Individual Freedom in Language Teaching. Christopher Brumfit

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      Christopher Brumfit

      Individual Freedom in Language Teaching

      Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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      First published 2001

      2012 2011 2010

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      ISBN-13: 978 0 19 4421744

      Printed in China

      For F, R, and S

      Published in this series:

      Bachman: Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing

      Bachman and Palmer: Language Testing in Practice

      Brumfit and Carter (eds): Literature and Language Teaching

      Canagarajah: Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in Language Teaching

      Cook: Discourse and Literature

      Cook: Language Play, Language Learning

      Cook and Seidlhofer (eds.): Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics

      Ellis: SLA Research and Language Teaching

      Ellis: The Study of Second Language Acquisition

      Ellis: Understanding Second Language Acquisition

      Howatt: A History of English Language Teaching

      Jenkins: The Phonology of English as an International Language

      Kern: Literacy and Language Teaching

      Kramsch: Context and Culture in Language Teaching

      Lantolf (ed.): Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning

      Nattinger and DeCarrico: Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching

      Phillipson: Linguistic Imperialism

      Seliger and Shohamy: Second Language Research Methods

      Skehan: A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning

      Stern: Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching

      Widdowson: Aspects of Language Teaching

      Widdowson: Practical Stylistics

      Widdowson: Teaching Language as Communication

      Preface

      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,