H G Widdowson: Defining Issues in English Language Teaching

 Another review  from CETEFL. First posted on March 4 2004. (By Simon Gill).

Defining Issues in English Language Teaching, by H G Widdowson, pub OUP, 2003, 193 pp, ISBN 0-19-437445-9, price varies according to country

To make sure it’s not me that does all the work here, let’s start with a little questionnaire. Do you agree or not with the following statements?

1. For teachers, practice is much more important than theory.
2. The best model for learners to model their English on is English as spoken by its native speakers.
3. Samples of real authentic language are the best form of linguistic input for learners in classroom situations.
4. The foreign language classroom is an unreal place and remote from the real world.
5. The learner’s native tongue should not be used in the foreign language classroom.
6. Communicative testing is an essential part of modern language education.

If your answer to any of the above is ‘yes’, then you are in disagreement with the man who is, according to a work quoted on the back cover blurb of this recent volume to the Oxford Applied Linguistics series, “probably the most influential philosopher for international ESOL of the late twentieth century”. Don’t despair, though, for he is also a man who likes a good argument. As he writes in the Preface (p x), “…my purpose is to prompt critical thinking into the issues I raise, and there are times when I have been deliberately provocative to that end.”

If you have read anything else by Professor Widdowson or been fortunate enough to hear him speak, this will hardly come as a surprise, as both his writings and conference talks are always characterized by the same blend of thoughtfulness and healthy scepticism that he deploys here. This book is basically an extended polemic in which, as the title suggests, the author turns his attention to a number of matters of contemporary interest in the world of ELT, which he deals with in a linear fashion.

Commencing with the relationship of theory and practice (“there is no opposition between theory and practice, and to set them up against each other is, wilfully or not, to misrepresent the nature of both” – p 6), he moves on to make the case for teachers to have a theoretical model of their own against which to measure all the ideas that come their way and suggests parameters that might pertain to such a theory.

Next he considers the nature of English as an international language, and is unequivocal about how he sees the role of native speakers and their English in this: “How English develops in the world is no business whatever of native speakers in England, or the United States, or anywhere else…it is only international to the extent that it is not their language” (p 43). He posits the existence of two quite different varieties of English, the first being those Englishes tailored to the needs of local discourse communities and of limited value beyond those communities, the second being those Englishes generated by different specialized global communities to meet their own communicative purposes; it is among the latter type that he positions the kind of English we ought to be teaching.

After pondering some of the shortcomings he sees in corpus linguistics and ‘real language data’ as used in learner dictionaries and textbooks – “as an objective or learning, real English is unrealistic English” (p 114) – he moves on to the classroom itself and the kind of language that is appropriate for its inhabitants to use. Second Language Acquisition research, structural-oral-situational approaches to teaching, task-based learning, monolingual teaching, and communicative testing are all placed under the microscope and found wanting in some way or other. The following three pronouncements are representative: “Linguists do not tell it how it is, but how, from their point of view, it appears to be…linguistic reality is in the eye of the beholder” (p 77); “the recommendation that teachers…should…present only ‘real’ language is misguided, and misleading, on a number of counts” (p 108), and “communicative tests are impossible in principle…” (p 171).

So, little of contemporary ELT escapes unscathed. His tone throughout is one of a keen and yet detached enquiry of which I am sure Karl Popper would approve. Nothing is taken for granted; everything is probed. He is openly mistrustful of the kind of one-size-fits-all panaceas that are all too common in ELT, which is, I have always thought, a discipline with a great propensity for reinventing the wheel and putting fairy lights on it, and for this he deserves credit.

However, it must be said that he does paint with a broad brush. His advocacy of an overtly bilingual pedagogy, for instance, is an intriguing one, but he provides little of substance as to what form this might take. An unkind or undiscriminating reader might even take it as a licence to return to (or continue with?) a dyed-in-the-wool grammar-translation approach, especially as on the same page he remarks with what seems to me to be approval on the recent rehabilitation of grammar. And the binary distinction between two types of Englishes, one based on geography and the other on shared concerns, is a bit too neat for my liking; my own experience is littered with people whose English needs were, by this yardstick, most definitely of the latter kind and yet whose fondness for the linguistic products of often distant geographical communities was a key factor in their learning and use of the language.

Reading back through this review, it is clear to me that Professor Widdowson has, with me at least, succeeded in the goal established in the quotation from the preface. The book is not exactly easy reading – it is too densely argued for that – but it is most definitely worth the effort. The prose is complex but elegant; he has a gift for the illuminating insight, the well-turned phrase, the pithy summary. He has a way of getting below the surface of things and showing even the most familiar of ideas in a fresh light, so that the overall effect is one of a rich and beautifully-presented smorgasbord. Lovely to contemplate, and while you might not want to, or even be physically able to, actually eat everything that’s on the table, you wouldn’t go away hungry and might well have a good time discussing what’s on offer with your neighbour. As a snapshot of where the great beast ELT is at, and some of the possible directions in which it might go, this is excellent.