorporate subtests of presumably different aspects of reading. Re-analyses by Spearritt (1972) and Thorndike (1973a) of data obtained by Davis (1968) with Grade 12 students indicated that while some types of reading comprehension skills are experimentally distinguishable, they are usually so highly intercorrelated that they are likely to be measuring one basic ability. At the Grade 6 level, however, a full profile of reading comprehension would appear to require five types of tests—vocabulary knowledge, comprehension of simple instructions, comprehension of simple one-sentence questions or paraphrased statements, comprehension of passages, and speed of reading (Spearritt et al. 1977). Speed of reading tests
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Testing were a regular component of reading test batteries prior to the 1960s but they have largely fallen into disuse. They failed to take account of the different purposes of reading and tended to be based on less complex reading material. Speed or rate of reading is more realistically estimated from the material actually used to assess comprehension. The possibilities of using diagnostic reading tests to identify the specific weaknesses of backward readers were appreciated by Burt and others as early as the 1920s. Among the best known of the diagnostic reading tests were those developed by Schonell (1942) in England, which measured accuracy of word recognition both in isolation and in context, ability to analyze and synthesize words containing common phonic units, names and sounds of letters, directional attack on words, and visual word discrimination; as well as speed and comprehension. More recent tests such as the Gates-McKillop-Horowitz Reading Diagnostic Tests include, in addition, subtests such as syllabification, blending, and rhyming. Many diagnostic tests are individually administered, and require oral responses. They yield information of direct practical value in the teaching of reading. Special types of reading or prereading tests have been developed to determine whether a child is ready to learn to read, or to assist in early reading instruction. Reading readiness tests of the 1930s and 1940s assessed such measures as mental age, various aspects of language proficiency, and visual discrimination ability. These tests have been superseded by tests more directly related to the process of reading, such as knowledge of the functions, features, and technical language of literacy (e.g., distinguishing the print from the picture, and distinguishing between a letter and a word) (Clay 1979; Ayers and Downing 1982). Information from this type of test is likely to be of more value to the classroom teacher. In response to a need for reading comprehension tests which indicated the level of material students were capable of reading as well as comparing their relative achievement, various types of content-referenced or criterion-referenced reading tests have been devised. Elley and Reid (1969) constructed a set of reading comprehension tests for New Zealand students in Grades 3 to 10 which yielded 'level scores' which could be associated with examples of published reading materials that were of suitable difficulty for the students. This was achieved by matching the average frequency level of the nouns in the passages which the students could read with that of the nouns in the published materials. Other examples of contentreferenced or criterion-referenced tests include TORCH-Tests of Reading Comprehension and the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests, both reviewed in the Tenth Mental Measurements Yearbook in 198990. These types of test provide more information of direct value for classroom teaching purposes than do the more widely used norm-referenced tests. 716
Another type of reading test aims to determine the percentage of students who can correctly answer specific literacy tasks. This kind of test was employed in the reading literacy survey in 31 countries undertaken by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in 1991. Passages for comprehension included material such as short letters, maps, and timetables as well as expository and narrative passages (Elley 1994). Since improvement in reading skill is likely to be more gradual than in other subjects and less closely tied to school instruction, reading comprehension seems particularly amenable to assessment on a continuous scale. Such a scale has been developed for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the United States (Beaton 1987). The NAEP Reading Scale used latent trait scaling procedures to equate tests at the 9-year old, 13-year old, and 17-year old age levels in the process of developing a combined reading scale. This latent trait scale was calibrated to give scores from zero to 500, with a mean of 250.5 and a standard deviation of 50. Since it is not normreferenced, the scale can be used to compare reading levels across age groups and across different time periods. Two sample items from the reading test were used to indicate the level of reading proficiency at various anchor points—150 (rudimentary), 200 (basic), 250 (intermediate), 300 (adept), and 350 (advanced), where proficiency was taken to mean that 80 percent of the students at the particular level could be expected to answer correctly the items representing that level. This type of scale shows promise as a means of reporting students' proficiency in reading as distinct from their relative status in an age or grade grouping. Proficiency in reading obviously depends on the extent of the reader's vocabulary. Estimates of a person's productive vocabulary could be obtained from samples of the person's speech or writing. Measures of vocabulary knowledge, however, are usually based on the person's recognition vocabulary, generally tested in printed form. Vocabulary tests have mostly been designed as group tests of achievement, but they have also been employed as diagnostic tests, as a component of individual intelligence tests, and as a means of estimating vocabulary size (e.g., Elley and Reid 1969). In the latter role, particularly, they encounter definitional problems of what it means to know a word. There are several levels of knowledge of a word, and some words have multiple meanings as well as derived forms. Arising out of these definitional problems, several types of vocabulary test have been developed. Multiple-choice tests of the recognition type are the most common, for example: Which of the following four words (or pictures, for younger students) means most nearly the same as the given (stimulus) word? The stimulus word is sometimes presented in isolation, and sometimes in the context of a sentence or longer passage.
Language Testing in Mother Tongue Synonym/antonym tests rather than multiple-choice tests have been employed in international comparative studies when vocabulary tests of comparable difficulty are required in different languages (Thorndike 1973b). Recall-type vocabulary tests include those in which students are required to define a word, give an example of its use, or insert a word which has been omitted from a sentence. Responses are dependent on the student's powers of verbal exposition and the tests may be subject to arbitrary decisions in scoring. Multiple-choice tests, on the other hand, require that the student know the meanings of the distracters as well as the stimulus word. Nevertheless, the correlation between the multiplechoice format and open-ended formats is usually very high (e.g., Vernon 1962; Clark 1973), and there is no evidence that different types (as distinct from different subject areas) of vocabulary test measure more than one underlying factor. 2. Writing
The twentieth century has seen a marked change in emphasis in the teaching and testing of written expression or composition in the mother tongue. Prior to the 1950s, considerable emphasis was placed on the mechanics of writing in many countries in contrast to the production of scripts. Competence in mechanics was regarded as an essential prerequisite for good writing. Hence, there was a proliferation of tests in such areas as spelling, dictation, punctuation, formal grammar, word usage, sentence structure, correctness and effectiveness of expression, and the like. With the exception of spelling and dictation tests, in which the target words were often written down by the student, the tests were generally multiple-choice in form for convenience of administration and scoring. Such tests still form part of achievement test batteries in language, though their predominance in the assessment of written expression has diminished. Until the 1950s, the assessment of writing ability through the production of written scripts, original in content or style or otherwise, was largely left to teachers in schools and colleges. This early emphasis on the mechanics of written expression was supported by two important sources of influence. One was the convenience and objectivity of multiple-choice testing especially for large-scale testing programs (e.g., College Board and Iowa Basic Skills Tests in the United States), which was far less expensive and time-consuming than having essays written by students and graded by teams of markers. The other was the mounting research evidence of substantial disagreement among markers when they independently graded the same scripts, as in the Hartog and Rhodes experiments in the 1930s. Concurrent with the emphasis on the mechanics of writing, much effort was put into the development of valid surrogate measures of writing ability, such as
the interlinear excise for the College Board English Composition Test, which required the student to locate and correct deficiencies in poorly written material (Godshalk et al. 1966). Various investigators showed that English grades of college students and their teachers' ratings of their writing ability could be well predicted from the verbal sections of the Scholastic Aptitude Test and objective English scores, and that essay ratings added little to the prediction. Nevertheless, there was considerable concern among educators about the washback effect on students' writing skills of relying largely on the use of objective measures of those skills. Some resolution of these problems came with the development of new approaches to the rating of English compositions. While there had been some experimentation with composition scales, research and debate had concentrated on the relative merits and demerits of analytic versus general impression methods of marking essays or compositions. In analytic methods, the marker gives a separate mark to elements such as choice of words, quality of ideas, and spelling and punctuation, arid averages these to obtain an overall rating. In impression marking, the mark is determined by the marker's assessment of the quality of the composition as a whole. Research indicated that neither method was clearly superior. Wiseman (1949), however, established that very high levels of marker reliability, 0.90 and above, could be obtained with compositions written in England's 11 + examination by aggregating the independent ratings of several examiners based on their quick general impression of the scripts. The value of this approach was confirmed by Britton et al. (1966) in a study of compositions written by 16-year old students in England, and with 11th and 12th grade students in the United States (Godshalk et al. 1966). Given that multiple marking of essays on a large scale is still expensive, the possibilities of computer scoring of essays have been explored (Page 1985). Different types of writing such as narrative, descriptive, expository, and argumentative had been recognized since the eighteenth century, but since the 1950s there has been greater recognition of the need to take more account of the purpose and context of writing when assessing it. Braddock et al. (1963), among others, found that the quality of a person's writing is influenced by the topic chosen or set. Britton and others described three broad functions of writing as transactional, expressive, and poetic. By the 1980s the use of a single composition, coupled with a detailed marking scheme with a 'heavy loading' on spelling, punctuation, and grammar, had given way to a range of writing tasks in a variety of situations as the chief means of assessing the writing ability of students in their mother tongue (Wilkinson et al. 1980). The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the United States requires students to demonstrate
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Testing the ability to reveal personal feelings, to write in response to a wide range of societal demands and obligations, and to show that they appreciate the value of writing. Further difficulties in the assessment of writing ability became apparent in the study of written composition undertaken in 14 countries in the 1980s by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The different cultures were found to differ in the functions of writing which were emphasized in school. Other potential differences which had to be addressed in the selection of writing tasks were differences in preferred patterns of organization in writing, in the topics and approaches to writing considered appropriate, in the form of task instruction and rating criteria considered appropriate, and in the amount of time students should be allowed for a writing assignment (Takala 1988). This study highlights the importance of context and situation in the assessment of writing ability in the mother tongue. 3. Listening The idea of assessing listening ability—the ability to understand spoken language—emerged in the United States in the 1920s. It gathered momentum over the next couple of decades as researchers drew attention to the importance of listening among the communication skills, the absence of formal training in listening, and the inadequate comprehension levels of students and adults after listening to lectures or talks. Formal tests of listening comprehension began to appear in the 1950s, the best known being the Brown-Carlsen Listening Comprehension Test for Grades 9 to 13 (Brown and Carlsen 1953) which provided measures of immediate recall, following directions, recognizing transitions, recognizing word meanings, and lecture comprehension, and also the Education Testing Services's STEP (Sequential Tests of Educational Progress), tests of listening for Grades 4 to 14. In both of these tests, the stimulus material and the multiplechoice options were presented orally by the test administrator, while the students could follow a printed version of the multiple-choice options. These tests were criticized on the grounds that oral presentations of the tests would be likely to vary to an unknown degree among different test administrators. More importantly, some critics claimed that the tests were merely oral versions of reading comprehension tests, and there was no evidence that so-called 'listening comprehension tests' were measuring anything over and above what was already measured by reading comprehension and intelligence tests. In a factor analytic study designed to investigate this question, Spearritt (1962) demonstrated, with an Australian sample of 300 Grade 6 students, that listening comprehension tests of differing varieties did define a separate listening comprehension factor, which in turn was correlated with verbal comprehension memory, and
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reasoning factors. A listening comprehension factor was also identified by Clark (1973). Since listening comprehension tests seemed to measure a separate aspect of language of importance in schooling, tests of listening comprehension were developed, sometimes as part of larger batteries of tests, for use with primary or elementary school students in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United Statqs. In response to charges that listening comprehension tests were little more than reading comprehension tests in spoken form, and that they should involve spoken language in natural situations rather than literary material read aloud, Wilkinson et al. (1974), in England, introduced substantial changes to the style of listening comprehension tests. Stimulus material consisted of genuine spoken language selected on linguistic principles, and recorded on tape. Subtests were designed to measure the ability to understand content, to infer missing parts of a conversation, to understand differences in meaning resulting from different emphases in speech (phonology), to detect the appropriateness of the spoken language used in various situations (register) and to detect the relationships existing between people from the language they employ. This style of testing was much more closely integrated with natural spoken language such as conversational situations, and represented a distinct shift from the original emphasis on the use of listening comprehension tests to assess how well students had comprehended and recalled the contents of lectures or short talks. It was employed in an innovative way by Gorman and Brooks (1986) in oracy surveys in the United Kingdom involving exchanges between a listener and speaker, on the principle that listening and speaking should not be artificially separated. In the 1980s, more explicit attempts were made to base listening comprehension tests on a listening or communication model, as in the Listening Skills Test developed by the Educational Testing Service for the National Teacher Examination, and to differentiate them from reading tests. In most tests, oral language was used in presenting directions, and also in stimulus and response materials, which were drawn to a large extent from familiar day-to-day situations. One of the more recent tests, the Watson-Barker Listening Test in college/adult and high school versions (Watson and Barker 1984,1989), is available in both audiotape and videotape formats. Its subtests—listening for message content, listening to dialogues/conversations, listening to short lectures, listening for emotional meaning, and listening for instructions/directions—indicate the range of items likely to be included in future listening comprehension tests (Rhodes et al. 1990), but the reliability and empirical differentiability of such subscores need to be established(Villaume and Weaver 1996). Reliability coefficients of about 0.60 were obtained by Bourke et al. (1980) for 10- and 14-year
Language Testing in Mother Tongue old Australian students, however, on short criterionreferenced listening subtests, such as comprehending passages and comprehending conversation. The adoption of a definition of 'listening' by the International Listening Association (1995) as 'the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages' suggests that the scope of listening comprehension tests may be still further widened. 4. Speaking The assessment of speaking ability is subject to a number of difficulties, most of which do not apply to reading, writing and listening. It is not amenable to objective measurement, nor to group or large-scale testing. It requires an individual assessment of each student's performance, regardless of whether the student is a solo performer or a member of a small group, and is, thus, a time consuming form of assessment. The actual speaking performance is evanescent, and in practice has to be observed and/or rated at the time at which it occurs, although audio- and video-taped performances can be useful for research and public examination purposes. Markers are not always consistent in their ratings of performances. Partly because of these difficulties, and partly because of the importance ascribed to literacy as compared with oracy in many countries, schools have paid far less attention to the assessment of speaking ability than to reading and writing abilities. Individual assessment of speaking ability, with particular reference to its evolutionary aspects, has been conducted by specialist examining bodies in some countries since at least the early 1900s. Students were given ratings or marks on such aspects as quality of content, organization of material, level of vocabulary, and quality of voice and articulation, as well as an overall mark. Rating scales of this form have been widely used to assess levels of speaking proficiency of foreign students or second-language learners, but rarely in mother tongue testing, since most students are assumed to be competent in speaking their mother tongue language. Various kinds of measures have been proposed for measuring speaking ability in the mother tongue. Separately measured elements such as utterance length, diversity of speech acts, diversity of syntax, and so forth can be combined to form a communication index. Another approach is to assess students on a range of speaking tasks, such as describing objects, giving directions, sequencing and organizing ideas, telling a story, conversing in different situations, and so on Bourke et al. 1980). Some guide to appropriate measures is provided by factor analytic studies. Using pre-adolescent subjects, Marge (1964) identified different speaking ability factors for different situations (oral interview vs. classroom performance), in addition to others such as nondistracting speech
behavior, voice quality, and language maturity. Yet speaking ability would seem to be more validly assessed as an integrated skill rather than as an amalgam of speech or other elements. Carroll (1993) found evidence for a higher-order general trait of oral communication ability. It is important to measure speaking ability in different situations. Wilkinson (1965) drew a useful distinction between reciprocal speech situations, such as conversation in which the speaker receives and reacts to verbal and/or nonverbal responses from the listener(s), and formal speech situations such as lectures, speeches, and radio and television talks. For reciprocal speech situations, possible forms of testing include the interview and small group discussion. Formal speech situations could involve lecturettes, debates, and dramatic or semi-dramatic group activities. Underhill (1987) describes a wide variety of oral testing techniques. Recitations of memorized material or reading aloud, however, provide measures of spoken language rather than of speaking ability. In speech courses in the United States, some form of speech-making is commonly used to assess speaking ability. Considerable attention has also been devoted (Powers 1984) to assessing interactive communication in speaking and listening through a referential communication model. For example, a student might be required to give directions to one or more listeners after studying a map; the performance of individual listeners would be judged by their response to the map task, and the performance of each speaker by the average response of the listeners. Audiotape recordings were found in an oral examinations experiment sponsored by the Schools Council in England in 1966 to be quite adequate for the assessment of speaking ability. Videotape recordings would additionally capture facial expressions and gestures. Difficulties still remain in assessing the speaking ability of individual students in group discussions, in respect of both opportunities for participation and level of contribution. But the problem of low levels of agreement among examiners in their ratings of speaking ability can be overcome by securing independent ratings of the performance from two (double marking) or more markers (multiple marking), and averaging the ratings. So the testing of speaking ability in the mother tongue is quite feasible, provided there is sufficient time available and that assessment covers performances in both formal and reciprocal speech situations. Published tests of speaking ability in the mother tongue are rare, but criteria for such tests set out by the Speech Communication Association in the United States (Lieb-Brilhart 1980) are still relevant. 5. Conclusion Significant changes have occurred in mother tongue language testing during the twentieth century. The most striking has been the move toward more valid
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Testing measures of communication in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and the reduction of the earlier emphasis on testing the mechanical aspects of language supporting these skills. The greater emphasis being given to the oracy skills of listening and speaking in many countries represents a further change. While there is ample factorial evidence to justify separate assessments of reading, writing, listening, and speaking abilities (Spearritt 1996), trends in mother tongue language testing are likely to lead to broader tests of communication skills drawing from two or more of the skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The publication of standards for the English language arts (1996) and for the assessment of reading and writing (1994) by the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English can also be expected to generate broader types of performance assessment in the testing of mother tongue language. Bibliography Ayers D, Downing J 1982 Testing children's concepts of reading. 24(4): 277-83 Beaton A E 1987 Implementing the New Design: The NAEP 1983-84 Technical Report. National Assessment of Educational Progress/Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ Bourke S F, Clark M L, Davis D F, Holzer F 1980 Oracy in Australian Schools. Australian Council for Educational Research, Hawthorn Braddock R, Lloyd-Jones R, Schoer L 1963 Research in Written Composition. National Council of Teachers of English, Champaign, IL Britton J, Burgess T, Martin N, McLeod A, Rosen H 1975 The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). Macmillan Education, London Britton J N, Martin N C, Rosen H 1966 Multiple Marking of English Compositions. HMSO, London Brown J I, Carlsen G R 1953 Brown-Carlsen Listening Comprehension Test Evaluation and Adjustment Series, Grades 9-13. World Book Co., Yonkers, New York Carroll J B 1971 Development of native language skills beyond the early years. In: Reed C E (ed.) The Learning of Language. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York Carroll J B 1993 Human Cognitive Abilities: A survey of factor-analytic studies. Cambridge University Press, New York Clark M L 1973 Hierarchical Structure of Comprehension Skills, Vol. 2. Australian Council for Educational Research, Hawthorn Clay M M 1979 The Early Detection of Reading Difficulties: A Diagnostic Survey with Recovery Procedures, 2nd edn. Heinemann, London Davis F B 1968 Research in comprehension in reading. Reading Research Quarterly 3: 499-545 Elley W B (ed.) 1994 The IEA Study of Reading Literacy: Achievement and Instruction in Thirty-Two School Systems Elley W B, Reid N A 1969 Progressive Achievement Tests: Reading Comprehension, Reading Vocabulary. New Zealand Council for Educational Research, Wellington Gates A I 1926 Gates Silent Reading Tests Grades 3-8. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York
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Godshalk F I, Swineford F, Coffman W E 1966 The Measurement of Writing Ability College Entrance Examination Board, New York Gorman T, Brooks G 1986 Assessing oracy. In: Portal M (ed.) Innovations in Language Testing. NFER-Nelson, Windsor, UK International Listening Association 1995 ILEA Listening Post 53:1 International Reading Association, National Council of Teachers of English 1994 Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing. International Reading Association, Neward, DE International Reading Association, National Council of Teachers of English 1996 Standards for the English Language Arts. International Reading Association, Newark, DE Lieb-Brilhart B 1980 Oral communication instruction in the USA. In: Crocker W J (ed.) Developing Oral Communication Competence. University of New England, Armidale, NSW Marge M 1964 A factor analysis of oral communication skills in older children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 7: 31-46 Oiler J W (ed.) 1983 Issues in Language Testing Research. Newbury House. Rowley, MA Page E B 1985 Computer scoring of essays. In: Husén T, Postlethwaite T N (eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Education. 1st edn Pergamon Press, Oxford, pp 944-46 Powers D E 1984 Considerations for Developing Measures of Speaking and Listening. College Board Report No. 84-5. College Entrance Examination Board, New York Rhodes S C, Watson K W, Barker L L 1990 Listening assessment: Trends and influencing factors in the 1980s. Journal of the International Listening Association 4: 62-82 Schonell F J 1942 Backwardness in the Basic Subjects. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh Spearritt D 1962 Listening Comprehension—A Factorial Analysis. Australian Council for Educational Research, Melbourne Spearritt D 1972 Identification of sub-skills of reading comprehension by maximum likelihood factor analysis. Reading Research Quarterly 8(1): 92-111 Spearritt D 1980 Relationships among the four communication skills during the primary school years. In: Crocker W J (ed.) Developing Oral Communication Competence. University of New England, Armidale, NSW (also ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 18'0 025) Spearritt D 1996 Carroll's model of cognitive abilities: Educational implications. InternationalJournal of Educational Research 25(2): 107-198 Spearritt D, Spalding D, Johnson M 1977 Measuring Reading Comprehension in the Upper Primary School. ERDC Report No. 11. Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra (also ERIC Document Reproduction Service. ED 155609) Takala S 1988 Origins of the International Study of Writing. In: Groman T P, Purves A C, Degenhart R E (eds.) The IEA Study of Written Composition I: The International Writing Tasks and Scoring Scales. Pergamon Press, Oxford Taylor W L 1953 Cloze procedure: A new tool for measuring readability. Journalism Quarterly 30: 415-33 Thorndike R L 1973a Reading as reasoning. Read 9(2): 13547 Thorndike R L 1973b Reading Comprehension Education in
Language Testing: Methods Fifteen Countries: An Empirical Study. Wiley, New York and Almqvist and Wiksell, Stockholm UK Department of Education and Science 1975 A Language for Life (The Bullock Report). HMSO, London Underhill N 1987 Testing Spoken Language: A Handbook of Oral Testing Techniques. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Vernon P E 1962 The determinants of reading comprehension. Edu. Psych. Meas. 22(2): 269-86 Villaume W A, Weaver J B III 1996 A factorial approach to establishing reliable listening measures from the WBLT and the KCLT: Full information factor analysis of dichotomous data. InternationalJournal of Listening 10: 1-20
Watson K W, Barker L L 1984 Watson-Barker Listening Test. High school version (with C V Roberts) 1989. SPECTRA Incorporated Publishers, New Orleans, LA Wilkinson A 1965 Spoken English. Educational Review. University of Birmingham, UK Wilkinson A, Barnsley G, Hanna P, Swan M 1980 Assessing Language Development. Oxford University Press, Oxford Wilkinson A, Stratta L, Dudley P 1974 The Quality of Listening. Macmillan Education, Basingstoke, UK Wiseman S 1949 The marking of English composition in grammar school selection. British Journal Educational Psychology 19: 200-9
Language Testing: Methods C. A. Chapelle
A language test is an instrument for systematically observing performance and summarizing observations to provide information about test takers' ability to use language. Tests designed to measure native language ability have long been included in school achievement tests and in tests used for decisions about college and graduate school admissions. Tests for assessing second language ability or for identifying language problems have a wider range of uses. Researchers investigating second language acquisition rely on language tests to document learners' knowledge at a particular point in time so that they can study its development. Many educational decisions are made on the basis of language test results. Universities in many countries require a specified level of performance on a language test in the language of instruction for admissions. Language programs test students to place them into classes on the basis of their level of language development. In language classrooms, tests are used as signposts marking the end of a unit of study, and providing information about the overall success of learning for grading. In language classes and clinical settings, language tests help to pinpoint language problems, providing information that can help in planning future instruction or treatment. Given the wide range of uses for language tests, it is not surprising that much effort has been devoted to research and development of testing methods. 1. General Distinctions Among Test Methods Many different systems of classification are used for distinguishing one test method from another. Some divide test methods in terms of the skill the test measures, that is, reading, writing, listening, or speak-
ing. Others distinguish tests based on the aspect of language ability measured such as lexical, syntactic, or pragmatic knowledge. These classifications refer to the inferences to be made from the test scores. In other words, they refer to what is measured rather than how it is measured. To focus more directly on language testing methods, general distinctions are used to introduce important concepts underlying language testing methods—discrete versus integrative, ability versus performance, and field-specific versus general purpose. 1.1 Discrete Point versus Integrative In a discrete-point test each test item is intended to assess a specific piece of knowledge, whereas in an integrative test, tasks are intended to measure learners' ability to integrate aspects of language knowledge during language use. The clearest examples of the discrete-point method come from tests of grammar or vocabulary which lend themselves to being tested one point at a time. For example, Lado (1961, p. 192) illustrated the discrete-point principle with the following vocabulary item: He wears glasses. Something 1. for the rain 2. to see with 3. for ice 4. to drink with This item is intended to assess the examinee's knowledge of the word 'glasses' and therefore, in keeping with the strict discrete-point principle, the stem of the item 'He wears glasses' provides no clues about the meaning of the tested word. These types of items have
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Testing been used in tests for many different purposes, but their most obvious advantage is in diagnostic settings, where the test user is trying to determine precisely what the examinee does and does not know. 'Whereas discrete items attempt to test knowledge of language one bit at a time, integrative tests attempt to assess a learner's capacity to use many bits all at the same time, and possibly while exercising several presumed components of a grammatical system, and perhaps more than one of the traditionally recognized skills or aspects of skills' (Oiler 1979, p. 37). Many tests would fit that definition to some degree, but a clear example of the integrative test method is the cloze test, which is intended to call on a number of language abilities simultaneously as examinees attempt to fill in the blanks in a text with whatever words come into mind as they read. The following illustrates three items from one sentence that could appear as part of a larger text on a cloze test. Richard left his reading at the and then couldn't restaurant last newspaper in the morning. read Integrative tests such as the cloze are often used for assessing overall language proficiency in cases where test users want to identify differences among examinees to make decisions about class placement according to level. 1.2 Ability versus Performance An ability test is often thought of as 'indirect' because what examinees do to complete the test does not necessarily resemble how they would use language in nontest settings. Performance on such tests is used to infer their level of language ability, which is considered to underlie language performance across different settings. Both the discrete-point and the integrative test methods illustrated above would be considered ability tests. 'A defining characteristic [of a performance test] is that actual performances of relevant tasks are required of candidates, rather than more abstract demonstration of knowledge' such as that required by some discrete-point and integrative tests (McNamara 1996, p. 6). Tests used to measure writing and speaking are often referred to as performance tests because examinees are asked to use language with a simulated purpose. For example, a performance test intended to measure examinees' use of English for teaching classes at a university asks them to prepare and deliver a short lecture in their field of study to a simulated small class of participants, who are hired to act as students in the class during the test (Plakans and Abraham 1990). Evaluators judge their success in terms of how well they succeed in their purpose of delivering the lecture and responding to students' questions. In past years, the ability-performance distinction has been given more significance than it probably
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deserves. In fact all tests are indirect, because they rely on a sample of examinees' linguistic behavior rather than all possible relevant instances of their language use. Nevertheless, the distinction serves a purpose for test users, who can consider ability tests to be appropriate for an assessment of language ability, which is expected to apply across various situations, and performance tests may be the right choice for measuring language use related to a particular situation. 1.3 Language for Specific Purposes versus General Language A specific purpose test is one 'in which test content and methods are derived from an analysis of a specific purpose target language use situation, so that test tasks and content are authentically representative of tasks in the target situation ... Such a test allows [test users] to make inferences about a test taker's capacity to use language in a specific purpose domain'(Douglas in press). The performance test which assesses language for teaching would be one example of a specific purpose test. Another example comes from a project whose purpose was to develop the Occupational English Test in Australia (McNamara 1996). The testing procedure for the psychotherapist requires the examinee to play the role of a physiotherapist while interacting with a patient. In one of the test tasks, the candidates see a card containing information about the elderly patient they are talking to, the equipment they need to explain to the patient (e.g., a wheelchair), and the goal to have the patient choose the walking stick instead of the wheelchair. In contrast to the specific language content of the various modules of the Occupational English Test, the oral proficiency interview of the American Council for Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) requires examinees to engage in conversation about themselves and family that might come up in a social situation. The intention in this test is to avoid requiring the examinee to talk about field-specific topics so that the test score can be used to indicate general speaking ability. The ACTFL and other general purpose tests can be expected to remain widely used where it would not be possible to identify common purposes for all test takers. Still, specific purposes tests have become increasingly popular because many test users recognize that they want to know about examinees' ability to use language for specific purposes such as conversing with patients about medical problems. 1.4 An Analytic Framework for Test Methods Broad distinctions among testing methods help to portray some principles of testing methods. However, researchers who study language tests find such categories too general to capture all important aspects of the testing situation. For example, if one describes a test as 'integrative,' what does this say about the
Language Testing: Methods method of scoring responses or the topic of the input to the learner (e.g., the text of the cloze test)? Both of these features of the test method are important because they influence test scores, and therefore, researchers have attempted to articulate an appropriate analytic framework for description of test methods. The most widely used framework for describing features has developed in two stages, first called test method facets (Bachman 1990), and more recently, test task characteristics (Bachman and Palmer 1996). Test task characteristics are defined as the following: the test setting such as the physical specifications of the room and the participants; the testing rubrics including the instructions, test structure, allotted time, response evaluation, and calculation of scores; the input to the test taker such as its length and grammatical and topical characteristics of test questions; the output expected from the learner such as its length and grammatical and topical features of responses; and the relationship between input and output such as whether or not the questions the examinee is asked depend on previous responses. This framework of test task characteristics reveals that globally-defined methods can only partially define test methods. For example, a test of language for specific purposes is one in which the linguistic input and/or output from the learner are to be confined to particular topics and purposes, but 'specific purpose' does not, for example, specify anything about setting, or scoring method. Testing researchers therefore find a framework for test task characteristics critical for investigating testing methods. 2. Choosing and Evaluating Test Methods When test users evaluate language tests, they typically ask which of the methods is most valid and reliable. Unfortunately, this frequently asked question has no answer because validity and reliability do not apply to a test, or testing method in general. Instead, these concepts refer qualities of test use in a particular situation. For example, one might develop a vocabulary test that targets exactly the words studied in a particular language class. Such a test may allow the instructor to make valid inferences about the words the learners acquired during the course of the semester; it might be used validly for assigning marks by distinguishing students who had learned the words from those who had not. However, this same test that had a valid use in one setting would not necessarily be expected to be valid for making inferences about overall vocabulary knowledge that could be used for university admissions decisions. Because validity and reliability are relative to test use, the question is how to identify a test method that is appropriate for its intended purpose. Test purpose includes the inferences to be made about examinees' language ability, the uses to be made of those infer-
ences, and the intended impacts of the test on those involved with it. In addition to these facets of test purpose, resource issues have to be considered as well. Given the complex of factors affecting choice of optimal testing methods, researchers have not tried to prescribe methods for purposes categorically. Instead, they have attempted to develop the knowledge necessary to help test users decide about ideal testing methods for a particular situation. The most important finding from this research is that testing methods have a marked influence on the picture of language ability obtained from a test. This finding is important because it contrasts with prior assumptions about the nature of language ability and the purpose of testing. In the past many researchers attempted to develop and analyze tests in a way that would reveal a stable, underlying language ability that was independent from test methods. Today, the focus is radically different. Researchers now attempt to finetune their understanding of how test task characteristics influence performance. Research on integrative tests has found that they do not all measure the same 'integrative langauge ability.' Proponents of integrative tests at one time suggested that the purpose of language testing was to seek the best way to assess integrative language ability, which was believed to underlie language performance in all domains. However, subsequent research looking at various forms of integrative tests found that facets of the test tasks of integrative tests influence test takers' performance (Bachman 1990). The facets that make a difference include which words in a text examinees are asked to fill in (in a cloze test) and whether they are asked to construct their responses (as in the cloze example above) or to select their responses as one would in a multiple-choice test. These findings indicate that scores on integrative tests need to be interpreted in view of the particulars of the testing method rather than as a single, integrative ability; they also provide specific information about the effects of test method choices for test developers. Another set of findings is emerging from research on performance tests of speaking and writing ability. Performance tests were once uncritically trusted as 'authentic or direct' tests, but research has shown on these tests, as well, that particular facets of the test tasks influence the scores learners receive. Important facets include those associated with the scoring method, such as the raters and the rating criteria (McNamara 1996). These studies have helped to highlight the indirectness of the test scores relative to the examinees' ability to perform, and they have also had concrete applications to design of performance tests and rater training. Still another set of findings concerns the influence of specific purpose language on test scores. The assumption behind specific purpose language testing was that examinees' performance would be different,
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Testing perhaps better, if they were asked to perform test tasks using language within their field of expertise. Results have shown that this assumption can be substantiated, but only sometimes (Douglas in press). It seems that performance on specific purpose language tests is influenced by the level of specificity of the language on the test and the types of test tasks examinees are asked to perform (Clapham 1996). It is not the case that a reading passage about 'circuits,' for example, with comprehension questions will necessarily engage the field-specific knowledge of test takers to provide a score indicating specific purpose language ability in electrical engineering. Instead, there is a need to better understand the other features of language test tasks that engage specific purpose language ability, and the ways in which performance can be rated to result in scores that reflect this ability. In short, research on language testing methods has progressed to the point that today language testing methods are seen as a complex of facets, each of which may influence a test score. 3. Language Testing Methods in the Future Research on language testing methods is likely to continue to clarify the influence of particular test task characteristics on test scores. Of particular interest today is the study of how test task characteristics influence the difficulty of test tasks. Such research assumes that the ability that a test measures can best be defined by looking carefully at the tasks on the test, and examining the relationship between task characteristics and their difficulty. This line of research links questions about test method to some test validation procedures. Another critical question for the future is how computer-assisted test methods influence test performance. Research on large-scale language tests has begun to investigate these questions, finding that examinees' computer familiarity may not significantly influence their performance on a computer-assisted test provided they have followed guided practice using the computer before the test. Such large-scale studies need
to be complemented by others investigating the influence of a variety of task characteristics associated with computer-assisted test delivery. Testing method research is also taking another direction today as researchers investigate the influence that testing methods have beyond the testing situation (Wall 1997). For example, researchers are beginning to look at how methods used in large-scale testing affect the choices teachers make about what to teach in the classroom, and the ideas students hold about what is important to learn. The role of language-testing methods is more pronounced today than ever. Some progress has been made in recognizing the influence of testing methods on test scores, and in identifying particular influences of specific test task characteristics. In the future, one can expect perspectives gained through this work to inform choices that test developers and users make about testing methods. Bibliography Bachman L F 1990 Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford University Press, Oxford Bachman L F, Palmer A S 1996 Language Testing in Practice. Oxford University Press, Oxford Clapham C 1996 The Development of the IELTS: A Study of the Effect of Background Knowledge on Reading Comprehension. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Douglas D in press Testing Language for Specific Purposes: Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Lado R 1961 Language Testing. McGraw-Hill, New York McNamara T 1996 Measuring Second Language Performance. Longman, London Oiler J 1979 Language Tests at School. Longman, London Plakans B, Abraham R 1990 The testing and evaluation of international teaching assistants. In: Douglas D (ed.) English Language Teaching in US Colleges and Universities. National Association for Foreign Student Affairs, Washington, DC, pp. 68-91 Wall D 1997 Impact and washback in language testing. In: Clapham C, Corson D (eds.) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Volume 7: Language testing and assessment. Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 291-302
Language Testing: Users and Uses T. McNamara
1. Test Use and Test Type Tests are used for many purposes. They have important administrative functions in education and training, immigration, and access to employment, for example in certification, selection, quality control, and
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the ensuring of accountability. They have a range of functions within the classroom, guiding the work and perceptions of teachers and learners. Educational researchers also use tests to identify differences between groups of subjects and to measure the effects
Language Testing: Users and Uses of educational treatments. Are different kinds of tests required for these different purposes, or can a single test be suitable for different purposes? The answer is yes to both questions. Different uses of tests may involve the construction of tests of different types (a teacher's classroom quiz hardly resembles a formal examination, for example). On the other hand, the same test may be used for quite different purposes. For example, an essay may be part of a diagnostic assessment procedure to help a teacher plan her teaching, or it may be part of a formal examination to determine eligibility for selection for a workplace, a career, or an educational place. Can a single all-purpose test be used for a variety of functions? The answer to this is no. The most familiar distinction between test types in terms of test purpose is that between achievement and proficiency tests. Achievement tests are associated with the process of instruction in educational and training settings. They include the familiar quizzes and other regular but informal assessments; end of course tests; portfolio assessments, in which students are assessed on the basis of a number of pieces of work showing progress over time on a variety of tasks; and observational procedures for recording progress on the basis of classroom work and participation. Achievement tests accumulate evidence during or at the end of a course of study in order to see whether and where progress has been made in terms of the goals of learning. Achievement tests should support the teaching to which they relate. Formal tests are unsuited to the purpose, as they often relate poorly to curriculum goals, for example, where the latter emphasize performance while the test lacks a performance component (a test of speaking or writing). Because achievement tests are less constrained by considerations such as the provision of assessment tasks of equal difficulty across learners and learning settings, achievement tests can be more innovative than formal tests. The movement known as alternative assessment emphasizes this potential for innovation. It stresses the need for assessment to be integrated with the goals of the curriculum and to have a constructive relationship with teaching and learning. Standardized tests are seen as too often having a negative, restricting influence on progressive teaching, for example, by relying on conservative testing formats such as multiple-choice questions, or by not including direct tests of the spoken language because of expense or the difficulty of equalizing assessment conditions across raters. In alternative assessment, direct evidence of performance will be sought without concern for such considerations. Moreover, learners may be encouraged to share in the responsibility for assessment, and be trained to evaluate their own capacities in performance in a range of settings in a process known as self-assessment.
Whereas achievement tests relate to the past in that they measure what language the students have learned as a result of teaching, proficiency tests look to the future situation of language use without necessarily any reference to the previous process of teaching. The future 'real life' language use is referred to as the criterion. Proficiency tests are often professionally developed and are based on psychometric considerations rather than instructional ones; that is, they pay greater attention to the statistical properties of test scores such as consistency of measurement (reliability). In recent years, such tests have included performance tests where characteristics of the criterion setting are reflected in features of the test. For example, a test of the communicative abilities of tour guides working through the medium of a second language in work settings will include simulations of the tasks facing tour guides in their jobs, such as attempting to interest clients in optional tours, dealing with unforeseen difficulties and reassuring clients, as well as the more obvious tasks of presenting historical and other information. Where proficiency tests have an important gate-keeping function, for example, determining who will be admitted to a course of study, or to an occupation requiring practical second language skills, courses of study to prepare candidates for the tests may grow up in the wake of the introduction of the test. The best known proficiency tests for international students seeking admission to English-medium universities are the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) developed by the Educational Testing Service at Princeton and the International English Language Testing System (IELTS), a joint British/Australian enterprise. As a result of the existence of these tests, TOEFL and IELTS preparation courses are very common in schools preparing students for study in an English-medium university. However, the primary aim of the test is not to evaluate learning on such courses, and candidates may take the test without ever having attempted a formal course of study, for example, if their second language skills have developed in more naturalistic environments, such as through a period of residence in a country where the language is spoken. 2. Test Users Test users are those who benefit from or are otherwise affected by the information provided by tests. Mostly those who make direct use of the information made available by tests are doing so in their capacity as representatives or members of institutions, for example, as administrators, planners, policy makers, teachers, employers, researchers, and so on. When an assessment is made, it is not done by someone acting in a private capacity, motivated by personal curiosity about the other individual, but in an institutional role, and serving institutional purposes. These will typically involve the fulfilment of policy objectives in education
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Testing and other areas of social life. Test users also include those who are 'acted upon' by the test, such as test candidates and their sponsors, including families, who have much to gain or lose from the outcome of the test. Users of tests in this wider sense can be called test stakeholders. 3. Assessment and Educational Policy Language assessment serves policy functions in a range of educational contexts. One example is in the area of vocational education and training for adults. Most industrialized countries have in recent years responded to the need for upgrading of the workforce in the face of rapid technological change by developing more flexible policies for the recognition and certification of specific work-related skills, sometimes known as competencies. National competency frameworks, consisting of an ordered series of 'can do' statements describing levels of performance on relevant job-related tasks, have been adopted. Language and literacy competency frameworks have been developed as part of these policies. Such assessment frameworks define the goals of training, and the assessment of competencies forms the basis for employment and wage and salary levels. In international education, tests are used to control access to educational opportunities. Before they can be admitted to a university course, international students are required to meet a standard on a test of language for academic purposes such as TOEFL or IELTS. Although on the face of it some assessment of language ability seems reasonable in this context, questions arise regarding the level of proficiency to be required, and how this should be determined. While administrators find such tests convenient to use, they are unlikely to ask questions about the fairness and interpretability of the scores, unless there is some glaring discrepancy between scores on the test and independent evidence of capacity to cope with academic tasks involving language, for example, through unacceptably high failure rates or complaints from teachers in the academic environment. Sometimes administrators under pressure to increase the number of international students accepted will question the origin and defensibility of existing cut score levels on such tests. Tests are also used by educational administrators as part of an effort to maintain control over the quality of educational outcomes. Increasingly, national tests are being administered at various levels of the school system and funding decisions tied to the achievement of outcomes as measured by tests. Politicians and the general public are increasingly involved in debates over relative educational standards, within a single country over time, within different areas of a country, and between countries (the results of intercountry comparisons are often material for front page headlines). In adult education contexts, for example, those
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involving the language education of immigrants, tests are also used to facilitate communication within educational systems. As learners move from one course to another, scores on tests provide a common language of achievement between different educational centers. Classroom teachers use assessment to diagnose need, to recognize achievement of goals, to motivate, to reward, and to communicate with learners and their families or sponsors. Educational systems sometimes attempt to combine these needs with the administrative need for accountability and transferability of credit within the system by using a single assessment framework for both purposes (Brindley 1998). This typically takes the form of an ordered series of statements defining levels of achievement in relevant areas of the curriculum, for example, in relation to each of the language macroskills. This has the advantage for administrators of involving classroom teachers in the assessment processes required for their administrative needs. This has particular advantages in the educational culture which may be suspicious of externally imposed formal tests (schoolteachers in elementary and junior high school and teachers of language to immigrants, for example, are frequently resistant to such testing). There are limits however to the extent to which the needs of different test users can be met in this way. The needs of administrators for reliable assessment information is unlikely to be met by local assessments of this type, while on the other hand the available framework, which may be restricted to a very few levels, will be unable to recognize the reality of growth in competence in specific areas of language use, even though such growth may be plain to the teachers and learners. 4. Assessment and Social Policy Language tests are also used in the fulfillment of social policy objectives in government, for example, in the area of immigration. As international population flows rapidly increase, and the workforce becomes more mobile, language proficiency becomes a relevant consideration in the control of these flows. In those countries that are in a position to encourage and select immigrants, preference is frequently given to potential immigrants who can demonstrate knowledge of the main language of the country of immigration. This raises questions of fairness and equity. Is the assessment fair? Is it relevant? In what ways is it accountable to those affected by it? Should there be any language assessment at all in this context? Policies involving assessment of individuals need always to be subject to careful scrutiny by those concerned with social justice. On the one hand, the right of countries to control population inflows is generally recognized as legitimate. On the other hand, the world is increasingly intolerant of immigration policies involving discrimination based on race. What is the real agenda of such tests?
Language Testing: Users and Uses For example, in Australia formal language tests for immigrants were commissioned in the early 1990s, at a time of economic recession and high unemployment, as the government looked for respectable grounds on which to reduce the annual intake of immigrants. In Germany following reunification and the end of the Cold War the Government has insisted on tests of proficiency in German as part of a policy of containing the influx of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe wishing to settle in Germany. Following the arrival of immigrants in the receiving country, language tests may have other functions, for example, in controlling access to work and education. Once immigrants have arrived they will naturally wish to take up their specialist occupations and professions, for example, in medicine and other skilled areas. But successful participation in professional life in the new country depends on effective use of the second language. Government insistence on determining the degree of such competence seems on the face of it to be reasonable, since society clearly needs to be protected from the consequences of professional incompetence resulting from communication difficulties. This is most obviously the case in 'high stakes' contexts such as medicine. But again, there must always be a suspicion that such assessment can be abused and become an excuse for discrimination, particularly if assessment policy is influenced or even determined by professional associations who may have a vested interest in reducing the number of newcomers practising in a given field. Caution about the role of language tests as an instrument of power is justified by the long history of the misuse of that power (Spolsky 1995). Language tests have a tradition of use for purposes of social and cultural exclusion. A venerable example of this is the shibboleth test, mentioned in the Book of Judges, in which ethnically related distinct pronunciations of the word 'shibboleth' (meaning, according to some authorities, 'an ear of wheat,' others 'stream') were used as the basis of a draconian policy of exclusion in the context of military conflict. Individuals suspected of being members of the opposing tribe were asked to say this word, and if they pronounced it in a particular way, they failed the test and were immediately put to death. Such a test is used to establish identity, rather than proficiency. More recently, a proposal was made to the Royal Canadian Mounted Policy in the 1960s to exclude homosexual recruits by means of a language testing procedure. Word lists which included some items of homosexual slang (words such as camp, cruise, fruit, and trade) were to be presented to recruits, and an electronic apparatus, similar to a lie detector, was to be used to detect physiological changes indicating recognition and hence nervousness. It was assumed that only homosexuals would recognize the secondary meaning of such words and hence would be detected. The use of the electronic apparatus
in the test led to it being known colorfully as the 'fruit machine.' More conventional proficiency tests have also been used for purposes of exclusion. Prior to the Second World War the Australian Government used a language test as part of its policy to exclude immigrants other than those coming from the British Isles. Those applying to immigrate could be administered a dictation test in any language selected by the immigration officer; if the person passed the test in English, then any one of a range of other languages could be used until the candidate failed. In one notorious case in 1939, a Hungarian Jewish refugee applied for immigrant status. He was a polyglot and passed the test in a number of languages before finally failing in Gaelic, thereby being refused entry. This blatant example illustrates the possibility that language tests can form part of a politically and morally objectionable policy. 5. The Responsibility of the Tester for Test Use In the 1990s the responsibility of language test developers in relation to the potential uses of the tests they develop has become the subject of intensive discussion. This debate has in large part been inspired by changes in validity theory. Messick (1989) has proposed the notion of consequential validity, that is, that the interpretability and meaningfulness of test scores may be compromised by the consequences of the introduction of a particular type of test. Some writers have interpreted this very broadly to mean that test developers are ethically responsible for the consequences of the tests they introduce. Other writers have rejected this as opening a Pandora's Box: for example, it is not always possible to know to what uses tests will be put, and it is hard to see how test developers can be held responsible for uses they had not anticipated or intended. More relevantly, Messick holds that educational assessment is embedded in values, and is far from being the neutral objective science that is associated with the term psychometrics. In this sense, all tests have a social meaning associated with their use and discussion of language tests can legitimately expose those meanings and functions. Much of the discussion takes the form of debates about the ethics of language testing (Davies 1997). Generally, discussions have involved an expanded sense of the responsibility of language test developers for the effects of tests. Three main areas of concern have emerged. The first is accountability to test users (Hamp-Lyons 1997). The test (and hence the test developer) needs to be accountable to the people most immediately affected by the test, principally the testtakers, but also those who will use the information it provides. A second area relates to the influence that testing has on teaching, the so-called washback effect (Alderson and Wall 1996). The third involves test impact (Norton 1997), the effect of a test beyond the
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Testing classroom, the ripples or waves it makes in the wider educational and social world. While the discussions of the ethics of language testing mentioned so far acknowledge the social and political role of tests, they imply a belief that tests can be made ethical, and stress the individual responsibility of testers to ensure that they are so. Another, more radical view of language testing sees tests as essentially sociopolitical constructs, which, since they are designed as instruments of power and control, must therefore be subjected to the same kind of critique as are all other political structures in society. This latter approach is termed critical language testing (Shohamy 1998). From the perspective of critical language testing, discussions of the individual responsibility of the language tester are misguided. Critical language testing at its most radical is not reformist since reform is a matter of modification, not total replacement. At its most radical indeed, it would not recognize testing as we know it at all. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that language testers themselves have found it difficult to articulate this critique, or have interpreted it as implying the necessity for individual ethically responsible behavior on the part of testers. So far, discussion has been restricted to studies of the institutional character of language tests as part of an effort to make language testing as a discipline and as an area of knowledge self-reflexive and socially aware. An example of this work is the study by Spolsky (1995) of the
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history of TOEFL as an institutional test. We can anticipate an increasing exploration of the ramifications of the notion of critical language testing; a major new book by Shohamy (in press) outlines the scope of such an enterprise. Bibliography Alderson J C, Wall D (eds.) 1996 Washback [Special issue] Language Testing 13: 3 Brindley G 1998 Outcomes-based assessment and reporting in language learning programs: A review of the issues. Language Testing 15: 1 Davies A (ed.) Special issue: Ethics in language testing. Language Testing 14: 3 Hamp-Lyons L 1997 Ethics in language testing. In: Clapham C M, Corson D (eds.) Language Testing and Assessment. [Vol. 7 of Encyclopaedia of Language and Education}. Kluwer Academic, Kluwer, pp. 323-33 Messick S 1989 Validity. In: Linn R L (ed.) Educational measurement (Third edn.) Macmillan, New York, pp. 13103 Norton B 1997 Accountability in language assessment. In: Clapham C M, Corson D (eds.) Language Testing and Assessment [Vol. 7 of Encyclopaedia of Language and Education]. Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 313-22 Shohamy E 1998 Critical language testing and beyond. Studies in Educational Evaluation 24: 4 Shohamy E in press Critical language testing. Longman, London Spolsky B 1995 Measured words. Oxford University Press, Oxford
The Profession Institutions Journals A. Valdman
The term educational linguistics constitutes a sort of neologism arising from the profound changes undergone by the term applied linguistics, itself reflecting changes in the perception of that discipline by both its practitioners and professionals in allied fields beginning in the 1970s (see Applied Linguistics). In the 1960s, at the time when it reigned supreme in activities involving the interface between structural linguistics and second language teaching, applied linguistics was viewed as what the French call a discipline-tampon, that is, as mediating between theoretical insights from structural linguistics and the practical activities of the second and foreign language classroom. With the development of the Hymesian construct of communicative competence (see Hymes) and the growing focus on language use in a variety of social contexts, applied linguistics became a discipline-carrefour, a crossroad, the role of its practitioners changing to that of selecting contributions from the full gamut of the language sciences and orienting them toward a broadened set of pedagogical activities. More recently, applied linguistics has lost its role as a sort of gatekeeper, and applied forms of allied disciplines— applied sociolinguistics, applied psycholinguistics, and so forth—now interface directly with second and foreign language didactics. As schools in immigrant countries such as Canada, Australia, the United States, and those in Western Europe and Scandinavia have had to integrate children speaking a variety of languages, the attention of applied linguists and their colleagues in applied fields of the language sciences has extended to educational aspects of language contact, in particular, bilingual education. This change in the types of learners served by practitioners—from adults to children, coinciding with attempts to apply the theoretical constructs of Universal Grammar to second language learning—has blurred the line demarcating this field from first language acquisition (witness the generalized use of the term acquisition instead of learning). Another trend, more salient in Western Europe than in North Amer-
ica, has been the observation of natural language acquisition—some European researchers prefer the more inclusive term of appropriation—on the part of adult immigrants and migrant workers. Thus, applied linguistics has been subsumed into a larger nexus: educational linguistics. Concomitant changes affected journals devoted to applied linguistics. Their scope broadened to include issues related to language use and social issues affecting a great variety of language learning situations, and the influence of the latter in shaping epistemological and methodological discussion in the broadened field of educational linguistics. As a consequence, their impact on pedagogical practices lessened as new and more specialized concerns, many interdisciplinary in nature, spawned a plethora of new venues. The profound changes that the traditional field of applied linguistics has undergone is reflected in the evolution of the two oldest journals in educational linguistics: Language Learning (LL), which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, and The Modern Language Journal (MLJ), entering its 83rd year of publication. The organ of the Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations, MLJ was narrowly associated with foreign language teaching in the United States. On the other hand, LL, which sprung from the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, was devoted principally to issues in the teaching of English as a second language. Today, the pedagogical focus of these two venerable venues appears to be converging: an increasing proportion of the articles in MLJ deal with ESL and, although second language instruction (and ESL in particular) remains the dominant concern of contributors to LL, a larger place is given to research on foreign language learning. Both journals have given priority to issues in language learning over language teaching, and to the results of empirical studies over general discussions of pedagogical approaches or descriptive linguistic studies. The predominance of experimental designs adapted from experimental psychology has 729
The Profession led to a convergence of the content of these two journals and those covering the cognitive sciences, although that trend has been tempered, particularly in the case of MLJ, by the readership's increasing awareness of and concern for language use. Its content reflects the growing awareness on- the part of specialists in language learning and teaching that sociolinguistic, sociopsychological, and pragmatic.factors may have as.great an effect on language learning and retention as cognitive and psycholinguistic factors. In this article, I will provide a classification of existing journals in educational linguistics based on their scope and content as well as their impact on the potential readership. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the issue of linguistic and geopolitical dominance of the publications in this field. . Journals in educational linguistics fall into two initial groupings: (a) publications generally springing forth from the older tradition of applied linguistics covering a broad range of issues and serving a wide readership; and (b) those that serve more specialized audiences or are linked to the so-called hyphenated fields of linguistics; in particular, anthrop-, psycho-, and sociolinguistics. LL probably stands as the most widely disseminated member of the first category. The younger IRAL (founded in 1962), the English title of which is International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, appears to have remained closer to the more traditional interpretation of applied linguistics than its North American peers. In addition, it differs by its truly international purview, symbolized by its trilingual title (English, French, and German) and evidenced by its acceptance of articles in all three tongues, a rare linguistic ecumenism among international journals in educational linguistics. This central subset also includes Applied Linguistics, whose editorial policy opens with a declared intention to promote 'a principal led approach to language education' and thus casts its net somewhat more broadly than LL. With considerably less impact are journals addressed to national audiences publishing principally in languages other than English, for example, Etudes de Linguistique Appliquee and Melanges (CRAPEL, Centre de Recherches et d'Application Pedagogiques en Langues) in France, Zeitschrift fiir Fremdsprachenforschung in Germany, and Revista de Linguistica Tedrica y Aplicada (RLA) in Chile. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SSLA), although its focus differs little from LL, initially attempted to broaden the scope of the field by defining it to include problems on language contact, notably pidginization and creolization. Compared to LL and SSLA's more ecumenical receptiveness to theoretical views on language acquisition, the more recently founded Second Language Research has opted for a narrower interest in the application of Universal Grammar to second language learning. In addition, as indicated in its editorial policy statement, it favors 'con730
tributions that explore links between [second language acquisition and second language performance] and related nonapplied fields such as theoretical linguistics, neurolinguistics, and first language development.' Belonging to a subset of this category are journals that target language teachers and address more properly pedagogical concerns; my locus in the United States renders this list nonexhaustive and somewhat narrow. Except for The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue Canadienne des Langues Vivantes (the Canadian counterpart of MLJ now in its 53rd year of existence), Language Teaching, Applied Language Teaching (published by the Defense Language Institute, the language training arm of the US Department of Defense), and ELT Journal, these are the organs of professional associations and, in most instances, they also serve to disseminate professional information to their membership. As the journal of the largest and most powerful association of language teachers worldwide, TESOL Quarterly exerts the greatest influence. Interestingly, it has broadened its potential readership by adding teachers of 'Standard English as a Second Dialect' to teachers of ESL, thereby launching a bridge to professionals in bilingual education and those confronted with the special needs of disadvantaged African-Americans in inner-city schools. Foreign Language Annals, published by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, addresses mainly methodological issues in language teaching of interest to practitioners. Because their pages are devoted mostly to literary studies, the voices of the other American foreign language associations (The French Review, Hispania, Italica, etc.) only marginally address the concerns of educational linguists, except for the pedagogicallyoriented publication of the American Association of Teachers of German, Unterrichtspr axis/ Teaching German. Somewhat more specialized and addressing more narrow aspects of second language pedagogy are Language Testing, Journal of Language for International Business, English for Specific Purposes, and Journal of Second Language Writing. Of the journals in the second category, those focusing on more specific areas of the language sciences, the subset dealing with sociolinguistic issues, defined broadly to encompass bilingualism and language planning, probably contribute more centrally to educational linguistics. Several, many edited in Europe, target theoretical and educational aspects of bilingualism: Multilingua, The Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, The International Journal of Bilingualism, and the newly created Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. English Today, English WorldWide, and World Englishes also play a major role in addressing one of the most serious problems at the level of international communication. Concomitant with the globalization of economic exchanges, English is being transformed from the national language of an
Journals inner circle of primarily monolingual English-speaking nations to an international lingua franca and to one of the vernaculars of multilingual states in which it serves as official language carrying political power and social prestige. This shift raises two sets of thorny educational issues. First, can international vernacular varieties of English suitable for specific purposes establish themselves as autonomous norms equal in status to the standard variety of the inner circle? Second, in anglophone multilingual countries, can local vernacular varieties of English develop free from the stigma that attaches to varieties that, as the result of second language acquisition, show features of language transfer and extensive restructuring? In other words, will Nigerian or Indian Englishes accede to the status of standards on equal terms with, say, Canadian or Australian Englishes? Discussions and research that address some of these sociolinguistic and language policy and planning issues and their implication for basic mother-tongue education are found in Language Problems and Language Planning, Language in Society, The International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Current Issues in Language & Society, and The Journal of Language and Anthropological Linguistics. The second set of specialized journals has a close affinity with developmental psychology and addresses more properly the concerns of mother-tongue educators. It includes, on the one hand, journal disseminating research on first language acquisition and normal development such as The Journal of Child Language, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, and Applied Psycholinguistics, and, on the other hand, those dealing with various communicative disorders such as International Journal of Language & Communicative Disorders, Journal of Fluency Disorders, and Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. With less impact on educational linguistics are the journals of the various branches of psychology, cognitive science, and educational research such as Journal of Memory and Language, Journal of Education Psychology, Journal of Educational Measurement, and Applied Cognitive Psychology. Most of the journals listed follow the prototypical pattern of publishing at large submissions that undergo a rigorous procedure of blind evaluation by specialized reviewers. This policy plays to the advantage of younger scholars by neutralizing the halo effect of the 'household names' of a field; its disadvantage is to limit the journal's treatment of topical issues. Many publications in educational linguistics resolve this dilemma by producing, either sporadically or on a regular schedule, thematic issues, for example, one of the four annual issues of SSLA consists of the treatment by a guest editor of a topic submitted for approval to its editorial and advisory boards. Some journals, for example, The Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, the organ of the National Applied
Linguistic Association, or the AILA Review/Revue de I'AILA, published by the International Organization, opt for exclusively thematic coverage, as does the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. One salient fact about journals in educational linguistics is that most are either edited or published in the United States or the United Kingdom. The unchallenged status of English as the international language of scientific communication surely accounts in large part for this dominance. Another contributing factor lies in the vitality and strength of centers of research and teaching in the language sciences in these two countries. Many of the seminal theoretical contributions that underlie much of the current development in educational linguistics have been put forward by scholars in American, British, or Englishspeaking Canadian universities; for example, Wallace Lambert (see Lambert) and the importance of sociopsychological factors on language learning, S. Pit Corder (see Corder) and the notion of the systematicity of the learner's interlinguistic systems, Dell Hymes (see Hymes) and the notion of communicating competence, Michael Halliday (see Halliday) and focus on discourse, William Labov (see Labov) and the rigorous study of linguistic variation, and last but not least the determining influence of Noam Chomsky. Many—and the most powerful—professional associations in educational linguistics have headquarters in North America and all aspects of the production of their journals are centered there. A final factor whose influence should not be underestimated resides in the dynamic entrepreneurship of British publishers in the domain of journal publications. Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, recently joined by Blackwell, have vastly increased their lists, to the extent that they publishnearly half of the journals in theoretical linguistics not associated directly with professional societies. For example, in the last two years the production (as opposed to the editing) of both MLJ and LL has been transferred from American campuses to the offices of Blackwell. This Anglo-Saxon dominance in the dissemination of research finding and methodological innovations in educational linguistics cannot but raise serious concerns. Because much of American research on second language acquisition follows the models of experimental educational psychology, research questions tend to be narrow and the database limited. For example, so-called longitudinal studies are conducted under highly contrived conditions over a period ranging from several hours to a few weeks. In Western Europe, on the contrary, the longitudinal study of natural language learning sponsored by the European Science Foundations extended over at least two years. More seriously, the educational issues addressed tend to be restricted to those with social and political importance for the affluent North and neglect those of the more populous and economically deprived
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The Profession South. For example, studies addressing multilingual education start from the implicit premise that monolingualism is the norm whereas, in terms
of the number of human beings affected, multilingualism constitutes the normal state of linguistic affairs.
Professional Associations R. Young
Scholars and students of educational linguistics in many countries have formed professional associations. The purposes of such associations are to promote research in the broad field of educational or applied linguistics, to facilitate the dissemination of information and research, and to provide a forum where members of the professional community may meet. Individuals join these associations by paying an annual fee and the associations achieve their ends by means of organizing conferences and symposia, by publishing scientific journals, newsletters, and world wide web sites, and by attempting to influence public policy on matters of language and education. This article will describe the activities of two international associations, the International Association for Applied Linguistics (AILA) and the International Language Testing Association, as well as the activities of one organization in the United States: the American Association for Applied Linguistics. This article concludes with a listing of several other international organizations. 1. AILA (Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquee)
The Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquee (AILA) is an international federation of approximately 35 national associations of applied linguistics. Affiliates include professional associations in European countries (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Macedonia, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom); in the Americas (Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the USA); in Asia and the Middle East (Israel, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, The Philippines, and Singapore); in Australia and New Zealand; and in South Africa. The objectives of the association are to promote research and teaching dealing with all fields of applied linguistics, to disseminate the results of this research, and to promote international and interdisciplinary cooperation in these fields.
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The most visible activity of AILA is the World Congress of Applied Linguistics, which is organized by a member affiliate every 3 years. AILA was founded in 1964 at an international colloquium on applied linguistics at the University of Nancy, France. The next congress took place in Cambridge, England, in 1969. Subsequent congresses have been held in Copenhagen, Denmark (1972), Stuttgart, Germany (1975), Montreal, Canada (1978), Lund, Sweden (1981), Brussels, Belgium (1984), Sydney, Australia (1987), Halkidiki, Greece (1990), Amsterdam, The Netherlands (1993), and Jyvaskyla, Finland (1996). In 1999 the World Congress is hosted in Tokyo by the Japan Association of Applied Linguistics, and in 2002 it will be hosted by the Singapore Association for Applied Linguistics. AILA is governed by an Executive Board consisting of the President, three Vice Presidents, a Secretary General, a Treasurer, a Publications Coordinator, a Scientific Commissions Coordinator, and three Members at Large. The recommendations of the Executive Board are discussed and voted on by the International Committee, on which every national affiliate has a vote. The Executive Board and International Committee meet once a year at different sites around the world. The very broad scope of professional concerns of AILA affiliates and their members is reflected in the AILA Scientific Commissions, which seek to promote research and dissemination of information within their fields. In 1998, 23 scientific commissions existed, including: adult language learning, child language, communication in the professions, contrastive linguistics and error analysis, discourse analysis, educational technology and language learning, foreign language teaching methodology and teacher education, immersion education, interpreting and translating, language and ecology, language and education in multilingual settings, language and gender, language and the media, language for special purposes, language planning, learner autonomy in language learning, lexicography and lexicology, literacy, mother tongue education, psycholinguistics, rhetoric and stylistics,
Professional Associations second langauge acquisition, and sociolinguistics. The scientific commission on literacy is one of the most active. The convenors organize a symposium on literacy at the World Congress, produce working papers on key theoretical issues in literacy, and facilitate computer-mediated scholarly interaction through their world wide web site at www.education.uts.edu.au/ aila/home. AILA sponsors publication of a newsletter, AILA News, a journal, the AILA Review, and a world wide web site, www.brad.ac.uk/acad/aila. Issues of AILA Review contain collections of articles on a particular theme such as consciousness in second language learning (volume 11,1994) or collected papers from a world congress (volume 12, 1995-96). AILA, together with the British and American associations for applied linguistics, also cooperates with Oxford University Press to publish the journal Applied Linguistics. 2. AAAL (American Association for Applied Linguistics) With over 1400 members, the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) is the largest affiliate association within AILA. Founded in 1977, AAAL is the United States national affiliate of AILA, although an increasing number of its members reside outside the United States, principally in Japan and Canada. AAAL is governed by an Executive Committee consisting of the President, First and Second Vice Presidents, the Immediate Past President, a SecretaryTreasurer, and three Members at Large. The President of the Center for Applied Linguistics is an ex officio member of the AAAL Executive Committee. AAAL organizes an annual conference in early spring chaired by the First Vice President, who succeeds to the presidency of the association at the conclusion of the conference. Conferences over the next few years will be held in Stamford, Connecticut (1999), Vancouver, British Columbia (2000), St. Louis, Missouri (2001), and Salt Lake City, Utah (2002). The annual conference is also the time when members of AAAL have the opportunity to attend the general business meeting, when the Executive Committee reports to the membership and resolutions are debated and voted on. In recent years, AAAL has tried to influence public policy on matters of language and education by means of resolutions passed at the general business meeting and published on the association's world wide web site www.aaal.org. In 1998, AAAL passed a resolution opposing a California ballot initiative 'English for the Children' which proposed to limit bilingual education in California public schools to 1 year. Despite the opposition of AAAL and other professional associations, the ballot initiative passed and effectively dismantled bilingual education in the State of California. In another issue of educational policy emanating
from California, in 1997 AAAL passed a resolution relating to the Oakland School Board's decision to encourage teachers to learn Ebonics, otherwise known as African-American Vernacular English, and to use it as a means for teaching standard English. The AAAL resolution encouraged all students and teachers to learn scientifically-based information about linguistic diversity and to examine the social, political, and educational consequences of differential treatment of dialects and their speakers. Some months after the AAAL resolution was passed, a conference on 'Language Diversity and Academic Achievement in the Education of African American Students' was held in New York. Those attending the conference agreed that contrasts between standard English and some of the varieties of English spoken by African-American students frequently lead to ineffective classroom instruction and mistakes in identifying predictable differences between language varieties as deficiencies in reading, writing, and speaking. This lack of understanding pairs with negative attitudes to foster low expectations that often impede academic achievement for the students involved. Researchers at the conference urged teacher education programs to give teachers accurate and practical information about language and dialect diversity to enhance their ability to teach students who come from a variety of language communities. AAAL sponsors an award to recognize distinguished scholarship and service to the community of applied linguistics. Courtney Cazden, Charles Ferguson, Robert B. Kaplan, Bonifacio P. Sibayan, and Roger Shuy are among the individuals whose contributions have been recognized by this award.
3. ILTA (International Language Testing Association) The International Testing Association (ILTA) is a professional association of people actively involved in the assessment of second and first language skills and it has as its purpose the improvement of language testing throughout the world. Established in 1992 at the Language Testing Research Colloquium in Vancouver, ILTA helps in the formation of a language testing profession by publication of a newsletter, Language Testing Update, and a world wide web site, www.surrey.ac.uk/ELI/ilta/ilta.html. Members of ILTA and other language testing professionals meet annually at the Language Testing Research Colloquium, which is usually held in the neighborhood of either the AAAL annual conference or the AILA world congress.
4. Other Professional Associations In addition to those mentioned above, many other professional associations exist within the field of edu-
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The Profession cational linguistics. The following alphabetical listing is a selection of associations with international membership. Some are narrowly defined by their focus on a particular aspect of educational linguistics; others are large associations with interest sections that cater to members interested in educational linguistics. (a) ACTFL, The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, www.actfl.org (b) CALICO, Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium, www.calico.org (c) ELRA, The European Language Resources Association, www.icp.inpg.fr/ELRA/home.html (d) FIPLV, Federation Internationale des Professeurs de Langues Vivantes, www.bris.ac.uk/ DeptsjEducationjfiplvlfiplv.htm
(e) FIT, Federation Internationale des Traducteurs, www.fit-ift.org (f) IATEFL, The International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, www.iatefl.org (g) ICPLA, The International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (h) IprA, The International Pragmatics Association (i) IRA, The International Reading Association, www.ira.org (k) MLA, Modern Language Association of America, www.mla.org (1) NABE, National Association for Bilingual Education, www.nabe.org (m) TESOL, Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, www.tesol.edu
Research Centers B. Spolsky
The professionalization of the field of educational linguistics has been shaped by the pioneering work of a number of research and information centers and projects. This article describes some of them. Because the best place to keep up to date with their activities is on the web, URL addresses have been included in the text. The first group of centers date from the late 1950s. The Center for Applied Linguistics (http://www.cal. org/) was established in Washington in 1959 under the directorship of Charles Ferguson (see Ferguson), with the sponsorship of the Ford Foundation, which at that time through the energetic leadership of the late Melvin Fox was deeply committed to issues of language and education. It had four primary objectives: to improve the teaching of English as a second or foreign language; to promote the teaching of the less commonly taught languages; to conduct research that would enhance the educational process; and to serve as a clearing house for information and convenor of conferences on language-related issues. In the first of these areas, the Center played a major role in starting TESOL (the US based international professional organization for teachers of English as a second or foreign language; see Professional Associations), TOEFL (the test of English as a foreign language now administered by Educational Testing Service), and a number of programs in Native American education. It developed special interest in nonmainstream dia734
lects of English, language and literacy in the workplace, language acquisition, bilingualism, language proficiency testing, and integrating language and content instruction in the classroom. The Center was a force in research and policy in the expansion of bilingual education in the United States in the 1970s as well as in addressing the needs of refugees. It is responsible for two federally-funded ERIC clearing houses, one language and linguistics and a second on English as a second language literacy education. It describes its current core purpose as 'to improve communication through better understanding of language and culture.' Since the Center has no endowment or government subvention, its projects originate from a variety of funding sources, including public grantmaking agencies and private foundations, as well as international corporations, school systems, government agencies, social service providers, and private businesses. The Center maintains a professional staff of its own, but has no university or direct governmental affiliation. The Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT) (http://www.cilt.org.uk/) has been working in support of language teaching and learning in the United Kingdom since 1966. Through its library and information service, publications, training, conferences, and professional development, CILT provides services for language professionals. In 199495 CILT led a feasibility study for a European data-
Research Centers base on language teaching and learning carried out established in 1945 under the jurisdiction of the with colleagues from Denmark, France, Germany, Ministry of Education, includes educational tasks in Holland, and the United Kingdom. Much of the its language planning activities. One of its sections research carried out during this study and the meth- is a Center for Teaching of Japanese as a foreign odology developed as a result has been fed into the language. The Regional Language Centre (RELC) Lingua project (see below). CILT is supported by United Kingdom Government grants. It is based in (http://www.relc.org.sg/), an educational project of the London and its services are delivered through a Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO), is located in Singapore. The members national collaborative network of regional centers. Another early center was the Bourguiba Institute of of the SEAMEO are Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Modern Languages (Institut Bourguiba des Languages Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Vivantes) in Tunis which began in 1958 as a Binational Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Center of the United States Information Agency, and Thailand, and Vietnam. The associate members are was transformed, with support from the United States Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Agency for International Development, the Peace and the Netherlands. RELC (the 'E' originally stood Corps, the Ford Foundation, and the British Council for English) was set up in 1968 to provide assistance to into a center offering a fuller spectrum of language SEAMEO member countries in the area of language teaching services. It provides not just adult education, education. It conducts advanced training courses and but also university level instruction, develops teaching undertakes research, publications, and information materials for the schools, and offers summer and year dissemination and other activities related to the long courses in Arabic, English, French, and other linguistic needs and problems of Southeast Asia. languages. The Modern Languages Projects of the Council of The Modern Language Center (http://www.oise. Europe, active from the early 1970s, had important utoronto.ca/MLC/) is a section of the Ontario Institute impact on the teaching of modern languages. One for the Studies of Education and so part of the gradu- area has been the specification of realistic objectives ate department of curriculum of the University of (threshold levels; van Ek and Trim 1984). Other Toronto. It addresses a spectrum of issues related to emphases have been communicative methodologies, second and minority language teaching and learning. adding the intercultural dimension to language learnSince its founding in 1968, the quality and range of ing, the improved training of language teachers, and the Center's graduate studies programs, research and assistance with the reform of national language teachdevelopment projects, and field and dissemination ser- ing programs. Another series of projects has dealt with vices have brought it national and international rec- Language Learning for European Citizenship (Trim ognition. Under the leadership of its founding 1997). A Common European Framework of Refdirector, Professor H. H. Stern (see Stern) and his erence is being developed as a common basis for successor, Professor Merrill Swain (see Swain, Merrill describing objectives, methods, and assessment in lanK.), it earned a reputation as a pioneer in research in guage teaching. A 1997-2000 project intends to prosecond language learning and bilingual education. Its mote plurilingualism and pluriculturalism and work focuses on curriculum, instruction, and policies increase public awareness of the part played by lanfor education in second, foreign, and minority lang- guages in forging a European identity. Founded in 1977, the Research Centre on uages, particularly with reference to English and French in Canada but also other languages and Multilingualism (http://www.kubrussel.ac.be/centra/ settings. ovmeng.html) at the Catholic University of Brussels Le Centre international de recherche sur le bilin- carries out research on language contact and language guisme (International Center for Research in conflict and promotes international cooperation in the Bilingualism) at the University of Laval, Quebec, star- field. It has an important publication program. The National Foreign Language Center (http:// ting in the 1960s and re-established in 1991 as le Centre international de recherche en amenagement linguistique www.nflc.org/) in Washington was established in 1980 (CIRAL, International Center for Research in with support initially from the Ford and Mellon Linguistic Management) (http://www.ciral.ulaval.ca/), Foundations, and located at the Johns Hopkins Unihas been a pioneer in the study of language policy versity. Directed in its early years by Richard and other fields of educational linguistics. In work Lambert, a political scientist long active in interconducted by William Mackey and Heinz Kloss, it national studies in the USA, it focused on policy began to build databases and carry out surveys of rather than on methods. The NFLC aims to improve language policy and language teaching. It maintains US capacity for crosscultural communications, para web database on language policy in countries of the ticularly in languages other than English, to make language issues an integral part of public policy disworld. The National Language Research Institute of Japan course in the United States, to develop methods to (http:// www.kokken.go.jp/public / eibun40 / cover.htm), measure national needs for language competence, to 735
The Profession improve access to language learning in the education system, and to support research on effective language teaching and learning. There is a small professional staff, mainly engaged in funded research projects. A grant from the Mellon Foundation made it possible to establish a program of resident fellows whose research activities complement and broaden the work of the Center. There are a good number of centers in Australia, one set being a direct result of the 1987 National Policy on Languages (NPL). The National Languages and Literacy Institute (http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/ language-australia/) of Australia was launched in November 1990. NLIA originally comprised five university research centers, each of which focused on one of four key disciplines in applied linguistics as set out in the NPL Report. In 1991, it was incorporated as a nonprofit entity. The next year, the Australian Language and Literacy Policy succeeded the National Policy on Languages, providing funding to increase work in English education, adult literacy, child English as a second language, child literacy, plain English, and style. In 1996 the name of the organization was changed to Language Australia Limited. Language Australia is governed by a board nominated by education ministers from the Federal and State Governments, the Federal Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs as well as the nongovernment schools sector, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, business and industry representatives, and representatives of the research centers. The Chief Executive of Language Australia is Professor Joseph Lo Bianco. There are at present eight Language Australia Research Centers located in universities across Australia: (a) The newest, established in 1997, is the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures Education in Schools (http://www.humanities.unisa.edu.au/ rclces/) at the University of South Australia. It emphasizes culture as well as language, and works in the areas of teacher training, standards, and assessment; (b) One of the foundation group is the Language and Society Centre (LASC) (http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/ language-australia/centres/LASC.html) at Monash University which conducts sociolinguistic research on language in Australian society. It has been active in bilingual education and languages other than English, and is internationally known for its work with community languages; (c) The Language Acquisition Research Centre (http: IIsunsite.anu.edu.au / language-australia / centres / larc.html) at the University of Western Sydney, Macarthur, focuses on psycholinguistic factors in language acquisition, computational tools for linguistic research, and testing and training of analysts. It also provides in-service courses for language teachers; 736
(d) The Centre for Deafness and Communication Studies (CDCS) (http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/languageaustralialcentresjCDCS.html) at Griffith University, Queensland works with and for deaf and hard of hearing children, young people, and adults. It is working on a sign language curriculum and the assessment of sign language proficiency; (e) The Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture (http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/languageaustralialcentresjCDCS.html) at the University of Technology, Sydney and James Cook University of North Queensland in Townsville is concerned with research and development in communication and culture which relate schools, vocational education, and workplace training in the context of increasing local diversity and global connectedness; (f) Another foundation center, the Language Testing Research Centre (http://www.arts.unimelb.edu.au/ Dept/LTRC/) at the University of Melbourne was established at the beginning of 1990 to carry out research and development in language testing, to evaluate programs of language learning and teaching, to develop tests and other proficiency measurement instruments for English and other languages, to offer services in evaluation and testing, and to provide education and training in language assessment; (g) The Language Australia Style Council (http: //sunsite.anu.edu.au / language-australia / centres / StyleC.html) at Macquarie University, Sydney is a national forum for examining the state of Australian English. It consists of a regular conference for people with a professional interest in language as well as related research projects. It is part of the Dictionary Research Centre; and (h) The eighth is the Centre for Research and Development in Interpreting and Translating (http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/language-australia/centres/ CRDIT.html) at Deakin University, Melbourne focusing on research and development in the provision of languages services in Australia, the development of policy concerning interpreting and translating, and the conduct of specialized training programs in the field. There are also Australian centers independent of Language Australia. The National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research (NCELTR), at Macquarie University in Sydney, was established in 1988 with funding from the Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, to support the Adult Migrant Education Programme throughout Australia. It offers degrees, conducts research, and develops and disseminates curricular material. The Centre for Language Teaching and Research (http://www.lingua.cltr.uq.OZ.AU/) at the University of Queensland in Brisbane has been particularly active
Research Centers in the area of computer-assisted language learning (CALL). In the USA, Title VI of the US Higher Education Act supported the establishment in the early 1990s of seven National Foreign Language Research Centers (http://polyglot.cal.msu.edu/nflrc/). These centers continue a US policy of Federal intervention in education (constitutionally left to the States) by selective funding of educational activities in areas deemed to be of national importance. While there continues to be controversy over the focus and role of these centers (there is dispute over whether they should be broad but regional, or focused on specific languages), they are starting to have an effect on US second and foreign language teaching. These centers often continue work of earlier local centers. The National Capital Language Resource Center (http://www.cal.org/nclrc/) located in Washington, DC, is a collaboration between Georgetown University (whose School of Languages and Linguistics was for many years one of the strongest US programs in applied linguistics) Center for Applied Linguistics, and The George Washington University. Each institution contributes its own established network of foreign language educators and institutional resources that make the Center national in scope. The National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center (http://www.educ.iastate.edu/nflrc/) at Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa is committed to foreign language education in primary and secondary schools. The Center provides professional development for kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) teachers and foreign language teacher educators who serve as methods professors at institutions of high education. The Foreign Language Center (http://www.cohums. ohio-state.edu/flc/) is part of the Ohio State University College of Humanities. The Center coordinates the university's language programs. The Foreign Language Center is the administrative home of the Ohio State University National Foreign Language Resource Center (which is funded by a US Department of Education grant awarded in 1994 and granted again in 1996). The Language Acquisition Research Center (http://larcnet.sdsu.edu/) at San Diego State University is another National Language Resource Center, established in 1989 to improve the teaching and learning of languages. At the San Diego center, the focus is on research, development, training to improve language testing, increasing understanding of other cultures, and to improve language performance, all through innovative uses of technology. The National Foreign Language Resource Center (http://www.lll.hawaii.edu/nflrc/) at the University of Hawaii started in 1990. The mission of the center is to help improve the teaching and learning of languages other than English. The Center engages in research and materials development projects and conducts
summer institutes for language professionals. In addition, the Center distributes teaching materials, as well as technical and research reports. The Center focuses its efforts on the less commonly taught languages, particularly those of Asia and the Pacific. The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (http://carla.acad.umn.edu/) was set up at the University of Minnesota in 1993, and combines federal and locally supported projects. One activity was a funded project to articulate foreign language instruction across secondary and tertiary institutions. State teachers drew up a common curricular framework to meet both state and federal standards within a proficiency-oriented ideology. The federal funding supports less commonly taught language instruction. In other areas, such as using technology to support second language instruction, there is a common agenda from both federal and state funding. Michigan State University's Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR) (http://clear. msu.edu/) was awarded a grant under the NFLRC program in 1996. Its objective is collaboration in foreign language research and teacher education across college, departmental, and institutional boundaries. Projects include research on learning and teaching methods and materials, second language assessment, links to teachers and schools, and collaboration with the college of education. There are other US centers in the field. Funded now by the National Institute on the Education of At-Risk Students in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement at the US Department of Education, the Center for Research in Education, Diversity, and Excellence (http://www.cal.org/crede/) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is concerned with the education of linguistic and cultural minority students. It conducts some 30 projects in the areas of exemplary language learning programs, staff development, impact of family and peers, curricular content areas, school integration, and alternative assessment. There are two centers dealing with literacy at the University of Pennsylvania. The National Center on Adult Literacy (NCAL) (http://litserver. literacy. upenn.edu/) was established in 1990 with a major grant from the US Department of Education, built upon a research center founded at the University in 1983. NCAL is supported by federal, state, and local agencies as well as by private foundations and corporations. Focused primarily on North America, NCAL aims to improve understanding of adult learners and their learning, improve adult basic education and literacy work, and provide information on adult literacy. The International Literacy Institute (ILI) (http:// litserver.literacy.upenn.edu/ili/index.html) was officially established in 1994 by UNESCO and the University to provide leadership in research, development, and training in the broad field of international literacy 737
The Profession and development, with an emphasis on developing countries. The ILI organizes conferences, disseminates a newsletter, and is involved in a number of research, development, training, and networking activities around the world. In Europe, staring in the late 1980s, there have been a number of important international projects. Set up in 1987, Mercator-Education (http://www.fa.knaw.nl/ mercator/) specializes in the various aspects of minority language education. It distributes information on matters concerning all levels of education, about language learning and teaching. Mercator-Education is part of the Mercator project in which it collaborates with Mercator-Media and Mercator-Legislation. The whole is coordinated by the European Commission. Mercator-Education maintains as a network of educational centers and corresponding experts, representing different language communities in the European Union. Mercator-Education has established a common database on the education of minority languages containing data on publications, organizations, persons, and factual aspects. It also provides a question and answer service and regularly publishes a newsletter. There are joint study projects. The European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) (http://www.bmwf.gv.at/lbm/texts/95-5/graz. html) was set up on the initiative of Austria and the Netherlands, with special support from France, in Graz (Austria) by the Council of Europe in 1994. At present 24 states subscribe to the agreement. The Center is a forum for discussion of the implementation of language policies with a mission to disseminate good practice in the area of modern language learning and teaching. The Center aims also to contribute to the respect and reinforcement of linguistic diversity in a multilingual, multicultural, democratic, and tolerant Europe. Its activities cover all levels of education, and it is open to the European cultural and language education networks in Europe. While the Center has a pan-European role, it plans to pay special attention to the critical needs of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Until recently, those interested in the different aspects of minority languages were mainly found in the communities themselves. Now, there is increasing cooperation and collaboration among the various language groups, such as the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (http://www.eblul.org/), an independent organization which acts and speaks on behalf of the circa 50 million European Union citizens who speak a language other than the official language of the State in which they live. Its members are volunteer associations and institutions active in the promotion of minority languages throughout the EU. The Bureau's purpose is to promote and defend the autochthonous regional or minority languages of the countries of the EU and the linguistic rights of those who speak these languages.
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LINGUA is the name given to the section of the European Community action program in the field of education 'SOCRATES' concerned with promoting the learning of foreign languages. From 1995 until the end of 1999, SOCRATES applies to the 15 Member States of the EU as well as to Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway in the framework of the European Economic Area agreement. The LINGUA program within SOCRATES (http://www.uma.es/Servicios/Internac/ Scratesin.htm#lingua) is concerned with all levels and sectors of education. It emphasizes school education, initial and in-service training of language teachers, adult education, and the development of curricula and language-teaching and assessment instruments for all educational sectors. The use of open and distance learning is encouraged. LINGUA also provides support for initiatives designed to promote innovative language learning. The European Commission's 1995 White Paper 'Teaching and Learning: towards the learning society' set the objective of helping all EU citizens to be proficient in at least three European languages. According to LINGUA, improved knowledge of an increasing number of languages is fundamental for strengthening understanding and interaction between peoples while preserving their cultural and linguistic diversity. It is essential for implementing the right to freedom of movement, and for exploiting the full potential of the single European Market. It is a key factor for the creation of an open European area for educational cooperation. Europe needs a concerted strategy for the promotion of foreign language competence, embracing both the European Community and national authorities and encompassing not only school education but also providing improved opportunities for language-learning in the adult education sector: some 40 percent of persons aged 40 or above in the EU Member States have never received any foreign language instruction. All the official working languages of the European Union (i.e., Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish) are covered by LINGUA, together with Irish, Luxemburgish and, from outside the EU, Icelandic and Norwegian. Special priority is given to the less widely used and less taught languages. LINGUA conducts cooperative programs for language teacher training, and supports in-service training programs in the field of foreign language teaching. There are centers in other parts of the world. In Senegal, le Centre de linquistique appliquee de Dakar conducts research in African languages with the goal of improving the teaching of languages of international communication in Africa. It works to integrate Senegal spoken languages into the national educational system. It has an extensive publication and information program. The Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland is a research insti-
Summer Institute of Linguistics tute for applied linguistics active in research, training, publishing, and information dissemination. The Center is engaged in developing 'The National Certificates' system in cooperation with the National Board of Education, and coordinating the European System for Diagnostic Language Testing (DIALANG). The Language Policy Research Centre at Bar Ilan University in Israel (http://www.biu.ac.HIHU/lprc) was set up in 1995 to carry out a major research study for the Israeli Ministry of Education on language education. In cooperation with Tel Aviv University and with other universities in Israel, the Netherlands, the West Bank, Germany, and Eritrea, it has also been
working on research projects concerning Israeli language education policy, sociolinguistics of Bethlehem, languages in Eritrea, and the language adaptation of Russian speaking immigrants to Germany and Israel. From a few pioneering centers, then, the field has grown into a wide network of local, national, and regional projects and institutions. Bibliography Trim J (ed.) 1997 Language Learning for European Citizenship. Council of Europe, Strasbourg van Ek J A, Trim J L M (eds.) 1984 Across the ThresholdReadings from the Modern Languages Project of the Council of Europe. Pergamon, Oxford, UK
Summer Institute of Linguistics J. Bendor-Samuel
The Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) is an educational and humanitarian organization involved in linguistic research and its application in literacy and translation programs in over 1000 languages. Its research has concentrated on the languages of minority peoples where little previous study has been undertaken, and is focused on assisting in the development of those languages with a view to a body of written materials being published in them and descriptive materials about them (grammars and dictionaries, etc) being compiled. It has developed training programs in many parts of the world to facilitate this.
accounts of the origin and history of the people, their beliefs and customs) and informal conversational material. Linguistic analysis covering the phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse structure of the language concerned is carried out. The collection of a lexicon and of a body of interlinear text is also made. Local colleagues are trained to participate fully in this research. A significant part of this material is published either in print, or in computer-readable or microfiche form. The need for dictionaries and grammars usable by the local people has also been recognized.
1. Purpose The SIL's statement of goals reads: 'The primary purpose for the existence of the Summer Institute of Linguistics is to (a) provide training in language learning and linguistic analysis, (b) carry on linguistic investigation of minority group languages wherever they may be found, and (c) provide a writing system for such languages and a literature which will be of educational, cultural, moral, and spiritual value.' In working to achieve this purpose, SIL's activities vary in response to local situations but can be summarized as having the following elements.
1.2 Translation In accordance with its aim of providing literature of educational, moral, and spiritual value, SIL works with local speakers to facilitate the translation and publication of the Bible, but does not normally become involved in the translation of religious material apart from the Bible. Usually the New Testament is translated, but increasingly in some parts of the world there is a demand for most or all of the Old Testament in addition. The Institute also assists local government and private agencies in the translation of other materials, for example, health and hygiene booklets, agricultural and other technological and developmental materials.
1.1 Linguistic Research Most SIL Language programs involve personnel learning to speak the local language and to record, both in oral and written forms, substantial quantities of language data, including oral literature (traditional
1.3 Literacy The aim of SIL is to assist the local communities in establishing ongoing literacy programs which are
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The Profession suited to local conditions and needs. This frequently includes the drafting and testing of reading primers and easy reading materials. Attention is also given to the skills of writing and of numeracy. The training of local people to serve as literacy teachers and supervisors for literacy programs is usually undertaken. Recognizing the need that exists for the writing and production of new materials in the local language, SIL frequently holds new writers' workshops. In such workshops, those from the local community who have an interest and show some ability in writing are trained to become authors. Frequently, material of considerable cultural value, such as the traditions of the group preserved in their oral literature, is published. In its literacy work, SIL seeks to cooperate with other government and nongovernment agencies, and indeed endeavors to ensure that its efforts are fully integrated into local institutions. In countries where this has been desired by the government and by the communities concerned, SIL has assisted the government to establish a system of bilingual schools. In these schools, students are taught to acquire the skills of reading and writing in their own language and to master the national language. In this way, after the early years of instruction in their own language, they become competent to continue their education with the national language as the language of instruction. 1.4 Training and Transfer of Technology High priority is given to the transference of languagerelated skills to the citizens of the countries where projects are undertaken. Training covers a wide range of activities from teaching linguistics, translation, and literacy courses at local universities to on-the-job training as personnel work alongside local translators and literacy personnel. In an increasing number of language programs, SIL personnel serve as advisors or consultants to local personnel. 1.5 Cultural Awareness In carrying out linguistic, translation, and literacy work, a knowledge of the local culture is acquired. Normally a significant amount of ethnographic material is gathered, particularly in areas having to do with the social organization and relationships in the community and the world view of the language group concerned. 1.6 Practical Community Assistance Personnel from the SIL normally reside in the language communities for substantial periods of time. Six months of the year over a 15-year period is not uncommon. They seek to be sensitive to the desires of the local community, and are often involved in community development projects of various kinds. 740
2. Historical Origins The Summer Institute of Linguistics began modestly enough in 1934 with a summer school to teach young people aboriginal languages. There were two students. W. Cameron Townsend, who organized the school and taught the grammar and literacy lessons at it, had learned the Cakchiquel language of Guatemala the hard way—without any training. He was convinced that a knowledge of phonetics and some introduction to the structure of non-Indo-European languages would make a big difference. He deliberately chose a rustic setting in Arkansas where nail kegs substituted for chairs as good training for life among aboriginal peoples. The next summer, there were five students; one of them was Kenneth L. Pike. After the course, the students accompanied Townsend to Mexico to study some of the Native American languages. This pattern was repeated the next summer, and by the end of 1936 students were studying Aztec, Maya, Tarascan, Mazatec, Otomi, Mixe, Tarahumara, Mixtec, and Totonac. The -linguistic schools and the fieldwork of SIL were under way. The Schools of the Summer Institute of Linguistics have a pragmatic purpose. They aim to provide the student with the background and skills which will enable him or her to learn a language, usually unwritten, for which pedagogical and descriptive materials are nonexistent or inadequate. The student learns basic linguistic theory and acquires techniques not only to learn to speak but also to analyze a new language and to provide a written form for that language. A strong emphasis from the very beginning of the Institute has been that linguistic theory and its practical application should continuously interact and reinforce each other. Thus, Pike, who studied under Townsend in 1935 and carried out initial linguistic fieldwork the following winter, came back as one of the teachers for the 1936 session. Similarly, Eugene Nida (see Nida, Eugene Albert), who was a student in 1936, subsequently alternated practical fieldwork and regular teaching at the Summer Institutes. At Townsend's insistence, Pike began to write a textbook on phonetics in the summer of 1936 and continued to work on that manuscript during the winter months when a broken leg kept him out of the Mixtec area. The following summer, 1937, Pike attended the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America at the University of Michigan. Professors Charles Fries and Edward Sapir encouraged him to continue his studies, and these led eventually to his PhD in 1942 at the University of Michigan, with the phonetics book as his dissertation. This pattern of summer teaching followed by practical fieldwork gave the courses and the textbooks that developed from those courses a strong practical emphasis. All the courses utilized extensive language
Summer Institute of Linguistics material drawn from the fieldwork that was being carried out, and these served to familiarize the students with diverse linguistic structures and to give them the opportunity of analyzing short language problems. Many of those who were called upon to teach were encouraged to continue their studies in general linguistics so that their teaching could be soundly based as well as practically oriented. 3. Expansion of Activities The pattern of annual summer schools and linguistic fieldwork in Mexico continued for a number of years. Growth was steady but unspectacular. By the end of 1941, SIL had 44 members and was involved in 17 indigenous languages in Mexico. A significant year was 1942, when, at the invitation of the University of Oklahoma, SIL moved its summer school to that university. From that summer and for more than 40 years following, SIL offered courses each summer at Norman, Oklahoma, as part of the summer program of that university. In 1942, for the first time, enrollment reached 100 students. At the end of the summer, 51 of these students joined the SIL organization with the intention of carrying out long-term language work, thus doubling SIL's membership. Growth made it necessary to put SIL on a legal basis, and in 1942 SIL was formally incorporated. At the same time, a sister organization, the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT), was set up to represent the aims of SIL, and particularly its translation work, to friends and churches who did not fully understand an educational and scientific organization such as SIL. Over the years since, the two organizations have worked together in a symbiotic relationship. While SIL carries out the linguistic training, and is responsible for the linguistic, translation, and literacy work, WBT represents SIL's work and seeks to encourage interest, personal involvement, and funding among friends and churches in the countries from which members come. The next major development occurred in 1946. Until then linguistic fieldwork had been limited to Mexico and the USA. In that year, SIL began work in Peru among the language groups of the Amazon jungle. Within a year, members had begun research in six different languages. Amazonia posed new challenges. The language groups lived in remote and difficult-to-reach places. Communications were nonexistent and travel slow, dangerous, and exhausting. Not untypical was the experience of one team who had 2 weeks on a dangerous river, followed by a 4-day walk, to reach the language group which they were studying. Cameron Townsend realized that small planes could transform the situation. That same journey could be made in a flight of 1 hour and 45 minutes. He saw, too, that small planes could not only provide much safer communication but also make it possible to reach some
language groups which would otherwise be inaccessible. His vision and insistence led to the formation of the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service to provide this service to the linguists. Another innovation in Peru was the establishment of a system of bilingual schools, to serve the educational needs of the jungle peoples who were outside the normal educational system. Potential teachers in the various jungle villages were selected to come to the SIL center at Yarinacocha to be trained to teach their own people the skills of reading, writing, and numeracy, and the first stages of elementary education, using their own languages as the medium of instruction. At the same time, they were able to acquire a good grasp of the national language, Spanish, so as to be able to teach the national language to their own people. These new teachers returned to their villages after three months' training and passed on to their people what they had learned. The next year, they came back to Yarinacocha to learn more, and once again returned to their jungle schoolrooms. This cycle of 3 months' training and the rest of the year in the village was repeated until the normal elementary syllabus had been covered. Successful teachers were given recognition by the government and commissioned as bilingual teachers. Monolingual pupils who learn to read in their own language in the first year read with understanding. They also begin to learn Spanish, at first orally, but in the second year they are introduced to reading Spanish. Thereafter their education continues to be bilingual at least through the first three primary grades. Beyond that, materials in Spanish can be used effectively. Instead of having to use teachers from outside the communities who are alien to the local culture, this system results in teachers who know the local language and culture and in pupils who learn to read with comprehension. This combination of linguistic research with its application in literacy programs and the establishment of bilingual schools, together with the use of the modern technology of small planes and radios, was seen by many educators and government officials as a very practical way to meet the needs of language groups in remote areas. Soon, SIL was invited to extend its work to other countries in Latin America; Guatemala (1952), Ecuador (1953), Bolivia (1955), Brazil (1957), Colombia (1962), and Suriname (1967). Another landmark year for SIL was 1953. Up to that year, SIL's work was limited to the Americas. In 1953, at the invitation of the Department of Education, Culture, and Sport of the Philippine government, SIL began a program of linguistic research with its practical applications in literacy and translation in that country. This was followed by new
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The Profession work in Papua New Guinea in 1956. Work spread to other countries around the Pacific (Vietnam 1957, Australian Aborigines 1961, Indonesia 1971, Solomon Islands 1980, Vanuatu 1981, and New Caledonia 1984) and to other parts of Asia (Nepal and India 1966, Thailand 1977). It was in 1962 that SIL began work in Africa, under a cooperative agreement with the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ghana. The next year, similar work began in Nigeria in cooperation with the University of Nigeria (Nsukka). Subsequently, linguistic work has begun in some 20 African countries. Work has also been undertaken in some of the languages spoken in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Some of the textbooks developed by SIL have been translated into Russian and training courses in translation principles have been carried out in response to local requests. 4. Current Activities 4.1 Language Programs Work is being undertaken in some 1050 languages, and SIL has been involved in various ways in a further 450 languages. These languages are found in all parts of the world in more than 50 countries, approximately as follows:
regional language or in one or more of the neighboring languages. The sociolinguistic surveys being carried out also gather data regarding the patterns of use and acquisition of second languages as well as data on proficiency in these languages. In doing this, SIL has been developing several methods of assessing the degree of proficiency that speakers have in second languages such as a sentence repetition test and a second language oral proficiency evaluation (SLOPE) which adapts the procedures that are used in the FSI second language proficiency testing to make them appropriate for use in non literate communities. SIL's linguistic and sociolinguistic surveys are usually carried out in close cooperation with local academic institutions. An illustration of this and of the nature and scope of SIL's activities in this type of research can be seen in the five volumes of the Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan amounting to some 1"400 pages and published jointly by the National Institute of Pakistan Studies of the Quaid-i-Azam University and SIL (O'Leary 1992).
4.2 Publications Less than two years after the start of fieldwork in Mexico, in 1937, SIL published the first results of its linguistic research—12 papers in Investigaciones Lingiiisticas, the organ of the Mexican Institute of Linguistic Investigations. Since then, SIL has conAfrica 300 active programs tinued to publish its research. Americas 300 active programs The publications of SIL are listed in its Bibliography Asia 220 active programs (1992) and can be grouped into four categories: Pacific 230 active programs (a) Approximately 5000 articles and books on general linguistic topics. This includes the various In addition to research in the individual languages textbooks used in SIL schools. included in these figures, SIL is involved in a number (b) Some 7000 linguistic articles and books about of linguistic and sociolinguistic surveys, covering specific languages and groups of languages. many other languages. In many parts of the world, This includes both descriptive and comparative scholars recognize extensive chains of related speech works. While the majority of these have been in forms. SIL has been engaged in collecting wordlists, English, there are a number in Spanish and making comparisons between such wordlists, recFrench. ording and transcribing oral texts, and then using (c) Approximately 8500 books and articles written these to assess the intelligibility of spoken forms in minority languages. This category includes a among speakers of divergent dialects/languages. wide range of educational, literacy, and cultural Information has also been gathered through interbooks. views and orally administered questionnaires used (d) Biblical material. Up to the time of writing, SIL with speakers of these various speech forms and coverhas been involved in the translation of the New ing their ethnic self-identification, their dialect group Testament into over 450 languages and of porcontacts, and their perception of linguistic similarities tions of the Bible (e.g., a gospel) into a further and differences. Groupings of relatively similar speech 400 languages. The Institute does not normally forms which can be labeled 'languages' can be estabpublish these books, but leaves this to the varilished on the basis of the criteria of lexical similarity, ous Bible Societies and similar agencies. a high degree of intelligibility, patterns of contact, One of the most widely used books published by and the perceptions of the speakers themselves. Casad (1974) describes in detail the fieldwork involved in SIL is the Ethnologue, edited by Barbara F. Grimes. This is a listing of all the languages of the world such research. In many areas of linguistic diversity, there is also arranged alphabetically within each country. Each considerable multilingualism. Where there are so entry includes the name of the language, alternative many languages in close proximity, people frequently names, a three-letter language code, the number of acquire some degree of proficiency in a national or speakers, the location of the speakers, its linguistic
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Summer Institute of Linguistics classification, a list of known dialects, information regarding the degree of bilingualism, and what Scriptures have been translated with their date. In addition, the existence of Braille materials, some ecological information, and linguistic typological information is included where this is available. Maps showing the location of each language are included. The 13th edition (1996) has entries for over 6700 languages. The Ethnologue is updated with a new edition published every 4 years. A companion volume is an Index with over 33 000 entries which identifies all language names, their alternative names, and dialects, and refers these to the main language names and codes. 4.3 Training Programs From Oklahoma, the summer schools spread to other universities in the USA (North Dakota, Oregon, and Texas), and to Australia, Canada, England, Germany, France, and Singapore. Combined enrollment since the early 1970s has averaged around 1200 students each year. Most of these students take introductory courses in various aspects of linguistics and also in ethnography, but since the late 1970s around 300 enroll each year for the advanced courses at the various schools. These advanced courses, besides covering various theoretical approaches to phonological and syntactic analysis, include topics such as 'Language Use in Multilingual Societies,' 'The Constituent Structure of Discourse,' 'Semantics and Pragmatics,' 'Historical and Comparative Linguistics,' and 'Teaching English as a Second Language.' Linked to the development of these advanced courses has been the expansion of some of the original summer schools into all-year-round institutes which can offer a wider range of linguistic and applied linguistic courses than the summer schools are able to. In Dallas, an affiliation to the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) provides for the sharing of faculty and a joint program in linguistics leading to advanced degrees. All-year-round training is also offered in England (in association with the University of Reading) and in Australia. Overall, SIL schools have used a wide variety of theoretical approaches to linguistic analysis. Some schools have used the theoretical approach developed by Pike known as Tagmemics, but never to the exclusion of other linguistic theories. Generally, SIL schools have tended to reflect the theoretical orientation of the universities in which its members studied. Thus, the British School was strongly influenced by J. R. Firth's prosodic analysis, and the North Dakota School has used a generative approach. At Oregon, a functional-typological approach is used, while at Texas, generative, stratificational, and tagmemic courses are offered.
5. Information Processing In the 1960s and early 1970s, SIL began using computers to facilitate linguistic analysis and typesetting of documents. Since small computers were not yet available at that time, work had to be done on mainframe computers. In the most notable project of that era, text collections in over 300 languages were turned into concordances in a process developed by Dr Joseph F. Grimes, first at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico, and then at the University of Oklahoma with the assistance of a grant from the National Science Foundation. Each field linguist sent in up to 200 typed pages of texts which were entered by keypunch operators at the university and submitted to the program, which generated a printed concordance of every wordform and morpheme. In the mid 1970s, with the advent of microcomputer technology, pioneering work began to investigate the feasibility of such information-processing technology being used in field locations. By the early 1980s, when portable personal computers became commercially available, SIL had already developed some basic sof-tware tools for supporting field linguistics. By 1990, the use of personal computers by field workers of SIL was virtually universal. Particularly popular are battery-operated laptop computers. Programmers within the organization have developed a full range of programs for both MS-DOS and Macintosh platforms that support the work of field linguistics. SIL has developed programs that are now in use for many linguistic tasks, including: acoustic analysis of speech; automatic glossing and interlinear alignment of text; compilation of dictionaries; generation of concordances; morphological parsing; analysis of comparative wordlists of related dialects and languages; automatic adaptation of written texts among related dialects and languages; and editing and printing of documents using non-Roman characters. Throughout, SIL's policy has been to share these programs freely with others, provided they are not used for commercial gain. Of particular interest to field linguists because of its ability to be used in field situations anywhere in the world is the development of a hardware interface which connects a tape recorder or microphone to a computer and so provides an acoustic phonetics field laboratory. This system, labeled CECIL, and the accompanying Spectrum program, produces a display on the computer screen giving an analysis of loudness/intensity, fundamental frequency, and changes in sound quality with numerical and graphical readouts for frequency and intensity. The Spectrum program uses the files produced by CECIL and calculates spectrograms and spectra. The program has the very useful facility of being able to play back stretches of speech at one-third or one-fifth of the original speed of the utterance while maintaining the frequency level. Many linguists have found CECIL to be of real assistance
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The Profession in their analysis of pitch features and other difficult phonetic parameters. Attempting to produce similar written materials in hundreds of languages, SIL has developed a program which enables it to adapt materials from one language into a related language or dialect. Such computerassisted related language adaptation has exciting possibilities for the production of written materials in many languages where the comparatively small number of speakers had previously made the inevitably small number of copies of a book relatively uneconomic. In the 1990s, attention has turned to developing a new generation of integrated application programs built on object-oriented and knowledge-based technologies. At the heart of this endeavour is a system called CELLAR (for Computer Environment for Linguistic, Literacy, and Anthropological Research) which has been developed by a team of programmers at SIL's international headquarters. CELLAR is the data management 'engine' for SIL's LinguaLinks CDROM, which was released initially in 1996 and is updated at least once a year. Technical information about CELLAR, and about LinguaLinks, is available at http://www.sil.org on the Internet. 6. Personnel SIL is set up as a member organization, that is, those who carry out its activities become members of SIL and control its work. Members in a given geographical area, frequently a specific country, form an entity of SIL and set the policies in that country and elect their own leadership. Every 3 years, delegates from all these entities meet in conference to determine the general policies of the organization and to elect its Board of Directors. The original members of SIL were Americans, but, in the 1990s, personnel come from over 20 countries. Substantial numbers, over 300 from each country, come from the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia, and significant numbers (over 100 from each country) from Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The Institute increasingly has an international flavor, with 50 members from Japan, 100 from Korea, 80 from New Zealand, and 60 from Finland, to name but a few countries. Approximately half the members are engaged in language-related activities while the other half provide services which enable the language work to be carried out, often in remote areas—pilots and mechanics for the planes, radio technicians, computer specialists, accountants and other business people, teachers for members' children, and so on. All share the same motivation—service to minority people and, in particular, the provision of Scripture for them. 7. Finances The bulk of the funding for SIL's activities comes from individuals and churches who are interested in 744
SIL's services to minority peoples. They are drawn from a wide spectrum of Christendom; for the most part, they are evangelicals from many different denominations who share a strong desire to see the Bible made available to all the peoples of the earth and who have a keen interest in the educational and humanitarian aspects of SIL's work. Specific projects such as major literacy programs and some linguistic research projects have benefited from government funding grants and from nongovernment funding agencies, such as private foundations. 8. Future Prospects With the number of distinct languages in the world standing at over 6500 and bearing in mind that more than half of these have not been described in any detail, SIL is not likely to run out of work in the near future! The organization is aiming to be involved in a further 1000 languages. The pattern of its work will continue to evolve. The increased focus already being given to the transference of language-related skills to local scholars will certainly continue with growing impetus. The higher priority being given by governments in many parts of the world to the eradication of illiteracy, coupled with the recognition that literateness in local languages is vital for economic and social development, will impact on SIL and lead to an increase in all aspects of its literacyrelated activities. The harnessing of modern technology will remain another priority. An example of this is LinguaLinks, an 'electronic encyclopedia' produced by SIL with a new generation of tools, helps, and training for the field researcher in anthropology, sociolinguistics, linguistics, and applied linguistics, including literacy and language learning activities. LinguaLinks is a Knowledge Support System (KSS) designed to provide whatever is necessary to generate performance and learning at the moment of need. The goal is to provide a field researcher with information, training, and expert advice at any time and place through the use of the personal computer. This system combines the use of hypertext documents, 'smart' computer programs, experts systems, and computer-based training. LinguaLinks contains a set of electronic field manuals, with resources for the field language worker in five subject domains: anthropology, language learning, linguistics, literacy, and sociolinguistics. These electronic resources assist the language researcher to observe, collect organize, analyze, and publish language and culture data. The initial version of LinguaLinks was released in 1996 and incorporates the work of SIL and non-SIL scholars. LinguaLinks is updated at least once a year as new material and functionality is added. The research agenda for LinguaLinks is multidisciplinary, requiring knowledge from a constellation of disciplines. SIL hopes that
Summer Institute of Linguistics LinguaLinks will be seen as a contribution to academic excellence in all of its knowledge domains, and invites contributions by SIL and non-SIL scholars. The researchers developing LinguaLinks are committed to close consultation both with those involved in doing field research and with theoreticians. This makes LinguaLinks reference materials and data management tools useful to a broad range of researchers.
Bibliography Brend R M, Pike K L (eds.) 1977 The Summer Institute of Linguistics. Mouton, The Hague Casad E H 1974 Dialect Intelligibility Testing. SIL, Dallas, TX Grimes B F (ed.) 1993 Ethnologue, Languages of the World, 13th edn. SIL, Dallas, TX O'Leary C F (ed.) 1992 Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan. Quaid-i-Azam University and SIL, Islamabad SIL 1992 Bibliography. SIL, Dallas, TX
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People Ascham, Roger (1515-68) A. P. R. Howatt
Roger Ascham (pronounced ['aesksm]) was born into a North Yorkshire family of yeoman background which had long been settled in the area. His early education took place in the house of a local landowner who succeeded in inspiring an intense love of learning and archery, both of which were to prove significant in Ascham's later work. In 1530 he entered St John's College, Cambridge, and his aptitude for languages, in particular Greek, was so striking that he was asked to act as tutor to the younger students. After gaining his MA in 1537, he accepted the offer of a readership in Greek and settled down to a life of scholarship. Ascham's health was never good and a period of sickness during a visit to Yorkshire in 1541 depleted his limited resources and he was forced to take up a translator's post with the Archbishop of York. The trip north had, however, revived his love of archery and he set about writing Toxophilus (1545) which is both a practical manual on the topic and a conscious attempt to prove that English was an effective medium for serious work of this kind. Dedicating the book to Henry VIII himself, Ascham traveled south to present it in person to the king, an undertaking that was rewarded with warm praise and a pension of £10. Ascham's royal connections were renewed in 1548 when he was hired to teach the Italian hand to the young Edward VI and later when he was appointed tutor to Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth. After a disagreement with his royal patron in 1550, Ascham traveled abroad where he remained (mainly in Augsburg in south Germany) until after Edward's death in 1553. Given his strong Protestant convictions, his next post as Latin secretary to Queen Mary was unexpected but he fulfilled his duties well and engendered sufficient trust to renew his relationship with Elizabeth who, shortly after her accession in
1558, installed him as a prebendary at York. This gave him the financial security to embark on his major work The Scholemaster, but recurrent illness meant that progress was slow and he died in 1568 without having completed it. It was finally published in 1570 by his wife Margaret. At first sight The Scholemaster appears to be merely a method for the teaching of Latin ('a plaine and perfite way of teachying children... the Latin tong'), but in reality it is much more. The primary focus is Ascham's philosophy of a humanist education rooted in the study of the classical languages and their literatures accompanied by a strong emphasis on the development of Christian piety and moral judgment. Aims of this nature were familiar in Renaissance Europe, but they were buried in Latin tracts and had rarely been expressed with such cogency in the vernacular language. The book is famous for promoting the technique of 'double translation' (i.e., translating from Latin into English and, after a pause, recreating the original Latin text) but it is not always realized that the purpose of such exercises was not merely to teach Latin but also to develop confidence and elegance of expression in the mother tongue. In many ways Ascham was ahead of his time—he was a firm opponent of corporal punishment, for instance, and a champion of education for girls—but the broad thrust of his curriculum reflected contemporary concerns in seeking to instill in the young, and particularly the young ruler, both soundness of judgment and a forceful eloquence in the use of language. Bibliography Ryan L V (ed.) 1967 The Schoolmaster (1570) by Roger Ascham. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
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The Profession
Alatis, James Efstathios (1926- ) E. M. Anthony
As university dean, US Government Education official, scholar and teacher, Professor James Efstathios Alatis has for almost 40 years been a significant contributor to the fields of applied linguistics and the teaching of foreign languages, including English. Importantly, he has also been an articulate advocate and interpreter of these disciplines to both specialists and laity in the United States and abroad. Dr. Alatis was born in Weirton, West Virginia in 1926. After receiving his undergraduate degree from West Virginia University, he earned both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Ohio State. At Georgetown University in Washington, he has held the titles of Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Modern Greek and Dean Emeritus of Georgetown's School of Languages and Linguistics since 1994. Earlier he served as Dean of that school for 21 years. He became well known across the world and widely appreciated as the dedicated Executive Director of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (1966-87) when it was based at Georgetown University. It was largely through his efforts that TESOL achieved its status as a well-respected international organization. His government service included a post in the Department of State as English Teaching and Testing Specialist, 1959-61, and a 5-year stint at the Office of Education, at that time part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. During his last 2 years there (1965-66), he presided as Chief, Language Research Section. He has also been a member of the English Teaching Advisory Panel of the US Information Agency, and
President of what has become the National Council for Languages and International Studies. Always proud of his family's Greek heritage—he had written his Ohio State dissertation about Greek immigrants' English—he was awarded a Fulbright Lectureship in English as a Foreign Language at the University of Athens (1955-57). Other evidence of his accomplishments includes Phi Beta Kappa membership; the Northeast Conference Award for Distinguished Service and Leadership; two awards for Service to Georgetown and a medal from its President; recognition from the National Association for Bilingual Education; alumni awards from West Virginia University and from Georgetown; and the President's Award from the Joint National Committee for Languages and National Council for Languages and International Studies. He is also a prolific author, collaborator, and editor. There is space here for only a representative fraction of his publications. Bibliography Alatis J E 1990 On English as a World Language. Journal of Applied Linguistics 6 Alatis J E, Straehle C A, Gallenberger B, Ronkin M 1995 Linguistics and the Education of Language Teachers: Ethnolinguistic, Psycholinguistic, and Sociolinguistic Aspects. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Alatis J E, Straehle C A, Ronkin M 1997 InternationalJournal of the Sociology of Language: Aspects of Sociolinguistics in Greece. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin Alatis J E, Straehle C A, Ronkin M, Gallenberger B (eds.) 1996 Linguistics, Language Acquisition, and Language Variation: Current Trends and Future Prospects. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Alatis J E, Twadell K 1976 English as a Second Language in Bilingual Education. TESOL, Washington, DC
Candlin, Christopher N. (1940- ) K. Sajavaara
Christopher (Chris) N. Candlin was born at Stocktonon-Tees, England, on 31 March 1940. He received his B.A. (Hons) and M.A. degrees in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford in 1963 and 1964, Dip.Ed. (Teaching English as a Foreign Language)
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from the University of London in 1964, and M.Phil, from Yale University in 1967. The University of Jyva'skyla awarded him an Honorary Ph.D. degree in 1996. After a brief Research Fellowship at Leeds from 1967 to 1968, he moved to Lancaster University,
Carroll, John Bissell (1916where he was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Modern English Language from 1968 to 1981, Founding Director of the Institute of English Language Education from 1976 to 1983, Chair of the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language from 1980 to 1983, and Founding Director of the Centre for Language in Social Life from 1983 to 1987. He was appointed to a Personal Professorship in Applied Linguistics in 1981. In 1987 he was appointed Professor of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney. He established the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research in 1988 and the Centre for Language in Social Life in 1994. In 1996 he also became Professor of Applied Linguistics at the City University of Hong Kong. In 1995 he was given the status of Honorary Professor of Language and Communication at the Centre for Language and Communications Research, College of Cardiff, University of Wales. He has been a visiting professor in universities in Canada, the United States, Germany, Japan, Spain, and Finland. He has functioned as an external examiner, research review panelist, evaluator of programs in language education and curriculum development, and consultant and academic adviser for a large number of universities and research institutions in various parts of the world, for the British Council, and the Council of Europe. He has been an invited speaker at numerous congresses and conferences all over the world. He was Vice President of the Australian Association of Applied Linguistics in 1988-93 and became President in 1993. He was elected President of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) in 1996, after having served as Scientific Commissions Convener from 1993 to 1996. His teaching and research interests cover a wide area of applied linguistics with a strong emphasis on
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language education and problems in human communication in institutional and professional contexts. His fields of special interest also include language testing and assessment, new technologies in language education, second language acquisition, lexicography, and translating and interpreting. He has been responsible for over 50 major research programs in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Hong Kong since 1975. He is an author or editor of more than 30 books and reports and nearly 100 articles on sociolinguistics, language education, language and communication in professional contexts, and discourse analysis. An important area of his contribution to research is his editorship of a number of key publication series in applied linguistics and language study, applied linguistics in action, language in social life, language teaching methodology, and language teacher education. Chris Candlin's teaching and research is characterized by a strong sense of the social relevance of the work to be done. Bibliography Candlin C N, McNamara T F (eds.) 1990 Language, Learning and Curriculum: Studies in Honour of Terry Quinn. National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Sydney Candlin C N, Keobke K 1997 Bamboo: A Virtual Digest of Applied Linguistics Research. City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Candlin C N, Thurstun J 1997 Exploring Academic English. National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Sydney Candlin C N, Reid I, Malcolm I (eds.) 1998 Framing Student Literacy: Cross-cultural aspects of English communication skills. National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Sydney
Carroll, John Bissell (1916-
)
C. W. Stansfield
John B. Carroll is probably the premier psychologist in terms of contributions to educational linguistics in the twentieth century. In educational linguistics, he is best known for his work in defining and measuring foreign language aptitude, but he made many other important contributions as well. Carroll was born on June 5, 1916 in Hartford, Connecticut. As a boy he developed passions for music
and language. An excellent pianist and organist, he considered becoming a musician. However, his interest in language and the belief that he could make his greatest contributions through academic pursuits resulted in his focusing on language throughout a professional career that spanned over 50 years. As a boy Carroll studied Latin, French, and German. A major event in Carroll's life was his meet749
The Profession ing Benjamin Lee Whorf at age 12. They developed a close friendship as Whorf (1897-1941) relayed to him his ideas about a strong relationship between language and culture. Whorf, who worked for a Hartford insurance company, had developed a contagious enthusiasm for language matters. Whorf gave his papers to Carroll, who read them avidly and saved them. In 1956, Carroll published Whorf s papers in a volume entitled Language, Thought and Reality. The publication of this volume remains a major event in the history of linguistic anthropology. Carroll attended Wesleyan University where he majored in Classics and graduated summa cum laude in 1937. He attended the Summer Linguistics Institute at the University of Michigan that same year. Then, he enrolled in a doctoral program in Psychology at the University of Minnesota. His interest in language led him to focus on the study of verbal aptitude as a graduate student. His dissertation, A Factor Analysis of Verbal Abilities, was completed in 1941 and published in Psychometrica that same year. As an academic, Carroll soon rose to prominence for his many contributions to psychology, particularly in the areas of intelligence theory, verbal learning, cognition, verbal aptitude, and learning theory, and for his application of new statistical methodologies to the study and analysis of research data. In the early 1950s, Carroll applied for a contract to develop a foreign language learning aptitude test for the US Army. The contract was given to someone else, but undaunted, or perhaps even annoyed, Carroll began a research program with support from the Carnegie Foundation that culminated in the publication (with Stanley Sapon) of the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) in 1959. Carroll also published numerous articles on the subject of foreign language aptitude, which he described as consisting of four components: phonetic coding ability (the auditory component), grammatical sensitivity, rote learning ability, and inductive language learning ability. Ironically, the MLAT became the most frequently used language aptitude test of US Government Agencies, and Carroll's writings on foreign language aptitude remain the most comprehensive and authoritative treatment of the subject to this day. In 1961, Carroll published 'Fundamental Considerations in Testing for English Language Proficiency of Foreign Students.' This paper, delivered at a conference held for the purpose of discussing matters relevant to the development of a new admissions test for foreign students in the USA, set out the distinction between discrete-point and integrative testing. The content of the paper seemed to challenge the validity of the discrete-point model that reigned at the time. Carroll's distinction and his support of an integrative
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model was the initial catalyst for hundreds of articles that appeared subsequently on the subject of the construct of language proficiency. Carroll's article also influenced the design of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) to include some contextualized, integrative language tasks. In 1967, Carroll published a study of the language proficiency of foreign language majors in the USA during their senior year. This study provides baseline data and has been replicated in various ways by others to determine if the foreign language attainment of teachers and advanced students has improved over the years. In 1975, Carroll published The Teaching of French as a Foreign Language in Eight Countries, which has also provided baseline data for subsequent countrywide or multicountry studies. Another major work by Carroll is the American Heritage Word Frequency Book. This volume became the standard word frequency book used by textbook and test developers in the USA. During his career, Carroll served in various positions: including Professor of Psychology and Education at Harvard University (1949-67), Senior Research Psychologist at Educational Testing Service (1967-74), and Kenan Professor of Psychology and Director of the Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina (1974-82). He remained an active researcher for more than a decade after his retirement, publishing his 800-page magnum opus, Human Cognitive Abilities, in 1993. During the latter part of his career, he received numerous major awards for lifetime achievement or significant contributions to various areas of knowledge. No longer involved in academic matters, he continues to reside with his wife in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Bibliography Carroll J B 1956 Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT Press, Boston, MA Carroll J B 1961 Fundamental considerations in testing for English language proficiency of foreign students. In: Testing. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC. Reprinted in Allen H B, Campbell R N 1972 Teaching English as a Second Language: A Book of Readings. McGraw-Hill, New York Carroll J B 1967 The Foreign Language Attainments of Language Majors in the Senior Year. Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Carroll J B 1975 The Teaching of French as a Foreign Language in Eight Countries. Almqvist & Waksell, Stockholm; Wiley, New York Carroll J B 1993 Human Cognitive Abilities. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Carroll J B, Davies P, Richman B 1971 The American Heritage Word Frequency Book. Houghton Mifflin, New York Carroll J B, Sapon S M 1959 Modern Language Aptitude Test. Psychological Corporation, San Antonio, TX
Cazden, Courtney B. (1925-
)
Caxton, William (ca. 1415-91) W. Hüllen
William Caxton's fame rests on his being the first printer of books in English and the first owner of a successful printing shop, thus ushering in a new era in cultural history. But he was also a merchant of political influence and a gifted translator (mainly) from French into English. He was born in Tenterden, Kent, some time between 1411 and 1422, and died in Westminster in 1491. After an apprenticeship as a mercer in London between 1438 and 1446, he left for Bruges where he stayed for 30 years. He became so intimately acquainted with the Dutch language that many of his translations from French show traces of Dutch interference. In Bruges, he acted as a governor of the newly chartered Merchant Adventurers between 1462 and 1465, a post which gave him considerable influence in the supervision of trade between the Low Countries and England. He was commissioned to negotiate a new trading treaty between the two countries which became effective in 1469. After 1470 he relinquished his commercial and political offices. Caxton's interests in printing and in translating went hand in hand because, among other titles, he was eager to print his own works. In Cologne, he informed himself about printing techniques between 1471 and 1474, and published his first translation in the latter year in Bruges at a press owned by Colard Mansion. That was The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, the first book printed in English. He moved to London, and in 1477 issued The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, the first book printed in England and in English. Between then and his death he produced the incredible output of about 70 books, almost all of them folio, 21 being his own translations. He edited Chaucer, Lydgate, Gower, The Chronicle of Brut, and also pamphlets, horae, and speeches. He translated mainly French versions of classical literature and of
the philosophers, and issued such translations by others. For experts, his works are recognizable by the founts, which, however, he changed quite often, and by such conspicuous signs as the absence of title pages, of ordinary commas, and of catchwords at the foot of each page. He was the first to include woodcuts in his books. William Caxton is a good example of somebody who contributed to the development and the study of language not from any theoretical interest but by following pragmatic aims. The sheer mass of his printed work helped to establish a new printable style for English and its orthography. His practical interest in the wool trade with the Low Countries made him translate and edit a book of French and English conversations (or edit somebody else's translation), which shows a new way of teaching foreign languages in class, where the old habit of printing topically ordered vocabulary is imbedded in a new method of presenting natural dialogues and role plays (Caxton 1900; Hüllen 1989). Bibliography Blades W 1971 The Biography and Typography of William Caxton, England's First Printer. Rowman and Littlefieid, Totowa, NJ Butler P 1966 The Origin of Printing in Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL Caxton W 1900 Dialogues in French and English. Kegan Paul, London Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3: 1290-98 Hullen W 1995 A Close Reading of William Caxton's Dialogues: '... to lerne shortly frenssh and englyssh.' In: Jucker A H (ed.) Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Benjamins: Amsterdam, pp. 99-124. Kibbee DA 1991 For to speke Frenche trewely. The French Language in England, 1000-1600: Its Status, Description and Instruction. Benjamins, Amsterdam
Cazden, Courtney B. (1925-
)
P. Ulichny
Courtney Cazden, Charles William Eliot Professor of Education (Emerita) at Harvard University, has been a key contributor to the study of language learning,
the language of teaching, and literacy in diverse contexts. As language relates to education, she has consistently attended to variations based on race, class, and culture. 751
The Profession While completing her Ed.D. at Harvard Graduate School of Education, she joined Roger Brown and his research team on the classic study of Adam, Eve, and Sarah's first language acquisition. Cazden's early attention to variation in children's language introduced social class and, later, culture as critical variables emanating from the context of language learning. Her 1966 article in the Merrill Palmer Quarterly established the importance of describing varieties of children's language in terms of difference not deficit. Her 1965 dissertation, a language intervention study in an African-American preschool setting, was among the first to consider race and class and show improvement in language through intervention. 1965 was also the beginning of Head Start, an early childhood intervention program and cornerstone of the War on Poverty. This confluence of research and national policy shaped the early years of Cazden's academic career. Child Language and Education, published in 1972, made explicit for the first time the implications for education of Chomsky's linguistic theory. The language and education connection was further explored in the coedited volume, Functions of Language in the Classroom (1972), and established her career-long association with Dell Hymes and Basil Bernstein. In 1975 Cazden returned as a teacher to a San Diego classroom. Hugh Mehan videotaped her teaching throughout that year collecting data for his classroom discourse study, Learning Lessons (1979). Cazden sub-
sequently produced numerous works involving discourse analyses of a variety of classroom events. Her overview of the field, Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning (1988), has been translated into Spanish and Chinese. Again, her research on classroom discourse explored the impact of variations in home languages and cultures when diverse students encounter mainstream classrooms. Attention to cultural variation involved Cazden in bilingual/ bicultural settings in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, and the US. A third major research focus has been in the area of literacy, stimulated by summer school teaching since 1986 at the Breadloaf Summer School of English. The literacy focus of Cazden's research contains the most obvious connections to curriculum in her work, including her studies of oral narratives as a special type of classroom event. Whole Language Plus (1992) collects her essays on literacy and education in the US and New Zealand. Once denied a license to teach primary school in New York because she pronounced a hissing /s/, Cazden received tenure at Harvard University in 1971 becoming one of only 13 tenured women faculty. She has had a distinguished academic career, received numerous honors and awards for her contributions to education research which she has conducted on three continents, and has been an advocate for overcoming barriers to educational opportunities that result from cultural and class-based varieties of language use.
Clay, Marie M. (1926- ) S. McNaughton
Marie M. Clay was born in New Zealand in 1926. Initially trained as a primary teacher she taught children with special needs before becoming a school psychologist in 1948. While practicing part time she gained a B.A. and then a M.A. at Victoria University (Wellington) in education and psychology. Postgraduate study continued at the University of Minnesota in Clinical Child Psychology (1951). Her Ph.D. in education (1966) followed her appointment as lecturer in education at the University of Auckland in 1960. There she taught developmental psychology and special education, developing the first universitybased training program for school psychologists in New Zealand, and the foundation programs for Reading Recovery specialists. She became the first woman
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Professor (of Education) and Head of Department at the University of Auckland in 1975. She has held visiting professorships at several universities and, since retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1991, has worked as an international educational consultant. Clay's research integrates goals of description, explanation, and optimization. Her seminal longitudinal study described patterns of progress in children's early reading knowledge and strategies. From this, and other studies of reading, writing, and oral language, she formulated an integrated model of how children learn to read and write, accounting for diversity in development within and between instructional programs. It stresses the executive control which fluent readers acquire, a theme extended in analyses of
Comenius, Jan Amos Komensky (1592-1670) the multiple forms that self-awareness can take in early literacy learning. Studies of effective remedial teaching led to Reading Recovery. This early school intervention procedure provides instruction that enables low progress readers to engage effectively and rapidly with classroom programs. Reading Recovery has an internationalized research, development, and training base in many sites world-wide. An extensive theoretical and operational articulation is provided for the assessment and teaching procedures, for the training of Reading Recovery teachers, and for the variation in developing Reading Recovery in different contexts. Assessment procedures are available in English, Spanish, and Maori languages. She has studied aspects of oral language development and assessment in different language systems including studies of the language needs of Maori children in New Zealand, predating the development of indigenous preschools. Her influence on theory and
research is illustrated in a number of specially edited collections. Professor Clay has held prestigious positions in, and has been recognized by, a large number of national and international organizations including the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English. She is a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Bibliography Clay M M 1982 Observing Young Readers. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH Clay M M 1991 Becoming Literate: The Construction of Inner Control. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH Clay M M 1993 Reading Recovery: A Guidebook for Teachers in Training. Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH Clay M M 1998 By Different Paths to Common Outcomes. Stenhouse, York, ME Gaffney J S, Askew B J in press (eds.) Stirring the Waters: A Tribute to Marie Clay
Comenius, Jan Amos Komensky (1592-1670) J. L. M. Trim
Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky, 1592-1670), Czech theologian, philosopher, and educational reformer. A unique synthesis of mediaeval scholasticism, renaissance scholarship, protestant reforming zeal, and seventeenth century scientific rationalism makes him the most significant and original contributor to language teaching theory and practice in the early modern period. Born in Nivnice, Moravia to parents who were members of the unit as fratrum (Moravian Brotherhood), Comenius studied in Herborn and Heidelberg, taught briefly in the Moravian school of Prerau, then became a minister of the Brotherhood in Fulnek. In 1621, following the Battle of the White Mountain, he fled enforced catholicization, losing his library and all possessions. In 1628 he settled in Lissa, Poland and in the following years produced the educational writings which were the foundation of his later reputation and influence, also being elected bishop of the Moravian Church (1632) and later (1648) presiding bishop of its scattered flock. Comenius saw the chaotic and violent conditions of contemporary Europe as the result of ignorance. Men, though made in the image of God, were lost in the labyrinth of the world of appearances, unable to perceive or understand the underlying harmony and unity of the created universe and their intended place within it. Education, which should be a life-long pro-
cess open to all, irrespective of nation, race, class, sex, or ability provided Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth. To do so it must address the whole human being: senses, hand, mind, and tongue through observation, manipulation, conceptualization, and expression in that order wherever possible. Language education, first in the mother tongue then in Latin and other vernaculars, was central, but only if directly related to practical experience. Where direct experience was not possible, pictures must suffice. Orbis sensualium pictus (The visible world in pictures 1658), considered the first picture book for children, provided a visual tour of the world, passing successively through the divine, the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms and then the physical, social, moral, and spiritual aspects of human life. Each of the 62 plates was described by a short text contextualizing terminology in Latin and in one or more of the European vernaculars. Orbis pictus, which remained popular in successive printings and adaptations for over a century, was essentially an illustrated version of Janua Linguarum Reserata (The Gate of Languages Unlocked 1631). In a striking image, Comenius compared the progress of a language learner in stages from infancy to full maturity to the exploration of a palace and its treasury, dealing successively with the skeletal structure of a language (vestibulum), the substantial body of the language and associated areas of knowledge
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The Profession and experience (janua), stylistic refinements bringing life and color (atrium), then the works of more suitable and accessible authors (palatio), and finally the unlimited wealth of writing (thesaurus). In Didactica Magna (1633-38) and later Novissima linguarum methodus (1644-46), he elaborated his educational theories in a systematic way, expanding simple but powerful concepts (language learning should be speedy, solid, and enjoyable) into 187 axioms, many of which foreshadow contemporary thinking. The role of the teacher is to organize, motivate, and direct learning is a disciplined, cooperative atmosphere. This demands, the highest standards of morality, knowledge, and understanding, and should be accorded a correspondingly high social status. In permanent exile, Comenius corresponded, traveled, and resided extensively in Europe, finally settling (1656) in Amsterdam after losing his entire fortune
and unpublished manuscripts in renewed fighting in Poland. In Amsterdam he republished his complete works on education, then devoted his last years to a vast uncompleted project for a unified model of all human knowledge (pansophia) (including a sketch for a fully logical artificial language) and for the general reform of human affairs (de Rerum Humanarum Emendatione Consultatio Catholica). This work, which was published only in 1956, sets out a universal design for an ideal society free from violence, in which all things flow from the spontaneous development of beings according to their own nature: omnia sponte fluant; absit violentia rebus. Bibliography Komensky J A in progress Opera omnia. Academia, Praha. Sadler J E 1969 Comenius, Edited with an Introduction. Educational Thinkers series. Collins-MacMillan, London.
Cooper, Robert Leon (1931- ) B. Spolsky
Trained originally as an educational psychologist, Cooper has essentially mapped the sociolinguistic aspects of educational linguistics, showing the need to incorporate social dimensions in the notion of language ability, and spelling out the place of language educational policy (which he labeled 'language acquisition planning') as a critical element in the social changes associated with language planning. After undergraduate training at Harvard and graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania, he studied educational psychology with Thorndike and MacGinitie at Teachers College and Columbia, respectively. From 1966 to 1968, he worked with Joshua Fishman (see Fishmari) on the epoch-making study of bilingualism in the New Jersey barrio. His seminal paper 'An elaborated language testing model' drew on that experience. It was the first clear statement that language testing and teaching needed to take into account the communicative competence proposed by Dell Hymes (see Hymes, Dell Hathaway) rather than the rigorous but more narrowly focused notion of linguistic competence being spread by Noam Chomsky and his followers. Cooper then spent a year working with the pioneering Ford Foundation sponsored study of language in Ethiopia. There, along with Charles Ferguson (see Ferguson), J. Donald Bowen and M. L. Bender, he helped trace the goals for language policy and language education in a complex multilingual society. 754
After teaching at Yeshiva University, Stanford University, and California State University, Cooper moved to Israel in 1972 to join Fishman again for the first major study of the spread of English. He remained in Israel, and for the rest of his academic career, he was a professor in both education and sociology at the Hebrew University, where he trained students and carried out sociolinguistic research that helped bridge the fields of sociolinguistics and education. He coedited two key collections of papers on bilingual education in the late 1970s. In the late 1980s, he codirected a sociolinguistic survey of the Old City of Jerusalem. His magisterial Language Planning and Social Change (Oxford University Press) 1989 rounded out a career of research and publications that have established the key relationships between sociolinguistics and educational linguistics.
Bibliography Bender M L, Bowen J D, Cooper R L, Ferguson C A (eds.) 1976 Language in Ethiopia. Oxford University Press, London Cooper R L 1968 An elaborated language testing model. Language Learning (Special issue No. 7): 57-72 Cooper R L 1984 A framework for the description of language spread: The case of modern Hebrew. International Social Science Journal 36(1): 87-112
Corder, S. Pit (1918-90) Cooper R L 1989 Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Fishman J A, Cooper R L, Conrad A W 1977 The Spread of English: The Sociology of English as an Additional Language. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Fishman J A, Cooper R L, Ma R 1971 Bilingualism in the
Barrio. Research Center for the Language Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN Spolsky B, Cooper R L (eds.) 1977 Frontiers of Bilingual Education. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Spolsky B, Cooper R L 1991 The Languages of Jerusalem. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK
Corder, S. Pit (1918-90) L. Selinker
'Pit,' as he was known to all, was the distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics of the University of Edinburgh, and was one of the most influential linguists of our time. He is foremost among those regarded as founding the academic study of second language acquisition. In fact, in a 1980 issue of the French journal, Langage (No. 57), he was called 'Le Père Fondateur,' the founding father of the field of second language acquisition; the appellation stuck. His pioneering work changed the course of theoretical, experimental, and educational work in second language acquisition. It is widely acknowledged that the current vibrant state of this field could not have come about without his many significant and valuable contributions. His research is summed up in his 1981 book with the revealing title, Error Analysis and Inter language, a collection of a dozen slightly revised papers. This seminal work in the field begins with a self-authored synthesis detailing his intellectual journey, moving from the study of error analysis to the study of interlanguage; this synthesis is followed by his highly influential 1966 paper 'The significance of learners' errors.' Other seminal topics include overt versus covert errors, input versus intake, relationship of input to the current state of learner grammar, learner system as a dynamic system, successive stages of learner language, idiosyncratic dialects, simple codes and the source of second language acquisition, the learner's initial hypothesis, language continua, language distance, strategies of communication, transfer taking place between two mental structures (native language and developing interlanguage), and formal and functional simplification. These form the basis for much current work. A more general work, his 1973 Introducing Applied Linguistics, was and still is important for practical scholars. A 1984 festschrift, Interlanguage, was published after scholars from all over the world gathered in Edinburgh that year to honour him; this volume ends with interesting concluding remarks by Corder himself.
His disciplined speculation was admired by all who studied his work carefully, and much of his earliest material is still up-to-date, with his work being widely cited. He began, as brilliant work must, by reinterpreting a common notion: the much maligned notion of 'error' in language teaching and learning. He refrained this concept from something negative (showing lazy unmotivated students) to something normal and important for adult second language acquisition to occur, that is, an indispensable language learning strategy. A second feature, and this trait was a constant with Corder, is that he went against most previously held belief by showing that using one's native language in learning a second language is mostly facilitative and not inhibitory. For the analyst, errors become indicative of hypothesis testing, a 'window' on the learner's internal language, later termed 'interlanguage,' a view which Corder helped develop and disseminate in some detail. Showing the nature of interlanguage as a type of language, perhaps tied to a universal core grammar, remains an important contribution to theoretical as well as applied and educational linguistics. Methodologically, he taught several generations of researchers how to study interlanguage longitudinally, and such studies are continually being carried out, such as those on 'guestworker' interlanguages of English in the UK and French, German, Dutch, and Swedish in Northern Europe. He created the important technique (Corder 1981) of using an interlanguage informant who is 'bilingual' in a special way: knowing both the advanced mature state of that interlanguage and the earlier learner states of that same interlanguage. In a bold move, also a characteristic trait of Corder's, he linked up longitudinal studies of interlanguage with studies of input in attempting to teach the target language. In this case as well, hundreds of empirical classroom interlanguage studies derive from this work (more detail on Corder's work may be found in Selinker 1992). Much is owed to S. Pit Corder intellectually and for his many kindnesses, his humanity, and humaneness.
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The Profession He was able and willing to set up contexts for creative work for younger scholars, which he did at Edinburgh for over 25 years, many not in his immediate areas of interest. His point was to look at applied and educational linguistics broadly and to create in each student an ability to develop their own independent voice, an important legacy that remains. He regularly attracted to Edinburgh students and visiting colleagues from many countries to study and contribute to this very broad applied linguistics, within the exciting and challenging environment he created. This personal influence is widely acknowledged and can be seen in the daily work of the several hundreds of
Edinburgh graduates of the various M.A. and Ph.D. level courses from the late 1950s to his retirement in the early 1980s. Bibliography Corder S Pit 1981 Error Analysis and Interlanguage. Oxford University Press, Oxford Corder S Pit 1973 Introducing Applied Linguistics. Penguin Education, London Davies A, Criper C, Howatt A P R (eds.) 1984 Interlanguage. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh Selinker L 1992 Rediscovering Interlanguage. Longman, London
Elphinston, James (1721-1809) A. P. R. Howatt
James Elphinston was a man of many parts— language teacher, school proprietor, textbook writer, educationalist, translator, poet, anthologist, and spelling reformer—some of which he played more successfully than others. The son of an episcopalian clergyman, Elphinston was born and bred in Edinburgh where he remained until 1753 when he went south to open a school in Brompton which, after a move in the early 1760s, became known as Kensington Academy. Following the academy tradition Elphinston's first priority was the teaching of the mother tongue ('of all languages the first in every sense') followed by French ('the general tongue of Europe') and later still the classics (see Hans 1951:77-79). His school was a success and survived his departure in 1776. In common with most middle-class Scots of his time Elphinston was greatly concerned to 'improve' the speech of his fellow countrymen. Before leaving Edinburgh he had composed a list of Scotticisms, originally attached (without acknowledgment) to David Hume's Political Discourses (1752), later published in the Scots Magazine (vols. xxii, 1760, 686-87 and xxvi, 1764, 187-89), and again as an appendix to his Animadversions on Kaimes's Elements of Criticism (1771). His language textbooks included a grammar of French, which he spoke fluently having spent time in Paris in his youth (The Analysis of the French and English Languages (1756)), and a 2-volume grammar of English (The Principles of the English Language Digested (1765)) in which he stressed the importance of learning grammar in English rather than in Latin which was 'as unfit for informing the human mind
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as... addressing the Almighty.' He published numerous translations from French but unwisely attempted a version of Martial's Epigrams (1782) which attracted the concerted scorn of the literary establishment. Elphinston was already in his mid-sixties when he published his major work, a proposal for spelling reform called Propriety Ascertained in her Picture: or, Inglish speech and spelling rendered mutual guides in two volumes including An Anallysis of dhe Scottish Dialect and a Digest of Moddern Anglicism (1786-87). His ideas were moderate and useful, including the consistent use of consonant doubling to mark stressed short vowels (e.g., anally sis and moddern above) but the time was wrong: the middle classes wanted to be reassured about what was correct, not to be unsettled by doubtful linguistic experiments. In spite of two popular versions of the scheme (Inglish Orthoggraphy Epittomized (1790) and A Minniature ov Inglish Orthoggraphy (1795)), it failed, but the groundwork was generously acknowledged by John Walker in the Preface to his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791): 'among those writers who deserve the first praise... is Mr Elphinston who... has reduced the chaos to a system and, by a deep investigation of the analogies of our tongue, has laid the foundation of a just and regular pronunciation.' Bibliography Hans N 1951 New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Rohlfing H 1984 Die Werke James Elphinstons (1721-1809) als Quellen der englischen Lautgeschichte. Carl Winter, Heidelberg
Ferguson, Charles A. (1921-98)
Ferguson, Charles A. (1921-98) J. A. Fishman
One of America's leading linguists, with an unusually broad range of well-developed interests and a highly significant number of organizational accomplishments, Charles A. Ferguson was born on July 6,1921, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a city in which he also grew up and received his elementary, secondary, and higher education (University of Pennsylvania: AB 1942 (Philosophy), AM 1943, and PhD 1945 (Oriental Studies)). Having specialized in Arabic and Bengali, Ferguson was initially employed as a linguist for Near Eastern languages by the US Department of State, Washington DC, from 1947 to 1955, and then joined Harvard University as a lecturer in linguistics and Arabic, remaining there until 1959. In 1959, Ferguson became the founding director of the Center for Applied Linguistics, in Washington DC, a position which he maintained until 1966. Under Ferguson's leadership the Center developed from initially being under the auspices of the Modern Language Association of America into an independent institution, with a staff of approximately 100 and international stature in most of the areas of applied linguistics, a field which Ferguson and the Center firmly placed on the agenda of linguistics throughout the world. While directing the Center, Ferguson also served as a member of the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Linguistics and Psychology (1959-61) and later became the chairman of the Council's Committee on Sociolinguistics (1964-70). In the course of half a dozen years Ferguson's leadership enabled the Committee to establish this new area of specialization as a recognized field of linguistic research and instruction, both in the USA and throughout much of the world, with journals, conferences, and research projects quickly being devoted to it. Ferguson's continued identification with Sociolinguistics is evidenced by the very large number of articles and books which he has authored, coauthored, edited, and coedited in this field. In 1967 Ferguson became Professor of Linguistics and the founding chairman of the linguistics program at Stanford University. Even in the early 1990s, linguistics at Stanford is characterized by a strong
interest in many of Ferguson's areas of specialization, including not only those mentioned above but also child language, language universals, language and religion and, of course, all of the standard areas of general linguistics. His many honors (e.g., academic appointments at universities on five continents, honorary doctorates from Stockholm University and Georgetown University, charter member of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, the Arabic Linguistic Society, and Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, and past-president of the Linguistic Society of America, of which he first attended a meeting when he was still in high school) reflect his unusual breadth of interest and expertise. In addition to his own seminal publications, many of which have stimulated further research internationally, both by colleagues and by students, Ferguson has been honored by a collection of his selected papers (Dil 1971) and by a two-volume Festschrift in honor of his 65th birthday (1986). The latter (Fishman et al. 1986) contains a full bibliography of his published works, both articles and books, through to 1985. Ferguson became Professor Emeritus of Linguistics in 1986 but continued to live in Palo Alto, California, together with his wife, Professor Shirley Brice Heath, and their four children. He continued to be active in the many areas of interest which he had pioneered and fostered throughout an exceptionally productuve and stimulating career. Two collections of his papers appeared (Ferguson 1996, 1997) during this period. Bibliography
Dil A (ed.) 1971 Language Structure and Language Use. Essays by Charles A. Ferguson. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Ferguson C A 1996 Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford University Press, New York
Ferguson C A 1997 Structuralist Studies in Arabic Linguistics. Brill, New York Fishman J A, Tabouret-Keller A, Clyne M, Krishnamurti B, Abdulaziz M (eds.) 1986 The Fergusonian Impact. Vol. 1: From Phonology to Society; Vol. 2: Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of Language. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin
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Finocchiaro, Mary Bonomo (1913-96) J. E. Alatis
Mary Finocchiaro was one of the most beloved language teachers in modern times. She was affectionately referred to as 'the Queen of TESOL' (the international association of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages). She served that organization as a member of the Executive Committee, as first Vice-President and in 1970-71 as President. Dr. Finocchiaro began her distinguished career as a teacher of foreign languages in 1932. Her doctorate from Columbia University was in Romance languages, but her most important contributions were in the field of teaching English as a second language. She was Supervisor of Instruction for non-English speaking children in New York City. She held Fulbright professorships in Spain and Italy, and was assigned as American Specialist in Language and Linguistics for the US Department of State. She conducted seminars in Morocco, Spain, Germany, Turkey, and Poland. She produced a worldwide television series for the US Information Agency. She was a consultant on English-teaching programs for Puerto Rico, Poland, and Spain and was director of the program for teachers of children of Puerto Rican origin at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) where she also directed the MA program in English as a second language. She retired in 1972 and moved to Rome where she served for many years as consultant in English as a foreign language at the American Embassy, contributing her services as a volunteer, and supervised secondary school teachers at the University of Rome under the Scuola Media program. She founded TESOL Italy (ITESI) in 1975 and served as its first Executive Director. She helped
shape her profession internationally, her unique gift being her ability to share her knowledge and experience with teachers everywhere. Her principal concern was always the classroom teacher. In her later years, she continued to share her expertise with teachers throughout Italy and around the world. The plethora of books, articles, and texts produced in her fruitful career reveal a wise and enthusiastic teacher who spearheaded productive thinking in the development of language pedagogy. She interspersed innovations with common sense, humanity, and a sharp focus on the practical concerns and needs of the classroom. Her publications reflect her intellectually honest and unfaddish approach to language teaching and learning. Her most popular publication was English as a Foreign Language: From Theory to Practice, which went through four editions. Her most recent book, a reflection of her perpetual intellectual curiosity, coauthored by her British colleague, Christopher Brumfit, was The Functional-Notional Approach. This work epitomizes her constant collaboration with British colleagues and her inexhaustible efforts in bringing about cooperation between the Americans, the British, and the entire European community of scholars. Bibliography Finocchiaro M B 1969 Teaching English as a Second Language. Harper and Row, New York (Rev. ed. of the 1958 version, Teaching English as a Second Language in Elementary and Secondary Schools) Finocchiaro M B 1974 English as a Second Language: From Theory to Practice. Regents Publishing, New York Finocchiaro M B, Brumfit C 1983 The Functional-Notional Approach. Oxford University
Fishman, Joshua A. (1926- ) B. Spolsky
Joshua Fishman is acknowledged founder of the sociology of language, a spirited advocate of bilingual education in the USA, and a sympathetic friend of all groups who strive to maintain their ancestral languages. Born on July 18, 1926, in Philadelphia, PA, he was educated there in public schools, at Olney High
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School, in elementary, secondary, and tertiary level Yiddish schools and courses, and, from 1944-48, at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned BS and MS degrees. In the summer of 1948, he studied Yiddish, the language of his home and and his Jewish education, at UCLA with Max Weinreich, the doyen of Yiddish linguistics, at the same time as did the
Fishman, Joshua A. (1926latter's son Uriel Weinreich. His first scholarly article appeared, in Yidishe shprakh, in 1947; in 1949 he received a prize from the Yiddish Scientific Institute for an unpublished monograph on bilingualism (subsequently published in 1951). In 1951, he married Gella Schweid; they have three sons and Yiddish has remained the home language for them, their children, and grandchildren. From 1951-54, he was educational psychologist for the Jewish Education Committee of New York, at the same time studying social psychology at Columbia University, where he gained a PhD in 1953. From 1955-58, he directed research for the College Entrance Examination Board, combining this with teaching the sociology of language (disguised as social psychology) at City College (CUNY). In 1958, he became associate professor of human relations and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, but 2 years later moved to Yeshiva University, New York, as professor of psychology and sociology; from 1960-66, he was also Dean of the Ferkauf Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities. In 1966, he became Distinguished University Research Professor of Social Sciences; from 1973-75, he served as academic vice president; and, in 1988, became professor emeritus. He then began to divide the year between New York (where he has also become a Visiting Professor at New York University and at City University of New York Graduate Center, while maintaining his teaching connection with Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Yeshiva University) and California (where he has become visiting Professor of Education and Linguistics at Stanford University). Four Festschriften were published in his honor by colleagues and former students on the occasion of his 65th birthday in 1991, each volume dealing with a different area of his specialization, and the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America conducted a 4-day conference in his honor at that time. In the course of his career, Fishman has held visiting appointments at well over a dozen universities in the USA, Israel, and the Philippines, and fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, CA), the East-West Center (Honolulu), the Institute for Avanced Study (Princeton, NJ), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (Wassenar), and the Israel Institute for Advanced Study (Jerusalem). Beginning with a number of publications on educational testing, he completed in 1964 his first major study of the sociology of language, Language Loyalty in the United States. A year later, Yiddish in America appeared. In 1968, he published three major books: Bilingualism in the Barrio (a pioneering study of a multilingual community), Language Problems of Developing Nations (the earliest major collection in
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language planning), and Readings in the Sociology of Language (a first attempt to define the new field). His prolific publication continued, amounting by now to over 900 items which have shaped and defined modern scholarly study of bilingualism and multilingualism, bilingual and minority education, the relation of language and thought, the sociology and the social history of Yiddish, language planning, language spread, language shift, language and nationalism, language and ethnicity, and (most recently) ethnic and national efforts to reverse language shift. Since its founding in 1973, he has edited the International}ournal of the Sociology of Language. Some of his most influential works, authored or edited, are Language and Nationalism (1972 [1989]), Never Say Die!; A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters (1981), Language and Ethnicity in Minority Perspective (1989), Yiddish: Turning to Life (1991), The Earliest Stage of Language Planning (1993), Post-Imperial English (1995), The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York (1997), and the Handbook of Language and Ethnicity (1999). Together with Gella Fishman he has also established the extensive five-generational 'Fishman Family Archives' at Stanford University Libraries, including his correspondence, course notes and outlines, lecture notes, manuscripts of his books, and papers and recordings/videos of his talks. His work is preeminent for the meticulous analysis of large bodies of data collected in major surveys using the methods of sociology and, more recently, it has also incorporated the exhaustive elucidation and interpretation of archival material. For a quarter century he has conducted a column on Yiddish sociolinguistics in every issue of the quarterly Afn Shvel. Since 1996 he has also written on Yiddish and general sociolinguistic topics once a month for the weekly Forverts. Currently being prepared for publication are Test Construction for Research Purposes and Can Threatened Languages be Saved? All his scholarly work with minority ethnic groups and with others engaged in the struggle to preserve their languages and traditions has been inspired by a deep and heartfelt compassion that has always sustained the markedly human tone in his most objective writings. Bibliography Fishman J A 199la Bibliographical inventory (compiled by Fishman G S). In: Cooper R L, Spolsky B (eds.) The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought: Essays in Honor of Joshua A. Fishman's Sixty-Fifth Birthday. Mouton, Berlin Fishman J A 1991b Reversing Language Shift: Theory and Practice of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Fishman J A 1991c Yiddish: Turning to Life. Benjamins, Amsterdam
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Greenbaum, Sidney (1929-96) B. Aarts
Sidney Greenbaum was born in London in 1929. He taught as a Primary School Teacher from 1954 to 1957, and as a Grammar School Teacher from 1957 to 1965. He joined the Survey of English Usage at University College London as a Research Assistant in 1965, and stayed there until 1968. His further career details are as follows: Assistant Professor in English Language, University of Oregon (1968-69), Professor of English Language, University of Winsconsin-Milwaukee (1969-83); Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and Director of the Survey of English Usage, University College London (1983-90); Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University College London (1988-90); Research Professor and Director of the Survey of English Usage, University College London (1990-96). Greenbaum's interest in the English language ranged over many different areas, principal among them empirical grammatical research, grammatical description, language pedagogy, and corpus linguistics. His earliest work was Studies in English Adverbial Usage (1969), followed by Verb-Intensifier Collocations in English: an Experimental Approach (1970), Elicitation Experiments in English: Linguistic Studies in Use and Attitude (1970, with Randolph Quirk) and Acceptability in Language (edited, 1977). The last three books pioneered experimental techniques in investigating English grammar and usage. He is known first and foremost as a grammarian and as one of the authors of The Grammar of Contemporary English (1972) and the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), both coauthored with Randolph Quirk, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. These works have become standard reference grammars for English. Greenbaum also edited
a number of books with scholarly papers on the English language, among them Studies in English Linguis'tics: for Randolph Quirk (1980) and The English Language Today (1985), and he wrote numerous articles on English grammar, usage, and style. 1996 saw the publication of The Oxford Grammar of English. From the larger grammars mentioned above two shorter pedagogical grammars were distilled, namely A University Grammar of English (1973) and A Student's Grammar of English (1990), both with Randolph Quirk. A stand-alone English grammar textbook was published under the title An Introduction to English Grammar (1991; US title A College Grammar of English, 1989). Within the domain of language pedagogy Greenbaum also had an interest in composition (see, e.g., his Studying Writing: Linguistic Approaches, edited with Charles Cooper, 1986) and in language usage (cf. The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Cowers, revised with Janet Whitcut, 1986; Good English and the Grammarian, 1988 and The Longman Guide to English Usage, with Janet Whitcut, 1988). In the early 1990s Greenbaum founded the International Corpus of English (ICE), an ambitious project which aims to set up identically constructed corpora in a number of different countries of the English-speaking world (e.g., Great Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Phillipines, and Nigeria, among others). The linguistic material collected in these corpora includes both spoken and written language in 32 different categories, for example, conversations, broadcasts, commentaries, letters, novels, and learned prose (see Comparing English Worldwide: The International Corpus of English, edited, 1996, and http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage). Sidney Greenbaum died in 1996 while on a lecture tour in Moscow.
Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood (1925- ) J. Fine
Halliday has developed systemic function linguistic theory and its application to education at all levels. Halliday received his B.A. from London University in Chinese language and literature and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1955 (published as The Lan-
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guage of the Chinese 'Secret History of the Mongols'1}. Halliday held professorships at University College London, 1965-70, University of Illinois, Chicago circle, 1973-75, and at University of Sydney, 1976 to his retirement in 1987. He has been visiting professor
Haugen, Einar (1906-94) at Yale, Brown, University of California (Irvine), Nairobi, National University of Singapore, and Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. Systemic functional linguistic theory (see systemic theory) that Halliday developed with others is concerned with the operation of texts in their contexts. Language is seen as sets of meaning resources that are selected for use in particular social contexts. Field, mode, and tenor are the variables that are at stake in contexts. Meanings at various levels of abstraction (e.g., ideology, genre, register) are studied paradigmatically to present the meaning contrasts that speakers draw from. The meaning contrasts are then worded (technically, 'realized') by the lexis and grammar of the language. The linguistic choices are grouped into the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions. Halliday has applied functional systemic theory to education from early language learning to university education. He has studied the intonation, vocabulary, cohesion, and grammar in first and second language teaching and learning. In these applications the emphasis is on the speaker's control over text types, the ways texts are constructed and the functions of language in social contexts. Halliday's approach to language and education has had a substantial influ-
ence on the Australian education system. His work on grammar, cohesion, and intonation is widely used in research on education, language learning, and pathology. He is an honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, and holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Nancy and Birmingham. Bibliography Halliday M A K 1973 Explorations in the Functions of Language. Edward Arnold, London Halliday M A K 1975 Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language. Edward Arnold, London Halliday M A K 1978 Language as Social Semiotic. Edward Arnold, London Halliday M A K 1994 An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd edn.). Edward Arnold, London Halliday M A K, Hasan R 1976 Cohesion in English. Longman, London Halliday M A K, Hasan R 1989 Language, Context and Text: A Socio-semiotic Perspective (2nd edn.). Deakin- University Press, Geelong, Australia and Oxford University Press, Oxford Halliday M A K, Martin J R 1993 Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. Falmer Press, London and University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA Steele R, Threadgold T 1987 Language Topics: Essays in Honour of Michael Halliday two volumes. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, PA
Haugen, Einar (1906-94) N. Hasselmo
Einar Haugen was a leader in the development of the field of sociolinguistics during the second half of the twentieth century, while also making major contributions to the debate on linguistic structuralism and to language pedagogy, Scandinavian philology and dialectology, and Scandinavian-American cultural relations. Haugen was born on April 19, 1906 to John and Kristine Haugen, Norwegian immigrants to the USA, and learned English as his second language. After finishing his B.A. at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1928, he studied under George T. Flom at Illinois, receiving his Ph.D. in 1931 with a dissertation on Ivar Aasen's New Norwegian language. From 1931 to 1964 he served as professor of Scandinavian languages at Wisconsin, becoming Victor S. Thomas Professor of Scandinavian and Linguistics at Harvard in 1964. His many scholarly leadership positions include the presidencies of the Society for
the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (1938), the Linguistic Society of America (1950), the Ninth International Congress of Linguists (1962), and the American Dialect Society (1965). Haugen was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and several Scandinavian academies. He was the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and served in a visiting or advisory capacity in Scandinavia and Japan. He was honored by the governments of Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, and held honorary degrees from St. Olaf College and the Universities of Iceland, Michigan, and Oslo. Haugen participated actively in the debate on the nature of linguistic structuralism from the late 1930s, arguing for linguistic realism and serving as a link between European and American structuralism. With The Norwegian Language in America (1953) and
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The Profession Bilingualism in the Americas (1956), Haugen—with Uriel Weinreich—created a new theoretical and methodological framework for the study of bilingualism and language contact. He helped lay a new foundation for the study of language in its socioeconomic setting, and became one of the founders of the fields of sociolinguistics and contrastive linguistics. With his analysis of the problems of, and solutions to, linguistic subjugation in Language Conflict and Language Planning (1966), Haugen reinvigorated and gave respectability to the modern field of language planning and provided a paradigm for the now flourishing study of language policy and practice in developing countries. Linguistics owes to Haugen such concepts as 'bilingual description'—which became contrastive linguistics—'diaphone' and 'diamorph,' 'semi-communication,' 'schizoglossia,' and 'ecology of language.' In addition to his sociolinguistic work on the Scandinavian languages and specialized studies on Old Norse phonology and Norwegian dialectology,
Haugen made major contributions to Scandinavian language pedogogy: several textbooks in Norwegian, a Norwegian-English Dictionary (1965), and The Scandinavian Languages (1976). Haugen also wrote on Scandinavian literature and Scandinavian-American cultural relations and served as a translator from the Norwegian. Bibliography Haugen E 1953 The Norwegian Language in America: A Study in Bilingual Behavior, 2 vols. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA Haugen E 1956 Bilingualism in the Americas: A Bibliography and Research Guide (American Dialect Society, No. 26). University of Alabama Press, Alabama, AL Haugen E 1966 Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Haugen E 1972 The Ecology of Language. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Haugen E 1976 The Scandinavian Languages: An Introduction to their History. Faber and Faber, London
Heath, Shirley Brice C. B. Cazden
Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words (1983, llth printing 1996 with postepilogue) has become an international classic. An example of research in educational anthropology, ethnography of communication, and sociolinguistics, it is arguably the most widely cited study of children's language use in and out of school. Reading of Heath's long engagement with three communities in a southeastern area of the United States—poor white, poor black, and middleclass white and black—as they sent their children to the then newly integrated public schools, one wonders how one person could become a trusted adult with multiple participant and research roles in all three groups. Heath grew up in rural Virginia. Her grandmother ran the store in an otherwise all-black community. So from the beginning, she became aware of herself as a minority, an 'other.' Close relationships with those different from herself continued through her work in the early years of the civil rights movement in Mississippi and teaching migrant children in California. Along the way, she studied in six colleges toward B.A. and M.A. degrees, learning at different times and places: how to teach special education, reading, and English as a Second Language; and English, linguistics, Spanish and sociology. When Heath applied for 762
a doctorate, she was reminded again of her own marginalized identity when she was admonished to replace her southern accent with 'general American' pronunciation. Heath received her doctorate in cultural anthropology and linguistics from Columbia University in 1970, and taught first at Winthrop College, South Carolina, where she started the research that became Ways with Words. After early reports of that research became known, Heath moved to the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education in 1977, and then to Stanford University in 1980, where she is a professor of English and Linguistics and, by courtesy, Anthropology and Education. On paper, these biographical details may read as a fragmented education. But the total helps to explain the range of Heath's scholarship and professional work. Telling Tongues (1972) is a historical study of language policy in Mexico. The Braid of Literature (1992) is a study of two children's literary development, co-authored with the children's mother, with extensive notes on connections to literary theory. Language in the USA (1981), co-edited with her sociolinguist husband Charles Ferguson, is a panoramic view of a more multilingual US than its usual public image. The co-edited Handbook for Literacy Edu-
Hill, Archibald A. (1902-92) colors (1997) attests to her commitment to understanding student learning and the importance of all the communicative arts in education. Identity and Inner-City Youth (1993) is a co-edited collection that can be read as an introduction to her next book: a 10-year ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of the language and learning of adolescents in out-of-school youth organizations and enterprises around the US. She has also written more than 100 articles and chapters. For these achievements, Heath has received many honors, including being named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Education; and awarded the George and Louise Spindler Award for Scholarly Contributions to Educational Anthropology, the David Russell Research Award of the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Grawemeyer Award in Education.
Bibliography Heath SB 1972 Telling Tongues: Language Policy in Mexico: Colony to Nation. Teachers College Press, New York Heath S B, Ferguson C A (eds.) 1981 Language in the USA. Cambridge University Press, New York Heath S B 1983/1996 Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communication and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, New York (reprinted, llth printing, 1996, with postepilogue) Heath S B, Wolf S A 1992 The Braid of Literature: Children's Worlds of Reading. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Heath S B, Flood J, Lapp D (eds.) 1997 Handbook on Research on Teaching Literacy Through the Communicative and Visual Arts. Macmillan, New York and Prentice-Hall International, London Heath S B, McLaughlin M W (eds.) 1993 Identity and Innercity Youth: Beyond Ethnicity and Gender. Teachers College Press, New York
Hill, Archibald A. (1902-92) C. W. Hayes
Archibald Anderson Hill was born on July 2, 1902, in New York City and spent his childhood in San Diego, California. He earned his B.A. from Pomona College (1923), his M.A. from Stanford University (1924), and his Ph.D. from Yale University (1927). In 1928, Hill married Muriel Louise Byard, his partner for life, who preceded him in death. Hill's first faculty appointment was at the University of Michigan, where he was influenced by Samuel Moore, whom he credited for interesting him in linguistics and its usefulness. 'Usefulness' became Hill's byword for the remainder of his career. In 1930, Hill was appointed as Associate Professor of English Philology at the University of Virginia, where, except for his absence during World War II, he remained until 1952. During the war Hill served in the Communications and Intelligence Division of the US Naval Reserve with the rank of Lt. Commander (later Commander). In 1952, he was appointed as Vice-Director of the Institute of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University. In 1955, he left for the University of Texas, with the rank of Professor of English. Later at Texas, colleagues in related disciplines recognized his concern for linguistics and its usefulness, and he was appointed as Professor of English, Linguistics, and Education. At Texas he often said he was happier than anywhere else where he had taught,
and he remained there until he retired to emeritus status in 1972. During his career, Hill was senior lecturer for the US Department of State Experts Program in Poznan, Poland. He coordinated the Voice of America Forum Series, Linguistics Today 1966, and was Fulbright Professor at the University of Belgrade in 1968. In 1969, he held the Thord-Gray Lectureship at the University of Lund, Sweden. Hill was active in the Linguistic Society of America, serving as Secretary-Treasurer from 1952 to 1969, at which time he was elected President. During his long and distinguished career Hill published over 150 pieces of scholarly work. One of his first articles was 'Phonetic and Phonemic Change' (Language). It was recognized as a major work and reprinted in Readings in Linguistics (Martin Joos, ed.). He credits George Trager, Henry Lee Smith Jr (see Smith, Henry Lee), Bernard Bloch and Martin Joos for many of his insights and much of his inspiration, and 'Together with all linguists of my generation,' he wrote in Introduction to Linguistic Structures, 'I owe a pervasive debt to Bloomfield and Sapir without whose work... all of American linguistics would be impossible' (see Hill 1955b). Throughout his career Hill insisted that 'Linguistics ... is a tool for all who wish to understand man.' Perhaps reflected in this statement is Hill's greatest contribution to linguistics: while he considered himself 763
The Profession a theoretical linguist, and contributed much, at the same time he wished to be known as an applied (useful) linguist, with publications in the application of linguistics to the teaching of English as a second/foreign language and to the analysis of literary texts serving as marks of usefulness. An example of the first is Hill (1964), and an example of the latter is his Chapter 21, 'Beyond the Sentence,' in Introduction to Linguistic Structures. Here Hill contended that linguistics stops at the sentence, where stylistics begins. While continuing to publish in literature and linguistics, Hill published a highly influential theoretical text, Introduction to Linguistic Structures (1958), and edited three volumes of proceedings on the problems inherent in the analysis of English, taken from a series of symposia presented at the University of Texas, to which he invited Noam Chomsky to present his thoughts on the newest linguistic model (see Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Analysis in English 1962). It was, Hill said, an exciting time to be alive, and to be a scholar. In Linguistics Today, Hill pointed to the past and to that 'distant future when linguistics is [as] fully developed as chemistry or
physics and has become a science in which so much is known that the apprentice will need years of study before he reaches the edges of knowledge.' Bibliography Hill A A 1936 Phonetic and phonemic change. Lg 12:15-22 Hill A A 1955a An analysis of the Windhover: An experiment in structural method. PMLA 70:968-78 Hill A A 1955b Linguistics since Bloomfield. Quarterly Journal of Speech 41:253-60 Hill A A 1958 Introduction to Linguistic Structures. Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York Hill A A 1962 [First, Second, Third] Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Analysis in English. University of Texas, Austin, TX Hill A A 1964 The New Linguistic Method: Drill Material and Instructor's Handbook, rev. Chinese edn. Paul P Y Lin, Charles T C Tang (transl and eds). University of Texas, Austin, TX Hill A A 1969 Linguistics Today. Basic Books, New York Hill A A 1976 Constituent and Pattern in Poetry. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX Jazayery M A, Polome E C, Winter W 1978- Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honor of Archibald A. Hill, vols. 1-lV. Mouton, The Hague (vol. 1); The Peter De Ridder Press (vols 2-4)
Hornby, Albert Sidney (1898-1978) A. P. R. Howatt
A. S. Hornby, or 'ASH' as he liked to be known, began his English teaching career working in Japan with Harold Palmer (see Palmer, Harold Edward) at the Institute for Research in English Teaching (IRET), and when Palmer left in 1936 Hornby succeeded him as Director. The accident of fate that threw the complementary talents of these two immensely gifted men together provided English language teaching in the UK with a solid foundation encompassing the whole field of professional endeavor. Palmer's example was inspirational and his publications theoretically innovative, but they did not provide a coherent body of practical expertise on which a secure future could be built. This was Hornby's task and he fulfilled it with a series of achievements of major importance. Of all his many undertakings the dictionary known throughout the world as The Advanced Learner's was easily the most impressive. It began as one of Palmer's projects at IRET which Hornby took over and completed before he left Japan himself in 1942. An early version known as An Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary appeared in Tokyo in 1942 but it was not 764
until 1948, after the project had been adopted by Oxford University Press, that it was published (with Hornby, E. V. Gatenby, H. Wakefield as named authors) in more or less its final form, though the famous title An Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English did not finally emerge until 1952. Further editions appeared in 1963 and 1974. For decades it was alone in its field and it has retained the loyalty of users all over the world. In 1961 Hornby used the substantial royalties to set up a Trust to fund a scholarship program for overseas teachers of English. Hornby's second contribution to the fledgling profession was to act as the founding editor of its first journal. When it started up in 1946, ELT (the J did not appear till 1972) was a small-scale publication for the British Council which appeared eight times a year. When Hornby relinquished the editorship at the start of the 1950s, it was a substantial quarterly with a rising readership. The 1950s were Hornby's most productive years. In 1954 he not only published the most influential pedagogical grammar of its time, the Guide to Patterns and Usage in English, but also the first part
Hymes, Dell Hathaway (1927- ) of the course known to all English language teachers of the time as 'the Hornby course' (Oxford Progressive English for Adult Learners in 3 vols.). His last largescale work, The Teaching of Structural Words and Sentence Patterns, a 4-volume set of oral drills and exercises, began publication in 1959. As a man Hornby was self-effacing where Palmer had been an extrovert. Partly for this reason he was an ideal teacher trainer—supportive but demanding and patient but persistent. He traveled widely, attend-
ing teachers' seminars and training courses throughout the world and received many awards and distinctions including a Fellowship of University College London (his own alma mater) and an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1977. Bibliography Howatt APR 1984 A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Strevens P (ed.) 1978 In Honour of A S Hornby. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Hymes, Dell Hathaway (1927- ) N. H. Hornberger
Dell Hathaway Hymes was born on 7 June 1927 in Portland, Oregon and attended local schools there. He earned a B.A. in Anthropology and Literature at Reed College (1950), and M.A. (1953) and Ph.D. (1955) degrees in Linguistics at Indiana University. He taught at Harvard University (1955-60), University of California, Berkeley (1960-65), University of Pennsylvania (1965-88), and University of Virginia (198798, now Emeritus), with short visiting and adjunct appointments at Princeton and Johns Hopkins Universities. Internationally recognized for his contributions in linguistics, anthropology, folklore, and education, Hymes was a founder of sociolinguistics as it emerged in the 1960s. He was a founding editor (1972-1992) of the International Journal Language in Society, author, and editor of various publications, all of which played determining roles in shaping and directing sociolinguistics from its beginnings to the present. Hymes' work has had a far-reaching impact on education, specifically in the development of ethnographic and linguistic approaches to education. His book co-edited with Cazden and John and published in 1972 was the first volume to call attention to the need to examine actual classroom interaction in order to understand the role of language in learning and teaching, setting an entirely new direction for educational research which continues to the present day. Hymes' programmatic call for ethnographies of communication—for descriptions of the 'ways of speaking' of diverse speech communities—was taken up by his students and colleagues, yielding such mainstays of the educational research literature as Heath's Ways with Words (1983) and Philips' Invisible Culture (1983), among innumerable others. His theoretical formulation of communicative competence as distinct
from Chomskys linguistic competence, which he first enunciated publicly at a research conference at Yeshiva University in 1966, has been a major guidepost in second language teaching and research ever since. As Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education from 1975 to 1987, Hymes founded the Educational Linguistics programs (1976) and the Ethnography in Education Forum (1980), among the first such initiatives in the country. Among his many awards and honors, Hymes is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Life Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and a member of the British Academy; he has also been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1957-58), a Guggenheim Fellow (1969) and a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities (197273), among others. He was a trustee of the Center for Applied Linguistics (1973-78) and served as President of the American Folklore Society (1973-74), the Council on Anthropology and Education (1978), the Consortium of Social Science Associations (1982-84), the Linguistic Society of America (1982), the American Anthropological Association (1983), and the American Association for Applied Linguistics (1986). Bibliography Cazden C, John V, Hymes D (eds.) 1972 Functions of Language in the Classroom. Teachers College Press, New York Gumperz J, Hymes D (eds.) 1972 Directions in Socio-linguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, New York Heath S B 1983 Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Hymes D H (eds.) 1964 Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology. Harper & Row, New York
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The Profession Hymes D H 1974 Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA Hymes D H 1980 Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC
Hymes D H 1996 Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding Voice. Taylor and Francis, London Philips S U 1983 The Invisible Culture: Communication in Classroom and Community on the Warm Springs Reservation. Longman, New York
Jones, Daniel (1881-1967) B. S. Collins
Daniel Jones, the leading British phonetician of the early twentieth century, was born in London on September 12, 1881. He read mathematics at Cambridge, obtaining his B.A. in 1903 and converting this to an M.A. in 1907, but he soon found that he had a remarkable talent for languages, and began attending language courses during his vacations. It was at one such that he was introduced to phonetics by the pioneer language teacher, William Tilly. After graduation, Jones was persuaded by his father, a famous London barrister, to take up law. Nevertheless, Jones managed to interrupt his legal training in 1905 to spend a year in Paris studying under Paul Passy (see Passy, Paul Edouard). He was later, in 1911, to marry Passy's niece. Passy, who acted as a guide and mentor to Jones in his early years, encouraged him to sit the International Phonetic Association (IPA) examination and to make phonetics his career. Jones obtained no further linguistic qualifications, apart from honorary doctorates (Ph.D. Zurich, 1936; LLD Edinburgh, 1958). He did, however, take private lessons from Henry Sweet, which acted as another strong formative influence. In 1907, Jones was called to the Bar, but never practiced, having in the meantime obtained a parttime post at University College London teaching phonetics—then in its infancy as an academic discipline in Britain. The new subject proved popular with students and eventually, in 1912, Jones was able to set up his own phonetics laboratory and was appointed by London University to be head of the first British department of phonetics (reader, 1914; Professor, 1921^49; Professor Emeritus, 1950-67). In these early years of his career, Jones produced numerous publications, his first significant book being the compact Pronunciation of English (1909). The Outline of English Phonetics (1918), aimed at the foreign learner, was much more comprehensive, and can claim to be the first reliable full account of British received pronunciation (RP). Its descriptive framework penetrated linguistics worldwide, influencing Bloomfield 766
and the American Structuralist School. In 1913, Jones coedited with H. Michaelis A Phonetic Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious attempt at a dedicated pronunciation dictionary of English for over 100 years. It was soon overshadowed by the success of his own English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917a). The EPD (as it is always known) rapidly became the recognized authority on RP usage. Jones pioneered research on non-European languages, notably Cantonese, Tswana, and Sinhalese. His contribution on the analysis of tone has received insufficient recognition. His early innovative work on Tswana contains a perceptive analysis of register tone, including downstep (Jones and Plaatje 1916:xxv-xxxi), which he later further developed (Jones 1917b), and he was the first to use the ! symbol for this feature (Jones 1928:3). Jones's research on African languages was subsequently continued by several of his London colleagues, notably Ward). Jones (1917c) is the first statement of his theory of cardinal vowels, derived in part from Passy, but also showing the influence of A. Melville Bell and Sweet. It provided a simple dual-parameter model of vowel description based on tongue-arch height and lipshape. Despite largely contradictory X-ray evidence, Jones subsequently elaborated the theory, arriving eventually at a system of eight rounded and eight unrounded front and back vowels at supposedly articulatorily equidistant intervals, plus two close central vowels (1975:30-39). Jones produced three disk recordings of the cardinal vowels (1917, 1943, 1956), the last version being the best known. The cardinal vowel system (see Fig. 1)—although today in some disrepute in the light of contradictory instrumental evidence—has been widely used since its inception and much late twentieth century vowel description derives from Jones's model (cf. Butcher 1982). Jones was the first English writer (from 1917 onwards) to use the word 'phoneme' in its current sense, borrowing the term from the followers of Baudouin de Courtenay, and interpreting it as a 'family
Kaplan, Robert B.
Open Figure 1. Primary and secondary cardinal vowels. Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel.
of sounds' related by physical criteria. The phoneme principle became firmly established in British linguistics, well before the advent of either the Prague School or American structuralism (Jones 1964 and Appendix 1950 [1967]). After Jones suffered a nervous breakdown in 1920, his dynamic productivity diminished somewhat but he went on in his later years to write numerous articles and produce important revisions of his major books. His main effort was directed to The Phoneme (1950) which he regarded as his life's work. On publication, even though the large collection of language data was much admired, Jones's limited theoretical position, essentially unchanged from 1917, disappointed contemporary critics. Jones was, together with Passy, the main force behind the International Phonetic Association (he was Assistant Secretary 1906-27, Secretary 1927-50, President 1950-67). He was also editor of its influential journal Le Maitre Phonétique, and played a leading role, from 1906 on, in spreading the IP A alphabet worldwide. Jones was an active supporter of spelling reform and helped devise schemes for new
alphabets for African and Indian languages. In 1926, he became a founder member of the BBC Advisory Committee on Pronunciation; from 1942 to 1967 he was chief pronunciation advisor to the BBC. Although dated, Jones's works remain outstanding both for their detailed phonetic observation and their lucidity. They established him as the best-known phonetician of his generation and his ideas and methods, propagated by his colleagues and pupils (see Jones 1948) continue to influence many areas of phonetics and pronunciation teaching. Jones can fairly be placed among the leading figures in twentieth-century linguistics, and of all British phoneticians is generally regarded as being second in importance only to Sweet. Despite crippling illness, Jones remained working on his publications even in his last years. He died on December 4, 1967 at Gerrards Cross, England. Bibliography Butcher A 1982 Cardinal vowels and other problems. In: Crystal D (ed.) Linguistic Controversies. Arnold, London Gimson A C 1968 Daniel Jones (obituary). Le maitre phonetique 129(3): 2-6 Jones D 1909 The Pronunciation of English. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Jones D 1917a An English Pronouncing Dictionary. Dent, London Jones D 1917b The phonetic structure of the Sechuana language. TPhS 1917-20:99-106 Jones D 1917c Experimental phonetics and its value to the linguist. Nature 100:96-98 Jones D 1918 An Outline of English Phonetics. Teubner, Leipzig Jones D 1928 The Tones of Sechuana Nouns. International Institute of African Languages, London Jones D 1948 The London School of Phonetics. ZPhon 2, 3/4:127-35 Jones D 1950 The Phoneme: Its Nature and Use. Heffer, Cambridge Jones D 1964 The History and Meaning of the Term 'Phoneme.' International Phonetic Association, London Jones D, Plaatje S T 1916 A Sechuana Reader. University of London Press, London
Kaplan, Robert B. W. Grabe
Robert Kaplan is an applied linguist whose areas of specialization include written discourse analysis, writing theory and practice, contrastive rhetoric, literacy, language policy and planning, ESL teacher training, ESL administration, and language rights. He began teaching at the University of Southern California in
1960 and received his Ph.D. in English from USC in 1963. In 1970, he became a member of the newly formed Department of Linguistics at USC, and in 1973 he was the first North American professor to have the specific title of Professor of Applied Linguistics. He remained at the University of Southern Cal-
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The Profession ifornia until his institutional retirement in 1995. He is currently Professor Emeritus at USC, and he remains active in several Applied Linguistics projects. He has held a number of important positions in Applied Linguistics organizations: President of American Association for Applied Linguistics; President of TESOL; President of NAFSA; President of CATESOL; one of a group that founded the American Association for Applied Linguistics; planner for the journal, Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press); and planner, founder, and first Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Cambridge University Press). He is well known for his work in literacy and writing, contrastive rhetoric, and language policy planning. His work also addresses L2 teaching, teacher training, language program administration, and the notion of applied linguistics more generally. In the area of writing and literacy, he has written a major reference text on the theory and practice of writing, considering both L1 and L2 issues and concerns. More specifically, he first proposed, and since developed, the notion of contrastive rhetoric. At a time when most applied linguists were discussing grammar instruction, he wrote his famous 'doodles' article in 1966, addressing L2 discourse development.
This article described ways that L2 writers from different LI backgrounds seemed to be constrained by the rhetorical logic of their L1 s when writing L2 English essays. Over the past 30 years, he has supported the expansion of contrastive rhetoric to direct comparisons of writing across different languages and across various professional genres. A major shift in emphasis over time has been the recognition that LI discourse and rhetorical influences on L2 writing are commonly the result of LI literacy socialization practices imposed culturally. However, the notion that the LI itself constrains L2 discourse preferences is still an aspect of the concept of contrastive rhetoric, and this aspect has been recently supported by linguists and anthropologists reassessing the impact of the Whorfian hypothesis on language use and language development. In other areas, Kaplan's work in language policy and planning developed in the early 1970s with a multiyear study of English language use in Taiwan. He has since written regularly on language policy and planning, and he has coauthored a book surveying the field of language policy and planning. Finally, Kaplan has worked continuously to define and delimit the emerging field of applied linguistics itself, publishing a number of articles and edited books on this topic.
Kennedy, Benjamin Hall (1804-89) C. A. Stray
Kennedy's claim to fame in the history of language teaching rests on his Latin grammars, and particularly on the Public School Latin Primer (1866). Based on an earlier book of his (Kennedy 1844), this was commissioned by the headmasters of the nine leading schools, and quickly became the standard school grammar in England. The Primer was greeted by fierce protest from many of the teachers who were forced to use it. Some resented its being imposed on them at a time when educational and political liberalism appeared to be gaining ground (Stray 1989). Others complained of the introduction of new technical terms which necessitated a glossary at the end of the book (Roche 1969). Among the book's lasting innovations were its use of noun stems or 'crude forms,' taken from the work of T. H. Key (Key 1846), and the listing of noun cases in the order NOM voc ACC GEN DAT ABL. This order, which derived from Rask and Grimm (Allen and Brink 1980), has become the expository standard in the UK, but only sporadically elsewhere.
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The version of 'Kennedy's Latin Primer' still widely used is a revision of his Revised Latin Primer (Kennedy 1888), the product of a complete overhaul carried out anonymously by the aged Kennedy's daughters (Stray 1989). Bibliography Allen W S, Brink C O 1980 The old order and the new: A case history. Lingua 50: 61-100 Kennedy B H 1844 Latinae Grammaticae Curriculion; or a Progression Grammar of the Latin Language. Longman Green, London Kennedy B H 1866 The Public School Latin Primer. Longman Green, London Kennedy B H 1888 The Revised Latin Primer. Longman Green, London Key T H 1846 A Latin Grammar on the System of Crude Forms. Dulau, London Roche J W 1969 The great Latin primer question. British Journal of Educational Studies 17: 281-85 Stray C A 1989 Paradigms of social order: The politics of Latin grammar in nineteenth-century England. Henry Sweet Society Newsletter 13: 13-23
Krashen, Stephen D. (1941- ) Stray C A 1998 Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England 1830-1960. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 191-96
Stray C A in press Marion and Julia Kennedy, New Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Krashen, Stephen D. (1941- ) D. E. Eskey
Stephen Krashen is, arguably, the best known US theorist in the field of second-language acquisition and teaching and, unquestionably, one of the best known in the world. He has been especially successful in coining and disseminating new terminology; thus, in the discussion of his career which follows, terms rooted in his work have been italicized. A Professor of Education at the University of Southern California, he was born in 1941 and attended public schools in Los Angeles. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1964, he served with the Peace Corps in Ethiopia for 2 years. He earned his M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1972) in linguistics at UCLA and worked for a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University's Neuropsychiatric Institute. He began his academic career at Queen's College in New York City, then moved on to USC in 1975. His ideas have passed through several stages, from early monitor theory (Krashen 1981) to a more recent stress on comprehensible input (Krashen 1985) and have occasionally shifted focus in relation to teaching, from the natural approach (Krashen and Terrell 1982) to free voluntary reading (Krashen 1993), but have remained anchored in three major hypotheses: (a) that second-language acquisition results from exposure to comprehensible input, that is, spoken or written messages in the target language that the listener or reader understands, a subconscious process which he labels acquisition, as opposed to the conscious process of learning, which plays only the minor role of providing information the learner can use in monitoring his or her performance; (b) that acquisition requires a focus on meaning, not form, in any context; combined with the belief that language forms are acquired in a predictable, or natural, order which cannot be changed by teaching (an older hypothesis to which he subscribes), this constitutes an implicit claim that form cannot be taught but can only be acquired; and (c) that acquisition may be helped or hindered by the functioning of what he calls the affective filter, a meta-
phor for the learner's emotional state during the acquisition process: should the learner feel threatened or be bored (i.e., when the filter is 'high'), acquisition will be blocked (filtered out); should the learner be comfortable and interested (i.e., when the filter is 'low'), acquisition will be facilitated. He argues that in practice when any second-language learner is exposed to meaningful and interesting input which is at the right level linguistically but contains some new structures (a condition he has dubbed i +1), and provided that the affective filter is low, acquisition will occur; thus the learner will gradually acquire the target language through a series of such encounters with comprehensible input. These ideas have obvious implications for teaching, and many second-language teachers have embraced them enthusiastically and have attempted to implement them in various teaching contexts from elementary to university levels. It should be noted that his ideas are controversial and have been sharply attacked by critics (e.g., Gregg 1986), but many of his fundamental notions—for example, the primacy of acquisition—are now widely accepted, and his work remains both influential and popular with many in the field, especially classroom teachers. Bibliography Gregg K 1986 Review: Stephen D. Krashen, The Input Hypothesis. TESOL Quarterly 20: 116 Krashen S 1981 Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Prentice-Hall, New York Krashen S 1982 Principles and Practice in Second language Acquisition. Prentice Hall, New York Krashen S 1985 The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications. Laredo, Torrance, CA Krashen S 1992 Language Testing: Fundamentals of Language Education. Laredo, Torrance, CA Krashen S 1993 The Power of Reading. Libraries Unlimited, Englewood, LO Krashen S, Terrell T 1983 The Natural Approach. Alemany Press, Menlo Park, CA
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Labov, William (1927- ) S. Romaine
After working initially as an industrial chemist, William Labov entered the field of linguistics as a student in 1961 at Columbia University, where he was taught by Uriel Weinreich. After teaching some years at Columbia, he became Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. His research has concentrated on linguistic change and variation using spoken data collected in speech communities. His Ph.D. dissertation (1964) published in 1966 introduced a systematic methodology for investigating social dialects and provided the first sociolinguistic survey of an urban community. Unlike dialectologists, who generally chose one person as representative of a particular area, Labov carried out tape-recorded interviews with 103 informants who had been chosen by random sample as being representative of the various social classes, ages, ethnic groups, etc., to be found in New York City. The study showed that variation in the speech of and between individuals was not random, but conditioned by social factors such as social class, age, sex, and style, in predictable ways. The quantitative study of urban social dialects has since taken a central place in sociolinguistics, particularly in North America and Britain. Labov also demonstrated that the age distribution of a variable may be an important clue to ongoing change in a community by comparing the usage of speech communities at two points in time. His M.A. thesis applied such methods to study a sound change in progress on Martha's Vineyard. Labov found a strong correlation between the degree of centralization of certain vowels and the extent to which speakers identified with life on the island and wanted to remain. Through quantitative sociolinguistic work, there is now considerable
understanding of how linguistic change might proceed in a functional system by means of internal and external structuring of inherent variability, which shows directional gradience through social groups, geographic space, and time (see Weinreich, et al. 1968). In subsequent research on the Black English spoken by adolescents in New York City, Labov dealt with both the structure of Black English and some of the practical consequences of grammatical differences between Black and standard English. He argued that nonstandard speech forms are just as structurally complex, rule-governed, and capable of expressing logical arguments as standard English. Moreover, because such varieties play an important role in speaker identity, change towards standard English may be resisted. Labov found that in inner-city areas Black youths who socialized in street gangs were those who used the most nonstandard forms of speech and were most opposed to the value system of the school. Labov concluded that negative attitudes towards nonstandard speech were more decisive in determining school outcomes than the actual linguistic differences between standard and nonstandard speech. Bibliography Labov W 1966 The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC Labov W 1972a Sociolinguistic Patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA Labov W 1972b Language in the Inner City. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA Weinreich U, Labov W, Herzog M 1968 Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In: Lehmann W P, Malkiel Y (eds.) Directions for Historical Linguistics. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX
Lado, Robert (1915-95) J. E. Alatis
Robert Lado was a linguist of international stature. He was the first Dean (1960-73) of the School of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University. He built the School of Languages and Linguistics into the premiere American program of its kind. Course offerings and degree opportunities were expanded and 770
the School grew from an undergraduate college to a graduate school in nine languages and a highly acclaimed Department of Linguistics. He lectured extensively, and received honorary doctorates from Sophia University in Japan and Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He was acknowledged as
Lambert, Wallace E. (1922- ) a pioneer in applied linguistics, language testing, and bilingual education. He was also famous for his research in early reading and for his best-selling series of textbooks for teaching English as a second language. He wrote more than 100 articles and 60 books on languages and linguistics. He received his B. A. from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, his M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. At Michigan, he was Professor of English and Director of the world-renowned English Language Institute, where he worked with his friend, mentor, and colleague, Charles C. Fries, in developing the linguistically-based 'oral-aural' approach to language teaching. This approach later became synonymous with 'Audiolingualism' and was associated with the contrastive analysis hypothesis, of which both Fries and Lado were the earliest proponents. Lado's Linguistics Across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers was a seminal work in establishing the principles and practices of linguistic and cultural comparison. Similarly, his Language Teaching, A Scientific Approach was one of the first teacher-education texts expounding the structural linguistic basis of language teaching. His Language Testing: the Construction and Use of Foreign Language Tests; a Teacher's Book was the first book of its kind ever published. It too was based on the structural linguistics prevalent at the time.
Lado's parents were Spanish immigrants. He had emigrated to Spain before learning to speak English and returned to the United States to learn English as an adult. Under a Ford-Fulbright Foundation grant (1966-68), he helped establish English departments in five universities in Spain. Later, he founded the Lado International College, with branches in the US, Japan, and Peru. Through his contrastive analysis work, Lado is sometimes referred to as 'the indirect father of Second Language Acquisition' (SLA). His rich theory about contrastive analysis formed the basis for recent research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Interlanguage (IL). He was an active researcher even in retirement, and his most recent thinking may be found in his last book, Teaching English Across Cultures. Bibliography Lado R 1957 Linguistics Across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI Lado R 1961 Language Testing: The Construction and Use of Foreign Language Tests: A Teacher's Book. Longman, London Lado R 1964 Language Teaching, A Scientific Approach. McGraw-Hill, New York Lado R 1988 Teaching English Across Cultures: An Introduction for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. McGraw-Hill, New York
Lambert, Wallace E. (1922- ) G. R. Tucker
Wallace E. Lambert was born in 1922 in Amherst, Nova Scotia although his family moved shortly thereafter to Taunton, Massachusetts where he spent his formative years. After a hiatus caused by service in the US Army during World War II, he received his B.A. in Psychology from Brown University (1947), his M.A. in Psychology from Colgate (1950), and his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of North Carolina (1953). Lambert spent his entire professional career as a faculty member in the Psychology Department at McGill University which he joined in 1954. He continues this association as Professor Emeritus. By virtue of his prolific research, publication, and teaching, Lambert has had a profound and positive influence on educational policy and practice throughout the world. His early work on the relationship of bilingualism and intelligence (Peal and Lambert 1962) con-
stituted a landmark contribution to the field. The course of inquiry into the nature of the correlates and consequences of individual bilingualism was significantly altered following the pioneering contributions by Lambert and his students. The publication of their research resulted in a 'paradigm shift' within the field. Similarly, his early work with Gardner on the role of motivation and attitudes (Gardner and Lambert 1972) foreshadowed the development of a specialized subfield of educational linguistics—a concern with the role of individual differences in second language learning and teaching. His subsequent applied research into the effects of foreign (or second) language immersion on the cognitive, social, and educational development of English-speaking youngsters in the Province of Quebec (Lambert and Tucker 1972) likewise profoundly influenced the design and implementation of
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The Profession educational programs for both language minority and language majority students throughout North America (Cazabon et al. 1998). Lambert's early work led directly to an educational model referred to in the United States as Developmental Bilingual Education—that is, programs in which language minority and language majority youngsters spend some portion of the day together studying via one (or the other) target language to provide cross-language peer-group tutoring. This work has affected the course of subsequent (language) education for thousands of North American youngsters. In later years, Lambert's interests focused more sharply on understanding the educational, social, and personal consequences of the increasing heterogeneity of North American society (e.g., Lambert and Taylor 1990; Lambert 1992; Taylor and Lambert 1996). As he and his colleagues pursued their research in multicultural and multilingual communities such as Detroit, Michigan or Miami, Florida, Lambert continued to argue that ethnic minorities in North America can effectively and comfortably double their cultural identity .. .that 'they can have two cultures and two languages for the price of one' (Lambert 1991). Lambert himself has often noted the important role that his family—his wife Janine Fraissinet from France, and his children Sylvie and Philippe—played
in introducing him firsthand to the underlying issues of language, culture, and identity that became so prominent in his own research. Bibliography Cazabon M T, Nicoladis E, Lambert WE 1998 Becoming Bilingual in the Amigos Two-Way Immersion Program. Research Report 1. Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence, University of California, Santa • Cruz Gardner R C, Lambert W E 1972 Attitudes and Motivation in Second Language Learning. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Lambert W E 1991 And then add your two cents worth. In: Reynolds A (ed.) Bilingualism, Multiculturalism and Second Language Learning: Essays in Honour of W. E. Lambert. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ Lambert W E 1992 Challenging established views on social issues: The power and the limitations of research. American Psychologist 4: 533-42 Lambert W E, Taylor DM 1990 Coping with Ethnic and Racial Diversity in Urban America. Praeger, New York Lambert W E, Tucker G R 1972 Bilingual Education of Children: The St. Lambert Experiment. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Peal E, Lambert W E 1962 The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. Psychological Monographs 546 Taylor D M, Lambert W E 1996 The meaning of multiculturalism in culturally diverse urban America. Journal of Social Psychology 136: 727-40
Lee, William Rowland (1911-96) J. E. Alatis
Dr. W. R. Lee graduated from the University College London in 1933, where he studied under the phoneticians Daniel Jones and A.C. Gimson. He received further training as a teacher at the Institute of Education in London and taught in schools in Britain until the Second World War. After the war, he taught in Czechoslovakia and obtained his Ph.D. in Prague, where he met his wife Zdena, with whom he published jointly Teach Yourself Czech. This was the beginning of his long connection with Eastern European foreign-language teaching. He later returned to Britain and taught at the Institute of Education. He took an MA at the School of International Studies. He was the founder and first editor of English Language Teaching (now ELT Journal) for the Oxford University Press. Lee achieved genuine greatness as a leader and innovator in the teaching of English as a second or foreign language. He served the British Council as a lecturer, 772
course organizer, and advisor. He founded ATEFL (later IATEFL), the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. He also served as a part-time inspector of schools for teachers of immigrant children. Among his many lectures and papers were several that he gave at the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT) in Washington, DC and others in connection with Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), the American counterpart of IATEFL. He became famous for his books for children including Games and Contests in Language Teaching and a very early course The Argonauts' English Course: First Year, for Greek pupils. He wrote A Study Dictionary of Social English and coauthored an Elementary Technical and Scientific Dictionary. Professor Lee traveled to over 40 countries and received honors including the OBE and the Fellowship of the Trinity College of Music.
Mulcaster, Richard (1532-1611) 'Bill Lee' as he was affectionately known, was characterized by his love of teachers. He was an altruist and a pacifist who believed that language studies would eventually lead to a just and peaceful world. He was a widely-read humanist who wrote innumerable books and articles, edited journals, organized associations, and sat on committees all over the world. He attended the first TESOL convention in Miami Beach, Florida (1967), and worked tirelessly to encourage cooperation among teachers from both sides of the Atlantic. Bill Lee campaigned vigorously to ensure support by the British Government for the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language. English has now become one of Great Britain's greatest exports.
Bibliography Lee W R 1965 Language-Teaching Games and Contests. Oxford University Press, London Lee W R 1966 The Argonauts' English Course: First Year. Oxford University Press, London Lee W R (ed.) 1967 E.L.T. Selections: Articles From the Journal of English Language Teaching, Vols 1, 2. Oxford University Press, London Lee W R 1983 A Study Dictionary of Social English. Pergamon, Oxford Lee W R, Lee Z 1959 Teach Yourself Czech. English Universities Press, London Van Essen A, Burkart E 1992 Homage to W.R. Lee: Essays in English as a Foreign or Second Language. Foris Publications, Berlin and New York
Mulcaster, Richard (1532-1611) A. P. R. Howatt
Richard Mulcaster came from a Border family living near Carlisle. He was educated at Eton and both Oxford and Cambridge universities. In 1561 he was appointed to the headmaster ship of the newly founded Merchant Taylors' School in London, a post he held until 1586 when he left school teaching for the church. He returned, however, in 1596 to become High Master of St Paul's School and finally retired in his midseventies in 1608. He published a number of minor poetical works but is chiefly remembered for his contribution to education in two works, both of which appeared towards the end of his time at Merchant Taylors': Positions... necessarie for the training up of children in 1581, and a year later his great work The First Part of the Elementarie: which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung. As its title suggests, the Elementarie was intended as the first part of an ambitious plan to replace the existing Latin-based education system by a modern one founded on the mother tongue. Mulcaster's commitment to the English language was unequivocal: 'I love Rome but London better, I favour Italy but England more, I honour the Latin but I worship the English,' he said in a much-quoted passage at the end of the Elementarie (p. 254). In addition, as a practical educationist, he realized that what was needed was a solid basis of linguistic description in the form of a grammar of English, a dictionary and, as a necessary preliminary, a stable orthography. The heart of the Elementarie contains his own proposals for the reform of English spelling exemplified in a lengthy word-list called The Generall Table' (pp. 170-225).
Mulcaster's approach to change was moderate and pragmatic. He insisted that a successful program of spelling reform would have to observe three basic principles. The first of these was 'sound,' that is, the basic phonetic principle systematically relating sounds and letters, but it had to be modified by 'custom' (the retention of familiar, if irregular, spellings) and by 'reason' (the observance of grammatical and other patterns). For instance, Mulcaster proposed that the in honest should be retained on the grounds that 'the originall is well known' (p. 194). Among Mulcaster's successful recommendations was the abolition of unnecessary consonant doubling, put and bed, for instance, in place of putt and bedd or bedde. He also proposed a consistent use of final silent <e> to indicate vowel length. Most Mulcastrian spellings such as abide and rule have survived but not those which aimed to extend the principle to replace <ee> (e.g., betwene for between and se for see) or (e.g., luke for look). Other failures included the consistent doubling of final <1> (perill, youthfull^ etc.), and the use of final in words like quarrie, happie, and even saie. Although it was not accepted in every detail, Mulcaster's codification of good orthographic practice provided a systematic and practical foundation on which both teachers and printers could build a reasonably consistent and stable spelling system for English in the first half of the seventeenth century. Bibliography Scragg D G 1974 A History of English Spelling. Mont Follick Series, vol. 3. Manchester University Press, Manchester
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Nickel, Gerhard (1928- ) K. Sajavaara
Gerhard Nickel, one of the most important early proponents of applied linguistics, was born on 15 August 1928 in Kostellitz, Upper Silesia. He was a student of modern languages, philosophy, and theology at the Universities of Bamberg and Erlangen, Bavaria. He received an M.A. degree from the University of South Carolina and passed the high school teacher's examination (Staatsexamen) at the University of Erlangen in 1951. The following year he finished his doctorate at Erlangen, and received a diploma to teach French for foreigners at Rennes and another to teach English and French at Erlangen. In 1962 his postdoctoral habilitation in English Philology was accepted by the University of Erlangen. In 1962 he became Professor of English Philology at the University of Kiel. In 1969 he moved to Stuttgart to the chair of English Linguistics and Philology including Medieval Literature and became the Director of the Institute of Linguistics and the Language Centre. He received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Opole, Poland in 1996. He retired in 1996. Gerhard Nickel was one of the most important figures in the early history of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA). He was Secretary General from 1972-78, Vice-President from 1969-72 and 1978-81, was given the title of Honorary Vice-President in 1981, and became an Honorary Member in 1996. He organized the fourth World Congress of Applied Linguistics in Stuttgart in 1975. He was cofounder and first chairman of the German Association of Applied Linguistics (GAL). In his research Gerhard Nickel covered a wide field from the sociocultural background of early American comedy in his doctoral dissertation and Expanded
Form in Old English in his habilitation to an introduction into linguistics in German. He has published more than 100 papers, primarily on the role of applied linguistics, contrastive and error analysis, interlanguage, and language teaching and edited several collections of papers and congress proceedings in the same fields. He was director of the Project of Applied Contrastive Linguistics (PAKS) from 1967-75. He has been editor of IRAL, one of the leading journals in applied linguistics, since 1966, and has served in editorial functions for several other journals. An important aspect of Nickel's contribution to the progress of applied linguistics in various parts of the world has been his extensive lecture tours during three decades to various parts of the world, numerous plenary talks at congresses and workshops, visiting professorships at several universities, and adviserships to the Council of Europe, UNESCO, governments, and other institutions. His range of teaching was a correspondingly wide one, extending from medieval studies via modern theoretical to applied linguistics with special emphasis on foreign language learning and teaching; what his students would appreciate most highly was the emphasis Nickel put on the interconnections of these fields. Nickel's writings and lectures on linguistics are characterized by a deep understanding of the context of learning and teaching. He is always conscious of social reality: research is not an end in itself, it should serve awareness and understanding, which will result in changes in behavior. Bibliography Kiihlwein W (ed.) 1998 Language as Structure and Language as Process. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier
Nida, Eugene Albert (1914-
)
R. £. Longacre
Nida was born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA. He received a B.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1936, M.A. in patristics in 1939 at the University of Southern California, and Ph.D. in linguistics in 1943 at the University of Michigan; also numerous honorary degrees and awards from institutions in the USA and other countries. He was 774
Professor of Linguistics at the Summer Institute of Linguistics (which eventually located for many years at the University of Oklahoma) 1937-53 (see also Summer Institute of Linguistics). Nida has had a continuing involvement with agencies interested in the translation of the Christian scriptures. Besides his involvement with the early work of
Palmer, Harold Edward (1877-1949) the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Mexico he has been Executive Secretary for Translations, American Bible Society (1943-84), consultant for the United Bible Societies (1947-90), and continues as consultant for the American Bible Society 1984 to the present. In these various capacities he has succeeded in lifting translation concerns from those of a specialist group on to the plane of broad linguistic and cultural concerns. Nida's early linguistic interests centered around grammar, which in the 1940s and 1950s was conceived of largely as morphology. Both Nida's 1946 Morphology and his larger 1949 volume of the same title (both University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI) reflect shifting currents in American structural linguistics—from the process orientation of Edward Sapir to the flat morphemes-and-their-allomorphs orientation of Zellig Harris and Bernard Bloch. Nida has never lost his interest in words; some of his most mature and recent work has been his exploration of the lexical resources of the Greek New Testament (see below). Perhaps Nida's greatest contribution lies in the field of translation theory and practice. In his role as a teacher of future linguists and translators as well as in his more global role of consultant for missionary translators his influence has been profound— exceeded perhaps only by the influence exerted by the constant flow of his writings. He has done fieldwork in over 85 countries and in over 200 languages. Nida early came to emphasize dynamic and functional equivalence across languages and cultures as the key to successful translation. As linguistics has evolved during his scholarly life he has interacted with and made his own contributions to such developments as discourse analysis (textlinguistics) and sociolinguistics. From his early 1947 work Bible Translation a steady stream of publication has followed. Running rather to books than articles his production has been of two sorts: (a) such general works as those already mentioned and exemplified in the bibliography; and (b) special manuals for translators of given books of the Bible (not indicated in the bibliography). The latter have been variously authored, coauthored, and/or
edited by Nida, and cover a dozen or so books of the New Testament as well as the book of Ruth. In these manuals Nida has displayed a fine sensitivity to and uncanny prescience of passages where translators of the scriptures are likely to encounter lexical problems, cultural mismatches, syntactic tangles, and problems in textual cohesion and coherence. Nida's outstanding achievement latterly has been The Greek- Lexicon of the New Testament based on Semantic Domains (1988). This embodies a new departure in lexicography. Here words of similar semantic domains are so grouped as to give insight into the lexical structure of the Koine Greek. Nida has belonged to a number of learned societies which reflect his varied interests. Besides the American Anthropological Association, the Linguistic Society of Canada and the United States, the American Association for Applied Linguistics, and the Society of Biblical Literature, they include the Linguistic Society of America (President 1968) and the Society for Textual Scholarship (President 1987-88). In addition to the works already mentioned, representative pieces of his work are cited below. Bibliography Louw J P, Nida E A (eds.) 1988 The Greek Lexicon of the New Testament based on Semantic Domains, 2 vols. United Bible Societies, New York Nida E A 1947 Bible Translation. American Bible Society, New York Nida E A 1950 Learning a Foreign Language. National Council of Churches, New York Nida E A 1952 God's Word in Man's Languages. Harper, New York Nida E A 1975 Exploring Semantic Structures. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich Nida E A 1975 Componential Analysis of Meaning. Mouton, The Hague Nida E A, Reyburn W 1981 Meaning Across Cultures. Orbis, Maryknoll, NY Nida E A 1983 Style and Discourse. United Bible Societies, Cape Town Waard J de, Nida E A 1986 From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating. Nelson, Nashville, TN
Palmer, Harold Edward (1877-1949) A. P. R. Howatt
Harold Palmer was the founder, with Daniel Jones (see Jones, Daniel), of what eventually became the British school of applied linguistics, an approach to the teaching of languages rooted in the systematic study of spoken language.
A gifted practical linguist himself, Palmer started his career in 1902 at Verviers in Belgium where he learned to teach English as a foreign language according to the uncompromising Direct Method of the Berlitz schools. He later founded his own school in
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The Profession the same town, but in 1914 he had to return to London where he found employment with Daniel Jones who had established a Department of Phonetics at University College. Palmer taught spoken English to foreign students but his main innovation was a course of public lectures on language teaching methodology which attracted considerable interest among local modern language teachers and formed the basis of his first major publication, The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages, in 1917. This was followed by a shorter work, The Principles of Language Study (1921), which successfully combined Palmer's extensive practical experience with a sharply intelligent critique to create a small masterpiece of applied linguistic wisdom. In 1922 Palmer accepted a post in Japan as Director of a research and development center called the Institute for Research in English Teaching (IRET) sponsored by the Japanese government. At IRET he divided his time between basic research in English, particularly in phonetics and vocabulary studies, and the development of teaching materials and techniques for the Oral Method which he had sketched out earlier in London. His work came to fruition in a large number of publications including the seminal Grammar (Mother Tongue) of Spoken English, on a Strictly Phonetic Basis (1924), a collection of classroom activities by himself and his daughter Dorothee called English Through Actions (1925, republished in 1959), and a series of IRET publications on vocabulary control, a
research project that culminated in 1935 with a meeting in London (with Michael West and others) to compile a definitive list of the 2000 most useful words for learners of English as a foreign language. It was known as the Interim Report on Vocabulary Selection and was published much later as the General Service List of English Words (ed. Michael West, 1953). Shortly before his departure from Japan in 1936, Palmer was awarded an honorary doctorate for his work at IRET and he returned home to a career in materials writing, often in collaboration with Michael West whose New Method courses had already begun to appear. He died suddenly in 1949 while on a speaking tour for the British Council in South America. It is difficult to overestimate Palmer's contribution to twentieth-century English language teaching. He provided the profession with a set of fundamental principles that united his deep knowledge of the phonetics of spoken English with the insights of contemporary habit-formation psychology to create a methodology that ensured the active oral participation of all the learners in the class. After Palmer, ELT was no longer merely a junior branch of modern language teaching, but an independent profession which led the way in applied linguistic innovation. Bibliography Bongers H 1947 The History and Principles of Vocabulary Control. Wocopi, Woerden Howatt APR 1984 A History of English Language Teaching. ' Oxford University Press, Oxford
Passy, Paul Edouard (1859-1940) J. A. Kemp
Paul Passy was born in Versailles on January 13,1859, son of Frederic Passy, famous economist and politician who was the first to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Paul received an excellent education, entirely at home, and subsequently went to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. He embarked on a career of language teaching when he was 19, and it was the practical aspect of language study which he always felt should have his greatest attention, though he could equally have pursued a more theoretically directed career in the academic world. From an early age he had been interested in the problems of teaching languages (at the age of 10 he already had a good knowledge of Latin, English, German, and Italian), and in particular their pronunciation, and he was determined to find ways of improving existing methods. This concern sprang at
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least in part from his strong Christian belief, certainly from the time of his conversion to Protestantism in 1878, and his dedication to socialism, from 1897. His evangelistic spirit on behalf of Christianity and socialism was the predominant factor throughout his life, relegating his linguistic work to second place. He traveled widely, making careful transcriptions of the sounds of languages which he encountered. His adventurous spirit and passion for walking led him to explore the Rocky Mountains while in the USA, and at one stage he was lost and reduced to eating a rattlesnake before being rescued. From his mid-teens Passy had perceived the importance in language teaching of phonetics, and studied existing works on the subject, notably those of Sweet, Viëtor (see Viëtor, Wilhelm), Sievers, and Storm (Galazzi 1992). In 1886
Paulston, Christina Bratt (1932he was one of the founders of the Phonetic Association of Teachers of English, with the purpose of reforming existing methods of teaching languages, and became its president and the editor of its journal—Dhe Fonetik Titcer. It rapidly acquired an international character, with the encouragement of Jespersen, becoming the Association Phonetique Internationale, with Sweet as president. Passy was appointed secretary and editor of the journal (from 1889 called Le maitre phonetique), and remained so until 1927, when he took over as president. French was adopted as the Association's official language. Among the principles which he helped to formulate in 1888 for the Association's alphabet Passy placed special emphasis on those which would help the teacher—simplicity of the form of the symbols and the use of the minimum number necessary to distinguish meaningful differences between words; in other words a broad transcription. In 1896 he joined in an unsuccessful campaign to simplify the orthography of the French language. As well as his major concern for teaching methods (Passy 1899), he delved into historical phonetics in his doctoral thesis, which won the Prix Volney in 1892 (Passy 1890), and comparative phonetics (Passy 1906), as well as giving accounts of the sounds of specific languages (Passy 1887, 1891). He also had a special concern with the applications of phonetics (Passy 1929) and in particular the teaching of reading (Passy 1916). Daniel Jones acknowledged his debt to Passy in developing his system of cardinal vowels (Collins and Mees 1995). Passy became Docteur-es-Lettres in 1891, and in 1894 he was appointed to the newly created chair of General and Comparative Phonetics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes d'Histoire et Philologie in Bourg-laReine. He was the first to admit women—a revolutionary step at that time. He was Directeur Adjoint there from 1897 until his retirement in 1926, apart from the period 1913-17, when for political reasons he was relieved of his post.
)
Passy had that precious, but far from widespread, gift of lucidity of expression, whether spoken or written. The extent of the influence he exerted through his brilliant teaching is hard to exaggerate, and he undoubtedly ranks as one of the major figures in the development of the discipline of phonetics, though he himself was always quick to turn the credit elsewhere, and to think only of what he could do to help others. He died in November 1940. Bibliography Collins B, Mees I M 1995 Daniel Jones, Paul Passy and the early development of the cardinal vowel system. HL 22: 197-216 Galazzi E 1992 1880-1914. Le combat des jeunes phoneticiens: Paul Passy. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 46: 115-29 Jones D 1941 Paul Passy, Le maitre phonetique, 3rd series, July-Sept.: 30-39. Repr. in: Sebeok T A (ed.) 1966 Portraits of Linguists, vol. 2. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN Michaelis H, Passy P 1897 Dictionnaire phonetique de la langue franqaise. Meyer, Hanover Passy P 1887 Les sons du franqais. Didier, Paris. (English transl. Savory D L, Jones D 1907 The Sounds of the French Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford) Passy P 1890 Etudes sur les changementsphonetiques. FirminDidot, Paris Passy P 1891 De Nordica Lingua. Firmin-Didot, Paris Passy P 1899 De la methode directe dans I'enseignement des langues vivantes. Association Phonetique Internationale, Bourg-la-Reine Passy P 1906 Petite phonetique comparee des principales langues europeennes. Teubner, Leipzig Passy P 1916 La phonetique appliquée à l 'enseignement de la lecture. Association Phonetique Internationale, Bourg-laReine Passy P 1929 La phonetique et ses applications. Association Phonetique Internationale, Cambridge Passy P 1930, 1932 Souvenirs d'un Socialiste Chretien. Editions 'Je sers,' Issy les Moulineaux Simonsen E 1939 Paul Passy, Le maitre phonetique, 3rd series, April-June: 20-21
Paulston, Christina Bratt (1932-
)
M. Swain
Christina Bratt Paulston was one of the earliest proponents of the application of principles derived from sociolinguistics to language teaching and to educational linguistics. She was the first to apply Dell Hymes' (see Hymes, Dell Hathaway) notion of communicative competence to language teaching (Paul-
ston 1974). The focus of her scholarly work proceeded from the teaching of English as a second language (Paulston 1980a) to bilingual education (Paulston 1980b, 1988, 1992) to minorities, language policy, and linguistic rights (Paulston 1994; Paulston and Peckham 1998). She has worked on the history of 777
The Profession sociolinguistics and is currently studying the sociolinguistics of ancient Palestine. Born in Stockholm in 1932, Paulston was educated in classics and modern languages in the gymnasium there. On graduation in 1951, she received a Kellogg Foundation scholarship to study at Carleton College, Minnesota, where she earned a B.A. in 1953. She went on to receive an M.A. in English literature at the University of Minnesota. After graduation, she taught English and French for the next five years at high schools in Clara City, Lake Woebegon, and Pine Island, all in Minnesota. In 1960, while teaching at the American School in Tangier, Morocco, she met Rolland Paulston, her future husband. From 1963 until 1968, the new couple lived, worked, and studied in Sweden, the USA (at Columbia University), India, and Peru, each completing a Ph.D. dissertation. In 1969, Paulston was appointed to the linguistics department at the University of Pittsburgh, where her husband had joined the school of education a year earlier. This has remained their academic home since then. Paulston was director of the English Language Institute at the University of Pittsburgh from 1969 until 1998, and chair of the department of linguistics from 1974 until 1989. She was active in International TESOL, serving as Second Vice President and Convention Chair in 1972 and President in 1976. From
1976 until 1981 she served as a member of the Board of Trustees on the Center for Applied Linguistics (see Research Centers). During her career, she has published many articles and books in the areas of English as a second language, language teaching, bilingual education, teacher training, and sociolinguistics. More recently, her interests, have focused on the sociology of language and gender, and historical sociolinguistics. Bibliography Paulston C B 1974 Linguistic and communicative competence. TESTOL Quarterly 8: 347-62 Paulston C B 1980a English as a Second Language. National Education Association, Washington, DC Paulston C B 1980b Bilingual Education: Issues and Theories. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Paulston C B (ed.) 1988 International Handbook of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT Paulston C B 1992 Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Bilingual Education. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Paulston C 1994 Linguistic Minorities in Multilingual Settings: Implications for Language Policy. Benjamins, Amsterdam Paulston C B, Peckham D (eds.) 1998 Linguistic Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK Paulson C B, Tucker G R (eds.) 1997 The Early Days of Sociolinguistics: Memories and Reflections. Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, TX
Piaget, Jean (1896-1980) M. L. Donaldson
Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896 at Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Although his greatest influence has been in the field of developmental psychology, he trained initially as a biologist and his earliest publications were in biology (beginning at the early age of 11 years with an article about the albino sparrow) and in philosophy. Piaget regarded himself primarily as a genetic epistemologist. His aim was to unify biology and logic by examining the evolution and nature of human knowledge. It was as a means to this end that Piaget turned to psychology. In 1919 Piaget began his psychological career by studying psychoanalysis in Bleurer's psychiatric clinic in Zurich. The influence of psychoanalytic techniques is evident in the clinical method which Piaget developed for studying children's thinking. In 1920 Piaget went to Paris, where he worked with Theodore Simon on the standardization of some of the earliest 778
intelligence tests. Piaget soon became fascinated by the errors children sometimes made on intelligence test items, since he believed these errors reflected a mode of thinking which was qualitatively, rather than merely quantitatively, different from adults' thinking. Much of Piaget's research sought to describe and explain qualitative changes in thinking during childhood. In his first psychological book, The Language and Thought of the Child (1926), Piaget studied children's language as a means of investigating their thinking, but he devoted relatively little attention to studying the development of language in its own right and he did not accord language a central role in his theory of development. Nevertheless, his work has undoubtedly influenced child language research, albeit less strongly and less directly than it has some other areas of child development research.
Pitman, Sir Isaac (1813-97) Most notably, Piaget has contributed to the debate about relationships between language and thought. In Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (1951) he highlights the complexity of the interplay between the development of concepts and the development of language. Although he acknowledges that there are influences in both directions, it is to the influence of cognitive development on linguistic development that he gives by far the greater emphasis. According to Piaget, thinking has its origins in actions performed by children on their environment. The action-based logic that children construct during the sensorimotor period (from birth up to about 18 months) is seen as the foundation for the development of the capacity for representation, which Piaget terms the 'semiotic function.' Piaget regarded language as merely one component of the semiotic function, other components being deferred imitation, symbolic play, drawing, and mental imagery. Piaget's argument that language development is highly dependent on more general aspects of cognitive development contrasts sharply with Chomsky's emphasis on the modular nature of language acquisition. Furthermore, Piaget
rejected Chomsky's strong nativist position, arguing instead for a constructivist position, namely that the general cognitive structures which underpin language development are actively constructed by the child through interaction with the environment. In 1975, Piaget and Chomsky met at the Abbaye de Royaumont near Paris to debate their differing views (Piattelli-Palmarini 1980). Piaget died in 1980, but some of the theoretical issues raised by his work live on in child language research, even though the conclusions drawn from such research often conflict with Piaget's own. Bibliography Boden M 1979 Piaget. Fontana, London Bryant P 1982 Piaget: Issues and Experiments. British Psychological Society, Leicester Piaget J 1926 (transl.) Warden M The Language and Thought of the Child. Kegan Paul, London Piaget J 1951 (transl.) Galtegno C, Hodson F M Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. Heinemann, London Piattelli-Palmarini M 1980 Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London
Pitman, Sir Isaac (1813-97) M. K. C. MacMahon
Despite his eminence as a Victorian businessman, the driving-force in Pitman's life was education. His shorthand system arose from the need to equip young people with a valuable practical skill. In addition, he recognized that the irregularities and vagaries of English orthography could be a handicap to the young, and this led to his devising various reformed spelling systems for English. He was born at Trowbridge, Wiltshire (England) on January 4, 1813. At the age of 19 he began work as a schoolteacher, and his Stenographic Sound-Hand, a phonetically based shorthand, appeared in 1837. A second edition, entitled Phonography, followed in 1840. Its success, especially in educational circles, was almost instantaneous. The commercial world soon turned to it too. In 1843, Pitman was compelled to give up his teaching post in order to concentrate on the business side of shorthand and spelling reform, and in 1847 he set up the Phonetic Institute, the administrative headquarters for his publishing business in Bath. His desire that there should be a more logical and consistent reformed spelling system for English led, in
1844, to 'Phonotypy,' the first of several reformed alphabets, some of which he devised in conjunction with Alexander John Ellis (1814-90). Pitman was knighted in 1894, and died in Bath on January 22, 1897. Although not a phonetician in the modern sense of the word, Pitman based both his shorthand and reformed spellings on a conscious awareness of the phonemic contrasts of English. His support for phonetic and applied phonetic endeavors in Victorian Britain helped to create a climate of opinion about linguistic matters in which the work of more intellectually distinguished figures could prosper. Bibliography Abercrombie D 1937 Isaac Pitman: A Pioneer in the Scientific Study of Language. Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd, London. Repr. in Abercrombie D 1965 Studies in Phonetics and Linguistics. Oxford University Press, London C T 1901 Pitman, Sir Isaac. In: Lee S (ed.) Dictionary of National Biography, Supplement vol. III, pp. 266-68. Smith, Elder & Co., London
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Quirk, Charles Randolph (1920-
)
J. Roberts
When Randolph Quirk, then Professor of English Language in the University of Durham, announced his plans for a survey of British English in 1959 he cannot have foreseen the central position his work would come to occupy in language studies. At a time when linguistic theorists chose to appeal to intuition for judgment in usage, his scheme seemed particularly adventurous in its aim to draw together representative samples of a wide range of spoken and written materials. Within a few years other computerized collections were to be initiated, but the ambitions of data based surveys of usage for the latter part of the twentieth century were essentially established with the initiation of what was to become the Survey of English Usage (SEU). This uniquely combined 'corpus' study with psycholinguistic elicitation techniques, reaching beyond the corpus. Quirk was Director of the Survey, based in University College London, until 1981. He continued to play a major role in its activities during his years as Vice-Chancellor of the University of London (1981-85) and as President of the British Academy (1985-89), and he remains a central figure in the project's researches. His outstanding abilities both in scholarship and administration have ensured showers of honorary degrees, fellowships, and consultative positions. His generosity as teacher and colleague is evidenced by many fruitful collaborations over the years on innumerable books and articles, not least with Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik on the magisterial A Grammar of Contemporary English (1972) and its successor A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, which was first published in 1985 but has been continually revised and updated. Charles Randolph Quirk was born on July 12,1920, son of the late Thomas and Amy Randolph Quirk, at Lambfell, Isle of Man. After education at the Cronk y Voddy and Douglas High Schools, his undergraduate years were interrupted by service in the RAF (194045), and he supported himself by playing regularly in a danceband. A lectureship in English at University College London (1947-54) followed quickly upon graduation, a period broken only by a year (1951-52) as Commonwealth Fund Fellow in Yale University and the University of Michigan. During his years at Durham, first as Reader (1954-58) and afterwards as Professor (1958-60), he was still best known as a medievalist, writing articles and monographs mainly on Old and Middle English and Old Norse. His subsequent work on the structure of present-day English has always therefore been grounded upon a deep knowledge of historical scholarship. This can be seen very clearly in The Use of English (1962; enlarged edition 1968), a widely read book that grew out of
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popular talks given on the BBC World Service, and in its long-needed successor, English in Use (1990, with G. Stein). Although many of his publications are concerned with the technicalities of grammar, he could never be categorized as a prescriptive grammarian, despite the respect accorded his authority by those who consult his writings. Rather he shows a lively concern for what is 'appropriate language,' a phrase used by him in discussion of Dickens (inaugural lecture given in Durham, 1959), and he has communicated this concern in many lively lectures, papers, and reviews. Some flavor of these can be gained from such collections as The Linguist and the English Language (1974) and Words at Work: Lectures on Textual Structure (1986). Randolph Quirk first married Jean Williams (1946, marriage dissolved 1979) and has two sons. In 1984 he married Gabriele Stein, professor of English in the University of Heidelberg, with whom he has collaborated in several publications. He travels widely, often for the British Council, on whose Board he has served since 1983. In the UK as well as abroad his is an important voice in deliberations on all aspects of the teaching of English, for example, EFL, speech therapy, and the teaching of Standard English in the National Curriculum. He was created a life peer in 1994. Bibliography Crystal D, Quirk R 1964 Systems of Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features in English. Mouton, The Hague Greenbaum S, Leech G, Svartvik J 1980 Studies in English Linguistics for Randolph Quirk. Longman, London Quirk R 1954 The Concessive Relation in Old English Poetry. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT/Oxford University Press, London Quirk R 1962 The Use of English. Longman, London Quirk R 1995 Grammatical and Lexical Variance in English. Longman, London Quirk R, Greenbaum S 1970 Elicitation Experiments in English: Linguistic Studies in Use and Attitude. Longman, London Quirk R, Greenbaum S 1990 A Student's Grammar of the English Language. Longman, London Quirk R, Greenbaum S, Leech G, Svartvik J 1972 A Grammar of Contemporary English. Longman, London Quirk R, Greenbaum S, Leech G, Svartvik J 1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman, London Quirk R, Stein G 1990 English in Use. Longman, London Quirk R, Svartvik J 1966 Investigating Linguistic Acceptability. Mouton, The Hague Quirk R, Svartvik J 1980 A Corpus of English Conversation. Lund Studies in English, vol. 56. Gleerups/Liber, Lund Quirk R, Wrenn C L 1955 An Old English Grammar. Methuen, London
Richards, I. A. (1893-1979)
Ratke, Wolfgang (1571-1635) J. B. Walmsley
Wolfgang Ratke (Ratichius) was until recent times variously dismissed as a charlatan or hailed as a great and original thinker. Ratke was born on October 18, 1571 in Holstein, attended the Johanneum in Hamburg, and Rostock University. Motivated—like some earlier and some later English grammarians (cf. Sonnenschein; see Sonnenschein, Edward Adolf)—by the disharmony in grammatical terminology, Ratke produced in 1612 a Memorandum (the Frankfurt Memorial) in which he claimed that language teaching could be made more effective; that all curriculum subjects could be taught in German (as opposed to Latin); and that he could show how unity of language, government, and religion could be secured throughout the Empire. From 1612-18 Ratke worked in Frankfurt, Weimar, and Augsburg. It was during this period that the young Comenius heard of his work. When Ratke's colleagues Jung and Helwig abandoned him in Augsburg, Ratke took up an invitation from Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Kothen. In Kothen Ratke and his new staff produced more than 30 textbooks—the Kothen Series—within two years. However, Ratke ended his term in Kothen in prison. From 1620 until his death in 1635 Ratke wrote a series of further works which remained unpublished until 1970-71. The intellectual appeal of Ratke's grammars lies in the fact that they were conceived within a coherent theory of the curriculum. His aphorism Omniaprimum in Germanico was the first step in securing the vernacular as medium of instruction in Germany. Another—Ex Germanico in alias linguas—helped to establish the vernacular as a curriculum subject. Using the instrument of 'harmony,' the grammars of
other languages were to be taught on a basis uniform with the vernacular. Ratke published parallel universal and particular grammars in and for German, Latin, Greek, Italian, and French. Important vernacular German grammars in the Ratkean tradition were produced by Gueintz, Schottel, Harsdorfer, and von Zesen. Bibliography Conermann K 1997 Die furstliche Offizin von Kothen. Druckerei, Verlagswesen und Buchhandel im Dienste des Ratichianismus und der Fruchtbringenden Gesellschaft. Wolfenbutteler Barock-Nachrichten 24: 121-78 Ising E 1959 Wolfgang Ratkes Schriften zur deutschen Grammatik (1612-1630). Akademie Verlag, Berlin Kordes U 1997 Wolfgang Ratke (Ratichius, 1571-1635). Gesellschaft, Religiositat und Gelehrsamkeit imfrühen 17. Jahrhundert. University of Bielefeld, Germany Kordes U and J B Walmsley 1995 Eine verschollene Gelehrtenbibliothek. Zum Buchbesitz Wolfgang Ratkes um 1620. Wolfenbutteler Notizen zur Buchgeschichte 20: 133-71 Padley G A 1985 Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500-1700: Trends in Vernacular Grammar I. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Ratke W 1619 Grammatica Universalis: Pro didactica Ratichii. Kothen Ratke W 1970-71 Allunterweisung: Schriften zur Bildungs-, Wissenschafts- und Gesellschaftsreform, 2 vols. Volk und Wissen, Berlin Rhenius J (ed.) 1617 Methodus Institutionis nova quadruplex. Leipzig, pp. 132-206 Walmsley J B 1987 Towards a historiography of Ratke's writings in the English-speaking world. History of Second Language Teaching of Education 16: 11-27 Wells C J 1985 German: A Linguistic History to 1945. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Richards, I. A. (1893-1979) J. P. Russo
In a career lasting 60 years, I. A. Richards made major contributions to semantics, literary theory and criticism, theories of metaphor and translation, elementary reading and second-language training, and world literacy. Born in Sandbach, Cheshire on February 23, 1893, the son of a Welsh chemical engineer, Richards
attended Clifton and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he received first-class honors in 1915. Four years later he began teaching in the new English program at Cambridge. Collaboration with C. K. Ogden led to The Meaning of Meaning (1923), called the bestknown work on semantics ever published. They were known for their novel adaptation of American prag-
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Figure I. Triangle of interpretation.
matism and behaviorism in conjunction with native British philosophical psychology and their context theory of meaning. By contextualism they meant that a word or utterance gains its full meaning only through its surrounding context, interpreted in psychological and physical terms, which they depicted in a triangle of interpretation (Fig. 1). The authors defined two broad uses of language: referential (asserting or describing facts) and emotive (the expression of feeling). Besides these uses, they outlined five functions of language, each more or less present in a given utterance, though Richards eventually enumerated seven functions: indicating, characterizing, realizing, valuing, influencing, controlling, and purposing. Their theories anticipated themes in logical positivism and the Vienna Circle. In Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929) Richards examined literary language (Science and Poetry (1926) was a popularization). Principles of Literary Criticism offers a psychological theory of value, a theory of communication, and an analysis of poetry that places strong emphasis on complexity, irony, and synthesis ('poetry of inclusion'), thereby revealing the influence of literary modernism. Practical Criticism sifts through hundreds of student reports on poems and categorizes types of misreading (for example, stock responses, irrelevant associations, doctrinal adhesions, and sentimentality). Many supposedly well-prepared students had made faulty readings and foisted them upon the authors. The book proposes the method of 'close reading' to determine 'sense,' 'feeling,' 'tone,' and 'intention,' and lays particular emphasis on the proper kind of belief brought to reading, as well as the sincerity of response. Both books contain a critique of the media industry, then in its infancy. Together they exerted a broad impact on the study of literature. Richards has been referred to as the father of new criticism, which stressed close textual
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analysis and dominated academic literary studies from the 1940s to the 1960s. Coleridge on Imagination (1934) virtually founded Coleridge studies in the twentieth century, while The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) contains a revolutionary theory of metaphor. Hitherto metaphor was analyzed in terms of idea and image, the idea assuming the principal role with regard to meaning. Instead, Richards granted parity to the two halves of the metaphorical copula, calling them 'tenor' (principal subject) and 'vehicle' (what the principal subject is compared to). These interact to form the metaphor, which is the whole double unit, a new creation, not the vehicle alone. Neither tenor nor vehicle go through the metaphorical process unchanged: metaphor is a 'transaction between contexts.' During the 1930s Richards became absorbed in Basic English, an 8 50-word version of normal English devised by Ogden in the 1920s as an auxiliary international language. Sojourns in China convinced Richards of the possibility of using Basic English as a way into standard English. In 1939 he transferred to Harvard University where he developed the Language Through Pictures series (with Christine M. Gibson) and pioneered the use of audiovisual media in the teaching of beginning reading and second-language training. For students to possess major texts on which to develop their understanding of language and culture, he translated into simplified English Plato's Republic (1942) and Homer's Iliad (1951). Beyond (1974), on the relation of man to god in Homer, Job, Plato, Dante, and Shelley, is his humanistic testament. In his later career he also turned to writing poetry and published four collections. In 1974 Richards returned to Cambridge, England. In spring 1979 he embarked on a lecture tour of China with the general subject of English as a second language. He fell seriously ill and was taken back to Cambridge where he died on 7 September. Bibliography Brower R, Vendler H, Hollander J (eds.) 1973 I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor. Oxford University Press, New York Hotopf W H N 1965 Language, Thought and Comprehension: A Case Study of the Writings of I. A. Richards. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London Richards I A, Ogden C K 1923 The Meaning of Meaning. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London Richards I A 1924 Principles of Literary Criticism. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London Richards I A 1929 Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London Richards I A 1974 Beyond. Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, New York Russo J P 1989 /. A. Richards: His Life and Work. Johns Hopkins University Press and Routledge, Baltimore and London Shusterman R 1988 Critique et Poesie selon I. A. Richards: De la Confiance positiviste au Relativisme naissant. Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, Bordeaux
Robinett, Betty Wallace (1919-
)
Rivers, Wilga (1919- ) R. Steele
Wilga Rivers had a major influence on the evolution of language pedagogy during the latter decades of the twentieth century from the introduction of language laboratories to the adoption of computer-assisted learning. Born in Australia in 1919, she began her career as a French language teacher in a country high school in Victoria. In that isolated community with no links to France, she devised classroom techniques to motivate learners to communicate in a foreign language and enjoy discovering a foreign culture. That practical exploration of ways the foreign language classroom can enhance the lives of adolescents with diverse learning abilities and interests would inform her research on language learning and teaching during an illustrious career crowned in 1973 by her appointment as one of the few women full Professors at Harvard University where, as Coordinator of the Romance Language program, she established a nationally acclaimed model for language instruction. Rivers' studies in cognitive psychology while preparing her doctoral dissertation at the University of Illinois provided her with a rich theoretical framework. Her first book, The Psychologist and the Foreign-Language Teacher (1964), subsequently translated into Japanese, Romanian, Finnish, and Portuguese, demonstrated convincingly that the psychological tenets of the audio-lingual method, then the most popular American language teaching method, would not result in effective language learning. Rivers, thus, instigated a fundamental shift to a new pedagogy, the communicative approach, which she later refined to the interactive approach. Her Teaching Foreign Language Skills (1968) became an essential reference for language teachers adopting communicative objectives. Placing the list-
ening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in their linguistic and sociocultural contexts, she proposed numerous practical, dynamic activities enabling learners to go beyond automatic situational utterances and engage in personal and meaningful communication. This innovative book was the forerunner of her Practical Guide series (1975-89) focused on the specifics of the French, German, Spanish, and Hebrew languages and on the Teaching of English as a Second or Foreign Language which was translated into Japanese. In the Introduction to Interactive Language Teaching (1987) she posits that an interactive approach emphasising the collaborative process of authentic communication best satisfies the needs of learners as they move 'from skill acquisition to language control' and autonomy. Communicating in the foreign language in the classroom remains superficial unless a shared context of meanings is actively constructed by the learner's personal involvement in the interaction. This involvement is stimulated by creative activities proposed by the teacher, using different media to encourage participation in the interactive process of achieving linguistic and sociocultural competency in the foreign language. Rivers' interactive model of language learning and teaching is underpinned by 10 psychological, linguistic, and pedagogical principles published in her Teaching Languages in College (1992). The influential ideas of this truly outstanding educator and researcher were also expressed in 88 articles and invited lectures given in over 40 countries. Her huge international audience drew inspiration from her unique ability to combine theory and practice with clear-sighted innovations for the curriculum, teaching practice, and learner empowerment.
Robinett, Betty Wallace (1919- ) B. T. Downing
Betty Wallace Robinett, one of the founders of TESOL and of AAAL, is known as a scholar, particularly in the area of applied English phonetics, and as a teacher devoted to the professional development
of teachers of English as a second language. Born in Detroit on June 23, 1919, she attended Wayne State University, where she studied Latin and Spanish as an undergraduate student. In graduate school at the 783
The Profession University of Michigan she served as an instructor and administrative assistant in the English Language .Institute directed by Charles C. Fries from 1945 to 1950. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1951; it appears that she was the first woman in the United States to be awarded the Ph.D. in the field of linguistics. At Michigan she was among a group of students who founded a journal of applied linguistics, Language Learning, in 1948; she was its first business manager. Dr. Robinett served as a consultant to the Department of Education in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as Lecturer in English at the University of Michigan, and as Associate Professor of English at Interamerican University in San German, P.R., during the 1950s. She was appointed as Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics at Ball State University in 1959, advancing to Professor in 1967. She took part in the founding of TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) and was chosen as the first editor of its journal, TESOL Quarterly, a position she held from 1967 through 1972. Harold Allen brought her to the University of Minnesota in 1968 to develop and direct an M.A. Program in TESL and a program in ESL for international students (now the Minnesota English Center). She served as Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Program in ESL from 1968 to 1979. In 1979 she was a member of the University of Minnesota's first delegation to the People's Republic
of China, and she became Director of a Summer Institute for Teachers of English at Jilin Institute of Technology in the following year, returning to teach and direct programs in China in 1986 and 1990. Dr. Robinett served as chairman of ATESL, in NAFSA, in 1976-77, as President of TESOL in 197374 and as Vice President and President of AAAL in 1981-83. From 1960 to 1963 and again from 1986 to 1993 she was a member of USIA's English Teaching Advisory panel, chairing the panel from 1988 to 1993. From 1979 until her retirement in 1988 she served as Assistant and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Minnesota. In 1977 she was the recipient of the Morse-Amoco award for Excellence in Teaching, receiving the title of Morse Alumni Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota in 1996. Bibliography PratorC, Robinett B 1972, 1985 Manual of American English Pronunciation. Holt, New York Robinett B 1951 The Pronunciation of American English for Teachers of English as a Second Language. George Wahr Publishing Co., Ann Arbor, MI Robinett B 1978 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages: Substance and Technique. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN Robinett B, Schachter J (eds.) 1983 Second Language Learning: Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis, and Related Aspects. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI
Smith, Henry Lee (1913-72) C. A. Farley-Winer
Henry Lee Smith, Jr ('Haxie' to his colleagues, friends, and family), linguist, educator, and US State Department Foreign Service officer, was born on July 11, 1913, in Morristown, NJ, son of Henry Lee Smith and Elise Garr Henry. He was educated at Gilman Country School, Baltimore, MD, then at Princeton University, from where he graduated B.A. summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa in 1935, M.A. in 1937, and Ph.D. in Oriental languages and literature in 1938. He was a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter fellow in 193738. He was awarded an honorary LittD degree from Wagner College (Staten Island, New York) in 1961 and a postdoctoral fellowship in linguistics by the University of Edinburgh, UK, during his last sabbatical leave in 1970. Smith was a major in the US Army from 1942-46, and was the officer in charge of the language section of the Information and Education Division, Army 784
Service Forces. Cofounder of the Foreign Service Institute School of Language and Linguistics (194656) and of the FSI School of Languages, he was the first director (1946-56) and dean (1955-56) of the School. Previously, he had been a lecturer in English at Barnard College, Columbia University (1938^0) and an instructor of English at Brown University (1940-42). He was the chairman and cofounder (in 1956, with George L. Trager) of the Department of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Buffalo (later State University of New York at Buffalo), chairman of the Department of Anthropology (1964-65), and director of the Program in Linguistics (1967-68), but resigned that post to resume his research and teaching as Professor of Linguistics and English, an appointment which he had held since coming to the university in 1956. He died very suddenly on December 13, 1972, survived by his
Sonnenschein, Edward Adolf (1851-1929) wife, Virginia von Wodtke Smith (deceased October 26, 1987) and four children: Heather Smith Kleiner, Marshall, Randolph, and Letitia. His contributions to the discipline of linguistics left an indelible mark on the field. The development of the Army Language Program, also known as the 'Intensive Language Program,' which he directed, accelerated the course of language acquisition at a time when language learning and crosscultural understanding were becoming imperative for survival in a smaller world. The tools and techniques produced under his direction, using native speakers as informants for 22 different languages, are still available and in use in the 1990s. An outgrowth of this project was the development of a system of linguistic analysis that he called 'aspectualism,' in which he demonstrated a tripartite, 27-level framework that achieved a more finely focused view into the structure of language than had previously been defined. Introduced in the analysis was the concept of the 'morphophone,' which demonstrated, for instance, how two different phonemes in the same environment in a certain lexical item could be understood as expressions of the same morphophone unit, thereby making two different dialects mutually intelligible. A series of publications, beginning in 1951 with An Outline of English Structure (with George L. Trager), and including 'The concept of the morphophone' (1967) and 'The morphophone and English dialects' (1972), traces the development of this idea. Linguistic Science and the Teaching of English (1956) and The Linguistic Readers (1963-67), a beginning reader series coauthored by Smith, further explore the theory of the morphophone and its usefulness in enhancing the understanding of language structure. 'Dialects of English' (1969) explains and discusses the theory of the morphophone and its application to dialectology. In his memorable and highly effective speaking style, Henry Lee Smith told the world about linguistics, when it was still a relatively unknown and poorly understood discipline, through literally hundreds of lectures, workshops, and conferences. A guest much in demand on educational television and radio, he
prepared and presented Language and Linguistics, a 13-part series on Educational Television that was also widely used in classrooms over a period of years. Among the many special lectures he gave were those at Harvard University, Princeton University, and Gallaudet College, a school for the hearing-impaired in Washington, DC. He conducted a well-known radio program, 'Where Are You From?' from 1939-41 on WOR, New York City. He was listed in Marquis Who's Who, Who's Who in the East, and American Men of Science, and was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Linguistic Society of America, the American Anthropological Association, the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC, and many other civic and professional societies. Henry Lee Smith was a vivid and distinguished figure in the various worlds of which he was a part. Interrupted in mid-career and somewhat surprised by death, he was still deeply involved in his teaching-and research. He had often expressed the hope that his students would continue on the path he had laid out. Rida S. Bross and Anne Austin Dunlap, both doctoral students of Henry Lee Smith Jr., have performed invaluable service as consultants in the preparation of these materials. Bibliography Farley-Winer C A 1992 Henry Lee Smith Jr (1913-72). A Nachruf twenty years after. HL 19(1): 187-98 (includes a bibliography) Smith H L 1956 Linguistic Science and the Teaching of English. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Smith H L 1967 The concept of the morphophone. Lg 43(1): 306-41 Smith H L 1969 Dialects of English. In: Morris W (ed.) American Heritage Dictionary. American Heritage/ Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA Smith H L 1972 The morphophone and English dialects. In: Davis L M (ed.) Studies in Linguistics in Honor of Raven I. Me David Jr. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, AL Smith H L, Trager G L 1951 An Outline of English Structure. Battenberg Press, Norman, OK
Sonnenschein, Edward Adolf (1851-1929) J. B. Walmsley
Sonnenschein, motivated by a perception of disharmony in grammatical terminology similar to that which had exercised Ratke (see Ratke, Wolfgang), was the moving spirit in a campaign to simplify and unify terminology which spanned four decades and
embraced at least five countries—a kind of "entente cordiale grammatical.' Born November 20, 1851, Edward Adolf Sonnenschein studied at London and Oxford Universities, then taught in Glasgow. From 1883, when he was 785
The Profession appointed Professor of Latin and Greek at Mason College, he was active both in founding the new University of Birmingham and in campaigning for the reform of grammatical terminology. 1911 until Sonnenschein's death in 1929 constituted a period of consolidation, and also of long-drawn-out controversy with his arch-enemy, Jespersen. Sonnenschein's Parallel Grammar series (officially 1885-1903) comprised over twenty-five volumes covering Latin, Greek, English, French, German, Spanish, Welsh, and Dano-Norwegian, produced in conformity with his principle of uniformity of classification and terminology, uniformity of scope, and uniformity of size and type (not unlike Ratke's principle of harmony). Sonnenschein's activities from 1903-11 culminated in the Report of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology (JCGT 1911), and the ideas put forward there were incorporated in subsequent grammars of Latin, French, and English. The movement towards terminological simplification and unification involved the USA, France, Germany, and Austria, but was curtailed by the beginning of World War I. The publication of his New English Grammar and the fact that the JCGT report obtained
quasi-official status and continued reprinting until after World War II together ensured Sonnenschein's influence for several decades. Bibliography Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology 1911 On the Terminology of Grammar: Report of the Joint Committee on Grammatical Terminology. John Murray, London Somerset E J 1900 The Birth of a University: A passage in the life of E A Sonnenschein. Shakespeare Head Press, Oxford Sonnenschein E A 1916 A New English Grammar. Oxford University Press, Oxford Sonnenschein E A 1927 The Soul of Grammar. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Walmsley J B 1988 The Sonnenschein v. Jespersen controversy. In: Fries U, Heusser M (eds.) Meaning and Beyond: Ernst Leisi zum 70. Geburtstag. Narr, Tubingen Walmsley J B 1991 E A Sonnenschein and grammatical terminology. In: Leitner G (ed.) Perspectives on Traditional Grammars of English. Benjamins, Amsterdam Walmsley J B Sonnenschein's A New English Grammar. In: Tracy R (ed.) Who Climbs the Grammar-tree? Festschrift for D. Reibel. Niemeyer, Tubingen Walmsley J B in press L'entente cordiale grammaticale'— 1885-1915. In: Colombat B (ed.) Metalangage et terminologie linguistisque. Peeters, Louvain
Stern, H. H. (David) (1913-87) B. Harley and A. Weinrib
Hans Heinrich (David) Stern's central contribution to educational linguistics lies in the coherent theoretical framework he developed for the analysis of second language teaching. His most comprehensive work, Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching (1983), establishes the theoretical underpinnings of second language pedagogy from a historical perspective. Another seminal work on language teaching methodology, Issues and Options in Language Teaching, was published posthumously in 1992. It provides an overview of language teaching methodology as a basis for decision-making and future research. Born in Kassel, Germany, David Stern (1913-87) emigrated to Great Britain at age 19 and began his career as a teacher of modern languages in a grammar school. In 1956, he completed a Ph.D. on Parental Education and Parental Learning at the University of London Institute of Education, and from 1949 to 1965 taught educational psychology at the University of Hull. In the early 1960s his professional activities turned to second language pedagogy. In 1961-62 he served 786
with the UNESCO Institute of Education in Hamburg, where he edited the International Review of Education, organized a key conference on languages in primary education, and helped coordinate the International Study of Educational Achievement (IEA) in which 22 countries participated. These activities led to two publications (Stern 1967, 1969). In 1965, he went on to become a Reader in Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex. In 1968, he was invited to Canada as founding Director of the Modern Language Centre of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, a position he held for 14 years. Under his leadership the Modern Language Centre developed as a focus for research and graduate studies in bilingual education, the theory and practice of second language (L2) pedagogy, L2 curriculum development and evaluation, and L2 acquisition. Following his retirement, he continued to contribute to the field, and in 1985 launched a National Core French Study in collaboration with the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers. This major study laid the foundations for a mul-
Strevens, Peter (1922-89) tidimensional curriculum for French as a second language (LeBlanc 1990). Beyond the legacy provided by his many publications, David Stern is remembered by colleagues and students for his enthusiasm, warmth, and boundless energy. He was dedicated to the improvement of second language pedagogy and worked tirelessly both in Canada and internationally to share his knowledge, experience, and vision. The national and international influence of his work was acknowledged by several prestigious awards and by two honorary doctorates, one from the University of Hamburg in Germany, the other from Concordia University in Canada.
Bibliography LeBlanc R 1990 National Core French Study: A Synthesis. Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers, Ottawa, ON Stern H H 1967 Foreign Languages in Primary Education. Oxford University Press, Oxford Stern H H (ed.) 1969 Languages and the Young School Child. Oxford University Press, Oxford Stern H H 1983 Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Stern H H 1992 In: Allen P, Harley B (eds.) Issues and Options in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Strevens, Peter (1922-89) H. G. Widdowson
Peter Strevens played a key role in establishing applied linguistics as an academic subject, especially as it related to the teaching of English as a second language. After having studied under Daniel Jones at University College, London, his first post was as a lecturer in phonetics in the University of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) from 1949 to 1956. This set the key to his career in that it involved making the technicalities of phonetics relevant to the practicalities of pronunciation teaching. He continued his exploration of the relevance of the linguistic sciences to language pedagogy at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with Michael Halliday (see Halliday) and Angus Mclntosh. This resulted in the publication in 1964 of a book of enormous influence, which, in Britain at least, effectively established the credentials of applied linguistics as the principled study of language teaching and learning. In 1961, Strevens became professor of Contemporary English at the University of Leeds but when, three years later, the first chair of Applied Linguistics in Britain was set up at the University of Essex, he was the obvious person to be appointed to it. In 1973, he resigned to take up visiting professorships at the East-West Centre in Hawaii, and Concordia University in Montreal. Then in 1978, in a move which again signifies his concern for the practical accountability of ideas in applied linguistics, he became the director of a group of language schools, the Bell Educational Trust. Stevens's career was seemingly a varied and restless one, but it had an underlying consistency of purpose: the making of abstract ideas operational in the prac-
tical domain. He was remarkably sensitive to changing trends of thought about language, and quick to recognize their pedagogic significance. Thus, we find issues (Strevens 1977, 1980) which were to be subsequently taken up and developed in mainstream thinking, particularly how the description of varieties of English bears on the design of courses of language for specific purposes and the role of English as an international language. Nor was he content to talk about these issues in principle: he put them into practice himself, and his most notable achievement in this respect was his crucial contribution to SEASPEAK, the maritime equivalent of the English of air traffic control. As a manual of specific English for international use, this work effectively combines the two central themes of Strevens's thinking. Strevens published widely, but his contribution to applied linguistics was also through his influence as consultant and entrepreneur of ideas. He was in touch with people and projects all over the world: an international figure at the center of his own worldwide web of contact and collaboration. Bibliography Halliday M A K, Mclntosh A, Strevens P D 1964 The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. Longman, London Strevens P D 1977 New Orientations in the Teaching of English. Oxford University Press, Oxford Strevens P D 1980 The Teaching of English as an International Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford
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Swain, Merrill K. (1944-
)
A. Cumming
Professor Merrill K. Swain is a leading researcher and theorist on bilingualism in education. Her research has focused on immersion education in second languages, evaluating its long-term effectiveness, learning and teaching processes, and school policies. In collaboration with colleagues in Toronto and other scholars internationally, Swain's research has demonstrated the value and viability of the immersion model of education: A second language is taught and learned through instruction in school subjects in the second language, rather than as a school subject itself (Swain and Lapkin 1982; Cummins and Swain 1986). The impacts of this concept have been profound, for example, in reforming school policies and teaching practices for French in English-speaking Canada, English in Hong Kong, Spanish, French, and diverse other languages in the United States and Australia, in addition to scores of other countries around the world (Johnson and Swain 1997). Theoretically, Swain's article with Michael Canale (1980) on communicative competence has provided a seminal point of definition of students' abilities and learning potential for educators and researchers alike (Harley et al. 1990). Since the 1980s, Swain has been formulating and researching a theory of 'comprehensible output,' arguing that to achieve full proficiency in a second language people need to use the language purposefully to express themselves by speaking and writing it (Swain 1995). This concept has become a cornerstone of educational reforms to promote students' abilities to communicate effectively in second and foreign languages. Swain has worked since 1971 at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where her scholarship
has attracted extensive funding from scholarly granting councils, school boards, and government agencies. Swain initiated in 1973, Working Papers in Bilingualism, which published over its 19 issues much of the key, relevant research on bilingualism in education during the 1970s. She served as Head of the Modern Language Centre from 1981 to 1991. Swain has lectured on second language education around the world and served on numerous advisory panels to large-scale research projects and editorial boards for journals concerned with language education. In 1992, she was the recipient of the Canadian Educational Association's Whitworth award for excellence in educational research. In 1998-99, she was president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. Bibliography Canale M, Swain M 1980 Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1: 1-47 Cummins J, Swain M 1986 Bilingualism in Education: Aspects of Theory, Research and Practice. Longman, London Harley B, Allen P, Cummins J, Swain M (eds.) 1990 The Development of Second Language Proficiency. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Johnson R K, Swain M (eds.) 1979 Immersion Education: International Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Swain M 1995 Three functions of output in second language learning. In: Cook G, Seidlhofer B (eds.) Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics: Studies in Honour of H. G. Widdowson. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 125-44 Swain M, Lapkin S (eds.) 1982 Evaluating Bilingual Education: A Canadian Case Study. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, UK
Trim, John L. M. J. Sheils
John Trim graduated in German from University College, London in 1949 where he taught phonetics from 1949-1958, specializing in the comaparative phonetics of English and German with special reference to intonation. He was appointed to a university lectureship in phonetics and linguistics in University of Cambridge 788
in 1958. He set up and was the first Director of the Department of Linguistics in 1965. He was Director of the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research from 1978 to 1987. He is a Founder member of BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics) and organised the
Troike, Rudolph C. (1933second International Congress of Applied Linguistics in 1969 which marked the transition of AILA from a purely European to a world organization. He has been Director of successive Council of Europe Modern Languages Projects where his ability to synthesize a wide range of approaches into a coherent framework has been instrumental in developing basic principles guiding language learning and teaching since 1970. As chairman of a small working party set up to investigate the feasibility of a European unitcredit system for language learning by adults in 1971, he guided the development of a coherent and transparent language teaching policy emphasising the definition and interdependence of objectives, methods, materials, and assessment. Objectives were seen as the central point in the definition of language teaching policy and with his collaborators he developed the first detailed system for describing the functions performed by language in communication and a definition of the general and specific notions to be expressed. These were developed in detail with application to English by van Ek in The Threshold Level, subsequently revised as The Threshold Level 1990 and extended as part of a three-level system (Waystage, Threshold Level, Vantage Level). The principle has since been applied to over 20 European languages. He has been the architect and part author of a Common European Framework of reference being developed by the Council of Europe as a basis for reflection, planning, and mutual information with
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regard to objectives, methods, and proficiency among all members of the language teaching profession across Europe. John Trim is the author of numerous books and articles in the field of linguistics, phonetics, applied linguistics, language teaching, and speech therapy, has acted as consultant and author for television and radio courses, and is a member of the Editorial Board of a number of international journals. His achievements and contribution to the field have been acknowledged in the awarding of many honours in Europe and beyond, including honorary doctorates from the Universities of Dublin, Prague, Wolverhampton, and Oulu. Bibliography Trim J L M 1996 Modern Languages in the Council of Europe. Language Teaching Vol. 29, pp. 81-5, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Trim J L M, Coste D, North B, Sheils J 1998 Modern Languages: learning, teaching and assessment. A common European framework of reference. Language Teaching Vol. 31, pp. 136-51, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Trim J L M, van Ek J A 1991a The Threshold Level 1990. Council of Europe, Strasbourg and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Trim J L M, van Ek J A 1991b Waystage 1990. Council of Europe, Strasbourg and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Trim J L M, van Ek J A 1997 Vantage Level. Council of Europe, Strasbourg.
Troike, Rudolph C. (1933- ) G. R. Tucker
Rudy Troike was born in 1933 in Brownsville, Texas. He received his B.A. and M. A., both in Anthropology, from the University of Texas in 1954 and 1957, respectively, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in German with a concentration in Linguistics in 1959. Following completion of his graduate studies, Troike worked for 3 years with the English Language Program of Georgetown University of Ankara, Turkey. In 1962, he began his academic carer as a professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Texas where he remained, except for a year as Fulbright lecturer in Taiwan, until 1972 where he went to Washington as head of the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). Throughout his career, Troike's research and publications reflect his continuing commitment to edu-
cational and social equity. This commitment is evidenced by his early work on the East Texas dialect project (Troike and Galvan 1969) and by his close collaboration with the Texas Education Agency in the 1960s which helped to ensure state adoption of linguistically sophisticated textbooks. In addition, Troike has been a leading proponent for bilingual education in the United States (see, for example, Saville and Troike 1971; Troike 1977, 1978). He has argued forcefully for the implementation of carefully planned, well articulated bilingual education programs as a means of preserving and developing America's language resources for the twenty-first century. During the period 1978-80, Troike served as Deputy Director of the first federally-funded National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. 789
The Profession Troike was the third permanent head of CAL following Charles Ferguson and John Lotz. Troike's tenure was noteworthy for three major concentrations of activity: first, his concern with bilingual education as evidenced by his directing the development of the Master Plan for the San Francisco Unified School District in response to the Supreme Court decision in the Lau v. Nichols case; second, his leadership in developing the National Indochinese Clearinghouse and Technical Assistance Center to assist in meeting the language and cultural orientation needs of hundreds of thousands of indochinese refugees to the United States—a program which continues at CAL today; and third, his work to train future generations of linguists and language educators for the Middle East and North Africa through CAL's sponsorship of a series of rotating Middle East Summer Linguistic Institutes which were funded collaboratively by the US Department of State, Ford Foundation, British Council, and Arab League Educational, Cultural, and Social Organization. Troike (1986) reflects on the activities during his CAL years in a festschrift prepared on the occasion of Charles Ferguson's 60th birthday. Following a 10-year appointment at the University of Illinois, Troike relocated to the University of Arizona in 1989 where he continues to serve as Professor and Head of the English Department. At Arizona, Troike has renewed his continuing interest in indigenous American languages (see, for example, Troike 1956, 1963, 1981, 1996) as well as his more general
concern for facilitating accessibility to bibliographic information about the languages of the world (Troike 1990). Bibliography Saville M R, Troike R C 1971 A Handbook of Bilingual Education. TESOL, Washington, DC Troike R C 1956 Commanche linguistic acculturation: A critique. International Journal of American Linguistics 22: 213-15 Troike R C 1963 The origins of Plains Mescalism. American Anthropologist 64: 946-63 Troike R C 1977 The contribution of linguistics to bilingualbicultural education. Journal of the National Association for Bilingual Education 1: 55-8 Troike R C 1978 Research evidence for the effectiveness of bilingual education. NABE Journal 3: 13-24 Troike R C 1981 Subject-object concord in Coahuilteco. Language 57: 658-73 Troike R C 1986 The Center for Applied Linguistics 19721977. In: Fishman J A (ed.) The Fergusonian Impact. I (From Phonology to Society). Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 537^5 Troike R C 1990 Bibliography of Bibliographies of the Languages of the World, Vol. I: General and Indo-European Languages of Europe. John Benjamins, Amsterdam Troike R C 1996 Sketch of Coahuilteco: A language isolate of Texas. In: Goddard I (ed.) Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 17: Languages. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, pp. 644-65 Troike R C, Galvan MM 1969 The East Texas Dialect Project: A pattern for education. In: Aarons A C et al. (eds.) Linguistic Cultural Differences and American Education (Special Anthology Issue of the Florida FL Reporter), pp. 29-31 and 152-53
Tucker, G. Richard (1942-
)
J. Crandall
Dick Tucker was born May 3, 1942 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. in Psychology from Williams College in 1964, and his M.A. and Ph.D in Psycholinguistics in 1965 and 1967, respectively, from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Upon completion of his graduate studies, Tucker worked for 18 months as a Ford Foundation Consultant to the Philippine Normal College in Manila, where he helped introduce a new specialization in Psycholinguistics into the graduate TESOL program. With Bonifacio Sibayan and Fe Otanes, he also planned and implemented the National Language Policy Survey of the Philippines which focused on the role of education in helping to develop language proficiency (Tucker 1968). He returned to McGill University in 790
1969, where he began a long career with a triple appointment in Psychology, Linguistics, and Football. Tucker's major research interests have focused on bilingualism, language policy, and the evaluation of innovative language education programs in diverse settings. At McGill, he and Wallace Lambert undertook what was to become a landmark longitudinal study of early immersion in a foreign language (French), the St. Lambert Experiment (Lambert and Tucker, 1972). Using multiple measures, including the role of individual differences in second language acquisition in different contexts (Tucker et al. 1976), he and Lambert followed the immersion students through high school (Lambert and Tucker 1979).
Twaddell, William Freeman (1906-82) During his tenure at McGill, Tucker undertook two additional Ford Foundation Consultancies with the American University of Cairo, Egypt (AUC) and the American University of Beirut, Lebanon (AUB), where he taught courses in the M.A. TESOL program and conducted a number of studies of the language learning strategies of Arab and Hebrew students learning English (Scott and Tucker 1974; Cooper et al. 1979). While in Beirut, he also designed and implemented the English Language Policy Survey of Jordan with Clifford Prator (Harrison et al. 1975). In 1978, Tucker left McGill to become the President of the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington, DC, the fourth permanent head of CAL. At CAL, he was a frequent consultant to governmental and international organizations seeking to develop effective language policies. In that role, he often called upon institutions to work to develop a language competent United States society, one in which all individuals are provided access to proficiency in English and other language (Tucker, 1986), through innovative language education programs such as contentbased language instruction and two-way developmental (immersion) bilingual programs (Crandall & Tucker, 1990). Tucker's tenure was co-terminous with the period of the second largest influx of refugees into the United States in the twentieth century, and under his leadership, CAL became the major national source of information and the languages and cultures of refugees from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Eastern and Central Europe. While at CAL, Tucker maintained a courtesy adjunct professorial appointment with Georgetown University but in 1992 he left CAL to return to fulltime teaching in the Department of Modern Lan-
guages at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he continues to engage in research on second language acquisition through innovative language education programs, including an ongoing study of Japanese immersion students, with Richard Donato and Janis Antonek (Donato et al. 1996). As Head of the Department, he has greatly expanded its offerings and initiated a doctoral program in Second Language Acquisition, with a focus on less commonly taught languages, such as Japanese and Chinese. Bibliography Cooper R L, Olshtain E, Tucker G R, Waterbury M 1979 The acquisition of complex English structures by adult native speakers of Arabic and Hebrew. Language Learning 29:255-75 Donato R, Antonek J, Tucker G R 1996 Monitoring and assessing a Japanese FLES program: Ambiance and achievement. Language Learning 46:497-528 Hamayan G R, Genesee F 1976 Affective, cognitive, and social factors in second language acquisition. Canadian Modern Language Review 32:115-341 Harrison W, Prator C, Tucker G R 1975 English-Language Survey of Jordan: A Case Study in Language Planning. Center for Applied Linguistics, Arlington, VA Lambert W E, Tucker G R 1972 Bilingual Education of Children. Newbury House, Rowley, MA Lambert W E, Tucker G R 1979 Graduates of early immersion: Retrospective views of grade 11 students and their parents. In: Obadia A (ed.) Proceedings of the C. A. I. T. Second National Convention, Ottawa, 1979 Scott M S, Tucker G R 1974 Error analysis and Englishlanguage strategies of Arab students. Language Learning 24:69-97 Tucker G R 1968 Psycholinguistic research in the Philippines. Philippine Journal for Language Teaching 5:29-42 Tucker G R 1986 Developing a language-competent American society. In: Tannen D (ed.) Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics 1985 (pp. 26374). Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC
Twaddell, William Freeman (1906-82) W. N. Francis
W. Freeman Twaddell, as he preferred to be called, was born in Rye, New York, on March 22, 1906, and died in Providence, Rhode Island, on March 1, 1982. His father was an organist and choir director, who moved several times during Freeman's youth, finally settling in Durham, North Carolina. There Freeman attended Duke University, graduating B.A. in 1926. In 1964 his alma mater awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. He went to Harvard for graduate study in German, taking the degree of Ph.D.
in 1930. His academic career began in 1929 at the University of Wisconsin, where he moved through the ranks, becoming professor of German and chairman of the German Department in 1937. In 1946 Twaddell moved to Brown University, where he remained for the rest of his life, becoming emeritus in 1971. Soon after moving to Brown he established a Department of Linguistics, of which he served as chairman until 1968. Within a few years he relinquished the chair of German so that he could
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The Profession devote his efforts to developing a linguistics program and building a department to support it. During this period he spent several years serving linguistic interests beyond Brown: as visiting editor at G. and C. Merriam Co., where he assisted in the work of editing Webster's New International Dictionary, Third Edition, as visiting professor at the University of Hamburg, and as visiting lecturer in Cairo, Tokyo, and the Philippines. In 1957 he was president of the Linguistic Society of America. His professional knowledge and wisdom were sought for many committees and institutions, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Twaddell's scholarly career divides itself into two phases, roughly coterminous with his terms at Wisconsin and Brown. During the earlier years, he quickly became one of the most distinguished of the 'post-Bloomfieldian' school of linguists, associating in America with Leonard Bloomfield, Einar Haugen (see Haugen, Einar), and Yuen Ren Chao, and in Europe with Trubetzkoy and Jakobson. His 1935 monograph On Defining the Phoneme became an immediate classic and is still cited today in spite of sweeping changes in linguistic theory. A series of papers on the historical phonology of German established him as a significant intermediary between traditional philology and the insights of structuralism. During his years at Brown, Freeman's interest concentrated on theories, problems, and techniques in foreign language teaching. Already at Wisconsin he had collaborated with Helmut Rehder in establishing a conversational approach to the teaching of German and writing a textbook to implement it. His first appointment to the new department at Brown was Dr Patricia O'Connor, a specialist in language teaching, especially English as a second language. Meanwhile he continued to collaborate with Helmut Rehder and later Ursula Thomas (also at Wisconsin) on a series of textbooks for the teaching of German. He also was called upon to speak at various conferences on such subjects as 'Vocabulary expansion in the TESOL classroom' and 'Departmental responsibilities for
foreign language teacher education.' Together with O'Connor, he was influential in establishing the Japanese English Language Exploratory Committee (ELEC). One innovation in his German texts was the use of the computer to analyze the vocabulary of reading selections. This early interest in computers led him to inspire the Brown Standard Corpus of PresentDay American English, a million-word database developed by his colleagues Nelson Francis and Henry Kucera. Meanwhile his interest in theoretical linguistics, though secondary to pedagogy, continued to inspire occasional papers, notably 'The English verb auxiliaries,' a mini-masterpiece still influential in English grammatical studies. Freeman had many other interests beside scholarship and pedagogy. He was devoted to his wife, Helen, and to his three sons. He was an accomplished pianist, and a devotee of classical music, records of which he played at high volume when studying or writing. His interest in German literature resulted in a Wortindex zu Goethes Faust, with a later expansion as Complete German-English Vocabulary to Goethe's Faust (both in collaboration), an edition of the Hildebrandslied, and a translation of the play The Saint by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. In his last years he engaged himself in editing a volume of Old Testament Readings, a selection of Old Testament passages of literary interest and value. And those who knew him will remember him as a master of impromptu wit and an inveterately outrageous punster. Much of the information in this article is derived from the comprehensive obituary and bibliography in Hill (1983). Bibliography Hill A A 1983 William Freeman Twaddell. Lg 59:347-54 Twaddell W F 1935 On defining the phoneme. Language Monographs 16 Twaddell W F 1948 The prehistoric Germanic short syllables. Lg 24:139-51 Twaddell W F 1963 The English Verb Auxiliaries, 2nd edn. Brown University Press, Providence, RI
Valdman, Albert (1931- ) B. Spolsky
Born in Paris in 1931, Albert Valdman, without doubt one of the leading applied linguists of this generation, was educated at the University of Pennsylvania where he received a B.A. in Romance Languages and at Cornell University where he earned an M.A. and
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Ph.D. in French Linguistics. In the tradition of Cornell-trained applied linguists, his first position was at the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State in Washington, beginning his lifelong devotion to ensuring that language teaching be based on a
van Els, Theo (1936thorough understanding of contemporary linguistics. After a spell at the Pennsylvania State University, he joined the faculty of Indiana University in Bloomington in 1960. Appointed to the Department of French and Italian (where he still directs the graduate program in French Linguistics), he was invited by a group of linguists scattered throughout the university to put together a Department of Linguistics, which he chaired from 1963 until 1968. Now nearly 40 years on the Indiana University faculty, Valdman holds the distinguished title of Rudy Professor of French and Italian and of Linguistics and also serves as chairman of the Committee for Research and Development in Language Instruction and directs the Creole Institute. He has held visiting appointments at the University of the West Indies (Jamaica) and at the University of Nice and taught in summer institutes at Harvard University and the University of Oregon. Valdman has held Guggenheim, NATO-NSF, Fulbright, and Senior Fulbright Research fellowships. His research and publications span a broad range of areas in applied and descriptive linguistics, including second language acquisition, foreign language teaching, pidgin and Creole studies (he has had a major hand in developing research and teaching in Creoles), and French linguistics (he is one of the pioneer researchers in the area of the study of French outside of France, especially in the Americas). The author or editor of more than 40 books, Valdman co-edited the Learner's Dictionary of Haitian Creole, hailed as an unequaled resource for Americans who seek to learn the language. Among his major books or edited volumes are: Trends in Language
)
Teaching (1964), Le français hors de France (1979), Haitian Creole-French-English Dictionary (1981), and Bien entendu! Introduction a la phonetique française (1993). In addition to publishing more than 200 articles and reviews in major journals in linguistics, he has been involved in the preparation of foreign language materials, including a high school French series and beginning French college textbooks. He is founder and editor of the influential journal Studies in Second Language Acquisition (see Journals) and a review editor of the French Review. Valdman has made significant contributions to the profession of educational linguistics. He served eight years as secretary-treasurer of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. He played a crucial role in integrating American applied linguistics into the international association, serving for six years as president of AILA, the International Association of Applied Linguistics. He has been president of the American Association of Teachers of French. Valdman has been named Commandeur dans 1'Ordre des Palmes Académiques of France, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchatel. Bibliography Valdman A (ed.) 1966 Trends in Language Teaching. McGraw-Hill, New York Valdman A (ed.) 1981 Haitian Creole-English-French Dictionary. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN Valdman A 1992 En route: Introduction au français et an monde francophone. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Valdman A (ed.) 1997 French and Creole in Louisiana. Plenum, New York
van Els, Theo (1936-
)
K. de Bot
Theo van Els has been one of the leading figures in Applied Linguistics in Europe since the early 1970s. After his graduation in English Language and Literature he has taught English in secondary education for a couple .of years. In 1965 he joined, and was soon after appointed director of, the recently established Institute of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nijmegen. After finishing his dissertation on a manuscript of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in 1972, he devoted himself to the study of Applied Linguistics through further specialized training at the University of Edinburgh and the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. In 1981 he was appointed Chair of
Applied Linguistics at the University of Nijmegen. From 1994 until his retirement in 2000 he has been rector of the university. Van Els has been very influential in establishing Applied Linguistics as an academic discipline through his work on a number of topics. He has always had an interest in the history of language teaching in Europe, in psycholinguistic aspects of bilingualism, and in curriculum development for foreign languages. In cooperation with Richard D. Lambert at the National Foreign Language Center in Washington, Van Els, who was a member of its Advisory Board for some time, developed a very successful line of
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The Profession research on foreign language attrition, which he viewed as essential for the development of a comprehensive language policy. His major contribution to Applied Linguistics is indubitably in the field of language policy and planning. His efforts to develop Applied Linguistics as an academic discipline led to the setting up of a course in Applied Linguistics first as a subsidiary subject and later as a full program. For this course, van Els and his colleagues wrote a handbook that was published in Dutch in 1977 and later in a revised form in English (1984). This handbook (Applied Linguistics and the Learning and Teaching of Foreign Languages), which was very well received, can claim to be the first comprehensive overview of the field in a single volume. In it an attempt is made to establish a link between research in first and second language acquisition and various aspects of language teaching, in particular curriculum development, language teaching methodology, and language testing. In 1989 he became chairman of a task force set up by the Dutch Ministry of Education to develop a National Action Program for Foreign Languages. This appointment was due to his many activities on the European and national level related to foreign language policy, in particular his seminal work on the assessment of foreign language needs. In 1992 he became chairman of the task force for the implementation of the National Action Program. Through his deep knowledge of the field and his well-developed political skills he managed to put foreign language
teaching and learning on the national educational agenda, which turned out to have a profound effect on educational changes that took place in the following years. The Dutch National Action Program is unique in its wide scope and its strong empirical basis. It has not only led to a more coherent national foreign language teaching policy and an awareness of the importance of foreign languages in many sections of Dutch society, but it has also served as a template for the development of national language policies in various other countries, including Israel and Japan. Van Els has published widely on a variety of topics and has been a teacher and advisor of most prominent applied linguists in the Netherlands. There is no doubt that he is the most important contributor to the prominent position that the Netherlands currently holds in the field of Applied Linguistics. Bibliography van Els T 1994 Foreign Language Planning in the Netherlands. In: Lambert R (Ed.) Language planning around the World: Contexts and systemic change. The National Foreign Language Center, Washington, DC, pp. 47-68 van Els T, Bongaerts T, Extra G, van Os C, Janssen-van Dieten A 1984 Applied Linguistics and the learning and teaching of foreign languages. Edward Arnold, London van Els T, van Hest E 1992 The Dutch National Action Programme on Foreign Languages. Ministry of Education, Den Haag van Els T, Weltens B 1989 Foreign language loss research from a European point of view. ITL-Review of Applied Linguistics, 83-84: 19-35
Victor, Wilhelin (1850-1918) K. Grotsch
Victor, philologist and phonetician, was born on December 25, 1870 in Cleeberg near Hachenberg/Nassau. In 1869 he began to study theology and classical philology at the University of Leipzig. Later on he also studied musicology and the Sanskrit language. He moved to Berlin and then to Marburg where he studied with F. Justi (1837-1907). In 1872 he went to England where he taught German, Latin, and music at several schools. In 1874 he returned to Marburg to study modern languages with E. Stengel (1845-1935). From 1875 on he worked as a teacher in Essen, Dusseldorf, and Wiesbaden, and as a headmaster in Friedrichsdorf/Taunus. In 1882 he became lecturer in Teutonic Languages at the University College of Liverpool. He was the first person to be appointed associate professor of English philology at
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the University of Marburg in 1884 and 10 ten years later he was promoted to professor. From 1888 he edited the periodical Phonetische Studien that was continued in 1894 as Die Neueren Sprachen. Zeitschrift fur den neusprachlichen Unterricht, which is still published in the late twentieth century. In 1909 he obtained the chair of English philology. He died on September 22, 1918, in Marburg. Victor's first scientific activity was in the field of Romance philology, but after his second sojourn in England he turned to English philology exclusively. Influenced by the English reform movement he aimed at a practical foundation of modern language teaching based on spoken language and not completely dependent on the reading of texts. As regards the acquisition of foreign languages, he laid stress on correct pro-
Widdowson, H. G. Vietor W 1884 Elemente der Phonetik des Deutschen, Englischen und Franzosischen. Gebr. Henninger, Heilbronn Vietor W 1885a Der Sprachunterricht mufi umkehren: Beitrag zur Uberburdungsfrage von Quousque tandem. O. R. Reisland, Leipzig Vietor W 1885b Die Aussprache der in dem Worterverzeichnis fur die deutsche Rechtschreibung zum Gebrauch in den preussischen Schulen enthaltenen Worter. Mil einer Einleitung: Phonetisches—Orthoepisches. Henninger, Heilbronn Vietor W 1888 Einfuhrung in das Studium der englischen Philologie. N. G. Elwert, Marburg Vietor W 1895 Die Northumbrischen Runensteine. N. G. Elwert, Marburg Vietor W 1902 Die Methodik des neusprachlichen Unterrichts. B. G. Teubner, Leipzig Vietor W 1906 Shakespeare's Pronunciation, A Shakespeare Bibliography Phonology: With a rime-index to the poems as a pronouncing vocabulary. N. G. Elwert, Marburg Mutschmann H 1939 Wilhelm Viëtor. In: Schnack I (ed.) Lebensbilder aus Kurhessen und Waldeck 1830-1930, vol. Vietor W 1909 Die Aussprache des Schriftdeutschen. O. R. Reisland, Leipzig 1. N. G. Elwert, Marburg
nunciation and rejected grammatical drills. With his demand for the improvement of modern language instruction (Vietor 1885a) and its theoretical formulation (Victor 1902), he initiated a lengthy process of reform in Germany. In order to support his practical intentions scientifically, he concentrated on phonetics (Viëtor 1884, 1906) and only occasionally turned to special philological problems (e.g., Viëtor 1895). He was among the first members of the International Phonetic Association (founded in 1886). He took part in the codification of the German standard pronunciation and rendered outstanding services to the teaching of German as a foreign language (Viëtor 1885b, 1909).
Widdowson, H. G. G. Cook
H. G. Widdowson is the leading theorist of Applied Linguistics. He has exerted an extensive influence upon the discipline from the 1970s onwards, publishing authoritatively on almost every aspect of the subject. His main work has been on the definition of Applied Linguistics itself, on discourse analysis, language education, and literary stylistics. His analysis of language in use incorporates complex contextual variables, while maintaining and demonstrating that these can be studied in a rational and principled manner. His model of Applied Linguistics thus achieves a balance between relativism and universalism, creating a dynamic interaction between the two. Applied Linguistics is, in his view, a discipline which mediates between theoretical linguistics and professional activity, contributing to both but driven by neither (1979). It is concerned with theory as much as with practice, with education rather than merely training, and should remain independent both of other academic disciplines, and short-term commercial concerns (1979, 1983, 1998a). For applied linguistics, he created a distinctive approach to discourse analysis. This introduced important new distinctions between cohesion and coherence, text and discourse, and for language teaching interpreted insights from pragmatics in order to understand the communicative needs- of language learners, and create effective ways of developing them (1973, 1978, 1979, 1983, 1984,
1990a). In literary stylistics, he introduced a new model based upon discourse analysis (1975), analyzing relationships between linguistic detail and literary effects, and developing innovative ways of drawing these to student attention in literature teaching (1992). In all these fields, his writing—renowned for its lucidity and elegance—unites professional relevance and academic advancement, while also achieving personal significance for many practitioners. After working on materials development and teacher education as a British Council officer in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Widdowson began his academic career in 1969 in Edinburgh University, in the first Applied Linguistics department in Britain. His doctoral thesis (Widdowson 1973), unpublished but frequently cited, established the basis for his work of the later 1970s and early 1980s. From 1977 to 1995, he was Professor of English for Speakers of Other Languages at London University Institute of Education, where he continued working until 1998, while also holding concurrent appointments as Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex (199298) and the University of Vienna (1995-98). In 1998 he was appointed Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Vienna. In 1980, he was founder, with Patrick Allen and Bernard Spolsky, of Applied Linguistics., the discipline's leading journal. Extensive editorial (1989 onwards, 1996 onwards) and advisory
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The Profession work with Oxford University Press has both exerted further influence on the direction on Applied Linguistics and provided guidance and support to many new authors entering the field. During the 1980s and 1990s, Widdowson has maintained a strong defence of the rationalist basis of applied linguistics, and the need for it to eschew easy answers to practical problems. In this cause, he has mounted a strong critique of 'solutions' emerging from second language acquisition research (1990a, 1990b), critical discourse analysis (1995, 1998b), corpus linguistics (1991), and systemic-functional linguistics (1997) engaging in constructive debate with leading writers in all of these fields. In his commentary on critical discourse analysis, he has argued that a principled enquiry into text patterning and persuasion is much needed, but should derive from a coherent theory of linguistic description and interpretation. See also: Applied Linguistics. Bibliography Widdowson H G 1973 An applied linguistic approach to discourse analysis. Unpublished Ph.D Thesis, Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh Widdowson H G 1975 Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature. London, Longman Widdowson H G 1978 Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford University Press, Oxford
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Widdowson H G 1979 Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, Oxford Widdowson H G 1983 Learning Purpose and Language Use. Oxford University Press, Oxford Widdowson H G 1984 Explorations in Applied Linguistics, 2. Oxford University Press, Oxford Widdowson H G, Candlin C (eds.) 1989 A Scheme for Teacher Education. Oxford University Press, Oxford Widdowson H G 1990a Aspects of Language Teaching. Oxford University Press, Oxford Widdowson H G 1990b Discourses of enquiry and conditions of relevance. In: Alatis J E (ed.) Linguistics, Language Teaching and Language Acquisition. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Widdowson H G 1991 The description and prescription of language. In: Alatis J E (ed.) Linguistics and Language Pedagogy: The State of the Art. Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC Widdowson H G 1992 Practical Stylistics: An Approach to Poetry. Oxford University Press, Oxford Widdowson H G 1995 Review of Fairclough's Discourse and Social Change. Applied Linguistics 16(4):510-16 Widdowson H G (ed.) 1996 The Oxford Introductions to Language Study. Oxford University Press, Oxford Widdowson H G 1997 The use of grammar, the grammar of use. Functions of Language 4(2): 145-68 Widdowson H G 1998a Retuning, calling the tune, and paying the piper: A reaction to Rampton. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 8(1): 131-40 Widdowson H G 1998b The theory and practice of Critical Discourse Analysis Applied Linguistics 19(1): 136-51
Alphabetical List of Articles
African American Vernacular English Age in Second Language Learning Alatis, James Efstathios (1926- ) Ann Arbor Case Applied Linguistics Ascham, Roger (1515-68) ASTP Australian Indigenous Languages Australian Minority Languages Basic English Becoming Bilingual Bilingual Education Bilingualism, Individual Bilingualism, Societal Black English (UK) Canadian Language Education Policy Candlin, Christopher N. (1940-) Carroll, John Bissell (1916-) Caxton, William (ca. 1415-91) Cazden, Courtney B (1925- ) Classroom Language Clay, Marie M.( 1926-) Comenius, Jan Amos Komensky (1592-1670) Communication Strategies Computer-assisted Language Learning Content-based Instruction (CBI) Contrastive and Error Analysis Cooper, Robert Leon (1931-) Corder, S. Pit (1918-90) Culture Deafness and Sign Language Instruction Dictionaries for Language Learners Diglossia Discourse in the Language Classroom Educational Failure Educational Linguistics Educational Linguistics on the Web Elphinston, James (1721-1809) English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales)
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Alphabetical List of Articles
English Teaching in Australia English Teaching in Canada English Teaching in England and Wales English Teaching in Scotland English Teaching in USA Ethics in Educational Linguistics Ferguson, Charles A. (1921-98) Finocchiaro, Mary Bonomo (1913-96) Fishman, Joshua A. (1926- ) Fluency and Accuracy Foreign Language Testing French Teaching in France Gender and Language General Introduction: The Field of Educational Linguistics Grammar (Mother Tongue) Grammar Acquisition Grammar in British Schools Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language) Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue) Greenbaum, Sidney (1929-96) Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood (1925-) Haugen, Einar (1906-94) Heath, Shirley Brice Hill, Archibald A. (1902-92) History of Second Language Teaching Home and School Language Hornby, Albert Sidney (1898-1978) Hymes, Dell Hathaway (1927- ) Immersion Indian Language Education Policy Input and Interaction Intensity Interculrural Discourse Interlanguage Irish Language Education Policy Japanese Language Education Policy Jones, Daniel (1881-1967) Journals Kaplan, Robert B. Kennedy, Benjamin Hall (1804-89) Krashen, Stephen D. (1941- ) Labov, William (1927-) Lado, Robert (1915-95) Lambert, Wallace E. (1922- ) Language Acquisition 798
Alphabetical List of Articles Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability Language Across the Curriculum Language and the Brain Language Awareness Language Diffusion Policy Language Disorders Language Education Policy—Africa Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries Language Education Policy—Asia Language Education Policy—Europe Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union Language Education Policy—Latin America Language Education Policy—Pacific Language for Special Purposes Language for Special Purposes: Pedagogy Language Laboratory Language Loyalty Language Testing Language Testing in Mother Tongue Language Testing: Alternative Methods Language Testing: Fundamentals Language Testing: Impact Language Testing: Methods Language Testing: Users and Uses Learning Strategies Lee, William Rowland (1911-96) Lexicology Lexis: Acquisition Linguicide Linguistics and Language Learning Listening in a Second Language Listening: Second Language Pedagogy Literacy Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness Literacy: Phonological Awareness Literacy: Research and Method Literature Teaching Maori Language Revitalization Minority Language Rights Minority Languages Miscue Analysis Morphology Motivation Mulcaster, Richard (1532-1611) Multilingual States
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Alphabetical List of Articles
Multilingualism National Language Policy and Education National Languages National Oracy Project National Writing Projects Native Speaker Needs Analysis New Information Technology in Language Education Nickel, Gerhard (1928-) Nida, Eugene Albert (1914-) Observing Classroom Language Oracy Palmer, Harold Edward (1877-1949) Passy, Paul Edouard (1859-1940) Pathology: Intervention Pathology: Overview Paulston, Christina Bratt (1932-) Pedagogy Phonetic Pedagogy Phonology in Language Acquisition Phonology in Second Language Acquisition Piaget, Jean (1896-1980) Pitman, Sir Isaac (1813-97) Postliteracy Prescription in Dictionaries Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar Professional Associations Pronunciation Quirk, Charles Randolph (1920-) Ratke, Wolfgang (1571-1635) Readability Reading and Writing Disorders Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention Reading Difficulties Reading in a Second language Reading Inventories Reading Recovery Reading Teaching: Materials Reading Teaching: Methods Reading: Acquisition Reading: Early Reading: Second Language Reading: Testing Reading: Theories Research Centers 800
Alphabetical List of Articles Richards, I. A. (1893-1979) Rivers, Wilga(l919-) Robinett, Betty Wallace (1919-) School Language Policies Schools Council UK Second Language Acquisition: Conversation Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories Second language Acquisition: Sign Language Second Language Learning Second Language Learning: Individual Differences Second Language Teaching Second Language Teaching Methods Semantics Smith, Henry Lee (1913-72) Socialization Sociolinguistics Sonnenschein, Edward Adolf (1851-1929) Speaking in a Second language Speaking: Second Language Pedagogy Spelling Spelling Errors: English Spelling Tests Spelling: Invented Spelling: Learning Standard English Standardization Standards, Scales, and Guidelines Starting Early Stern, H. H. (David) (1913-87) Strevens, Peter (1922-89) Summer Institute of Linguistics Swain, Merrill K. (1944-) Sweden: Immigrant Languages Syntax in Second Language Acquisition Systemic Grammar Applied Teaching Endangered Languages Text Textbooks The Blind Child The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language Traditional Religious Education and Literacy in Developing Countries Trim, John L. M. Troike, Rudolph C. (1933-) Tucker, G. Richard (1942-) Twaddell, William Freeman (1906-82)
801
Alphabetical List of Articles Ulpan Valdman, Albert (1931-) Van Eis,Theo (1936-) Victor, Wilhelm (1850-1918) Vocabulary in Language Acquisition Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy Wales: Language Education Policy Widdowson, H. G. Writing in a Second language Writing in School Writing Instruction Writing: Process Approach Writing: Second Language Pedagogy
802
List of Contributors Contributors are listed in alphabetical order together with their affiliations. Titles of articles which they have written follow in alphabetical order, along with the respective page numbers. Co-authorship is indicated by *. AARTS, B. (University College London, UK) Greenbaum, Sidney (1929-96): 760 ABBOTT, GERRY (University of Manchester, UK) The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language: 560 AGER, D. (University of Aston, Birmingham, UK) French Teaching in France: 384 ALATIS, J. E. (Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA) Finocchiaro, Mary Bonomo (1913-96): 758; Lado, Robert (1915-95): 770; Lee, William Rowland (1911-96): 111
ALLWRIGHT, D. (Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada) Discourse in the Language Classroom: 319 ANTHONY, E. M. (Allison Park, PA, USA) Alatis, James Efstathios (1926- ): 748 ARNOLD, H. (Flint College, Suffolk, UK) Miscue Analysis: 427 ATKINSON, M. (University of Essex, UK) Language Acquisition: Formal Models and Learnability: 230 BALL, A. F. (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA) * Standard English: 205 BARRETT, M. D. (University of Surrey, Guildford, UK) Vocabulary in Language Acquisition: 244 BEARD, R. (University of Leeds, UK) Reading Teaching: Methods: 457 BENDOR-SAMUEL, J. (Summer Institute of Linguistics, High Wycombe, UK) Summer Institute of Linguistics: 739 BENTLEY, D. (Oxford Brookes University, UK) Spelling: 467 BENTON, L. (Maplewood, NJ, USA) Postliteracy: 178 BLANC, M. (Sheepscombe, Gloucestershire, UK) Bilingualism, Societal: 31 BOYD, S. (Gothenberg University, Sweden) Sweden: Immigrant Languages: 73 BRISK, M. E. (Boston University, MA, USA) Bilingual Education: 311 BRYANT, P. E. (University of Oxford, UK) Literacy: Phonological Awareness: 169 BUTLER, C. S. (University of Nottingham, UK) Systemic Grammar Applied: 419 803
List of Contributors BYERS BROWN, B.f (University of Manchester, UK) Pathology: Intervention: 266; Reading and Writing Disorders: 275 BYGATE, M. (University of Leeds, UK) Speaking: Second Language Pedagogy: 668 CAIRNS, R. (Edinburgh, UK) English Teaching in Scotland: 380 CARTER, R. A. (University of Nottingham, UK) *Dictionaries for Language Learners: 345; English Teaching in England and Wales: 378; Literature Teachiw 425 CATFORD, J. C. (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA) Phonetic Pedagogy: 644 CAZDEN, C. B. (Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, USA) Heath, Shirley Brice: 762; Socialization: 63 CHAPELLE, C. A. (Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA) Language Testing: Methods: 721 CLARK, J. L. (Institute of Language in Education, Hong Kong, China) Needs Analysis: 539 CLYNE, M. (Monash University, Clayton, Vic, Australia) Australian Minority Languages: 80; Intercultural Discourse: 500 COLLINS, B. S. (University of Leiden, The Netherlands) Jones, Daniel (1881-1967): 766 CONNOR, U. (Indiana University School of Liberal Arts, Indianapolis, IN, USA) Writing in a Second Language: 306 COOK, G. (University of Reading, UK) Widdowson, H. G.: 795 COOPER, J. M. (Topsham, Exeter, UK) Pathology: Overview: 271 CORSON, D. J. (The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, ON, Canada) Language Across the Curriculum: 323; School Language Policies: 336 COWIE, A. P. (University of Leeds, UK) Lexicology: 349 CRANDALL, J. (University of Maryland Baltimore County, MD, USA) Content-based Instruction (CBI): 604; Tucker, G. Richard (1942- ): 790 CULLEN, C. (University of York, UK) Prescriptive and Descriptive Grammar: 204 CUMMING, A. (Maquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia) Swain, Merrill K. (1944- ): 788 CZERNIEWSKA, P. (London, UK) National Writing Projects: 387; Writing: Process Approach: 475 DALPHINIS, M. (London Borough of Hackney, London, UK) Black English (UK): 189 DASWANI, C. J. (National Council for Educational Research & Training, New Delhi, India) Literacy: 159 DA VIES, A. (University of Edinburgh, UK) Ethics in Educational Linguistics: 21; Native Speaker: 532 804
List of Contributors DAVIES, F. I. (University of Liverpool, UK) Textbooks'. 337 DE BoT, K. (Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, The Netherlands) van Els, Theo (1936- ): 793 DIRVEN, R. (University of Duisburg, Germany) Grammar (Mother Tongue): 403 DITTMAR, N. (FB Germanistik Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany) Semantics: 587 DONALDSON, M. L. (University of Edinburgh, UK) Piaget, Jean (1896-1980): 778 DORNYEI, Z. (Thames Valley University, London, UK) Motivation: 525 DOWNING, B. T. (Minneapolis, MN, USA) Robinett, Betty Wallace (1919- ): 783 EASTMAN, C. M. (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA) National Languages: 147 EDMUNDSON, A. (National Hospitals College of Speech Sciences, London, UK) * Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention: 440 EDWARDS, A. D. (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK) *Observing Classroom Language: 325 EDWARDS, J. R. (St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada) . Educational Failure: 192 EDWARDS, M. L. (Syracuse University, NY, USA) Phonology in Language Acquisition: 241 ELLEY, W. B. (University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand) Grammar Teaching (Mother Tongue): 410 ESKEY, D. E. (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA) Krashen, Stephen D. (1941- ): 769 FARLEY-WINER, C. A. (Buffalo, NY, USA) Smith, Henry Lee (1913-72): 784 FARR, M. (University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA) * Standard English: 205 FINE, J. (Bar-ILan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel) Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood (1925- ): 760 FISHMAN, J. A. (Bronx, NY, USA) Ferguson, Charles A. (1921-98): 757 FLETCHER, P. (University of Hong Kong, China) Language Acquisition: 225 Fox, J. D. (Centre for IT Development, Norwich, UK) Computer-assisted Language Learning: 355 FRANCIS, W. N. (Brown University, Providence, RI, USA) Twaddell, William Freeman (1906-82): 791 FREEDMAN, S. W. (University of California at Berkeley, CA, USA) Writing Instruction: 481 805
List of Contributors GALLAWAY, C. (University of Manchester, UK) *Input and Interaction: 219 GARMAN, M. (University of Reading, UK) The Blind Child: 276 GASS, S. M. (Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA) Second Language Acquisition: Conversation: 572 GOODACRE, E. (Middlesex University, London, UK) Reading Inventories: 453 GORDON, W. T. (Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada) Basic English: 483 GOULANDRIS, N. (National Hospitals College of Speech Sciences, London, UK) Spelling: Learning: 470 GRABE, W. (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA) Kaplan, Robert B.: 767 GREGG, K. R. (St Andrew's University, Osaka, Japan) Second Language Acquisition: History and Theories: 577 GRENOBLE, L. A. (Dartmouth College, NH, USA) Language Education Policy—Former Soviet Union: 127 GROSJEAN, F. (University of Neuchatel, Switzerland) Bilingualism, Individual: 284 GROTSCH, K. (Berlin, Germany) Vietor, Wilhelm (1850-1918): 794 GURD, J. M. (University of Oxford, UK) *Language and the Brain: 237 HALL, N. (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) Reading Recovery: 453 HANCOCK, I. F. (University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA) African American Vernacular English: 187; Ann Arbor Case: 188 HARLEY, B. (University of Toronto, ON, Canada) * Stern, H. H. (David) (1913-87): 786 HARRIS, J. (Institute of Language in Education, Hong Kong, China) Writing in School: 477 HARRISON, C. (University of Nottingham, UK) Readability: 428 HASSELMO, N. (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA) Haugen, Einar (1906-94): 761 HAUGEN, E.f (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA) Standardization: 70 HAWKINS, E. W. (York University, UK) Language Awareness: 413 HAYES, C. W. (University of Texas at San Antonio, TX, USA) Hill, Archibald A. (1902-92): 763 HEDGE, T. (Baling College of Higher Education, London, UK) Writing: Second Language Pedagogy: 682 806
List of Contributors HERRIMAN, M. (University of Western Australia, Nedlands, WA, Australia) Literacy: Metalinguistic Awareness: 166 HICKEY, T. (The Linguistics Institute of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland) Irish Language Education Policy: 85 HINTON, L. (University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA) Teaching Endangered Languages: 74 HORNBERGER, N. H. (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA) Hymes, Dell Hathaway (1927- ): 765; Language Education Policy—Latin America: 133 HOUSE, J. (Zentrales Fremdspracheninstitut der Universitat Hamburg, Germany) Text: 598 HOWATT, A. P. R. (University of Edinburgh, UK) Ascham, Roger (1515-68): 747; Elphinston, James (1721-1809): 756; History of Second Language Teaching: 618; Hornby, Albert Sidney (1898-1978): 764; Mulcaster, Richard (1532-1611): 773; Palmer, Harold Edward (1877-1949): 775 HUDSON, A. (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA) Diglossia: 37 HULLEN, W. (University of Essen, Germany) Caxton, William (ca. 1415-91): 751 JAMES, A. R. (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences, Wassenaar, The Netherlands) Phonology in Second Language Acquisition: 567 JAMES, S. L. (University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA) Language Disorders: 255 JERNUDD, B. H. (Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, China) Language Education Policy—Asia: 116 JOHNS, A. (San Diego State University, CA, USA) Language for Special Purposes: 512; Language for Special Purposes: Pedagogy: 633 JOHNSON, J. A. (Waltham Forest Education Authority Teachers' Centre, London, UK) National Oracy Project: 387 KAPLAN, R. B. (Port Angeles, WA, USA) Language Education Policy—Pacific: 139 KELLY, R. (Singapore Polytechnic, Singapore) Foreign Language Testing: 689 KEMP, J. A. (Middlemains, East Lothian, UK) Passy, Paul Edouard (1859-1940): 776 KINAHAN, C. (University of London, UK) *Educational Linguistics on the Web: 361 KRISHNAMURTI, BH. (University of Hyderbad, Andhra Pradesh, India) Indian Language Education Policy: 83 KUNNAN, A. J. (California State University, Los Angeles, CA, USA) Language Testing: Fundamentals: 707 KYLE, J. G. (University of Bristol, UK) Second Language Acquisition: Sign Language: 584 LAITIN, D. D. (University of Chicago, IL, USA) Multilingual States: 54 807
List of Contributors LAMBERT, R. D. (Barnegat Light, NJ, USA) National Language Policy and Education: 151 LARSEN-FREEMAN, D. (School for International Training, Brattleboro, VT, USA) Grammar Teaching (Foreign Language): 612 LETTS, C. (University of Reading, UK) Becoming Bilingual: 209 LITTLEWOOD, W. T. (Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China) Second Language Teaching Methods: 658 LONGACRE, R. E. (Dallas, TX, USA) Nida, Eugene Albert (1914- ): 774 LUKE, A. (James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville, Qld, Australia) * Pedagogy: 332 LUKE, C. (James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville, Qld, Australia) *Pedagogy: 332 LYSTER, R. (McGill University, Montreal, PQ, Canada) Immersion: 626 MACKINNON, G. E. (University of Waterloo, ON, Canada) Reading: Theories: 462 MACLEAN, C. G. (Perthshire, UK) Language Diffusion Policy: 92 MACLURE, M. (University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK) Home and School Language: 202 MACMAHON, M. K. C. (University of Glasgow, UK) Pitman, Sir Isaac (1813-97): 779 MARSHALL, J. C. (Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, UK) * Language and the Brain: 237 MASTERSON, J. (London Guildhall University, UK) Reading: Early: 450 McCAFFERY, J. J. (Auckland College of Education, New Zealand) Maori Language Revitalization: 144 MCLAUGHLIN, B. (University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA) * Second Language Learning: 540 MCNAMARA, T. (St. Kilda, Vic, Australia) Language Testing: Users and Uses: 724 McNAUGHTON, S. (University of Auckland, New Zealand) Clay, Marie M. (1926- ): 752 MEARA, P. (University College of Swansea, UK) Lexis: Acquisition: 565 MEIERS, M. O. (Leongatha, Vic, Australia) English Teaching in Australia: 374 MERCER, N. (Open University, Milton Keynes, UK) Classroom Language: 315 MESTHRIE, R. (University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa) Language Loyalty: 42 808
List of Contributors MORGAN, C. (University of Bath, UK) Culture: 495 MORRIS JONES, R. (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK) Wales: Language Education Policy: 157 MUGGLESTONE, L. C. (University of Oxford, UK) Prescription in Dictionaries: 353 NATION, I. S. P. (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) Fluency and Accuracy: 611; Morphology: 522 NG, E. K. L. (Burnaby, BC, Canada) New Information Technology in Language Education: 366 OAKHILL, J. (University of Sussex, Brighton, UK) Reading: Acquisition: 431 OXFORD, R. L. (University.of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA) Learning Strategies: 518; Second Language Learning: Individual Differences: 552 PAULSTON, C. B. (University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA) Multilingualism: 60 PEARCE, J. J. (Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, UK) Schools Council UK: 389 PERERA, K. (University of Manchester, UK) Educational Linguistics: 17; English Teaching Curriculum (England and Wales): 373; Reading Teaching: Materials: 454 PHILLIPSON, R. (Roskilde University, Denmark) *Linguicide: 48; * Minority Language Rights: 51 PHILP, A. M. (University of Glasgow, UK) Grammar in British Schools: 393 PORTER, D. (University of Reading, UK) Pronunciation: 647 POULISSE, N. (Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Communication Strategies: 484 PRESTON, D. R. (Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI, USA) Sociolinguistics: 65 PRINGLE, I. (Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada) Canadian Language Education Policy: 81; English Teaching in Canada: 377 PUMFREY, P. D. (University of Manchester, UK) Reading: Testing: 459 READ, C. (University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA) Spelling: Invented: 469 REEDER, K. (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada) Intensity: 632 RICHARDS, B. J. (University of Reading, UK) * Input and Interaction: 219 RIDGE, S. G. M. (University of the Western Cape, Bellville, South Africa) Language Education Policy—Africa: 101 RINGBOM, H. (Abo Akademi, Finland) Contrastive and Error Analysis: 489
809
List of Contributors ROBBINS, S. (University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA) * Second Language Learning: 540 ROBERTS, J. (King's College London, UK) Quirk, Charles Randolph (1920- ): 780 ROMAINE, S. (University of Oxford, UK) Labov, William (1927- ): 770 ROST, M. (Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA) Listening in a Second Language: 290 Russo, J. P. (University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA) Richards, I. A. (1893-1979): 781 SAJAVAARA, K. (University of Jyvaskyla, Finland) Candlin, Christopher N. (1940- ): 748; Nickel, Gerhard (1928- ): 774 SCHMITT, N. (University of Nottingham, UK) * Dictionaries for Language Learners: 345 SCHOLFIELD, P. J. (University College of North Wales, Gwynedd, UK) Vocabulary: Second Language Pedagogy: 678 SCIARONE, A. G. (Technical University Delft, The Netherlands) Language Laboratory: 363 SCOVEL, T. (San Francisco State University, CA, USA) Age in Second Language Learning: 281 SELINKER, L. (University of London, UK) Carder, S. Pit (1918-90): 755; *Educational Linguistics on the Web: 361 SHAFER, R. E.f (Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA) English Teaching in USA: 381 SHARWOOD SMITH, M. A. (University of Utrecht, The Netherlands) Syntax in Second Language Acquisition: 592 SHEILS, J. (Council of Europe, Strasbourg, France) Trim, John L. M.: 788 SHIMAOKA, T. (Koishikawa, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan) Japanese Language Education Policy: 86 SHOHAMY, E. (Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, USA) Language Testing: Impact: 711 SHOPEN, T. (Australia National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia) Australian Indigenous Languages: 79 SIMPSON, J. M. Y. (University of Glasgow, UK) Minority Languages: 49 SKUTNABB-KANGAS, T. (Roskilde University, Denmark) *Linguicide: 48; *Minority Language Rights: 51 SMITH, K. (Haifa University, K Tivon, Israel) Language Testing: Alternative Methods: 703 SNOWLING, M. J. (University of York, UK) *Reading and Writing Disorders: Intervention: 440; Reading Difficulties: 451 SPEARRITT, D. (Clifton Gardens, NSW, Australia) Language Testing in Mother Tongue: 715 810
List of Contributors SPOLSKY, B. (Bar-Han University, Ramat-Gan, Israel) ASTP: 603; Ulpan: 677; Cooper, Robert Leon (1931- ): 754; Fishman, Joshua A. (1926- ): 758; General Introduction: The Field of Educational Linguistics: I; Language Testing: 695; Linguistics and Language Learning: 26; Research Centers: 734; Standards, Scales, and Guidelines: 390; Valdman, Albert (1931- ): 792 STANSFIELD, C. W. (Second Language Testing Inc., North Bethesda, MD, USA) Carroll, John Bissell (1916- ): 749 STEELE, R. (University of Sydney, NSW, Australia) Rivers, Wilga (1919- ): 783 STERLING, C. (Coventry University, UK) Spelling Errors: English: 468; Spelling Tests: 473 STRAY, C. A. (University of Wales Swansea, UK) Kennedy, Benjamin Hall (1804-89): 768 SULEIMAN, Y. (University of Edinburgh, UK) Language Education Policy—Arabic Speaking Countries: 106 SWAIN, M. (University of Toronto, ON, Canada) Paulston, Christina Bratt (1932- ): 111 SWANN, J. (Open University, Milton Keynes, UK) Gender and Language: 200 TAGER-FLUSBERG, H. (Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center, Waltham, MA, USA) Grammar Acquisition: 211 TARONE, E. (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA) Interlanguage: 507 TRIM, J. L. M. (Cambridge, UK) Comenius, Jan Amos Komensky (1592-1670): 753; Language Education Policy—Europe: 122; Starting Early: 675 TUCKER, G. R. (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA) Lambert, Wallace E. (1922- ): 111; Troike, Rudolph C. (1933- ): 789 ULICHNY, P. (Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA) Cazden, Courtney B. (1925- J: 751 URQUHART, A. H. (College of St. Mark and St. John, Plymouth, UK) Reading in a Second Language: 295 VALDMAN, A. (Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA) Journals: 729 WAGNER, D. (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA) Literacy: Research and Method: 171; Traditional Religious Education and Literacy in Developing Countries: 183 WALMSLEY, J. B. (Universitat Bielefeld, Germany) Ratke, Wolfgang (1571-1635): 781; Sonnenschein, Edward Adolf (1851-1929): 785 WEINRIB, A. (University of Toronto, ON, Canada) *Stern, H. H. (David) (1913-87): 786 WESTGATE, D. P. G. (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK) *Observing Classroom Language: 325
WHITNEY, N. F. (London, UK) Listening: Second Language Pedagogy: 639 WIDDOWSON, H. G. (University of Vienna, Austria) Strevens, Peter (1922-89): 787 811
List of Contributors WILCOX, S. (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA) Deafness and Sign Language Instruction: 249 WILKINS, D. A. (University of Reading, UK) Applied Linguistics: 6; Second Language Teaching: 656 WILKINSON, A. M. (University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK) Oracy: 178 WILLIAMS, E. (University of Reading, UK) Reading: Second Language: 652 YOUNG, R. (University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA) Professional Associations: 732 YULE, G. (Ka'a'awa, HI, USA) Speaking in a Second Language: 302
812
Name Index Aaron P G, 449 Abbott G, 563, 564 Abdulaziz M, 757 Abercrombie D, 779 Abrahams RD, 189 Abrahamsson K, 182 Abu-Absi S, 114 Abu BakrY, 107, 109, 114 Abuhamadia Z, 107, 109, 114 Ackerman J, 586 Acredolo L, 585, 586 Adams M J, 20, 21, 169, 455, 457, 459, 464 Adamson B, 122 Adelman M, 500 Adjemian C, 511, 512, 549, 552 AdsettM, 180, 183 Agard F B, 603 Ager D E, 386 Ahmad N M, 109, 110, 114 Aikman S, 137, 138 AkinnasoN, 107, 114 Al-Amin A M, 107, 109,115 Alatis J E, 17, 21, 395, 401, 402, 748 Alba V, 62, 63 Al-BatalM, 111,114 Alderson J C, 23, 25, 296, 297, 298, 300, 301, 654, 656 AlegriaJ, 170,171 Alessi S M, 370, 372 Alexander L G, 408 Alexiou M, 38, 41 Al-Hamzawl M R, 107, 114 Al-HusrTS, 111, 115 Al-Jabirt M A, 110, 112, 115 Al-JamT'-'A, 109, 115 Al-Jawar- A, 111, 115 Alladina S, 19, 21 Allard R, 33, 36 Allen J P B, 7, 17,28,29 Allen P, 320, 322, 628, 629, 631, 788 Allen W S, 768 AllwrightD, 321,322 Al-Qurtubl I M, 112, 115 Al-SafiH AZ, 107, 115 Al-SayyidN, 109, 115 AltomaSJ, 38, 41, 109, 111, 114 Al-ZaynN, 109, 116 Amastae J, 206, 208 Andersen E S, 64, 65, 277, 278, 279 Anderson A, 295, 643, 644 Anderson B, 59 Anderson E, 263, 265 Anderson J, 176, 177 Anderson R C, 301,523, 525 Anderson-Inman L, 523, 525
Andreewsky E, 239, 241 Andrew C, 627, 632 Andrianarivo J, 49 Angiolillo P F, 603 Anthony E M, 659, 668 Antonek J, 791 Aplin R, 419 Appel G, 500, 605, 606, 610 Apple M W, 335 Archer D, 135, 136,138 Arevart S, 611 Ari L L, 678 Arnberg L, 74 Arndt V, 687 Arnold H, 427 Arthurs H, 24, 25 AshIO, 410, 413 Askew B J, 753 Assal G, 240 Atkins P, 463, 465 Atkinson M, 228, 229, 236 Atkinson P, 25 Au K, 206, 207, 208 Aulakh G, 507 Austin T Y, 137,138 AxtellJL, 618, 621,625 Backman J, 451 Badecker W, 525 Baetens-Beardsmore H, 290 Bailey K N, 558, 559 Bailey R W, 564 Bailey T, 180, 181, 182 Bain E, 401,402 Bain R, 401,402 Baker A, 641,644 Baker C, 158,211,290 Baker C D, 333, 335 Baker L, 438, 440 Bakker P, 34, 36 Balcom P, 405, 408 BaldaufRBJr, 133, 138, 143 Ball A F, 206, 207, 208 Balota D A, 463, 464, 465 Bamford J, 656 Bamgbose A, 106 Banks S, 24, 25 Bankson N W, 242, 243 Bantock G H, 625 Barber Ch, 516, 517, 519 Barbour S, 39, 41 Bardovi-Harlig K, 506 Barfield S, 627, 632 BarhamlH, 413 813
Barnes Barnes D, 38, 41, 317, 318, 323, 324, 325, 326, 331, 336, 337, 395, 403 BarnsleyG, 479,481 Barnwell D, 603 Barrett M D, 245, 248 Barth F, 62, 63 Barton ME, 219, 220, 224 Bartsch R, 538 BashTrM'U, 109, 114 Bass K, 445, 449 BatemanDR, 411,413 Bateman J A, 423, 424 Bates BE, 210, 211 Bates E, 228, 229, 248 Battison R, 239, 241 Bauer L, 523, 525 Baugh J, 189 Baumann J F, 436, 440 Bausch K R, 408 Bayley R, 65, 66, 70 BazerguiN, 611,612 Bazerman Ch, 516, 517, 518 Bejoint H, 354 Beard R, 455, 457, 459 Becker AM, 590, 591 Becker W C, 523, 525 Beers J W, 469, 470 Behrmann M, 445, 449 Beilby N, 467 Bejoint J, 348, 349 BelanoffP, 638 Belcher D, 309 BellH, 107, 114 Bellot J, 564 Bellugi U, 215, 218, 240, 241, 251, 255 Bender ML, 38,41,754 Benson E, 351,352 Benson M, 351,352 Benson P, 665, 666, 668 Bentler R, 265 BentleyRH, 189 BentonL, 180, 181, 182 Benton R A, 146 Bereiter C, 187, 188, 195, 198, 200, 367, 368, 372, 475, 477, 533, 538 Berger P, 499 Berkenkotter C, 367, 372 BerkoJ, 214, 218 Berman R A, 299, 300, 301 Bernache C, 606, 609 Bernard, 135, 137, 139 Berndt R, 405, 408 Bernhardt B H, 242, 243 Bernhardt E B, 298, 301 Bernstein B, 187, 188, 194, 199, 200, 204, 333, 334, 335,421,424 Bernstein D, 265 Bernthal J E, 242, 243
814
Name Index BerrillD, 178 BertelsonP, 170, 171 Besse H, 406, 409 Bettelheim B, 427 Belts E A, 453 Beyerstein D, 24, 25 Bhardwaj M, 589, 590, 591 Bhatia V, 600, 602 BholaHS, 166 Bialystok E, 284, 484, 486, 487, 488, 489, 533, 538, 576, 589, 591 Bibeau G, 631 Biber D, 600, 602 Bickerton D, 33, 36 Bigelow A, 277, 279 BinNunman A, 110, 114 Birch D, 421,424 Birdsong D, 533, 538 Bishop 1,401,403 Bissex G L, 470 Black S E, 445, 449 Blades W, 751 Blanc H, 47 Blanc M, 31,36 Blanc M H A, 295, 536, 538 BlauJ, 38,41, 107, 114 Bley-Vroman R, 582, 584, 670, 675 BlochS, 21,24, 25 Bloom P, 229 Bloomfield L, 60, 63, 533, 535, 536, 538 Blum-Kulka S, 501, 502, 503, 505, 506, 507, 678 Blundell L, 642, 644 Boden M, 779 Bogaards P, 348, 349 Bohannon J N, 64, 65 Bolitho R, 639 Bongaerts T, 7, 8, 17, 157, 489, 794 Bongers H, 776 BonnerSF, 619, 625 Bonvillian J D, 585, 586 Boraie D, 529, 532 Borer H, 236, 237 Bourdieu P, 183, 186, 332, 334, 335, 496, 498, 499 BowenD 1,491,495 Bowen J D, 754 Bower G H, 464, 465 Braak H,238, 240 BraddockR, 413 Bradley L, 170, 433, 440 Bradvic B, 241 Braine G, 309 BraineMDS, 213, 218 Branscombe A, 207, 208 Bransford J D, 522 BraschlW, 187, 188 BraschWM, 187, 188 Breatnach R B, 46, 47 Breen M P, 322, 323
Chesterman
Name Index Bremer K, 295 Brenzinger M, 43, 44, 45, 47 BrethertonI, 210, 211 Brice Heath S, 496, 499 Bridgewood M, 401, 402, 403 Briggs C L, 64, 65 Bright W, 38, 41 Brindley G, 525 Brink C O, 768 Brinton D M, 606, 609, 610 Brisk ME, 314 Britto F, 38, 40, 41 Britton J, 306, 309, 323, 324, 325, 336, 337, 478, 480 Broadfoot P, 497, 499 Broca P, 237, 240 Breeder P, 74, 295 Brookes A, 687 Brooks G, 462 Broughton G, 408, 409 Brower R, 782 Brown A L, 522 Brown G, 295, 305, 643, 644, 671, 672, 674 Brown H D, 7, 17, 529, 532 Brown L, 462 Brown P, 502, 506 Brown R, 212, 213, 214, 218, 226, 227, 229, 258, 265 Brown W D, 240, 241 Browning R, 38, 41 Bruck M, 451 Brumfit C J, 406, 409, 418, 419, 426, 427, 625, 665, 668, 670, 671, 674, 758 Bruner J, 203, 204, 388, 389, 497, 499 Bryant B R, 462 Bryant P, 170, 171, 451, 452, 459, 471, 473, 779 Bryant P E, 170, 433, 440 Bub D, 240, 241 Bucak S, 48, 49 BudinG, 516, 517, 519, 520 BuhlmannR, 517, 519 Bungarten Th, 517, 518, 519 Burden R, 529, 532 BurgerS, 627, 631 Burgess T, 478, 480 Burkart E, 773 Burke C L, 427, 460, 462 Burnaby B, 143 Buros O K, 462 Burris N A, 470 Burstall C, 676 Burt M, 405, 409, 577, 584 Butcher A, 766, 767 Butler C, 464, 465 Butler C S, 420, 424 Butler K, 276 Butler N, 414, 416, 419 Butler P, 751 Butterworth B, 445, 449 Buttet J, 240
Butts HF, 189 Bybee J, 251,255 Bygate M, 672, 673, 674 Byng S, 449 Byram M, 495, 498, 499, 563, 564 Cadora F J, 38, 41 Cahen L S, 469 Calvet L-J, 48, 49 Cameron D, 348, 349, 402, 403 Campanella D J, 241 Campbell R, 427, 445, 449 Campione J C, 522 Canale M, 406, 409, 788 Candlin C N, 749, 796 Canter G J, 238, 241 Cantoni-Harvey G., 606, 609 CapecchiV, 181, 183 Caplan D, 238, 240 CapotortiF, 48, 49, 51,53 Cappa S F, 238, 241 Caramazza A, 525 Carr T H, 240, 241 Carrell P L, 301, 635, 638, 654, 656 Carroll B J, 561,564 Carroll J, 632, 633 Carroll J B, 663, 668, 676, 677, 750 Carroll M, 590, 591 Carroll R, 498, 499 Carter R, 350, 352, 396, 403, 420, 421, 424, 567, 669, 674, 682 Carter R A, 349, 426, 427 CaryL, 170, 171 Casterline D, 252, 255 Castro J, 278, 279 Catford J C, 645, 646 Caudill M, 464, 465 Cauley KM, 213,218 Cavalcanti M, 135, 137, 138 CaxtonW, 751 Cazabon M T, 772 Cazden C B, 64, 65, 168, 169, 319, 323, 326, 329, 330, 331,333,335 Cazden C, 765, 794 Celce-Murcia M, 617 Chafe W L, 494, 495, 669, 674 Chalkley M A, 218 Chall J S, 170, 436, 440, 457, 459 Chamot A U, 518, 522, 547, 551, 606, 609, 635, 638 Chancerel J-L, 540 Chasin J, 585, 586 Chatterjee S, 38, 41 ChaudronC, 321,323 Chavarria Mendoza M C, 137, 138 Chen Z, 371,372 Cheng P W, 546, 552 Cheshire J, 202, 316, 319 Chesterman A, 494, 495 815
Chiat Chiat S, 247, 248 Chisman F, 182, 183 Chiss J-L, 386 Chomsky C, 470 Chomsky N, 219, 225, 226, 229, 404, 405, 409, 533, 534, 536, 538, 543, 544, 548, 550, 552, 578, 584, 676, 677 Christ H, 406, 409 Christian D, 627, 632 Christian-Smith L C, 335 Christie F, 339, 343, 388, 389, 397, 403, 480 Christophersen P, 658 CifuentesB, 135, 138 CilibertiB, 172, 177 Clapham C, 23, 25 Clark E V, 247, 248, 587, 591 Clark H H, 587, 591 Clark J L D, 320, 323 Clark M M, 436, 440 Clarke M A, 297, 301 Clay M M, 453, 454, 753 Clear J, 346, 349 Clement R, 528, 529, 532, 606, 609, 610 Clements R J, 603 Clibbens J, 585, 586 Clifford J, 495, 499 Clyne M G, 33, 36, 39, 41, 81, 506, 601, 602, 757 Coady J, 682 CoadyM, 21,24, 25 Coard B, 191,192 Coates J, 202 Cobarrubias J, 48, 49 Cochran-Smith M, 368, 372, 482 Code C, 238, 240 Cohen A, 299, 300, 301, 512, 678 Cohen AD, 516, 518, 522 Cohen M, 367, 372 Cohen S, 676, 677 ColeM, 184, 186 Coleman H, 499 Collier V P, 605, 609 Collins B, 777 Collinson W E, 73 Coltheart M, 436, 440, 449, 450, 451, 463, 465 Comrie B, 39, 41, 133, 595, 596, 597, 598 Conermann K, 781 Connor U, 308, 309, 310, 494, 495, 499, 601, 602 Conrad AW, 61,63, 755 Content A, 170 Cook V, 593, 598 Cook-Gumperz J, 333, 335 Cooks J, 206, 207, 208 Cooper M, 299, 300, 301 Cooper RL, 61,63, 107,108, 111, 114, 133,138,754, 755, 791 Coppens P, 237, 241 Coppieters R, 534, 538 Corbel C, 636, 638
816
Name Index Corder S P, 7, 17, 29, 404, 405, 409, 507, 508, 510, 512, 549, 552, 755, 756 Corkery D, 39, 41 Cornoldi C, 464, 465 Coronado Suzan G, 137, 138 Coronel-Molina S M, 138 Corson D, 324, 325, 337, 525 Coste D, 406, 409, 789 CostelloP, 135, 138 CottinghamS, 136, 138 Coughlin A K, 239, 241 Coulmas F, 38, 41, 122, 143, 150, 151, 532, 534, 536, 538 CoulthardM, 20, 21,316, 319 Coulthard R M, 320, 323, 326, 329, 331, 332, 333, 336, 600, 602 Cowie A P, 349, 350, 351, 352, 353 Cowley R, 38, 41 CoxB, 19,21,374 Crain S, 452 CrandallJA, 606, 609, 610 Craun M J, 469 Crawford S D, 189 Crick F, 240, 241 Crinson J, 400, 403 Criper C, 756 CrollP, 326, 331,497,499 Croneberg C, 252, 255 CrookallD, 518, 522 Crookes G, 528, 532, 556, 559 Crosson B, 238, 241 Cruse DA, 351,353 Crystal D, 212, 218, 396, 403, 534, 538, 560, 564, 600, 602,648,651,780 Csizer K, 530, 532 Culicover P W, 232, 237 Cumming A, 157 Cummins J, 27, 29, 36, 53, 211, 324, 325, 337, 605, 610, 628, 629, 631, 633, 677, 788 Curtis B, 463, 465 Curtis M E, 246, 248, 566, 567 Curtiss S, 265, 266 Dale P S, 248 Dalphinis M, 19, 21 Daniels H, 205, 208 DansereauDF, 519, 522 D'Arcy P, 325 Dardjowidjojo S, 122 Davey A, 423, 424 David J, 386 Davidson F, 24, 25 Davidson W, 239, 241 DavieR, 414, 416,419 Davies A, 7, 17, 178, 535, 538, 658, 756 Davies B, 324, 325 Davies E, 507 Davies F, 339, 340, 341,343
Name Index Davies P, 750 Davis J, 265 Davy D, 600, 602 Day E, 630,631 Day R R, 576, 656 D-ayfS, 111, 112, 114 de Bot K, 33, 36, 157 de Groot A, 290 de Jong EJ, 314 De Partz M-P, 448, 449 Dearden R F, 539, 540 DeCarrico J S, 350, 351, 352, 353 Dechert H W, 305 DeFord D, 454 Degenhart RE, 310 Delaney H D, 525 Delgado R, 242, 243 Delpit L, 482 Demuth K, 220, 225 Denison N, 46, 47 Dennis L A, 378 DesbergP, 451 Deshpande M M, 38, 41 DesLauriers R C, 378 Deutsch K W, 59 DevineJ, 297, 301, 654, 656 Diaz R, 207, 208 Dickerson L J H, 65, 66, 70 Dickerson W, 66, 70 Dickinson L, 529, 532, 666, 668 Dickson M, 638 DicksonP, 157 Dietrich R, 589, 590, 591 Dijk T A van, 464, 465, 600, 602 Dil A, 757 Dila C, 241 DillardJ, 187, 188 Dillon JT, 326, 328, 331 Dirven R, 405, 406, 408, 409 Dittmar N, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592 Dixon J, 476, 477 Dixon R,523, 525 Dobrich W, 256, 266 Docherty T, 22, 25 Dornyei Z, 305, 488, 489, 528, 530, 532 Donaldson M, 459 Donato R, 791 Donmall G, 413, 417, 418, 419 Dorian N C, 44, 45, 46, 47 Doughty C, 615,617 Doughty P, 415, 419 Doughty P S, 389, 390, 395, 403 Doule H G, 603 Downey J, 378 Downing J, 172, 177 Doyle W, 637, 638 DraskauJ, 515, 517, 518, 520 Dressier W U, 46, 47
Eskey DrobnicK, 515, 518 DrozdL, 517, 518 Dua, 149, 151 DuS M, 109, 114 Dubin F, 499 DuboisBL, 517, 518, 520 Dudley P, 178 Dulay H C, 405, 409, 577, 584 DungworthD, 513, 514, 518 Dunlea A, 263, 265, 277, 278, 279 Dunn L, 259, 266 Duranti A, 499 Durgunoglu A Y, 314 DutcherN, 174, 177 Dyson AH, 481,482 Eastman CM, 148, 150, 151 Eastment D, 360 Eastwood J, 672, 675 Eccles J S, 526, 532 Echevarria J, 610 Eckman F, 595, 598 Edmondson W, 409, 600, 602 Edwards A D, 20, 21, 318, 326, 331, 333, 335 Edwards D, 318, 329, 331, 496, 499 Edwards H P, 606, 609, 610 Edwards J, 73, 193, 194, 198, 200 Edwards M L, 242, 243 Edwards V, 19, 21 Ehri L C, 431, 432, 440, 451, 471, 472, 473 Eide A, 53, 54 Eidheim H, 45, 47 Eisemon T E, 176, 177 Elbert M, 242, 243 Elbow P, 476, 477 Elder L, 450, 451 Elfenbein J, 265 Elias-Olivares L, 206, 208 ElleyWB,413 Ellis A W, 170, 171, 449, 442, 452 Ellis N, 434, 440 Ellis R, 221, 225, 584, 592, 611, 612, 616, 618 Elman J, 228, 229 Emery C, 369, 372 EmigJ, 307, 310 EngelmanS, 187, 188 Engelmann S, 195, 198, 200, 533, 538 Engels L K, 408, 409 Enkvist N E, 306, 309, 310, 494, 495 Enright D S, 606, 610 Erickson F, 207, 208 Ericsson K A, 487, 489 ErnyP, 184, 186 Erting C, 586 Ervin G L, 487, 489 Esarte-Sarries V, 498, 499 Escobar A, 135, 138 Eskey D E, 297, 300, 301, 654, 656
817
Eurydice Eurydice, 676, 677 Evans A C, 240, 241 Extra G, 7, 8, 17,74,794 Ezra M, 585, 586 Faerch C, 295 FaiqS, 107, 109,114 Fairclough N, 147, 148, 151, 419 FaltisCJ, 314 Fantini A, 210, 211 Pardon R, 314 Farley-Winer C A, 785 Farr M, 205, 206, 208 Farr R, 499 Fasold R W, 33, 36,40,41, 66, 70, 147, 148, 150, 151, 207, 208 Fawcett R P, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 424 FearnsA, 517, 519 FelberH, 516, 517, 519, 520 Fellman J, 38, 41 Fenson L, 248 Ferguson A, 107, 114 Ferguson C, 206, 208, 532,533, 538 Ferguson C A, 32, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 60, 63, 64, 65, 151, 219, 225, 754, 757, 762, 763 Fernald A, 222, 225 Fernandez M, 41 FerraraJ, 299, 301,300 Ferrara R A, 522 Ferreiro E, 136, 138 Ferreyra P, 586 Fettes M, 83, 459 Fey M, 242, 243 Field J, 643, 644 Fierman W, 133 Fillmore C J, 670, 675 FineJ, 299, 300, 301 Finegan E, 600, 602 Fink G, 241 Finocchiaro M B, 406, 409, 758 Firth JR, 600, 601,602 Fisher E, 331 Fishman J, 19, 21, 44, 47, 51, 54, 147, 151 Fishman J A, 33, 36,40,41,42,60,61,63, 75, 77, 755, 757, 759 Fisiak J, 28, 29, 489, 495 Fitzgerald G G, 429, 431 FixU, 517, 519, 521 Flanders N A, 316, 319, 323 Flege J E, 306, 571 Fleming M, 499 FleschRF, 428, 431 Fletcher J, 427 Fletcher P, 212,218 Flood J, 762, 763 Flores d'Arcais G B, 463, 464, 465 Flower L, 475, 477 Flower LS, 307, 310 818
Name Index Flowerdew L, 340, 343 FluckH-R, 517, 518 Flynn S, 541, 552, 584, 594, 595, 598 Fodor J A, 533, 539 Forhan L E, 534, 538 Forsyth I, 390 Forsyth J, 133 Fortescue S, 355, 360 Foucault M, 334, 335 Fountas I C, 459 Fowler R, 426, 427 Fox G, 346, 349 Fox J, 360 Frackowiak R, 240, 241 Fraiberg S, 276, 279 FranchiEP, 136, 138 Francis G, 346, 349 Francis J, 462 Fransson A,-182, 183 Frauenfelder U, 592 Frayh-a A, 111, 114 Freebody P, 333, 335 Freedman S W, 482 Freeland J, 133, 136, 135, 138 Freeman Y S, 383, 384 Freire P, 136, 138, 333, 334, 335 Friedlander L, 369, 372 Friedman M, 451 Fries C C, 28, 29, 87, 89, 404, 409, 560, 564, 624, 625 Frishberg N, 250, 255 Friston K, 240, 241 Frith CD, 471,473 Frith U, 446, 449, 450, 451, 452, 465, 469, 471, 472, 473 Frolich M, 320, 322 Fromkin V, 204, 205 Frost J, 170, 171 Frrch C, 489 Fry E, 431 Fuchs-Briminghoff E, 183 Funnell E, 443, 447, 449 Furniss G, 314 Gaarder B, 60, 63 Gaffney J S, 753 GageWW, 189 Gair J W, 38, 42 Gairns R, 682 Gal S, 33, 36, 47 Galazzi E, 776, 777 Galbraith V, 553, 559 Gallagher C F, 39, 42, 108, 114 Gallaway C, 219, 221, 223, 224, 225, 227 Gallenberger B, 401, 402, 748 Galloway V, 518, 519, 522 Gallon M, 497, 499 Galvan M M, 789, 790 Garcia O, 506
Name Index Gardner K, 339, 343 Gardner R C, 69, 70, 527, 528, 529, 532, 553, 556, 559, 771, 772 Gardner-Chloros P, 35, 37 GarmanM, 212, 218 Garmonsway G N, 620, 625 Garner R, 435, 439, 440 Garnham A, 438, 439, 440 Garrett N, 372 GarrettP, 21 GarvinPL, 147, 148, 151 Gass S M, 495, 533, 538, 573, 574, 575, 576, 577, 595, 598, Gatenby E V, 353 Gattegno C, 544, 549, 552 GaudartH, 122 Gee J P, 64, 65 Geertz C, 495, 499 Genesee F, 606, 610, 626, 627, 628, 629, 630, 631, 632 Gentile LM, 461,462 Gentry J R, 467, 470 George H V, 670, 675 Germain C, 626, 631 Gernsbacher M A, 600, 602 Ghaladant S A S, 107, 114 Gibson E J, 654, 656 Gierut J, 243 GiffordD, 135, 138 Gilbert P, 477 Giles H, 200 GillH, 110, 114 Gillham B, 499 GimsonAC, 648, 651,767 Giroux H, 335 Givon T, 600, 602 Glaser R, 350, 353, 513, 516, 517, 520 GlaserSM, 461,462 Glasman H, 299, 300, 301 Glatthorn A A, 383, 384 Gleitman H, 219, 220, 222, 224, 225, 227, 230 Gleitman L R, 218, 219, 220, 222, 224, 225, 227, 230, 277, 279 Glenn C L, 314 Godenzzi J C, 136, 138 Godenzzi Alegre J, 138 Gorlach M, 564 Gold E M, 230, 237 Goldstein H, 414, 416, 419 GolinkoffR, 213, 218 Gomes B A, 329, 332 Gonzalez, 135, 137, 139 Goodman K S, 383, 384, 440 Goodman Y, 460, 462 Goodman Y M, 427 Goodnow J L, 64, 65 Goodwin C, 499 Goodwin G M, 241 Goodwyn S, 585, 586
Hamers Goody J, 184, 186 Gopinathan S, 122 Gordon L, 213, 218 Gordon W T, 484 Gore J, 335, 336 Gorman T P, 310, 462 Goswami U, 170, 171, 451, 452, 459, 471, 473 Goulandris N K, 447, 449 Grabe W, 297, 300, 301, 606, 610 Graddol D, 202, 316, 319, 495, 499 Graesser A, 600, 602 Graesser A C, 464, 465 Graff H J, 332, 335 Graham S, 526, 532 Graves A, 610 Graves D H, 388, 389, 475, 477 Gray W S, 166, 171, 177 Green L, 462 Greenbaum S, 350, 353, 412, 413, 780 Greenberg J, 595, 598 Greene T, 339, 343 Gregg K R, 541,552, 584, 769 Grellet F, 654, 656 Grenoble A, 77 Grice H P, 505, 506 Grimes B, 249, 255 Grimes F, 74, 77 Grin F, 34, 36 Grosjean F, 290, 658 Grossman H, 261, 266 Grundy P, 48, 49, 687 Gruner J, 241 Grunwell P, 242, 243 Gumperz J J, 34, 36, 206, 208, 504, 506, 507, 765 Gunnarsson B-L, 517 Gurd J M, 238, 241 GurugeA, 184, 186 Gutfleisch I, 592 G u y G R , 195, 198,200 Guyer E, 609, 610 Habein Y S, 38, 42 Hacker P, 445, 449 Hagen A, 198,200 Hailu F, 38, 41 Hakuta K, 284, 290 Hall E M, 378 Hall R A Jr, 39, 42 Halle M, 170, 171 Haller M, 463, 465 Halliday M A K, 17, 337, 339, 340, 343, 397, 400, 403, 421, 422, 424, 533, 536, 538, 599, 601, 602, 761, 787 Halpern D F, 202 HamadlMD, 111, 112, 114 HamayanGR, 790, 791 Hamburger H, 358, 360 HamelRE, 133, 138 Hamers J F, 31, 36, 295, 536, 538
819
Hammarberg Hammarberg B, 571 Hammill D D, 264, 266, 462 Hamp-Lyons L, 687 HannaP, 479, 481 HansN, 621,625, 756 Hansen L K, 35, 36 Haramati S, 678 Hardman F, 396, 398, 403 Hare R M, 22, 25 Hargreaves M, 676, 677 Harkess J, 672, 675 Harks-Hanke J, 409 Harley B, 284, 627, 628, 629, 630, 631, 632, 633, 788 HarlowLL, 519, 522 HarmerJ, 665, 668, 671,675 Harpin W S, 477, 480 Harries L, 150, 151 Harris J, 86 Harris M, 585, 586 Harris R 1,410,411, 413 Harrison B, 499 Harrison C, 338, 343,428,431 Harrison D S, 188 Harrison W, 114,791 Hart D, 633 Hartford B, 506 Hartnett C G, 339, 343 Hartung J, 248 HartwellP, 412,413 Hasan R, 333, 335, 339, 343, 396, 403, 422, 424, 599, 602, 761 Haskins J, 189 Haste H, 499 Hatch E M, 406, 409, 588, 592 Hatcher P, 449, 452 Haugen E I, 43, 47, 59, 73, 290, 762 HawisherG, 308,310 Hawkins E W, 416, 418, 419, 661, 668 Hawkins P, 20, 21 Hawkins R, 611,612 Hayes JR, 307, 310, 475, 477 Hecaen H, 241 Heasley B, 687 Heath S B, 20, 21, 64, 65, 135, 138, 148, 149, 151, 203, 204,205,206,207, 208, 326,331, 332, 335, 762, 763, 765 HebertM,451 Heckhausen H, 526, 532 Hedge T, 687 Heilman K M, 241 Heine B, 44, 45, 47 Helbig G, 405, 409 Heller M, 290 Henderson E H, 469, 470 Hendrix W S, 603 Henley N, 202 Henriques J, 334, 335 Henry J, 33, 36
820
Name Index Herbert R K, 106 Herbst T, 348, 349 Herriman M L, 143, 167, 168, 169 Herzog M, 770 Hess R, 194, 198, 200 Hewstone M, 35, 37 HeynemanSP, 176, 177 Hickey T, 85, 86 Hickmann M, 64, 65 Hidalgo M, 134, 135, 138 Higgins J, 357, 360 Hill A A, 763, 764, 792 HillesS, 598, 617 Hillocks G Jr, 308, 310, 382, 384, 412, 413 Hinds J, 309, 310 Hinton L, 77 Hintzman D L, 464, 465 Hirsch E D Jr., 499 HirshW, 146 Hirsh-Pasek K, 213, 218 Hocking E, 603 Hodson B W, 242, 243 H0edt J, 515, 517, 520 Hoey M, 479, 481 Hoffmann L, 514, 516, 517 Hofstede G, 498, 499 Hoiting N, 586 Holdaway D, 459 Holec H, 539, 540 Holes C, 109, 115 Hollander J, 782 Hollander M, 228, 230 Holliday A, 499 Hollway W, 334, 335 Holmes J, 409, 406 Homan R, 23, 25 Honey J, 196, 200 Hood J, 427 HopeyC, 176, 177 Hopper P, 588, 592 Hornberger N H, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 174, 177, 337 Hornby A S, 353, 625, 624 Hornby P A, 63, 60 Horwitz E K, 515, 520, 522, 557, 559 HotopfWHN, 782 Houlton D, 397, 403 House E R, 22, 25 House J, 409, 501, 502, 503, 505, 506, 507, 601, 602 Howard D, 240, 241 Howatt A P R , 560, 564, 625, 659, 665, 668, 756, 765, 776 Huckin T, 682 HudelsonSJ, 314 Hudelston S, 687 Hiillen W, 408, 409, 516, 517, 751 Hiinig W, 405, 409 Hudson A, 41,42
Name Index Hudson R, 400, 402, 403 Hudson R A, 33, 36 Huebner T, 68, 70, 589, 592 Hughes M, 331,332 Hull R, 319 Hulme C, 449, 452 Hult S, 369, 372 HumboldtW von, 591,592 Humphries T, 249, 255 Hunt KW, 477, 481 Hunter R, 241 Huntsman JF, 619, 625 Hutchinson T, 635, 638 Hyams N M, 213, 218, 229, 236, 237, 598 Hyltenstam K, 74, 593, 598 Hymes D H, 206, 208, 333, 335, 536, 539, 765, 766, 794 lancu M, 606, 609, 610 IlsonR, 351,352 Ingraham B, 369, 372 Ingram D E, 113, 115, 226, 230, 242, 243 Ingvar D H, 241 loup G,571 Iraqui V, 240, 241 IsingE, 781 IsmanllSK, 112, 115 JabburG, 107, 108, 115 Jacklin C N, 202, 553, 559 Jackson J, 22, 25 Jaeggli O, 593, 596, 598 JakobsonR, 306, 310 James A, 571 James C, 21,404, 409, 495 James S, 266 Jameson M, 367, 372 Jamieson M, 676, 677 Jamison D T, 176, 177 Janicki K, 406, 409 Janks H, 18, 21 Jansen B, 598 Janssen-van Dieten A-M, 7, 8, 17, 794 Jazayery M A, 764 Jenkins J R, 522, 524, 525 Jenkins N, 202 Jensen A, 200 Jensen L, 608, 610 Jeremias E M, 39, 42 JernuddB, 109, 115 Jespersen O, 548, 552 Joag-DevC, 301 John V, 765, 794 John V P, 333, 335 Johns A M, 309, 638 Johns T, 357, 360 Johnson D D, 436, 440 Johnson K, 406, 409, 626, 627, 631, 632, 665, 668
Kelly Johnson M, 228, 229 Johnson M J, 453 Johnson M S, 460, 462 Johnson R, 586 Johnson RK, 314,409, 788 Johnson S K, 469 Johnston M, 525, 549, 552 Johnstone R, 320, 323 Jolivet R, 240 Jonas S, 238, 241 Jones B L, 43, 47 Jones C, 355, 360 Jones D, 646, 766, 767, 777 Jones D G, 40, 42 Jones E, 240, 241 Jones FR, 371,372 Jones G, 369, 370, 372 Jones G M, 314 Jordon C, 207, 208 Jourdan C, 33, 36 JuckerH, 517, 518 Juillard C, 32, 36 Jung I, 136, 139 Jung N M, 137, 138 Jung U O H, 366 Jungeblut A, 175, 177, 179, 180, 183 Jupp T, 507 Jusczyk P W, 220, 225 Kachru B B, 32, 36, 143, 147, 149, 151, 563, 564 Kalaja M, 369, 372 Kaltman H, 507 Kalverkamper H, 516, 518 Kamin J, 627, 632 Kanungo G B, 84, 85 Kapitzke C, 184, 186 Kaplan R B, 7, 17, 133, 138, 143, 307, 308, 310, 498, 499, 639 Karmiloff-Smith A, 168, 169, 228, 229 Karpat K H, 39, 42 Kasakow N, 369, 372 Kasper G, 295, 306, 488, 489, 501, 502, 503, 505, 506, 507 Kasper L F, 609, 610 Kassabgy O, 529, 532 Katz J J, 533, 539 Kaufman D, 608, 610 Kaulfers W V, 390, 392 Keefers L E, 603 Keenan E, 595, 596, 597, 598 Keesing R, 33, 36 Keith G, 393, 397,401,403 Kekelis L S, 263, 265, 278, 279 Keller R E, 39, 42 Kellerman E, 295, 485, 488, 489 Kellerman S, 643, 644 Kelly A, 590, 591 Kelly L G, 659, 668
821
Kelman Kelman HC, 148, 151 Kempen G A M , 299, 300, 301 Kennedy B H, 768 Kennedy C, 336, 337, 639 Kennedy LD, 411,413 Kenny B, 143 Kenny D, 107, 115 Kent de Ravetta M M, 137, 139 KenworthyJ, 649, 651,652 Keobke K, 749 Key T H, 768 Keyset D J, 474 KhalTfa'A, 109, 111, 115 Khan L M L, 242, 243 Khan V, 21 KhasaraM, 109, 115 Khubchandani L M, 33, 36 KibbeeDA, 751 Kimura D, 239, 241 Kinneavy J L, 306, 310, 478, 481 Kintsch W, 464, 465, 602 Kirkland M, 59 Kirkman J, 639 KirkwoodM, 133 KirschI, 175, 177, 179, 180, 183 Kirshner H S, 241 KirtleyC, 170, 171 Kispal A, 462 KlareGR, 428, 431 Kleeck A van, 256, 266 Klein W, 587, 588, 589, 592 Kleineidam H, 406, 409 Klima E S, 215, 218, 241, 251, 255 Kloss H, 40, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49 Knott R, 336, 337 Kochman T, 206, 208 Kocourek R, 518 Koda K, 300, 301 Koehn D, 23, 24, 25 Komensky J A, 754 Kontra M, 49 KordesU, 781 Kormos J, 305, 488, 489 KowalM, 630, 631,632 Kramarae C, 202 Kramsch C, 498, 499 Krapels A R, 307, 310 Krashen S D, 405, 409, 548, 549, 552, 584, 625, 666, 668 Krashen S O, 66, 70 Krashen S, 314, 510, 512, 541, 552, 577, 584, 605, 606, 609, 610, 629, 632, 633, 769 Krauss M, 48, 49 Kreeft-Payton J, 207, 208 KreftW, 183 Kreindlerl, 133 Kress R A, 460, 462 Krishnamurti Bh, 85, 757
822
Name Index Krishnamurty R, 346, 349 Kroll J, 290 KroppU, 183 Krueger M, 607, 610 Kruidenier B, 606, 609, 610 Kuczaj S A, 245, 248 Kiihlwein W, 774 Kuhberg H, 589, 590, 592 Kuhlman N, 499 Kulick D, 33, 36 Kwiatkowski J, 242, 243 Kyle J G, 585, 586 LabarcaA, 518, 519, 522 Labov W, 66, 70, 187, 188, 189, 195, 200, 206, 208, 506,507,510,512,770 Lado R, 28, 29,404,409,489,495, 508, 512, 577, 584, 771 Lai W A Y , 122 LaitinDD, 59, 149,151 Lalleman J, 598 Lamb H, 413 Lambert R, 157 Lambert R D, 113, 115 Lambert W, 51, 54, 626, 627, 632 Lambert W E, 609, 610, 771, 772, 790, 791 Lambley K, 620, 625 Landau B S, 277, 279 Landau S I, 354 Landercy A, 646 Landry A, 378 Landry R, 33, 36 Lane H, 253, 255 Langacker R, 408, 409 Langmore S E, 238, 241 Lantolf J, 500, 605, 606, 610 Lapkin S, 576, 627, 628, 630, 631, 632, 633, 788 LaplanteB, 631, 632 Lapp D,762, 763 Large B, 434, 440 Larsen T, 264, 266 Larsen-Freeman D, 291, 295, 320, 323, 575, 576, 584, 615,617,618,659,668 Larson AD, 411,413 LarssonS, 182, 183 Lass N J, 271 Lassila O, 369, 372 Laudanna A, 525 Lauren Ch, 518 Lavine R Z, 522 Lavy V, 174, 177 Lazard G, 39, 42 Le Page R B, 32, 35, 36, 37, 151, 539 Leahy MM, 271 Leap W L, 45, 47 Leather J, 571 Leaver B L, 604, 607, 610 LeavittRM, 135, 139
Marsh
Name Index LeblancR, 240, 241,787 LeboucherN, 174, 177 Lee C, 207, 208 Lee W R, 773 Lee Z, 773 Leech G, 406, 408, 409, 505, 507, 780 Legutke M, 665, 668 Lehrer A, 351,353 Lehtisalo T, 369, 372 Lehtonen J, 29 Leiger J, 264, 266 LeitnerG, 517, 518 Lemke J L, 333, 335 LemleM, 136, 139 Lengyel Z, 284 Lenin VI, 133 Lenneberg E H, 569, 571, 676, 677 Lennerberg E, 538, 539 LennonP, 611,612 LenzF, 517, 518 Leonard L, 257, 266 Leonard L B, 242, 243 Leopold W, 211 Leu D,427 Levelt W J M, 306, 486, 488, 489, 548, 549, 552, 587, 592, 669, 675, 671 Levin H, 654, 656 Levin J R, 525 Levine D, 500 LevineK, 183 Levinson S L, 502, 506 Levy R S, 239, 241 Lewis EG, 26, 29, 314 Lewis N, 242, 243 Li W L, 44, 47 Lichtheim L, 239, 241 Liddell S, 586 Lieberson S, 35, 36, 59 Lieven E V M, 222, 225 Lightbown P M, 545, 551, 552, 665, 668 Lightfoot D, 237 Limage L, 183 LipkaL, 351,353 Little D, 666, 668 Littlewood W T, 543, 547, 551, 552, 665, 668, 671, 672, 675 Lloyd-Jones R, 383, 384, 413 Lo Bianco J, 80, 81 Lopez L E, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139 LobanWD, 477, 481 Locke J, 618, 626 Loncke F, 586 Long J S, 252, 255 Long M, 575, 576, 630, 632, 633 Long M H, 291, 295, 575, 576, 584 Long S, 242, 243 Long T H, 353 Long, 576
Lopez DE, 61, 63 Lorge I, 523, 525 Loschky, 670, 675 LotfiA, 183, 185, 186 Louw J P, 775 Love R J, 238, 241 Low A A, 239, 241 LozanovG, 551,552 Lucariello J, 585, 586 Luckmann T, 499 Ludi G, 143 Luke A, 143, 332, 333, 334, 335 Luke C, 332, 334, 335, 336 LundbergI, 170, 171 Lundquist L, 517 Lunsford A A, 383, 384 Lunzer E A, 339, 343 LuykxA, 136, 139 Lynch T, 295, 643, 644 Lyons C, 454 Lyons J, 204, 205, 350, 353 LysterR, 629, 630, 631,632 Ma R, 755 Mac Aogain E, 86 Macaulay W J, 394, 403 MacCarthy P, 414, 419 Maccoby E E, 202, 553, 559 Macedo D, 136, 138, 333, 334, 335 MacGregorC 1,450,451 Mackay D, 389, 390 MacKay I, 306 Mackey A, 576 Mackey W F, 17, 149, 150, 151, 409 MackinR, 351,353 MacLeanM, 170, 171 MacLureM, 178,462 MacMillan C M, 83 MacWhinney B, 217, 218, 228, 230 Madden C, 598 Maffi L, 49 MaherT, 136, 139 MahshieSN, 314 Major R, 306 MakdesiN, 111, 115 Malcolm I, 749 Mandel B J, 383, 384 Mann V A, 170, 171 Mansour G, 106 Manzini M R, 236, 237 MaratsosM P, 218 Marchman V, 228, 230 Marcus G F, 228, 230 Marland M, 324, 325, 418, 419 Mar-Molinero C, 134, 135, 139 Marmor G S, 277, 279 Marrou H I, 625 Marsh G, 451 823
Marshall Marshall J C, 238, 239, 241, 442, 445, 449 Martin J R, 397, 403, 422, 424, 478, 480, 481 Martin J W, 491,495 Martin L, 329, 332 Martin N, 325, 478, 480 Martin P W, 122 Martin-Jones M, 533, 535, 539 Mateene K, 48, 49 Matthews A, 671,672, 675 Matthiessen C M I M, 423, 424 Maybin J, 336, 337, 496, 500 McCaig I, 351,353 McCarthy M J, 349, 350, 352, 669, 672, 674, 675, 682 McCartyTL, 315 McClelland J L, 450, 451, 463, 464, 465 McCloskey M L, 606, 610 McClure J D, 43, 47 McClurg P A, 369, 372 McCormick W, 239, 241 McDonald P F, 513, 514, 518 McHoul A W, 333, 336 Mclntosh A, 17, 421, 424, 787 McKay S, 143 McKeown M G, 246, 248, 566, 567 McKinnon M, 198, 200 McLaren P, 335 McLaughlin B, 541, 552, 584, 611, 612 McLaughlin M W, 763 McLeod A, 478, 480 McLuskie R, 241 McNamara T F, 749 McNutt G, 264, 266 McRae K, 59 McReynolds L, 242, 243 McReynolds L V, 271 Meara P, 300, 301 Meara P M, 565, 567, 682 Meckel H C, 410, 413 Medway P, 324, 325 Meek M, 458, 459 Mees I M, 777 Mehan H, 199, 200, 319, 326, 328, 331, 332, 333, 336 MejiaA, 136, 139 Mendus S, 22, 25 Menn L, 46, 47 Menyuk P, 296, 301 Mercer N, 316, 318, 319, 329, 331, 496, 499 Mesalam L, 242, 243 Messick S, 24, 25 Met M, 606, 610, 629, 630, 632 Meyer E, 240, 241 Michaelis H, 777 Michel F, 239, 241 Migneron M, 627, 631 Milk R D, 606, 609, 610 Miller C, 107, 109, 115 Miller G A, 611,612 Miller J F, 212, 218
824
Name Index Mills A, 277, 278, 279 Milner B, 241 Milroy L, 506, 507 Mindt D, 404, 409 Mitchell J V, 462 Mitchell R, 320, 321,323 Mithun M, 47 Mittelberg D, 678 Mittins W, 397, 403 MohnD, 515, 518 Moffett J, 323, 325, 382, 384, 479, 481 Mohammed M, 298, 301 Mohan B A, 606, 608, 610 Mohan P, 46, 47 Moll L, 207, 208 Monroe P, 619, 625 Monte NL, 137, 139 Moody W, 253, 255 Moon R, 346, 349 Morais J, 170, 171 Moran C, 656 Morgan C, 498, 499 Morgan J L, 220, 225, 233, 237 Morgan R, 458, 459 MorleyJ, 646, 647, 651,652 Morris J M, 458, 459,467 Morris N, 137, 139 Morris R, 339, 343 Morton J, 463, 465 Moscovici S, 499 MosonyiEE, 135, 136, 139 Moss G, 202 MoussaS, 111, 115 MoyaR, 139 Moyle D, 427 MoysA, 157 Mulhausler P, 33, 36, 143 Muhammad Jawad, 112, 115 Milliard C, 53, 54 Munby J, 540 Munro M, 306 Murphy J, 383, 384 Murphy S, 383, 384 Murray D, 475, 477 Mutschmann H, 794, 795 Muysken P, 507, 598 Myers G, 515, 518 Myers-Scotton C, 150, 151 Nagy W E, 522, 523, 525 Nash W, 599, 600, 602 Nathan R G, 470 Nation I S P, 523, 525, 566, 567, 611, 682 Nattinger J R, 350, 351, 352, 353 NeiceD, 180, 183 Neil D, 505, 507 Nelson K, 585, 586 Nelson K E, 224, 225
Name Index Nelson N, 257, 266 Nemser W, 490, 495, 507, 512 NesdaleAR, 167, 168, 169 Neville M H, 655, 656 Newby M, 419 Newcombe F, 239, 241, 442, 449 NewhoffM, 242, 243 Newport E L, 219, 220, 222, 224, 225, 227, 230 Newton B, 325 Ng E K L, 366, 368, 372 Nicholson T, 339, 343 Nickel G, 405, 409 Nicoladis E, 772 NidaEA, 351,353, 775 Nir R, 678 Noels K A, 528, 529, 532 NordmanM, 518 Norman D A, 549, 552 Norman J, 38, 42 Norman K, 326, 327, 332, 500 NorthB, 157,789 NorthernJ, 271 Novak L L, 585, 586 Noyau C, 589, 590, 591 NoyelleT, 180, 181, 182, 183 Nunan D, 639, 665, 668 NunaymTK, 109, 115 Nuttall C, 656 NwenmelyH, 19,21 Nyikos M, 522 6 Gliasain M, 85, 86 6 Murchu M, 39, 42 6 Riagain P, 85, 86 Oakhill J, 438, 439, 440, 451, 452, 464, 465 Ochs E, 63, 64, 65, 497, 500, 535, 539 Odlin T, 495 Oftedal M, 50 OgbuJ, 173, 177,207,208 OgdenCK, 781,782 Ogunbiyi I A, 107, 114 Olesky W, 502, 507 Olivier W P, 366, 372 OllendorffH G, 622, 625 Oiler D K, 242, 243 Olshtain E, 512, 791 Olson DR, 167, 169 O'Malley J M, 518, 522, 547, 551, 552, 606, 609, 635, 638 O m r a n E M H , 112, 115 O'Neil W, 584 OoijensJ, 137, 139 Orlansky M D, 585, 586 Orme N, 620, 625 Osborn M, 497, 499 Osborne R, 22, 25 O'Shea T, 358, 360 Osherson D N, 232, 237
Peterson Osin L, 177 Otheguy R, 506 OTooleM, 421,424 Otto I, 530, 532 Ouellet M, 627, 632 Owen T, 367, 372 Oxford R L, 516, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522, 528, 532, 551,552,553,555,559 O z o g A C K , 314 Padden C, 255, 249 Padley G A, 781 PagliucaW, 251,255 Paikeday T M, 532, 533, 534, 539 Painter C, 422, 424 Palmer E, 114, 115 Palmer H E, 88, 91, 551, 552, 662, 668 Palmer L R, 73 Pandit P B, 32, 37 Paradis M, 290 Paribakht T, 486, 489 Parisi D, 228, 229 Park N S, 122 Parker I, 39, 42 Parker R, 325 Parkin D, 34, 37 Parkinson B, 320, 323 Parry T S, 553, 554, 559 Passeron J-C, 332, 334, 335, 496, 499 Passy P, 623, 625, 777 Pateman C, 335, 336 Paton J, 18, 21 Pattanayak D P, 85 Patten T, 423, 424 Patterson K E, 238, 240, 241, 445, 449, 463, 464, 465 PaulR, 470 Paulsen J H W, 43, 47 PaulstonCB, 17, 18, 21,778 Pauwels A, 40, 41,42 PawleyA, 537, 539, 611,612 Peal E, 771,772 PearceJ, 395,403,415, 419 Pearce J J, 389, 390 Peckham D, 778 Pei M, 39, 42 PelkaR, 515, 518 Pelletier L G, 529, 532 Perdue C, 588, 589, 592 Perelman L, 356, 357, 360 Perera K, 338, 343, 374, 456, 457 Perez-Pereira M, 278, 279 Perfetti C A, 439, 440 Perkins R, 251, 255 . Perren G, 419, 416 Pery-Woodley M-P, 687 Peters ML, 467, 471,473 PetersenO, 170, 171 Peterson L N, 241 825
Peterson Peterson P W, 608, 609, 610 Pethickm S, 248 Petitto L, 586 PfaffCW, 588, 589, 592 Philips S U, 64, 65, 765, 766 Phillips T, 178 Phillipson R, 27, 29, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 563, 564 Piaget J, 778, 779 Piattelli-Palmarini M, 779 Pica T, 576 Picht H, 517, 518 Pienemann M E, 525, 541, 549, 552, 596, 598, 611, 612 Pikulski J J, 453, 460, 462 Pilbeam A, 540 Pinker S, 214, 217, 218, 228, 230, 496, 500 Pinnell G S, 454, 459 Pintrich P L, 526, 532 PioreM, 182, 183 Pisoni D, 645, 646 Pitcher S L, 603 Plaatje S T, 766, 767 Plante E, 238, 241 Platt J, 534, 539 PlattJT, 17 Plaut D E, 464, 465 Plunkett K, 214, 218, 228, 229, 230 PorksenU, 516, 518 Poizner H, 239, 240, 241 Pollatsek A, 462, 465 Polome E C, 764 Pon G, 528, 532 Pool J, 35, 37, 59 Pooley R C, 382, 384 Poplack S, 290 Posner M I, 240, 241 Potter F N, 427 Poulisse N, 488, 489 PousadaA, 137, 139 Powell W R, 453 Powesland P F, 200 Powney J, 462 Pozzi-Escot I, 135, 136, 139 Prabhu N S, 625, 666, 668 Prager S, 606, 609 PratorC, 114,784,791 Preisler G M, 276, 279 Pressley M, 525 Preston D, 598 Preston D R, 67, 68, 69, 70 Price G, 50 Pride J, 507 Priebsch R, 73 Prince A, 218 Prinz P M, 278, 279 Prosser R J, 368, 372 Prys Jones S, 290 PuchnerL, 172, 177
826
Name Index Pugh A K, 655, 656, 462 Pumfrey P D, 427, 460, 462 Purves A, 600, 601, 602 Purves A C, 308, 310, 494, 495 Purves WC, 308, 310 PyeC, 221,225 QindTlA, 107,112, 115 Quertinmont S, 586 Quinn N, 500 Quirk R, 350, 353, 648, 651 Qvistgaard J, 517 Rabin C, 38, 42 Radden G, 405, 408, 409 Radford A, 236, 237 Radwanski G, 378 Raimes A, 307,310 Rainwater L, 192, 200 Raleigh M, 419 Ramanujan A K, 38, 41 Ramsden M 1993, 467 Randall M, 300, 301 Ranta L, 629, 630, 632 Rapcsak S, 238, 241 Rapeer L W,410,413 Rastle K, 463, 465 RatcliffG, 241 RatkeW, 781 Raupach M, 305 Ravitch D, 390, 392 Rawls J, 22, 25 Rayner K, 462, 463, 464, 465 Read C, 170, 171,469,470 Reading 360, 457 Rebuffot J, 627, 628, 630, 632 Redman S, 682 Reed L, 207, 208 Reid C, 671,672, 675 Reid I, 421,424, 477, 749 Reid J M, 555, 558, 559, 635, 639 Reid N, 80 Reil M, 367, 372 Reilly J, 248 Renard R, 646 Rendsburg G A, 38, 42 RengifoFA, 135, 136, 139 RenoufA, 350, 352, 353 Renznick J S, 248 Reuter Y, 386 Reyburn W, 775 Reyhner J, 77 Rhenius J, 781 Rhodes N, 627, 632 Richards B, 227, 229 Richards B J, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225 Richards I A, 781,782 Richards J, 640, 644
Name Index Richards JB, 135, 139 Richards J C, 17, 534, 539, 639, 659, 665, 668 Richardson A, 256, 266 Richman B, 750 Richmond J, 397, 403 Richterich R, 540, 624, 625 Riding A, 136, 139 Rieck B O, 592 Riel M, 367, 372 Ringbom H, 493, 495 Ringenberg K R, 135, 139 Risse G L, 239, 241 Rivenc P, 406, 409 Rivers W M, 364, 366, 659, 668, 682 Rixon S, 643, 644 Roach P, 648, 652 Roberts A H, 524, 525 Roberts C, 295, 507 Roberts G R, 455, 457 Roberts P, 395, 403 Robertson F, 561, 564 Robey R R, 237, 241 Robinett B, 784 Robins RH, 618, 619, 625 Robinson G, 497, 500 Robinson P C, 639 Robinson W P , 200, 224, 225 Robson C, 469 Roca I M, 237 Roche J W, 768 Rochester S, 422, 424 Rodgers T S, 659, 668 Rodman R, 204, 205 Rodney W, 180, 183 Rodriguez D, 526, 532 Roeltgen D P, 241 Rogoff B, 500 Rohlfing H, 756 Romaine S, 202, 290, 533, 535, 536, 539 Ronkin M, 395, 401, 402, 748 Rope F, 386 Rosen H, 323, 325, 336, 337, 478, 480 Rosen T J, 228, 230 Rosenbaum-Cohen P R, 299, 300, 301 Ross R, 265, 266 Rost M, 295, 640, 644 Rothery J, 397, 403 RouchdyA, 107, 115 Roulet E, 409 Rubagumya C M, 18, 21, 106 Rubens A B, 239, 241 Rubin J, 516, 518, 522 Ruiz R, 136, 139 Rumelhart D E, 463, 465, 500, 549, 552 Russo J P, 782 Rutherford W, 594, 598, 616, 618 Ryan A,300, 301 Ryan F, 607, 610
Seibicke Ryan L V, 747 Ryding E, 241 SatlM, 107, 115 SabelC, 182, 183 Sadler J E, 754 Safirk, 593, 596, 598 SagerJC, 513, 514, 518 Sajavaara K, 29 Salinos, 135, 137, 139 Sammartino P, 390, 392 Sampson G, 619, 625 Sanders T G, 136,139 Sapir E, 63, 65 Sapon S M, 750 Sarig G, 298, 301 Sasanuma S, 443, 449 Saussure F de, 536, 539 Savage W, 143 Saville M R, 789, 790 SawaieM, 107, 115 Saxton M, 223, 225 Scarborough H, 211, 212, 218, 256, 266 Scarcella R, 553, 559, 633 Scardamalia M, 367, 368, 372, 475, 477 Schachter J, 595,598, 784 ScharerR, 157 Schaub P, 389, 390 Schenkel W, 405, 409 Schermerhorn R A, 61, 63 Schieffelin B, 63, 65, 497, 500 Schiffman H, 39, 42 Schmid-Schonbein G, 408, 409 Schmidt A, 47, 79, 80 Schmidt P, 423, 424 Schmidt R, 529, 532, 556, 559, 611,612 Schmidt R W, 528, 532, 665, 668 Schmiedt J, 106 Schmitt N, 349, 682 Schneider G, 517, 518 Schneider W, 546, 549, 552 SchoerL, 413 Scholfield P, 348, 349 Schuchat T, 678 Schum R, 265 Schumann J, 500 Schumann J H, 69, 70, 526, 529, 532 Schunk D H, 526, 532 Scott MS, 791 Scovel T, 284, 511, 512, 569, 571 Scragg D G, 773 ScribnerS, 184, 186 Scriven M, 21,25 Searfoss L W, 461, 462 Searle J, 496, 500 Searle J R, 505, 507 Sebeok T A, 73 Seibicke W, 517, 518
827
Seidenberg Seidenberg M S, 450, 451, 463, 464, 465 Seller T B, 245, 248 Self 1,358,360 Seliger H W,412,413 Selinker L, 405,409,495, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 535, 539, 545, 552, 592, 598, 756 Selinker L L, 29 Seines O A, 239, 241 SerroSM, 135, 139 Sevush S, 241 Seyer P, 369, 372 Seymour PH K, 447, 449, 450, 451 Seymour-Smith C, 22, 25 Shallice T, 239, 241 Shankweiler D, 452 Shannon P, 383, 384 ShapsonS, 630, 631 Sharwood Smith M, 295, 572, 576, 594, 598, 618 Shaw S, 370, 372 Shearin J, 528, 532 Shedlack K J, 241 Sheils J, 789 Shepherd J F, 522, 525 Sheppard K, 608, 610 Shiffrin R M, 546, 549, 552 Shimaoka T, 91 Shipman V, 194, 198, 200 ShohamyE, 107, 115 Shopen G, 80 Shopen T, 80 Short D J, 606, 608, 609, 610 Shriberg L D, 242, 243 Shusterman R, 782 Shuy R W, 207, 208, 382, 384, 505, 507 SibayanBP, 122 Simon B, 497, 499 Simon H A, 487, 489 Simonot M, 295 Simonsen E, 777 Simpson J M Y, 50 Simpson P, 421,424 Sinclair J, 316, 319, 345, 349, 408, 409, 523, 525 Sinclair J C, 20, 21 Sinnclair J M, 35, 333, 336, 350, 352 Sinclair J McH, 320, 323, 326, 329, 331, 600, 602 Singer P, 22, 25 Singleton D, 284 Skagen A, 183 Skehan P, 284, 553, 554, 560, 611, 612, 670, 673, 675 SkibaR, 587, 588, 591,592 Skutnabb-Kangas T, 27, 29, 48, 49, 52, 53, 54, 315 Slavin R, 558, 559, 560 Sledd J, 207, 208 Slobin D I, 215, 218, 229, 230, 591, 592 SmalleyWA, 122 Smith D Jr, 364, 366 Smith F, 20, 21, 170, 171, 435, 440 Smith G H, 146
828
Name Index Smith HL, 411,413, 785 Smith W F, 366, 369, 372 SmithermanG, 189 Snow C E, 64, 65, 219, 222, 224, 225, 228, 230, 630, 632 Snow M A, 606, 608, 609, 610 Snowling M J, 170, 171, 276, 446, 447, 449, 451, 452, 472, 473 SnyderL, 210, 211 Somerset E J, 786 Sommer G, 44, 45, 47 Sonnenschein E A, 786 Southgate V, 455, 457 Spache G, 469 Spada N, 320, 322, 665, 668 Spanos G, 606, 610 Sperling D, 360 Sperling M, 482 Spolsky B, 26, 29, 38, 42, 107, 115, 157, 188, 284, 390, 392, 603, 755 SprattJ, 174, 177 Sridhar K K, 85 St John M J, 636, 639 Stack E M, 366 Stalin J, 133 Stampe D, 242, 243 StanbackT, 180, 181, 182 Stanovich K E, 437, 440 Stansfield C W, 553, 554, 559 Staton J, 207, 208 Stauffer R G, 523, 525 Steele R, 761 Steffensen M S, 301 Stein G, 780 Stein N L, 438, 440 Steiner E, 423, 424 Sterling C M, 469 Stern H H, 17, 532, 535, 536, 539, 562, 564, 633, 659, 668, 786, 787 StetkeyvchJ, 111, 115 Stevenson P, 39, 41 Stevick E W, 625, 666, 668 Stewart W A, 187, 188 Stewart-Dore N, 339, 343 Stipek D J, 526, 528, 532 Stob M, 232, 237 StockwellRP, 491,495 Steel-Gammon C, 242, 243 Stokes S, 642, 644 Stokoe W C, 252, 255 Stoller F, 606, 610 StollerP, 188 Stone G W, 382, 384 Stone M, 191, 192 Straehle C A, 395, 401, 402, 748 Straight H S, 607, 610 StrattaL, 178 Strauss C, 500
VanEk
Name Index Stray C A, 768, 769 Street B V, 177, 183, 186 Strevens P D, 17, 421, 424, 765, 787 Strother J B, 299, 301 Stryker S B, 604, 607, 610 Stuart M, 21, 319, 436, 440, 450, 451 Stutterheim C von, 588, 592 Suleiman Y, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115 Summers D, 353 S u n H K , 122 Sustakowski H 1,411,413 Sutter W, 522 Svartvik J, 406, 409, 495, 492, 780 Swadesh M, 43, 45, 47 Swain M, 211, 314, 406, 409, 511, 512, 576, 605, 609, 610,611,612,626, 627,628, 629, 630,631,632,677, 788 Swales J M, 298, 301, 309, 310, 479, 481, 500, 515, 518, 636, 638, 639 Swan M, 479,481,641,644 SwannJ, 202, 316, 319 Sweet H, 645, 646, 647 Sweetland R C, 474 Swisher L, 238, 241 SyderFH, 537, 539, 611,612 Tabouret-Keller A, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 539, 757 TaceloskyKA, 137, 139 TaeschnerT, 210, 211 Tajfel H, 538, 539 Tallal P, 265, 266 Talmy L, 407, 409 Tang G M, 606, 610 Tannen D, 206, 208, 577 Tarone E, 485, 489, 511, 512, 592, 672, 673, 675 Tarone E E, 66, 67, 70 Tay M, 534, 539 Taylor D M, 772 Taylor J R, 406, 409 Taylor L, 241 Temperley M S, 671, 675, 682 Temple C A, 470 Temple C M, 445, 449 TerborgH, 588, 591,592 Terrell T D, 548, 549, 552, 666, 668, 769 Teszner D, 241 Thai D, 248 Theriault C, 629, 632 Thomas A, 182, 183 Thomas H, 665, 668 Thomas O, 395, 403 Thompson L, 495, 499 Thomson B, 389, 390 Thomson D S, 43, 47 Thornberry P, 49 Thorndike E L, 431, 523, 524, 525 Thome B, 202 Thornton G, 403, 395, 415, 419
Thornton G M, 389, 390 Threadgold T, 761 Thurstun J, 749 Tibbits R, 585, 586 Tickoo M L, 350, 353, 639 Tiegerman E, 265 TilmatineM, 107, 109, 113, 115 Timm L A, 40, 42 Titone R, 659, 668 Tobin M J, 277, 279 ToddF, 318, 326, 331 Tomasello M, 219, 220, 224 Tomic O M, 505, 507 Tomlin R, 575, 577 Torbe M, 324, 325, 336, 337 Tough J, 203, 204 TowellR, 611,612 Trabasso T, 188 Trager G L, 785 TreimanR, 170, 171,470 Tremblay P F, 528, 529, 532 Trim J L M, 113, 115,789 Trimble L, 515, 518 Trimble M T, 515, 518 Troike R C, 189,789,790 Trollip S R, 370, 372 Trudell B, 134, 139 Trudgill P, 200 Tucker G R, 114, 609, 610, 771, 772, 790, 791 Tucker R, 324, 325, 626, 627, 632 Tuijnman A C, 175, 177, 181, 183 TunmerWE, 167, 168, 169 Turnbull M, 633 Turner 1,608,610 Turner R, 515, 517 Twaddell W F, 87, 89, 91, 792 Twadell K, 402, 748 Tyler A, 522, 523, 525 Tyler R W, 539, 540 Tyron D T, 143 Tzavaras A, 241 Ulijn J M, 299, 300, 301 Ullman M, 228, 230 Underwood M, 641, 643, 644 Ur P, 618, 643, 644, 665, 668, 670, 673, 675 Urquhart A H, 296, 298, 301, 654, 655, 656 Urquhart S, 299, 301 Urwin C, 334, 335 Ushioda E, 529, 532 Varadi T, 486, 489 Vaid J, 290 Valdes J, 498, 500 Valdman A, 793 ValentimSdS, 137, 139 Vallar G, 238, 241 Van Ek J A, 406, 409, 505, 507, 789
829
van Els van Els T J M, 7, 8, 17,113, 115,794 van Ernden A, 603 Van Essen A, 773 van Hest E, 794 Van Horn R, 370, 372 vanLierL, 321,323, 324, 325 vanOsC, 7, 8, 17,794 Vance R, 238, 241 VanPatten B, 670, 673, 675 Varady T, 49 Varennes F, 49 Varonis E M, 533, 538, 573, 574, 575, 576, 577 Varro G, 35, 37 Vasseur M, 295 VelhoM, 136, 139 Vendler H, 782 VenezkyRL, 172, 177 Venn C, 334, 335 VergnaudJ, 170,171 Verhoeven L, 314 VersteeghK, 107, 115 Victor W, 795 Vincent D, 462 Voller P, 665, 666, 668 VolterraV, 210, 211,586 vonGleichU, 134, 139 vonHahnW, 518 Vygostky L S, 368, 372, 500, 610 Waard J de, 775 Wagner D, 166 Wagner D A, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 183, 184, 185, 186 Wagner D L, 620, 625 Wakefield H, 353 Walbridge L, 107, 115 Walkerdine V, 334, 335, 336 Wall D* 23, 25 Wallace C, 656 Wallach G, 256, 266, 276 Wallesch C-W, 238, 241 WalmsleyJ B,781,785,786 Walter C, 641,644 Walter S L, 135, 139 WannasA, 109, 110, 115 Wannenmacher W, 245, 248 Ward C A, 35, 37 Wardhaugh R, 7, 17, 50 Warren-Leubecker A, 64, 65 WastaSA, 137,139 Waterbury M, 791 Waterland L, 456, 457 Waters A, 635, 638 Watson D J, 460, 462 Watt I, 184, 186 Watts R J, 505, 507 Webb W G, 238, 241 Weber H, 17,534,539 830
Name Index Weeks F, 561,564 Weigle S C, 608, 610 Weiller C, 240, 241 Weinberger S, 571 Weiner B, 526, 532 Weinreich U, 35, 37, 60, 63, 290, 489, 495, 509, 512, 770 Weinstein B, 59 Weinstein S, 232, 237 Weir C, 299, 301 Weir C J, 655, 656 Welch V, 451 Wells C G, 220, 225, 226, 230 Wells C J, 781 Wells G, 204, 329, 330, 332, 500 Weltens B, 794 Wenden A, 516, 518, 522 Werlich E, 406, 409 Wernicke C, 239, 241 Wertsch J, 500 Wesche M, 606, 609, 610, 627, 628, 631, 632 Wesche M B,221,225 Wesche M H, 606, 609 West M, 560, 564 West M P, 653, 656 West R, 561,564 Westgate D P G, 20, 21, 318, 326, 331, 332, 333, 335 Wexler K, 232, 237 Whaley L J, 77 White J, 202, 462 White L, 545, 552, 583, 584, 596, 598 White R V, 687 Whitty G, 332, 336 Whorf B,500 Widdowson H G, 10,17,425, 427, 515, 518, 540, 617, 618, 665, 668, 795, 796 Wierzbicka A, 408, 409, 497, 498, 500, 503, 505, 507 Wigfield A, 526, 532 Wilcox P, 254, 255 Wilcox S, 254, 255 Wilkins D, 80, 641,644 Wilkins D A, 406, 409, 505, 507, 618, 624, 625, 672, 675 Wilkinson A, 479,481 Wilkinson A M, 178, 395, 403 WillesMJ, 316, 319 Williams E, 656 Williams G, 33, 37 Williams J, 206, 207, 208, 615, 617 Williams M, 529, 532 Williams R, 332, 336, 639 Williamson J, 396, 398, 403 Willis J, 665, 668, 670, 675 Wilson R, 34, 36 Winch G, 454, 457 Wing A M, 445, 449 Winograd T, 420, 423, 424 Winter E O,479,481
Zydatii
Name Index Winter W, 764 Wise R, 240, 241 Wodak R, 337 Wode H, 587, 592 Wolf S A, 762, 763 Woll B, 585, 586 Wood K, 390 Wrenn C L, 780 Wright P, 176, 177 Wright R, 630, 632 Wurm SA, 143 Wyatt D H, 369, 372 WyllieM,413 Wyper D, 241 Wysocki K, 522, 524, 525 Xu F, 228, 230
Yanqubl, 112, 116 Yashiro K, 91 Yazdani M, 366
YeeAH, 122 YoderDE,271 Young A W, 442, 449 Young D J, 419, 420, 421, 423, 424, 557, 559 Young L, 505, 507 Young R, 67, 70 YuillN, 451,452 Yule G, 305, 306, 643, 644, 671, 672, 673, 674, 675 ZaborskiA, 107, 116 Zador P, 46, 47 Zarate G, 497, 500 Zattore R J, 240, 241 Zelan K, 427 Zelinsky-Wibbelt C, 423, 424 Zentella A C, 206, 208 ZepedaO, 315 ZhurovalYe, 170, 171 ZidonisFJ,411,413 Zobl H, 543, 550, 552, 593, 595, 598 Zydatii W, 405, 406, 409
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Subject Index AAAL 733 Ability assessment, ethnocentricity in 193, 197 language definition 704 testing 704, 722, 723 Abkhaz 130 Absolute Language Proficiency Ratings for foreign languages 702 Abstractness, role of language in 203 Academic language 605 acquisition failure, bilinguals 211 English for Academic Purposes 634 instruction strategies 607-608 research 14 Academic use of language, literacy requirements 167 Academic fran9aise 384 Academies, standard language prescription 71, 353 Acceleration, poetry analysis 420 Accents (social and regional) gender and 201 political significance 648 in second languages learning 567, 647, 648 sociolinguistics 647-648 validity 647 Accuracy in second language teaching/learning 611, 662 audio-lingual method 663 oral 669, 670 Achievement tests 725 Acquisition of language 225-230, 281-282 adults 282-283, 548, 550, 553, 558 bilingualism 209-211 blind children 263-264, 276-279 child-directed speech and 223-224 cognitive development and 168 competition model 217 connectionism 228 creativity 544, 548 definition 689 derivational and inflectional morphology 522 developmental sequence, importance for teaching 524-525 environment, role of 543 formal models 230, 234-236 gender-appropriate 201 grammar 211-218, 225 hearing-impaired children 262 imitation in, adult-child interaction 64 immersion 64 innateness 226-227, 229, 281-282, 543 phonological processes 242 input and interaction in 219-225, 227
atypical learners 221 blind children 278 changes over time 219-220 in the classroom 220-221 Father Bridge Hypothesis 220 fathers, siblings, peers 220 fine tuning hypothesis 220 imitation 64 individual differences 223 labeling 224 language delayed children 221 recasts 224 see also Child-directed speech language acquisition device 509, 511, 548, 577, 676 language disordered children 257 learnability theory 231-234 identification in the limit 230-232 linguistic theory and 228-229 logical problem 230 maturational schedule for development of language 236 mentally retarded children 261 metalinguistic awareness 166, 168 methodology and theory current 227-229 history 225-227 morphology 228 nature of human language faculty research 11 organization/reorganization of rules and representations 228 over-regularization assumption testing 228 parameterization 228 parenthood training in school 415 phonology in 241-243 reading see Reading, learning role of vision 278^279 semantic bootstrapping 217 semantics 587 sequence, disordered 257 sign language 584-586 systemic grammar 421-422, 424 universal grammar and 543, 550 universal principles, parameter setting 549, 594 vocabulary 248 versus language socialization 63 see also Second language acquisition ACTFL 722, 734 Address patterns, intercultural variation 503 Adult education learner-centered 181 workplace literacy training 181 Affixes, lexical storage 523 Africa language policies and practices 103-104
833
Africa in education 104-106 language situation in 101-103 lingua francas 103 national/official languages 149, 150 North, arabization 110-111 South see South Africa African American vernacular English see Black English, America African languages, standardization 72 Afro-Caribbean languages speakers of, failure of English teaching 414 varieties, relationship with Standard English 19 Age, language learning and 281-284, 553, 558, 675-677 critical period hypothesis 582, 675-676 Aging, effects on foreign language learning 284 Agora 'Web pick' of the month 362 Aided symbol systems 271 AILA 732-733 Air traffic control, language of 561 Airspeak 561 Alatis, James Efstathios 748 Alexia with agraphia 442 Algeria, Arabization/language education policy 110-111, 113-114 Alliance francaise 95, 96 Alphabet, Soviet Union 128 Ambiguity immersion programs 629 tolerance of, in second language learning 558 America, Latin see Latin America American Association of Applied Lingusitics (AAAL) 733 American Council on Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) 734 oral proficiency interview 722 American English African vernacular see Black English, America as national/official language 148 American languages, native Canada 82-83 Latin America 134 language education policies 134-135, 136-137 maintenance, bilingual education in 311, 312 revitalization 76 standardization 72 American Sign Language (ASL) 249, 251-252 child-directed speech 222 as second/foreign language 254 Amplification of speech 270 Anaphoric reference, grammatical development 217 Andean Center for Education and Promotion (CADEP) 135 Andean Oral History Workshop 135 Andean Program in Bilingual Intercultural Education (PRO-EIB-Andes) 136 Anglocentrism, in teaching English as a foreign language 561-562 834
Subject Index Ann Arbor, Michigan, Black English court case 188-189 Antonyms, sense relations, lexicology 350 Aphasia apraxia and 239-240 in bilinguals 288 and brain 237-238 Broca's 238 childhood 264-265 conduction aphasia 238 crossed aphasias 237 reading and writing disorders, treatment 275-276 Wernicke's 238, 239 Aphasiologists 273 Applied Language Teaching 730 Applied linguistics 6-17 ethics 22, 24 language pedagogy and 16 lexicology 349-353 origins 2-3, 623 scope 1, 7-8 limits 16-17 theory and research 9-12 empirical research 12 Applied Linguistics 730 Applied Linguistics Virtual Library 361 Appropriateness, linguistic, and nonstandard language speakers 19 Aptitude for second language learning 553-555, 559 testing 698 Arabic dictionaries 112 diglossia 38, 40 Islamic schools, Asia 118, 120, 121 Juba 103 lexicon, modernization policies 112 literacy, Muslim schools in developing countries 185 as official/national language 108 reform 111-112 standardization 72 use in African schools 104 Arabic-speaking countries authenticity/modernity debate 107 diglossia 107 language education policies 106-116 corpus planning 107, 111-112 ethnic dimension 113-114 foreign languages 112-113 status planning 107-111 official/national languages 108 Arabicization 108-110 Arabization 108-110 North Africa 110-111 Sudan 109 Armenia, language policy 130 Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) 603,624, 662
Subject Index Arrest, poetry analysis 420 Artificial Intelligence (AI), use in language teaching 358, 360 Ascham, Roger 747 Asia, language education policies 116-122 Assessment language, Pacific Basin polities 142 see also Tests/Testing Assigning Structural Stage (ASS), grammatical development 212 Assimilation cultural, multilingualism 61 minorities, France 385 Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquee (AILA) 732-733 Association pour la Didactique du Fran9ais Langue Maternelle 386 ASTP 603, 624, 662 Attitudes to language, socialization and 64 Attribution theory 526 Audio-lingual method, language teaching 541, 542, 624, 662, 664 accuracy 663 behaviorism 663 creative use 663 dialogs 663 habit formation 541, 663 influence on learning theory 547 overlearning 663 pattern drill 541, 663 structural linguistics 662-663 substitution table 663 Audio-visual method, language teaching 624, 664 Auditory stimulation in treatment of language disorders 268 Australia English teaching, government reports 374-377 extraterritorial language promotion 99-100 heritage languages 80 in education 18 International Development Program 99 language policy 80, 337, 376, 736 minority languages in education 80-81 multiculturalism 80 research centers 736-737 Australian Aboriginal languages 80 death of 79 in educational system 79-80, 81 maintenance 80 Australian Aboriginals, education 79 Australian Broadcasting Commission, international service 100 Automaticity, in language learning process 545-546, 546, 547, 551 Auxiliaries, in child language acquisition 220 Aviation, language of 561, 634 Avoidance in bilingualism 286
Bilingual education as communication strategy 484, 487, 682 Awareness of language 413-419 Centre for Language Awareness 417 course syllabus 414-^15 critical 418 grammar 400, 401 lexical, reading acquisition 432-434 multilingualism as teaching resource 415 school courses 389, 397-398, 413-415, 417 teachers 399 Aymara 134, 135 Azerbajdzhan, language policy 130 Azeri 130, 131 Baby-talk see Child-directed speech Backing, sound changes 243 Bahasa Indonesia 120 Bahasa Malaysia 118-119 Baltic States, language policy 130 Bambara 103 Bank of English 346 Basic Education for Skills Training Program (BEST) 181 Basque, promotion through education 312 Bay Area Writing Project 388 Behavior modification/control, in treatment of language disorders 267 Behaviorism, second language acquisition 541, 577, 663, 664 Bengali, diglossia 38 Bentham, Jeremy, influence on Basic English 483 Berlitz Method, language teaching 541, 661 Bible role in standardization of language 71 translation Summer Institute of Linguistics 739, 741 Wycliffe Bible Translators 741 Bicultural Distance Radio Education Systems program 137 Biculturalism see Biloquialism Bidialectism see Biloquialism Bilingual education 311-315 Ancient Rome 619 Australia 79, 80-81 Canada 81-82, 626 China 119-120 developmental 771 goals 311-312 and language across the curriculum policies 324 language education policy and 27 Latin America 134, 136, 137 linguistic minority children 35-36 New Zealand 144, 145 program models 312-313 dual language programs 312 immersion programs 312, 313, 626-632 language-switch models 312 transitional 312-313 835
Bilingual education Soviet Union 130 Sweden 73-74 USA 19 Wales 156-157 Bilingualism 60-63 activation/deactivation procedures 286, 288 additive 626-627, 629-631 immersion programs 628 alternate use 285 assimilated 55 attitudes 289 balance 285 base language 286 biculturalism and 290 borrowing 287, 288 brain structure studies 288-289, 566-567 Canada 148, 149 code-switching 14, 287, 288 compound bilinguals 288, 566 contact between languages within individual 286-287 contact situations 285 coordinate bilinguals 288, 566 degree, in different sociolinguistic situations 209 description 285-286 development through education 313 diglossic 32-33, 40, 60, 209 dormant 285 effects on cognitive and academic development 211 elitist/folk distinction 60 fluency 285 group 60 individual 15, 284-290 infants, first language classification 657 institutional 60 interferences (between-language deviations) 210-211,286 interlanguage (within-language deviations) 69, 286 internal lexicons 288, 588 interpreters/translators 285 language acquisition 209-211 attrition 210 dominance 210 interferences (between-language deviations) 210-211 sequential 210 simultaneous 209-210 language choice 287 language education policy 152 language mixing 286 language modes (monolingual/bilingual) 286-287, 288 language specificity 289 language switch 288 linguistic minorities 285 listening 292 metalinguistic awareness 576 in multilingual societies 55
836
Subject Index native speakers 534 neurolinguistics 288-289 on-line processing 288 overextensions 588 passive 45 personality change 289 psycholinguistics 287-288 research 13 centers for 735 sequential 209 simultaneous 209 societal 31-37 origins 31-32 sociolinguistic variations in language contact situations 32-34 theoretic implications 34 state, and national/official languages 148, 149 subordinate bilinguals 288 superposed 40 types 209 unassimilated 55 Bilinguality 31 Biloquialism 207 bilingualism and 290 Standard English, teaching 19 students' rights to, in English teaching 382 Biofeedback, in treatment of stuttering 270 Birmingham Collection of English Test (BCOET) 346 Black English America 187 court case, Ann Arbor, Michigan 188-189 in education 187-189 verbal deprivation myth 195 Britain 189-192 in African musical tradition 192 Creole and 189-190 in education 190-192 linguistic change 190 copula verb deletion 195 habitual be 195 oral culture 195 Blending skills, in early reading acquisition 433, 435 Blind children, acquisition of language 263-264, 276-279 Blissymbolics 271 Bloomfield, Leonard, and native languages 533 Body language, use in immersion programs 629 Bokmal 71 Bolivia, language education policy 134, 135 Borrowing, individual bilingualism 286, 287, 288 Brain asymmetry, effects 238 and bilingualism 288-289, 566-567 damage, and linguistic impairment 238 language and 237-240 faculty/speech location 237, 238 language impairment correlations 237-238 lateralization, and bilingualism 288-289
Subject Index and reading disabilities 238 and sign language aphasias 239-240 written language and 238-239 Brazil, language education policy 134, 136, 137 Breakthrough to Literacy, learning materials 389, 456 Brezhnev, Leonid 129 British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), code of ethics/practice 24 British Contextualism 599 British Council 98-99 British National Corpus (BNC) 347 lexical research use 352 British Sign Language (BSL) 252 child-directed speech 222 Broadcasting, international, language teaching 95, 98 Brunei, language education policy 116, 118 Building of language 268 Bullock Report (1975) (UK) 323, 336, 378, 387, 416 educational disadvantage 414 grammar teaching 393, 395 Business Executive (computer simulation) 371 CADEP 137 CALICO 7 Cambodia, language education policy 121-122 Cambridge International Dictionary of English (CIDE) 347 Cameroon, language policy 105 Canada bilingual education 82, 211, 312 bilingualism, and national/official language 148, 149 English teaching, government reports 377-378 extraterritorial language promotion 92, 96-97 heritage languages 82 in education 18 indigenous languages 82-83 language education policy 81-83 language legislation 149 literacy assessment 180 literacy policy/programs 182 official languages 81-82 research centers 735 school language policies 337 Canadian Broadcasting Commission, international service 97 Canadian International Development Assistance (CIDA) 96-97 Canadian Modern Language Review 730 Candlin, Christopher N. 748-749 Cannibalism, linguistic 48 Cantonese, Hong Kong 118 Caregiver speech see Child-directed speech Caribbean, colonial linguistic legacy 133 Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft (CDG) 94 Carrol, John Bissell 749-750 Case grammar, in foreign language teaching 405 Caxton, William 751
China Cayuga, death 46-47 Cazden, Courtney B. 751-752 CD-ROM, language education 359, 370 CELIAC 137 Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, University of Minnesota 737 Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington 734 Website 361 Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR), Michigan State University 737 Center for Research in Education, Diversity, and Excellence, University of California, Santa Cruz 737 Center for the Study of Writing 388 Central America, language education policy see Latin America Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyvaskyla 738-739 Centre de linguistique appliquee de Dakar 738 Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (CILT) 416, 734-735 Centre international de recherche en amenagement linguistique (CIRAL), University of Laval 735 Centre international de recherche sur le bilinguisme, University of Laval 735 Centre for Language Teaching and Research, University of Queensland 736-737 Change, linguistic, and school language policies 337 Channel tunnel, language of 561 Chechnia 130 Chereme251 Child development, school language and culture 496 Child-directed language, in sign 585 Child-directed speech 219 cross-cultural study 221-222 general characteristics 219 and hearing impairment 222 influence on intervention 224 lack of negative evidence/feedback 223, 229 and language acquisition 223-224, 227, 229 linguistic complexity 222-223 Motherese hypothesis 223 similarity to foreigner talk 221 simplification in 219, 222 as teaching register 222-224 Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES database) 228 Children communication/interaction, with parents 255-256 language disorders effects on academic performance 256-257 social effects 255-256 socialization, role of language 421 China language education policy 116, 117, 119-120 Languages of Wider Communication in 60 minority languages 117
837
Chinese Chinese Classical, diglossia 38 Modern Standard (Putonghua) China 119, 120 Hong Kong 118 standardization 72 use in New Zealand 145 writing systems 72 romanization 72 Choice of language for education 151,313-314 bilingual/multilingual societies 152 domestic languages 151-152 foreign languages 153 immigrants 151-152 regional languages 152 Chomsky, Noam, on native speakers 533, 534 Chomsky Hierarchy of languages, identification in the limit 231 Circumlocutions, language-disordered children 259 Classes, languages, finiteness 232 Classroom behavior, categorization through analysis of language use 319, 320 culture 495^96 contrast with home culture 496 language and 496-497 discourse 496 pedagogy in 334 immersion 626-627, 629-631 interactions IRE model 333 student verbal repertoires demonstration 333 language see Classroom, spoken language (below); Language classroom submersion 626 technical language 318 Classroom, spoken language 315-319 communication analysis, for language variation fostering 199 communicative norms 202 cued elicitations, in teacher-initiated exchanges 317-318 discourse analysis 316 discourse features 315-316 ethnography in 326 ethnographic analyses 20, 199 functions 315 interactions, discourse analysis 600 joint knowledge markers, in teacher discourse 318 and linguistic differences of social class and cultural diversity 203 National Oracy Project 387 observation and analysis 325-332 cognitive activity coding 331 context 328 discourse boundaries, marking 331 discourse cohesion 326, 331 ethnography in 326 838
Subject Index insightful observation 326 instant coding 327 intonation 329 lessons as speech events 331 linguistically distinctive discourse 326-327 live recording 327 , narrative interruption avoidance strategies 330 observer's paradox 327-328 pauses and interruptions 329 pragmatics 329 prosodic features 329 reporting 331 respondent validation 328 systematic coding 326 teaching exchange 326, 387 turn-taking 326, 331 verbal scaffolding description 326 word-emphasis 329 oral communication skills 315 reconstructed recaps, in teacher discourse 318 structure 315-316 teachers' questions 316-317 transcription 327, 328-331 two-thirds rule 316 Clauses, relations, for different writing tasks 479 Clay, Marie M. 752-753 Cleft lip/palate, surgery 269 Clerc, Laurent 253 Clinical linguistics, systemic linguistics 422, 424 Cloze tests 715, 722, 723 readability measure 429-430 second language competence 693 text manipulation, CALL 356, 357 Coarticulation, and reading acquisition 433 COBUILD corpus 352 COBUILD project 345-346 Cochlear implants 269 Code-switching, bilinguals 286, 287, 288, 501 trigger words 501 Codes diglossia 40-41 and educational outcomes 334 elaborated, formal language 194 restricted 194 Codes of practice/ethics doubts concerning 24-25 educational linguistics 24, 25 morality in 22 Cognition coding, classroom observation and analysis 331 development, effect of bilingualism 211 and literacy 169 Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) 605 instruction strategies 607-608 Cognitive activities, writing as 306-307, 309 Cognitive development acquisition of language 168
Subject Index language across the curriculum policies and 20, 324 Cognitive grammar, in foreign language teaching 406 Cognitive learning strategies language for specific purposes 635 second/foreign languages 519, 520, 521, 544-547, 663 automaticity 545 habit-formation 663 hierarchical task structure 545-546 Cognitive models, text and discourse processing 599-600 Cognitive neuropsychology, acquired dyslexia 442 Cognitive processes, second language acquisition 13 Coherence, cross-cultural differences 309 Cohesion, and reading in a second language 299 Coinings, communication strategies 485 Collins COBUILD dictionaries 345-346, 351, 523 Collocation(s) dictionaries 351 grammatical 351 lexical 351 in poetry analysis 420 in vocabulary learning and teaching 351 word form distinctions 523 Colloquies, history of language teaching 619-620 Colombia, language education policy 134 Colonial languages in language policies, Latin America 133 nonstandard varieties 135-136 Colonialism effect on language education policies 113 influence on language situation in Africa 101-102, 104, 105 national/official languages 149, 150 rationalization of language 58 standardization and 72-73 Color terminology, blind children 277 COMENIUS 125 Comenius, Jan Amos Komensky 753-754 Comissao Pro-Indio do Acre (CPI) 136 Communication alternative 270-271 among bilinguals 286 augmentative (assistive) 270 behavior plus expectations, in intercultural discourse 501 classroom, monitoring by Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching 320 cross-cultural 206, 500-501 motivation for second language learning 527 schools 206 disorders see Disorders of language/ communication electronic 366-368 oral skills 315 parent-child 255-256 in second/foreign languages ability 698, 702
Communicative competence communication strategies 488 fossilization 304 teaching 488, 660, 664 testing 691-692, 698 writing 306, 309 total 253-254, 263, 271 use of language 689-691 language testing and 690-691 Communication strategies accommodation (foreigner talk) 14, 501, 574-575 approximations 484, 485 first language 484-485 interlanguage psycholinguistic process 509 restructuring and 485 second/foreign languages 484-488 analysis-based 486 analytic strategies 485, 487 avoidance 484, 487 compensatory (achievement) strategies 484, 485 conceptual strategies 485 control-based 486 definitions 484 effectiveness (comprehensibility) effect 486, 487^88 holistic 485, 487 interpersonal discourse 291 lexical strategies 485^486 message adjustment 304 Nijmegen project 485-487 paraphrase 484, 485, 682 potential consciousness in 484 problem-orientedness in 484 proficiency effect 486, 487 research 14, 486-487, 488 resource expansion 305 speaking 302-306 strategic competence transfer 488 task demands effect 487 teaching 488 transfer 485^86, 487 vocabulary teaching 681-682 as semantic processing, in second language acquisition 589 Communicational Teaching 666 Communicative approach, in second/foreign language teaching 664-666 feedback 665 history of 624 learner autonymy 666 meaning 664 principles 664-665 procedures 665-666 skills/natural learning concept 665 strong/weak versions 665 Communicative competence differences 206 grammatical development 217 introspective/analytical studies 540 839
Communicative competence native speakers 536-537 Natural Approach 548 second/foreign languages 624, 664, 665 sociolinguistics 69 Communicative context, second language learning 579 Communicative grammar, foreign language teaching 405-406 Communicative intents, expression emotionally disturbed children 262 language-disordered children 259 Communicative methodology, influence on CALL 357 Community Language Learning, second/foreign language teaching 666-667 Community languages see Heritage languages Compact disks, language education 370 Comparative approaches to language study in school 397 Compensation strategies for communication 484, 485 in second/foreign language learning 519 Compensatory education, for environmental deficiency 193-914 Competence communicative see Communicative competence linguistic, native speakers 536 linguistic and literate, pedagogical construct 333 and performance, second language learning and teaching 542 second language acquisition 578-580, 584 transitional, interlanguage 549 Universal Grammar theory 550 Competency frameworks, language and literacy 726 Competition model, language acquisition, grammatical development and 217 Complementarity, sense relations, lexicology 350 Composition (writing) see Writing (composition) Comprehensibility, readability and 428 Comprehension listening see Listening, comprehension reading see Reading comprehension second language listening and 290-291 Compromise method, language teaching 661 Computational linguistics, systemic linguistics 422^*23, 424 Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) 176 Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) 7 Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) 355-358 authoring 357 concordances 357-358 design features, environments and materials 360 intelligent (iCALL) 358 interactive audio 358 role 359-360 simulations 357
840
Subject Index teacher supporter role 360 text manipulation 356-357 Computer-based education (CBE) 176 Computers field linguistics 743, 744 language testing 710, 724 lexical research 351-352 linguistic analysis 743 use in language education 366-372 foreign language teaching 365-366 hypermedia 369-370 language laboratories 365-366 stimulation-stimulated oral discourse 370-371 telecommunications 366-368 word processing 368-369 writing teaching and 482 Concordances, language teaching/learning and authentic language data 357 computer-assisted 357-358 Conferencing, electronic 366 Conjunctives, and reading in a second language 299 Connectionism, in acquisition of language theories 228 Connectionist parallel distributed processing neural net models for reading text 450, 463, 464 Conscientizagao (Freire) 136 Content-based instruction (CBI) 604-610 assessment 608 effectiveness 609 instructional models paired (adjunct) 606, 607, 609 second/foreign language contexts 606-607 sheltered (language-sensitive) 606, 607, 609 instructional strategies 605-606, 607-608 rationale for 604-606 teacher education 608-609 Context in interpretation of word meaning 523 words in, importance for learning 275 Context-free languages, identification in the limit 231 Context-sensitive languages, identification in the limit 231 Contextualization, in linguistic criticism 426 Contingent reinforcement, in treatment of language disorders 267 Contrastive analysis 8, 28, 489-^495 applied, criticisms 490-492 contrastive discourse analysis 493^494 developments originating from 492-494 errors analysis and 12, 492 functional 494 interlanguage and 493 language for specific purposes 514 languages, micro-level applications 491 lexical 490 linguistic difference and difficulty for learners 491 microlinguistic studies 489-490 models 490
Deaf
Subject Index limitations 494 tertium comparationis 490 translation equivalence 490 morphosyntactic 490 performance analysis and 492 interlanguage studies 596 phonological/phonetic 489-490 pragmatics 493-494 predictive validity 491 projects 494 second language teaching/learning 489, 508, 509, 541,542,577,583 listening 640 static language concept 491 strong form 542 theoretica!494 transfer/transfer analysis 493, 508 comprehension 493 positive/negative 542 second language acquisition 542 universals base 542 weak form 542 Contrastive linguistics see Contrastive analysis Contrastive pragmatics, politeness 493-494 Contrastive rhetoric 494, 601, 768 texts, and reading in a second language 299 writing in a second language 306, 307-308 Control, discrimination and 52-53 Convergence, societal bilingualism 34 Conversation analysis 600 blind children 278 gender differences 20 second language learning 572-577 discourse characteristics 579, 580 foreigner talk 14, 501, 574-575 interruptions 572-573 metalinguistic awareness 575-576 miscommunication 573-574 native/non-native speakers 572-575 negotiation of meaning 573, 576 nonunderstanding 573-574 stimulation-stimulated 370-371 structure modification 575 skills emotionally disturbed children 262 language-disordered children 259-260 mentally retarded 261 Converseness, sense relations, lexicology 350 Cooper, Robert Leon 754-755 Cooperative Principle, Gricean 505 Coordinations, grammatical development 216 Coppieters, R., native speakers 538 Corder, S. Pit 755-756 Corpora British National Corpus (BNC) 347, 352 in concordance compilation 357 in lexical research 351-352.
Council of Europe actions on linguistic discrimination 52 and foreign language teaching 125, 154 language proficiency testing 156 Modern Languages Projects 735 Counseling, in treatment of language disorders 268 Counseling-Learning 541 Courts of law, actions on linguistic discrimination 52 Cox Report (1989) (UK) 19, 324, 374, 379, 397, 418 Creative construction hypothesis, second language acquisition 577-578 Creativity, second languages 537 Crediton Project, writing taxonomy 479 Creoles 33-34 in African musical tradition 192 Black English and 189-190 in education, Britain 190-192 oral literature 191-192 Standard English relationship with 19 Creolization and language death 46 Crioulo 103 Critical pedagogies 332, 334-335 Cross-cultural communication see Communication, cross-cultural Cross-cultural discourse see Discourse, intercultural Cross-linguistic studies, morphology acquisition 214 Cultural identity, maintenance, by mother tongue as medium of instruction 18 Cultural pluralism, school language policy 18, 336 Cultural studies, and linguistic criticism 426 Cultural value systems, intercultural discourse variation 506 Culture 495-500 classroom 495-596 contrast with home culture 496 language and 496-497 definition 206 foreign language teaching/learning 497^499 intercultural training 498-499 and language promotion 93 natural discourse styles 498 see also Communication, cross-cultural Cupeno 45 Curriculum design, needs analysis 539 hidden, societal pragmatics 333 see also Language across the curriculum Daghestan 130 Deaf 249 bilingual education 312 communication in aided symbol systems 271 combined systems 271 manual signing systems 270-271 technological aids 270, 271 language acquisition, sign language 585 sign languages in education 252-255 841
Deaf bilingual-bicultural approaches 254 oral approach 253 total communication 253-254 Deaffrication, phonological process 242 Deafness see Hearing loss/impairment Death of language 33, 42-47 causes 43-44 demographic factors 44 linguistics of 45-46 Declaratives, sentences, grammar acquisition 215 Decontextualized language 256 Deep structure, second language learning and teaching 543 Dementia, reading in 443-444 Derivation of words, spelling learning and 472 Descriptive grammars 204-205, 404 Deutsche Welle 95 Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) 95 Developing countries, traditional religious education and literacy 183-186 Development, child see Child development Development of language children see Acquisition of language disorders of see Disorders of language/communication, developmental parental role 203 Dialectics, teaching, history 619 Dialect(s) appreciation of differences 207 definition 206 difference from language for specific purposes 513 English, linguistic characteristics 206 eradication policy 207 nonstandard and gender 201 and learning to read 458 variety, school study 397 Dialogues, history of language teaching 619-620 Diary studies acquisition of language work 226 in applied linguistics research 15 Dictation, language testing 699 Dictionaries bilingual, second language learning 348-349 COBUILD 345-346, 523 collocations 351 EFL 350, 351 foreign language teaching, history 620 idioms 351 language learners 345-349 bilingual developments 348-349 production dictionary 348 monolingual learners' 350 collocations 351 lexical fields 350-351 sense relations 350, 351 usage notes 351
842
Subject Index prescription 353-354 signed languages 252 and standardization of language 71, 72 usage labels, prescriptive 353 usage notes, for lexical fields 351 Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson), prescriptive bias 353, 354 Dictionary of Language Testing 710 Didactic grammar 404 Difficulty, in psychology of learning 491 Diffusion of language, policy 92-101 Diglossia 32-33, 37^2 Arabic 107 broad 40 categories 40 classic 40 codes 40-41 dialectal 41 diatypical 41 fluid 41 general 41 in-diglossia (Binnendiglossie), distinction from outdiglossia (Aussendiglossie) 40 incidence 38-40 intralanguage, distinction from interlanguage diglossia 40 partial 41 political 563 pseudodiglossia 41 rigid 41 style shifting 40 typology 40-41 Direct Method in language teaching 541, 542, 622, 623, 661 conditions for success 661 grammar 661 meaning 661 oral interaction 661 question-and-answer practice 661 second/foreign languages 364 vocabulary 680 Directed Activies Related to Text (DARTS) project (UK) 340 Discis Books 370 Discourse authentic, language learning 635 classroom 496 coherence, in academic writing in a second language 14 definition 599 interactions, cross-cultural comparison 504 intercultural 302-306, 500-507 approaches to study 501 cultural value systems 506 culture clash, breakdown/conflict 505 listening 295 noncommunication/miscommunication 501-502
Subject Index pragmatic rules in 501, 502, 503, 504 research 505-506 speech acts analysis 502-503 universality, and assumptions of cooperative principle 505 Kinneavy's theory 306, 478 language classroom 14, 319-323 educational interest 319 purposes and means of study 320-321 national styles 498 as pedagogic subject 334 processing, cognitive models 599-600 socio-cultural contexts, language for specific purposes 635 spoken, in language for specific purposes 514 strategies of comprehension and production 600 stress, unwillingness to use second language 304 structure, culture-specificity 601 study, CALL storyboarding 356 transcription 327, 328-331 types, French teaching in France 385 Discourse analysis acts 316 classroom interactions 316, 320, 321, 600 teacher talk 316-318 comprehension checks 292 contrastive 493-494, 601-602 Pear Story, The (film) 494 downgraders 502, 503 exchanges 316, 326 grammar teaching approach 397 language play 503-504 language for specific purposes 514, 517 moves 316 repairs 292 sociolinguistics 69 spoken discourse 600 texts 600 transactions 316 upgraders 502 Discourse community, as target for language for specific purposes 636, 637, 638 Discrimination, linguistic 51 action against 52 minority languages and 51-54 Disorders of language/communication 271-275 assessment 273 , blind children 277 developmental 255-266 and academic performance 256-257 blind children 263-264 diagnosis 255 emotionally disturbed children 261-262 hearing impaired children 262-263 learning disabled children 264 mentally retarded children 261 metalinguistics 260, 264 morphology 258, 261, 264
Dyslexia patterns of development 257 phonology 258, 261,264 pragmatics 259-260, 262, 264 rate of development 257 semantics 259, 261,264 sequence disorders 257 and social interactions 255-256 specifically language impaired children 264-265 syntax 258-259, 261,264 effects 272 interventions/treatment 266-271, 273 alternative communication 270-271 counseling in 268 interprofessional practice 274 methods 267-268 modes 267 patient motivation 266 surgical 269 technological aids 269-270, 271 learning disabled 264 mentally handicapped/retarded 261 risk factors 273 terminology 272-273 see also Reading disorders; Writing disorders; names of specific disorders Distributional learning, grammatical development 217-218 Divergence, societal bilingualism 34 Dominance, discrimination and 52-53 Dominant languages 535 classification 657 place in education 53 Donatus 619 Downgraders, discourse analysis 502 Dysarthrias, brain and 237 Dysgraphia acquired 444-445 cognitive approach 445-446 deep 444, 445 developmental 447 specific 447 surface 445 treatment 449 Dyslexia 440-441 acquired 442-443 brain and 239 child reading difficulties 451 deep (phonemic) 442, 443 treatment 448 developmental classification problems 444 cognitive approach 445-446 etiology 444, 446 treatment 449 dissociation between addressed and assembled phonology 463 etiology 444, 446 morphological problems 452
843
Dyslexia phonological 443 developmental 445-446, 451, 472 phonological deficits 451 phonological segments insensitivity 170 surface 442-443, 444 developmental 445, 452 treatment 448-449 syntactic processing difficulties 452 e-mail 359, 366 Ebonics see Black English Echolalia 261-262 blind children 277 Ecuador, language education policy 134 Editorial Center for Indigenous Literature 135 Education additive/subtractive, in multilingualism debate 53 language choice see Choice of language for education mother tongue in 533 national/official languages in 147 policies see under Policies as socialization 495-497 classroom language and culture 496-497 Educational disadvantage biological determinism and 192-193 environmental deficiency and 193-194 poverty and 192 school response 198-199 language awareness teaching 414 Educational failure caused by language mismatch attitudes 192-200, 202 group differences and 192-194 language attitudes and 196-198 language dimension 194-196 Educational linguistics 17-21 definition of field 1-2 taxonomy 2-6 Educational Technology 355 Educational underachievement Aboriginal pupils, Australia 79 African Americans 187, 188 bilingual pupils, New Zealand 145-146 ethnicity differences and 203 gender and 201,203 social class and 203, 220 Educational wastage 173 El Salvador, adult literacy program 136 Electrolaryngography 270 Electronic conferencing 366 Electronic devices, as aid to communication 271 Electronic mail (e-mail) 366 in language teaching 359 Ellipsis in listening to a second language 294 and reading in a second language 299 Elocution 272 844
Subject Index Elphinston, James 756 ELRA 734 Els, Theo van 793-794
ELTJournallW Emotional disturbance, developmental language disorders and 261-262 Endangered languages documentation 76 teaching/revitalization 74-77 role of linguists 76 role of schools 75-76 England and Wales education, knowledge about language 379 English teaching government reports 378-380 see also National Curriculum in English English African American "vernacular see Black English, America Afro-Caribbean language varieties relationship with 19 American see American English; Black English, America Australian, Style council 736 Basic 483-^84 Black see Black English dialects, and teaching 382 dictionaries for language learning 345-346 diffusion 560 diglossia, Later Middle Ages 620 extraterritorial promotion by Australia 99-100 by United Kingdom 98-99 by United States 97-98 as a foreign language, testing 708, 725 foreign language teaching, history 620-621 international status 61, 133, 560-561 loanwords 522 nativization 147, 150 negation, acquisition 215 new Englishes, native speakers and 534, 535 Nonstandard 205 restricted Englishes 561 as second language content-ESL 607 dictionaries for learning 345-346 signed 271 spelling errors 468^69 and initial reading schemes 455-456 learning 470-473 teaching 467 spoken/written comparison, grammatical study 397 Standard 205-208 access to education for Black English speakers 191 multicultural contexts 205-206
Subject Index oral 205 written 205 teaching Australia, government reports 374-377 basics 383 bidialectalism 382 Canada, government reports 377-378 Coalition Conference 1987 (Dartmouth II) (USA) 383 Commission on Basic Issues on the Teaching of English (USA) 382 Dartmouth Seminar (USA) 382 dialect 382 dissatisfaction with 415-417 England and Wales, government reports 378-380 English Curriculum Development Centers (USA) 382 grammar 379, 382 knowledge about language 374, 379, 389, 416, 417 Language in Use materials 389, 395 linguistics 382-383 mother tongue teaching in eighteenth century 621 personal growth model 382 phase elective programs (USA) 382 prescriptivism versus descriptivism debate 382 Scotland 380-381 systemic grammar and 421 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 361-362, 560, 734 UK, differences from USA 395 USA 381-384, 395 see also Teaching English as a Foreign Language use of in Asian education 116 India 84 as lingua franca 61, 133, 560-561 number of speakers 93, 95 Pacific Basin 142 worldwide 560 varieties intercomprehensibility 563-564 learning-model 564 natural 563-564 vocabulary learning, Latin influence 523-524 written academic Creoles relationship with 19 cultural identity conflict 19 educational policy and 373 literacy requirements 167-168 national Curriculum 378 UK education 19 English for Academic Purposes 634 English as a foreign language see English as a second/ foreign language; Teaching English as a Foreign Language English Language Education Council 89 English Language Teaching (ELT) 560
Ethnography English Language Testing Service 707 English as a second/foreign language 560, 560-564 acquisition final k t/d' deletion, by Chinese 65-66, 67 'r' pronunciation, by Japanese 65 British Council projects 98-99 cultural imperialism 563 cultural transmission (Western) 562-563 curriculum development 562 dictionaries 350, 351 extraterritorial promotion 98-99 language education policies and 153 Europe 126 TENOR development 562 testing 561, 697, 702, 708, 710, 725 USIA promotions/courses 98 see also Teaching English as a foreign language English for Specific Purposes 513, 561, 635 diachronic studies 516 ERASMUS 125 ERICA project on textbook use 339 Error analysis 12, 29, 507 explanations 492 second language learning 492 transfer 493 Errors correction, in second language learning 548, 593, 617 grammatical 214 Estonia, language policy 130 Ethics 21-25 applied linguistics 22, 24 balance of individual and social in 22 institutional/professional 22-23 codes 22, 24 conflict with individual conscience 23 safeguards in 23-24 sanctions in 23, 25 language testing 709-710, 714, 727-728 limits on 23-24 Ethnic groups/minorities culture maintenance 62 language maintenance and shift 61-62 language as a resource 62 relationship with environing society 61 Ethnicism 52-53 Ethnicity educational underachievement and 203 language awareness and 416 oral assessment and 20 Ethnocentrism, discrimination and 51 Ethnographic approach in applied linguistics research 15 classroom language 321, 322, 326 Ethnography classroom language 326 constitutive 326 of speaking 69 845
Ethnomethodology Ethnomethodology, discourse analysis 15, 69 Etudes de Linguistique Appliquee and Melanges 730 Etymology and role of morphology in language learning 522, 524 word form distinctions 523 Europe foreign language learning 153 pedagogical innovation 154 internal multilingualism 123-124 language education policies 122-127 foreign language teaching 124-126 minority/regional languages 123-124 multiplicity of agents 123 role of English 126 linguistic diversity 122-123 research centers 734-735, 739-740 see also Council of Europe European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages 738 European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) 738 European Charter for Minority or Regional Languages 124 European Court of Human Rights, Sami minority language case 52 European Language Resources Association (ELRA) 734 European System for Diagnostic Language Testing (DIAL-ANG) 739 European Union (EU) 125-126 EUROTRA (machine translation project) 423 Evenki 132 Expectancy-value theories, motivation and 526 Face, discourse, intercultural variations 502, 503, 504 Fax machines, use in language teaching 359 Federation Internationale des Professeurs de Langues Vivantes (FIPLV) 734 Federation Internationale des Traducteurs 734 Feedback language classroom interaction 320, 321 second/foreign language teaching 617 communicative approach 665 immersion programs 629, 630-631 testing 696 treatment of language disorders 270 Feminist pedagogies 335 Ferguson, Charles A. 757 diglossia 37-42 Ferring 43-44 Fictions, Basic English 483 Filipino standardization 142 use in education 117 Fingerspelling 252 uses with deaf children 263 Finite state languages, identification in the limit 231 Finnish, language for specific purposes 516 Finocchiaro, Mary Bonomo 758 846
Subject Index FIPLV 734 First language 535 definition 657 Fishman, Joshua A. 758-759 FIT 734 Five-Step Learning theory, foreign languages, Japan 89 Fluency, second language 302, 303, 304, 306, 611 Foreign languages acquisition education policy in Arabic speaking countries 112-113 learning strategies for listening 292 communication strategies 484-488 definition, distinction from second languages 536-537, 656, 657, 689 tests/testing see Tests/Testing, second/foreign languages see also Second languages Foreign Language Annals 730 Foreign Language Center, Ohio State University College of Humanities 737 Foreign language learning choice of language 153 computer-assisted 355-358 direct method 364 IT in 370-371 language laboratories 363-366 listening 639 social functions 153-154 stimulus-response method 364 strategies for 518-522 choice 520-521 training in 519, 520, 521 typologies 521 use of term 657 see also Second language learning Foreign language teaching 656-658 accuracy 611 CALL 355-358 content-based instruction 604-610 instructional models 607 contrastive linguistic analysis 28 error analysis 29 Eurocentrism 414 Europe 124-126 European Union and 125-126 history 124 role of Council of Europe 125 role of English 125 fluency 611 grammar and 403-409 grammar-translation method 404 language awareness and 413 language laboratories 364, 365 language for specific purposes 513, 514 oral proficiency 668-669 scales and guidelines 390-391, 392
Subject Index speaking 668-675 standards, United States 391 texts in 598-602 in UK (modern languages) 19 see also Second language teaching; Teaching, language Foreign Language Teaching Forum (Website) 362 Foreigner talk 14, 501, 574-575 similarity to child-directed speech 221 Form, negotiation of, immersion programs 630-631 Formal language, elaborated code 194 Formulas, routine, in vocabulary learning and teaching 351, 352 Fossilization interlanguage 507, 508, 509, 511 phonological, cerebral lateralization and 511 in second language learning 69 France education system 384-385 extraterritorial language promotion 95-96 literacy assessment 180 literacy policy/programs 182 rationalization of language 55 state language policy 384, 386 France InterActive 369-370 Franglais 287 French extraterritorial promotion 95-96 French society and French language 384 grammmar, teaching 385 as lingua franca, in seventeenth century 621 Popular 103 teaching in England, later Middle Ages 620 teaching in France 384-386 evaluation 386 model 385-386 Progammes and Accompaniments for college level 385-386 use of education, South East Asia 121, 122 Toubon Law (1994) 384 worldwide 95 French Alliance 95, 96 Frisian 43-44 Functionalism, grammatical development 217 Functions of language (Jakobson) 306 Gaelic see Irish; Scots Gaelic Gallaudet, Thomas 253 Games, language intercultural variation 503-504 second language teaching 673 Ge'ez, use in Ethiopian Orthodox Church 38 Gender (sex) bias, in language classroom discourse 321-322 differences, and oral assessment 20 and educational underachievement 203 gender-appropriate language 201
Grammar language and 200-202 language use 64, 201-202 verbal ability 201 pitch and voice quality 201 and second language learning 553, 559 Genderlects 64 Generalizability theory (G-theory) 709 Generalization second language phonology learning 570 see also Overgeneralization Generative grammar, in foreign language teaching 404-405 Generative linguistics language competence in 542 and second language learning and teaching 547-548 Genocide, linguistic 48-49 Genre(s) discourse communities, as target for language for specific purposes 636, 637, 638 language for specific purposes 514 and teaching writing 388, 479-480 German diglossia 39, 40 extraterritorial promotion 94-95 language policy 130 language for specific purposes, diachronic studies 516 Swiss 39, 40 use of, worldwide 94, 95 Gestures in communication 484 intercultural 501 and sign language acquisition 586 Given/new distinction, in listening in a second language 294 Glottophagie 48 Goal theories, motivation 526-527, 529 Goethe Institute 94-95 Gorbachev, Mikhail 129-130 Governments, language promotion 92-101 Grammar acquisition see Grammatical development communicative, foreign language teaching 405-406 comprehension 214 tests 212-213 descriptive 204-205, 404 didactic (teaching) 404 direct method, in language teaching 577, 661 formalistic approaches 404-405 innateness 282 learning 404 modular approach 234-235 monolingual learner's dictionary 350 mother tongue 403-409 and natural approach in language teaching 405 pedagogic/pedagogical 28, 404, 408 prescriptive types 204-205 progressive form 407 847
Grammar reference-grammar 404 rules, learning 234 scientific 28 in second language teaching 404, 612-618 classroom methods 615-617 communication 612 contexts and meaning 617 Grammar-Translation method 541, 542 grammatical structures 612, 613-614, 615 grammaticization 617 learner feedback 617 linguistic description 612-614 psycholinguistic considerations 614-617 simplification, for learnability 612 syllabus sequencing 615 semantic approaches 405-406 structuralist, in foreign language teaching 404 study through concordancing 357 teaching 379 awareness of role in meaning 396 communicative descriptions 397 conscious/unconscious use of language 400 creative writing approach 393, 394 discourse analysis approach 397 discovery and problem-solving approaches 402 focus on ways of expressing meaning 402 France 385 functional descriptions 397 history 619, 620 impact on language skill 410—412 language-study-based approach 393, 395 linguistic approaches 394-395 methods 401^02 mother tongue 21, 410-412 NATE Position Paper 401 and National Curriculum requirements 374 needs approach 394 operational versus explicit knowledge 394 relevance of explicit awareness 400 . strategies 402 Systemic-Functional model 397 textbooks based on linguistic grammars 411 texts and 401 traditional approach 382, 393-394, 398-399 United Kingdom 393-403 types 404 Grammar-translation method, in language teaching 541,542,622,660-661 aims 660-661 dominance of grammar 404 Grammars, possible, finite number 235 Grammars (works), and standardization of language 71,72 Grammatical analysis, history of teaching 619 Grammatical development 211-218, 225 communicative competence 217 competition model of acquisition 217 complex sentences 216-217 848
Subject Index cross-sectional simulations 227 data archiving 228 data sampling 226 morphology 228 distributional learning 217-218 functionalist approach 217 longitudinal sampling 227 measurement 212-213 morphology 214-215 inflectional 215 parameter-setting approach 213, 218 reorganizational processes 218 semantic bootstrapping in 217 sentence modalities 215-216 stages 212, 226 two-word utterance stage 213-214 Grammaticality, native speakers 534 Grammaticization, signed languages 251-252 Grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, in reading acquisition 433, 435 Graphemes 471 Greece, Ancient, language teaching 618-619 Greek diglossia 38-39 standardization 70 Greenbaum, Sidney 760 Greenlandic, standardization 72 Group therapy, language disorders 267 Guarani40, 137 Guatemala bilingual education 311-312 language education policy 134, 136 Guinea, language policy 105-106 Habit formation, language teaching/learning 541,542, 548, 577, 634, 662, 663 Habitus 498 Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood 760-761 systemic functional grammar 419-420 Hamburg Notation System foV-Sign Languages (HamNoSys) 252 ~~ Handwriting, National Curriculum (England and Wales) 373 Haugen, Einar 761-762 Hawaii, reversing language shift 76 Head Start programs for environmental deficiency 193 Hearing, aids 270 Hearing loss/impairment child-directed speech 222 children, communication methods 263 conductive 262 fluctuating 263 interventions/treatment 269-270 and language development 262 linguistic-cultural perspective 249 pathological perspective 249 postlingual 263 prelingual 262-263
Subject Index sensorineural 262 treatment 269 Heath, Shirley Brice 762-763 Hebrew diglossia 38, 40 extraterritorial promotion 100-101 revitalization 75 standardization 72 teaching, Ulpan programs 100, 677 Hegemony, through discrimination against minority languages 53 Heritage languages Australia 80 Canada 82 discrimination and 51, 52 in education 18-19 policies, Europe 124 Latin America 133 Sweden 73-74 Hill, Archibald A. 763-764 Hiragana syllabary 38 Home languages 535-536 Home and school language 202-204 differences versus deficits 202 dimensions of difference 202-203 switch 626 Hong Kong language education policy 116, 118 standard language development 142 Honorifics, intercultural variation 504 Hornby, Albert Sidney 764-765 Human Languages Website 362 Human rights 51 linguistic 51 Universal Declaration of 52 Humanistic approaches to language teaching/learning 541,542,666-667 Hymes, Dell Hathaway 765-766 Hypercorrection, bilingualism 286 Hyperlexia 447^48, 452 management 275 Hypermedia hardware/software 370 language teaching 359, 369-370 Hypertext, definition 369 Hyponyms, lexicology 350, 351 IATEFL 734 ICPLA 734 Identity, personal, language as marker 65 Ideology, stylistics and 420, 421 Idioms, dictionaries 351 Igbo 103 Illiteracy early Soviet Union 127 economically advanced countries 178-179 functional, measuring 179-180 statistics 163-166
Indonesian see also Literacy ILTA 733-734 Immersion/Immersion programs 626-633 bilingual education 313 Canada 82, 211,312 classroom instruction processes 626-627, 629-631 core features 626-627 double 627 early 627, 628 early total 626, 627, 628 endangered languages 75-76 late 627, 628 Maori 144-145 middle 627, 628 minority languages, Australia 80-81 outcomes academic and linguistic 628 social-psychological 628-629 partial 627 postsecondary 627 proactive approach 630 program types 627 range of contexts 627-628 reactive approach 630-631 total 627 two-way 627 Immigrants assimilation, linguistic rights and 51 education policy, language 151-152 France 385 intercultural discourse 501 Israel, Ulpan programs 677 language assimilation 57 language testing 726-727 languages of see Heritage languages transitional bilingual education 312-313 Incorporation, socio-structural, multilingualism and 61 Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) 212 India language education policy 83-85, 152 language planning deficiencies 84-85 language situation 83-84 national/official languages 149 Northern, polyglossia 33 rationalization of language 58 writing systems 72 Indigenous languages discrimination and 51 in education 18 Indonesia Indonesia-Australia Language Foundation (IALF) 99-100 Islamic schooling 184 language education policy 116, 117, 120 minority languages 117 Indonesian 120
849
Infants Infants bilingualism, first language classification 657 vocal development 242 Inference(s)/Inferencing contextual second language processing 294-295 vocabulary acquisition 566 deductive 294-295 inductive 295 listening and 290 in reading comprehension 438-439 Inflection in grammatical development 215 and language learning 524-525 and spelling learning 472 teaching/learning 522 Informal Reading Inventories 453, 460 Information processing automatic 545, 547 controlled 545, 546 hierarchical task structure 545-546 learned response 545 organization 546 Information technology (IT) in language education 355, 359-360, 366-372 hypermedia 369-370 stimulation-stimulated oral discourse 370-371 telecommunications 366-368 word processing 368-369 Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) 455^456 Innateness grammar 282 language acquisition 226-227, 229, 281-282, 543 phonological processes 242 Input, linguistic, child language acquisition 219-225, 227 Institut Bourguiba des Languages Vivantes, Tunis 735 Institute for Research in Language Teaching 88-89 Instituts Universitaires de Formation des Maltres (IUFM) 385 Integrative motive 528 Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (iCALL) 358 Intelligent Tutoring Systems 358 Intelligibility, and deviations from norms 13 Intensity, second language instruction 632-633 Interaction analysis, language classroom discourse 320, 321 Interaction in child language acquisition 64, 219-225 Interactive audio, in Computer Assisted Language Learning 358 Interactive video, in language teaching 358 Interference bilinguals210-211,286 second language learning and teaching 493, 542 syntax 592-593, 596 Interlanguage 507-512 bilingualism 69, 286
850
Subject Index data elicitation techniques 510, 511 definition 508, 510 and discourse analysis, in intercultural discourse 501 fossilization 507, 508, 509, 511 interim grammars 593 interim structures 593 interlingual identifications 507, 508, 509 politeness strategies 512 processing, second language 303-304 psycholinguistic processes communication strategies 509 learning strategies 509-510, 512 native language transfer 509, 512 overgeneralization 509 transfer of training 509 second language acquisition 493, 549, 581, 587-588, 593 speech acts 512 universal grammar base 510 and universals 511 variation 511 by discourse domain 511 International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) 716, 718 International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) 734 International Center for Research in Bilingualism, University of Laval 735 International Center for Research in Linguistic Management, University of Laval 735 International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association (ICPLA) 734 International English Language Testing Service 707 International English Language Testing System (IELTS) 725 International Language Testing Association (ILTA) 733-734 code of ethics/practice 24 International languages 60-61 vs local languages 53 International Literacy Institute (ILI), University of Pennsylvania 737-738 International Reading Association (IRA) 734 International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 730 International Study of Written Composition (IEA Study)308-309 Internet, educational linguistics on 361-363 Interpretation, second language listening and 290-291 Interpreting bilingualism and 285 signed language 250 Intertextuality, systemic functional linguistics 421 Intonation intercultural variation 504 in second language acquisition 568, 640, 648 Intuition, native speakers 534, 537
Subject Index IRA 734 Iraq, language education policy 113 Ireland, Republic of, language education policy 8586 Irish diglossia 39 in education 85-86 revitalization 76 Islamic schools/schooling Asia 118, 120, 121 contemporary 184 literacy and pedagogy 184-185 Israel, extraterritorial language promotion 100-101 Item Response Theory (IRT) 701, 709
Japan foreign language teaching 86-87 English Language Education Council 89 Institute for Research in Language Teaching 88-89 language laboratories 88 teachers 88-89 teaching methods 87-88 textbooks 87 language education policy 86-91 rationalization of language 56 Japanese hiragana syllabary 38 kanbun (Classical Chinese) writing style, diglossia 38 wabun writing style, diglossia 38 writing systems 72 Jargon, difference from language for specific purposes 513 Jensen, Arthur 193 Jones, Daniel 766-767 Joseph Conrad phenomenon 302, 569 Journals 729-732 electronic 363 Juba Arabic 103 Jumble exercise 356 Kannada, diglossia 38 Kaplan, Robert B. 767-768 Kazakhstan 130 Kennedy, Benjamin Hall 768-769 Kenya, national language 149, 150 Keyword in context (KWIC), CALL concordances 352,357 Khmer, use in education 121-122 Khruschev, Nikita 129 Kikongo 103 Kingman Report (1988) (UK) 191, 379, 396, 416, 417-418 Knowledge of language 10, 704 second language acquisition 9, 13, 579 strategic, in language learning 704
Language for specific purposes Kohanga reo (language nests), New Zealand 144 Korea, People's Democratic Republic (North), language education policy 121 Korea, Republic of (South), language education policy 121 Korean, writing systems 72 Korenizacija 127-128 Krashen, Stephen D. 769 Kyrghyzstan 130 Labov, William 770 Lado, Robert 770-771 Lambert, Wallace E. 771-772 Language acquisition device (LAD) 509. 511, 548, 577, 676 Language Acquisition Research Center, San Diego State University 737 Language across the curriculum 323-325 need for school policy 324, 336, 416, 418 Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure (LARSP) 212 Language classroom acquisitional constraints 550 discourse 319-323 gender (sex) bias 321-322 inequality in 321 input 322 learner talk, task design 322 negotiation of comprehension 322 output 322 purposes and means of study 320-321 research 14 teacher domination 321 teaching/learning relationship 322 interaction feedback/analysis 320, 321 Language education policies see Policies, language education Language Experiences Website 362 Language laboratories 363-366, 624, 663 computerized 365-366 Japan 88, 89 Language Learning (LL) 729-730 Language Learning & Technology 363 Language in the National Curriculum (LINC) project (1989-92) (UK) 379, 396, 398, 402 Language pathologists 273-274 interprofessional cooperation 274 Language Policy Research Centre, Bar Ilan University 739 Language for specific purposes 512-518 applied linguistics and 514-515 diachronic studies 516 discourse, sociocultural contexts 635 internal structuring 514 research 514, 515 centers for 515-516 rhetoric 515 sources of vocabulary 513-514
851
Language for specific purposes spoken discourse analysis 514, 517 standardization of terminology 514 status in linguistics 513-514 synchronic studies 516 teaching 633-639 authentic discourse 635 contexts 634-635 evaluation of curriculum/teaching 637 first language considerations 634 genre-based approaches 636 learner-centered approaches 635-636, 638 learners' theories of language learning and 634 learning strategies 635-636 learning styles and 635 schema theory 635 specificity 633, 634-635 student assessment 637-638 student/teacher roles 634-635 students' needs and expectations 634 task-based approaches 636-637 teachers' preparation and attitudes 634-635 technological influences 637 term and concept 513 testing 722, 723-724 vocabulary needs 679 Language Teaching 730 Languages of Wider communication see Lingua francos Lao, use in education 121 Laos, language education policy 121 Larynx, artificial 270 Latent trait theory in foreign language testing 701 Latin diglossia 39 standardization 71 teaching Classical Period 619 Early Middle Ages 619-620 Later Middle Ages 620 Latin America language education policies 132-139 bilingual education 134, 136, 137 classroom language education policies as 137 glocal institutions and 136 mother tongue literacy programs 134-135 nonstandard varieties of former colonial languages 135-136 target communities and bottom-up policy 136-137 sociolinguistic diversity 133-134 Latvia, language policy 130 Learnability Degree-1 233-234 Degree-2 233 function 232-233 Learnability condition first language acquisition 578 second language acquisition 578, 581
852
Subject Index Learnability theory, language acquisition 231-234 identification in the limit 230-232 second language 580-581 Learner-centered approaches language courses, needs analysis 12, 540 language for specific purposes teaching 635-636, 638 task-based 636-637 Learning accretion 546 by heart 619 cognitive process 545 discontinuity, sudden insights 546 grammar 404 importance of language in education 20 improvement, capacity-free (automatic) processes 546 internal representations 545 knowledge of languages 9-10 memorability/meaning link 360 multisensory environments 360 restructuring 545, 546 second languages 546, 547, 551 U-shaped developmental functions 547, 551 tuning 546 Learning circles, electronic 367 Learning disabilities, speech and language problems 264 Learning language assessment, educational language policies and 155-156 etymology in 522, 524 information technology 366-372 linguistics and 26-29 morphology in 522-525 second languages see Foreign language learning; Second language learning social functions 153-154 spelling 470-473 Learning strategies 518-522 adult language learning 550 affective 519, 520, 521 assessment of use 518-519 choice of 520-521 cognitive/metacognitive 519, 520, 521, 551 in language for specific purposes 635, 636 compensation 519 expansion, language for specific purposes 636 good language learners 519, 520, 550-551 interlanguage psycholinguistic process 509-510 language for specific purposes 635-636 less skilled language learners 520, 550 memory 519 mnemonics 509, 512 in second/foreign language learning effectiveness 520 experts 550-551 phonology 570
Subject Index typologies 521 vocabulary 681-682 women 553 social 519, 520, 521 stylistic comfort zones 556.559 terminology 521 training 519, 520, 551 vocabulary, second/foreign languages 681-682 women 553 Learning theory, use in treatment of language disorders 267 Lectures, literacy requirements 167 Lee, William Rowland 772-773 Legislation, language Canada 149 India 149 United States 148-149 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 127 LEONARDO 125 1'Epee, Abbe de 253 Lerzebuergesch 39 Letters, recognition in reading acquisition 432 Lexical awareness, in reading acquisition 432-433 Lexical bar, vocabulary learning 522 Lexical fields, lexicology 350-351 Lexical storage 523 Lexical syllabuses, lexicology 350 Lexicography lexical contrastive analysis applications 490 see also Dictionaries Lexicology analysis, through KWIC concordancing 352 applied linguistics 349-353 British National Corpus 352 frequency ratings 352 lexical fields 350-351 lexical syllabuses 350 paradigmatic relations 350 sense relations 350 use of corpora in lexical research 351-352 word combinations 351 Lexis see Vocabulary Liberal arts, history of language teaching 620 Liechtenstein, diglossia 39 LINGUA 125,738 Lingua francos 33, 60-61 Africa 103 cultural variations 498-499 and standardization of language 72 through demographic factors 60 Linguicide 48^9 through discrimination 51 Linguicism 52-53 Linguistic Minorities Project (UK) 19 Linguistic Virtual Library 362 Linguistics and English Teaching, Schools Council Programme 389-390, 395, 415^16, 456 Linguistics Resources on the Net Web page 362
Literacy Listening comprehension correlation with reading comprehension 437, 439-440 second languages 290-291 tests 718-719 learning, language awareness courses 414 learning strategies for second languages 291, 292 oracy 178, 387 process of 290-291 second language 290-295, 305, 306 acquisition/learning 291-292, 639 bottom-up/top-down processes 293 contextual inferencing 294-295 cross-cultural communication 295 ellipsis 294 given/new distinction 294 grammatical parsing 293-294 lexis first principle 293-294 mishearings 293 misunderstandings during grammatical parsing 294 parallels with first language listening 291 phonological perception 290, 292-293 pragmatic competence 292 processing speed 293, 294 speech simplification and 293 testing 700 word recognition 290, 292-293 second language processing, intake 291, 292 second language teaching 639-644 aid to pronunciation 640 communicative materials 641-643 discrimination tasks 640 evaluation of materials and methods 643 grading of task 641 intonation 641 listening for gist 641 note-taking 641 product versus process 643 pronunciation tasks 640 real life tasks 641-642 redundancy in 641 teacher competence 643-644 texts and exercises 640-641, 643 use of authentic discourse 292, 641-642, 643 skill of 639-640 Literacy 159-166 acquisition 160, 446 research in 172-173 social and cultural differences 172-173 adult 160 Australia 376 measurement 173-174 readability studies 428 assessment national 179-180 reading tests 716
853
Literacy campaigns in developing countries 162 children 160 Classical Period 618, 619 consequences 169 contribution of school education 20 definition 159, 171-172 design of instructional materials 176 domains 175 skills assessment in 175-176 functional 159, 171-172 gender and 201 as a global issue 162 government policies/programs 179, 181-182 and language competence 161 levels 159-160 measurement 172, 173-176 household surveys 174—175 literacy levels 175-176 metalinguistic awareness 166-169 mother tongue adult programs, Latin America 134 mother tongues/second language issues 173, 176-177 multisectoral approaches 176 National Literacy Strategy (England and Wales) 398-399, 401 nonstandard language and 19 nonmainstream groups 206 oracy 161-162 Pacific Basin polities 141 as pedagogical goal 332-333 pedagogy of the oppressed 334 phoneme-grapheme correspondences 170 phonological awareness and 169-171 programs 171 promotion, Summer Institute of Linguistics 739-740, 741 purposes of, contextual conceptions 167 research 171-173, 176-177 centers for 737-738 use of technology 176 retention 173 role in language development 20 second language 161 skills 175 assessment 175-176 socialization 64 statistics 163-166 traditional religious schools and 184—185 training learner-centered 181 workplace 181 and work 180-181 training programs 181 and written/spoken language differences 167 Literary analysis, systemic grammar 420, 424 Literary canons, linguistic criticism and 426 Literary criticism, linguistic contextualization 426
854
Subject Index and literature teaching 425-427 Literature diglossia in 37 teaching and linguistic criticism 425-427 stylistic analysis 425 Lithuania, language policy 130 Loanshifts, bilingualism 287 Loanwords bilingualism 287 and language learning 522 Logic, history of language teaching 620 Longitudinal development data, from diary studies, in applied linguistics research 15 Longman Dictionary of American English 347 Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) 347 Longman Lancaster Corpus (LLC) 347 Longman Language Activator (LA) 348 Loyalty, language see Maintenance of language Luisefio, death 45 Luxembourg bilingual education 312 diglossia 39 language education policy 126 Macau, language education policy 118 Mainstream definitions 205-206 see also Nonmainstream Maintenance of language 42-47 bilingual education in 311, 312, 313 in ethnic groups 61, 62 status factors 44 Makaton Vocabulary 271 Malay Brunei 118 Malaysian education 118-119 Malayalam, diglossia 38 Malaysia language education policy 116, 117, 118-119 language planning 35 minority languages 117 standard language development 142 Mandarin, Singapore language policy 117 Manding 103 Maori Kura Kaupapa Maori (Maori immersion movement) 144-145 in New Zealand education 143-146 revitalization 76 Te Kohanga Reo (language nest movement) 144 Te Reo Maori Society 144 Markedness in second language acquisition 67, 579, 581, 595-596 implicational hierarchy 579-580, 595 typology, and phonology acquisition 571 Markedness differential hypothesis 595
Subject Index Marr, Nikolai 128 Master-Apprentice Language Program 76 Mauritania, language policy 104-105 Maxims, Gricean, in intercultural discourse 505 Mayan 136 Mean length of utterance (MLU) in developmental language disorder 258 in measurement of grammatical development 212 Meaning acquisition of language, systemic grammar 421-422, 424 derived from reading, direct/mediated routes 436-437 grammatical, and pedagogical grammar 406-408 language teaching 360, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666 lexical, culture and 497^98 negotiation immersion programs 629 intercultural discourse 504 second language learning 573, 576 public, stylistic devices 420 spatial, in second language acquisition 587, 590-591 study, CALL storyboarding 356 systemic functional grammar 420, 423, 424 vocabulary, teaching 680, 682 Measurement theory, foreign languages testing 701 Media language, literacy and 167 Memorization, second/foreign language learning 519 Memory in learning, association of nodes 545 long-term 545 memorability/meaning link 360 short-term 545 and text interpretation 439 in theories about reading 463 in vocabulary learning, phonological recoding 436-437 Mentally retarded developmental language disorders 261 language development 261 Mercator-Education 738 Metacognitive skills, in monitoring reading comprehension 438, 439 Metalinguistic awareness conversation, second language learning 575-576 literacy 166-169 Metalinguistics problems, language-disordered children 260, 300 in reading acquisition 431, 432, 433 Metaphor, signed languages 251 Metapragmatics, child language development 64 Mexico language education policy 134, 137 Spanish in 135 Michif 34 Michigan Test of English Language 708 Mindworks 367
Morphology Minorities assimilation, France 385 education 52 ethnic educational policies 62 language as a resource 62 Minority languages 49-50 discrimination and 51 education and 35-36, 48-49, 313-314 Australia 80-81 India 85 New Zealand 143-146 institutional support 44 language education policies 152 Asia 116, 117 China 119-120 Europe 123-124 Indonesia 120 Vietnam 122 linguicidal policies 48 maintenance, bilingual education in 311, 312, 313 marginalization 53 official status 148 research centers, Europe 738 rights 51-54 Sami case at European Court of Human Rights 52 see also Heritage languages Miscommunication conversation, second language learning 573-574 intercultural discourse 501-502 Miscue analysis 427 oral reading errors 453, 461 Miskitu 134 Mixed languages 34 MLA 734 Modality in semantics of second language acquisition 591 signed 249-250 Modern Language Association of America (MLA) 383, 734 Modern Language Center, University of Toronto 735 Modern Language Journal (MLJ) 729-730 Modern Languages Aptitude Test 553-554 Moldova, language policy 130 Monitor theory, second language acquisition 66, 69, 510,577-578 Morality individuality 23 professional see Ethics, institutional/professional public 23 Morocco language education policy 113-114 Quaranic schools 184, 185 Morphemes, grammatical 214 Morphological creativity as a communication strategy 485 Morphology acquisition in children 228
855
Morphology blind children 277 disorders of developmental 258, 261, 264 learning disabled 264 mentally retarded 261 and reading difficulties 452 grammatical Brown's 14 morpheme study 214 development 214-215 in language learning and teaching 522-525 rules, productive use 214 signed languages 251 Mother tongues 535 adult literacy programs, Latin America 134 and education 18, 51, 52, 53, 533 India 83-85 language study 21 Singapore language policy 117 Motherese see Child-directed speech Motivation 525-532 choice 526 components 526-527, 529-530 educational contexts 526 executive (volitional) 526 intrinsic 529 second language learning 13, 526, 527-530, 556, 559,581 phonology 569 process-oriented conceptualization 530 research in 1990s 528-530 social psychological approach 527-528 strategies for 529-530 Movement control, treatment of language disorders 268 Muhlenberg legend 148 Mulcaster, Richard 773 Multiculturalism Australia 80 Standard English and 205-206 Sweden 73-74 Multilingual Glossary of Language Testing Terms 710 Multilingual societies education and 35-36 language education policy 152 national underdevelopment and 35 Multilingual speech communities 69 language planning 34-35 education and 35-36 research 15 second/foreign language teaching 657-658 speech repertoires 32 Multilingual states 54, 657 language policies, political implications 54-59 minority languages 55 as norm 58 postcolonial 58-59 rationalization of language 54-56 Multilingualism 60-63
856
Subject Index ethnic groups in contact 61 group 60 implications 53 India 58-59 institutional 60 internal, Europe 123-124 language acquisition 209-211 and language policies 62-63 and language shift 61-62 polyglossic 32-33 research center, Brussels 735 societal 31-37 origins 31-32 sociolinguistic variations in language contact situations 32-34 theoretic implications 34 state 58 political implications 59 Switzerland 56 USSR 58 as teaching resource 397, 415 Multimedia definition 369 in language teaching 358-359 creative writing role 360 design of learning environments and materials 360 macro-generation of materials 360 Multisensory learning environments 360 Myanmar, language education policy 116, 121 Myringotomy 269 Names, proper, acquisition 244 Narrative abilities, language disordered children 260 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 179-180, 381-382, 716, 717-718 National Association for Bilingual Education (NABE) 734 National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE), Position Paper on grammar 401 National Capital Resource Center, Washington 737 National Center on Adult Literacy (NCAL), University of Pennsylvania 737 National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research (NCELTR), Macquarie University 736 National Child Development Study (UK) (1972) 414, 416 National Congress on Languages in Education 416-417 National Council of Teachers of English (USA) 382 National Curriculum in English (England and Wales) 373-374, 378 Creoles, Black English 190-191 grammar 398 knowledge about language 417-418 LINC project (1989-92) 379, 396, 398, 402 policy on Standard English 19, 373
Subject Index Profile Components 373-374 reading, Standard Assessment Tasks 462 writing, chronological/non-chronological 479 National Curriculum in Modern Foreign Languages 19 National Foreign Language Research Centers, United States 735, 737 National K-12 Language Resource Center, Iowa State University 737 National Language Research Institute, Japan 735 National languages 146-150 bilingualism and 148, 149 choice, new nations/former colonies 149, 150 development in Asia 116 relationship with support for minority languages 117 relationship with use of English in schools 116 in education 147, 336-337 nationalism and 147-148 planning, facilitated by social forces 62 National Languages and Literacy Institute (NLIA), Australia 736 National Literacy Strategy (England and Wales) 398-399, 401 National Oracy Project (UK) 387 National Writing Project (UK) 387-388, 480 National Writing Project (US) 388-389 Nationalism 147 language planning and, multilingual speech communities 35 Nationism 147 language planning and, multilingual speech communities 35 Native speakers 532-539 bilingual 534 choice of model 534 competence 536-537 Coppieters' experiment 538 definition 537 educational issues 533 grammaticality 534 idealized 536 intuition 534 and new Englishes 534, 535 practical issues 534-535 psycholinguistic issues 533-534 racism issues 535 of second language 537 theoretical issues 533 Nativization, Soviet Union 127-128 Natural Approach in language teaching 405, 548, 666 Natural language generation, systemic grammar and 423 interlanguage as 511 processing SHRDLU system 422 systemic linguistics 422, 424 Natural learning, in language teaching 665, 666
Official languages Needs analysis, language education 12, 539-540 language for specific purposes 634 learners characteristics 539 self-diagnosis 539 learner's needs 625 instruments of assessment 539-540 interpretations 539 target-oriented 539 on-course 539, 540 pre-course 539, 540 Negation, grammar acquisition 212, 215 Negotiation, professional language of 634 Neologisms, language for specific purposes 514 Netherlands bilingual education 311 National Action Program for Foreign Languages 794 Neurolinguistics, bilingualism 288-289, 566-567 Neuropsychology, cognitive, acquired dyslexia 442 New Guinea see Papua/New Guinea New Zealand minority languages in education 143-146 National Languages policy 145 Te Kohanga Reo (language nest movement) 144 Newbolt Report (1921) (UK) 379 Nicaragua, language education policy 134 Nickel, Gerhard 774 Nida, Eugene Albert 774-775 Nigeria, language situation 103 Nomenclatures 514 Noncommunication, intercultural discourse 501 Nonmainstream groups definition 206 language teaching education policy 206-207 instructional approaches 207-208 language use culturally-embedded aspects 206 linguistic characteristics 206 literacy 206 Norms, monolingual, education and 51, 53 Norwegian, standardization 71 Notional-Functional language teaching 406, 636 Noun phrase accessibility hierarchy 595-596 Null subjects, in grammatical development 213, 228 Nynorsk 71 Observer's paradox 66 classroom language 327-328 Occupational English Test 707, 722 Official languages 146 African countries 104 bilingual/multilingual states, imposition 54 bilingualism and 148, 149 choice, new nations/former colonies 149, 150 in education 147 nationism and 147
857
Ogden Ogden, Charles Kay, Basic English 483 Omission, spelling errors 468 Onomastics, language for specific purposes 514 Operators, Basic English 483 Oracy 178, 382 and language across the curriculum 324 and literacy 161-162 National Oracy Project (UK) 387 Oral approach to language teaching 619 English teaching in Japan 87-88, 623 Oral assessment, gender differences 201 Oral communication skills 315 Oral discourse, second language teaching 671-674 exercises 672-674 interactional features 291, 671, 672 transactional features 671-672 Oral language processing, second language teaching contextualisation 669 drills and speech production 669-670 exercises 669-671 fragmentation 669 Orientation instrumental 527-528 integrative 527-528 motivation and 527-528 Orthography/Orthographies learning 470-473 logographic, phonological awareness insensitivity 170 modified, in reading teaching materials 455-456 and reading acquisition 434 in a second language 300-301 Orthological Institute 484 Ossetic 130 Overgeneralization(s) bilingualism 286 in grammatical morphology acquisition 214 prevention, Subset Principle 583 second language learning 303, 509, 583, 587 Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD) 347 Oxford English Dictionary, prescription 354 Pacific Basin geographical and political diversity 139-140 language education policies 139-143 literacy 141 Paget-Gorman Sign System 271 Palilalia 272 Palmer, Harold Edward 775-776 Panoptic conjugation system 483 Papua/New Guinea, standard language development 142 Parameters, situational, stylistic work 420, 424 Paraphrase Basic English 483 communication strategies 484, 485, 682 Parents, communication with children 255-256
858
Subject Index Parsing, listening and 290, 293-294 Parts of speech, history of teaching 619 Passives, grammar acquisition 216 Passy, Paul Edouard 776-666 Pathology, language 271-275 interprofessional practice in 274 as profession 273-274 see also Disorders of language/communication Paulston, Christina Bratt 777-778 Pauses, temporal variables, in speaking a second language 303 Pear Story, The (film), contrastive discourse analysis 494 Pedagogical grammar 28, 404, 408 Pedagogies critical 332, 334-335 feminist 335 Pedagogy 332-336 language education policy implementation 27-28 of the oppressed 334 progressive 335 subject, discourse and 334 Performance improvement, through capacity-free (automatic) processes 546 second language acquisition 578-580, 584 distinction from competence 542 U-shaped developmental functions 547, 551 Performance analysis, second language learning 492 Performance testing of language 704-705, 722, 723, 726 Persian, diglossia 39 Peru language education policy 134, 135, 137 Spanish in 135 Summer Institute of Linguistics programs 741 Philippines language education policy 116, 117, 152 madrasah schools 118 minority languages 117 standard language development 142 Phonemes, signed languages 251 Phonemic awareness, reading acquisition and 433^34 Phonemic segmentation 168, 170, 450, 451 spelling acquisition and 471 Phonetic Teachers' Association 646 Phonetics contrastive analysis 489^90 in language teaching, history 623 pronunciation teaching, second language 648 in second language acquisition 568, 569 teaching 644-647 Phonological awareness alphabetic script 169, 170, 471 literacy 169-171 reading success 451 Phonological disorders
Subject Index developmental 258 learning disabled 264 and reading difficulties 451 Phonological perception 290, 292-293 Phonological processes assimilation 242 children 241-243 definitions and uses 242 innateness 242 psychological reality 242 simplification in 243 sound changes atypical 243 systematic 242 substitution 242 syllable structure 242 and underlying representions 242-243 use in clinical phonology 243 velar fronting 243 Phonological processing, and spelling acquisition 471 Phonological training, and reading learning 434 Phonology acquisition in second languages 567-571 adults 568-569 articulatory/perceptual patterns 568, 569 biological influences 568-569 contextual influences 571 developmental processes 570 generalizations 570 LI influence 570 learning strategies 570 personality variables 569 phonetic representation 568, 569 phonological system 568 production/perception abilities and 569-570 pronunciation patterns 567 sensorimotor patterns 568, 569 social-psychological factors 569 transfer 570 typological factors 571 clinical, use of phonological processes 243 contrastive analysis 489^490 pronunciation teaching, second language 648 signed languages 251 Phonotactics, in second language acquisition 568 Piaget, Jean 778-779 Pidginization 33 and language death 46 Pidgins 33 Africa 103 evolution 501 Pike, Kenneth Lee, Summer Institute of Linguistics 740 Pitman, Sir Isaac 779 Planning, educational, traditional religious schools 185 Planning, language 140 acquisition planning 107
Policies Arabic-speaking countries corpus planning 107, 111-112 foreign languages 112-113 status planning 107-111 bottom-up 136-137 corpus planning 34, 107 and language in education 18-19 multilingual speech communities 34-35, 62 education and 35-36 and school language policies 336-337 status planning 34-35, 107 Planning, language-in-education see Policies, language education Plurals, grammatical meanings 407 Plurilingualism, additive 676 Poetry, linguistic analysis 420 PoliceSpeak 561 Policies educational, assessment and 726 foreign language teaching, Europe 124-126 language Africa 103-104 Australia 376 corpus 151 education and 151-156 France 384, 386 multilingual states 54-59 and multilingualism 62-63 outside education system 151 language diffusion 92-101 language education Africa 101 Arabic-speaking countries 106-116 Asia 116-122 assessment and 155-156 Australia 80 bilingualism and 27 Canada 81-83 choice of language 151-153 definition of term 130-141 Europe 122-127 grammar, England and Wales 398-399 India 83-85 Japan 86-91 language teaching, nonmainstream groups 206-207 mistaken opinions affecting 27 multilingual societies 15 Pacific Basin 139-143 pedagogy and 154 Republic of Ireland 85-86 schools 18-19 social functions and 153-154 Soviet Union 127-132 teachers/teaching and 27-28 Wales 156-157 literacy 179, 181-182 minority/regional languages, Europe 123-124 859
Policies school language 336-337 language across the curriculum and 324,416,418 language awareness and 413, 417 Politeness contrast!ve pragmatics 493-494 in intercultural discourse 502 interlanguage research 512 Politics, language and language policies in postcolonial states 58-59 language revivals 55, 57 Polyglossia 32-33 Portfolio testing, language learning 705 Portuguese Latin America 133 nonstandard varieties 135-136 Macau 118 Orthographic Accord 135-136 Portunhol 135 Postliteracy 178-183 definition 179 Power, and discrimination against minority languages 52-53 Pragmatic rules in intercultural discourse 501, 502, 503 interactions 504, 505, 506 Pragmatics contextual inferencing 294-295 contrastive 493-494 disorders developmental 259-260, 262, 264 emotionally disturbed 262 learning disabled 264 mentally retarded 261 Prague School (Prague Linguistic Circle), functionalism 599 Prefixes, language learning 524 Prejudice, language and 196-197 Prescription, dictionaries 353-354 Prescriptive grammars 204-205 Principles and Parameters theory 234-236 Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae 619 Processing language, brain structures 238 Professional associations 25, 732-734 Professional ethics 22-23 characteristics 23 codes 22, 24 conflict with individual conscience 23 ethical milieu 25 safeguards 23-24 sanctions and 23 Proficiency, language definition 704 testing 704, 707-708, 725 communicative model 708 pragmatic model 708 skills and components model 707-708 Programa Nacional de Education Bilingiie (PRONEBI)311-312 860
Subject Index Programmed instruction, language disorder treatment 267 Project testing, language learning 705 Promotion of languages, extraterritorial 92-101 Pronouns, personal, learning 246 Pronunciation acceptability 648 attitudes to, and second language learning 569 listening as aid 640 second language teaching 647-652 accents 647, 648 appropriacy 647-648 contrastive units 649 elicitation from learner 650 in flow of speech 650 goal 649 influence of mother tongue 648 intelligibility and 647, 648, 649 intonation 648 isolated sounds 650 methodology 649-651 modeling and imitation 649, 650 monitoring 651 phonetics and 646, 648 phonology 648 practice 649 productive proficiency in phonological system 648 recognition tasks 650 repetition 651 scope 648 teaching/learning sequence 651 Prostheses 270 Proximity, interpersonal cross-cultural context 505 Psycholinguistics bilingualism 287-288 contrastive 493 difficulty in language learning 491 listening in second language 290, 291-292 processes, lexical search 292 word recognition, second language processing 292 Psychology humanistic, language teaching 666-667 lexis acquisition, second language learning 566-567 of suggestion, in language teaching 667 Psychometrics, foreign languages, testing 700 Public language, restricted codes 194 Puerto Rico, language education policy 137 Putonghua, use in education China 119, 120 Hong Kong 118 Quadrivium 620 Quaranic schools contemporary 184 literacy and pedagogy 184-185 Quechua 134, 135, 137 officialization 134
Subject Index Question and answer sequences, language teaching 619 Questions grammar acquisition 212, 215 as test of performance 695 w/z-questions 215 yes-no 215 Quick, Charles Randolph 780 Racism language 51 native speakers and 535 replaced by ethnicism 53 Radio international broadcasting language promotion 95, 98 language teaching 100 language teaching, English 100 Radio Australia, teaching of English 100 Radio Canada International 97 Radio France International 96 Rasch model, in foreign language testing 701 Rationalization of language democracy and 59 economic growth and 59 France 55 immigration and 56-57 Japan 56 multilingual states 54-56 revival movements and 55, 57 settler colonies 58 Spain 55-56 Switzerland 56 USSR 58 Ratke, Wolfgang 781 Readability 428^31 adult literacy needs 428 cloze procedure 429-430 comprehensibility and 428 formulas 428 comprehension and 428 criticisms 428-429 Flesch (Reading Ease) formula 428 Fry Graph 429 reading schemes 428 text sampling adequacy 429 text structure, comprehension and 430 textbooks 20, 338 content area reading 428 difficulty 429 vocabulary 428 word frequency and 428, 429 Reading ability phonemic awareness 434 relationship with reading-related skills 432 word awareness skills 432—433
Reading abstract letter identification, and early visual processing 463 and acquisition of literacy 20 cognitive models 441 comprehension see Reading comprehension (below) connectionist parallel distributed processing neural net models 450, 463, 464 in dementia 443-444 development 436-437 early 450-451 meaning access: mediated 436-437 stage models 436 in a different script, teaching 296 difficulties 451^452 inference making 452 reading recovery program 453-454 social background and 416 Directed Activies Related to Text (DARTS) 340 disorders of see Reading disorders (below) dual-route theory 441 errors, miscue analysis 427, 453, 461 gender differences 201 interpretation 655 as a language activity 05015.15 learning 159-160, 431^40 alphabetic stage 450 alphabetic writing systems 433, 434 children 450-451 children's metalinguistic skills 431, 432, 433 contextual information 436, 437, 439 decoding difficulties 452 developmental stage models 436 facilitator skills 431-432 grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules 433, 435 improvement through phonological training 434 letter recognition 432, 462, 463 lexical awareness (word consciousness) 432-433 logographic stage 450 meaning access: direct or mediated 436-437 metalinguistic awareness 166, 167 morphological problems 452 normal development 446 orthographic awareness 434 orthographic stage 450 phoneme/grapheme correspondences 451 phonemic and linguistic awareness 433-434 phonological difficulties 451 poor readers 451 prerequisite skills 431 reading readiness 432 register of written language 437 related skills 431^34 research in 172-173 semantic deficits 452 skills through practice 432 socialization 64 861
Reading specific reading difficulties 451 syntactic deficits 452 terminology 431, 432 text integration 451 theories 464 understanding of printed language concepts 432 word recognition 433, 435, 436 letter recognition 432, 462, 463 effects of context 463 models bottom-up 297 interactive 297, 301 top-down 297 performance low-frequency/high-frequency words 450 regular words 450 phonological receding as memory aid 436-437 readiness 432 recovery program 453-454 relationship with spelling 470, 471 research components of second language reading process 298-301 transfer of skills between languages 298 in a second language 295-301 and cohesion 299 conjunctives and 299 effects of orthography 300-301 ellipsis 299 intersentential relationships 299 interpretation 655 lexical repetition 299 literacy in mother tongue 296 proficiency 297-298 relationship between source and target language 296 research 13 scripts 296 syntactic processing 299-300 testing 700 text organization 299 transfer of skills 296, 297-298 vocabulary 300-301 second language teaching 652-656 approaches 655-656 improving 653-656 initial reading 652-653 methods 652 reader competence and 654 reader schemata 654, 656 reader-text interaction and 654-655 script and 652, 653 skills transfer from first language 653 texts 653-654 sentence understanding subskills 462 skills Barrett's taxonomy 655 and second language teaching 654-655, 656 862
Subject Index speed, tests 715-716 strategies, teaching 454 subskills 462 success, phonological awareness 169-170, 451 teaching see Reading, teaching (below) tests/testing 459-462, 460 content-referenced (criterion-referenced) 461, 716 diagnostic 461, 716 domain-referenced 461 informal 460 Informal Reading Inventories 453, 460 literacy assessment 716 miscue analysis 453, 461 mother tongue 715-717 normative 460-461 readiness test 716 reading ages 461 second language 700 selection 461 Standard Assessment Tasks 462 standardized 461 types 460-461 uses 460 text comprehension subskills 462 theories 462-465 bottom-up principle 462 dual route 463 interactive principle 462, 463 modularity principle 463 and nature of memory 463 reading as hypothesis testing 462 top-down principle 462 word recognition subskills 462 Reading aloud, history of language teaching 619 Reading comprehension 437-440, 655 assessment, interpretation in 655 correlation with listening comprehension 437, 439-440 difficulties, theories of 439-440 expository texts 438 inferential skills 438-439 Informal Reading Inventories 453, 460 mental model of text 438 prereading activity 635, 655-656 questions 655 register of written language 437 schemata activation 297, 298, 654, 656 second languages improving 653-656 interpretation and 655 prereading activity 655-656 questions 655 testing 700 self-monitoring 300, 438, 439 sentence understanding, parsing mechanism 464 slow decoding barrier 439 stories 438
Subject Index testing cloze test 715 mother tongue 715-717 multiple-choice 715 second language 700 text integration and 439 texts inferences 464 macrostructure 464 situation model 464 subskills 462 use of syntactic constraints 439 vocabulary size indicator 439 word meaning 464 Reading Disc 370 Reading disorders 440-451 acquired 442-A44 cognitive neuropsychological approach 442^44 interventions 275, 448-449 brain damage and 239 cognitive approach 441^442 developmental causes 444, 446 classification problems 444 cognitive approach 445^46 comprehension deficits 447-448 interventions 275, 449 interventions 275-276 language disorders and 256 see also Dyslexia Reading Inventories 453, 460 Reading for Learning project (UK), on textbook use 339 Reading, teaching methods 434-436, 457-459 alphabetic 457 apprenticeship (real books) 436, 456, 458, 459 assessment 436 code-based 435, 436 early reading development, phonological processing 459 eclectic 652 Gestalt influence 457 global 652 grammatically appropriate texts 458 guided groups 459 history 457 language awareness 652 language experience 435, 456, 458, 652 linguistic 652 look-and-say 434-435, 652 paired reading 458-459 phonic 435, 436, 454-455, 457, 458, 652 psycholinguistic method 435-436 reading aloud 653 reading schemes 454, 456, 458 real books (apprenticeship) 436, 456, 458, 459 second languages 652
selection 652 shared reading 458-459 sight vocabulary 435 story-based 458 whole sentence 652 whole word 434-435, 436, 457, 652 word recognition skills 383, 455 teaching materials 454-456 avoidance of bias 456 basal reading programs 454 Breakthrough to Literacy 389, 456 language experience (unpublished materials) 456, 458 modified orthography schemes 455-456 phonic schemes 455 reading schemes 454, 456, 458 real books 456 second language learning 653-654 sight schemes 455 training 454 Reading-related skills 431-434 Reasoning contextual inferencing 294-295 skills, role of language in 203 Rebus symbol system 271 Received Pronunciation, in second language teaching 648 Recife Declaration 148 Recursively enumerable languages, identification in the limit 231 Reference, blind children 277-278 Reference-grammar 404 REFLECT adult literacy program 136 Reflexives, grammatical development 217 Reform Movement, history of language teaching 622-623 Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore 735 Register(s) acquisition, through socialization 63-64 of child-directed speech 219-220 difference from language for specific purposes 513 second language acquisition 67 texts 600 analysis 600-601 generic structure 421, 424 Regular languages, identification in the limit 231 Relative clauses, grammatical development 216-217 Religious schools/schooling Islamic 184 literacy and pedagogy 184-185 traditional forms 183-186 Repertoires, speech, multilingual communities 32 Representation in reading comprehension 438 underlying, and phonological processes 242-243 Research Center on Multilingualism, Brussels 735 Research centers 734-739 language for specific purposes 515-516
863
Reversing Language Shift Reversing Language Shift (RLS) 76 Hawaii 75 Revista de Linguistica Teorica y Aplicada (RLA) 730 Revitalization of languages 74-75 Maori 143-146 role of linguists 76 role of schools 75-76 Revival of languages, movements for 55 Revue tlanadienne des Langues Vivantes 730 Rhemes, textlinguistics 599 Rhetoric contrastive 494, 601, 768 cultural 498 language for specific purposes 515 new 599 teaching, history 619, 620 Rhetorical Structure Theory, and Nigel grammar 423 Rhythm in second language acquisition 568 teaching, in listening in a second language 641 Richards, I.A. 781-782 Rivers, Wilga 783 Robinett, Betty Wallace 783-784 Roman language teaching 619 Romance (computer simulation program) 371 Romance languages, language for specific purposes 516 Royal Academy of the Spanish Language 135 Rules descriptive 204, 205 prescriptive 204 Russian diglossia 39 use in Soviet Union 128, 129, 130 education 129, 130, 131 Sami, minority language education, Norway 52 Samoan, use in New Zealand 145 Sanskrit diglossia 38 standardization 70 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, writing in a second language 308 Satellite television, in language teaching 359 Scale and Category Grammar influence on grammar teaching 394 in language teaching 421 in stylistic work 420 Scandinavian languages, standardization 71 Schema theory, teaching language for specific purposes 635 Schemata, activation, in reading comprehension 297, 298, 654, 656 Schizophrenia, systemic linguistics analysis of spoken language 422, 424 School language policies 336-337 and language across the curriculum 336 and language in education 18-19
864
Subject Index School(s) choice of language for instruction 313-314 failure see Educational failure France 384,385 French teaching in 385-386 and home, children's language experiences see Home and school language inter-group communication 206 cross-cultural 206 international 313 language use in 256 religious Islamic 184-185 literacy and pedagogy 184-185 traditional forms 183-186 special, language-disordered children 267 Schools Council Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching 389-390, 395, 415-416, 456 Scotland English teaching 380-381 grammar teaching 399-400 Scots Gaelic East Sutherland 45, 46 language shift 43, 44, 45, 46 Scottish guidelines for English Language (SOEID) (1991)399-400 Scripts (writing) alphabetic and learning spelling 470, 471 and phonological awareness 169, 170, 471 and reading in a second language 296, 300-301 Sea, language of 561, 634 Seaspeak 561,787 Second languages classification distinction from foreign languages 656, 657 communication strategies 484-488 creativity in 537 definition 536-537 grammatical intuitions 510 listening in see Listening, second language native speakers 537 pronunciation 302, 304 reading in see Reading, in a second language skills 13-14 speaking in see Speaking, second language writing in see Writing (composition), in second languages see also English as a second/foreign language Second language acquisition age and 210, 281-284 attitude 581 behaviorism 577 causal explanation 579 in children 210 cognitive processes 13 communicative context 579 competence 542
Subject Index Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis 577, 583 creative construction hypothesis 577-578 creativity 544, 548 cultural dimension 537 developmental sequences 549 difficult areas 533 discourse characteristics 579, 580 four variable components 580 functional explanation 579 fundamental difference hypothesis 582 grammars, subset/superset relation 583 habit formation 577 implicationally-scaled data 549 innate capacity 543 input 579, 580, 583 control: subset principle 583 language acquisition device 509, 511, 548, 577, 676 language classroom discourse 320-321 learnability condition 578, 581 learnability theory 580-581 learning mechanisms 580 general 581,582, 584 learning research 12-13 linguistic knowledge 579, 580 linguistic universals and 579 listening in 291-292 literacy 161 markedness 67, 579, 581 implicational hierarchy 579-580 Monitor Model/Theory 66, 69, 510, 577-578 motivation 581 negative evidence 580 networks 67 oral performance, monitoring 66 overgeneralizations 303, 509, 583 parameters adjacency 544 head-position 583 pro-drop 550, 583 variation 581, 582 production, variability 579 relative clauses, English 579-580 research 12-13 diary studies 15 social psychology of language 69 sociolinguistics 65-70 acculturation model 69 fossilization 69 variables 65-68, 69 sociology of language 69 structuralism 577 theory 577-584 domain of 578, 584 goals and problems 578-581 history 577-578 hypothesis-testing 582-583 method 583-584 performance 578-580, 584
Second language learning predictions 582-583 through native speakers 618, 620, 621, 623 typological markedness 579 universal grammar 578, 581-582, 583, 584 use of term 657 variables dynamic paradigm 67-68, 69 implicational scale 67-68 stylistic 66 Second language learning accuracy in 662 ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines 698 adults 548 phonology 568-569 affective filter 769 age and 281-284, 675-677 critical period hypothesis 582, 675-676 automatization 545-546, 546, 547 bilingual education in 311, 312, 313 choice of language 153 cognitive theory 544-547, 550 communicative context 579, 587 complex cognitive skill 547 contrastive analysis 489, 508, 509, 541 transfer theory 542 conversation 572-577 deficient data 543 definition 689 developmental sequences 593, 597 dictionaries for 345-349 bilingual developments 348-349 COBUILD 345-346 production dictionary 348 difficulty/ease, linguistic difference 491, 493 drill-and-practice exercises 551 error analysis 492 errors, correction 548, 593, 617 feedback 617 Five-Step Learning, Japan 89 fluency 611 form versus function 588 grammar teaching 612 grammaticalization 587, 588 habit formation 541, 542, 548, 662, 663 negative transfer 542 history 540-541 humanistic approach 541, 542 immersion programs see Immersion/Immersion programs individual differences 13, 292, 552-560, 698 age of acquisition 553, 558 aptitude 553-555, 559 demographics 553 gender 553, 559 learning motivation 13, 556-557, 559 learning strategies 553 learning styles 555-556, 559 personality features 557-558, 559 865
Second language learning influence of LI 489 innate mechanisms 543 intensity of 632-633 Interagency Language Roundtable Language Skill Level Descriptions 698 interlanguage 507-512 internal representations 545 knowledge about 9-10 language education policy and 27 linguistics and 26 markedness 595-596 implicational hierarchy 595 metalinguistic awareness benefits 169 methods 541,542, 658-668 see also Teaching language, methods: names of specific methods motivation 526, 527-530 process-oriented conceptualization 530 research in 1990s 528-530 social psychological approach 527-528 strategies for 529-530 needs analysis 539-540 overgeneralizations 303, 509, 583, 587 parameters adjacency 596 pro-drop 594, 596 variation 544 pattern drills 662, 663 pedagogy 154 performance analysis 493 phonology 567-571 prefabricated/formulaic phrases 617 primary schools 676 processes, contrastive analysis 491-492 projection problem 543 receptive competence 292 restructuring 545 cognitive theory 546, 547, 551 role of culture 497-498 semantics 587-592 longitudinal studies 589 modality 591 spatial relations 587, 590-591 temporality 587, 589-590 social function 153-154 strategies 292, 518-522, 553, 681 accuracy 303, 305 choice 520 effectiveness 520 resource expansion 305 training in 519, 520,521 typologies 521 structures channel capacity 544 frequency effects 544 styles 520-521, 555-556, 559 analytic 555 closure (closure oriented) 555-556
866
Subject Index concrete/sequential 555 global 555 intuitive/random 510, 555 openness (nonclosure oriented) 555-556 pedagogic uses 556, 559 sensory preferences 555 syntax 592-598 canonical order 596 copula-inclusion experiment 597 elicitation methods 597 interference 592-593 processing models 596-597 testing see Tests/Testing, second/foreign languages theory 540-552 linguistic 542-544 top-down/bottom-up processes 550-551 transfer 493 listening 291 parameter resetting 544, 550, 594 transitional competence 549 universal grammar 595 universals, developmental constraints 292 use of term 657 variables, individual 13 vocabulary 565-567 integration and use of acquired words 566-567 learning strategies 565-566 Second Language Research 730 Second language teaching 656-658 accuracy 611 oral 669, 670 adults, nineteenth century 622 applied linguistics 623-624 cognitive theory 544-547 communication, grammar 613 communicative language teaching 624-625 content-based instruction 604-610 instructional models 606 strategies for integrating language and content 607-608 contrastive analysis 489-495, 541 transfer theory 542 drill-and-practice exercises 551 fluency 611 oral 669, 670, 671 grammar 612-618 habit formation 541, 542, 548 negative transfer 542 history 618-625 immersion programs see Immersion/Immersion programs impact of theory 547-551 instructional models 606 intensity of 632-633 and language across the curriculum policies 324 language laboratories 663 language for specific purposes 633-639 learners' individual differences and 558-559
Subject Index learning theory 541-542 listening in 639-644 methods 541,542, 658-668 see also Teaching language, methods; names of specific methods native speakers, history 620, 621, 623 needs analysis 625 outside school system 155 phonetics in 623, 646 pronunciation 647-652 reading 652-656 improving 653-656 inital reading 652-653 Reform Movement 622-623 scales and guidelines 390-391, 392 schools, pattern of 155 signed languages 254 speaking 668-675 standards, United States 391 systemic grammar and 421, 424 theory 540-552 linguistic 542-544 use of authentic discourse 292 use of term 657 vocabulary 678-682 writing 682-687 Segmentation, skills, in early reading acquisition 433, 435 Self-assessment, language learning 705 Self-confidence, linguistic, motivation for second language learning 528 Self-determination theory, motivation 527, 528 Self-efficacy theory 526 Self-worth theory 526 Semantic bootstrapping, use in grammatical development 217 Semantic relations, grammatical acquisition 213 Semantics communicative functions of words or forms 588 disorders developmental 259, 261, 264 learning disabled 264 mentally retarded 261 in second language acquisition 587-592 communication strategies 589 longitudinal studies 589 modality 591 operating principles 588-589 semantic coherence principles 589 spatial relations 587, 590-591 temporality 587, 589-590 and text creation 420 Senegal, Quaranic schools 184 Sentences complex acquisition, in grammatical development 212 grammar acquisition 216-217 modalities, in grammatical development 215-216
Situations Shift, language 42-47 causes 43-44 course 44 demographic factors 44 economic factors 43-44 in multilingual settings 33, 61-62 reasons for nonoccurrence 62 rememberers 45 reversal 75 Hawaii 76 semispeakers 45, 46 status factors 44 through linguistic discrimination 51 young fluent speakers 45 Shona 102 Siberia, language policy 131-132 Sight, role in normal language development 278 Sign language(s) 249-252 acquisition 584-586 joint reference 585 brain damage and 239-240 deaf education 252-254 dictionaries 252 fingerspelling 252 grammaticization 251-252 interpretation 250 linguistic research 250-252 metaphor 251 morphology 251 phonology 251 question forms 585-586 syntax 251 teaching as second language 254 use with deaf children 263 writing systems 252 Sign systems, manual 270-271 SignFont 252 Sign(s) aspects 251 methodical 253 parameters 251 Silent Way method, in language learning and teaching 541,650,667 Simplification bilingualism 286 in child-directed speech 219, 222 in children's phonological processes 243 grammar, second languages 612 intercultural discourse 501 second language reading texts 653-654 speech, and mishearings in second language 293 Singapore language education policy 116, 117 language planning 35 minority languages 117 Sinhalese (Sinhala), diglossia 38 Situation, context of, texts 600 Situations, parameters, stylistic work 420, 424 867
Slavonic Slavonic, Old Church 39 Small talk, intercultural variation 504 Smith, Henry Lee 784-785 Social-affective strategies, language for specific purposes 635-636 Social class and educational underachievement 203, 220 relationship with profit from education 20, 416 understanding of classroom interaction rules 203 Social psychological theories, motivation 527 second language learning 527-528 Socialization 63-65 acquisition of registers 63-64 children, role of language 421 children's metapragmatic knowledge 64 education as 495-497 classroom language and culture 496-497 environmental influences 64 indexicality 63 language attitudes 64 literacy 64 resistance 64-65 Sociolinguistics discourse analysis, ethnomethodology 69 ethnography of communication 69 language for specific purposes 514 norms, listening 292 quantitative microsociolinguistics dynamic paradigm 67-68, 69 Labovian paradigm 65-67, 68, 69 second language acquisition 65-70 second language processing, listening 295 speech communities, learners 69 SOCRATES 125 LINGUA program 738 Sonnenschein, Edward Adolf 785-786 Sound changes atypical 243 systematic 242 Sound systems, in second language acquisition 568, 571 Sounds, speech, development in blind children 277 South Africa language policy 106 mother tongue in primary education 18 South America, language education policy see Latin America Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) 735 Soviet Union 127 language education policy 127-132 effect of perestroika 129-130 Leninism and early policy 127-129 post-World War II 129 regional impact 130-132 Language of Wider Communication 60 lexical inventory 128 literacy campaign 128-129 868
Subject Index as multilingual state 58 nativization 127-128 see also individual parts of former Soviet Union Spain, rationalization of language 55-56 Spanish Latin America 133 nonstandard varieties 135 , standardization 71 use of Paraguay 40 United States 148 Speaking hierarchical task structure 545-546 performance assessment, mother tongue 719 second language 302-306 communicative effectiveness 305 communicative stress 304 fluency 302, 303, 304, 306 fossilization 304 interactive communication 306 interlanguage processes 303-304 lexical substitutions 303 oral performance, monitoring 66 prefabricated patterns 304 processing characteristics 302 pronunciation 303, 304 rate 303 recipient-designed 306 repetition/self-correction 303, 305 social factors 304 temporal variables 303, 304 transfer 302-303 second language processing research 14 speaking runs 303 strategies 304-305 variability 304 second language teaching 668-675 scripted/unscripted tasks 670-671 Speech assessment procedures, process-based 242 cued 271 discourse analysis 600 disordered, phonological analysis 241-242 disorders 272 language of, literacy and 169 location in brain 237, 238 prestige forms, second languages 66 processing, second language 290-291, 669-671 repertoires, multilingual communities 32 sounds, development in blind children 277 styles adjustment, language-disordered children 260 monitoring 66 Speech act(s) analysis, cross-cultural contexts 501, 502 intercultural variation 502-503 channel 503
Subject Index directness/indirectness distinction 502-503 honorifics 504 linguistic creativity rules 503-504 organization 503 small talk 504 in interlanguage comparative work 512 theory 600 classroom discourse 326-327, 331 Speech communities diglossic 32-33 multilingual see Multilingual speech communities Speech therapy, systemic grammar value 422 Speeches, literacy requirements 167 Spelling ability, influencing factors 468-469 acquisition normal development 446 and phonemic segmentation 471 stages 467 alphabetic, learning 471 assessment 473-474 and educational standards 469 by analogy 471 cognitive models 441-442 difficulties 472 and developmental dyslexia and dysgraphia 472-473 disorders, acquired 444-445 errors analysis 468 surveys 468-469 grammatical markers 471 graphemes 471 influence of reading 470 invented 469-470, 471 development 470 sources 469-470 learning 470-473 morphological structure 472 National Curriculum (England and Wales) 373 orthographic conventions 471 orthographic regularities 470-471 phonological processing 471 regular/irregular words 471, 473 relationship with reading 471 sound-spelling correspondence rules 470 teaching 467 France 386 tests 473-474 transitional probabilities 472 word-processor checks 368-369 word-specific knowledge 471-472 Spoken language classroom see Classroom, spoken language evaluation 178 in language for specific purposes 514 and written language grammatical study 397
Stylistics literacy and 167 Stalin, Josef 128, 129 Standard language education 196 Pacific Basin polities 141-142 role in discrimination 51 Standard languages European attitudes 198 national languages and 148 and nonstandard languages, in education 19 written, literacy and 206 Standardization of language 70-73, 72, 146 colonial and missionary influences 72-73 dictionaries 353 history 70-71 institutions' role 71 means and effects 71-72 writing systems 72 Standards, United States 390-392 foreign language teaching 391 teaching English as second language 391 Statistics, principal languages of the world 93, 95 Stern, H. H. (David) 786-686 Stimulus-response theory, foreign language learning 364 Stopping 242 STORYBOARD 356, 357 Stress in second language acquisition 568 teaching, in listening in a second language 641 Strevens, Peter 787 Structural-situational approach, language teaching 662, 665 accuracy 662 creative use 662 habit formation 662 pattern drills 662 question-and-answer practice 662 sequencing 662 situations 662 Structuralism influence on grammar teaching 394 in second language methods 541, 577 Structuralist grammar, in foreign language teaching 404 Studies in Second Language Acquisition (SSLA) 730 Stuttering, treatment 270 Style(s) and choices of process type 420 continuous competence model, second language acquisition 66-67 shifting, and diglossia 40 sociolinguistics of second language acquisition 66, 69 Stylistics ideological aspects 420, 421 pedagogical, and literature teaching 425-426 research, language for specific purposes 514 869
Stylistics systemic grammar in 420-421 Subjacency 233 Subjects, null, in grammatical development 213 Substitution errors, speech, blind children 277 Sudan Arabization/Arabicization 109 language policy 105 Suffixes, language learning 523, 524 Suggestopedia, second language learning and teaching 541,667 Summer Institute of Linguistics 739-745 activities/language programs 739-740, 741-743 finances 744 history 740-741 information processing 743-744 personnel 744 publications 742-743 training programs 743 Surface structure, second language learning and teaching 543 Surgery language disorders following 268 reconstructive 269 treatment of language disorders 269 Survey of Literacy Skills Used in Daily Activities (LSUDA) 180 Sutton Sign Writing 252 Swahili Standard 102 Tanzania 106 Swain, Merrill K. 788 Swann Report (1985) (UK) 19, 336-337, 414, 416 Sweden, education adult education 182 heritage languages in 18 immigrant languages in 73-74 Swedish, language for specific purposes 516 Switzerland, as multilingual state 56 Syllables, division into onset and rime, phonological awareness 170 Syllabus design lexical 678 needs analysis 539 needs profile 540 Syllabuses European notional-functional, for second languages 698 lexical, lexicology 350 Symbol systems, aided 271 Syntax acquisition, blind children 277 disorders developmental 258-259, 261, 264 learning disabled 264 mentally retarded 261 second language acquisition 592-598 signed languages 251 Systemic grammar 870
Subject Index applied 419-424 in clinical linguistics 422, 424 in computational linguistics 422-423, 424 in educational linguistics 421-422, 424 literary analysis 420, 424 meaning 420, 423, 424 in stylistic studies 420-421 Systemic Theory, in teaching writing 397 Tag questions, acquisition 215 Tajik 130 Tajukistan 130 Talk in the classroom 325, 326 between teacher/pupil, gender differences 201 context-specific 328 exploratory 327 naturally-occurring 327 observation and analysis techniques 325-332 on/off task talk 315 and transmissional teaching 327 coding, small groups 331 and language across the curriculum 323 oracy 178 Tamil, diglossia 38 Tanzania, language policy 106 Task-based approach, in learning language for specific purposes 636-637 Taxonomy, educational linguistics 2-6 Teacher-student interaction, immersion programs 630-631 Teacher-talk 316-318 Teachers awareness of language 399 French education system 385, 386 language education policy implementation 27-28 training content-based instruction 609-610 language in 389, 396, 418-419 Pacific Basin polities 142-143 Teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) anglocentrism 561-562 Australian initiatives 99-100 British Council 99 curriculum development 562 history 560 industry 561 Japan 86-89 profession 561 publishing 561, 562 sixteenth century 620 seventeenth century 621 teachers' associations 562 testing 561 USIA in 98 vocabulary 678-682 Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 560
Subject Index Website 361-362, 734 Teaching, language applied linguistics research 16 Artificial Intelligence in 358, 360 assessment 153 CALL 355-358 categories 17-18 CD-ROM 359 computer, instruction/facilitation role 357 concordances authentic language data 357 computer role 357 developmental sequence importance 524-525 e-mail 359 endangered languages 74-77 English see English, teaching ethics 23 fax 359 foreign languages see Foreign language teaching; Teaching English as a foreign language French see French, teaching grammar 404 United Kingdom 393-403 history of 618-625 applied linguistics and 623-624 communicative language teaching 624-625 nineteenth century 621 phonetic principles 623 Reform Movement 622-623 Information Technology in 359-360 interactive video 358 meaning centrality 360 methods 658-668 acquisition-based approaches 666 active participation 661 affective factors 666-667 alternative 666-667 communicative approach 664-666 components 659 conscious learning, monitoring function 666 diffusion 660 eclectic 661 habit-formation 624, 662, 663 historical development 659-664 humanistic approaches 666-667 learning activities 659 oral method 661 procedures 659 rule-learning 663 structural-situational approach (situational language teaching; oral approach) 662, 665 teacher's role 661, 662, 665-666, 667 see also names of specific methods morphology in 522-525 multimedia 358-359 natural language processing 360 nonmainstream groups education policy 206-207
Tests I Testing instructional approaches 207-208 practices, analysis of classroom discourse and 320 second languages see Second language teaching spelling 467 systemic grammar and 421-422, 424 teacher's role, CALL 357, 360 technology 355-360 theories 659 writing 481-482 Technical language, use in classroom 318 Technology, in language teaching/learning 355-360 Telecommunications in education hardware and software 367-368 language teaching 359 writing instruction and development 366-367 Television and acquisition of language 224 international broadcasting 96 language teaching 359 multilingual, in Australia 81 Telugu, diglossia 38 Temporal variables, speech 303 Temporality, in second language acquisition 587, 589-590 TEMPUS 125 Terminography, in language for specific purposes 514 Terminology, in language for specific purposes 514, 517 TESOL 361-362, 734 TESOL Quarterly 730 Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) 697, 702, 708, 725 computer-based 710 Tests/Testing 707-714 ability 704, 722, 723, 733 achievement 725 in applied linguistics research 15-16 bias 714 classical true score (CTS) measurement 709 cloze test 693, 715, 722, 723 codes of practice 714 computers in 710, 724 criteria (criterion) referenced 156, 709 critical 714, 728 dictionary 710 discrete point 693-694, 697-698, 707, 721-722 educational policy and 726 ethics 709-710, 714, 727-728 fairness 709 formative 155-156, 704 gender and 201 general purpose tests 722 generali/ability 709 glossary 710 history 707 impact of tests 711-714 research on 713-714 terminology 712
871
Tests I Testing types 712-713 indirect 699, 722 as instrument of power 727 integrative 693-694, 698, 707, 722, 723 international education 725, 726 language education policies and 155-156 listening 718-719 literacy 174-175 methods 703-706, 721-724 alternative 703, 706, 726 analytical framework 722-723 choosing and evaluating 723-724 future 724 mother tongue 715-721 multicomponent language test, in applied linguistics research 15 norm-referenced 156, 709 performance 704-705, 707, 722, 723, 726 pragmatic 708 proficiency 698, 704, 707-708, 725 reading 459^62, 715-717 reliability 709 requirements of tests 689 second/foreign languages 689-695, 695-703 Absolute Language Proficiency Ratings 702 achievement (post-test) 696, 697 alternative methods 703-706 aptitude 698 areas of learner difficulty 694 aural comprehension 700 authenticity 699 backwash effect 696 benefits 697 C-test 6999 Cambridge University LES, EFL exams 697 channel 699 cloze test 693, 698, 699 communicative ability 691-692, 698, 702 communicative functions 698 communicative performance 698 comprehension 690 criterion-referenced 701, 702 definition 695 diagnostic 696, 697, 792 dictation 699 direct measure 699 direct/indirect test items 693 discrete points 693-694, 697-698 employee competence 697 English as a Foreign Language 561, 697, 702, 708, 710, 725 feedback 696 formative testing 704 indirect 699 integrative skills 693-694, 698 International Association of Applied Linguistics 696 International English Language Testing Service 697 872
Subject Index item banks 699 item response (latent trait) theory 701 Language Testing 696 Language Testing Research Colloquium (USA) 696 linguistic content 697-698 measurement theory 701 methods 698-699, 703-706 modern/scientific approach 700-701, 702 multiple-choice 698-699, 700-701 norm-referenced 701-702 objective 699 objectivity 700 oral 699, 700, 702 participants 695-696 performance 704-705 portfolio testing 705 postmodern 702 pretest 696 proficiency 698 project testing 705-706 psychometrics 700 purposes 696-697, 704 questions 695, 698 rating scales 700 reading ability 700 reading comprehension 700 reliability 700 response 698 results, interpretation and use 701-702 rubric 698 sampling 697 scoring (marking) 698-699, 700-701 self-assessment 696, 705 set curriculum 696, 697 speaking 690 standardized 696, 701 stimulus/input 698 student admissions 696, 697 take-home tests 706 test-taking processes 694 testers/testing agencies 695, 697 traditional approach 700, 702 uses 696 validity 692-694, 696, 699, 701-702 vocabulary 681 washback effects 694 writing 690, 699-700 written passages 699 speaking 719 specific purpose language 722, 723-724 spelling 473-474 summative 156 test qualities 708-710 test task characteristics 723 types 725 users 725-726 uses 711-712, 721,724
Subject Index educational outcome measure 726 in educational policy 726 responsibility of tester 727-728 social policy objectives 726-727 validation 709 validity 689 consequential 712, 727 impact and 711 systemic 712 vocabulary 716-717 second/foreign language 681 washback 694, 709, 712-713 writing 717-718 Tex-Mex 287 Text-generating systems, and natural language generation, Nigel program 423 Text linguistics 599 research, language for specific purposes 514 text organization in writing taxonomies 479 Text manipulation, Computer Assisted Language Learning 356-357 Text processing, cognitive models 599-600 Textbooks accessibility 338 elimination of negative stereotyping 333-334 functions ideational 337, 339-340 interpersonal 340-342 sociocommunicative 337-338 textual 337, 338-339 language of 167, 337-343 new linguistic grammars influence on 411 readability 20, 338, 428 topic-type categorization 339-340 use ERICA project (Australia) 339 Reading for Learning project (UK) 339-340 writers' roles 340-342 Text(s) academic, cross-cultural comparison 601 cohesion, and reading in a second language 299 comparisons 601 comprehension research, think-aloud protocols 15 creation, semantic choice process 420, 423 difficulty, readability formulae indication 428 foreign language contribution of cultural knowledge to understanding 13 lexical repetition device 299 foreign language teaching 598-602 French teaching in France 385 generic structure, register relationship 421, 424 interpretability 306 interpretation, long-term memory input 439 language, functional theories 600-601 language for specific purposes in 513 linear sequencing, English 601 linear topical movements, English 601
Translation linguistic analysis, taxonomic categories 420 opaque 299 production, cognitive processing 599-600 and reading in a second language 299 register, analysis 600-601 relationships between existing and future texts 420 rhetoric tradition 5998-599 as semantic unit, social context 420, 424 structure, comprehension in early readers 438 systemic functional grammar 420 transparent 299 typologies 601 written and spoken distinction 601 literacy and 167 Thailand, language education policy 116, 120-121 Theme, textlinguistics 599 Thinking, higher-order, role of language in 203 Tone-groups, transcription conventions 329 Tongue-tie 269 Total Physical Response Approach, language teaching 666 Tourism, language and 92 Townsend, W. Cameron 740, 741 Trade languages, professional language 634 Trade Unions, literacy training 181 Transcription, classroom language 328-331 analytical 331 conventions 327, 329-330 spontaneous speech 326 Transfer communication strategies 485-486, 487 contrastive analysis 493, 508 errors 12 interlanguage psycholinguistic processes 509, 512 parameter resetting 544, 550, 594 second language learning 582 contrastive analysis 542 interference 493, 542 phonology 570 positive/negative transfer 542 reading skills 296, 297-298, 653 speaking 302-303 Transfer analysis 8, 493 errors 12 Transference, in intercultural discourse 500-501 Transformational grammar(s) influence on grammar teaching 395 learnability 232-234 Principles and Parameters Theory, grammar 234-236 second language learning and teaching 543, 547 Transformations deep/surface structures 543 function, Binary Principle 233 Translation cultural context in 497-498 equivalence 490
873
Translation in Grammar Translation method 660-661 machine, systemic linguistics 423 signed languages 250 theories, language for specific purposes 514 Translators, bilingualism and 285 Transparency, vocabulary learning and 523, 524 Trigger words for code-switching, intercultural discourse 501 Trim, John L.M. 788-789 Trivium 620 Troike, Rudolph C. 789-790 Tucker, G. Richard 790-791 Tunisia, language education policy 110 Turkic 130 Turkish diglossia 39 standardization 72 Turkmenistan 130 Turn-taking classroom discourse 326, 331 intercultural variation 503, 504 Twaddell, William Freeman 791-792 Two-word utterance stage, grammatical development 213-214 Typology diglossia 40-41 sound systems, and second language phonology acquisition 571 universals, contrastive analysis 542 Ulpan 100, 677-679 Understanding, second language, listening and 291 UNESCO, actions on linguistic discrimination 52 United Kingdom extraterritorial language promotion 98-99 heritage languages in education 19 modern language teaching, nineteenth century 621-622 United Nations, discrimination prevention covenants 51 United Nations National Household Survey Capability Program 175 United States bilingual education 311 bilingualism, assimilationist policies 19 Black English see Black English, America English teaching 381-384 extraterritorial language promotion 97-98 language legislation 148-149 literacy assessment 179-180 literacy policy/programs 182 national/official languages 148, 149 research centers 734, 735-736, 737-738 United States Information Agency/Service (USIA/ USIS) 97-98 Universal Grammar 282 arguments from the poverty of the stimulus 234-236 874
Subject Index core grammar 544 creativity 544 current theory 550 first-language acquisition 543 intuitions of grammaticality 510 parameter resetting, for second language acquisition 544, 550, 595 parameter setting, for language acquisition 543-544 adjacency 544 pro-drop 544 peripheral grammar 544 research 11 second language acquisition 510, 548, 578, 581-582, 583, 584 Universals contrastive analysis 542 and interlanguage 511 research 11 second language acquisition 579 Upgraders, discourse analysis 502 Usage, correct/incorrect, prescription 353 Use of language conscious/unconscious, grammar and 400 gender and 201-202 knowledge of 9 study of, through CALL storyboarding 356 Uzbek 130 Uzbekistan 130 Valdman, Albert 792-793 Valency grammar, in foreign language teaching 405 van Els, Theo 793-794 Variables, sociolinguistic, second language acquisition 65-68 Varieties of language attitudes to 196-198 in education 196 research, for learning task determination 14 Vatican City State Radio 94 Velarization, sound changes 243 Venezuela, language education policy 134 Verbalism, blind children 277 Verbosity, comparison with forceful and direct language 195 Vernaculars, as national language 149 Versification, history of language teaching 620 Video medium, interactive, in language teaching 358 Videodisks, language education 370 Vietnam, language education policy 122 Victor, Wilhelm 794-795 Vision, role in normal language development 278 Vocabulary acquisition in second languages 565-567 active/passive vocabulary 567 comparison of learners 567 conscious learning 565-566 coreness 588 guessing strategies 566
Words
Subject Index incidental learning 566 integration and use of acquired words 566-567' meanings in context 565-566 mnemonic imagery techniques 565 strategies 565-566 think-aloud study techniques 566 vocabulary growth 566 comprehension, norms 248 development 244-248 blind children 277 delayed 259 discontinuity 245 early 244-246 individual differences 246, 247-248 later 246-247 mentally retarded 261 norms 247-248 relational words 247 through labeling 224 growth 244, 246 for language for specific purposes 513-514 learning applied lexicology 350 etymological input 524 frequent prefixes/suffixes 523, 524 keyword technique 524 lexical bar 522 lists, morphographic analysis 523 meaning inference 523, 524 morphological approach 522-525 strategies 246 transparency 523, 524 word families grouping 522-523, 525 word parts as mnemonic devices 524, 525 and reading in a second language 300-301, 653-654 school textbooks 428, 429, 455 second language teaching 678-682 active/passive 678 avoidance 682 checking/testing 681 controlled vocabulary 624 definition 678 dictionary use 682 direct method 680 exercises 680-681 games 680-681 learning strategies 681-682 meaning 680, 682 meaning, contextual clues 682 new vocabulary 680 paraphrase 682 practice 680-681 preteaching 680 rate 679-680 'selection 678-679 sound shape 680 specific purposes needs 679 standard examinations 679
survival strategies 681-682 survival vocabulary 679 throwaway 680 written course 678 size, and reading comprehension 439 spurt 244, 245 study through concordancing 357 tests, mother tongue 716-717 Vocal cords (folds), surgery 269 Vocalization, development 242 Vocational languages 634 Voice (speech), teachers/therapists 273 Voice of America (VoA) 97, 98 Vowelization 242 Wales English teaching government reports 378-380 see also National Curriculum in English language education policy 156-157 Warfare, linguistic 48 Watson-Barker Listening Test 718-719 Webster's Third New International Dictionary 354 Welsh diglossia 39-40 in education 156-157 language shift 43 Wes Cos 103, 105 Widdowson, H.G. 795-796 Word-combinations, lexical analysis 351 Word consciousness see Lexical awareness Word families scale (for grouping) 523 in vocabulary learning 522-523, 525 Word-finding disorders, childhood 259, 264 Word-formation, language for specific purposes 514, 517 Word frequency in readability measures 428, 429 use of corpora 352 Word lists, polyglot 620 Word order comprehension of 214 in grammatical development 213, 214 Word processing, writing teaching and 482 Word processors, facilitation of composition 368-369 built-in assistance tools 368-369 Word recognition as logographs, in early reading 433 phonological perception 290, 292-293 lexical templates 292 teaching 383, 455 Word Routes 349 Words abstract 246 action names 244, 246 affect 244 attribute names 244, 246
875
Words communicative functions 588 context-bound 244, 245 decontextualization of 244, 245 defined as vocabulary, foreign language teaching 678 fast mapping 246 lexical field assignation 246 meaning deduced from context, in reading 246, 436, 437, 439 verbal context 246 mental processes 246 mental states 246 naming insight, children 245 object names 244, 245 contrasting features 245 prototypical features 245 prototypical referents 245, 246 semantic fine-tuning 246 overextension 245 recission 245 relational 247 remembering, phonological receding as memory aid 436-437 social-pragmatic 244, 245 spatial location 244 states 244 underextension 245 Working class children, school underachievement 220 language differences versus deficits, in education 194 imperative-normative interactions 194 performance/competence relationship 194 Workplace language assessment 726 literacy and 180-181 training programs 181 World languages 60-61 vs local languages 53 World Wide Web, educational linguistics on 361-363 World Wide Web Virtual Library Catalogue 361 Writers in Electronic Residence Program 367 Writing cognitive models 442 learning 160 Writing (composition) acquisition of literacy 20 audiences 478 awareness of 684 mutual dependence 306, 309 in teaching 481-482 brainstorming 683 chronological/nonchronological, in National Curriculum in English 479 cognitive activity 306-307, 309 cognitive demands of 475 cohesive devices 686 876
Subject Index collaborative 481,684 as communication 306-307, 309, 478 composing strategies, teaching 683 conative 478 conferencing 684 as a craft 475-476 creative 478 second/foreign language 360 cross-cultural differences 308, 309 cultural activity 308-309 current theories 306-307 development, and process approach 476 difficulties, reading recovery program 453^54 evaluation criteria 686-687 explanatory 478 exploratory 478 expressive 478 genres Recount genre 480 Report genre 480 teaching 388, 479-480 impact of grammar teaching 410-411 informative 478 internal feedback system need 475 learning, metalinguistic awareness 166 levels of abstraction 478 literary 478 as means of learning 683 national writing projects 387-389 England and Wales 387-388 United States 388-389 Observation and Comment genre 480 personal growth approaches 476 persuasive 478 planning activities 683-684, 685, 686 poetic 478 process approach 475-477 components of writing process 475 criticism 476-477 problems 481 and writing development 476 process view 683-684 processes 306-307, 309 product view 685-687 analysis of written discourse 685 evaluation 686 range definition 685 reader-audience relationships 306 referential 478 rhetorical models 306 role of writing genres in schooling 421 scales of development 479 in school 477-^81 writing taxonomies 478-479 writing types 477-478 scientific 478 in second/foreign languages 306-310 coherence 309
Subject Index composing process 307 contrastive rhetoric 307-308 controlled tasks 686 language for specific purposes 636 task representation 636 teaching 682-687 testing 699-700 text coherence 309 text organization, cross-cultural differences 307-308, 309 skills, and grammar teaching 394 as a social practice 476 strategies 306-307 success, phonological awareness 169-170 syllabus, discourse types exploration 686 taxonomies Crediton Project 479 Kinneavy's map of discourse 478 London School 478 Moffett's 479 in schools 478-479 text organization 479 teaching 481-482 collaborative activity 481 computers and 482 connection with other language processes 482 discourse analysis approach 397 multiple purposes/audiences 481-482 process approach 475-477, 481 product focus 481 second/foreign languages 682-687 Systemic-Functional model 397 workshop classroom 470, 481 teaching materials, Breakthrough to Literacy 389 telecommunication-mediated 366-368 testing 717-718 foreign language 690, 694 impression marking 717
Zinguinchor indirect group tests 694 transactional 478 types, in school curriculum 477-478 word processing and 368-369, 482 Writing disorders 440-451 acquired 444-445 cognitive neuropsychological approach 442-444 interventions 275 cognitive approach 441-442 developmental cognitive approach 445-446 interventions 275 interventions 275-276 language disorders and 256 Writing systems alphabetic and learning spelling 470, 471 orthographic rules 434 and phonological awareness 169, 170, 471 and reading acquisition 433, 434 Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a.) 455-456 signed languages 252 in standardization of language 72 Written language brain and 238-239 and spoken language grammatical study 397 literacy and 167 Wug test 214 Wycliffe Bible Translators 741 Yaaku, language shift 45 Yahi, death 45 Yemen, Quaranic schooling 184 Yiddish 40 Yoruba 103 Zeitschrift fur Fremdsprachenforschung 730 Zinguinchor, multilingual speech repertoire 32
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