A book revisited: Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching

I am writing a book this summer, and this morning I intuitively reached along the row of books I set up on my desk months ago — twenty or thirty I expected to need for my writing, and had not, until today, opened. I picked out Christopher Brumfit's Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching. I first read it in the late 1980s, when I was trying to articulate my sense that education and language teaching had to be understood together. Working through it then was laborious but rewarding, particularly the philosophical stance Brumfit takes at the outset. I have looked at it periodically since, and it has always struck me as a useful map of communicative language teaching.

What struck me today in particular was how obvious it is — that the three fields he holds together are the very three I have been trying to synthesise in ways that make a practical difference. As Brumfit says in his preface, the book is "deliberately synthesising educational, philosophical and linguistic scholarship." I have sought to synthesise these theoretically and practically, within the particular context of a Japanese university and of English education in Japan more broadly.

Working in the field over forty years as a practitioner while holding these interests has made it clear to me that a broader map is needed than the one he could set out for readers who are already theoretically inclined. My long experience as a practitioner with a strong theoretical inclination has given me the ability to begin to articulate in practice and theory what I think Brumfit was reaching for. The book is excellent — clear, deep, focused — but too remote from where teachers work, from the world of actual teaching, administration and planning, to reach them. It served me. It does not serve the people I want to serve.

He makes clear who he is writing for in a remark from the same preface. In this book, he says, he has cut much of the apparatus from the doctoral thesis on which it is based. But he has kept "enough scholarly apparatus to enable critics to attack me." It is an honest instinct, and one reason I am drawn to him — the willingness to leave the means of disagreement in place. But it assumes a particular reader: one equipped to follow the argument and, if it fails, to refute it. A reader already inside the philosophical and educational conversation. The readers I have in mind need not be.

What is needed is not a more accessible version of Brumfit's scholarly approach. It is a clear vision of the choices that are already being enacted in educational practice. There are both unconscious choices governing current practice and choices that cannot be seen at all with the maps of the field that are currently available.

On a philosophical level Brumfit synthesises three fields — education, philosophy, language learning — and does it well. Accuracy and fluency were chosen by Brumfit as his subtitle, and this critical variable is widely taken for granted today as being of central importance in language learning. Even learners find it a useful way to think about what they are doing: the pull between reaching for the right form and being understood. Teachers naturally find it useful too.

But it is a variable of language performance. The critical variables of whole-person education are not identified in the book. When dignity and cultivation of the individual are at the centre, a number of distinctions come into view. They are not variables of language performance but rather of the quality of experience: thinking and feeling, doing and noticing, self and others, self-direction and imposed direction. Nor are they refinements or offshoots of accuracy and fluency. They respond to the question of what the person needs.

Brumfit once came up to me after a conference presentation I had just given, and we sat down for a chat. He thought the learner corpus project I was working on might dovetail with his wife's research into French teaching. He died not long after this conversation, the only time we spoke together. I would have enjoyed more such conversations. Looking closely at his book again today, I can see that he had a very intelligent interest in the terrain that I am now attempting to map.