Why do we teach English?

Socio-linguistic research in the past few years has made educators more conscious of language functions and therefore has clarified one level of language teaching goals with greater precision. The recognition that many students of English need the language for specific instrumental purposes has led to the teaching of ESP—English for Special or Specific Purposes. Hence the proliferation of courses and materials designed to teach English for science, medicine, agriculture, engineering, tourism and the like. But the frustration of a French architect who, having learnt the English of architecture before attending a professional international seminar in London, found that he could not invite his American neighbour to have a drink, is significant.

Specialised English is best learnt as a second layer built upon a firm general English foundation. Indeed, the more specialised the learning of English becomes—one organisation recently arranged an English course for seven Thai artificial inseminators—the more it resembles training and the less it is part of the educational process. It may be appropriate, therefore, to conclude this chapter with a consideration of the learning of English as a foreign/second language within the educational dimension.

Why do we teach foreign languages in schools? Why, for that matter, teach maths or physics? Clearly, not simply for the learner to be able to write to a foreign pen friend, to be able to calculate his income tax or understand his domestic fuse-box, though these are all practical by-products of the learning process. The major areas of the school curriculum are the instruments by which the individual grows into amore secure, more contributory, more total member of

society.

In geography lessons we move from familiar surroundings to the more exotic, helping the learner to realise that he is not unique, not at the centre of things, that other people exist in other situations in other ways. The German schoolboy in Cologne who studies the social geography of Polynesia, the Sahara or Baffinland is made to relate to other people and conditions, and thereby to see the familiar Königstrasse through new eyes. Similarly the teaching of history is all about ourselves in relationship to other people in other times: now in relation to then. This achievement of perspecttive, this breaking of parochial boundaries, the relating to other people, places, things and events is no less applicable to foreign language teaching. One of the German schoolboy’s first (unconscious) insights into language is that der Hund is not a universal god-given word for a canine quadruped. ‘Dog, chien, perro—aren’t they funny? Perhaps they think we’re funny.’ By learning a foreign language we see our own in perspective, we recognise that there are other ways of saying things, other ways of thinking, other patterns of emphasis: the French child finds that the English word brown may be the equivalent of brun, marron or even jaune, according to context; the English learner finds that there is no single equivalent to blue in Russian, only goluboj and sinij (two areas of the English ‘blue’ spectrum). Inextricably bound with a language—and for English, with each world variety—are the cultural patterns of its speech community.

English, by its composition, embodies certain ways of thinking about time, space and quantity; embodies attitudes towards animals, sport, the sea, relations between the sexes; embodies a generalised English speakers’ world view.

By operating in a foreign language, then, we face the world from a slightly different standpoint and structure it in slightly different conceptual patterns. Some of the educational effects of foreign language learning are achieved—albeit subconsciously—in the first months of study, though obviously a ‘feel’ for the new language, together with the subtle impacts on the learner’s perceptual, aesthetic and affective development, is a function of the growing experience of its written and spoken forms. Clearly the broader aims behind foreign language teaching are rarely something of which the learner is aware and fashionable demands for learner-selected goals are not without danger to the fundamental processes of education.

It may be argued that these educational ends are achievable no less through learning Swahili or Vietnamese than English. And this is true. But at the motivational levels of which most learners are conscious there are compelling reasons for selecting a language which is either that of a neighbouring nation, or one of international stature. It is hardly surprising, then, that more teaching hours are devoted to English in the classrooms of the world than to any other subject of the curriculum.

Suggestions for further reading

P. Christophersen,  Second Language Learning, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

P. Strevens,  New Orientations in the Teaching of English, Oxford University Press, 1977.

P. Trudgill, Sociolinguistics, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.