Daily Excerpt: How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately (Shekhtman)

excerpt from How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately by Boris Shekhtman -

THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATIVE RULES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

In learning and teaching second and foreign languages, teachers and students have a number of resources at their fingertips to work with both the “top-down” and “bottom-up” aspects of language acquisition. Textbooks and reference grammars provide us with grammar rules. These are very useful in understanding how the language works and in helping us to make our communication literate. Some textbooks, along with conversation guides and the like, provide us with scripts for generating various kinds of speech acts in various topical domains. We have the weather forecast script, the political meetings-and greetings script, the professional reception script, the business meeting script, and so on and so forth. A very few textbooks (and then only at high levels of proficiency and only in some languages) provide us with the outlines for discourse structures for various kinds of genres: chit-chat, formal presentations on scientific topics, the narration of anecdotes, the preparation of a piece of literature (in one of many possible genres), news reports (written and oral), and so on.

Each of these resources does one of two things: (1) it provides an overall structure (macro) level or (2) it provides the pieces that fit into the structure (micro level). What current resources fail to provide, however, is set of guidelines that learners can use to control their language use. The word, control, here is very important because, in general, current resources control the speaker, not the other way around. Thus, a structure at the micro level gives students a format to use; it is, however, generally quite inflexible: students fit their output to the structure, not to the speaking situation or environment in which they find themselves.

Likewise, structures at the micro level give students forms to use; they, too, are inflexible: in general, they are either right or wrong, and students piece them together syntactically either correctly and are understood or incorrectly and are not understood. Both formats and forms are language specific.

Communication rules, however, are quite generic by nature. They transcend the linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects of language. They are not language specific. They are mechanisms for putting students in control of information flow, of idea exchange, of negotiation, and of any other communicative function, regardless of the language being spoken. They subordinate linguistic performance to social performance and sociolinguistic knowledge to psycholinguistic legerdemain. Legerdemain, indeed, is an appropriate word because to many these rules of communication seem like magic. And, if it is magic to control one’s environment, then it would be hard to argue otherwise.

In essence, though, these rules of communication are just what they are labeled. Analysis of social performance through speech reveals the keys (rules) to being in control of a conversation. There are many positive aspects to having such tools at one’s ready and being able to use them well. First, they allow one to enter into a conversation with a native speaker and successfully stay in that conversation by regulating the conversation in such a way that it remains on a proficiency level that is both manageable by the student and comfortable for the native speaker. Second, it allows a student to accomplish his or her goal in entering into the communication, whether that be to impart information, negotiate a deal, or impress an audience with a brilliant presentation. Third, they allow speakers of a foreign language to use that language to their advantage, not disadvantage.

These, of course, are only some of the positive aspects of learning to use communication tools. Other advantages are identified within the various chapters of this book.

It is very popular nowadays to talk about learning strategies. It is only slightly less common to teach learning strategies. Rules of communication are strategies, and they form an import ant part of a student’s strategic competence. Individual learning strategies, however, are generally limited, and it is the choice of the right strategy or combination of strategies at a particular moment that predicates whether or not a student will be successful in learning or using a bit of language.

Communication tools go beyond learning strategies; they are not strategies for learning but for organizing, fostering, controlling, and learning from whole communications. While they can be taught and practiced in the classroom, they go far beyond it and allow the student to live, work, and play successfully in the foreign-language environment. The question, then, is for whom are such tools intend ed? The answer is very simple: for everyone. Teachers have successfully taught these tools to students at every level of foreign-language proficiency from raw beginner to near-native speaker. They have seen students change from being tongue-tied and incoherent to impressive language users without an additional day of foreign language study. As Natalia Lord (see Chapter Notes at the end of this volume) points out, these rules make any communication more effective, even in one’s native language, although, of course, they were intended for the foreign-language student trying not only to survive but also to accomplish a variety of goals in communications with native speakers.

The toolbox presented here and the instructions for the use of each tool have no parallel in the second language literature. Whether you are a teacher or a student, take time to learn how to use each of these tools. You will not regret it; it will be some of the best-spent time you will ever have in teaching and learning a foreign language

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