5 - Practice Escaping an Ideological Grip: How the CLT Agenda Slipped through the Cracks of Error Taxonomies

Summary

Abstract

Although it is assumed that learner errors are an integral part of the language learning experience, their exact conceptualization as a phenomenon and, by extension, the understanding of their role in relation to language proficiency or communicative competence remained unclear during the twentieth century. If the twentieth century truly marked an overarching, communicative revolution in the field of FL education, the basic assumptions of the CLT ‘paradigm shift’ should affect Cuban's complete multi-layer curriculum. This contribution demonstrates how the analysis of past practices aids critical judgment as to whether Cuban's taught and tested curricula are able to resist top-down attempts of the intended curriculum to reframe them, thereby escaping the ideological grip of educational teaching agendas or alleged paradigm shifts.

Keywords: CLT approach; learner error taxonomies; paradigm shift; intended curriculum; tested curriculum

Valorizing the Past Practice of Error Classification

It is hard to dispute that the following cliché is painfully apt:

Teachers and mothers who have waged long and patient battles against their students’ or children's language errors have come to realize that making errors is an inevitable part of learning. People cannot learn language without first systematically committing errors.

While it has been widely assumed that language errors are an integral part of the language learning experience, the historical trajectories within the field of language teaching in the twentieth century have brought about relatively little consensus on the conceptualization of learner errors as a phenomenon and, by extension, their specific role in relation to constructs such as language proficiency or communicative competence.

In this chapter, I take a closer look at four different error categorization systems developed between 1980 and 2003, a time period often considered to be the heyday of the communicative language teaching (CLT) movement. It is my intention to examine the degree to which these error taxonomies— developed for use in various foreign language education settings by practitioners—accounted for and reflected the basic rationale of the CLT agenda, that is, the fostering of communicative skills that allow learners to express their intentions in a correct and appropriate way.