Ken Carroll

Most traditonal language teaching focused on grammar, tests, and structures - the forms, in other words - often to the exclusion of the way that people actually spoke the target language.  This practice remains very much the focus of language teaching in China.

The structural approach contrasts with communicative language teaching (CLT). CLT goes beyond structures to look at how language functions:  as a tool for communication in real-world situations. CLT is therefore empirical and concerned with function as well as form.

Knowing the structures alone will not afford you a natural communicative ability in a new language. You have to know how people actually speak. There are endless grammatical ways you could express even the simplest thing in English, but just because a sentence is grammatically correct, it doesn’t mean it is something that native speakers would ever say. In fact, using grammar to generate odd sentences can create odd effects.  Native speakers of English tend to draw from  set phrases and lexical chunks throughout communication. Word choice depends on your social purpose, and subtle changes in word choice can make a big difference the social meaning you convey. The subtlety works because these phrases have acquired cultural connotations that native speakers can read.

[Poor, or inappropriate word choice is actually a greater barrier to communication than grammar, and the best communicators are not necessarily those who construct the best sentences. I’ve seen this time after time at my language schools here in Shanghai.]

Another apect of the problem is using over-formalized English i.e. the type of English that is taught in schools in China.  This tends to create a social distance, even where both parties are seeking to bond. The process is unconscious, but failure to adopt the conventions of a given social group can suggest an unwillingness to enter into it. I’ve observed this in the way that Chinese speakers of English sometimes use the language, particularly at the early stages of fluency. Having studied only the structures of English (and often through a process of memorization) many of them adopt the overly formal idiom of the textbook (written by Chinese professors who may never have spoken the language). I’ve even seen people memorize phrases to use at informal social events. This strategy tends to send all sorts of formality signals and creates an atmosphere that is a block to closer contact. This phenomenon is more acute amongst men and I beleive  is the reason why bonding between Chinese and western men tends to end at the workplace. (Most of the wesntern men I know here do not to socialize much with Chinese men outside the work context.)

Ken Carroll