Li LJ

the special needs of state English

language education
Adrian Holliday

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Many teachers in state English language education around the world are
unsure about the appropriateness of the communicative approach to the
conditions prevalent in their classrooms. One reason for this may be that
they are trying to use a particularly narrow interpretation of this approach
produced, for very different classroom contexts, by branches of the ELT
community in Britain, North America, or Australasia. There is, in other
words, a problem of technology transfer between these branches of the
profession and the rest of the world. However, there does exist a broader
version of the communicative approach which has within it the potential to
adapt to all types of classroom context, provided it is informed by local
knowledge. Teachers in state education already have this local knowledge
about their students and the realities of their classrooms. Their experience
must be capitalized upon and incorporated into a more environment-
sensitive communicative approach.

Introduction During a seminar for secondary school teachers in South Africa, one
experienced teacher commented 'We have been feeling guilty about
standing up in front of our students and talking.' She and her colleagues
had been led to believe that in the communicative classroom students
should spend most of their time sitting in groups practising English with
each other. She had the notion that there was little excuse for teacher-
fronted lessons. From talking to many teachers of English, both as a
second and as a foreign language, based in secondary and tertiary
institutions in different parts of the world, I get the impression that there is
widespread consternation at being faced with this 'new' methodology,
which they feel they ought to adopt to be up-to-date, but which does not
seem to suit the nature of their classrooms.
This paper seeks to explore a possible cause of this problem, which I
suggest is not simply a matter of'communicative' versus ' traditional', but
something much deeper. Without wishing to be unduly divisive, I would
argue that the problem concerns the nature of technology transfer between
two parts of the English language teaching profession. I use the term
ELT Journal Volume 48/1 January 1994 © Oxford University Press 1994 3
 'technology' to refer not only to hard- and software used in the classroom,
but to the whole range of methodologies, techniques, and procedures
which make up classroom practice, plus their realization in textbooks and
classroom material.1
Two parts of the One part of the profession originates in Britain, Australasia, and North
profession America (the 'BANA' countries)2. Here, English language teaching tends
Instrumentally- to be instrumentally oriented, in that it has grown up within a private
oriented ELT language school ethos where there has been considerable freedom to
develop classroom methodology as a sophisticated instrument to suit the
precise needs of language learners. It has been possible to define and

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create a technology based on good classroom conditions to suit the needs
of particular markets. Students come as individuals or in groups to learn
English, and the technology does whatever is necessary to provide them
with a quality product.
This type of English language teaching can be found in private language
schools in the BANA countries and in private language schools elsewhere
in the world which are their subsidiaries or upon whose model they are
based. It can be found in the cultural centres of BANA countries abroad
and in English language teaching operations found in higher education in
BANA countries—although these are not private, they take students on a
commercial basis, and provide a specific service.
Institutionally- The other part of the profession comprises tertiary, secondary, and
influenced ELT primary English language education in the rest of the world ('TESEP').
Unlike the BANA type, English in these institutions is taught as part of a
wider curriculum and is therefore influenced and constrained by wider
educational, institutional, and community forces quite different from
those in the BANA sector.
The logistics and interests of the wider curriculum in any state institution
affect the resources allocated to English language teaching, such as the
number of hours available, the timetable, the class size, furniture, and
facilities. There are also constraints and influences on individual teaching
style. An English language teacher behaves not only according to the
needs of language learning, but also according to the norms set by other
subjects. For example, there may be peer pressure against a teacher
introducing group work into her or his classroom, on the grounds that
students will carry new expectations into other subject classrooms which
their teachers might find disruptive.
Similarly, the expectations of students will be influenced by what they
experience in other subjects. Strong traditions of both teaching and
learning will be carried from previous generations of teachers and
students within the institution. Moreover, every member of the
community will have an influencing perception about what should happen
in a school or university. What happens in TESEP English language
classrooms stems from deep within the society as a whole; and the role of
the TESEP English language teacher is not only to teach English but also
to socialize the student as a member of that society.
Adrian Holliday
 This state of affairs is quite different from that in BANA English language
teaching, where the notions of 'school', 'classroom', and 'teacher' are
defined within a more specialized commercial or adult education context.
Whether the English language school or institute is in their own country or
abroad, students who wish to attend the BANA institute are likely to be
more prepared to leave behind the more traditional notions of school and
university to embark upon a completely different experience, where
learning is instrumental rather than institutional.
These descriptions of BANA and TESEP are of course idealized, and
represent extreme examples at each end of a continuum. Different
institutions will be located at different points along that continuum.

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Technology It can safely be said that most of the technology of English language
transfer teaching is produced by the BANA side of the profession. Books which
propound the technology and textbooks which demonstrate its use come
almost entirely from BANA publishers. The most prestigious MA,
diploma, and training courses for teachers are carried out either in BANA
institutions, or in institutions in other countries which are staffed or
monitored by BANA personnel. The seminars and workshops carried out
in TESEP countries which are considered to be most effective are nearly
always given or initiated by BANA institutions or travelling 'experts'.
TESEP teachers, if they wish to obtain the most 'prestigious' professional
development, must therefore go to BANA-oriented institutions where
they become direct recipients of BANA technology. The outcome is that
many TESEP teachers depend on BANA technology for a wide range of
professional support—creating a significant one-way technology transfer
from BANA to TESEP situations.
Technology transfer is not in itself a bad thing. Human affairs depend
upon the exchange of ideas. However, in the case of English language
education, there are several problems:
a. the narrowness of the technology which is sold to TESEP teachers, and
its subsequent lack of adaptability to their teaching situations
b. the lack of ownership of the technology by TESEP teachers
c. the narrowness of the second language acquisition research which
underlies the technology.
I shall deal with each of these problems in turn, and suggest how they
might be addressed.
The effective I do not believe that BANA technology is essentially narrow and
narrowness of unadaptable to TESEP situations. I shall argue in the second half of this
BANA technology paper that, by its very nature, the communicative approach does have the
potential for being adaptable to any educational situation. However, the
technology which is, in effect, most commonly imported to the TESEP
world involves a much narrower version of the communicative approach,
which is not adaptable. This narrower version suits the majority of BANA
classrooms and is therefore very popular, occupying the majority of
textbooks, and professional literature, and the largest portion of the
seminars and training courses which carry the technology abroad.
Needs of state English language education 5
The learning group This popular form of BANA technology presents a learning group
ideal ideal—an ideal classroom and behaviour scenario which does not
correspond to many TESEP classrooms. Two complementary principles,
of this ideal are that (i) group and pair work are effective learning modes3
and (ii) these modes can be most effectively set up and monitored in small
classes. Thus, the majority of BANA classrooms have fifteen or fewer
students, an emphasis on learning through group practice, and substantial
teacher control over what students say and write. The teacher has to be
there to hear what students say and to be able to provide repair where
necessary. The emphasis is thus on precise classroom management and
there is a strong classroom regime. Reading and writing are not excluded

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as foci. However, what many TESEP teachers see in this classroom
paradigm is an emphasis on oral communication (e.g. Tomlinson,
1990:27), with a high premium on maximum opportunity for student oral
initiation (Nunan, 1987).
Although, on the face of it, these principles can be taken on board by
adding oral 'communicative activities' to the practice phase of more
'traditional' structure-based lessons (Allwright, 1992), there are bound to
be problems within many TESEP classrooms. The nature of the
classroom group is likely to be fixed by the institution; and little can be
done about classes which are too large for the teacher to monitor group
and pair work effectively. Especially where there is a common mother
tongue, the control required to ensure quality target language practice
does not exist. Athough the teacher-centredness of more 'traditional'
approaches is said to exercise unnecessary authority, this authority is
based on transmission of subject matter, and is not managerial in nature.
Thus, the classroom regime upon which the BANA approach is based
does not exist. There is instead an institutional regime which cannot
easily be adjusted to fit the imported technology. TESEP teachers who try
to include group or pair work on this basis report that these activities do
not work. The communicative approach is often rejected on these
grounds. However, the main reason for 'failure' is likely to be ineffective
management brought about by difficult-to-manage classroom situations.
The need to One of the reasons, therefore, for the inadequacy of BANA technology
re-interpret within TESEP classrooms is the way in which the communicative
approach is presented. What is often not understood in the process of
technology transfer is the environment-sensitive side of the approach.
Hutchinson and Waters (1984:108) state that an essential attribute of the
communicative approach is that methodology is geared not only to the
competence but also to the 'expectations of those participating in the
learning process'. This seems common sense for any effective classroom
methodology; and yet the so-called communicative methodology that
TESEP teachers may read about in books is unlikely to have been geared
to the expectations of their students.
The point is that communicative activities can take more forms than
simply practicing oral communication in pairs and groups. They can
involve text analysis, for example, where students communicate, not so
Adrian Holliday
 much with each other as with a text, to solve a language problem about
how the text works. There are immediate advantages of text-based
activities for TESEP classrooms:
1 Students can work in groups or individually.
2 If they work in groups there is no reason why they cannot use their
mother tongue. They have to read or listen to something in English, and
perhaps produce a written or oral outcome to the activity in English, but
they can talk about the text, and about what they are going to produce,
in whatever language suits this purpose.
3 If this is the aim, given the design of the activity, there might not be a
need for close teacher monitoring. Teachers in large classes can see

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from a distance whether or not students are getting on with the work,
and assess what has been learnt by the task outcomes.
4 The texts can have many forms, from recordings of speech, or teachers
reading aloud for listening practice, to examples of grammar, to which
problems can be set4. Even a lecture can have a communicative
function, such as providing an oral text on which students can carry out
communicative information transfer activities.

Learning- Another area of misinterpretation surrounds the whole popular notion of

centredness learner-centredness. This concept is inherently problematic for TESEP
teachers who perceive it as meaning that they will have to relinquish
authority to allow for student autonomy. Especially within the state
education context, the learner is not the sole focus of what happens in the
classroom. Hutchinson and Waters' reminder that 'education is . . . a
compromise between the individual and society' (1984:108) makes much
more sense to TESEP teachers, who may well have less ability to cut
society out of the classroom. In English language classrooms in state
education, teachers, institutions, and the community as a whole are also
stakeholders in what happens in the classroom. It seems far more realistic
to see learning as a primary objective, to be achieved only after the
requirements of these stakeholders have been met—hence learning-
rather than learner-centredness.

Again, it is a misinterpretation that a communicative approach cannot be

designed to consider the requirements of these stakeholders. Hutchinson and
Waters go on to say that a communicative approach should be geared not
only to the students, but to 'all the parties concerned' (ibid.). This further
underlines the fact that the communicative approach should not be narrow at
all, but essentially adaptable to all the requirements of the classroom
situation within its wider institutional and social setting. 'Communicative'
does not therefore mean having students practising communication in pairs
or groups. It means making decisions, appropriate to the educational
environment, about whether or not, or how often to have pair or group work,
and about the lesson's focus—on speaking, reading, writing, grammar,
pronunciation, etc., none of which need be precluded in a communicative
approach. However, these must be principled decisions, based upon what is
currently known about how language is learnt. I shall say more about this in
the final section of this article.
Needs of state English language education 1
 The problem of The second problem connected with technology transfer is that TESEP
ownership teachers are largely recipients of a BANA technology that originates
elsewhere. This state of affairs can often be manifested by a surface
understanding of the technology. One reason for the communicative
approach being perceived as narrower than it ought to be is that, though
varied in approach and substance from the point of view of the BANA
initiators, it is received as 'established practice' by TESEP teachers who
have had no stake in its development5. The communicative approach can
thus take on the form of a rather abstract theory, divorced from the
realities of TESEP classrooms. Teachers who read the books and attend
the seminars and courses, once the peculiarities of the discourse of BANA

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science are overcome, will be able to articulate the basic concepts of the
technology, discussing and working it academically, finding it
professionally soothing to go through the motions of up-to-date talk.
However, this mastery of the theory will remain divorced from the reality
and practice of the classroom, where, as I have argued above, the
technology cannot really be applied6. There is then a danger that this
abstract theory will find its way to TESEP colleges of education, where it
may be taught as an academic subject, still with little connection with the
realities of the classroom.
The only way to close this gap between perceived theory and practice is to
acknowledge the realities of TESEP classrooms during the formation of
the technology itself. The gap arises because these realities are seen as
constraints to a BANA technology, and therefore left to the end, when
they need to be seen as the rationale for a TESEP technology7.
The notion of culture takes on an important role here. In English language
education, the term is often used within the context of 'culture profiling'
of students according to their national or regional traits—e.g. Arab
culture, Koranic culture, Japanese culture (see Valdes, 1986).
Characteristics based upon these traits have often been seen as constraints
to the ideals of classroom behaviour set by BANA technology. Their
descriptions thus tend to be BANA constructs which over-generalize and
stereotype TESEP personalities and blur and inhibit any real analysis of
classroom realities. Elsewhere I argue that it is much more useful to look
at smaller culture variables, such as institutional, student, and teacher
cultures, and at resourcing problems, which may derive from other than
national or regional boundaries (Holliday, 19918).

The narrowness A final factor which underpins the apparent inappropriacy of BANA
of second technology is the narrowness of second language acquisition research.
language Others have commented on its failure to tell us what we need to know
acquisition about what happens between students in real classroom situations (Breen,
research 1986; Allwright, 1988). Its value is that it addresses how the individual
learner learns language. The problem is that the learner is not really a
person in a real social setting, but rather an almost robotic entity whose
sole purpose for being in the classroom seems to be to learn language. To
help methodologies relate to the realities of TESEP classrooms it is
important to know not about learners but about pupils and students in real
Adrian Holliday
 classroom settings, where there may be many other influences on
language learning from the society outside as well as within the classroom
(Thorp, 1991; Young, 1987). We also need studies on the social affects
surrounding teacher behaviour in specific social settings, and on the
exigencies of institutions and wider educational environments.
Of course, research into this softer social area is more difficult to quantify
and to justify as a means of providing the accountability needed by an
increasingly competitive BANA professional group. Savignon
(1991:274) makes the point that 'researchers eager to establish SLA as a
worthy field of enquiry turned their attention to more narrow, quantitative
studies.' This seems to me to be research for BANA purposes9.

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Allwright's suggestion (1988:51) that we need instead to find out what
happens between people in the classroom directs our thoughts more
towards research for TESEP purposes.

Teachers are Savignon also reminds us, indirectly supporting the argument against a
the key purely learner-centred approach, that teachers too are very important
participants in the classroom. They possess a great deal of knowledge
about their students within a social context. It is with them that the
research necessary to find truly appropriate methodologies must lie. The
notion of teacher-oriented research for the purpose of developing
appropriate methodologies is gaining respectability (Allwright, 1992).
There are still, however, few published examples of this in TESEP
situations, Naidu et al. (1992) being a marked exception. The emphasis
for the TESEP community must be to reflect on and develop teaching
techniques to suit real classrooms, not techniques developed for
classrooms in distant lands.

Preserving the I do not wish to argue that there is no possibility for BANA technology to be
best of what has useful in the TESEP context, or that the only appropriate methodologies will
been achieved be those produced solely in TESEP contexts. However, instead of the
current, unacceptable situation of a one-way technology transfer based very
much on the perceived superiority of BANA products, it would be much
more realistic to have a market-place in which there would be an informed
exchange of technology (Hyde, 1993). Although in the short term much of
the production of English language teaching technology must remain within
BANA countries, BANA industry must learn from TESEP experience, to
make its products appropriate to TESEP needs. Nor am I against TESEP
teachers travelling to BANA institutions for professional development. As
well as providing quality training and development, a current irreplaceable
value of such institutions is the opportunity afforded to TESEP teachers to
broaden their professional perspectives through meeting colleagues from
other countries. However, the quality of training which such institutions can
provide will depend very much on how much experience they care to get
about TESEP situations, and how far their courses respond to this
experience.
A further caution to my argument is that basing appropriate
methodologies on local contexts does not necessarily mean ignoring the
Needs of state English language education 9
 strengths of BANA technology. Although it would be wrong to assume
that the BANA world has had a monopoly on modern language teaching
methodologies (Hyde, 1993), it is the case that adaptable, environment-
sensitive, communicative approaches, are the product of that part of
BANA technology, which has been informed by experience from a
variety of classroom situations. Indeed, this paper is very much influenced
by the experience of a particular group of BANA professionals who have
worked for many years on aid projects, learning about TESEP
classrooms—even though the effects of this experience have been
limited, have had little influence on the more popular form of the
technology described earlier in this paper, and have, perhaps, tended to

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report on 'problems' created by local attitudes and institutions, which are
seen as 'deficient' and which BANA technology must somehow
overcome.
The communicative revolution in English language teaching has taken
place and cannot be ignored. It acknowledges the undeniable fact that
students bring with them to the classroom a great deal of competence
which has to be addressed. I do not intend that my argument be used to
support those teachers who favour a supermarket-type eclectic approach,
where different methods and approaches are seen as a series of products
which can be picked off the shelf. The communicative approach has been
a development from previous methodologies; and further improvement
can only be achieved by further development, not by going back.
Received February 1993

Notes
1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 5 This may also be the case for BANA teachers who
have had no role in the generation of the approach,
1992 IATEFL conference in Lille. A wider but relatively less so than for the more distanced
discussion of the subject matter can be found in TESEP teachers.
Holliday (forthcoming).
6 This separation between theory and practice can be
2 For the sake of convenience, 'BANA' and 'TESEP' seen in the setting up of a 'hidden curriculum' by
will be used as adjectives and will therefore precede local teachers in curriculum projects (Kennedy,
nouns such as countries, personnel, technology, 1987:164; Holliday, 1990).
situations, etc.
7 This is reminiscent of the discussion surrounding
3 This principle of collaborative learning is founded the role of constraints in syllabus design (Swales,
partly on findings in group psychology and 1980; Bowers and Widdowson, 1986).
management (Wright, 1987:36-45) and partly on
second language acquisition research (Long and 8 For example, differences between BANA and
Porter, 1985). TESEP practice can be usefully seen in terms of
conflicting skills- and subject-oriented
4 Examples of communicative grammar activities professional-academic cultures (see also Holliday,
for classes of over 300 are described in Azer 1992).
(1990). Group work is used both as a means for the
students to be less dependent on the teacher, and to 9 A Moroccan English language educationalist cited
enable the teacher to watch and learn how the by Hyde (1992:3) as saying that English is really
students are getting on. The texts are short and can 'using "us" [the Moroccans] for special purposes'
be written on the blackboard. might not be so far from the truth.
10 Adrian Holliday
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Hyde, M. 1993. 'Are we using English for our and teacher education in Iran, Syria, and Egypt. His
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specific purposes?' Potential schizophrenia in the social aspects of technology transfer in English
Maghreb. Unpublished paper. Canterbury Christ language education. He has an MA in Linguistics for
Church College. ELT and a PhD from Lancaster University.

Needs of state English language education 11