Teaching Language as Communication

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© H. G. Widdowson 1978

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First published 1978

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To my father, G. P. Widdowson

This book is an attempt to clarify certain issues that seem to me to arise from adopting a communicative approach to the teaching of language. I have in mind, in particular, the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. Over recent years I (and a number of others) have advocated such an approach in principle and have tried to put it into practice in the preparation of teaching materials. In principle and practice, however, there always seemed to be loose ends of one sort or another: inconsistencies, unexamined assumptions, unresolved difficulties. My aim in this book was to sort out some of the things that I had been saying, consider their implications more closely, and see if they might be ordered into a coherent account. I wanted to try to think things through.

The ‘communicative’ approach is, of course, very much in vogue at present. As with all matters of fashion, the problem is that popular approbation tends to conceal the need for critical examination. There seems to be an assumption in some quarters, for example, that language is automatically taught as communication by the simple expedient of concentrating on ‘notions’ or ‘functions’ rather than on sentences. But people do not communicate by expressing isolated notions or fulfilling isolated functions any more than they do so by uttering isolated sentence patterns. We do not progress very far in our pedagogy by simply replacing abstract isolates of a linguistic kind by those of a cognitive or behavioural kind. If we are seriously interested in an approach to language teaching which will develop the ability to communicate, then we must accept the commitment to investigate the whole complex business of communication and the practical consequences of adopting it as a teaching aim. Such a commitment involves, I believe, a consideration of the nature of discourse and of the abilities that are engaged in creating it. This is the main concern of the first part of this book. The commitment involves, too, an attempt to think out the possible pedagogic procedures which will lead the learner towards the ability to handle discourse. The second part of the book represents such an attempt. I do not claim that in either part I have done any more than open up a number of possibilities. Our present state of knowledge about language and language learning is such that it would be irresponsible to be anything but tentative. But it would be even more irresponsible to avoid investigation and to pretend that there are no problems.

So this book is not in any way intended as propaganda for a new ‘communicative’ orthodoxy in language teaching. It is, on the contrary, an appeal for critical investigation into the bases of a belief and its practical implications. I am not trying to present a conclusive case but to start an inquiry.