Against dogma: A reply to Michael Swan H. G.

Widdowson

This article is a reply to the two articles entitled A critical look at the Communicative Approach by Michael Swan, which appeared in the two issues that preceded this one (39/1 and 39/2). It is argued that Swan misrepresents the ideas which have gone to make up what is now known as the communicative approach; and that Swans arguments are in themselves contradictory. In the authors belief, Swan fails to offer evidence or support for his own position on the theory or practice of ELT, and is thus guilty of the same charge that he lays, undeservedly, at the door of those whose views he attacks.

Michael Swans two articles are admirably provocative pieces, eloquently written and stimulating to read. This much should be acknowledged. It should be noted, however, that they are not to be read as dispassionate criticism of a careful analytic kind. They are, rather, an indictment, charged with feeling, almost as if Swan felt that the ideas he opposes were a personal affront. And the desire to have a dig at theorists and to pander to anti-intellectual prejudice at times reduces the discussion to farce. So with reference to their title, these papers are critical only in the sense of being captious: they are not evaluative. Nevertheless, they do indicate areas of misunderstanding and misconception, and as such warrant a reply. Dogma and enquiry The first point I should like to make is a very general one about the purpose of intellectual enquiry. The ideas that have been put forward concerning a communicative approach to language teaching do not, as Swan himself acknowledges, constitute a coherent and monolithic body of doctrine, nor were they intended as a manifesto for revolutionary change. They cannot by definition therefore be a dogma. Swan represents them as such in order to make a better target for attack. This is, to say the least, regrettable, because these ideas were proposed (for the most part) in the spirit of positive enquiry and were intended to encourage teachers not to reject customary practices out of hand and embrace a new creed, but on the contrary to subject these practices and proposals to critical (i.e. evaluative, not captious) assessment. So the intention behind the enquiry was to act against the dogmatism of doctrine whether new or old, revolutionary or reactionary. Its purpose was to provoke, not to persuade; to liberate thought, not to confine it by the imposition of fixed ideas. Perhaps I might be permitted to give two quotations from my own work to correct the quite false impression of doctrinaire assertion that Swan, for some reason, wishes to convey:
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This book is not in any way intended as propaganda for a new communicative orthodoxy in language teaching. It is, on the contrary, an appeal for critical investigation into the basis of a belief and its practical implications. I am not trying to present a conclusive case but to start an enquiry. (Widdowson 1978:x) Above all we must deny ourselves the comfort of dogma which deals in the delusion of simple answers. (Widdowson 1979:262) My reason for drawing attention to this misrepresentation is not (principally) to express my resentment at unfair treatment, but to point to a consequence which nullifies much of Swans own argument. For the effect of creating a dogma on which to practise his polemic is that he is led into contradiction by committing precisely the same error that he unjustly attributes to the approach he is criticizing. What he does is to dismiss one set of ideas as if they constituted a single dogmatic creed, but then replace them with a dogma of his own. Again, as Swan might himselfput it, we hear a strangled cry as the communicative baby this time disappears down the plughole. Ouestions
arising

What the Swan dogma amounts to essentially, it would seem, is a reassertion of the traditional view that what learners need to be taught is grammar, lexis, and a collection of idiomatic phrases: their effective use for communicative purposes can be left for them to work out for themselves by reference to common sense and the experience they have of using their own language. Ideas about use and usage, the realization of appropriate meaning, communicative strategies, negotiation, and so on that all these theorists prattle about in their impenetrable jargon are so much moonshine and nothing more. One can almost see the groundlings rolling in the aisles with glee. This dogma is then itself directly contradicted by other remarks in the two articles. Swan talks approvingly, for example, about the teaching of notions and functions: We must make sure our students are taught to operate key functions such as, for instance, greeting, agreeing or warning. But why should this be necessary if the function of an utterance (use) can always be inferred by a common-sense association of sentence meaning (usage) and situation, as has previously been claimed, and, in the case of warning, so amusingly (if tendentiously) demonstrated by the anecdote of Wilberforce and his accomplices? And if Swan accepts that functions need to be taught as aspects of language other than structure and lexis, how does he propose that this should be done in a principled way without invoking the ideas about use and usage he has so summarily dismissed? Again, Swan tells us that we need to make sure that our students are trained to become fluent in whatever aspects of speaking, understanding, reading and writing relate to their purposes. But, according to the dogma, students already know how to do these things: all they need is a knowledge of English structures and lexis and these abilities will come of their own accord. So why do they need any training? Why indeed do we need to bother with teaching these abilities at all? Again we are told that one of the reasons for poor performance at classroom comprehension tasks may be that the learners command of the language is just fluent enough for him to decode the words, but this occupies all his faculties and he has no processing capacity to spare for interpreting what he hears. But how is this possible if the ability to understand, that is to say to provide language items with appropriate communicative value in context, follows automatically from a knowledge of
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language combined with the skills the learner has already acquired from the experience of using his own mother tongue? According to the dogma which denies any relevance to the use/usage distinction, decoding and interpreting should not be different processes at all. Fluency (whatever Swan might mean by this) in the one ought not to be distinct from fluency in the other. This problem of poor performance may also, we are told, be caused by the fact that the learners have been trained to read classroom texts in such a different way from real-life texts that they are unable to regard them as pieces of communication. But how can this be? If they know the language, why cant they automatically apply this knowledge? And what, anyway, does it mean to say that learners treat texts in a different way? How then is this distinct from regarding them as pieces of communication? These questions can be clarified by reference to the concepts of cohesion and coherence and strategies of prediction and negotiation, but this kind of jargon is inadmissible, so all we are left with is a befuddled vagueness which, to use Swans own expression, contributes nothing to our understanding of how to teach foreign languages. We are told that the inability of learners to regard texts as pieces of communication is the result of poor methodology and that the solution involves changing what happens in the classroom, not what happens in the student. What exactly is it that might lead us to assess one methodology as poor, another good? What sort of change in the classroom is called for? And anyway what is the point, we might ask, of changing what happens in the classroom unless it brings about changes in the student? Questions of this kind (in so far as they make sense) need careful and theoretical consideration. They cannot be resolved by bland statement. Repeatedly we find in these articles assertions about teaching and learning which can be justified, or indeed understood, only by reference to the kind of idea that Swan ridicules with such relish. And not infrequently, as we have seen, such assertions actually presuppose the validity of these ideas even when they are intended to undermine them.
Approve with care

Elsewhere, what Swan conceives of as the communicative approach is favoured with approving comment. It has, we are told, many virtues. What are they then? It has new information and insights to contribute (for instance about the language of social interaction). What new information and what new insights? At times, Swan seems to suppose that the language of social interaction simply means the stereotyped, idiomatic side of language to be learned as a collection of conventional and idiomatic expressions of the kind provided by a notional/functional inventory. Even a cursory glance at the literature on the pragmatics of language use would disabuse him of such a simplistic notion. But then pragmatics, depending as it does on recognizing a distinction between usage and use, has little relevance to foreign language teaching and is anyway grossly over-valued at the moment. The communicative approach is, again, given credit for enormous improvements in our methodology. Methodology is perhaps the area where the Communicative Approach has done most to improve our teaching. What exactly are these improvements? On what principles are they based? And how have they come about, if they are based on ideas that are apparently so defective in theory and irrelevant in practice? Unreasoned approval of the communicative approach is no better than unreasoned condemnation. What we need is clear thinking and explicit, well-informed argument of the kind which Swan conspicuously fails to
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provide. He fails to provide it because he is more interested in attacking the communicative approach than in seeking to understand and assess it, and so finds it convenient to invent a distorted version so as to present his own views more effectively. These views are represented as being in opposition to the ideas about communicative language teaching. But many of them, particularly those put forward in the second paper, have already been explored in relation to these ideas, although Swan, by ignorance or design, fails to acknowledge the fact. His discussion about the use of authentic data, for example, and the classroom replication of reality has long since been anticipated by others pursuing the implications of a communicative approach. Similarly there has long been a recognition of the importance of grammar and lexis and the need to teach them as an essential communicative resource. The difference is that these matters have been treated as issues to be thought out and not just pronounced upon. Most of those who have given any systematic consideration to the effective teaching of grammar, for example, would wish to question the proposal for a separate treatment of the formal and functional aspects of language which Swan (not very humbly or tentatively, I may say) puts forward with such apparent conviction: Simplifying somewhat, one might say that there are two kinds of language: stereotyped and creative. Semantic syllabuses are needed to help us teach the first; only structural/lexical syllabuses will enable us to teach the second. This statement, we should note, presupposes both a theory of language and a theory of pedagogy. The least we might expect is that such theoretical presuppositions should be made as explicit as possible so that they can be brought out into the open and debated. Of course it is more comfortable (and convenient) to deny the validity of theoretical enquiry and instead make easy appeals to prejudice in the name of experience and common sense. But if we claim that our activities have any professional status, then we have to accept the need for a careful appraisal of the principles upon which they are based. And this must require the exercise of intellectual analysis and critical evaluation not as specialist or lite activities, but ones which are intrinsic to the whole practical pedagogic enterprise. Naturally there are risks involved: ideas can be inconsistent or ill-conceived; they may be misunderstood or misapplied; they may induce doubt. Some of us believe that such risks are worth taking. For others the delusion of simple answers will always be available as an attractive alternative to thought.
Received January
References

1985 ate; before that he had worked for several years with the British Council in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. He is the author of a number of books, including Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature ( 1975), Teaching Language as Communication (1978), and Explorations in Appied Linguistics (1979). With J. P. B. Allen he edited the English in Focus series (OUP), and he is the Associate Editor of the series Reading and Thinking in English (OUP). His latest book, Learning Purpose and Language Use, was published by OUP in 1983. He was one of the founder editors of Applied Linguistics.

Widdowson, H. G. 1978. Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Widdowson, H. G. 1979. Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The author H. G. Widdowson is Professor of English for Speakers of Other Languages at the University of London Institute of Education. Previously he was a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where he also did his doctor-

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