Málfríður - 15.05.1993, Blaðsíða 22

Nick Hannigan:
IATEFL1992—AN ENGLISH
TEACHING CONFERENCE
IN FRANCE
The annual conference of IA-
TEFL (International Association
of Teachers of English as a For-
eign Language) was held this
year (in the spirit of European
union) in the French city of Lille,
which despite its reputation for
being a grimy industrial metro-
polis turned out to have a char-
ming centre and friendly inhabi-
tants.
The success of these confe-
rences is very hard to judge and
normally comes down to person-
al prejudices; for what it is
worth, I felt that this conference
was a little below par: there
seemed to be fewer participants
and the overall standard of talks
and lectures was disappointing.
Wilga
This is not to say that there
were no good talks. The two
major plenary lectures were ex-
cellent. The first was given by
the legendary Wilga Rivers, who
is Professor Emerita (feminine of
emeritus, she told us) at Har-
vard, but who is also well known
in the English teaching world for
her books on language teaching
(e.g. Rivers and Temperley 1978
A Practical Guide to the Teach-
ing of English, Oxford University
Press). She launched an indirect
attack on extreme communi-
cativism in language teaching,
starting with an anecdote about
a journey she made as a student
through the Soviet Union. Not
having the right food coupons
she was unable to get into any
restaurant. Finally she crept into
a hotel through the back door
and sat down, but as she was
not supposed to be there the
waiters paid no attention to her.
Finally, a party of Georgians tur-
ned up. They invited her over
and ordered food all round. She
spent a long and enjoyable eve-
ning communicating with them,
found out they were teachers,
where they taught and lots of
other things. All this communica-
tion occurred despite the fact
that she had no language in com-
mon with the Georgians. The
point she was making was that
language teaching is not just
about teaching communication
but about teaching communica-
tion with Ianguage, and that the
language system has to be
taught correctly and respected.
According to Wilga Rivers
there are two things basic to
language use: (1) knowledge of
the language and (2) control of
the language. She made the
point that we have to acquire
the basic structure so that we
can then be liberated to express
ourselves.
Stephen Krashen’s theories
have been pretty thoroughly dis-
credited over the last few years
but Wilga Rivers put the boot in
once more in her discussion of
the nature of human memory
and of the most effective met-
hods of learning. She declared as
untenable Krashen’s learning/
acquisition dichotomy and de-
scribed a model for memory in
which the memory is dynamic
and process oriented — memory
involves the building and crea-
tion of networks and connec-
tions. There can be no wall be-
tween knowledge which is
“acquired” and knowledge which
is “learnt”: the same processes
are involved. The consequence
of this is of course that the tend-
ency to assume that “natural“
methods are of necessity best
and the more “traditional“ lear-
ning of systems is of necessity
ineffective, is seen to be over
simple.
Rivers was not demanding a
return to boring rote learning.
For memory to be effective, for
our minds to be able to con-
struct the networks of which me-
mory is made, our minds must
be engaged (i.e. interested) and
as memory is essentially a per-
sonal thing each learner is going
to remember (construct connec-
tions) in a very personal way.
This is closely connected to von
Humboldt’s idea that no one can
teach a language — it can only
be learnt. For learners to be eng-
aged they need purposeful act-
ivities and tasks; they need to
know what they are practising
and why; they need to learn the
system. Rivers quoted Chomsky
22