Variados

William Littlewood
(English Centre, University of Hong Kong)

Introduction

W
hen teachers first began to adopt a communicative approach to foreign and second language teaching, “learning communication” was often presented as an alternative to “learning grammar”. In discussions about classroom methods and course design, people often became so excited by a
whole set of new concepts (suchas “communicative competence” and “communicative functions”) that all our previous occupation with the grammar of the language seemed suddenly out-of-date. It was almost as if, by mutual agreement of the teaching profession, grammar had ceased to exist. This impression was reinforced by much of the published material of the time. For example, in many of the textbooks which became popular in thelate 1970s and early 1980s, the learning content is described entirely in terms of communicative functions (such as “introducing yourself” or “asking the way”). If they deal overtly with grammar at all, this is often hidden away as unobtrusively as possible.

However, the notion that grammar and communication are incompatible opposites is based on serious misconceptions about the nature oflanguage and language use.

At the core of every language is the system of regular patterns which make up the grammatical system of that language. It is this system that enables speakers to create an infinite variety of utterances, in speech or in writing, which express the meanings they wish to communicate. It is because other speakers share knowledge of the same system that they canunderstand what the utterances mean. One of the wonders of human language is, indeed, precisely this capacity for “rule-governed creativity”: although the system of rules itself is limited, there is no limit to the number of sentences that it can create or, therefore, to the number of meanings that it can convey.

It is true that some restricted kinds of communication are possible without grammar. Insome situations, for example, we can communicate through gestures or through phrases learnt from a phrase-book. As soon as we move beyond this rudimentary level, however, grammar becomes the essential basis for communication. This position was summed up in strong terms by David Wilkins, whose work in the 1970s provided one of the major impetuses to the communicative approach:The notion that an individual can develop anything other than a rudimentary communication ability without an extensive mastery of the grammatical system is absurd (David Wilkins in the journal Applied Linguistics, 1981).

Far from grammar being irrelevant in a communicative approach, then, the opposite is true : the more thoroughly a learner masters the grammatical system of the language, themore effectively he or she can use this language for communication.





This affirmation of the importance of grammar does not mean, however, that we should ignore the insights and developments of the last twenty years and return to the extreme grammar-oriented approaches that have often dominated language teaching in the past. Rather, we should use these insights to help us shape a moresuitable approach to grammar, which takes account of two fundamental factors that emerge from the discussion above:

1. Grammar is an essential feature of language and language use.

1. However, grammar exists not for its own sake but in order to serve communication.

On this basis we should seek to shape an approach which avoids not only the extreme rejection of grammar that we have oftenencountered in recent years but also the extreme over-emphasis on grammar for its own sake, with which we are equally familiar.

In this article I propose to look at four issues that we need to consider in order to devise a suitable approach to grammar in language teaching. They are as follows:

1. What do we mean by the term “grammar”? A lot of confusion has arisen because people use...