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6.1. THEORETICAL PRINCIPLES
The conceptual underpinnings of learner-centered pedagogy are truly mul-
tidisciplinary in the sense that its theory of language, language learning,
and language teaching came not only from the feeder disciplines of linguis-
tics and psychology, but also from anthropology and sociology as well as
from other subdisciplines such as ethnography, ethnomethodology, prag-
matics, and discourse analysis. The influence of all these areas of inquiry is
very much reflected in the theory of language communication adopted by
learner-centered pedagogists.
6.1.1. Theory of Language
In order to derive their theory of language, learner-centered pedagogists
drew heavily from Chomskyan formal linguistics, Hallidayan functional lin-
guistics, Hymsian sociolinguistics, and Austinian speech act theory. In chap-
ter 1, we discussed how these developments contributed to our understand-
ing of the nature of language. Let us briefly recall some of the salient
features.
Criticizing the basic tenets of structural linguistics, Chomsky pointed out
that language constitutes not a hierarchical structure of structures as
viewed by structuralists, but a network of transformations. He demon-
strated the inadequacy of structuralism to account for the fundamental
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CHAPTER 6
characteristics of language and language acquisition, particularly their cre-
ativity and uniqueness. Whereas structuralists focused on “surface” features
of phonology and morphology, Chomsky was concerned with “deep” struc-
tures, and the way in which sentences are produced. Chomskyan linguistics
thus fundamentally transformed the way we look at language as system.
However, preoccupied narrowly with syntactic abstraction, it paid very little
attention to meaning in a communicative context.
Going beyond the narrowness of syntactic abstraction, Halliday empha-
sized the triple macrofunctions of language—textual, interpersonal, and
ideational. The textual function deals with the phonological, syntactic, and
semantic signals that enable language users to understand and transmit
messages. The interpersonal function deals with sociolinguistic features of
language required to establish roles, relationships, and responsibilities in a
communicative situation. The ideational function deals with the concepts
and processes underlying natural, physical, and social phenomena. In high-
lighting the importance of the interplay between these three macrofunc-
tions of language, Halliday invoked the “meaning potential” of language,
that is, sets of options or alternatives that are available to the speaker–
hearer.
It was this concern with communicative meaning that led Hymes to ques-
tion the adequacy of the notion of grammatical competence proposed by
Chomsky. Unlike Chomsky who focused on the “ideal” native speaker–
hearer and an abstract body of syntactic structures, Hymes focused on the
“real” speaker–hearer who operates in the concrete world of interpersonal
communication. In order to operate successfully within a speech commu-
nity, a person has to be not just grammatically correct but communicatively
appropriate also, that is, a person has to learn what to say, how to say it,
when to say it, and to whom to say it.
In addition to Hallidayan and Hymsian perspectives, learner-centered
pedagogists benefited immensely from Austin’s work. As we know, he
looked at language as a series of speech acts we perform rather than as a
collection of linguistic items we accumulate, an idea that fitted in perfectly
with the concept of
language as communication
. We use language, Austin ar-
gued, to perform a large number of speech acts: to command, to describe,
to agree, to inform, to instruct, and so forth. The function of a particular
speech act can be understood only when the utterance is placed in a com-
municative context governed by commonly shared norms of interpretation.
What is crucial here is the illocutionary force, or the intended meaning, of
an utterance rather than the grammatical form an utterance may take.
By basing themselves on speech-act theory and discourse analysis, and by
introducing perspectives of sociolinguistics, learner-centered pedagogists
attempted to get closer to the concreteness of language use. Accordingly,
they operated on the basis of the following broad principles:
LEARNER-CENTERED METHODS
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·
Language is a system for expressing meaning;
·
the linguistic structures of language reflect its functional as well as
communicative import;
·
basic units of language are not merely grammatical and structural, but
also notional and functional;
·
the central purpose of language is communication; and
·
communication is based on sociocultural norms of interpretation
shared by a speech community.
In short, unlike language-centered pedagogists who treated language largely
as system, learner-centered pedagogists treated it both as system and as dis-
course, at least some of the features of the latter (cf. chap. 1, this volume).
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