Teaching Language as Communication

H. Widdowson

Oxford Applied Linguistics

This book develops a rational approach to the teaching of language as communication, based on a careful consideration of the nature of language and of the language user's activities. It will stimulate all language teachers to investigate the ideas that inform their own practice.

Widdowson H. G.

Teaching Language as Communication

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First published 1978

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ISBN: 978 0194370776

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To my father, G. P. Widdowson

Introduction

This book is an attempt to clarify certain issues that seem to me to arise from adopting a communicative approach to the teaching of language. I have in mind, in particular, the teaching of English to speakers of other languages. Over recent years I (and a number of others) have advocated such an approach in principle and have tried to put it into practice in the preparation of teaching materials. In principle and practice, however, there always seemed to be loose ends of one sort or another: inconsistencies, unexamined assumptions, unresolved difficulties. My aim in this book was to sort out some of the things that I had been saying, consider their implications more closely, and see if they might be ordered into a coherent account. I wanted to try to think things through.

The �communicative’ approach is, of course, very much in vogue at present. As with all matters of fashion, the problem is that popular approbation tends to conceal the need for critical examination. There seems to be an assumption in some quarters, for example, that language is automatically taught as communication by the simple expedient of concentrating on �notions’ or �functions’ ra