Communicative Language Teaching: A New Metaphor

Author(s): James R. Nattinger

Source: TESOL Quarterly , Sep., 1984, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 391-407
Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)

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 TESOL QUARTERLY, Vol. 18, No. 3, September 1984

Communicative Language Teaching:

A New Metaphor
JAMES R. NATTINGER
Portland State University

A great deal of current research in language acquisition and in ESL

classroom practice is coalescing into a method for second language
instruction called Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).
Although there is agreement about some of its characteristics, other
aspects of this method lack consensus or even clear definition. One
reason for this may be because CLT has moved away from the
metaphors commonly used to describe language teaching but has
not as yet fastened onto one of its own. This article discusses some
characteristics of what such a new metaphor might be and reviews
a few of the ways in which CLT guides classroom practice, aligns
ESL teaching with current theory in other fields, and offers
directions for future research.

Currently, a method for second language teaching that calls itse

"communicative" is developing; specifically, this method is know
as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). Although work on
is still preliminary, CLT has the possibility of being less vague tha
former "communicative competence" methods, less limited th
notional-functional ones, less ethnocentric than many humanisti
methods, and less psycholinguistically objectionable than audiolin
gual ones. CLT practice is quite diverse, yet underlying all of
variations are these similarities: 1) communicative competence is th
goal at each level of instruction, 2) interaction between langua
users and their environment is a primary objective of all exercis
and 3) the processes involved in using language, that is, the strateg
for making sense of something and for negotiating meaning, are t
center of attention.
This article will first describe some of the ways that CLT is bein
used in classrooms to teach conversation, writing, and reading an
will then suggest how this method is related to current theo
building in second language acquisition research, in linguistics, an
in artificial intelligence. Before that, however, it is necessary
consider how method is linked to metaphor in general, for one of t

391

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problems in talking about CLT is that this method seems to have
moved away from the metaphors commonly used to describe
language teaching and has yet to fasten firmly onto one of its own.

METAPHOR AND METHOD

A metaphor helps us understand by suggesting likenesses

something whose outlines are vague and imperfectly un
and something whose shape is distinct and familiar. In sug
such a relationship, a metaphor provides us with a framew
organizing our knowledge and gives shape to the unkno
more likenesses between the two entities it suggests, the be
metaphor seems to be, so that often the border between t
blurs, creating a confusion of the metaphor with psych
reality (Seliger 1983). When this happens, we understand o
to be exactly like another and, whether consciously or not,
to act as if they were the same in all of their details and implic
If metaphor were only rhetorical flourish, this problem w
essentially trivial and would have little to do with language
but it is clear that it is much more.' Any model, any theor
description is a metaphor of a sort, so most of the explain
learning we do takes place metaphorically. Language lear
teaching are also closely tied to metaphor, as Herron claim
we teach (or think we are teaching) and how we teach, alon
the complementary perceptions of value, are intimately lin
metaphor" (1982:241). Yet, in spite of this link, there has be
written about the relationship between metaphor and l
learning, or between metaphor and education in general, f
matter. Herron's article, one of the best in tracing the histo
metaphors that have characterized language teaching, summ
the situation well.
According to Herron, the grammar-translation method wa
panied by a gymnastic metaphor, one which equates traini
exercise of the body with that of the mind. The main thru
equation is that as muscles become stronger and more
through rigorous exercise, the mind becomes more dexterou
classroom training. And just as the body becomes generally
as a result of this training, learning results in generally in
intellectual powers. Some of the implications of this metap
that students are full of latent abilities which, because of

i Lakoff and Johnson (1980) make dramatic claims for metaphor and, in fact, put i
center of our lives. Our conceptual system itself operates almost wholly meta
they feel.

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training, have never been developed; that teachers are trainers who
will discipline them into practicing these unused powers; and that
language, the focus of this exercise, is a formal object which consists
of meanings to be extracted and mastered.
A more recent method, audiolingualism, carries with it quite
another metaphor, one that Herron calls the production metaphor,
which links language teaching to the development of marketable
and usable skills. The implications here are that schools are factories
in which teachers, who are supervisors, oversee the products being
molded (i.e., the students), who are essentially passive receptacles
for the learning that is poured into them by the teachers. Learning
itself is broken down into uncomplicated sub-tasks in order to avoid
snags on the production line. Language is seen as a formal, gram-
matical object, much as in the gymnastic metaphor, and is to be
poured into the students bit by bit.
Post-audiolingual methods, those that have called themselves
"humanistic" and "learner-centered," are based on yet another
metaphor, one which shifts from defining teaching to defining
learning. In this metaphor, second language learners are equated
with children learning their first language: just as children learn first
languages actively and automatically in natural, informal environ-
ments, second language learners go about acquiring language best in
similar naturalistic situations in which the meaning and function of
language become much more important than the memorization of
the forms of the language. Further implications of this metaphor are
that teachers, who are something like guardians of the child language
acquirers, must concentrate on the emotional as well as the cognitive
needs of their students and that the students themselves, unlike
students in the gymnastic and industrial metaphors, actively go
about learning in an environment to which they are intimately
attached. The language they learn is a communicative rather than a
grammatical construct, one whose meanings are not inviolable and
self-contained but rather are created in the very act of students'
relating to their environment and to each other. Meaning itself is
something that emerges as it is negotiated.
Considering all language learning to be comparable to first
language learning, as this metaphor does, is in many ways quite
stimulating, for it has made us reconsider many of our assumptions
about teaching. But there are, as Herron admits, many things about
it that are unsatisfactory. The basic equation of the metaphor itself is
intuitively jarring: second language learners are not children who are
tied completely to the immediate environment and who are ap-
proaching a language for the first time; rather, they are experienced

COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING 393

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language users (no matter how young) with a great deal of common
sense about the world, and they have knowledge of the linguistic
patterns of their first language as well as of the strategies necessary
for using those patterns. A more intuitively accurate metaphor will
have to change this basic analogy, while retaining the parts that are
satisfying.
Whether the new metaphor will be simply an adaptation of the
humanistic one to accommodate new criteria, or whether it will be a
completely different one, is not certain at this point, although it
seems likely that if the basic analogy changes, the resulting metaphor
will also be quite different. But even though this metaphor has yet to
take a definite shape, some of its general characteristics are clear: it
would again describe language as a communicative rather than a
grammatical construct, and would define meaning as that which
emerges in students' communicative interactions with each other.
Teachers would still look to the emotional as well as the cognitive
needs of the students and would provide as natural a language
learning environment for them as possible. This new metaphor,
however, would describe students not as beginning language learners
but rather as sophisticated processors of language who use what
they already know about language and the world to make sense of a
new linguistic system. This new metaphor, when it is finally
articulated, will be the one to characterize CLT.

CLT IN THE CLASSROOM

Strategy, interaction, process-the keys to CLT; how ar

guiding classroom practice? Let me describe some work
different areas of language teaching in order to give an id
variety they have generated and, in this way, suggest more
cally what it is that the new metaphor will need to account

Conversation

In "The Open-Ended Scenario: A New Approach to Conve

tion," DiPietro (1982) expands upon the typical roleplaying acti
by proposing that new information be introduced into rather
situations in order to force students to make quick choices abou
direction of their conversations. The intention, he says, "i
emulate those occasions which often occur in real life wherein
people are called upon to redirect their communication in respon
to newly introduced facts and events" (1982:16). This sort of o
interaction requires not only sudden changes of expression an
content but also draws on both receptive and productive skills.

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 In open-ended scenarios, new information is handed out in phases
rather than given all at once:
PHASE ONE: The teacher selects one male and one female student.
The male must invite the female to dinner at a restaurant. The female
may either accept the invitation or reject it. The interactants are to
develop a conversation in either case.
PHASE TWO: If the female accepts, the two go to the restaurant where
they encounter another male who appears to be the boyfriend of the
female. Develop a conversation among the three individuals. If the
female rejects the offer to dinner, the male asks another female, who
accepts. Then they go to a restaurant where they encounter the first
female seated at a table having dinner with another male. Develop a
conversation with the four persons (DiPietro 1982:17).
The teacher divides the class into small groups, assigning each group
a role to play in the scenario, and allows time for preparation and
rehearsal. The groups discuss the desired goal of their interaction in
each situation and the verbal strategies they might use to achieve it,
which leads to considerations of possible speech functions for each
strategy and the grammatical ways of expressing them. DiPietro
feels that "matters of grammatical form are best explained in
strategic contexts" (1982:19) like these, which provide a natural
connection of function and form. The problem for the students, of
course, is that they must allow for a number of possibilities in the
future interaction by preparing for the verbal countermoves of the
interlocutors, since what is said by speakers depends crucially on
what is said to them. Students thus experience firsthand the ways in
which extended discourse affects conventional language and, at the
same time, they develop verbal strategies.

Writing
The teaching of writing can be described in a similar way. It may,
at first, appear odd to think of writing in the same terms as conver-
sation for it seems, on the surface at least, to be an isolated and solitary
activity. But the two are in fact very similar. Writing, like speaking, is
almost always directed toward an audience whose expectations
shape the form and content of the message, making interaction an
integral element of the process. Furthermore, writers discover
solutions as they go along. They modify their discourse as they
attempt to get closer to their intended meaning; they try out different
strategies, much as speakers do in ever-shifting conversations, and as
they write and rewrite, and approximate more closely their intended
meaning, the form with which to express the meaning suggests itself.
Many ESL writing texts, based on structural approaches, prescribe

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the form first and then ask that the meaning be tailored to fit, a
procedure which reflects just the opposite approach. Zamel (1982,
1983) has done a good deal of work to develop a writing program
that follows the new directions.
For Zamel, revision becomes the main component of instruction
as students are taught to view their writing as someone else's
reading. As students assume the roles of both writer and reader, they
try to predict what problems the reader will have and what possible
reactions there will be to what they are writing. The first part of
such a course gets the students to articulate ideas they want to write
about. Then the teacher helps them to order these ideas by getting
them to consider, their intention, or the goal they have in mind for
what it is they will write. This comes about in conversations with the
teacher and with members of a small group to which the students
have been assigned and, throughout the process, questions are raised
not only about the goal but also about the written strategies and
forms most likely to be useful in achieving that goal. In this way it is
extremely similar to the kinds of "rehearsals" that DiPietro proposes
for his open-ended scenarios. Once the writing begins, it usually
takes the form of sketchy notes, quickly jotted ideas, perhaps more
fully developed sentences, but never formal, cohesive outlines.
Students have to be constantly reassured that they are not supposed
to know exactly what they are going to say before they begin. The
teacher then allows ample time for revision. Students write down
ideas, rethink them, rewrite them, rewrite them again, not exactly
sure of what is going to appear next on the page. New insights can
occur anytime in the process, and, as they do, they are jotted down
and incorporated into future revisions. Fluency-letting ideas flow-
is an immediate result and happens in the context of goal and reader
expectations. As the revisions get closer to the intended meaning,
accuracy of form begins to be attended to. Zamel finds that first
revisions usually address very general issues such as content, organi-
zation, or purpose of the entire piece, while each subsequent
revision turns to more formal considerations and, finally, to sentence
polishing.

Reading
Reading, a third area of language teaching, can also be described
in similar terms. Readers are seen as not passively absorbing but
rather as actively creating meanings on the basis of the discourse
clues they find, just as in speaking and writing. Readers assess these
clues against their experience and expectations-against their
schemas (see Carrell 1982, Carrell and Eisterhold 1983), and they

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make tentative guesses about meanings, which will then be rejected
or confirmed as the reading progresses (Smith 1978, Van Dijk 1981,
Purves 1983). The tie to writing is extremely close, as suggested
above. Widdowson, for example, regards reading "not as a reaction
to a text but as interaction between writer and reader mediated
through the text" (1979:174). This is certainly contrary to any idea of
a text being complete in itself and independent of any context,
which has been the assumption of many traditional and audiolingual
theorists (Fries 1963, Lefevre 1964). The idea that a text can be so
self-contained was no doubt reinforced by the gymnastic and
industrial metaphors, which suggest that words are containers that
hold exact amounts of meaning waiting to be released. In the new
metaphor, however, meaning is seen as being attached to words
when they are used in particular contexts.2 Thus, reading, as
described by this metaphor, is not seen as a process of imperfectly
extracting meaning from a text, since the process of writing the text
was equally imperfect in encoding meaning. This is why Widdowson
says there is "no possibility of recovering complete meaning from a
text [because] it is never there in the first place" (1979:174). It is best
to think of encoding, he says, "not as the formulation of messages, in
principle complete and self-contained, but as the devising of a set of
directions" (1979:174) which will indicate to readers where they are
to look in their own experience for the writer's meaning. Readers
understand and carry out these directions as well as they can by
means of the strategies they have already learned.
How does this work in practice? Widdowson (1978) has the
students progress from simple to complex prose by "gradual approxima-
tion," the building up of dialogue sequences into more and more
complex units. He interposes each passage with numerous points
called "interpretive checks" (which are essentially questions that
direct the students to consider the meaning and organization of what
they have been reading) and in this way adroitly links problems of
grammatical choice with those of rhetorical constraints, such as
operate in the real world (Eskey 1983). In other words, he provides a
natural connection between function and form, which is very similar
to the sort of thing DiPietro works for in his conversational exercises.
Weaver (1980) offers something quite different. Whenever students
find stop signs drawn at various points in her narratives, they must
This is not to say that we have finally reached the "perfect" metaphor, which will never be
supplanted by another; it is only to suggest that metaphors guide us and influence our
thinking. The matter is entirely relative. It would be possible to come up with many
different metaphors for the same situation, for example, each influencing us differently.
Furthermore, as one anonymous reviewer of this article suggested, "using metaphors for
certain situations is an ad hoc way of looking at that situation; it is, in fact, another
metaphor!"

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stop and consider-often aloud-what is going to happen next. In
this way they learn about other students' strategies for predicting, as
well as recognize the ones they themselves use. Stories with an
element of suspense or mystery are especially good for predicting,
Weaver suggests, and so are folktales, because they often contain
interculturally predictable patterns and because they can be used
with students of various ages and language backgrounds.3

RELATED RESEARCH

The emerging metaphor that underlies these specific ESL pr

also directs current research in other areas. In work on second
language acquisition, for example, interest is turning from viewin
input and language product independently to viewing the interactio
between the input and the product. As Larsen-Freeman points ou
"structure in a child's competence may at first develop out of
construction that the child builds jointly with other speakers," a
from interactions like these, she continues, it may be that "a chi
learns how to produce topic-comment constructions" (1980:vi-vii)
Hatch feels the same can be said for second language learner
Rather than first learning correct structures, then learning how
apply them in discourse, it is much more likely that the learn
"learns how to do conversation ... how to interact verbally, and o
of this interaction syntactic structures are developed" (1978:404).
Most agree that the learner's developing ability to empathize with
audience affects language learning. Differing strategies are al
being investigated to account for differences in the ability to acqu
language (Rubin 1975, Naiman, Frohlich, Stern and Todesco 197
Cohen and Aphek 1981, Tarone 1981). Scarcella and Higa, for
example, note that
older second language acquirers utilize conversational strategies to
greater extent. They are better at keeping conversations going ("sustain
ing the talk") and can use several strategies to improve the comprehens
bility of the input they receive, [which means] they are therefore bett
at getting the comprehensible input they need for acquisition (1982:17
... Adult native English speakers do much more negotiation work
conversation with younger L2 learners than they do with older learner

For these reasons, a modified cloze procedure and a Grimm's fairy tale may be a very g
combination for an ESL reading class. To fill in the blanks, students select words that m
sense with what went before as well as with what they think will come later; they then ref
or reject these choices as the reading progresses. This is the very sort of thing that Lebaue
(1984) proposes for helping students better comprehend academic lectures. Her student
practice with cloze exercises drawn from transcripts of lectures in order to enhance th
ability to extract relevant information, to predict future information, and to relate th
background knowledge to new information.

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 They provide larger quantities of simple input, a more supportive
atmosphere, and a constant check to see that the input a child receives is
both attended to and understood (1982:193).
Work in linguistics has, traditionally, been concerned with describ-
ing the formal properties of linguistic knowledge, not with how that
knowledge is used, so this work has only been of indirect value in
guiding language teaching practice, as Chomsky (1966) suggested
long ago. Two principles that underlie most current linguistic
theory, in fact, immediately contradict the basis upon which CLT
methods and research are carried out: that monologue rather than
dialogue is the linguistic basis of language; and that basic meanings
are independent of an individual's particular experience (Habermas
1970, Sampson 1982). Recently, however, some linguists have begun
to explore the relationship between these formal properties of
linguistic knowledge and how they are used by working on cognitive
models of language structure and on models of discourse processing,
and many are finding a tight link between language comprehension
and production, and language context and existing knowledge
(Ortony 1975). Chief among these linguists is Chafe, who has been
exploring the relationship between language and consciousness, and
language and memory (1970, 1973, 1974, 1980). He has examined the
problem of how we make meaning from language and how we
remember it and has suggested that language users primarily focus
on semantic information when they perceive a message. They
"translate" surface structures as quickly as possible into meaningful
sequences of propositions, then store that information in memory.
These stored semantic facts, he says, are "schematic" structures
consisting of an "event," "action," "process," or "state," and a
number of "participants" having expected case roles. These sche-
matic structures are themselves further integrated into the user's
world knowledge, which is itself organized in terms of prototypical
situations called frames and scripts. These are complex cognitive
units that represent series of cause and effect relationships about
particular subjects and frequently occurring episodes in our lives
(Van Dijk 1981). Such knowledge-based structures are seen to
provide a framework for comprehension patterns in discourse as
well as to account for inference strategies, which are an extremely
important part of discourse processing.
Much of Chafe's work, as well as that of other linguists who have
turned to more performance-based research, echoes work in arti-
ficial intelligence (AI). Researchers here also study underlying
processes of discourse production, comprehension, and storage and,
as they attempt to model computers after the way the mind works,
have had to turn away, just as these linguists have had to, from static

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models of information storage and retrieval. The old metaphor in
this field, which many still accept as common sense, equates human
intelligence with "the result of applying rules of inference to a large
data base of static facts, a process idealized in mathematical
theorem proving" (Waltz 1982:14). But many AI researchers, not
believing this analogy to be a good one, are looking for new ways of
thinking about thinking.
A nice example of this occurs in AI's attempts to develop a chess
program. AI researchers have had to shift from a power strategy (a
brute-force, trial-and-error search of all possible moves and counter-
moves) to more efficient "knowledge strategies that more clearly
approximate human mental processes and employ heuristics" (Welles
1983:53) for two reasons: first, they have found that chess masters do
not consider all possible moves but instead use their vast experience
to limit, drastically, the number of choices they have; and second,
they have realized that it is the way that chess masters store
knowledge in their memory that gives them such an advantage.4
Novices see positions on the chessboard simply as individual pieces
on individual squares, but masters, who have organized their
knowledge more hierarchically, see the same positions as clusters or
chunks of several pieces which are themselves grouped into more
general chunks, and these grouped into still more general ones (Hunt
1982). The masters can recall these chunks just as easily as novices
can recall individual pieces. This is similar to research in natural
language processing, which finds that we recall many more words if
they are chunked into coherent groups rather than if they are
learned individually (Miller 1956, Simon 1974), and similar to work
in cognitive psychology, which finds that new information is re-
tained by aggregating it into more comprehensive chunks, which are
then made accessible by linking them in as many ways as possible to
information that is already stored (Miller, Galanter, and Pribram
1960, Simon 1969, Hofstadter 1980, Hunt 1982).
There is, then, a great deal of interaction between AI and
cognitive psychology: mechanical processes for chunking and link-
ing information imitate human processes of perception and memory;
methods of information retrieval reflect human strategies for infer-
ence and production. The two fields also share an elusive goal-to
be able to model "common sense." To do this will require linking
Recently, however, many AI researchers have abandoned heuristic chess programs because
"the intelligent programs kept making mistakes, although slower brute force programs that
simply tried all possible moves did not. As the technology of computer hardware advanced,
brute force increasingly became the method of choice; in the past five years chess programs
have become dumber, faster, and much harder to beat" (Hunt 1982:327). As a result of this
and other such work, the major direction of AI research currently is to discover what the
human mind can do better than the computer and to describe these skills with programs
that minimize brute force and that deduce general principles instead.

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perception, reasoning, and action simultaneously, in as yet unknown
ways, because ultimately the intelligent use of concepts depends on
all three. Research that results from this will have much to say to
CLT teachers, who make such "common sense" performance the
goal of their classroom activities.

FUTURE RESEARCH

CLT not only guides classroom practice and aligns ESL teac
with current theory in other fields, but also offers clear directions
future research. Foremost among the issues that are unresolve
the question of what ought to be the starting point in the desig
implementation of a second language program. Should it be
development of a communicative methodology or the specifica
of the content of CLT courses? Should it, to use Richards' (
terms, be basically a "learning-centered" method, whose meth
ology is developed through a theory of learning processes
instructional procedures, or should it be basically a "langu
centered" method, which is developed through the syllabus
concerned with the way language content is defined and organ
As Yalden (1983) suggests in her summary, CLT has been de
variously as both kinds of method. This variety can, perhap
seen as both the result and the cause of there being no cl
metaphor guiding CLT at the present. As learning-centered var
she cites the work of Krashen (1981), Terrell (1982), and t
immersion model of bilingual education (Stern 1980), which
feels are all "naturalistic" versions of CLT and "in which method-
ology is of far more interest than syllabus design, if indeed the latter
figures at all" (Yalden 1983:236). Another learning-centered variant
of CLT, most clearly articulated by Candlin and Breen (1979), she
says, "not merely ignore[s] the classic procedures of functiona
syllabus design but is opposed to it" (1983:236). Language-centered
interpretations of CLT also abound, and several models of syllabus
types have been proposed, from structural ones (Brumfit 1980), to
the completely functional models used in English for Science and
Technology (EST) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), to
the more communicative syllabus types (Yalden 1982). Interestingly,
many of these combine their descriptions of syllabus content with
methodological concerns. Brumfit's (1980) model, for example
"grafts functional teaching on to a structural core" (Yalden 1983).
Yalden's own "proportional model" uses topics "as a framework for
a gradual change of proportion in the time devoted to languag
forms on the one hand and language function and discourse structur
on the other" (Yalden 1982).

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 Just what sorts of syllabus components will eventually be deter-
mined to be the most efficient, whether these be structural, semantic,
functional, or more process-oriented strategic units, is certainly un-
clear at this point. Whatever decisions are made, either in syllabus
specification or in communicative methodology, will come from
research in the three areas upon which CLT is based, and they will
provide answers to questions such as these:
Strategies: what sorts of strategies do we have for perceiving,
producing, learning, and acquiring language? how do these differ
from each other? how can they best be made use of in the
classroom?
Interaction: how does the learner's developing ability to empathize
with an audience affect language learning? what sorts of interactions
are possible, and what are their effects?
Processes: what are the psychological units of perception and
production? how are these integrated into larger structures of
knowledge? how can they be incorporated into a class syllabus?

A COMPUTATIONAL METAPHOR

Such questions of strategy, interaction, and process have m

do with the processes of comprehension and production tha
the forms of language, and they are very similar to the qu
now being asked by researchers in cognitive science, a new d
that combines the sorts of investigations in linguistics,
cognitive psychology mentioned previously. Let me return
research briefly to consider whether one possible metaphor
that discipline might offer a compatible one for CLT.
The metaphor involves the computer. In cognitive science
researchers are guided by a computational metaphor to help
build precise models of mental processes. This metaphor pr
special way of looking at language, a view which is som
different from the ones offered by other language theories,
been very useful in helping these researchers to conceptual
develop their work. As Winograd (1983) describes it, this m
is built on four assumptions: 1) The proper domain of stud
structure of the knowledge possessed by a language user, n
form of the text itself or the social context in which the text o
2) This knowledge can be understood, completely, as forma
concerning the structure of symbols. 3) Instead of concentra
"competence," an abstract characterization of a user's know
language which is independent of any rules for manifest
knowledge, the computational metaphor directs attentio

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organization of "performance," to the processes of comprehension
and production that put the underlying competence to work. Thus,
these processes assume a central rather than a peripheral role.
Finally, 4) the computational metaphor assumes that knowledge
structures and processes are shared with other aspects of intelligence;
the metaphor directs researchers to ask in what ways language fits
into larger contexts of action and knowledge, not to view language,
as most generative grammarians do, as the product of some special,
autonomous, language faculty. If we understand how language
works, cognitive researchers feel, we will be far along the path to
understanding how the mind works-in reasoning, learning, and
remembering.
As compatible as the computational metaphor seems to be with
many of the issues raised previously, it has two immediately
apparent limitations which may make it inappropriate for CLT. The
first is its basic assumption that knowledge can be completely
modeled as a set of formal structures. This may simply be too narrow
a view of language use to be intuitively satisfactory for language
teachers. As Winograd notes,
many critics of artificial intelligence argue that much of our skill in using
language is not in the nature of formal rules, but is more akin to physical
skills like walking or playing tennis. They do not believe that the
individual's ability to use language can be explained by any formal
characterization analogous to the data structures of computers or the
rules of formal logic. They see the success of computer programs that
deal with natural language in specialized domains as due to the con-
strained nature of those domains (1983:29).

In light of some of the ways in which CLT is currently being

described, perhaps an even more immediate limitation of the
metaphor is its relegation of the social aspects of language use to a
decidedly secondary role. It is not clear, in fact, whether there
would even be a place for descriptions of social interaction in this
metaphor. If it turns out that CLT is defined largely in terms of
affective variables, then this computational metaphor will not offer
a useful way of conceptualizing it or of describing it further.

A FINAL MATTER

In spite of the uncertain metaphor, the unanswered quest

the diverging methods, there is already enough agreem
basic matters in CLT to permit empirical research to disco
sorts of classrooms provide better environments for second
learning and what sorts of syllabus designs work best. The
such rigorous evaluation procedures is great, as Richard

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suggests, especially since new methods often go unmeasured and
their claims remain unevaluated. Gathering empirical data of this
kind should be a main thrust of future research in CLT. Such data
will determine the most effective types of classroom interactions
and will help validate the selection of items for the syllabus. When
this happens, many of the variations in methodology and content
mentioned above will disappear. As the specific details of CLT
practice become clearer, so will the general outlines of a compatible
metaphor to guide it.

THE AUTHOR

James Nattinger, a professor of English and Linguistics at Portland State U

has written articles on language teaching which have appeared in
Quarterly, Language Learning, English Teaching Forum, and in other pr
publications. He has taught ESL in Spain, Argentina, and, most recent
People's Republic of China.

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