Chapter 5 - Aspects of classroom treatment: toward a more comprehensive view of second language education

Summary

In an influential paper published in the early eighties, H. H. Stern distinguished between learning a language through use in the environment (i.e., functionally) and through processes of language study and practice (i.e., formally). As Stern (1981) pointed out, this aspect of language behavior can be characterized as a psycholinguistic/pedagogic continuum, or P-scale. There is nothing inherently good or bad about activities at either end of the scale, and in organized language teaching we often find an interplay between formal and functional approaches. In this paper the term experiential is used to refer to activities at the functional end of Stern's P-scale, while analytic refers to activities at the formal end. The experiential-analytic distinction is analogous (although not necessarily identical) to distinctions made by other investigators with regard to general pedagogic orientation. Barnes (1976), for example, discusses interpretive versus transmission teaching; Wells (1982) distinguishes between collaborative and transmission orientations; while Cummins (1984) uses the labels reciprocal interaction and transmission to refer to these two dimensions.

The relationship between experiential and analytic activities in the classroom has recently emerged as one of the key issues in second language pedagogy. According to some authorities (e.g., Krashen 1982) analytic or grammar-based activities are of minimal benefit, since conscious “learning” cannot be converted into the central process of unconscious L2 “acquisition.” Others (e.g., McLaughlin, Rossman, and McLeod 1983) have argued that “controlled” processes may precede the development of “automatic” processes.