Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1980

a second language or a foreign language is in trying to find an area which is a very real communication need of the person, to emphasize whether or not the message got across, and not whether or not you were totally accurate like a native speaker in producing the English language. This shift of emphasis has led in recent years to the rise of the communicative approach to second language learning and teaching. W e have moved from an emphasis on the form of language to the function of language. W e are attempting to adopt here at The Chinese University a modified form of the communicative approach. What do our students need? H ow can we design programmes which meet those immediate communication needs? What do our students have to say and write? These are the questions we are asking. This does not mean that what I am saying is forget about how people talk, or forget about accuracy. The communicative approach to learning a language is in fact nothing really new; many people have been using it for a long time. It is a revolt against the very formal way of learning a language by learning the grammatical forms, by over-emphasizing how things are expressed. Q. Has the communicative approach become a trend in TESL? A. It is one of the most promising developments that has taken place in our discipline in the past ten years. But we must beware of labelling the approaches to teaching in a simplified way. What the communicative approach really means is drawing our attention as language teachers to the importance of what is being said and what people are talking about. What they talk about, and their need to talk about things strongly influence how well they learn a language. In a sense, we are following this dictate in The Chinese University in saying: what do our students really need to be able to say, let us teach them that. W e put great emphasis on the subject matter that they have to be able to use. Q. What do you think about the standards of our students? A. For an educator, that is not a real question, although this is what everybody wants to know. You get many people who will say, ‘Oh, such and such a person cannot speak English very well'. As an educator in a university, the question we ask is, ‘Can we help this person to better most skills in communication?' There is a wide range of proficiency in English at this University but we do not attempt to measure whether they are bad, good or indifferent. Our task is to try to help everybody to improve, and this is true of native speakers as well as speakers of English as a second language. Students in American universities can be helped to improve their communication skills in English even though their mother-tongue is English. So, too, we can help our students of The Chinese University to be more effective communicators in English. Our task is to accept them at the level of proficiency that they come in and to improve that level. Many people will say our students are very good at English, but that is rather the same as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant in Spain saying 'Your Cantonese is very good' when I only know one or two phrases. What do you need English for and how well you can fulfill that need——that is what standards are. To us, we will not judge our students on how well they will perform at a cocktail party at Buckingham Palace because that is not their real need. W e are only concerned with how well they can use textbooks to obtain knowledge. But still, we will not judge them as to how well their English is because we cannot set our criteria for saying how well. W e believe as educators that we can always improve them and that is our task. And even the best of our students can improve in some way and it is m y job to try to do it. Q. At present, are there students who are handicapped in their studies by the lack of proficiency in English? A. It is difficult for me to say. I believe that there would be some when I look at the difficult texts that they have to read in English and I know from m y teaching of first-year students how efficiently they will be able to read those texts. It would take them a long, long time to read those texts and to make sense out of them. If they can only read those texts by poring over them for hour after hour, then can I help them to read those texts in a much shorter time? If so, I would have improved their skill in English and make them able to spend more time on studying their subject rather than concentrating on their English. As teachers, we assume that everyone can be improved and our task is to try to improve them towards making them better students. 25