DEVELOPMENT AND RESEARCH IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS
Language-teaching curriculum
Development
The term ‘curriculum’ is used in its widest sense to include purpose and objectives as well as content (or syllabus) and method (McGrath 2002). An explicit curriculum can be seen as a statement of the means by which a set of objectives is to be achieved and at the same time an operational definition of how we should understand those objectives. Thus an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) curriculum (Douglas 2000) will contain the content of a teaching program, possible guidance on how to present that program and at the same time represent by its instantiation what is meant by ESP.
The applied linguistics of curriculum studies may therefore be regarded as the language teaching specialism, which N. S. Prabhu sees as ‘a matter of identifying, developing, and articulating particular perceptions of teaching and learning on the one hand and seeking ways in which perceptions can be shared and sharpened through professional debate in the teaching community on the other’ (1987: 107).
This definition is given in his account of the Communicational Teaching Project, which he directed in southern India in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was not, Prabhu states ‘an attempt to prove a teaching method through controlled experimentation … it should not be looked on as a field trial or pilot study leading to a large scale implementation’ (ibid: 103). It was, he writes, ‘essentially an attempt to develop a fresh perception of second language teaching and learning. It drew on a pedagogic intuition arising from earlier experience, and deliberately sought further sustained experience, both to test the strength of the intuition and to be able to articulate it in the form of principles and procedures’ (ibid: 109).
The impetus for the project was a profound dissatisfaction with conventional (English) language teaching in India, which has since the 1960s been of the structural drill type (Prabhu uses the name Structural-Oral-Situational or SOS). This itself was an innovation on the earlier fashion of grammar–translation approaches. Since the SOS innovation was hard won, opposition to Prabhu’s proposals for change was fierce. What he maintained was that ‘the development of competence in a second language requires not systematization of language inputs or maximization of planned practice, but rather the creation of conditions in which learners engage in an effort to cope with communication’ (ibid: 1).
Prabhu distinguishes sharply between his communicational competence and communicative competence, which he regards as the ability to achieve social or situational appropriacy, as distinct from grammatical conformity. The focus of his project therefore was not on communicative competence but ‘on grammatical competence itself, which was hypothesized to develop in the course of meaning focused activity’ (ibid).
The philosophy behind the project is that learners are meaning seekers. Grammar– competence – is best learnt through purposeful communication; the analogies used at various times are, first, the child learning his or her mother tongue where learning takes place through the search for meaning and not through formal instruction; and, second, the learner (first- or second-language learner) engaged on a content task such as a mathematics task. There, it was argued, the desire, the determination to solve the mathematics problem is so strong that learners will assist one another to negotiate their way to a solution. When tasks similar to a mathematics problem which use language but which are not language focused are presented then the challenge to find a solution will encourage language negotiation and hence language learning: learners ‘when focused on communication … are able to deploy non-linguistic resources and, as a result, not only achieve some degree of communication but, in the process, some new resources, however small, in the target language’ (ibid: 29).
In other words, language is best learnt when it is being used as a means not as an end. This is a very nativist view and as might be expected met with opposition. Researchers maintained that the project was not experimental, and educators contested that the project, which was publicized as an innovation, could not be generalized to other contexts in India because those involved in implementing the project were quite untypical of the majority of classroom teachers.
However, as we have seen, Prabhu always denied that his work was experimental or indeed that in itself it was generalizable. He was not interested in revolutionizing English teaching in India. What he was interested in was to develop a fresh perception of second-language learning. He argues that ‘pedagogic innovation … may be viewed as an act of renewing contact with innovation and re-interpreting experience through a fresh perception’ (ibid: 109).
Not experimental, not available to the majority of classroom teachers: these are surely serious criticisms in spite of the disclaimers (Beretta 1990). Can a project that has so little claim to permanent effect legitimately be regarded as applied linguistics? If it is, is there a danger that critics will consider that applied linguistics is neither scientific nor relevant?
My response is that with the caveats Prabhu has offered, his work is of interest to applied linguistics because what it does is to elaborate our thinking about language learning. As such it will certainly not revolutionize language teaching in India but it may, as he very fairly observes, offer some insights, help us think again about our normal practice. It is likely that the role of applied linguistics in curriculum development is as much in offering new insights based, however distantly, on theoretical underpinnings from other disciplines as in offering ways of changing practice and method.
