ELT/ESP/EYL Professional Practice
Language description and course and materials design
To consider in this session: the implications that different models of language
description may have for helping us decide what language to teach, both in terms
of product and of process.
1.
Choices about aspects of language to focus on in materials
Gilmore (2007) quotes a language researcher as follows: what era would you
think the quotation is from?
“The great advantage of natural, idiomatic texts over artificial ‘methods’ or ‘series’ is
that they do justice to every feature of the language… The artificial systems, on the
other hand, tend to cause incessant repetition of certain grammatical constructions,
certain elements of the vocabulary, certain combinations of words to the almost total
exclusion of others which are equally, or perhaps even more, essential”.
Some differences between textbook and ‘natural’ language
Gilmore 2004
Data sets:
Textbook dialogues of service encounters
Service encounters initiated and recorded by author
Research questions
Is turn taking between S1 and S2 similar between both sets of data?
Does frequency of pauses differ between textbook and authentic data?
Do participants in both textbook and authentic data make mistakes relating to TRPs?
Does back channelling occur in both sets of data?
Is the lexical density in both sets of data similar?
How common are repetitions in the two sets of data?
Are the dialogues similar in length?
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Is the frequency of hesitation devices similar through both sets of data?
What does Gilmore’s data suggest about the aspects of language which the
coursebook materials are choosing to focus on? What aspects does it suggest that
the coursebook has left out?
2.
Recent development in language description that we may want
to take into account
Pragmatics - the norms of interaction
“Sociolinguistic research on the speech behaviour of native speakers of English is
important not only for establishing descriptions of how we perform verbally in our
day-today interactions with other native speakers, but also for the purpose of making
use of this baseline information in educational settings”. (Boxer & Pickering 1995:
44.)
Genre analysis - textual organisation and communicative purpose
Genres, then, provide a frame (Swales 2004) which enables people to take part in, and
interpret, particular communicative events. Making this genre knowledge explicit can
provide learners with the knowledge and skills they need to communicate successfully
in particular situations. It can also provide learners with access to socially powerful
forms of language. (Paltridge 2006: 103)
Grammar – functional approaches
“Grammar becomes a study of meanings are built up through the choice of words and
other grammatical resources such as singular or plural, negative or positive, and other
linguistic forms such as tone and emphasis”. (Bloor & Bloor 2004: 2)
Lexical patterns – corpus evidence
“Studies of large corpora provide two main contributions to linguistics. First, they
provide many new and surprising facts about language use. This is an important test
for an approach to language study: it can help us to learn new things. Second, by
looking at language from a new point of view, corpus studies can help to solve
paradoxes which have plagued linguistics for at least a hundred years. … Corpus data
and methods provide new ways of studying the relations between language system
and language use. If a pattern becomes very frequent in use across very large
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quantities of text, then it becomes entrenched as part of the system. Frequency in text
becomes probability in the system.”. (Stubbs 2007: 126).
In your experience, to what extent are contemporary materials taking these
developments in language description into account?
3.
More on empirical linguistics (see Stubbs 2007).
Relationships between language data and language system:

Language is both an abstract system, and also the use which a community of
speakers make of the system.

Descriptive, empirical linguistics is based on the second aspect – on the data
which we can see.

It has ‘disproved’ some descriptive claims based on introspection.
Computer-based analysis of corpora:

Is inherently quantitative

Shows what is usual and what is less usual

Shows patterns of lexical behaviour ( KWIC technology)

Explanatory inferences can be drawn from observed patterns
“By organising huge masses of data, technology can make visible patterns which lie
outside unaided human perception and which no amount of introspection or manual
analysis could discover”. (2007: 131).
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4.
Theory/Practice interactions
“There is nothing so practical as a good theory”. (Lewin, 1952: 246).

Where do language description theories come from?

Does language description always have implications for language teaching?
Teachers, learners and researchers

What is the position of language teachers vis a vis language description
researchers?

Can language teachers generate particular language descriptions? Do they do
so?

Can learners be asked to generate particular language descriptions? If so how,
and using what data?
5. Widdowson 2003: Cautionary points about the scope of linguistic
description
What, if anything, do developments in language description tell us about the language
we should choose for teaching? And what do they tell us about the aspects that we
should teach? To what extent is description an adequate basis for prescription?
Widdowson’s arguments:
Descriptions, however good, should not automatically set pedagogic goals
Giving a primacy to description sets linguists in power over teachers.
Which description is relevant?
“All linguistic descriptions are necessarily limited…. [although] corpus
descriptions carry a reality that others do not, it also needs to be recognised… that
the reality they represent is only partial.” (Widdowson 2003: 86)
Reading
Boxer D & Pickering L 1995: “Problems in the presentation of speech acts in ELT
materials: the case of complaints” ELTJ 49/1 44-58
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Bygate, M. 2005. Applied Linguistics: a pragmatic discipline, a generic
discipline? Applied Linguistics 26, 4: 568-581.
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Carter, R. & Nunan, D. 2001. The Cambridge guide to teaching English to
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Clarke, M. 1994. The dysfunctions of theory/practice discourse. TESOL Quarterly
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