Interview

Henry Widdowson

Henry G. Widdowson is an authority in the field of applied linguistics and language teaching. He is perhaps best known for his contribution to communicative language teaching. However, he has also published on other (though related) subjects such as discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis, the global spread of English, English for Special Purposes and stylistics. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning calls him "probably the most influential philosopher of the late twentieth century for international ESOL".

Widdowson is Emeritus Professor of Education, University of London, and has also been Professor of Applied Linguistics at Essex University and Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Vienna. He is the Applied Linguistics adviser to Oxford University Press and series adviser of Oxford Bookworms Collection. Widdowson is co-editor of Language Teaching: A Scheme for Teacher Education and the series editor of Oxford Introductions to Language Study and the author of Linguistics (1996) in the same series. He has also published Defining Issues in English Language Teaching (2002), and Practical Stylistics: An Approach to Poetry (1992).

His most recent book is entitled Text, Context, Pretext. Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis (2004), published by Blackwell's.

Source: Wikipedia.

Prof. Widowson conducted this interview by e-mail with ELT News editor Mark McBennett in December 2005, shortly after an OUP-sponsored seminar tour of Japan with Michael Swan.

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ELT: Christopher Brumfit, in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Language Teaching and Learning, described your status in the TESOL world as "probably..the most influential philosopher of the late twentieth century". How would you sum up your philosophy?
HW: I am not sure about having a philosophy ­ that sounds rather grand. I have a way of thinking about TESOL: that if it is to justify the name of a profession, then its practitioners have the responsibility to think critically about what they do. In my view, they need to be educated and not just trained, that is to say informed about theoretical ideas and research findings but not, emphatically not, simply to accept them as fact or on faith, but to subject them to careful appraisal so as to decide how far they are relevant to their own circumstances.

You’ve said (in the Journal of the Imagination in Language Learning and Teaching) that TESOL cannot be considered as a science, because "it is a domain of practical activity not of abstract enquiry", and that it is more of an art form. But research findings continue to be touted as scientific fact and used to formulate the teaching methodology of the day. What, in your opinion, are the more conceptually flawed theories in general use today?
Research findings are of their nature generalizations, and always need to be interpreted in the light of particular pedagogic conditions and requirements. They may indicate things that teachers might find it appropriate to consider, but cannot determine how or what they should teach. But teachers are under considerable pressure to adopt what is recommended, indeed touted (as you put it) on the authority of ‘experts’.

Perhaps the most obvious recent example of this is the current precept that English teachers must only use real or authentic English in their teaching ­ that is to say the English that naturally occurs in the contexts of native speaker use. This directive comes from corpus linguistics and as such has no necessary pedagogic validity whatever.

In language pedagogy, as every teacher knows, the primary consideration has to be how to make the language real for learners in the context of their classroom so that they can engage with it, appropriate it, learn from it. The essential point, I think, is that the English that is taught as a subject is not at all the same as the English that occurs in native speaker contexts. It is a foreign language, and it is this foreignness that is the reality that learners have to be guided to cope with. And English is foreign in different local ways in different countries and different classrooms.

And still on the topic of research, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard Gardner is known for his theory on different kinds of intelligence, such as social intelligence, spatial intelligence and so on. Do you have any thoughts on how this idea applies to language teaching?
It is obvious that people vary a good deal in the kind of thinking they find conducive. I am always amazed, for example, at the facility with which colleagues of mine do crossword puzzles that I find completely baffling, or represent ideas by means of diagrams, which I cannot make head nor tail of. And of course I take comfort in the thought that they have a different kind of intelligence from mine ­ different, but not, of course, superior. The difficulty is that certain kinds of intelligence tend to be privileged over others in particular cultures and in particular traditions of education, and people who cannot demonstrate this approved way of thinking are then written off as failures, no matter how intelligent they might be in other ways.

As far as language teaching is concerned, this should alert us to the possibility that certain kinds of activity that are to be found in textbooks, particularly those perhaps associated with task based learning, might presuppose ways of thinking that are alien to certain individuals, or groups of learners, who might then have to cope not only with the foreignness of the language but the foreignness of the way of thinking that the activity requires. We come here to the very general issue of individual and cultural differences among learners and how far these can be, or should be, accommodated in teaching. Again, having identified a possible problem, its solution can only be a matter of local decision.

Anyone looking up ‘stylistics’ on the internet will have to sift for it amongst a lot of information about the R&B group of the same name. Tell us a little about this area of linguistics.
Generally speaking, stylistics is the study of the linguistic features of texts, the actual verbal texture of occurrences of language use and its effects. Originally the texts in question were literary, and stylistics was seen as an extension of traditional work in literary criticism in that it linked interpretation to a more precise linguistic analysis of texture. These days, stylistics has extended its scope to include texts of all kinds, and has become more or less identified with critical discourse analysis and is primarily concerned with revealing how linguistic features are indicative of underlying ideological significance.

As applied to literature, the central claim of stylistics (at least as I see it) is not that it can lead to a more exact interpretation of a text but that it can provide students with the means for substantiating their own understanding of a text, and so make them less dependent on the ready made and second hand interpretations handed down to them by critical authority. So for me, stylistics is essentially an approach not to literary criticism but to literary education.

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