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APPROACH TO LANGUAGE LEARNING AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

Lita Brusick Johnson

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. In their daily work, ESL

teachers may not encounter philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein who made thisobservation about language. However, they do encounter day-in and day out adultlearners who display an analogouspracticaland often specific motivation for theirlearning: to reduce the limitations that a lack of English places on their ability to engagein their communities, their places of employment, and the wider world. This motivationcan also be expressed more positively: these learners are seeking to expand fields oflife in which they can confidently, effectively, and meaningfully engage.

If students are to meet their goals, language teaching must include far more thanactivities that assist them to acquire vocabulary and understand grammatical rules,though this is indeed important. Language learning and thus, language teachinghas a wider goal: that learners achieve communicative competence, which includes

both linguistic competence (use of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary) and socio-linguistic, discourse, and strategic competencies. Together these interconnectedcompetencies enable learners to communicate and constructmeaning in contexts oftheir own choosing. However, once teacher and students are in the classroom, theimplications of the communicative competence goal are not abstract. They are playedout in the common space the learning space that students and teachers constructtogether, all bringing into that space knowledge and experience that contribute to thelearning process.

I believe that this learning process is well served by an intentionally student-centeredapproach to communicative second-language teaching, an approach thatcommits teachers to:

careful, ongoing assessment ofstudents needs and interests and thecreation of meaningful activities and tasks that are in alignment with thesewherever possible, using authentic material to teach language forms.

(Reference: Your Story, My Story project conceptualization and design, underthe Project tab.)

providing such learning opportunities in ways that scaffold new learning onwhat students have mastered, reinforcing learning across the four language skillareas.

(Reference Textbook Adaptation section, underContent Writing tab.)

enhancing learning and thinking skills that build upon the strengths studentsbring into the classroom and that enable students to, wherever possible, take

control of their own learning.(Reference project design, noted above, and Curriculum Research Paper,under Content Writing tab.)

Students production of speech and writing in increasingly less controlled andmore complex ways is a critical aspect of language learning that enhancescommunicative competence. Teachers bring to the common learning space deepknowledge about the English language and how it is used; their instruction helpsstudents understand the meaning of vocabulary words and elements of syntax and

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grammar. But the preponderance of a teachers work is encouraging, coaching, andcreating opportunities for learners to practice the forms in controlled ways and then,as quickly as possible, to use them repeatedly in authentic ways to communicatemeaning, to the point where these element are automatized and incorporated intolearners developing language systems.

(Reference Textbook Adaptation, under Content Writing tab; and various lessonplans, under Lesson Plan tab.)Paul Nation (2007) suggests that learners benefit from language courses that

weave together into an instructional whole four equal strands of opportunities forstudents: (1) to receive meaning-focused input, (2) to produce meaning-focusedspeech and writing, (3) to focus on language forms, and (4) to develop their speakingand writing fluency. I believe that this approach is both sound and workable in theclassroom. It provides a conceptual and practical framework for teachers to dealintentionally with the inherent tension between accuracy and fluency, while creatingopportunities for learners to produce language, which is at the heart of their languagelearning.

The truism does, in fact, hold for teaching English as a second language:nothing is simple. There is no one clearly marked path that students can follow tobecome communicatively competent. The complexities of language learning andlanguage teaching mirror the amazing and quite wonderful complexities of humancognition and communication, which reflect both differences between individuals andfundamental patterns that underlie such individual differences. Approaching thesecomplexities with a combination of awe-filled amazement and analytical intensityenables teachers to avoid imposing on students a one-size-fits-all language learningplan even as they point to patterns that are common to all and share specificlanguage and cultural knowledge that can help each learner achieve his/her languagelearning goal.

This is why teaching is both a skill and an art, at the same time both practical andconceptual, requiring the balancing the part and the whole, the needs of the individualand the group. Teaching is daily work that requires an ability to hold two (or more!)opposed ideasin the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function (inthe words of F. Scott Fitzgerald). And yet, in the end, it will be each student who willextract from the full array of what is taught and done in the classroom that which she orhe needs to find a path to language learning. Thus, it is both the duty and delight ofteachers to help each learner, in community, to advance on that path towardcommunicative competence.