Adapting and Writing Language Lessons/Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1
WHAT SEEMS TO BE WHAT IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
Language teaching has shared neither the honesty nor the self-knowledge of the fine arts. Whereas artists are willing to seek inspiration from the past, teachers, being cursed with the assumption that their discoveries are necessarily an improvement on what went on before, are reluctant to learn from history.
Kelly, 1969
Of the making of many orthodoxies there is truly no end. Harold Dunkel has reminded us that even in the 16th and 17th centuries, language teachers faced much the same problems that we face, and sought similar solutions.
The student began study of the language at an early age with a large number of contact hours. He was required to speak the language at all times, he studied other subjects through it, and had opportunities for additional practice outside of class. He learned dialogues, and had visual aids…. How much the vernacular should be used in teaching was a matter of hot dispute, and to teach grammar inductively, yet systematically, comprehensively, and efficiently was as difficult then as now.
Dunkel, 1967
E. V. Gatenby in 1950 doubted whether any new principle had been discovered since Gouin. Gudschinsky (1968, p. x) acknowledges that most of the basic ideas in her book are found in Sweet (1900), Cummings (1916), Palmer (1917) and Ward (1937). Yet in the pages of our professional journals, applied linguists still cry back and forth to one another in Viëtor's words of nearly a century ago: 'Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren!' As each linguistic or psychological principle is (re)discovered, new materials must be written to conform to it, and before us nothing was. Each generation sees in its predecessors the dead hand of the past, and each innovating coterie feels that in some sense it has finally devised a method that is 'as elastic and adaptable as life is restless and variable.' (Jespersen, 1904, p.4). This was in one way true of the Friesians, and in another way true of the same audiolingualists who are lately being repudiated for having espoused a 'sterile method based on parrotting and mechanical habit formation.' So let it be with Caesar.
The second chapter of this book will outline certain assumptions about materials for language learning. The present chapter is an attempt to state some ideas that relate to language learning as a whole. It begins with an interpretation of very recent history, particularly the competition between 'behavioristic' and 'cognitive' points of view. In this context, it then goes on to discuss three fundamental problems: What is learning? What is to be learned? What makes learning happen?
LANGUAGE TEACHING AS APPLIED LINGUISTICS
The next-most-recent orthodoxy stemmed from the work of linguistic scientists as language teachers during and after World War II. Overlapping variants of this tradition have been labelled, with some inevitable confusion, 'the oral approach,' 'the linguistic method,' and 'audiolingualism.' Rivers (1964), in a well-known and clear description of this school of thought, saw it as resting on four assumptions. The first assumption was that foreign language learning is basically a mechanical process of habit formation. This assumption had three corollaries: that habits are strengthened by reinforcement; that foreign language habits are formed most efficiently by giving the right response rather than by making mistakes; and that since language is behavior, then that behavior can be taught only if the student is induced to 'behave.' The remaining assumptions were that students learn more efficiently when speaking is presented before reading and writing: that 'analogy' is a better foundation for producing new sentences than is 'analysis'; and that meanings should/can be learned only in the matrix of allusions to the target culture.
The linguistic scientists who most influenced this approach to the task had come to language teaching out of a background of describing and analyzing hitherto unstudied languages. Their work had impressed them deeply with the fact that an adult outsider encounters such a language initially on its acoustic level, and that he can make sense of it only as he successively discovers its formal characteristics. He meets these characteristics first of all in terms of audible contrasts among sets of utterances that are partly like, and partially different from one another. American linguists of the postwar period were thus very much concerned with segmenting spoken utterances into parts, and making statements that would summarize the privileges and limitations of occurrence of these parts relative to one another.
It is therefore not surprising that the practitioners of what came to be called 'applied linguistics' resolutely concentrated their attention and that of their students on what we now think of as the surface structure of the language. So A. A. Hill, a leading descriptive linguist, in a paper (1959) on the relationship between language analysis and language teaching, urged the advantages of 'work[ing] through the formal characteristics [of the language] to arrive at functions and meanings.' Politzer (1965) and others have emphasized that a language is in some sense made up of sounds. Fries (1952) built his description of English structure on the assumption that 'all the signals of [grammatical] structure are formal matters that can be described in physical terms.'
This view of linguistic description, when applied to language teaching, led to two different sets of conclusions. One set appears in the following series of statements which are reordered but not reworded from Cornelius (1953, p. 12):
Cornelius represented a strain of American applied linguistics which placed heavy emphasis on the imitation and memorization of authentic samples of speech. In fact, his instructions to teachers stand among the most extreme statements of that point of view. His references to the learning of structure as such were both brief and vague: he mentions 'the word-sequence and sentence-structure habits of the native speaker' (p. 7 f); 'explain[ing how] the language system functions, and drill[ing] structural points through intensive repetition (22); 'the other features of the language which accompany the sounds' (71).
Other applied linguists, most notably (within American practice) C. C. Fries, placed the heaviest emphasis not on memorization of texts, but on explicit, conscious practice of structural patterns. Politzer (1965, p. 8) sounded very different from Cornelius' statement when he told language students that 'even in your native language you have not learned by memory all of the sentences that you [need]. What you have learned is a system and how to use it.'
A number of textbooks have combined dialog memorization with pattern practice. Among the earliest and most conspicuous of these were the Audio-Lingual Materials. Brooks, who was a leading consultant in the preparation of these materials, provided what was in its day accepted as a fairly authoritative statement of American applied linguistics (1960). He said (p. 49) that 'a student learns grammar not by attempting to say everything that he will eventually want to say, but by familiarizing himself with structure patterns from which he can generalize, applying them to whatever linguistic needs he may have in the future.' 'The single paramount fact about language learning is that it concerns . . . the formation and performance of habits' (p. 47). The teacher should learn how to 'teach the use of structure through pattern practice' (p. 139), but 'structure is [also] learned in the form of dialogues based upon living situations' (p. 123). 'The principal method of avoiding error in language learning is to observe and practice the right model a sufficient number of times; the principal way of overcoming it is to shorten the time lapse between the incorrect response and the presentation once more of the correct model.' (p. 56).
The views of Cornelius, Brooks, and others in the twenty years that followed World War II are examples of what Lane (1966, p. 16) has termed the 'sunburn model of language learning,' according to which the teacher, as prime source of knowledge and light, exposes the students to the material until the desired effect is achieved. To say that linguistically oriented language teaching in the 1950's was limited to promoting exposure in the rather crude sense of some of the above quotations would be a caricature and inaccurate; but to say that 'sunburn' (or at least a good tan) was its immediate goal would not be unfair.
The beginning of the new decade brought with it what Lane (ibid.) called the behavioral model of language learning. Its distinctive emphasis, drawn from research on animal learning, was on the shaping of behavior through positive or negative reinforcement (i.e. rewarding) of the activities in which an organism might engage. This period saw an upsurge of interest in programmed instruction, teaching machines, and operant conditioning. The cardinal principles of this approach (adapted from Valdman 1966, p. 136) are:
But although the behavioral model was in some respects undeniably more sophisticated and more effective than the sunburn model, its aim for many of its adherents remained 'to condition [the student's] verbal behavior to permit habitual autonomous manipulation of [the] second language' (Morton, 1968, p. 20).
In the last few pages, we have sketched some of the best known manifestations of what we may call A-L orthodoxy.[1] It is important to remember that A-L thinking consisted of at least two main strands, which were seldom separated from one another in the practice of that era, but which are nevertheless easy to separate in principle. These two strands were the linguistic and the psychological. Thus, attention to the surface structure of a language need not necessarily lead to spending most of class time in 'individual and choral repetition, of carefully guided conversations, of pattern practices, and the like' (Moulton, 1961).
BEYOND APPLIED LINGUISTICS
In the late 1960's, after two decades of controversy, conquest and prestige, A-L doctrine began to come under increasingly heavy criticism from a point of view which we may label T-C, for transformational-cognitive. Like A-L, this point of view has its linguistic component, drawn mainly from the work of transformational-generative grammarians, and its psychological component drawn from cognitivism. Again, the matching of the two was at least partially a matter of historical accident, rather than mutual deducibility.
It is instructive to look at some of the ways in which the transformational-cognitive school (T-C) has been contrasted with its immediate predecessor (A-L). An unusually clear comparison is found in Kniesner (1969). According to Kniesner, A-L was characterized by a preoccupation with the differences between languages rather than the similarities, and by the belief that any language is a set of habits used in speaking (as opposed to writing). It consists of the habits that its native speakers actually have, and not either the habits that someone thinks they ought to have, or linguistic statements about those habits. The goal of A-L language teaching was 'fluent, error-free speech, without conscious attention to rules.' All the points in this summary, as well as in Rivers' (p.2-3), may be easily and amply documented from the writings of the leaders of A-L;[2] there is little use in denying that they were characteristic emphases of the A-L tradition.
By contrast, Kniesner considers Chomsky's observations (1966) to be typical of the T-C approach. Two of these draw principally on the linguistic side of T-C thinking:
Two more are primarily psychological:
In this view, the learner's task is not 'to master a corpus' (Kuno, 1969), but rather (Kniesner, op. cit.) 'to limit and test hypotheses to find the generative rules which link surface manifestations with meaning-bearing underlying abstract structures and permit creation and understanding of an infinite number of novel utterances.' Some of the pedagogical implications of T-C, as seen by Kuno (1969) are:
The positive thrust of T-C thought is clearer than the negative, for the bad, old, outmoded, behavioristic audiolingualists seldom gave full allegiance to the dogmas which the cognitivists attribute to them. (cf. Ney, 1968) Even when they proclaimed these doctrines, their common sense (with which they as well as their critics are endowed) usually prevented them in practice from reaping the consequences of excessive consistency which, as their successors point out, might logically have resulted from their theory. Most of Kuno's five points (above) were in fact found in stated precept as well as in actual practice within A-L.[3] One is tempted to agree with Rivers (1968, p.78), that 'there is no reason to believe that [these] two positions are mutually exclusive.' There are differences, but they are differences of emphasis.
What are actually the issues at stake? Some writers give the impression that a central disagreement is over the importance of 'habit formation' (see for example Cooper, 1970). It would be a mistake, however, to attach too much importance to what is largely a terminological discrepancy between the two schools.
It is certainly true, and has been well documented by quotations appearing earlier in this chapter, that many language teachers of the past two decades have emphasized 'forming habits.' It may also be true, as Chomsky (1966, p. 4) has charged, that 'there is no sense of "habit" known to psychology' in which language use can be described as a matter of 'grammatical habit.' Even though linguists have undeniably been influenced by what has been going on in the field of psychology, their use of 'habit,' if 'unknown to psychology,' is at least well known to the lexicographers of everyday usage: 'a disposition or tendency, constantly shown, to act in a certain way' (ACD). To put the same common notion in slightly different terms, when A-L language teachers have spoken of 'forming language habits,' they have meant something like 'obtaining unhesitating accuracy in the control of something in the target language.' That 'something' might have been a sentence (Habe ich Ihnen schon erzählt, wo ich vorige Woche Donnerstag gewesen bin?) or a structural problem (English tag questions, Spanish ser vs. estar, French partitive constructions), or vocabulary. The trouble is that T-C writers frequently seem to believe that their A-L colleagues thought only of the first of these: 'great importance is placed upon mimicry, memorization of prepared dialogs, and repetitive substitution and transformation drills' (Cooper, 1970, p. 304; cf. also Valdman, 1966, p. 146). To this, T-C objects that in first-language learning 'we do not go around collecting sentences to hold in memory for future use in speaking and understanding. Nor do we have to search through our personal linguistic archives and carry out the steps of solving a proportion whenever we want to say something' (Langacker, 22).
But T-C is right in decrying habit formation only if the phrase means nothing except 'memorizing sentences and solving proportions with them,' or if 'habits' are only behaviors which are 'acquired through the forging of stimulus-response bonds' (Cooper, p. 309). If 'habit formation' means (or also means) 'attainment of unhesitating accuracy,' then it is a goal at which adherents of T-C themselves aim — or surely ought to.
T-C and A-L therefore have much in common. Both recognize that languages are partly like and partly unlike each other, although one school emphasizes the similarities and the other the differences. Both schools agree that 'the behavior of the speaker, listener, and learner of language constitutes . . . the actual data for any study of language' (Chomsky, 1959, p. 56). Both schools (and not just T-C) have always tried to produce students who could understand all and produce only grammatical utterances of the target language (Cooper, op. cit. p. 306), regardless of whether the grammar of the language was described structurally or transformationally. Both schools (and not just A-L) aim at unhesitating accuracy in that behavior.
The fundamental issues in language teaching, then, lie not here, but where they have always lain. We constantly seek—and occasionally obtain—new light on three different but related areas: What is to be learned? What is the nature of learning? What makes learning happen?
WHAT IS TO BE LEARNED?
Our understanding of the nature of what in a language has to be learned has been furthered in recent years by two developments within linguistic science. One is the interest in the ways in which all natural human languages are alike, which has followed (and been made possible by) several decades of emphasis on the ways in which they differ. The second is the increased attention to what Gleason (1965, p. 202) has called 'agnation:' the relationships among sentences with constant semantic relations among the same major vocabulary items, but with different (surface) structures:
The cook used cornmeal.
Cornmeal was used by the cook.
. . . use of cornmeal by the cook . . .
. . . the cook's use of cornmeal . . .
. . . the cook who used cornmeal . . .
etc.
In all of these examples, it was the cook who used the cornmeal, and cornmeal was what he used, and what he did to the cornmeal was use it; but the configurations, or surface patterns in which these three concepts appear vary from complete simple sentence to relative clause to nominalizations of the whole idea.
The inclusion of such data as these in the study of language has followed a long period in which linguists concentrated on segmenting 'enate' sentences (sentences with identical surface structures) and classifying the resulting parts:
| The | cook | used | cornmeal. |
| The | people | ate | mush. |
| The | children | ate | mush. |
To insist that the principal things to be learned in a language are its 'patterns' is one thing, but this word may be interpreted with the same latitude as 'habit' (see above). To define 'pattern' enately, as 'a sentence or phrase with all of the content words removed' (Brown, 1967, p. xviii) is unnecessarily narrow. In this sense, the sentences in the frame above would all represent the same pattern, which could be represented somewhat as follows:
| Article | Personal Noun | Transitive Verb | Noun |
and the five phrases about the cook using cornmeal would be regarded as representing five different and presumably unrelated patterns. To define 'pattern' in this way encourages the writer of materials to ignore the extremely productive agnate relationships, such as connect the five sentences about cornmeal. But this book is not the place for detailed discussion of either of these matters.
WHAT IS THE NATURE OF LEARNING?
Recent study of the learning process is leading to increased appreciation of the importance of learning as opposed to teaching. Newmark and Reibel (1968, p. 149) comment that
the excessive preoccupation with the contribution of the teacher has…distracted the theorists from considering the role of the learner as anything but a generator of interference; and preoccupation with linguistic structure has distracted them from considering that learning a language means learning to use it.
and Valdman (in Mueller, 1968, p. 58) implies that 'programmers and teachers [should] learn to observe rather than interfere with the student's acquisition of the foreign language.' Carroll (in Mueller, 1968, p. 64) suggests that 'we try to take more careful account than we have, previously, of the learner's concept of what it is that he is learning,' and (p. 66) that students 'using basic language acquisition capacities . . . utilize the material . . . to help themselves develop towards language competence more or less in the sense explicated by Chomsky' [emphasis mine]. In educational circles generally, there is a revival of interest in student-centered and partially student-directed instructional strategies. But we will not attempt to review here the development in organization of language instruction around the student. For one point of view, see my 'Who's who in language transfer' (IRAL, forthcoming).
But if the learner is indeed to be at the center of deliberate language transfer, we must no longer look at him only as 'linguistic man'—man regarded only as a potential internalizer and producer of alien sounds, words and patterns. Any language student is an entire social being, who inhabits (or consists of) an entire physical organism. If he is a social being, then we cannot go on 'perfecting the routine means…yet [remaining] oblivious to its meaning and purposes' (Marx, 1970, p. 949). We cannot justify dull practice (or even non-dull practice, or even a 'fun' language course) solely on the basis of its contribution to learning, which in turn contributes to the fulfillment of some future [economic or] spiritual goal (Lado, 1964, p. 42). If the student is a physical organism, we cannot remain content with our present ignorance (Kandel, 1970, p. 70) of the neuronal mechanisms that are the microphysiological counterparts of observed language learning behavior.
Although Kandel very recently (op. cit.) and others (for example, Chomsky, 1965, p. 57) have affirmed our inability to explain in cellular terms what we know about behavior and learning in higher animals, writers and teachers continue to make assumptions about the neuro-mechanics of language acquisition. Occasionally, they make these assumptions explicit, as in the following quotations from Marvin Brown (op. cit.). According to Brown, 'the student [must first] get the pattern ringing in his ears.' Then, by repeating, 'he…acquires…muscular facility.' Now a path may be 'built from ear to mouth' and 'from eye to mouth.' Finally, the student 'burns the pattern into the brain by going through the drill…many times at increasing speed' (p. 4). Repeating and participating 'many times, constantly pushing for slightly greater speed' is 'the payoff [and] the step that builds the habit' (p. xviii). One may ask whether too much of this kind of practice may not lead to habituation (learning to ignore stimuli that have lost novelty or meaning) rather than to habit formation. But while some of the word pictures in this description are obviously intended to convey methodological rather than anatomical truths, the idea of strengthening selected neural paths by sheer frequency of use is by no means new to language teachers.
If, however, we recognize the uncertain and largely metaphorical nature of what we can say in this realm, it is still possible to sketch a view of language learning, somewhat different from Brown's.
The National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., once had on display a model of part of a DNA molecule for one common type of microorganism. The model is twelve feet long and two feet in diameter, and contains hundreds of small colored balls that represent individual atoms. We are told that a model of the complete molecule on the same scale would be over 142 miles long. This particular molecule obviously has nothing to do with the learning behavior of higher organisms, but it does suggest that in the arrangements of atoms within biochemical molecules, and/or in the arrangements of such molecules relative to one another, lie immense possibilities for information storage. We may venture the following postulates, stated in biochemical terms, but based on other kinds of evidence:
1. The (sub?)molecular structure of a person's brain plays a major role in determining how he will he able to respond to what happens.
2. 'Learning' implies a change in how a person is disposed to respond to what happens. (This is a commonplace.)
3. 'Learning' presumably involves rearranging something in the molecules of the learner's brain.[4] Such a statement is not necessarily an assertion of materialistic behaviorism, since it does not rule out the possibility of an acorporeal aspect of the mind. It is surely compatible with any but the most extreme of mentalistic views. In this sense, a new (sub)molecular arrangement may correspond to a new 'hypothesis,' or available basis for action, whether or not the proprietor of the brain is consciously aware of the hypothesis.
4. Certain features of these (sub)molecular arrangements are innate. Some of these innate features are shared by all normal members of the species. They, for example, explain our apparent inability to form the negative of a proposition by pronouncing the phonemes of the affirmative in reverse order, even though it is very easy for us to understand what such a process would involve. This is in fact only one rather gross instance of the language universals that enter into inferences about the 'base structure' that is common to all languages. It is in this sense that linguists now talk about the innateness of language.
5. Certain things about these (sub)molecular arrangements are not innate. With regard to the linguistic aspects of behavior, this is why nobody claims that anyone is born with the ability to speak a language, but only with the propensity to learn to speak one or more languages of an innately determined kind.
6. Some of the non-innate arrangements become more permanent if actions that arise from them produce favorable results. Otherwise, these arrangements are dissipated. These correspond to what Skinner and others have called 'operants.' But note that the changes that we are talking about are not limited to the concatenation of 'behaviors:' learning to say fool after April, or le before monde, or a la esquina a tomar el autobus. Nor are they limited to 'solving proportions' using 'patterns' which are 'sentences with all the content words removed.' They may and do include both of these, but they may also include the hypotheses that correspond to the deepest, subtlest and most abstract units or rules of the transformational-generative (or any other) style of linguistic analysis.
But just as our view of the relevant 'operants' has sometimes been too simple, so it has also been too narrow in that we have often failed to look beyond what we can describe in terms of one or another brand of linguistics. To make the noises What sort of work do you do? in a classroom or a lab because that is the sentence that is supposed to follow Yes, I'm an American in the dialog is a far different 'operant' from making the same noises outside of class, in speaking to a new acquaintance, because one wants to get certain information. The same is true of saying Mr. Grant is going to practice next Tuesday as a response to the teacher's Mr. Grant is going to practice next Monday followed by the cue word Tuesday, as contrasted with saying the same words in conversation with real people. We should ask the student to 'do what we want him to learn' (Cooper, op. cit., p. 314), and what we want him to learn is not to produce and understand sentences, but to communicate through a number of channels, one of which involves producing and understanding sentences.
There are, in addition, non-linguistic 'behaviors' which are totally indispensable for linguistic success: willingness to phonate, feeling that one has something worth phonating about, expectation that the language can be useful—these and many others deserve conscious and systematic encouragement from the teacher at least as much as gender agreement or sequence of tenses do.
7. The arrangements to which we have referred in 5 and 6 (above), at least insofar as they relate to speech, must consist of a multidimensional network, much of it below the level of consciousness. Disciplined exploration of some new dimensions has been, at least from the language teacher's point of view, the major contribution of post-Chomskian linguistics. Most evident has been the study of relationships among surface structures, with resultant postulation of deep structures. (cf. the discussion of enate and agnate relationships on p. 12f, above.)
8. The job of a teacher consists of two parts:
What do these changes of molecular arrangement correspond to? Can one's brain be changed in such a way that an anecdote memorized 25 years ago and not recalled once in the last fifteen can still come back verbatim? Anyone who has ever memorized and remembered anything in any language must answer this question in the affirmative. Of course it happens. A-L makes much of it; T-C makes considerably less. Can one summon up remembered sentences and use them to solve an immediate problem in sentence construction? Again, this is a common experience of language learners, and again the schools differ in the relative weight that they give to this human ability. T-C errs only when it claims that these phenomena should be totally excluded from the methodology of language teaching.
Are there instances of speech that cannot be accounted for in this way? Certainly there are, and T-C writers never tire of furnishing examples. The assertion of T-C that 'a language is a set of principles establishing correlations between meanings and sound sequences' (Langacker, 1967, p. 35) is largely true. Indeed, A-L writers have recognized its truth in many of their grammar notes, and give lip service to it whenever they repeat after Bloch and Trager that a language is a system (and not just a set) of oral symbols. T-C, of course, is characterized by greater emphasis on this undisputed fact, and A-L by less. What we mean to emphasize here is that the neuronal molecules are inaccessible to direct control from outsiders. Because they are inaccessible, any method of teaching must come to terms with the learner. This may take place in any of a number of ways, and these will be the subject of the following section.
MOTIVATION
Motivation is whatever makes the learner ready and willing to rearrange his own molecules, but what is that? Miller, a social psychologist, and Wardhaugh, a linguist, express current ideas on this topic in language that is strikingly harmonious and at times almost identical. Motivation of course encompasses the student's purposes (Wardhaugh, 1967, p. 23), and we should make materials as relevant as possible to the live concerns of the student, so as to increase the chances of individual involvement (Miller, 1964, p. 40f.). But it also encompasses the social and academic climate (Wardhaugh; cf. also the non-recent Wallace, 1949); we too often overlook or use unskillfully the forces within the learning group itself, and the quality of the interaction of its members (Miller). Fear of inadequacy (Wardhaugh) and failure (Miller), of change (Miller) and anomie (Wardhaugh) are negative forces which teachers can identify and try to remove (Miller).
We may picture these aspects of motivation in terms of two intersecting axes of reality as it exists for the learner.[5] The horizontal axis expresses the external aspect of his experiences: his relations with other people, his ability to talk about past experiences, to interact with present waiters, taxi drivers and friends, and to plan for the future. This outward-looking kind of reality may in the long run be necessary for motivation, but it is not by itself sufficient.
The vertical axis extends through reality that is internal to the learner: his feelings, his anxieties, and his picture of himself. Does he enjoy what he is doing, or not? Does he see himself as succeeding, or as failing? Is he, in his own eyes, one of the moving forces in the learning process, or is he only a pawn?
Emphasis on this vertical axis is one of the interesting features of what Dr. Gattegno calls his Silent Way of teaching languages. During the first part of the course, all talking is about a set of small wooden blocks which differ from each other only in length and color, and are little more than concrete abstractions. At this stage, exploitation of the horizontal axis has been reduced to what must surely be its very narrowest minimum. But it is this very annihilation of the horizontal axis, coupled with the almost complete silence of the teacher, that allows and indeed forces both student and teacher to focus their attention on the introspective--on what resources are available from within the student, on what is taking shape within his mind, and what he is ready to do at any given moment. In the short run, and with a teacher who can focus his attention on the inside of the student's mind, the vertical axis may be sufficient for motivation. In the long run, of course, it is not.[6] In fact, motivation depends on connecting something on the horizontal axis of external experience with something on the vertical axis of the student's appreciation of himself. It is the vertical axis, however, that language teachers talk and write about the least.
Like our view of operants (p.18), our view of favorable results or rewards which will 'reinforce' those operants has been too narrow. For long-term, extrinsic motivation we have placed too much reliance on reference to 'spiritual goals,' or to 'an experience which is essential to understanding the world [one] lives in' (Grittner, 1969, p. 36) or to 'the belief that what is learned in school will transfer to situations which the student will later face in life' (ibid.) For short-term, intrinsic motivation, we too often depend on some superficial reward: a 'feeling of accomplishment' (Stevick, 1959), grades, numbers on a counting device, candies, money, permission to go on to the next frame, and the like.
A more comprehensive view of motivation derives from what we may call Lambert's principle.[7] This principle states that, other things being equal, a language course is effective in proportion to the breadth of its contact with the student's interests, and the depth of its penetration into his emotional life. The conditions that loosen up the atoms, or molecules, or electrons, of the brain so that they become available for rearranging lie outside the strictly linguistic realm. Both the teacher and the materials writer need to be aware of the full range of rewards and incentives that are available to the student:
(1) What needs, and what opportunities does the student have to gain satisfaction from having done something right? What he does may be very small, such as completing one line in a drill, or reciting a sentence out of a dialog, but the materials should lay out very clearly--and more explicitly than most do--some of the things that the student can do in order to gain approval. Here is where programmed self-instruction is at its best. This is also the aspect of 'intrinsic motivation' that has received most attention.
(2) What needs, and what opportunities does the student have to transmit and receive real messages? If the 'real messages' are to go much beyond the location of the chalk, and the menu for the next meal, then there must be some area or areas of shared genuine interest, whether these be planning the Spanish club's annual picnic, or preparing for two years' residence in Quito. This is one reason why integration of language study with other components of a curriculum or training program makes so much sense. Trainers have of course thought about this matter, but usually with most of their attention on its 'extrinsic' or long-term role, and very little exploitation of its potential for 'intrinsic,' day-to-day motivation.
(3) What needs, and what opportunities does the student have to satisfy his drive to acquire knowledge that he can project onto future events that he cares about? (Ritchie, 1967, p. 47). Competence in generating and understanding new sentences is something that most learners require as a pay-off, not only in the long run, but also immediately. (Reid, 1971)
(4) What needs, and what opportunities does the student have to be aggressive in making sense out of nonsense--to acquire skills and insights actively rather than having them 'skillfully presented and sufficiently drilled' into him? Active inquiry, even when it is not conscious, may result in active learning (Kuno, 1969). Here is the value, for some students at least, of the inductive presentation of grammar so dear to some A-L practitioners, and also of direct, monolingual teaching of meanings for words and sentences. (5) What needs and what opportunities does the student have for developing personal relationships with people who interest him? This question is related to the first two, for one 'does things right' primarily in the eyes of other people, and it is to other people that one 'transmits real messages.' But there is no reason why a language course should confine itself to helping the student 'get things right' and 'transmit real messages', either through talking about books, tables, pens and blackboards or through acting out imaginary episodes in the life of an American who is living with a Sarkhanese family. Built into the materials may be opportunities to become better acquainted with instructors and classmates.
These opportunities may be of two different kinds. The more obvious type is concerned with the content of the interrelationships: finding out about the other person's family, his likes and dislikes, his earlier experiences, and so forth. A second type grows out of competition and cooperation in the common tasks of studying and living together. The second kind of relationship may grow along with the first, or it may thrive without it. This is another key feature of the first stage of Gattegno's Silent Way of language teaching, in which very intense interpersonal interplay is carried out in the context of discussing abstract relationships among small colored wooden blocks.
CONCLUSION
When a student engages in activities that normally take place only inside a language classroom, it is as though he were picking up in his hands the stones from which he was to construct a wall. These activities include memorization of word lists, dialogs or rules, and performance of systematic drills; they also include the gaining of insights about structure, and the generating of sentences for the sake of generating them. To be sure, one can hardly build a wall without picking up the stones, but if the stones are not placed into the wall--if the activity does not immediately produce rewards of several different kinds (points 1-5 on pp. 23-25, above)--then the student simply sets one stone down as fast as he picks another up. One cannot remember what he has not in some sense understood, and he cannot put into practice (i.e. use in a larger context) what he cannot remember. This is the usual justification for many teaching practices today. But we sometimes forget that the reverse is also true: what one has not put into practice (used in a larger context) he will soon forget, and what he has forgotten he no longer understands. Any method is weak that emphasizes memory without understanding, or that is satisfied with memory and understanding in a narrowly intraverbal context.
To put the same matter in another way, a team of materials developers must ask itself three questions:
1. What must the student see? The things he needs to see include meanings of words and sentences, and also relationships among them. The materials should make it easy for him to see these things. It may very well be that the principal value of the commoner types of drill is not, as we once thought, in sheer repetition but in guiding the student as he explores the relationships between indicative and subjunctive, or affirmative and negative.
2. What must the student remember? In contemporary practice, these things are mostly words and examples of constructions. Some materials try to make the student remember by requiring him to memorize. Others emphasize multiple reintroduction of items to be remembered. Some materials seem to ignore the matter altogether. 3. What can the student do? Where can he lay the stones that he has just picked up, and what can he use for mortar? What practical application can he make of his new ability to choose between indicative and subjunctive French verbs, or how many kinds of satisfaction can he gain from being able to form the negatives of all the tenses of Swahili? This is the point at which materials writers most often abdicate to the teachers, and where unskilled teachers are most often oblivious to their opportunities.
- ↑ The letters stand for both 'applied linguistics' and for 'audio-lingual.' 'Applied linguistics' of course includes much besides language teaching.
- ↑ For three key statements, see Fries (1948), Moulton (1961), Brooks (1961).
- ↑ To cite only a few examples from well before the T-C era, Fries (1948) was quite ready for structural patterns (cf. 'regularities' in Kuno's [3], above) to be pointed out and described to the student. The first two volumes of Language Learning contained articles on an approach to reading (Nida), the dictionary (one by Hill and another by Marckwardt), and note-taking (Anthony, 1948). French (1949) counseled that 'a student should be saying something that has meaning for him personally, not only after he has learned the pattern but also while he is learning it,' and this idea was found also in Anthony (1949) and Reed (1948). Only the fifth point cannot be matched from the proponents of the oral approach, and this point depends on linguistic insights which were not available before the late 1950's.
- ↑ Physiological evidence is not entirely lacking at this point. Pribram, a neuropsychologist and neurosurgeon, in presenting his holographic hypothesis of memory storage argues that 'the totality of [the memory] process has a more or less lasting effect on protein molecules and perhaps other macromolecules' (1969, p. 77).
- ↑ This discussion of motivation in terms of two axes is taken from Stevick (1971).
- ↑ In Gattegno's system, the wooden blocks are followed by a series of pictures which are still about as unrelated to the horizontal kind of external, interesting reality as it is possible for pictures of real objects to be, but which provide the imaginative teacher with opportunities to begin creative expansion of the student's vocabulary.
- ↑ Lambert and his colleagues have done much to elucidate the social psychology of second-language learning. They distinguish between 'instrumental' orientation, which looks toward the utilitarian values of linguistic achievement, and 'integrative' orientation of students who learn as if they desired to become potential members of the FL group (Lambert, 1963, section 4). Jakobovits (1970) cites Lambert frequently in his relatively full discussion of the complex psychological issues that may be involved in the study of foreign languages.