Читать книгу Individual Freedom in Language Teaching - Christopher Brumfit - Страница 3

Two of my research students, both practising teachers, are partly responsible for the shape and form of this book. They both remarked on the consistency of my ideas over the years, and I felt slightly hurt, as if I had been accused of failing to learn from experience.

But when I read papers I had written over the past 20 years, and when I examined the theses written by my students, I realized that there is a pretty consistent view of language in the world struggling to emerge. Articulating this in full theoretical detail is a task which will require substantial leisure and some years of further work. But in the meantime, the chapters of this book attempt to show how these ideas can affect the practice of language teaching (broadly conceived to include work on literature and culture also) in many different settings.

First, though, it may be helpful to summarize the key beliefs underlying the arguments in this book. Most are defended in detail in the following pages, and all underlie the recommendations for improvement of practice that are offered. Each chapter may be regarded as an attempt to address a particular setting, and a particular educational problem, in the light of the following set of beliefs (chapters which argue these points in detail are indicated) :

• the rules of language use, and much of the language system, are inherently fluid and negotiable, but the teaching of languages has to act as if they are stable and unnegotiable in order to offer a supportive base for learners (Chapters 1 and 6)

• because of this paradox, language teaching risks becoming repressive by relying too heavily on generalizations that are no more than artefacts of language study in the past, and thus preventing language being used creatively to express individual and group difference (Chapters 2 and 4)

• because experience (of language and the world) is in constant flux, scholars, teachers, and learners have to cope with the complex and confusing data they receive through their senses; they do this by simplifying, generalizing, and by deriving principles, and all of these involve distortion of experience, though that distortion can be done in a more or less principled way (Chapter 3)

• because of the risk of distortion, all principles, generalizations, and examples derived from experience need to be thought about and discussed with fellow human beings; through such discussion we can reduce the risk of exploitation by anticipating ill effects and error by minimizing confusion or idiosyncratic interpretation (Chapters 12 and 13)

• because such discussion creates cultural groupings and sub-groupings with shared beliefs and shared points of reference, language is an especially dangerous object of study, for each item studied is an example of ‘language’ and also of ‘culture’ in that it instantiates ideas or objects which develop a cultural load independent of the language they are expressed by (Chapters 6, 8, and 9)

• because the same referents can have different significances in different cultural systems, culture can be independent of language barriers and language can never be the same as culture, but every linguistic group has the capacity to incorporate many cultures (Chapters 9, 10, and 11)

• because language is both shared by different groups, to enable us to communicate, and individual, to enable us to think, create, and imagine, language use potentially threatens group solidarity and challenges personal identity, so it is always risky and value laden (Chapters 5 and 8)

• because its use is risky and value laden, language teaching and learning are bound up with ethical and social concerns that need to be openly discussed if they are not to become secret and repressive (Chapters 7, 9, and 11)

• because these complexities need open discussion, any consideration of language in education is partial unless it is prepared to call upon a range of associated disciplines to clarify the object of study: a responsible ‘linguistics of education’ cannot avoid psychological, sociological, ethical, economic, historical, political as well as pedagogical considerations (Chapters 12, 13, and 14).

The chapters of this book show an attempt to address a variety of settings and practices with these beliefs as a background.

Thus you could say that I examine the science of the study of language teaching within the art of language making. Like most people with an academic background, I believe we should try to understand our field of study as clearly as possible, through examination of empirical evidence and through clear and logical thinking. But like most experienced teachers and language users, I am all too aware that language use and language development reflect human creativity, reveal human identity, and contribute to human aspirations far beyond what can be revealed by the idealizations and generalizations that scientific procedures unavoidably impose. Anyone concerned with language is concerned with human behaviour. Anyone concerned with human behaviour must rejoice and celebrate, empathize and criticize, deplore and oppose, just as much as investigate – for human beings are creative for both good and evil; they identify with communal aspirations which are both constructive and destructive, and they use the power which language gives to dominate as well as to liberate. Amid this welter of conflicting motives and confusing values, language teachers must live – contributing their small offering to world peace and understanding, or (wittingly or unwittingly) to exploitation and suffering.

In the chapters that follow I have drawn upon a view of language which starts from the variety of uses users impose on it, but recognizes that we are partly made by our linguistic inheritance. We make language together, but who we are is partly made by language. What we receive we never hand back unchanged. In addressing key aspects of language teaching theory and practice, I have drawn upon the many disciplines that help us to clarify language and literacy practices in the world and processes of learning and teaching in, and out of, the classroom. No serious discussion of practice calls exclusively on a single discipline, but readers will find that in different chapters I tend to concentrate on philosophy (Chapters 3, 7, 14), psychology (Chapter 2), curriculum theory (Chapters 5, 9), assessment (Chapter 8), ideology (Chapter 9), political theory (Chapter 11), history (Chapter 10), while sociolinguistic and applied linguistic principles underlie most chapters. At the same time, while a few chapters (1, 3, 12, 13, 14) offer general bases for any kind of language work in education, most link for practical exemplification to particular settings or particular types of teaching. Thus second language classrooms are the prime focus of Chapters 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, and 11; mother tongue classrooms in the UK are significant in Chapters 1 and 6; higher education is concentrated on in Chapter 5, literature teaching in Chapters 7 and 8, cultural studies in Chapter 9, and teaching outside the rich industrial countries (from an African perspective) in Chapter 10.

In short, each chapter is an essay trying to integrate understandings from whatever disciplines are relevant, with specific illustration from policy and practice in a particular area of language in education. Where the argument depends on reference to scholarly literature I have provided it, but on occasions I have preferred to outline widely agreed basic issues as clearly as I can as a background to my argument, and I have not referred such uncontentious summaries to standard textbooks.

Overall this book reflects an attempt to develop bases for an educational linguistics; I am currently working on a fuller theoretical development of these ideas. But I hope that as it stands, this book offers a persuasive perspective on the ways in which we use language to educate.

CJB

Centre for Language in Education

University of Southampton