Dr. Leon James
Professor of Psychology
University of Hawaii
(c)1972
Language teaching theory and practice in the1950s and 1960s was dominated by two approaches: audiolingualism and communication theory. Audiolingualism is "hard-nosed" theoretically relying on learning theory, S-R mechanisms and habits, transfer effects; error analysis). It involves laboratories, programs, sequenced materials, normative achievement tests. Communication theory is "soft" both in theory and practice: "less" drills, "less" structure, "less" discrete-point tests; and "more" conversation, "more" culture, "more" outside class activities.
Both audiolingualism and communication theory derive their scientific rationale from linguistics and psychology (applied linguistics, language pedagogy, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and educational psychology; the latter includes test construction and materials development techniques and theory). Thus, language teaching in North America during these two decades has been governed by the twin forces of linguistics and psychology.
In the 1970s a "third force" in language teaching has emerged and has made itself visible. It shows itself as a counter-movement to both linguistically-based and psychologically-based orientations to language teaching. In 1974, my book with B. G. Gordon, The Context of Foreign Language Teaching (Newbury House) explicitly rejected the assumption that language learning is a process of acquiring linguistic skills with linguistically defined units and progressions. At the same time, it questioned practices that are justified by psychological theory and mentality, namely, the use of tests for "diagnostic" purposes; the separation of language students by level or aptitude; and the reliance on psychological tests of attitude, motivation, and conflict in socio-cultural and personal areas.
A book published in 1976, authored by Earl W. Stevick of the Foreign Services Institute, Department of State, Washington, presents less well-known efforts that have been made in the technology of language teaching by individuals who have rejected both the primacy of linguistics and the validity of psychological learning theory of language. These individuals have focused instead on the interactional and transactional features of face-to-face talk, bringing to language teaching a third force to reckon with.
This paper is intended to inform the language teacher concerning these newer developments. Part I presents a detailed critique of the third force countermovement that derives its impetus from the Humanistic Psychology Revolution. I question its assumptions about the nature of language use in face-to-face interaction. I warn against its definitions of the language learner's alleged psychodynamic or psychiatric conflicts, and the remedies that are being prescribed. Then, Part II outlines a radical alternative within "the third force movement." My proposal is ethnomethodological rather than humanistic. Stevick's approach falls within the humanistic version of transactional analysis popularized by proposed by psychiatrist Eric Berne (Games People Play and popularized by I'm OK, You're OK. I outline several potential problems teachers may encounter in the application of this humanistic-psychiatric approach in the classroom.
In 1968 I introduced the concept of communicative competence in the language teaching and psycholingusitic fields (see Jakobovits, L.A (= Leon James). Prolegomena to a theory of communicative competence In R.C. Lugton (Ed.), English as a Second Language: Current Issues. Philadelphia: Center for Curriculum Development, 1970. Pp.1-39. See also: Jakobovits, L.A. Authenticity in foreign language teaching. Intro- duction to Sandra Savignon, Toward Communicative Competence: An Experiment in Foreign Language Teaching. Philadelphia: Center for Curriculum Development, 1972). In its mature development, the concept of communicative competence developed within an ethnomethodological framework. See my work on ethnosemantics and applied psycholinguistics available online. I chose the expression Transactional engineering principles in language teaching to distinguish it from Stevick's humanistic-transactional approach. The transactional engineering approach offers a new direction for the third force in language teaching.
Those who wish to ease themselves out of the weight of linguistic materials and lock-step program restrictions, but who wish to avoid turning their classrooms into "encounter groups" will find this proposal a clear alternative. Its functional approach to discourse and topicalization behavior avoids the assumption that discourse is a process of conscious effort of composition. As we all know, talk is spontaneous. Hence the instructional challenge in teaching language and discourse is to discover the antecedent forces of social interactions that spontaneously draw out speech. These social forces of interaction created by the communicative setting is the transactional environment that teachers need to create and control.
This will allow us to avoid dramatized representations of interaction rituals (e.g. psychodynamic inferences about unconscious or sub-conscious processes); and it avoids certain tedious activities involved in placement, sequencing, and normative testing. I think classroom activities can be governed entirely by pragmatic exercises involving the functional control of all sorts of uses of language. These activities more easily avoid artificial exercises and encourage the actual or authentic use of language; they are uses of language, and doing them is their value. The language teacher's challenge is managing or coaching students while they're busy. (See my work with Dr. Diane Nahl on the Community Classroom Generational Curriculum which is a continuation of this approach into cyberspace of the 1990s. click here to get there).
CRITIQUE OF PSYCHODYNAMIC DEFINITIONS OF LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING
My book The Context of Foreign Language Teaching (Newbury House, 1974) was reviewed by Earl Stevick in the December, 1975 issue of The Modern Language Journal. (See my list of publications.) This critique presents a detailed outline of the psychodynamic approach to language teaching which Earl Stevick summarizes in an influential book Memory, Meaning and Method: Some Psychological Perspectives on Language Learning (Newbury House: Rowley, Mass., 1976, 177 pp., paperback). In his book, Stevick repeatedly refers to my work as a psychodynamic approach. This is a misunderstanding of the approach I've called "Transactional Engineering in Language Teaching." My purpose here is to point out some of the misconceptions of the psychodynamic approach about the nature of language use in face-to-face interactions. This is followed, in Part II, by a radical alternative.
The Humanistic Revolution in psychology has influenced language teaching by spawning several unconventional or non-traditional approaches -- Encounter Groups, Teacher-as-Facilitator, Relevance in Foreign language Learning, Individualized Instruction, and the Silent Language Teacher. It has finally happened: Zen Buddhism has conquered a platform for itself in the form of a newly-heard-of method called "The Silent Way" -- and Earl W. Stevick, though self-consciously cautious (e.g. p. 135, 136, 144, 145), is nevertheless advocating it and presenting it as the method that scores highest on his doctrine of "The "Principles."
"The Silent Way" is attributed to Gattegno (1972) and proceeds on what might be called a "psychodynamic" (as Stevick describes it: e.g. p. ll9ff.), or as we would prefer, "psychiatric" orientation to the student or learner. In connection with this orientation, Stevick often cites, in addition to Gattegno (1972), the work of psychiatrist Berne (1972), Harris' medical model of communication (1967; an extension of Berne's "game theory" or "T.A."), the work of Curran (1961- 1974) and the point of view of religious counseling and psychotherapy, and the founder of Humanistic Psychology, Maslow (1970), and the psychoanalytic work on "language ego" by Guiora, (1965; 1972), to mention some familiar and unfamiliar examples.l
III. The Politics of Topics in Psychology
In 1957, the year Skinner's Verbal Behavior and Chomsky's Syntactic Structures were published, American academic psychology was still mostly divided into two monolithic blocks: the Freudians or Neo-Freudians and the Experimentalists (which included Behaviorists and Cognitivists). In those days of pre-Humanistic Psychology and pre-Generative Linguistics, language pedagogy centered around the Audiolingual orientation of the Post War Era (those happy times before the Publishing Revolution, and during which Language Laboratories were proud additions to FL programs). But along came a Revolution in American psychology called "The Third Force"-- i.e. an alternative branching off Freud, off Skinner: "Humanistic Psychology", to wit: Maslow, Rogers, Psychosynthesis, Easalon, EST, transpersonal psychology, personal growth, encounter group, bio-feedback, States of Consciousness, Group Facilitation, empathy, peak experience, primal, meditation, zen, my Guru, the Child-in-You, your personal space, your intimate enemy, your inauthentic games, your inner criteria, your deeper performances, self-actualization, and many others constitute the Third Force arsenal of instruments for 'psychologizing' the people. These are now proposed as a new orientation in language teaching. The politics of psychology that I wish to call attention to is this expansionist force recognized as "Humanistic" and which is claiming for its adherents new educational territory in the language teaching profession.3
IV. The Psychodynamics of Language Teaching and Learning
According to Stevick's presentation the following
assumptions can be listed as dealing with basic orientation credos that can be viewed as
characteristic of this new movement:
(1) the student = the learner (implicit)
(2) the learner = the individual (ditto)
(3) participation in drill, dialogue or Spanish club = participation involving entire range of individual's drives and needs (p.47).
(4) needs and drives are located "inside" the student and "inside" the teacher. (Ch. IV)
(5) a look "inside" the student and "inside" the teacher is given by experiments on rats, mice, fish, and human brain physiology (Part I of the book, called "Memory," which also relies on "verbal learning and verbal behavior" positivists.
(6) teaching meaning = person, psychological, deep (p.48).4
(7) motivation in language learning = total experience; entire personality (p.49).5
(8) "in most of our foreign language classrooms" (p.50) failure to deal with "needs for identity and self-esteem" (p.50) "results in emotional problems, the side effects of which may be both physical and intellectual" (p.50).
(9)language teaching should focus on satisfying the psychological needs of "security, identification, self-esteem", primarily, and only secondarily, on the satisfaction of "partial" needs such as those in "performing a dialogue doing a special project, participating in a routine grammar drill, etc." (p.51).
(10) individual variations in pronunciation ability are largely explainable in terms of people's "affective impact of hearing themselves or someone else sound foreign" and "at least a part of this tolerance seems to depend on events that took place in the earliest part of their lives"!"
(11) "the need to interact" (p.60) and "pre-existing personality structure" (p.61) are important determiners of second-language competence.
(12) "language drills are rituals", and "rituals can keep people apart" and so "bring little fulfillment," hence "Insofar as a drill is a ritual, these are warnings to any language teacher who is interested in the psychodynamic aspects of what goes on in class." (p.70).7
(13) the "teacher-player" who goes from workshop to workshop and from one textbook to another is playing a Game called Finding-Fault-with-Everything (p.72); the "underlying cause of this" is that teacher's feeling ("shared by almost all human beings", p.73) is "in the" "'I'M NOT - OK!'" position (p.73).
(14) "the role of Teacher has certain built-in attractions for anyone who has serious feelings of inadequacy..." (p.75).
(15) "from a psychological point of view, then, drills are often misused" (p.75); the point of view referred to is specifically that of T.A.: "The symbiosis of the Controlling Parent and the Adapted Child provides a strong defense for this system of classroom psychodynamics...").
(16) language teachers and language students should "complete some kind of psychotherapy before they begin their first drill": though this "may seem unattainable", nevertheless it is suggested as "a direction in which to move" (p.76).
(17) an abnormal condition, which can lead to atrophy of language competence ("even in the midst of thousands of native speakers", p.78), "may be that ego states are stored along with basic sentences and structural automaticities" (p.78).8
(18) if we look "inside the language teacher" we'll find a picture of "internal inconsistencies and the complexities of his own personality": to get himself sorted out is a job for the ego state of Adult (p.91).9
(19) the authority oriented "paternal-assertive" language teacher begets language learners who "may develop anxiety about their own capacity to act assertively" (p.92).
(20) "maternal-expressives" beget anger with depression and "fraternal permissives" beget status equality and sharing of responsibility; the latter type is the one for which "a personally secure language teacher ought to aim" (p.92).
(21) the "rational-procedural" pattern fails "to reach individuals at sufficiently deep levels in their emotional experience" and "may produce very little involvement or creativity" (p.93)
(22) unless the teacher appears to the students "first of all...as a; strong person, a source of stability", their "deepest need, at the level of security, will remain unfulfilled" (p.97).
(23) the language classroom should be a place of communion and sharing where a student can find his "voice" and teacher can share his knowledge (p.99).
(24) substitution and transformation drills, "even retelling of stories, answering questions about a dialogue or discussing a reading selection...are largely reflective" (or "echoic") forms of performance (p.107).
(25) "productive performance" (which is in contrast to "reflective") "comes from somewhere deeper within the student" (p.109): "the 'deeper' the source of a sentence within the student's personality, the more lasting value it has for learning the language" (p. 109) . 10
(26) let language teaching be like "truck farming": then, "the seed" is like the materials and their justifying linguistic analyses; the "farm machinery" is like methods and teaching aids, "the richness of the soil" is like "the native endowments which students bring with them to our training programs" (p.111); the "meteorological weather" is like "sprained ankles, chicken pox, family strife, and worry about international events" (p.111); "the boulders and weeds" are like "ego defense reactions of withdrawal and aggression" (p.111) -- these being the "psychodynamic" characteristics of "defensive learning" (p.ll0), i.e. the type of language learning that involves the transfer of "sounds and words and rules and patterns" (p.110) "from the teacher or the textbook into (or onto') the mind of the student (p.ll0); instead, we should "promote receptive learning" by "bringing to our work an understanding of the ego-senses which both student and instructor use, and of the reasons why they use them." (p.112).11
(27) according to a "Psychodynamic Interpretation of Language Learning" language is "purposeful behavior between people" and language learning is "slowed down when the learner is busy defending himself from someone else" (Principles I and II, p. 120).
(28) according to a "Psychodynamic Interpretation of Language Teaching; (1) "the teacher must help the student to maintain interpersonal purpose on one or (preferably) more of the levels that we have listed (p.49f.) -- [referring here to Maslow's "hierarchy of needs": physical needs, security needs, belongingness needs, social position needs, and self-actualization needs; (p.50);] this is called "Help the student to stay in contact with the language" (p.121); (2) the teacher must engage in "personal activation" whereby his "whole personality makes an impact" and to "try to supply missing motivations" to his students (p.122).12
(29) a distorted version of the maximum "Teach, then test." Is "Teach, then test, then teach some more, then test some more, all the way to the end of the course"; this amounts to "minimize productivity", "maximize reflection", "decrease the radius of the psychodynamic spiral", and "perpetuate the Controlling Parent - Adapted Child nexus" (p.123).13
V. Summary of the Psychodynamic Approach to Language Learning and Teaching:
The twenty-nine statements discussed in the previous section can be summarized and grouped into five categories of comments, as follows:
A. Scope of Language Teaching :
(i) language teaching should involve entire range of needs and drives of the individual (Statement 3, above)
(ii) teaching meaning should be personal, psychological, and deep (Statements 6 and 25)
(iii) motivation in language learning should be a total experience involving the entire personality (7)
(iv) the language teacher should first of all be a source of stability for the student's deepest needs (22)
(v) the language classroom should be a place of community (= communion and sharing; 23).
B. Nature of Language Learning Ability:
(i) language learning ability depends on childhood experiences relating to affective responses to foreign sounds (10).
(ii) language learning ability depends on a general need to interact, and to the learner's pre-existing personality structure (11; 27)
C. Psychiatric Assumptions about Students :
(i) the student-learner-individual has ego-states and defensive or receptive inner events inside the skin (1;2;4;26)
(ii) failure to deal with needs for identity and self-esteem in the language classroom produces emotional, physiological, and intellectual problems (8;9).
(iii) language students should take psychotherapy before the first language drill (16;18;26)
D. Psychiatric Assumptions about Teachers :
(i) inside the teachers' skin, flesh, and bones there are ego-states (5) which cause them to misuse drills due to their Controlling Parent ego-states (15;17)
(ii) language teachers who continuously seek workshops and new textbooks are in the "I'M NOT-OK" position (13)
(iii) teachers generally tend to come from a side of the population that has serious feelings of inadequacy (14) and should take psychotherapy before their first drill (16;l8;26).
(iv) there are four types of teachers: Paternal-assertive, maternal-expressive, fraternal-permissive, and rational-procedural; each of these types begets a characteristic student reaction: anxiety, anger-depression, equality-responsibility, and lack of meaningful involvement, respectively (19;20;21).
E. Advice to the Language Teacher on Method :
(i) avoid language drills because it is a ritual and rituals keep people apart and bring little fulfillment (12).
(ii) drills, dialogue, and other forms of exercises in the language classroom are reflective, echoic, shallow, superficial (24), whereas what's needed to encourage productive performance is reaching for deeper sources of sentence within the student's personality (25).
(iii) the language teacher should engage in personal activation trying to make an impact with his whole personality (28).
(iv) the language teacher should avoid recurrent testing because it makes the student defensive and slows down his learning (29).
VI. Transactional Engineering and Language Teaching: A Radical Alternative
In the last chapter of Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B.F. Skinner attempts to grasp the elusive question he formulates as "What is Man?": "As a science of behavior adopts the strategy of physics and biology, the autonomous agent to which behavior has traditionally been attributed is replaced by the environment -- the environment in which the species evolved and in which the behavior of the individual is shaped and maintained." (1971, p.l75). The psychiatric orientation to language teaching which I have described in reviewing the work of Stevick, belongs to a pre-scientific metaphysic of inner autonomy to which are attributed the various dramatized imaginings of inner states accompanying the language learning syndrome. To this I wish to propose a radical alternative: with Skinner I opt for a self-consciously designed literalness and simplicity to be found in the functional account that reconstructs behavior as an outcome of the situation (or the context, the environment, the situated occasion for the display).
Eighteen Propositions on the Nature of Discourse 14
Proposition 1: Discourse is the visible product of the interaction between individuals and their setting.
Proposition 2: Discourse is always treated as agentive; that is, a quotable or recorded sample of text always has a particular, uniquely specified individual as its author or source.
Proposition 3: The production of discourse samples by the author is always spontaneous.
Comment:
The first three propositions insure that when we talk about discourse or 'language use' we would always be talking about something that's visible, identified as to its conditions of authorship, and spontaneous. These three criteria afford us a perspective on 'language use' that retains objectivity and avoids the uncertainties of subjectivism. Thus, in this view, when an individual becomes the author of a place of identified discourse, as when one says something to another person, writes it down, thinks it, alters and edits it, etc., the product is a spontaneous creation made possible by the individual's relationship, in that unique dramatic moment, to the environment.
"Visible" refers to the availability of a record of the spontaneously produced text; e.g. a report of the event (as in a story or description) or a recording of it (as in a tape or transcript).
Proposition 4: Discourse is always produced in minimal units appearing sequentially in time.
Proposition 5: The minimal unit of discourse, that is, a segment that can stand by itself, will be called a situated display or an argument.
Comment:
The term "display" is used by ethologists and occurs in zoosemiotics; Goffman,
and some other sociologists are habitual users; I like it because it is neutral and
because it reflects the visibility requirement (P 1). "Situated display"
reflects the functional interconnectedness specified to exist between discourse and the
environment, that is, its conditions of spontaneous production or authorship.
"Argument" reflects the logical basis of meaning: no situated display can have a
function (i.e. , a meaning) by itself; the smallest or simplest of displays, such as a
steady unwavering stare or a directional arrow, will always appear situated somewhere or
framed by something that itself is already meaningful or functional, such as a
conversational interaction, or a traffic sign-post, or a page. Thus, the minimal structure
of a situated display that has meaning must have two components: the display itself, and
the frame to which it is hooked; the first component is known in logic since Aristotle as
'the nominal' while the-second component is called 'the complement.' Thus,
| Minimal Discourse Display |
= |
a situated display or argument |
- |
Nominal or Display + Complement or Context |
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| Third section | Final section |