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Correctness or Communication – Which is your Goal?

Enviado por matildemo

    3. Language Production
    4. Correctness and Communication in Foreign Language Production
    5. Conclusions
    6. Bibliography

    Introduction

    Teaching spoken language production, that is, teaching to talk in the foreign language is frequently considered to be one of the most difficult aspects of the language to attain.

    Why is it so? One major reason could be that the foreign language is taught in a classroom and not outside it as it is our native language learned.

    There are other reasons. It is also determined by the learners’ characteristics, the social context, and by the conditions of the learning. It refers, more exactly, to the learning of a foreign language in the environment in which the language in question is not used as the regular medium of communication.

    Learning a foreign language for us indicates a lower level of actual or delivered proficiency. We use this term to refer to the level of language command in comparing with a primary or dominant language.

    Concerning this matter, the present paper argues about correctness and communication in the production of a foreign language and proposes a conceptual frame about those concepts. It also provides a review on communicative competence and its attainability.

    Development

    Language Production

    In cognitive theory, language production is seen as an active process of meaning construction. According to Richards, this process can be divided into three stages:

    1. Construction, in which the speaker selects communication goals and identifies appropriate meanings.

    1. Transformation, in which language rules are applied to transform intended meaning into the form of the language.
    2. Execution, in which the message is expressed in its audible forms.

    It is the last stage we are concerned with in the present paper. It is in the stage of execution where the student should demonstrate how well he masters the oral language. There is a fact to think of here: there is not always a balance between "input" and "output".

    That is why several authors have insisted on a distinction between the" input"

    the learner receives and the learner’s" intake", that is, what he is able to take in. So his "output" will depend, to a large extent, on his" intake".

    The complexity of this process led us to ask the following questions: what is the appropriate form of spoken language to teach? How important is pronunciation?

    Is it appropriate to teach the same structure to all foreign students, no matter their age or their reasons for learning the spoken language?

    Are those structures considered standard the ones which our students should be expected to produce when they speak?

    Is the oral practice we give the students enough for producing the spoken English? Is correctness, in its full sense, attainable? As a result of our teaching, are our students proficient in the use of the spoken language?

    These rhetorical questions allow us to confirm that the teaching of the spoken language is really a worrying matter. Therefore, we should analyze up to what extent we should demand of our students to be accurate and proficient while using the spoken language, mainly if we analyze the context and conditions in which we teach them the language, as well as the fact that we ourselves are non native speakers.

    Correctness and Communication in Foreign Language Production.

    It is our task to demand of the students’ correctness in their performance while using the language orally. But how do we measure this "correctness"?

    In this case, we generally follow the assumption that the sentence is the appropriate unit of planning and performance. However, if we analyze native speakers’ performance, we can easily notice that it is generally characterized by the production of bursts of speech or phrases.

    Then we may consider that it is not fair to demand of our students to produce complete sentences. It is clear that we should make the students be aware of their errors. Yet, it is not always possible since in our category of non native speakers, we may not be able to detect those errors.

    The following extract from Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw can make us understand the concept of "correctness" in the foreign language much better:

    • Nepommuck: Her name cannot be Doolittle.
    • Higgins: Why?
    • Nepommuck: Because Doolittle is an English name. And she is not English.
    • Hostess: Oh, nonsense. She speaks English perfectly.
    • Nepommuck: Too perfectly. Can you show me any woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners, who have been taught to speak it, speak it well.

    Even native speakers agree on points of correctness demanded to second or foreign language learners that they do not follow in many cases.

    Let us analyze the phenomenon from the point of view of the communication goal. No one dare to deny that while communicating there is a transfer of meaning from one person to another and that that meaning can be expressed in different ways. Abbot has described communication as:

    • Passing information to somebody, although this can be achieved without the use of language at all in many situations. And when speaking, accuracy is not needed
    • Saying what one wants to say instead of what one is told, although in many situations a student may not want to participate, unless he is asked to do so.
    • Saying what is true rather than just what is linguistically correct, but this cannot be done all the time.
    • Paying attention to what people mean rather than how they express what they mean, although sometimes it is impossible to understand what some people say because they speak so badly (so we must claim for accuracy)

    If we analyze communication in this sense, we could say that there is no reason for teaching grammar. But this is not what we mean.

    We should teach our students to communicate in the foreign language and to do it as correct as possible. Now it is then when the dilemma arises: correctness or communication? Is our final goal accuracy or the transfer the meaning?

    We agree with the idea that, without disregarding accuracy, we should look for the fulfillment of communicative goals. Nowadays, the teaching of a foreign language is generally based on the communicative approach, as one of the latest tendencies in foreign language teaching. This approach implies the development of the students’ communicative competence.

    Competence means "when to speak, when not, and as what to talk with whom, when, where, in what manner" (Hymes, 1972). This definition may appear easy at a single glance. However, the complexity of the entire rule system is such that it might appear impossible for anyone except a native speaker to acquire communication competence.

    Complete competence, proficiency, or knowledge of the language- no matter its definition- is hardly ever reached by second or foreign language students, and it is time consuming in most of the cases. In any language learning, it can be summarized as:

    1. The intuitive mastery of the forms of the language.
    2. The intuitive mastery of the linguistic, cognitive, affective, and sociocultural meanings, expressed by the language forms.
    3. The capacity to use language with maximum attention to communication and to minimum attention to form.
    4. The creativity of language use.

    In review , communicative goals are best achieved by giving due attention to language use and not just usage, to fluency and not just accuracy, to authentic language and contexts, and to students’ needs to apply classroom learning to heretofore unrehearsed contexts in the real world.(Douglas, 1989)

    Conclusions

    We teachers are concerned with the fact that it is not easy to measure the students’ performance during the production stage as it was during the practice stage, where we concentrate our attention mainly on accuracy.

    There is evidence that the acquisition of native like production by non native like speakers may take years and in most of the cases, it may never be attained in foreign language teaching, communication is more likely to attain than correctness (or accuracy). Therefore, we state our modest consideration that we should not drown ourselves in a sea of corrections to have the students produce the language accurately but communicatively.

    Bibliography

    1. Abbot, G. and Wingard, P. Teaching of English as an International Language. Edición Revolucionaria, 1989.
    2. Brown, Gillian and Yule George. Teaching the Spoken Language. Edición Revolucionaria, 1989.
    3. Byrne, Donn. Teaching Oral English. Edición Revolucionaria, 1989.
    4. Douglas, H. Teaching by Principles, an Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy.
    5. Lee, Sandra and Nancy Horneberger. Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching.
    6. Omally, Michael and Uhl Anna. Learning in Second Language Acquisition.
    7. Richards, Jack and Rodgers, Theodore. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching.

    Authors:

    Cira Herrera Martínez

    Matilde Montes de Oca Boicet

    Yamiriam Ruiz Boicet

    Zaida María Pérez Sánchez