The Creative Spark in ELT: a retrospective … Part One
by Alan Maley
(This is the first half of a two part article Alan has written for Folio. The
second half will be published in the Autumn, in Volume 10/2 of Folio.)
The original brief for this article was to survey the development of creative
ideas in ELT over the past 25 years (1980-2005). On reflection however, this
time constraint seemed to be both artificial and unnecessarily limiting. Where
had the creative ideas of the past 25 years come from in the first place? How
did we get to where we are? It was the search for answers to these questions
which prompted me to push back the limits of the survey to the 1960’s.
Why the 1960’s? I view the 1960’s as a period of intense creative ferment –
politically, intellectually, scientifically and artistically. It was a time when
traditional lifestyles, beliefs, values and ideologies were being vigorously
challenged. This was most obvious in the wave of sometimes violent student
demonstrations, sit-ins, and public debates which swept across Western Europe,
particularly affecting France (where they almost brought down the government),
Germany, and Italy. In the States, Martin Luther King gave his famous ‘I have a
dream’ speech in 1963, and was assassinated in 1968 at the height of the Civil
Rights campaign. There was protest all across America against the Vietnam war.
In China the first home-made atomic bomb was exploded in 1964, and in 1966 the
‘Cultural Revolution’ began its 10-year period of chaos. Yuri Gagarin was the
first man in space in 1961, and Neil Armstrong the first man to set foot on the
moon in 1969. Quite a decade!
At much the same time the philosophers-cum-literary/social critics such as
Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillart, Lyotard (1992), Lacan and others were busily
‘de-constructing’ the accepted world around them. The effect of this
post-modernist project of de-construction was to shake the foundations of
certainty on which society had until then rested. In a de-constructed world,
nothing is certain: everything is open to ‘contestation’.
In literature too, critics and writers such as Roland Barthes and Alain
Robbe-Grillet were inventing new modes of literary expression in the ‘nouveau
roman’. Writers like Simone de Beauvoir were taking the lid off feminism. The
effects of surrealism (itself from an earlier period) were beginning to trickle
down and attract more attention as the work of painters like Magritte, de
Chirico, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and of course Picasso became better known.
In the theatre, the ‘theatre of the absurd’ (Esslin 2004), exemplified in the
plays of Ionesco, and the ‘theatre of cruelty’ was in full swing. And directors
such as Alain Resnais, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard and
others were re-inventing cinema, in the films of what became known as the
‘nouvelle vague’.
As an anglophone teacher of English, you might well ask what all this has to do
with creativity in ELT. Who are all these French people anyway, and what
possible connection do they have to ELT? I would agree that there is little
direct connection. However, I also believe that the complex kaleidoscope of
ideas characteristic of a particular period of time – what is sometimes called
the ‘Zeitgeist’ or ‘spirit of the age’ – subtly and indirectly interpenetrates
and influences thinking in all areas of activity.
In any case, things were moving on the anglophone front too. The humanistic
philosophy of Carl Rogers (1969), with its emphasis on the whole person, could
not fail to affect the way we came to view our learners. In philosophy, the
ideas developed by Austin (1962) in his How to Do Things with Words were hugely
influential, and formed part of the foundations for the ‘functional-notional’
movement of the 70’s. John Searle’s development of speech-act theory (1969) on
the basis of Austin’s work also formed part of this new way of viewing language.
The work of Karl Popper (1959) with its insistence on the disprovability of
theories, was shaking the positivist foundations of science. Thomas Kuhn’s
coining of the term ‘paradigm shift’ (1962) was also a defining moment in the
way we view the process of scientific discovery (even if he profoundly disagreed
with Popper.) The unconventional ideas of R,D.Laing and his colleagues were
likewise transforming views of insanity and how it should be treated, with some
interesting spin-off for language. And Arthur Koestler (1964) was inquiring into
the very nature of creativity itself.
The British educational scene was also undergoing massive change with the
enforced democratisation of access to secondary education. The ‘New Maths’ was
creating original ways of making mathematical concepts clear to young children
through ‘hands-on’ activity (‘I do and I understand’). And, partly under the
influence of the ideas of Raymond Williams (1958) and other socialist thinkers,
there was a similar movement towards creativity, oracy, freedom of expression
and liberalism in the teaching of English as a mother tongue. These were given
expression in the work of educationists such as Douglas Barnes (1969, 1976),
James Britton (1970), John Holloway, Nancy Martin and Geoffrey Summerfield.
In the world of the theatre, the unnervingly absurdist plays of Harold Pinter
were drawing attention. Satirical attacks on the establishment in the form of
the magazine Private Eye, founded in 1961, and the cabaret review Beyond the
Fringe (launched the same year) were beginning to wrinkle the British stiff
upper-lip. But perhaps the most ostensible sign of change was the explosion of
creativity in the world of pop culture in 1960’s Britain. The fashion world,
with Carnaby Street at its epicentre, and the advent of music groups such as the
Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the epitome of youthful creativity. After
almost two decades of post-War gloom and drabness, 1960’s Britain was suddenly
all colour, movement, and iconoclasm. It was the time of ‘flower power’ and
London was where it was at.
There were also powerful currents of protest and educational change in the world
at large. Among the most seminal I would list Ivan Illich in Mexico (1970),
Paulo Freire in Brasil (1970), Postman and Weingartner (1969) in the USA. We
should also not forget that the 1960’s also saw the translation of Vygotsky’s
work into English (1962). Krishnamurthi’s (2000) unconventional educational
ideas were also becoming better known and appreciated, particularly his claim
for individual responsibility for learning.
The 1960’s then were the seedbed or launching pad for many of the creative ideas
which surfaced in the following decades. More importantly perhaps, the 60’s
established a climate of thought – freedom to think the unthinkable; to flout
convention; to critically scrutinise and challenge established assumptions; to
seek new ways of solving old problems. It is the 1960’s which made possible the
astounding mushrooming of creative ideas which have characterised our Applied
Linguistics / Language Teaching world ever since.
If we can accept ‘meme’ theory (Dawkins 1973, Blackmore 1996, Watson-Todd 2004),
even if only as a metaphor, we can view the 1960’s as a particularly rich period
for the formation of new memes – ideas which spread rapidly, and become common
property.
In the remainder of this article, I shall, for the sake of convenience, group
the creative minds and movements under four headings: Academic Creativity;
Methodological Creativity; Institutional Creativity; Individual Creativity.
::
Academic Creativity
Here I shall try to summarise some of the major contributions to emerge from
Academia. I have separated this off because the theoretical breakthroughs
rarely, if ever, translate directly into classroom practice. They nonetheless
serve to create a climate of thought which often influences, however slowly,
unconsciously or indirectly, the direction of more practical manifestations of
creativity.
Chomsky’s devastating review of Skinner’s Behaviourism (1959) marks a watershed
in our thinking about the nature of language. The review, and the publication of
Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects of a Theory of Syntax (1965), forced a
major re-examination of the principles on which language teaching was based, and
its ripples can still be felt. The fact that all humans are hard-wired to learn
language, that surface structures are manifestations of ‘deep structure’, that
learning takes place through exposure to language in contexts of use – such
ideas all but destroyed the Behaviourist canon of beliefs. Chomsky must
therefore be considered a major academic genius of our time – the Einstein of
linguistics.
In Europe, and with a much more direct impact on the classroom, it was Wilkins
(1976) who put forward the powerful view of language as a set of ‘notions’ and
‘functions’ – language for doing things, in contradistinction to a view of
language as a set of grammatical structures. This insight set in motion a wave
of academic books and articles, (Brumfit 1984) and the first ‘new look’ courses
based on a functional organisation of language. (Abbs and Freebairn 1977) The
intellectual ferment and dialectical debate provoked by Wilkins’ ideas surely
places him among the most creative contributors to our field in the late 20th
century.
The influence of Michael Halliday (1978, 1985) has also been of great
significance. Taking up the baton from Firth (1957) his work pointed to a view
of language as socially-embedded, and socially constructed. This has had a major
impact on the way English is now taught, especially in Australia, through work
on the teaching of genres at school level. Hallidayan thinking permeates much of
the practical work done in classrooms in many parts of the world.
Until the 1960’s, study of language was largely confined to phonology,
morphology, syntax and semantics. ‘Grammar’ meant essentially the grammar of the
sentence. This
began to change with the work of Sinclair and Coulthard (1975). Their
investigation of classroom discourse revealed higher order patterning of texts –
above the level of the sentence. This opened the door for the subsequent
explosion of studies into text and discourse, both spoken and written. The work
of the ethnomethodologists, such as Schegloff and Sacks (1973 ) and Goffman
(1981), and on relevance theory and pragmatics (Brown and Levinson 1987,
Levinson 1983) has run in parallel with these developments, and has given us
better insights into the way spoken language is managed. (Tsui 1994). The move
towards a more socio-cultural view of language owed much to the work of pioneers
like Fishman (1968), Gumperz and Hymes ( ) and Labov (1972) in putting
sociolinguistics centre-stage.
It was Sinclair too who pioneered the computerised study of language corpora,
particularly through the Cobuild project (1987)). This work has been taken
forward by others such as Biber ( 1998, 1999). One of the main fruits of this
study was the emergence of collocational patterns based on actual instances of
usage rather than armchair speculation, and the spawning of a whole new
generation of dictionaries. The way we now view vocabulary and its teaching was
also heavily influenced by these studies. The frontier between grammar and lexis
became blurred: grammar at the level of the word was back in business. (We
should not, of course, forget the much earlier pioneering work of Palmer in this
area (Howatt 2004, Palmer 1938, Smith 2003).
In the area of phonology, the independent spirit of inquiry demonstrated by
David Brazil (1985) in his work on intonation has still to percolate fully
through into instructional materials, though there are some exceptions.(Bradford
and Brazil 1988 ) His insight that the major function of intonation is to
distinguish given from new information surprises through its simplicity,
originality and elegance. His further work on describing a spoken grammar of
English, separate and different from written grammar (1995) was tragically
interrupted by his death but has been taken forward by Carter and McCarthy in
their work on spoken corpora (1997).
A further area of creative endeavour resulted in the opening up of SLA research.
The big research question, to which all others are in a sense tributary, is ‘How
do we learn languages?’ It was largely through the work of Corder (1981) in the
UK, and Selinker (1972) in the States with their investigations of Interlanguage
that this question began seriously to be addressed. Previously the question had
been answered by a mixture of dogmatic assertion and folk beliefs about language
learning. Thereafter began a long and arduous search for answers based upon
careful observation and experimental research. While it is true that the yield
has been relatively meagre compared with the effort expended (see Ellis 1994),
we do have at least some firm data on which to base pedagogical decisions. (The
most accessible account of these is Lightbown and Spada 2000)
By the 1980’s there was a gathering body of opinion that the locus for research
should shift to the classroom itself. The pioneering work of Allwright and
Bailey (1991) deserves special mention for laying the basis for classroom
research, together with the developments fostered by Freeman and others (1982).
One implication of this work was that teachers would become ‘researchers’ by
undertaking action research projects in their own classrooms, rather than
relying on the theoretical pronouncements of the academic pundits. Action
research has since become an important card in the Teacher Development pack
(Edge and Richards 1993). Indeed, the emergence of Teacher Development (TD) in a
complementary relationship with Teacher Training (TT) (Head and Taylor 1997) has
accomplished a great deal in freeing up teacher creativity, and in restoring
teacher self-esteem.
The spread of English as a language of international communication has been one
of the hallmarks of the past 30 years or so. The implications of this have led
to some highly creative thinking about the role English now plays in world
affairs. Tom McArthur was one of the first to recognise the importance of this
new role for English, and his founding of English Today (in 1985) marks a
milestone. Braj Kachru’s now famous three circles model (1986) helped sharpen
awareness both of the spread of English and of some of the inequalities it
helped to promote. These were taken up later by researchers such as Robert
Phillipson (1992), Suresh Canagarajah (1999), and Alistair Pennycook (1994). All
of them challenged the notion of English as a neutral, beneficial and ‘natural’
phenomenon. This critical take on English in the world has led others, such as
Jennifer Jenkins (2000), to attempt a re-balancing of power relations by drawing
attention to the differences between metropolitan varieties of English and
English as an international Language (EIL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF).
In the area of reading research, frontiers were being pushed back by scholars
such as Kenneth Goodman (1967, 1986), Louise Rosenblatt (1978) and Frank Smith
(1978). Goodman’s ‘whole language’ approach to reading – as a process of
meaning-making was in stark contrast to earlier ‘bottom-up’ approaches.
Rosenblatt is chiefly to thank for the ‘reader response’ approach to reading,
with its emphasis on an aesthetic, personal response to texts rather than a
purely instrumental, efferent, referential approach to texts as repositories of
‘meaning’. Reading, literature and culture have always been closely linked. The
work of Claire Kramsch (1993) among others has highlighted the language/culture
connection. The importance of literature in a language teaching context has been
strongly put by Widdowson (1992), Carter and Long (1987), and McRae (1991) among
many others. After a long period of neglect, the use of literary texts in
language teaching was being reasserted.
Approaches to the teaching of writing were revolutionised when the practices of
the ‘process-writing’ school (initially developed in the context of mother
tongue teaching in the States) were applied to second language teaching. The key
figures in this movement included Donald Murray (1980) (see also Flurkey and Xu
2003), Peter Elbow, Janet Emig (1971, 1977), Ann Raimes (1991)and Vivian Zamel
(1982). Although the process-writing approach has since been widely criticised,
there is no doubt that it significantly altered perceptions about how writing
might be taught by shifting attention from the textual product to the processes
writers engage with in their writing.
In this section, I have focussed on major academic contributions to our
understanding of language and how it is learnt and taught. These might be
summarised as language and the mind (Chomsky), language and the world (Halliday,
Wilkins et al), language and text (Sinclair), language and the learner (Corder
et al), language and classrooms (Allwright et al), language and power (Kachru et
al.), language and phonology (Brazil et al), language and reading (Rosenblatt et
al), language, literature and culture (Kramsch et al) and language and writing
(Murray et al).
::
Methodological Creativity
In this section, I shall focus on creative contributions to methods of teaching.
For a comprehensive recent survey of this area, see Richards and Rodgers (2001).
Undoubtedly the most comprehensive methodological development in this period has
been the slow evolution of the Communicative Approach, based in part on the
perceptions of Austin and Searle, and on those of Hymes (1972). From the
earliest prototypes in its Functional-Notional beginnings to its latest
manifestations in the Task-based and Lexical approaches (see below) it has
become the commanding paradigm, to the extent that, for some critics, it is now
so ubiquitous as to have no meaning. When everything is communicative, what
distinguishes it from anything else? In its early days however it provoked a
flurry of creative experimentation in classroom techniques, in syllabus design
and in published materials. A heady mixture of techniques ranging from roleplay,
drama, using pop songs, information and opinion gap activities to jigsaw reading
(and listening), and problem-solving were tried, especially in the private
sector schools in UK. The educational philosophy was one of learner-centredness,
with the teacher in the role of facilitator. The overall focus was on
communicating genuine meanings, with an emphasis on the use of ‘authentic’
texts. The former P-P-P paradigm was inverted: first students were engaged in
communication; only later would attention be given to the linguistic aspects of
the communication. ‘Learning to use’ became ‘Using to learn’. It is now hard to
convey to anyone who did not live through this phase of creative ferment just
how exhilarating and exciting it was. A new wave of course materials was also
being published in support of the Communicative Approach. (See below –
Institutional Creativity - for the role of publishers as agents of creativity.)
Kernel Lessons by Robert O’Neill et al (1971) marked a clear break with the
past, to be followed by Brian Abbs and Ingrid Freebairn’s Strategies (1977),
Michael Swan and Catherine Walter’s The Cambridge English Course (1992), John
and Liz Soars’ Headway – and a host of others. All of these both drew upon and
contributed to the sense of creative adventure released by the Communicative
Approach.
At more or less the same time that the Communicative Approach was spreading its
tentacles, there emerged a number of rather unusual methodologies, all of which
exhibited a high degree of creativity in the sense that they flouted prevailing
conventions. The Silent Way, brainchild of Caleb Gattegno (1972), offered
minimal inputs which were to be worked on intensively by each individual
learner. Learners were made to rely on themselves in building ‘inner criteria’.
The paraphernalia of coloured rods, pointer and charts became the distinguishing
features of a demanding method, the rigours of which many learners did not
survive. Community Language Learning (CLL), propounded by Charles Curran (1976),
which had its origins in Rogerian psychology, with a tincture of Freudian
psychology, and a dash of religious redemption, was truly original in the sense
that it was the students who, from the outset, decided what they wished to
learn. The teacher became a ‘knower’ who needed to respond quickly, flexibly and
sensitively to learners’ needs and to guide them from total dependence to
independence. Suggestopoedia, the method developed by Georgi Lozanov in Bulgaria
(1988), aimed to lower learners’ threshold of resistance to learning by means of
music, comfortable chairs, dimmed lights and an atmosphere of relaxed alertness.
It was the complete opposite of the Silent Way, in that students were exposed to
very long texts, a great deal of teacher talk, and were urged not to make a
conscious effort to learn. Total Physical Response (TPR), developed by James
Asher (1977/1982) emphasised a comprehension approach to foreign language
learning based upon the ‘silent period’ observed in L1 learners.. Learners were
not required to speak in the early stages, but simply to carry out actions in
response to the teacher’s instructions. Although none of these methods attracted
a mass following, possibly because of the almost religious fervour required of
their devotees, they have nonetheless contributed significantly to current
methodology, and many of their practices have been quietly incorporated within
our contemporary practice.
Stephen Krashen’s (1985) ‘monitor model’ has also made a significant, and
iconoclastic, contribution to current methodology. Krashen’s ideas are couched
in a number of intuitively plausible assertions: that there are two separate
modes of learning a foreign language – conscious learning and unconscious
acquisition; that acquisition is what we should be aiming for; that there is a
‘natural order’ for acquiring the language; that acquisition will take place
naturally if learners are exposed to plentiful input; that this input should be
at the right level of challenge (the famous i+1 formula), and mediated in a
non-threatening atmosphere. So far these assertions remain unproven but they
chime to some degree with Chomsky’s ideas on L1 acquisition, and with Lozanov’s
notion of unconscious learning. They also fit neatly with the rising tide of
proof that extensive reading is perhaps the most effective way to learn a
language (Day and Bamford 1998). Krashen’s ideas have found concrete expression
in ‘The Natural Approach’ which he developed with Tracey Terrell (1983).
Communicative Language Learning has continued to evolve in response to changes
in the linguistic and pedagogical landscape. Two developments merit particular
mention: the Lexical Approach and Task-based Learning.
The notion of a process (or procedural) syllabus owes its existence to
N.S.Prabhu (1987). One of the most original methodological thinkers of the
period, Prabhu asserted that language learning takes place best when the mind is
engaged elsewhere. His classic experiment – the Bangalore Project (Prabhu 1987)
– was designed to show how a syllabus based uniquely on tasks, would work in
practice. In essence, the learners were required to solve a number of problems,
related to their real-life needs. With skillful teacher mediation, Prabhu
claimed that this produced better results than approaches which attempted a
frontal assault on the language. Though this was never proven to the entire
satisfaction of the academic research community, Prabhu’s pioneering work is at
the base of all subsequent work in this area. (Willis 1996, Willis and Willis
1996, Ellis 2003)
The Lexical Approach was the brainchild of Michael Lewis, who promoted it
untiringly both through conference presentations and workshops, and through his
publications. (Lewis 1993 ; see also Willis 1990.) Essentially, Lewis was
arguing for a redressing of the balance between syntax and lexis in language
teaching. The work of researchers such as Nattinger and de Carrico (1992) had
shown how much of language is lexically stored, rather than syntactically
generated. The corpus-based studies at Cobuild and elsewhere added substance to
a view of language which was primarily lexical. It was Lewis who put these
insights to practical use in his work, and it is largely to his credit that
vocabulary and collocation are now so firmly entrenched as organising principles
in many materials.
::
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Alan Maley is currently a freelance consultant, and Series Editor for the Oxford
University Press Resource Books for Teachers series. His publications include
Resource Book for Teachers: Literature, Beyond Words, Sounds Interesting, Sounds
Intriguing, Words, Variations on a Theme, and Drama Techniques in Language
Learning (all with Alan Duff), The Mind's Eye (with Françoise Grellet and Alan
Duff), Learning to Listen and Poem into Poem (with Sandra Moulding), Short and
Sweet, and The English Teacher's Voice.