Spoken Discourse Six

This is more like it. I can use this. Questions and observations to follow –

1.

I thought Communicative Competence was a Chomsky thing?

2.

The ‘need’ to divide books into chapters – this is a very chicken and egg type thing. Just off the top of my head, Pratchett doesn’t bother with chapters. Maybe not so much chicken and egg as cart and horse (r.e. the precedence of): surely the chapters of a book exist in order to facilitate presentation of the contents, rather than the content being dictated by the need for chapters? And then we get into all that jazz with regard to form and content…

  

3.

“… the required response is normally the production of a language sample, the communicative value of which the learner takes no responsibility for.”

‘Normally’? That’s just shitty lesson design, if so. A certain amount of highly structured reproduction is inevitable, but if that’s the norm then as a teacher you really need to raise your game.

I will refrain at this point from my increasingly practiced rant about the fundamental flaw of foreign language tuition being the conception of language as an object instead of a process. But it all stems from this and propagating those attitudes is at best perpetuating an unsatisfactory status quo.

At this point I’ll advertise my variation on a ‘Competition Contest’, which I designed before I’d done this unit, and am looking to revamp in light of this stuff.

4.

To what extent is eliciting in the classroom a phatic act? This is my big question from this unit, I think. As teachers we should already have a pretty good idea about what our students do or don’t already know. Our questions aren’t rhetorical, because we expect an answer, but by the same token we’re not asking for new information either in the content of the answer or, I would suggest, in the confirmation (or not) of our students to provide that content. You can see it in their eyes when they get what you’re saying. Seeking to confirm it verbally often adds little new information to the process.

What’s it about then? An assertion of authority? A means of maintaining attention? The latter perhaps, but it’s still hard to escape the conclusion that a lot of classroom exchanges contain no more purpose than nattering about the weather across the garden fence.