Special Feature
A Tale of Two Books: Looking back on twenty years of communicative language teaching
Steven Brown
Youngstown State University, Youngstown OH USA
February 2005
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Like many of my generation of English Language Teachers, I came to ELT through a back door. In the 1970s, I found myself teaching "Introduction to American Studies" to a very diverse group of students at City College of San Francisco, people who were working on a new language as well as on new academic concepts. By early 1981, I was in Japan teaching EFL full-time. The Communicative Revolution, Notional-Functional syllabuses and the ideas of Stephen Krashen were on everyone's tongue. It was an exciting time, and in retrospect a charmingly naïve time.
“Dialogues provide a strange sort of confidence to beginners (until they realize that real people seldom memorize "their" half of the dialogue).”
At least in Japan, lots of people were learning how to teach as they went along, and in most cases it was textbooks that taught us how to teach in a new way. In my case, even as I worked with the slim audio-lingual volumes the school had ordered for my class, Building Strategies (Abbs and Freebairn 1979) showed me the way. Several years later, a friend, Marc Helgesen, invited me on a continuation of his project (Helgesen, Mandeville & Jordan 1986, Helgesen, Brown & Mandeville 1988). We've recently revised the English Firsthand books again and I've been thinking where we've been over the past twenty years. I'd like to analyze selected pages of Building Strategies and English Firsthand to see what (if anything) we've learned.
Conversations
I'm sure I'm not the only one who can remember snippets of dialogue from high school Spanish textbooks. Dialogues have been with us from the beginning. They provide a strange sort of confidence to beginners (until they realize that real people seldom memorize "their" half of the dialogue). Here's the first half of a Building Strategies dialogue (Abbs & Freebairn 1979, p. 85-86):
Rod: Hello, Barbara! Welcome back! You look marvelous.
Barbara: Rod! What a surprise! It's lovely to see you again.
Rod: Sorry I didn't telephone you before I left, but I didn't have time, in fact…
Barbara: Oh, that's all right. Forget it!
Rod: Well, how was Italy?
Barbara: Fun, but tiring. Milan was interesting. It's bigger than I expected. Noisier and dirtier, too.
The dialogue presents two functions the unit will focus on: apologizing and comparing. It's relatively natural ("Fun, but tiring" and the attempt to represent overlapping conversation) and later attempts some humor (of a suitcase: "What's in it? Stones?") The dialogue is followed by comprehension questions like "Why didn't Rod telephone Barbara before she left?" The text also provides suggested starters for the answers to the questions that attempt (by what we might call now a focus on forms) to draw attention to the language within the dialogue:
What did he say when he apologized?
Sorry I …but…
What did Barbara think of Italy?
She thought it was …but…
Would we do this today? Yes, I think so. Though I'm not so sure we would have comprehension questions, we might well want to draw attention to the language of the dialogue, and directed questioning can accomplish that. Here's what English Firsthand (Helgesen at al. 2004a, p.92) does with this part of a dialogue about shopping (the theme of its unit on comparisons):
May I help you?
Yeah, I'm looking for a sweater.
What ______1______?
I'm not sure. ____2_____, I think.
The choices for #1 are size and color. The choices for #2 are medium and blue. The use of slots attempts to build flexibility in language use. The dialogue is much more minimalistic; there is no story line, there are no characters. The students are the characters and they choose what they want to say (and their partners have to listen a little more carefully). The dialogue is accompanied by a "3 Minute Conversation Task" that asks the students to personalize the activity (Close your book. Have a conversation. Talk about something you bought.) and a homework activity the students can do on their own to work with the dialogue.
The newer dialogue is at once simpler and more complex. There is less "content" but students are making more decisions. They're filling in slots and practicing in a way that is not an oral reading of the page. They are using their own lives, not Rod's and Barbara's. That said, there are students and teachers who like story lines and characters and there is certainly no denying that in the hands of a good teacher such stories can serve a useful purpose. I myself used to play up the soap opera possibilities of the plot of Strategies. Dialogues are interesting in that they have the potential to serve as exemplars of language, and it has been hypothesized that there may be structures that are better presented through exemplars than rules (DeKeyser 1998).
Listening
I am struck by the difference in the amount of listening given in the two books. In Building Strategies, this is the listening task:
John is British, but has worked in Japan. Etsuko is Japanese from Osaka, but she is studying in Britain. Listen to them comparing life as they see it in the two countries. Make notes about the features of each country they mention and the comparisons they make.
The follow-up task is Write paragraphs using your notes, like this: "John says that, in his experience, the …Etsuko says that, in her experience, the …" (Abbs & Freebairn 1979, p. 92). In English Firsthand 1, there is one entire page devoted to pre-listening or "Getting Ready." The first exercise asks learners to match sentences with responses ("May I help you?" " I'm looking for some jeans."). The learners listen and check their answers. The second exercise is a guessing activity. Students first guess the price of the items they will hear about in the listening task, and then note if they have ever bought that item. The purpose of guessing the price is to make students aware of the possible range of answers, so that they don't answer $250 instead of $25 (Helgesen et al. 2004, p. 90).
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