In the last article I wrote for The Journal ("Understanding communicative activities: Icon or I can't?", in issue Nº. 7), I argued that current ELT methodology was in grave danger of becoming little more than a collection of 'communicative activities' with bits tacked on. This article takes a wider look at the field of TEFL, suggesting that our profession has lost its way and is cruising along without really asking itself any searching questions.

At the risk of boring you, poor reader, let's just take one last look at communicative activities, for example. A 'good' task is an extremely difficult thing to design, and really busy teachers may not have the time to devote to it. This may result not just in a 'boring' or 'unsuccessful' task; it may actually do damage. Skehan (1994) suggests:

"Requiring learners to engage in task-based learning, if not balanced by other activities, may well lead to the use of comprehension and communication strategies, and encourage a performance-oriented approach to learning, with the result that fluency and synthesis are developed at the expense of accuracy and restructuring. Although it is proposed that that interaction will extend the grammatical system, the reality may be that the engagement of grammatical processes becomes 'unhooked' from communication, because other resources and strategies, which have a more direct pay-off, are employed. As a result, the grammatical system is by-passed, rather than extended or effectively applied, and short-term communicative gain assumes greater importance than longer-term grammatical development." (p.190)

In brief, what Skehan is worried about is that the learners will stop noticing that their linguistic output needs development. Instead, they will remember the cunning way they managed to get their idea across. They are learning strategies - or developing a 'strategic competence' - in ways of actually avoiding the need to improve their linguistic competence.

And, once we have acquired enough meaning-communication strategies, the result is premature fossilisation.

In other words, once you can get by, why bother going to the effort of learning more complicated ways of doing things? You can often see this process when talking to EFL teachers who work abroad - they often speak the language extremely badly. If you have supermarkets, why bother learning food and shopping language? This is the danger of practising only successful communication. As I argued in my last article, a whole generation of teachers has been encouraged to believe that 'successful' teaching means learners communicating their desired meaning. Add to this my other point that, for the learner, truth is always more powerful than correctness. "Rose red" is more truthful - meaningful? - than "Roses are blue". What the learner wants first is meaning, and language learning comes a distant second. They will resort to Portuguese rather than not get their meaning across, even if the meaning to be communicated is something as banal as the colour of Mr Brown's dog.

So, it seems, given the combination of both teachers' and learners' obsession with 'successful communication' at the expense of language development, we are heading for a fossilisation extravaganza.

It seems to me - does it to you? - that learners are fossilising earlier and earlier these days. Advanced students seem to make the kinds of mistakes that intermediate students used to make; the all-purpose infinitive, for example. Why is it? Could it be our fault?

At the crossroads

And this is why we are at the crossroads: as we end the Nineties, ELT is suffering from two contradictory neuroses: complacency coupled with a loss of confidence. We have always known that learners don't learn the things we teach them, but do learn the things we don't teach them. Research continues to show that little formal instruction is effective. Old certainties about what constituted "good" methodology are more difficult to maintain, and research into linguistics and language learning has not produced An Answer. Our methodology still contains direct theoretical opposites left over from see-saw battles between synthesis and analysis, instruction and acquisition, use and usage, form and notion, etc.

Why? I think the main reason for this self-assured timidity is the result of making EFL into a product. Let us look at a few areas:

Books: Books used to be methodologies. Each new coursebook used to signal a dramatic change. Anyone who has taught for a long time will remember the shock of the new: English Fast became Contact English became Streamline Departures became Strategies became Headway became Headway clone became Headway clone became Dolly the Sheep. There are a few exceptions: Cobuild, for example, the Sourcebook, some Young Learner materials. But, for the most part, if you ripped up most books today and threw the pages in the air, you'd have trouble distinguishing them on landing.

TEFL Teacher Training: In the beginning was PPP - Presentation, Practice and Production. Then along came the (much-misunderstood) communication gap, which got turned into 'activities'. Then we tacked on 'Skills'. And then… And then nothing. There has been tinkering around the edges of methodology, but TEFL training has also become a kind of product to replicate and sell. For example, one of the largest TEFL organisations alone trains over 3000 Certificate-level teachers every year.

Exams: EFL Exams used to rule our world, and thousands of students used to practise the 10 standard FCE transformations and do bizarre CPE summaries. This was the backwash effect, where Exams lorded it over our teaching and ruled what we had to do in class. And then exams discovered a new idea: frontwash. All you had to do was take a few exercises of the type we all do in every class - mainly 'communication activities', of course - and make them into a test. And so we had the Oxford exams and UCLES' new suite of KET, PET, etc. More new products.

A pattern is emerging here: fossilisation. So, could Skehan help? He describes (Skehan 1994) the stages involved in successful language learning, and says:

"One might … portray the progress of the second language learner in terms of a productive tension between synthesis and analysis. The analytic tendency will operate to preserve openness and capacity for change…; the synthetic tendency will to be integrate what has just been restructured into more fluent performance"

Perhaps, similarly then, what has been missing in our profession is our ability to preserve our openness to change. We have become complacent. We have a relatively successful product - change means threat as well as opportunity, we may have to de-skill before we re-skill, and that is a professionally challenging prospect. In other words, instead of confident timidity, we should adopt its opposite, purposeful risk-taking.

What change is on offer?

The driving force of the last 15 years has been aimed at letting people 'learn' through exposure to, and use of, lots of natural language. This view comes largely from studies of natural and second language acquisition (SLA), and has been mainly promoted by the great Pop-Linguistician, Krashen, as comprehensible input, or "i + 1", and through Prabhu's Bangalore project, which used tasks as the 'unit' of teaching. Having watched or heard a task being performed in the second language, learners were required to do the task themselves. There was no formal attention paid to the language used, only to the successful outcome achieved.

However, there are now two new areas of debate which are causing some excitement, Task-based Learning and the Lexical Approach. I can only hope to summarise them briefly here, but interested readers should consult the 'op. cit.' below:

Task-based Learning (hereafter "TBL"), represents a weaker form of the comprehension- and interaction-driven approach. Accused of being "PPP upside-down", Willis (1996) would rather it were called "PPP the right way up". She summarises the approach as follows:

"Learners begin by carrying out a communication task, using the language they have learnt from previous lessons or from other sources. They then talk or write about how they did the task and compare findings. At some point they might listen to recordings of other people doing the same task, or read something related to the theme of the task, again relating this to their own experience of doing the task. Only after that is their attention directed towards specific features of language form - features that occur naturally in the recordings they have heard or the texts they have read." (p.52)

We can see how Willis might hope that post-task attention to form might avoid fossilisation. But is it enough? Skehan (1996) has suggested a theoretical hierarchy of task-types that might prevent fossilisation, but these are untested. There is a danger that pressures of time and experience may simply lead to a new justification for old behaviours.

The second 'Big Idea' is the Lexical Approach. To outline the approach in a few words would demean it, but at its heart is the concept that language is grammaticalised lexis, rather than lexicalised grammar. In other words, it is argued that language consists of words held together by bits of grammar, and not, as it may come across to the average classroom student, grammar with some lexis around the edges. A further key concept is that a 'word' is not a set of marks with spaces at either end, but may consist of larger chunks such as "in any case…", or even of larger chunks such as "If … hadn't done it, it would never have…".

Willis (1994) suggests that: "Words are more amenable to learner analysis and discovery than "structures". This is partly because words are more immediately recognisable and partly because they are more frequent than any "structure" that might incorporate them. Instead of receiving a decontextualised and teacher-controlled presentation, learners can be asked to analyse texts which they have already processed for meaning. This may involve the analysis of a specific text, … [or] it may involve treating the texts … as a 'pedagogic' corpus. … learners can analyse a corpus for insights into the language which will help develop their own grammar." (p. 65)

So are these areas the equivalent of sliced bread or simply red herrings? TBL seems to me to have an excellent chance of mainstream, i.e. commercial, adoption: it doesn't require too much of a mental leap and much of what we already do is still relevant.

Despite more recent works by another pop-linguistician, Lewis (1993,1997), the lexical approach continues to look like throwing the baby out with the bath water. We are informed constantly - Lewis lists hundreds of examples throughout his texts - that these larger lexical chunks exist. He even categories them, e.g. "Fixed-" and "Semi-fixed Expressions". But what are we supposed to do with the partial and often overlapping categories he lists? The lexical approach rejects borrowing models from SLA studies and using them as "good pedagogy". But then it borrows ideas from psycholinguistics about how we store language in our heads, and posits that as "good pedagogy" instead.

It seems to me that the radicalism in the Lexical Approach lies not in its content, but in its methodology as outlined by Willis above. Completely unlike the Task-based Approach, it is not a product. In fact, it couldn't be because it cannot name its categories yet. It is a process, and a process that puts learners and their ability to question at the fore.

And it is this ability to question that is at the heart of language learning. We have seen how it is the key to preventing fossilisation. The learner "learns" when they have an insight, when they notice something new. This is the opposite of what we do at the moment. For example, we are doing a "gist reading". A student holds up their hand and asks us to explain a word, and we say, "Don't bother about it, just get the meaning". This is a perfect example of "successful communication" impeding the learning process. We should be asking ourselves "But why did the learner ask about only that word and not all the others?" And the answer is because they noticed it. In other words, the key element in learning is what Breen describes as "problematicity". Learning is not about "input + 1", but rather "intake + ?".

But each learner asks a different question, notices different things, has a different internal syllabus. And that is something that cannot be made into a product. It goes against what we are used to, which is trying to second-guess the learner's needs at every step of the way: we interfere. We produce lessons, tasks, syllabuses, course books, exams: all of them imposing what we think the average student should be learning at this stage, and ignoring the fact that there is no average learner.

The way forward

How TEFL will develop now has become much clearer. There will be two paths. One will consist of a highly professional, beautifully packaged multimedia product. Teaching will remain a process resembling the old definition of a lecture: getting the notes from the lecture's book into the students' books without passing through the heads of either". In other words, a beautifully polished teaching/learning fossil.

On the other hand, there will be a small number of learners who actually want to be actively involved in the learning process, and who will want a teacher-facilitator to help them. They will probably be using reference works like grammars and lexical corpuses, and have access to a large number of varied and unpredictable texts, such as the Internet. They will have a bank of tasks to help them learn and practise. They will want a say in what they do, who they work with, and how they work. But they will be very lucky if they find somewhere that offers them such a service. This - a process syllabus - still represents the best way forward, but only for the risk-takers who are prepared to take part in what Ron White has described as "a pedagogical magical mystery tour".

Bygate, M., Tomkyn, A & Williams, E. (1994), Grammar and the Language Teacher, Prentice Hall International Krashen, S. & Terrell, T. (1983), The Natural Approach, Pergamon/Alemany Lewis, M. (1993), The Lexical Approach, LTP Lewis, M. (1997), Implementing the Lexical Approach, LTP Skehan (1994), "Second Language Acquisition Strategies, Interlanguage Development and Task-based Learning" in Bygate et al. White (), Willis, D. (1994), "A Lexical approach", in Bygate et al. Willis, D. (1990), The Lexical Syllabus, Collins Cobuild Willis, J. (1996), "A Flexible Framework for task-based learning", in Willis and Willis 1996 Willis, J. & Willis, D. (eds.) (1996), Challenge and Change in Language Teaching, Heinemann