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.
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