Êîë³ñíèê Þ. Ì., Êîë³ñíèê Í. Ì.
Àêàäåì³ÿ ñóõîïóòíèõ â³éñüê ³ìåí³ ãåòüìàíà Ïåòðà Ñàãàéäà÷íîãî, ì. Ëüâ³â , Óêðà¿íà
THE STRUCTURAL AND SITUATIONAL APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE TEACHING
The situations selection and organizing them in accordance with such grading principles as difficulty, inclusiveness, frequency and so on will give the opportunity to determine what linguistic elements should be taught, as having common occurrence in such situations. A procedure of this kind would result in a « contextual » or « situational» syllabus as opposed to a « structural » or « grammatical » one [2 ; 4].
It should be underlined that there are a number of difficulties involved in constructing a syllabus along situational lines, not the least of which is the problem of knowing what a situation is. Hill suggests that one makes a syllabus of this sort by first making a selection of «structural, idiomatic and lexical items», then «selecting, and grading into steps the contexts or situations we wanted our pupils to learn to respond to» and then, finally, the structural, idiomatic and lexical items would have to be allotted to the contextual steps, and not vice versa, although some compromise would probably be necessary. Again there is no indication how this complex process is to be carried out, and no instances of its results. One suspects that what we have here and in Hill are in fact pseudo-procedures [2]. The idea of selecting and grading situations is an interesting one, but it is difficult to see how it can be put into effective practice with the degree of precision suggested in these two quotations in the absence of any clear definition as to what constitutes a situation.
One can, of course, argue that precision is not necessary anyway, and that it is perfectly possible to draw upon one’s intuitive knowledge of language use by selecting a number of situations which it is likely that the learner will encounter, like any ordinary situation, for example buying a railway ticket, booking in at a hotel, ordering meals in a restaurant, going to the cinema and so on, and then writing dialogues which represent the kind of verbal interaction which would take place on such occasions. What has to be noticed, however, is that this kind of representation requires the learner to extrapolate from the situation those features which have a bearing on the communicative value of the linguistic elements he is presented with. We do not want him to associate all of the language with just one situation: we want him to recognize which features of the situation are relevant in making particular linguistic elements appropriate ones to use. It is obvious that we do not want to teach him to say, for example, «I should like a 2nd class return ticket to Swansea Spa» or «Could I have a look at the wine list please» as automatic responses to being at a railway ticket window or a restaurant, but to know how to ask for a service, of which these are instances.
We assume, in other words, that he will be able to single out from the situations in which language is presented just those conditions which are relevant to the assignment of communicative value to the different parts of the dialogue.
We return, then, to the key notion of relevance. The relevant features of a situation with regard to the meaning of the linguistic elements which occur in it are just those features which serve as conditions which control the communicative value of those elements. If one is to define a situation, therefore, it seems reasonable to suppose that one will define it as exemplifying certain conditions. Instead of associating linguistic forms directly with situations, thus leaving the learner to discover relevance for himself, we need to establish the conditions which mediate between the two. The structural and situational approaches to language teaching might be represented simply as follows: communicative acts, conditions, structures and situations.
What these proposals amount to is that what language courses should aim at teaching is not linguistic structures in association with situations but communicative functions in discourse ranges over sentence boundaries and there is no reason for associating it with the sentence as the maximal grammatical unit. It may be that grading considerations require that communicative function should be associated with sentences in a notional syllabus and this leaves the problem of how learners are to recognize functions which range over a series of sentences in actual discourse and how the illocutionary force of one utterance is conditioned by that of others. In other words, we have still to develop in the learner the kind of strategy of understanding whereby he is able to recognize the value of linguistic elements as they occur in discourse, not as pre-established meanings but as generated from within discourse itself.
To summarize our idea what we need to do is to show how English structures, previously manipulated as formal objects, can be used to fulfil functions previously only associated with the other language. To use Halliday’s term, we need to provide the learner with a new « model» of English [3], and this we do by, as it were, grafting the forms of English on to the functions which constitute the rhetoric of the other subjects in the curriculum and which have been realized by the other language. In so doing we of course make the learner’s knowledge of these functions explicit .
The list of references:
1. Abercrombie D. Pseudo-procedures in linguisti cs / D. Abercrombie . – London : Oxford University Press , 1965. – Ð. 114–119.
2. Hill L. A. Selected articles on the teaching of English as a Foreign Language / L. A. Hill . – London : Oxford University Press , 1967. – 142 p.
3. Mackey W. F. Language teaching analysis / W. F. Mackey . – London : Longmans , 1965. – 554 p.
4. Wilkins D. A. Grammatical , situational and notional syllabuses . Paper given at the 3rd International Congress of Applied Linguistics . Copenhagen , August 197 2.