Lexical Warmer for the New Year

A Lovely View of Lancaster from the Priory (adj +n +of +NP)


Yes. The snow's gone now and a mild few days in prospect before I'm off back to the Algarve for a night. Then it's back up through the Alentejo to Lisbon and a New Year starting. The time has passed far too quickly and my feet have hardly touched the ground. Parties, kids and family. A lovely walk with Rachel along the canal on a frozen afternoon with her saving the ice and snow people from the ugly grit. A football match or two. Old faces and newly grown. A day in Preston and rescuing an old soldier from a fall on the ice then depositing him safely in the Harris Museum café. A few books bought. Some jeans and shirts in the sales. Decisions, decisions, decisions. On Monday I'll be back to the grind. I'm giving a training session on lexical approaches to language learning. An old favourite. There is a need for this. A very definite need for this. 


At random, a few items of interest from the above;


a mild few days, in prospect, back to + NP, touch the ground, an old soldier, a training session...and many more. That the majority of language teachers would fail to notice these items is worthy of comment. Michael Lewis' much needed and elegantly argued for change in mindset has seemingly failed to do that, 'set'. 


From now long experience I know all too well that if I presented the above opening to this blog to 9 out 10, and that's a generous estimate, practising English language teachers without comment, a good half of them would no doubt ignore the many complex and interesting things going on therein in favour of isolating the few complete sentences present and make a beeline for the verb forms they could identify. 'Present Perfect, Present Simple, Present Continuous, Future Simple 'tenses'' they would say and that would be that. A good few of them would also say that the English is either not well-formed as full sentences have not been used for much of the text. or that this kind of text is not representative of the type of language that learners can be usefully be exposed to.  Wrong on both counts. 


In opening his book Implementing the Lexical Approach (LTP, 1997) Lewis states that;


The standard view divides language into grammar (structure) and vocabulary (words). The Lexical Approach challenges this fundamental view of language. Instead, the Lexical Approach argues that language consists of chunks, which when combined, produce continuous coherent text.. (p7) 


This insight is crucial. That professional (and other) language teachers ignore this view on a daily basis is most certainly true and the predominance of the slot filling role for vocabulary still persists despite the influence now aging Lexical Approach and the such works as Scott Thornbury's Natural Grammar (OUP, 2005), wherein language patterning at phrase and clause level is given its due emphasis, alongside the sentence level grammar most equate with that much misunderstood and unduly limited word. For there is much more to 'grammar' than the sentence structures which continue to form the backbone of syllabuses as delivered in practice and the border between the grammatical and the lexical is indeed blurred.  


David Wilkins, as Lewis observes, said that 'Without grammar little can be conveyed; without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed' (Teaching Collocation. LTP 2000, p7). For language learners the crucial task is 'in acquiring a sufficiently large mental lexicon...even for intermediate learners this is enormous'. (ibid) The role of tradtional grammar  structures  needs to be re-evaluated as lexis takes centre stage. A new sense of awareness needs to be engendered and this should become second nature to teachers. First the mammoth task of shifting the emphasis back to where it belongs needs to be given. A tall order for this profession as it stands. But we can all fight our own little corners. 

After a few days in Algoz with Andy, a Brazilian and a dog and then it was cold

Well not that bad. I did actually get here with only an hour and a half delay at Faro. Many others had a much worse time of it. I really can't abide travel anymore...it became drab. Long gone the months on Greyhound buses and stunning rail journeys across the Rockies. These days it's airports and snowstorms. But here I am in Lancaster on a quiet Sunday night, garden snow-clad and looking forward to seeing it as I wake up in the morning. 


Lovely to have the kids next to me watching Patrick Stewart as Scrooge as soon as we arrived. And a lot more of them in the days to come. More snow please...coming home for Christmas.

Thank God It's Sunday

'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.'


WS


The old café will be closed today. He warned me not to come down for a coffee on Sunday and Sunday it is. I've been drinking too much of it as it is and am looking forward to a break from it for a couple of weeks, The coffee back there is foul by reputation and in fact. Of course I'll take the odd frothy pseudo-Italian bucket of flavoured milk to break up a Lancaster shopping day or two and the company will no doubt be convivial.  


A couple  days left still before I set off down to Algoz for a few Algarvian adventures before heading back via Faro and Liverpool to the city that has become the family lair. But before the chill and the tea,  it's course writing and a sea of PowerPoint slides to contend with, to order, to edit, to improve, to turn into the basis for a thousand leaning experiences worth their salt. How far we've come and yet how far we have to go. 





For a thousand years and more attitudes to language and language learning have been a strange  mixture of myth and realism, of deeply held beliefs bordering on the superstitious and attempts at applying the scientific world view to the workings of it, to the learning and teaching of it. However, like much else, its only since the late 19th Century that a truly scientific  attitude characterised by consistency and precision, unfettered by the preconceived,  has come into being and yet the field remains all too prone to myth making and fad. The subjective remains, in practice, supreme. 


Take a quick tour of what's been on offer since the fifties, a veritable catalogue of methods and approaches with adherents and critics coming and going and fulminating as distastefully as any a crazed  pulpit peacher.   And they are still with us today,  as the Callan Method, the Wall Street Institute, Berlitz and company with their blanket statements and potted solutions at the fore amply demonstrate. 


'The Callan Method is focussed on teaching students the basic grammar and the most essential vocabulary. By the time he (!) has completed all 12 stages of the Method (notice the use of capitals here), the student will have mastered the 5621 most common words of the English language.' 


Surely this smacks of the silly pseudo-religious and of the cult. They're all there if you look closely. The dangerous characteristics of the mystical. The voice of authority, the adherence to the cause, the sorry supplicant at the feet of Baal and the mountain to climb. The steps to be followed to reach enlightenment, the curious mixture of the statistical and the loopy promise and the shitting on the opposition. ('As many tests have shown they (the students) learn English in a quarter of the time'). A quarter of the time compared to what? Oh yes, 'make progress up to four times faster than at other types (sic.) of language school.' (My underlining.) And the appeal to science when it suits? 'The method is like a piece of precison engineering, an intricate design which is simple to use.' Now that should appeal to the ignorant and bring them the church door in their droves. It seems to be working. New schools, apparently,  are opeing at such a rate that the site is having to be constantly updated. Hallelujah ! But it is Sunday and we wouldn't want to be offending sensibilities on the (for some) day of worship.

The Long Haul to Darius the Great

Having a Friday off and a good old slouch on the sofa I saw the following on BBC Entertainment this afternoon. An Englishman turned Polish fireman explained to Michael Palin how he'd done it with one of the 'five most difficult languages there is' by drinking and talking to Polish guys until he'd drank (at least) the volume of several fire engines in beer and vodka over the ten years he'd lived in Poland. However, he was at a loss to explain how he'd arrived at this enviable state of being.   He'd had no formal lessons at all, hadn't encountered the language in any sense the common view might  accept as a 'study' setting and yet had married a local girl, settled in, was building a home in the woods, was raising a daughter called Chelsea (poor soul) and had clearly integrated successfully into his adopted community.


However, from what I hear he's an exception. Most English people living and working in Poland, usually English teachers, could not boast the level of fluency of this ex-Londoner, and now functioning fireman so expert at his trade that he trains encumbent Polish firefighters to follow in his capable footsteps for a living. Presumably a high level of proficiency in using Polish is required to do this. But I got to wondering, not about the relative difficulty of learning language x or language y, nor the role of formal instruction in language learning, but about what's come to be known as the 'intermediate plateau'. For this London gent had clearly pulled himself, or been dragged, beyond this towering wall of impossibility. 


Learners at B1  according to the CEFR level descriptor for this level:


Can understand the main points of clear standard  input on familiar matters regularly encountred in work, school, leisure etc. Can deal deal with most situations likely to arise whist traveling in an area where the language is spoken. Can produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar or personal interest. Can describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes and ambitions, and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans

http://www.coe.int/T/DG4/Portfolio/?M=/main_pages/levels.html

Learners of English making the transition from Pre-Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate and beyond typically reach a plateau in their language learning experience. After several hundred contact hours, and much sweat and blood,  the feeling of exhilaration at being able to hold a genuine conversation which accompanies the fact that the learner can now do all of the above (which is a fantastic achievement in itself)  is soon overtaken by a sense of frustration by many, notwithstanding our fireman friend. No matter how much more effort they put in, many learners and teachers report that the learning process does not follow a smooth transition from intermediate to advanced levels of proficiency. 


According to Jack Richards (Moving Beyond the Plateau-p1, CUP 2008) 'acquiring a usable supply of essental and high-frequency vocabulary does not come easily, nor does the ability to recall and use the correct grammar and conversational patterns at the appropriate times and to understand the gist and sometimes the details of the language they hear.' And this sensation causes no end of motivational troubles. The estimate  to acheive this breakthrough is  for learners to have acquired around 3,000 word families for use and at their immediate disposal. 


This is a very tall order when we remember what it means to be able to say that a 'word' is 'known'. This includes its pronunciation, the type of word it is, how it typically behaves in phrases and sentences, patterns and collocations in which it frequently occurs, it's appropriacy in context and more. To be able to produce an utterance of the complexity of this one, produced by a fluent Portuguese speaker of English in the natural context of summarising a passage from a book she was reading, is no mean feat-despite its apparent simplicity; 


'He decided to conspire against the king with six or seven other knights and managed to ambush and kill him...he was a nasty piece of work that Darius.'


The Spanish ladies have a way to go before they can scale such heights of fluent and natural production. They have though overcome a number of psychological plateaus of their own in realising that the road before them is a long one. They will need to praised for their victories and take a practical approach to their learning, be exposed and notice  salient patterns within the language, and above all else understand how the lexical system of English works. And of course-collect, engage and manipulate the items they come across as they explore. Being realistic will get them far and this is a major barrier for learners at this level. 

A very long day not yet over brings on a moaning session which will be replaced, I'm sure, after  a reasonable night's slumber and  comfortable dreams by my usual enthusiasm for what we do. We all have our off-days and if this isn't the space for public catharsis, where else is? I'll no doubt be back on with the course writing in the morning non the worse. However, much of this will remain valid.  So here we go. Tomorrow is another day.

It's a sad  fact that the world of language teaching and learning lags far behind most other areas of professional, social and academic life.  The teaching of English, as a profession and as a business activity, has more often than not failed to provide solutions for those needing to use it for communicative purposes in their own special contexts, if treated in a predominantly statistical fashion. I am entirely conscious while writing this that much good-will and a lot of hard work is put into the construction, running and follow-up of learning encounters the world over. But all is surely not well in the house of TESOL. 

Working conditions are often, and notoriously, depressing, while delivery of service remains on the whole uninformed by the rapidly growing and extensive research being carried out at leading centres of learning throughout the English speaking world and elsewhere. Piecemeal approaches at the ‘chalk-face’ are routinely employed with little or no reference to objectives and learner wishes, needs and contextual peculiarities. No overall strategy is formulated and made public, except through occasional reference to the syllabus provided in the first few pages of proscribed coursebooks (most of which, willingly or otherwise, encourage the perpetuation of the popular myth that in order to be able to speak the desired language a thorough knowledge of sentence level grammar, as exemplified in the written form of the language, is the number one pre-requisite).  

As pressure rises to ´get through the book’, even those carefully crafted and professionally written, such vital niceties as the pronunciation system of the language and lexico-grammatical patterns at phrase level which, many commentators believe, form the backbone of the language, are treated as no more than areas for on the spot correction, a technique about whose efficacy there are serious doubts, and fall by the wayside. That there are such things as spoken grammars, of which ongoing research has identified deep rooted differences when compared to their written counterparts and features of which, since the advent of language corpora are beginning to be described in some detail, many teachers remain woefully ignorant. (This ignorance is far from being the fault of the teachers themselves-with no overarching  system of accreditation in existence and minimal and misdirected training being the norm.) Learner acquaintance with text level features of language are quite often given belated attention in EAP or exam class scenarios and more often than not, limited to the presentation and practice a standardised set of cohesive devices seen in written language, many of which are, in fact, sparingly used by native speakers and the misunderstanding of whose subtleties give rise to many a red line or exclamation mark.

Surely this ground level analysis paints too depressing a picture. But is it surprising when what happens in the learning context is very often, dependent on the goodwill of badly paid teachers, who themselves lack any viable support and have been trained either inadequately, or for far too short a time? There are responsible people and organisations out there. I'm working for one at the moment. But these are far outnumbered by the unscrupulous and it's taken as granted in most environments that novice teachers need to take care in selecting from the literally thousands of seeming opportunities out there.

Again this is hardly the fault of the teachers. Llearners in many cases are seen as little more than sources of ready income for unscrupulous owners of ‘language schools’, who have little or no background in the field, and even less interest in the exciting developments in research into the nature of language learning, teaching and the language itself coming out of leading tertiary education institutions from Adelaide to Oxford and beyond. Many are the tales of woe recounted by those working in this field, as a few minutes browsing the TEFL Blacklist (http://teflblacklist.blogspot.com/) will clearly show.  

This scenario repeats itself throughout the world, and it is little wonder that the author of an article in the Guardian some years ago coined the term McTEFL, a term which, painfully and sadly, all too accurately describes the experiences of many who have toyed with the idea of making this their calling and have been sent scurrying back with a year or two’s experience of living in Italy, Thailand or Bolivia to find a ‘real’ job with little or nothing to show for it except a few vague memories and a distaste for teenagers and public transport and absolutely for sure, no savings. Very often, and hardly surprisingly, many end up in situations which if not outright dangerous, border on the ludicrous when looked back from the safe distance of years and miles. 

Woe is me...for a while only! Someone's got to do something about this mess and maybe the internet is the way. I had better get a letter to the council written then-while there's still a council to write to and all will be right with the world. So to sleep then  Sleep-and the world will be a new place, a fresh place and opportunities will appear. LIke each and every day. Must be getting close to dropping-gabbling away. Better get dreaming.

. 

Waves in Carcavelos

Boy were those waves were doing their thing today. I heard them last night  through the kitchen window here in Lombos roaring and crashing away, and that a good walk of ten or fifiteen minutes away. They were loud.



From the train window, going to Cascais this time-so it was a different show, you could feel the power in them, the sheer volume of swirling water. The shades of greeny grey in them, The hovering seabirds brought inland and dwarfed by them. The breakwaters battered by them and people on the train awed by them. The Atlantic has been a constant companion for me in my times here. Ever present, never the same- a reminder of the fact that we are shortlived guests on this planet. Especially when it does its winter thing. Like today. I can hear them now as I sit with midnight approaching and iamgine thme crashing in the dark on the sometimes calm sands of Carcavelos beach.

Another Log on the Fire-Listening Actively

A lovely calm has enveloped this room and gradually, as I sit in view of the glow of the fire and another log of ancient olive falls slowly to embers. Cold rain is making slippery the cobbled calçada of the streets of Linda-a-Pastora and the lights of Carnaxide glimmer once more over the walls of the terrace outside the window. It's Saturday and it's perfect for poetry. (So please read this aloud to yourself if you dare). 


Snow
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible
World is suddener than we fancy it.


World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkeness of things being various. 


And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay as one supposes-
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands-
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.


Louis Macneice





Another Saturday coming to a close then, and only one more to go before I head down to the Algarve for a few days on my way to Lancaster and a kiddie filled Christmas. Hope the snow lasts, or at least reappears, to make for a wintery white holiday with giant birthday roses for Mam on her 76th. 'The drunkeness of things being various' indeed and the familiar sights and sounds of home. (After all this time the north of England will always be that.) 


What hits me first  as I step off the plane at Liverpool's John Lennon airport are the voices, the scouse voices. And I recognise them as such immediately of course-they may not belong to my speech community, but their familiarity goes deep and I am reassured. The spoken word has this power and is surely primary. Having spent months, and at times years, away from the UK this unfailingly happens. The descent through the grey clouds, seemingly equally omnipresent, and the views from 30,000, then 20,000 and so on over the green fields and the final jolted touching of the earth are all a dreamscape. It's when you step out of international space and you here them all around. The voices. That's when you've arrived.


And so it continues. I end up on trains or buses just listening to the folk around and the content is virtually irrelevant. That I can modulate from listening for my own pleasurable purposes and then focussing in a fraction of a second on gathering the precise information I need, 'we will be arriving in Lancaster in a few moments', from a veritable ocean of sounds is an amazing feat if you stop to think of it for a moment. Listening is such an incredibly complex thing to be able to do. 


Right now I'm 'listening' to the rain against the window and at the same time the flames now lick the freshly introduced olive log and the crackle this produces.  I choose to attend to these happenings. The TV is on and I can, at will, follow the drift of the sitcom on the BBC while writing this blog, focus when the  canned laughter comes on and still have heard the joke that produced it. And then a cup of tea is offered and I hear this offer in real time while doing the rest of it without losing the plot of any of it. And this is a 'quiet'  Saturday night at home. 


Listening is surely the key skill, or much more properly sets of skills,  for language learners and it is far from easy.  Each time we listen at least the following occurs.

• Particular streams of sounds are isolated from competing sreams of background sounds
• Individual packets of sounds are isolated from within these streams
• These packets are segmented based on the systemic linguistic knowledge at the listener's disposal  into meaningful lexical and syntactic units
• Systemic knowledge is apllied  so as to  furnish these units with meaning. In the case of someone  learning the language in which the utterance is expressed, those units which are unknown need to be dealt with-either disgarded or stored for later attention i,e when the utterance has passed
• The resultant meaning is related to the social and/or emotional and/or cultural context in which the utterance occurs
• Cognitive skills are accessed and put into action as a result of  interpretation of the meaning(s) isolated

In real time conversation, the tennis match of small talk can mean rapid fire reponses are expected as routine, and the above process is applied repeatedly within the space of a few seconds. Similarly time-bound is the process of listening for the purpose of information gathering. If you miss it, you'll miss it. There goes Lancaster. Carlisle next stop and my tickets not valid. How am I going to explain that to the ticket inspector. We've all been there. You just hope that he's as understanding as the one between Toulouse and Cahors some years ago who shook me from  slumber a minute before arrival in that fair city. I hadn't heard the announcement and was unable to pick out a word from  the then unfamiliar stream, despite five years studying that unfortunate language on paper, coming from his helpful mouth.


And that reminds of the last time I read Macneice....and where! Had I missed that stop I may well not have ended up here. The place I was to call home for quite a while (and not long enough) and my motivation for learning French by listening to to it and trying to speak it. It was snowing at the time I picked up my old copy of 'Selected Poems' and, oh yes, there was a definite 'drunkeness of things being various' in that wonderful place and what things to listen to as I spent my nights sitting by another fireplace as the flakes stroked the wind panes and listening to my great friend Pascale producing a lovely stream of sound of which as time passed I managed to understand more and more. 'A purpose for listening' can mean many things.  














  

Michael Swan-What Grammar Does that Lexis Alone Can't

In short, from the linguist's point of view

• expressing relationships between things-spatial, causal, temporal
• distinguishing between stating and asking 
• modality
• relating concepts

From a teaching point of view

• Prioritise-don't go beyond what is needed
• Useful, essential, unimportant
• easy, difficult, impossible

Check out the first part of this link.

http://www.livesofteachers.com/2010/12/02/an-interview-with-michael-swan/

On the Fringes of Our Region-Listening, Language Awareness and Authentic 'Material'

Just got back from the slightly warmer house of Angeles on another sprightly morning. One in which the ladies did themselves proud. Maria had asked if they could review the lexis we had looked at last time,topic  'the weather´', if you recall. I spotted that the widescreen TV in the corner was hooked up to a PC and so we adjourned to the comfy sofa and clicked onto the BBC's regional weather report for the North-East of England and by the end of the 90 minute lesson they  had seen this particular spoken text no fewer than 8 times, reviewed a number of sections of it in detail, successfully completed a good half dozen tasks of varying complexity and been guided to notice the pattern adj + adv, as in bitterly cold, picked up a number of examples of ellipsis, been totally engaged with real text with a real communicative purpose, (their attention being absolute throughout), as well as expanding and filling gaps in their reportoires with useful items such as mild, a little bit milder, chilly, largely dry, east/west  of + NP etc. 


What struck me most today was the power of technology to allow for this sort of fast paced and totally focussed exposure to the living language being used in real time by a native speaker in a recognisable and familiar context stripped bare of the niceties and conventions of the classroom. Additionally, I thought as I reviewed this expererience in my head while crossing the bridge over the railway tracks on my way back, the teacher though, better 'facilitator' here,  really does need to language aware to pull this off, needs to be able to judge the appropriacy of the task to the learners in front of, or beside them in this case, and needs to know the learners and their developing interlanguage well. 


I had to think on my feet for this one. As a facilitator, my own attention was total too. Organising, setting up tasks-running, closing, following up, editing, explaining, drawing attention to things, and judging when best to do this, supplying information, and holding back when fluency was at issue. There's a time and place for all of this and more. The use of the internet in this way, at once;

• Provides a superbly tuned aid for the facilitator to focus on just what's needed, when it's  needed and straight from the horse's mouth- no getting away from it, this is a real weather forecast and if its too fast then the tasks given need to be graded. This is the real language at work here and this really has to be the model, source and goal. Its a question of learning how to manage it and increasing our own reportoire of delivery options
• Rivetting. This was one of the fastest paced lessons I've been a part of in a while. Pushing the limits of their listening skills and making them work for their biscuit. They said as much at the end, and I meekly apologised for having pushed them so hard. They were having none of it. This, for me, is a key indicator of a successful lesson. Maria had said that the 90 minutes has positively sped by (not in those words of course-but give it time) and I could do nothing but agree. 
• Can give the whole picture of what is going on in the act of communicating. The body language of the forecaster with her arms sweeping east and then west across the map as her monlogue grew in a flurry of snippets of discourse, all contextualised, all aimed at an audience and all aiding the listener to extract a clear unequivocal message.The maps, the familiarity of TV weather forecast conventions are contributory factors in opening the leaners schemata from top down. We went from the general down to the nitty-gritty and back again at will all at the click of a mouse. 
• Gives first hand exposure to register and features of discourse. The semi-conversational tone of the presenter and her use of ellipsis were focussed on-at their prompting. We had introduced these ideas a while back and they have made the realisation that it is neither helpful nor accurate to judge spoken discourse and rank it as somehow lower than its written cousin in the great chain of being. This is a crucial for realisation for learners at this level (and any other-come to think of it-it's all about selecting the task). So they were on track, and I must say fascinated, by the examples of ellision they uncovered, viz Western side of the Pennines, staying drier in the east, a little bit milder on Saturday, problems with ice etc.

And then it was lunchtime. Wanted to say more about listening in this posting. That can wait. I have some authentic Portuguese cooking to notice and explore waiting in the Transmontana takeaway. Wonder what'll be on offer today...sure to be warm. 

Russell's Adventures in Online Course Design

Bertrand Russell posed the question 'Is there  any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?' (The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press 1912, p7) ' This  question,'  the many faceted fanatic (as George Santayana called him) goes on with characteristic lucidity  ' which is at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked.'





And so it is, as the great philosopher, mathematician and polymath's words unfold and amply demonstrate in this tightly written whistlestop tour of the big questions in philosophy. 'Fanatic' he may have been, the word is a shade unfair, but dedicated and to his cause, whichever of the many he embraced throughout his long life.


If I might paraphrase, at the risk of Russell turning in his grave, which of course he wouldn't since he was the consummate atheist.  In the world of ESP the question of  how 'to specify validly the target communicative competence' (John Munby, Communicative Syllabus Design, CUP 1978, vi)  which at first seems far from clear, is in fact, not quite as difficult as it first appears. It shouldn't be as difficult as determining the existence or otherwise of the table in front us. A question far from being demonstrated beyond doubt. We accept the table's existence as a practical measure, but what of the syllabus?


Let me explain. Before the advent of communicative language teaching it was genrally accepted that course design should focus on the linguistic as the prime organising device. The approach to which, was to be made through the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking. And vaguely, yet with a fair degree of uniformity, in that order.  Universal failure of learners to activate the desired target items encapsulated in the structural syllabus (stilll with us today- 9 out of 10 cats prefer it),  research into conversational and social aspects of language use in the 70s and the increasingly wide need for ESP collectively led to a significant change of direction in course design. Language use became de rigueur and the functional approaches were born. (Munby being among the instigators). The criticisms which followed almost exactly mirror a core problem in offering courses for the professional. 


Do we market a series of courses designed to address living needs of those following our courses based on a collection of 'functions' dressed up as can do statements, while sweeping under the carpet the fact that language learning is a slow process of accumulation and internal development, or do we dispense with the synthetic altogether since, it could be argued these 'functions' are as imposed on learners as much as their form based cousins. The key issue for critics of functional approaches was context. Function and form were seen as two elements in the much wider concept of 'communicative compotence'. With the advent of CLT in the 80s the focus shifted towards teh question of how languages are learned and away from how linguists describe language. This led directly to TBL and the consequent focus on how leaners interact, both within and outside the artificial learning environment of the classroom. The expression and interpretation of meaning here enable refinement and eventual acquisition. The syllabus is to be organised around a series of appropriate tasks allowing the learner to either share meaning through engaging in everyday tasks or about how language works in sharing insights into the processes behind learning themselves. Another strand to this was the methodolgical shift away from  teacher led and teacher modelled classroom practice towards the  learner-centred  and consequently further motivation for instituting the task as an organising principle.


And then there was the internet. The tensions between the short focussed course and the time and atention needed for aquisition to take have found a new home. But with the opportunities for contextualisation and attention keeping having been mutliplied at a rate worthy of the most prolific of rabbits, the rules of the game have changed. Jane Willis notes that the one clear advantage the classroom learner has over his unassisted counterpart in acquiring the chosen target language is that instruction has a tendency to speed up acquisition to a degree significant enough to arrest fossilisation. Course plans based on tasks,  the focus that lessons written to fit with the task cycle and designed to promote noticing provide, worlds of text and context a few clicks away and a pressing desire to exchange meaning are all there to be harnessed. The motivation to learn provided by the need for access to the global village and using the portal of the laptop ,for now, to get there all point to future where the possibility of aquisition rates being speeded up. We need to keep this in mind as we move forward. Course design for online learning of lanaguages is in its infancy. It would be a grave mistake to lose sight of our search for a valid means of ensuring that communication and acquisition are dancing to the same tune. 


I  wonder what Russell, Whitehead and Moore would have made of all this if on one snowy winter's afternoon they'd put aside their pipes for a second and had glimpsed a slice of this future through the smoke, while debating whether the table was really there in their Trinity College 'rooms' or not.  I wonder if they would have liked it. Even they couldn't have imagined it.