Recent Developments in Elt – Part II

Extract

What the foregoing should have brought out is that ‘communication’ and ‘communicative’ are still very much the watchwords of current ELT, and that interest in research into what constitutes ‘communication’ persists strongly. It is, of course, true that over the last ten or so years a vast corpus of new knowledge has been accumulated and has led to many new applications; yet it is also evident that there is as yet little feeling of self-satisfaction and that efforts continue to be directed towards improvement of all aspects of ELT. However, there are some danger signs, perceived notably by Brumfit, that where the ‘communicative approach’ is concerned, stasis could well come about unless the obsession with syllabuses is leavened with a more immediate and sensitive concern for classroom techniques and events. The ‘humanistic/psychological approach’ is, on the other hand, principally methodologically orientated, but its own weakness is that it seems to underestimate the value of the syllabus as a device for assisting efficiency and, being in a sense ‘anti-linguistics’, may fail to see the value of descriptive knowledge of language. No doubt the debate as to how ‘explicitly’ one should actually teach learners will continue for many years to come – indeed, it has always been a perennial issue – but the one safe prediction at the present time seems to be that some sort of synthesis, as foreseen by Stern and Brumfit, will take place between the ‘communicative approach’ and the ‘humanistic/psychological approach’, such that ‘communicative teaching’ may come to have a more similar meaning for everybody. But for more detailed predictions of directions for the 1980s, Alatis et al. (eds.) (1981) should serve as a good starting-point.