Five skills English

[Footpath does not normally publish articles on language teaching. However, those of you who have heard John McRae know that he is passionate about making literature accessible to students through an imaginative teaching of the language. Some teachers askedfor a transcript of his lecture. Here is a variant.]

The four skills approach to communicative language teaching has been with us for a long time. It is not perfect, but in many ways it is seen as the best and most effective way of teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language. Listening, speaking, reading and writing are taught as separate or integrated skills, and are tested in ways which allow for right and wrong answers, and grades which confirm a target level of achievement reached. It is usually possible to get 100% correct answers in most language tests. This indicates that the testing system is predominantly closed, rather than open in its choices and variables. Progress in language learning is seen as measurable, quantifiable, in terms of language items, lexical items, structures etc. acquired, produced, recognised and manipulated.

There is a distinction to be drawn between testing and evaluation of learners' progress. Testing suggests a closed system of right/wrong, evaluation a more open system. In large part, the language system that is taught in the four skills approach focuses on referential language. This is language which means exactly what it says, where one word has one meaning, and where grammar and syntax follow the accepted rules. It is a rule-based approach, and usefully gives a basis for

language use, a linguistic skeleton which learners can move on to fleshing out.

However, the four skills approach frequently ignores representational language. That is language which is open to interpretation, contains plurality of meaning potential rather than one single denotational meaning, and requires negotiation and judgement by its receiver in order to be fully understood. No living language in the world can remain only at the referential level for very long. Every language in use is hugely representational, and perhaps no language more so than English.

Most communicative language teaching is based on an assumed idealised communicative situation where interlocutors say what they mean and mean what they say, and are received and understood as such. This is fine for communicative practice simulation. But, as the work of Deborah Tannen and others has shown this assumption is patently false in the world outside the classroom. Recent work on corpora of spoken English goes a long way to confirming that language in use is rarely as prescriptive and definitive as the kind of language learned in a communicative methodology. English in use is hedged about with modality, with vague language, with hesitations and lack of commitment, whereas learners of English are encouraged to use definite verbs, assertion, affirmation. It is this that leads to the necessity for a fifth skill to be incorporated into the currently widespread four skills communicative approach to language teaching and learning.

The fifth skill is the skill of processing and thinking. Any text spoken, written, or heard has to be processed and thought about in order that its implications be decoded, its frame of reference understood, its context and connotations assimilated, its ideological standpoints assessed, where it is coming from and who it is directed at, all being incorporated into the overall understanding.

Comprehension is widely perceived, especially by learners, as the ultimate aim, the point of arrival, the main target of learning achievement. This is a misapprehension both of how language works and of what language acquisition and proficiency are all about.

Where the four skills approach has tended to focus on comprehension as a testable aim, the five skills approach sees comprehension as a starting-point, the point zero in the processing of the text, whether it be spoken or written .

Five skills offers a process-based rather than a product-based approach. Experience of the language and how it works is frequently seen as more significant than information. Of course, information transfer on a purely referential level is vitally important in many fields of communication and language use. But it is limited in its applications to specialised areas of, particularly, professional language use.

Referential texts and representationality

Even a text which purports to be referential , such as a dictionary entry , lends itself to fruitful processing. The following text is, as the graphology shows, a dictionary entry:

Beans on toast is a popular snack, eaten at any time of the day. Heinz, the most popular brand of baked beans, originally canned beans in tomato sauce in 1895, and when they were imported into Britain a few years later they were sold as an expensive luxury. Everyone can afford their beans now and many companies sell them. Heinz alone sells approximately 2,500,000 cans every day.

See Snack.

What students can be invited to see in this text is some sort of ideological construct: w/zo is writing and to whom becomes a highly useful question. The apparatus would concentrate on where the text's frame of reference covers (it is wholly British-centred), how much information is given for anyone who knows nothing about the subject (colour, size and type of beans are not mentioned, toast is never mentioned). Frequently, students read this as a veiled advertisement for Heinz, as it seems to stress the brand name more than might seem necessary. Questions such as "who is everyone?" also reveal something about the assumptions the text (and possibly its producer) make. The fact that at current supermarket prices in the UK Heinz beans cost three times the price of a supermarket's own economy brand might give another insight to the question.

Contrasting that text with a genuine advertising slogan for the same company illuminates useful differences in graphology, syntax, semantics and function :

BEANZ MEANZ HEINZ

Students need encouragement to "see through language" in this way, but as soon as they realise that it is fruitful and indeed fun, they take to it rapidly and can be encouraged to read any text, from newspapers to text-books, from the non-literary text through any kind of literature (with a small T or a large ‘L’) with a healthy questioning attitude. With well-written texts this will of course lead to a greater appreciation of the text's qualities and the effects it achieves.

The development of the fifth skill, and the acquisition of processing skills, involves a refining of three levels of awareness in cognitive terms:

language awareness text awareness cultural awareness

The fifth skill is in itself nothing new: it effectively embodies the three ways of learning language outlined by Halliday when he suggested that a three-part structure is needed for discussions of language learning:

learning language learning through language learning about language

The most innovative recent textbooks and the best practice over recent years have implicitly been incorporating materials which require interpretation skills, and which expand cultural awareness as well as developing the basic language skills.

What is to be learned is twofold: the mechanisms of the syntax of the target language are a more or less closed system, with not too many variables, a system of syntax which has more or less clear rules of use and usage. Then there is the much more open system of lexis and register, which necessarily involves choice on the part of the producer of the language and a capacity to evaluate and respond to that series of choices on the part of the receiver.

The factors which condition such choices are of course manifold: they are social, cultural, linguistic, ideological, historical, local, personal, affective, and can indeed be as idiosyncratic as the individual speaker. Communicative language teaching and learning have, almost by necessity, avoided too much consideration of these factors, in a justifiable attempt to streamline the learning to what is quantifiable, and can be standardised.

At various times there have been debates on linguistic competence, fluency versus accuracy, the differences between written and spoken English, and the vexed question of standard and non-standard English. These will no doubt continue. Their relevance to the present discussion is considerable.

The new element which Five Skills English brings to bear on these debates is the concentration on how the language works rather than what it says: on how it means rather than simply on what it means.

Against reading comprehension

I once had a class tackle a First Certificate in English (FCE) Reading Comprehension, but made the mistake of omitting to give them the passage to read: they only had the questions.

They all passed.

Replicating this mistake deliberately for research purposes in several teaching contexts, I found that the results more or less replicated themselves: no-one got 100% correct answers. But with the application of a little intelligence, a process of elimination and some guess-work it was easy for a pass level to be achieved. This suggested to me that Reading Comprehension in that particular form was effectively testing neither reading nor comprehension. What students had learned to do was apply some mechanical techniques to a testing situation in order to get a satisfactory result.

Of course, this is anecdotal rather than scientific evidence and I use it only to describe a seminal classroom experience. But is often from our mistakes and failures that we gain our most useful insights. The question that arises is, simply, how valuable is comprehension in and of itself?

How much is reading comprehension applicable to a text such as this one, a text which has been widely used in representational language teaching textbooks:

40-LOVE

40 — love middle aged couple playing ten nis when the game ends and they go home the net will still be be tween them

It is almost impossible to consider this text in the usual classroom context of comprehension. Rather, it requires processing. The "traditional" question "what is it about?" might not be as fatuous as it may seem. Answers could cover a range of ideas, from tennis to relationships, from marriage to graphology. The point would emerge, however, that the text is not only about one thing: it is as much about the themes that might arise from discussion as it is about the text itself, its layout and its form reflecting the nature of the subject-matter and content. It will be about different things for different people. A fifteen-year-old will react differently from a forty -year-old. As with most representational texts, it is difficult to be prescriptive about there being one correct answer.

Apparatus

The kind of apparatus used in working with a text like 40 -Love could involve questions as above, and such textual intervention strategies as rewriting: if the text is rewritten in sentence form it loses much of its impact, and indeed its meaning.

This is a useful confirmation of the importance of how a text means going beyond what it means.

Similarly the effect or Junction of the texts can be explored by inviting students to discuss appropriate adjectives to describe the text and it impact - the following might be suggested "sad, witty, clever, amusing, disconcerting,” or, “not really poetry." Of course readers may opt for others, for more than one of these, and may even dislike and react against the text.

Another aspect of the text which might attract learner interest may be the etymology of the word "love" meaning zero in a tennis score: it comes from the French / 'oeuf since it would appear that tennis was originally scored with a kind of abacus with egg-shaped balls, one of which represented the score of zero. (Of course the reason might simply be that one of the balls was egg-shaped!)

It is also worth asking students what lines appeal to them most: "be be" is often chosen, partly because of the surprise dividing of the word "between" ; "ten nis" is often chosen because of a similar verbal/visual effect.

Open texts

The virtue of a text like this in the communicative language teaching context lies precisely in its openness, in the text's demand on its readers that it be processed on its own merits, with the reader bringing to the text shared knowledge, familiarity/unfamiliarity with culture, context, and subjectmatter, language awareness, text awareness and cultural awareness. How the reader reacts depends on individual response rather than on the precise correctness of an expected answer.

Even the word "love" is called into question, which is useful if the learner knows only one meaning of the word. The source of the meaning of "zero" as illustrated above might also be part of the learning aims of work with this text. Learning about language thus becomes part and parcel of learning the language itself. This particular poem is of course the kind of text which most easily exemplifies the teachability of representational texts, which is perhaps why it is so widely used in representational textbooks.

However, any text requires processing in not dissimilar ways. Most texts do not have one single meaning: they require some kind of processing, whether they be information or opinion, prescriptive or descriptive, fiction or fact, newspaper or recipe book. And learners have to be enabled to develop response strategies to the ever-expanding range of open texts the modern world presents them with: from advertisements to political speeches, from newspaper articles to song lyrics, from tourist brochures to comics, the representationality of the language used demands a capacity for processing, evaluating and responding to that language.

The Checklist

For teaching purposes I have always used the following list of linguistic features of text, which teachers can apply to any text their students are working with:

Lexis - the words

Syntax - the way the words are put together

Cohesion - the system of links that holds the text together Phonology - the sounds or music of the text

Graphology - the look of the text (punctuation, font etc) Semantics - the study of meaning and how it is achieved Register - the voice or tone of the text

Period - the historic placing of the language of the text Function - what the text is trying to do

Style - the combination of any of all of the above elements

Enabling language

The enabling language which students require in order to be able to discuss the processing they carry out with texts is the language of modality, of "might" and "may", of opinion and possibility, rather than certainty and right/wrong answers.

Of course it can be unsettling for learners to be deprived of the security blanket of there being a right or a wrong answer -but moving beyond that restricted referential level is a vital step forward in progress as a language learner. The analogy is of a driver learning to drive and never moving out of first gear. Until recently the jump from referential language learning to an awareness of representationality in the language teaching context has been left to a late stage in the proceedings, if it has been faced at all.

Teachers have to begin the awareness-raising process as early as possible in the language learning career of the student: left too late, bridging that gap becomes progressively more difficult. If representational materials are introduced from the very earliest stages of language learning, the learner's imagination is called into play, there is an awareness that judgement and response are part of language development, and a confidence is built that the learner does have something worth saying, something to bring to the text, some personal contribution to offer, rather than simply being at the mercy of the materials and the teaching of an unknown subject.

Around the world now, in the context of language-teaching textbook research and writing, several areas have already emerged where process-based methodology can be applied. These include:

- materials selection: where texts come from, when they were written;

- are they examples of current English? Spoken or written, or a mix of registers?

- are they British, American or another local English?

- techniques of reading such as the finding of binaries and opposites, following through of verb tenses to find the movement of the text, individual cohesive features which create phoric flow, etc.

- if translation is used, how does the text translate into the learner’s own current language, or back from that language into current English? Contrastive language awareness of how both languages work is fundamental to process-based methodology.

- continuous variation of question-types is necessary: from lower-order to higher-order questions, and with as much variation in question-types as possible, according to the requirements of the individual text.

- formulation of questions for open response rather than predetermined correct answers.

- perceptions of interpretation, ideology and “spin” contained within the text

- implicatures and cultural assumptions

- evaluation of lexical choice, rather than an emphasis on vocabulary acquisition -consideration of how frequently usable a new lexical item might be, for example.

- learner awareness of teaching/learning outcomes

- the text-book as a starting-point rather than an end-point in the learning process

- the importance of graphology, layout and visual stimuli as part of the process of meaning creation and response

- the question of thoroughness versus flexibility, standardisation versus individuality

- the evaluation of appropriateness of response: best answers rather than single possible right answer

- the contextualisation of closed and open choices.

Clearly all these areas merit considerable reflection and research, and there will be many more which will emerge as work on Five Skills methodology expands. All four currently recognised skills will require separate work on process-based approaches, and a priority will be the testing and evaluation system, with its current inflexible approach to correctness of response.