Spoken Discourse Eight

Gah. This has been such a frustrating module. It’s not just that I find the descriptive aspects tedious (though there is that). It’s that my gut tells me that this is, or at least should be, very significant, useful, and important for my work in the EFL classroom, and yet that significance has only threatened to emerge in brief spurts. I don’t mind grinding out the data analysis if it leads to something more tangible than just another description. More consistent examples of applicability is what I’m after, and it’s just very frustrating that it’s taken until the last unit to get there.

But get there we have, finally, and it’s reassuring to see a bit of research to back up my general approach to the classroom. Now to track down the references and work up from there. This is stuff I can use. Maybe.

Spoken Discourse Seven

I must confess that in direct opposition to the last unit, I found this one tedious as fuck. There is of course a difference between ‘interesting’ and ‘important’ or ‘useful’, so the boredom threshold is no excuse for not taking it seriously, but it does make it harder to pay attention. Some observations though, however disjointed –

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…

  

Spoken Discourse Five

So this is what’s been bugging me about performatives: they’re not really, are they? They don’t, in and of themselves, change anything at all.

I know that they’re meant to be the conditions for the performatives to function as such, but surely it’s those themselves that ‘change the world’ and not the words themselves? A ship doesn’t get a name until it’s written on the side, a couple isn’t married until they’ve signed the register, and a student doesn’t get house points until they’ve been written down in the record book. It's not all magic, y’know?

Spoken Discourse Four

Ah, OK then. Lectures. Nice to see that I wasn’t completely off track last time.

Mainly practical, this one, again. Which is nice but doesn’t give me all that much to get my teeth into here. One thing I would ask is why “staying very close to the classroom analysis” is necessarily an “advantage”. I can see why it’d be pleasingly symmetrical to produce a unified theory, but square pegs, round holes and all that.

Spoken Discourse Three

A pleasingly practical unit, this one, so not much in the way of notes here, either. I would suggest, though, that the highest rank of discourse being the Lesson is arbitrary and artificial, and ignores concepts of curriculum planning and progression. The claim that it is possible to show ‘objectively’ where ‘one topic ends and another begins’ is also fairly brave.

Spoken Discourse Two

“[I]n the classroom teachers spend most of their time asking questions and evaluating pupil responses…”

I wish this were true. The following might be a bit disjointed and ranty, but hopefully will come together to make some sort of sense. Eventually. I highly recommend reading up on the CONDUIT metaphor I mentioned in WD2, it’ll help bring a lot of this into focus. Perhaps.

Spoken Discourse One

“…it remains true that many of the tools we have available – the course books and so on – are based upon grammatical and other descriptions that were devised by people whose primary interest was in the written language.”

Oh good lord yes. In all my years involved with ELT in Japan I have never seen a genuine Spoken English textbook. They’re always just been grammar textbooks with a bit of talking: Reading Out Loud textbooks, basically. Endless substitution drills that do little to improve students’ spoken language skills but just continue to promote the rigid slot-and-filler view of language inherent in the grammar translation method.