English exercises

ACTIVITIES
TALKING OFF THE TOPS OF THEIR HEADS
We have still not come to grips with our basic problem: How do we develop communicative ability in a second language? We may intensify practice in the classroom (practice of patterns, practice of variation of patterns, practice in selection of patterns), but how do we engineer the great leap? Children learn all kinds of swimming movements whileloving parents hold them, let them go a little, but are there to support them if they lose confidence; then at some moment they swim. One moment they are non-swimmers, then they are swimmers, if only for a very short distance. The movements are the same, the activity is of a new kind –the difference is psychological. How do non-swimmers become swimmers? They draw on their own resources; they cease torely on somebody else’s support; they become autonomous in their control of their movements: they take off and they are swimming. How do we get our students to this autonomous stage in language use? This is the crucial point of our teaching. Until we have solved this problem we will continue to mark time, developing more and more efficient techniques for producing second-language cripples, withall the necessary muscles and sinews but unable to operate on their own. “Spontaneous expression,” “liberated expression,” “creative language use,” “authentic communication” –the terms may vary with changing emphases in our profession: The goal seems still to elude us.
We must examine the problem at the point at which we are stalled. How can we help the student pass from the storing of linguisticknowledge and information about how this knowledge operates in communication to actual use of this knowledge for the multitudinous, unpredictable purposes of an individual in contact with other individuals? We do not need new ways to help the student acquire linguistic knowledge –we know of many from our “twenty-five centuries of language teaching” and each in its heyday has seemed to be effectivefor this purpose. Here we can pick and choose according to our theoretical persuasion, our temperamental preferences, and our assessment of the learning styles of the particular groups of students with whom we are dealing. In any case, these students will learn according to their personal strategies in the ultimate secret of their individual personalities, even when they appear to be doing as wedirect.
We need a model of language teaching activity that allocates a full role to the student’s individual learning in communication. I propose the following division of essential processes.
Ability to communicate, to interact verbally, presumes some knowledge (cognition) both in the perception of units, categories, and functions, and in the internalizing of the rules relating to thesecategories and functions (which is a process of abstraction). I am not concerned here with how this knowledge is acquired, and I am willing to concede the validity (and probably the necessity) of a variety of approaches to this acquisition. Linguistic knowledge must, however, be acquired. In the process of acquisition students learn the production of language sequences: They learn through doing. Whetherwe use the terms “exercises,” “drills,” “intensive practice,” or “activities” is immaterial; some kind of practice in putting together smoothly and confidently what they are learning is also essential. Each student must learn to articulate the sounds of the language acceptably (articulation) and construct comprehensible second-language sequences by rapid association of learned elements(construction). No matter how much we relate these skill-getting activities to real-life situations this practice rarely passes beyond pseudo-communication. It is externally directed, not self-originating: it is dependent, not an independent, activity. The utterances may even be original in their combinations of segments, but the students are not communicating anything that is of real import to them nor...