Spoken English

The versatility of the term speaking in ELT2 is astounding. Since the early 1950s when the written medium lost its supremacy in the profession and speaking gained prominence (Brown and Yule 1983:2), the notion of spoken English seems to have lost itself amidst a sea of marginally related concepts. That includes, for example, audio lingualism, whose now largely discredited Behaviourist theory of learning advocated the extensive use of techniques primarily concerned with the teaching of oral language. That is perhaps a classic example of how "different pedagogical goals may be subsumed under the general rubric of teaching the spoken language" (Tarone1986:15). Therefore, it should come as no surprise that developing motor perceptive skills (Bygate 1987:5) by engaging learners in repetition, pattern practice and the like was (and, to a lesser degree, still is I daresay) generally regarded as teaching spoken English.

With the dawning of the almighty communicative era came the recognition that there is more to teaching speaking than simply encouraging learners to produce correct grammatical forms in spoken language. Grammatical competence had lost intellectual momentum and the early 1980s witnessed the emergence of a new model which acknowledged the primacy of "sociolinguistic competence" and "strategic competence" (Canale and Swain 1980) as further subsets of the wider notion of “communicative competence”, which seems to be current orthodoxy in ELT. Needless to say, for classroom activity to merit the label “communicative", learners should be provided with opportunities to "produce extended spoken discourse" (Tarone 1986:24), thereby creating a "reasonable facsimile of communicative behaviour" in the classroom (ibid.:26), of which the three aforementioned competencies are an integral part .

There are grounds for arguing, however, that creating a facsimile of communicative behaviour in class is one thing, enabling students to produce extended spoken discourse quite another. Communicative behaviour is by no means synonymous with speaking. In real life people communicate through a host of different channels and there is no compelling reason to dismiss writing in the language classroom, for example, as “non-communicative”. Admittedly, there are certain skills that seem to be unique to oral communication, such as turn taking, agenda management and facilitation/compensation strategies, for example (see Bygate 1987 for a comprehensive study). Nevertheless, enabling learners to draw on those skills and strategies is not synonymous with teaching spoken English.

What I am suggesting is that the profession is still relatively oblivious to the fact that “speech is not spoken writing” (ibid.:10). One cannot claim to be teaching spoken English without a keener awareness of what spoken English is like and how it differs from written English. Since this is probably one of the main flaws of the ACE course, it makes sense to turn to this issue now.