Meanwhile, Back in the Real World...: Accuracy and Fluency in Second Language Teaching

Abstract

In these remarks I hope to draw together a number of loosely related ideas that have contributed to a kind of revolution in the way that most of us in the ivory towers have come to look at language teaching and then to relate this newer point of view to what is actually going on in the real world where real teachers and real students get together in real classrooms. In other words, I want to compare current theory with current practice. There is a natural human tendency to look for simple solutions to complicated problems, and second language teaching is no exception. Our field has always suffered from a kind of pendulum effect, a melodramatic swinging back and forth between two extreme positions which Rivers has conveniently labelled formalist and activist (1981:25). Formalists, as the name suggests, have been mainly concerned with the forms of language-such as phonemes, morphemes, nouns, and verbs-and with the rules for combining them correctly. For them, learning a language means learning these forms and rules. Activists, on the other hand, have been concerned with language as activity, not as something people know but as something people do. For them, learning a language means learning how to use a language. To borrow a second useful distinction from Widdowson (1981), the major unit of language for formalists has been the sentence, which is the same formal unit that most schools of linguistics have been concerned with describing. On the other hand, the activists might consider the major unit of language to be the utterance (not a unit of grammar but one of meaningful discourse), which is the subject of the newer, less well-developed field of discourse analysis. This distinction is important for second language teachers because the kinds of