Brumfit argues that linguistics is far from the onlydriving force in the real world, since ‘… motives areat least as important as linguistics’ (p. 175).Language is too important and ubiquitous to be leftto the linguists. There follows a complex discussionof post-modern critiques, and how linguisticsshould respond to them. How do we deal with ‘… the paradox of communicating about theimpossibility of communication?’ (p. 182). He nonethe less approves a ‘weak’ form of the post-moderncritique. ‘Constantly concerning ourselves withclarifying what is shared and what is unique abouthuman experience demands a willingness toproblematize and critique.’ (p. 184). His conclusionis that … ‘applied linguistics needs … a plurality ofapproaches.’ (p. 186).

This is not an easy book to read, partly because ofits ambitious range. There are many diversestrands which do not always splice into a rope. Thearguments are tightly organized, but the hinges aresometimes loose. The book also makes more thanaverage demands on the reader’s syntactic tenacityand discoursal ingenuity. This is compounded bythe public expression of the author’s own internalconflicts and exploration of paradoxes.

This is, however, an enormously rewarding book.What unifies it is the author’s passionately-heldbeliefs, which surface both in the matter and themanner of the arguments. For the record, theseinclude a belief in rational, dialectic argument, indemocratic, public discussion, in accountability; abelief that language is not a discrete entity removedfrom worldly contact or inquiry from disciplinesother than linguistics; a belief in the value oftheoretical and empirical enquiry; a belief thatreality is complex, but that we have a duty toengage with this complexity; and a belief in thee¤ectiveness of education as a force for socialgood. And a belief that it is important to documentthe past, in order to protect the present from folly.

ReferencesEllis. R. 1997. The Study of Second LanguageAcquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Graddol. D. 1997 The Future of English. London: TheBritish Council.

The reviewerAlan Maley divides his time between the Institutefor English Language Education at AssumptionUniversity, Bangkok, where he directs the post-graduate programme, and freelance writing andconsultancy work. From 1963–88 he worked for theBritish Council in Yugoslavia, Ghana, Italy, France,

PR China, and India. From 1988–93 he wasDirector-General of the Bell Educational Trust,Cambridge, and from 1993–98, Senior Fellow at theNational University of Singapore. He has publishedover 30 books on ELT, and is Series Editor of theOxford Resource Books for Teachers.Email: mteaml@au.ac.th

Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom

Tricia Hedge

Oxford University Press 2000, 447pp, £15.40

isbn: 0 19 4421724

This is a worthy, and weighty, book which aims to‘encourage reflection and the building of a criticalperspective’ (p. 3), in order to make teachers think.It takes the view that this will be achieved byrelating the knowledge base derived from variousdisciplines—education, applied linguistics,sociolinguistics, and pragmatics, for example—tothe practical business of classroom teaching andlearning. The author sets about this not in apatronizing way, as she states in her Introduction(p.2) that ‘The discussion is not embedded in arationale based on the belief that teachers sit at thefeet of educationists and applied linguists waitingfor ideas to drop, like crumbs, to sustain them’.This work is the product of a career spent not justin knowing the relevant theories, but also inlistening to teachers, and creating constructivedialogue between theory and practice.

Although Teaching and Learning in the LanguageClassroom is a daunting 447 pages long, it is writtenin a fluent and straightforwardly readable style, anddivided clearly and logically into readily digestiblelumps. It is, from the outset, clearly of themainstream communicative canon; it does notexplore the wilder shores of our profession—thereader will not find ‘concordancing’ or ‘neuro-linguistic programming’ in the index. Nor is theauthor by any means a slave to theoretical fashions;she takes her perspective starting from the 1970sforwards, and does not discard a useful idea orinsight just because it is no longer new. The book ismore summative than speculative, engaging thereader—the practitioner—to apply the relevantresearch, and the appropriate theories, in their ownways and in their own working context.

There are four main sections: ‘A framework forteaching and learning’, ‘Teaching the languagesystem’, ‘Developing the language skills’, and‘Planning and assessing learning’. Each section

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begins with a series of questions which address therange of issues to be discussed, followed by anintroductory task. There is also a series ofdiscussion topics and projects, and a list of furtherreading, at the end of each section and chapter. Itbecomes evident that this is not so much a bookabout English Language Teaching as a tool forteacher education. Hedge always prefers to pose aquestion rather than to lay down the ELT law, as herintended audience is composed of teachers(teaching adolescents and adults) who can readilydraw on their classroom experience, and willalready have encountered most of the relevantissues in their work context.

The first chapter in ‘A framework for teaching andlearning’ is entitled ‘Learners and learning,classrooms and contexts’. It seeks to relate whathas been learnt about learning, learners, andlanguage use in relation to materials andmethodology for the classroom. Theories oflearning and learning processes provide thefoundation for the teacher’s consideration ofmaterials and methodology. Hedge observes that‘Good teachers have always taken a positivelycritical approach to appraising their work’ (p. 39),and this section examines the relationship betweentheory and research and professional development.

The next chapter looks at the communicativeapproach to language teaching and learning. It isaxiomatic in this work that the communicativeapproach is the established methodology; indeed,to some it may already seem old hat. Yet this is avery competent survey of the principles andimplications of the communicative approach, andit does the practitioner no harm to be remindedwhat they are. As Hedge points out, there are manymisconceptions regarding the communicativeapproach, for example, that accuracy and grammardo not matter. This is hardly surprising, as for yearsnow the word ‘communicative’ has been stuck onalmost every teaching product, rather as food andother goods are labelled ‘eco-friendly’ or ‘green’. Itis useful to be reminded of what the real thing is.

Hedge concludes this first section by looking atlearner autonomy and learner training. This is ameasured and thoughtful discussion of the field,suggesting rather than proselytizing,recommending that teachers guide learnerstowards di¤erent forms of autonomous learning indi¤erent educational and cultural contexts. Theabsence of any discussion of state of the arttechnologies may be surprising, but the authorevidently chooses to concentrate on the learner andlearning processes.

The second section, ‘Teaching the languagesystem’, is conventionally structured in chapters onvocabulary and grammar.

It is gratifying to find the acquisition of vocabularytreated with such prominence. Communicativemethodology can stress teaching skills to thedetriment of teaching vocabulary; the learnercannot exercise their language skills if they have notyet acquired suªcient language items. Hedge(p.110) quotes Wilkins (1972: 109) as declaring that‘Linguists have remarkably little to say aboutvocabulary, and one can find very few studies whichcould be of any practical interest for languageteachers’. Since then, of course, we have had theCollins Cobuild (Collins 1987) dictionary, and anexplosion in corpora, but their practical value forlanguage teachers remains debatable: Jane andDavid Willis’ splendid Cobuild English Course didnot bring about a revolution in syllabus design andcommercial publishing. Rather, aspects of thelexical syllabus are gradually being incorporated inmore recent textbooks. Once again, the authordoes not dwell on the high-tech aspects of lexicalresearch so much as on the learning processes,and their implications for teaching methodology.Hedge emphasizes that teachers should use arange of methods and activities to stimulate theacquisition of vocabulary, and concludes sternlyand pragmatically that ‘learners need to take on aconsiderable measure of responsibility for theirown vocabulary development’ (pp.138–9)—exhorting students to ‘learn the words’—but inclass as well of out of class.

Grammar, like vocabulary, has su¤ered a period ofneglect not just within the communicativemovement but also at the hands of its immediatepredecessors and allied methodologies insecondary school English teaching. Many Britishstudents growing up in the 1960s only learnt formalgrammar if they studied a foreign language. Hedgeattributes the unpopularity of grammar in EnglishLanguage Teaching to Krashen’s (1982) notion ofnaturally acquired grammar, but the reviewerconsiders it to have been part of a generaldisa¤ection across the various language teachingdisciplines. In part, that distaste for the formalteaching of grammar arose because the methodsand materials used were didactic, repetitive,tedious, and—all too often—just plain bad. Thegood news is that the pendulum has swung back inthe last decade towards foregrounding pedagogicgrammar, and that the materials and methods havebeen much improved.

Hedge succeeds in examining the processes of

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grammar acquisition while judiciously avoiding thefearsome technical jargon, or rather jargons, thatspecialists indulge in. This is no mean feat.Teachers operating in an international context mustbe at least grammatically bilingual in British andAmerican terminologies. At the level immediatelybeyond the pedagogical grammar, of course, thethicket of jargon becomes impenetrable. But Hedgeremains resolutely orientated towards the teacherand the learner: in spite of all the theories, sheargues that ‘for beginner and elementary studentsthe grammar component of a syllabus is usuallyselected on the basis of received wisdom’ (p. 170).This is all very well, but it does beg the question ofwhose wisdom, how it is imbibed, and whether it iswise. Textbooks at this level almost always over-teach the present continuous, which is not muchused as a present tense; and ‘any’ is taught as theinterrogative of ‘some’, when ‘Have you got some…?’ is entirely acceptable. She concludes that thereis almost too much theory, or too many theories, topermit a carved-in-stone perspective for pedagogicgrammars, and so advises teachers to ‘chooseeclectically’ (p. 179). This may seem adisappointingly conventional piece of advice, but itis as inevitable as it pragmatic: most good teachersare too sensible and too sceptical to be zealots inthe cause of one grammatical fad or another.

The third section, ‘Developing the language skills’,maintains a conventional pattern in approachingthe subject in the order ‘Reading’, ‘Listening’,‘Speaking’, and ‘Writing’. Hedge has alreadywarned us in her Introduction that this ‘traditional’approach is a ‘convenience’ which serves us as aframework for ‘organizing’ (sic) ‘what in practice isa complex of interrelated aspects’ (this is probablythe most graceless utterance in an otherwise lucidlywritten book). At this point, we have to confrontthat ‘received wisdom’ bugaboo again:practitioners, such as, for example the reviewer,may question the convenience of that particularparadigm. Writing courses often involve moreemphasis on reading input and discussion thanactual writing, just as reading courses may centreon classroom discussion, presentations, and reportwriting or reviewing. Meanwhile, extensive readingis likely to take place outside the classroom, andbetter speaking and listening activities may occurin Reading and Writing classes than in thedesignated Speaking and Listening slot.

This said, the discussion that follows is thoroughand interesting. Chapter 6, on reading, does notprovide an answer to the ine¤able question of howto make learners in non-reading cultures, and

cultures which are becoming increasingly based inoracy, want to read—not least on the Internet. Right now, outside of teacher mandated tasks, thereviewer’s students, for example, engage in readingand writing almost exclusively from the Internet.

In Chapter 7, Hedge argues that listening has beenpopularly described in ELT literature as ‘neglected’and reminds us that in everyday communication ‘9per cent is devoted to writing, 16 per cent toreading, 30 per cent to speaking, and 45 per cent tolistening’ (p. 228). While one wonders how suchround numbers are derived, two points must bemade here: firstly, that communicativemethodology is essentially discussion-based—i.e.it is interactive at the level of speaking andlistening, and secondly, that competence inspeaking and listening varies enormously from oneculture to another. Practitioners who have taughtmixed groups of Arab males and Japanese females,for example, will readily concur.

If we have strayed into speaking here it is becausethese two skills are impossible to untangle. Amajority of users of the English language do notneed to write, apart from occasional form-filling. Itis possible to be a fluent speaker-listener withoutfeeling the need to read, or while remainingfunctionally illiterate. Indeed, 10% of Britons comeinto this category. But unless the speaker is aterminal windbag, and the listener psychologicallydamaged, as Hedge puts it: ‘in the world outsidethe classroom (listening) is often participatory’ (p.255). For ‘often’ read ‘always’, or the listener isprobably not listening after all. The key to honinglistening skills, says Hedge, is confidence, andwithout joining in, that confidence cannot grow.

Hedge provides a useful and understandable guideto the theories of speaking skills, at the point whereanthropology in the form of conversational analysisintersects with language teaching and learning.Some readers might feel surprised that such animportant component of language behaviourshould be placed third in the order of languageskills: what happened to the primacy of oracy? Butthat is the way of received wisdom.

In Chapter 9, Hedge argues that the teaching ofwriting has undergone considerable change—or asshe puts it, ‘dramatic departures from traditionalapproaches’—in the 1990s. Essentially, thisinvolves leaving behind model texts and ‘practisinglanguage points’, which are essentially rehearsingfossilized grammar exponents, and moving on to‘learning to write through writing’ (p. 301), i.e.‘learning by doing’, with the support of other

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learners and the teacher. This is evidently anobjective devoutly to be wished, but would it not bewonderful if there were a halfway sensible textbookto support this endeavour? At this point, theory letsus down. There are a number of excellent booksabout writing, some of which Hedge cites at theend of the chapter (though, strangely, not Tribble(1996), but very few that are of any use in theclassroom.

Hedge provides a good insight into the benefits ofprocess writing and brings writing back into theclassroom, where teacher and peer support canbolster the learner’s e¤orts. Gone, one hopes, arethe days when the learner toiled unaided out of theclass, with only a hazy idea of the purpose of thetask in hand, and received their work back from theteacher, covered in red ink, and long after they hadany spark of interest in the subject. Writing todayshould be more interactive, more collaborativethan of yore.

Hedge’s conclusion puts the case for anincremental approach to writing methodologies ,moving from process writing in the initial stagesthrough an increased awareness of audience, as thelearner increases in competence and maturity, andthen on, at an advanced level, to a contrastiveunderstanding of di¤ering writing conventions in,say, English for Academic Purposes or businessreport writing.

The final section discusses the implementation ofthe issues and theories discussed in the first threesections of the book. Hedge encapsulates the last40 years of ELT course design as structural duringthe 1960s and 70s, communicative in the 1980s,task-based in the 1990s (which will surpriseparticipants in the Bangalore project), and inclusiveof much of the above on the cusp of the newmillennium. She leads us through needs analysis,design, and content, all the way to assessment andevaluation. Insuªcient space is given to projectwork, and its description as ‘less formal thanclassroom-based work’ is somewhat odd: the moreautonomy a teacher gives a learner, the greater theneed to specify objectives and procedures—thesecannot necessarily be clarified in the classroom,since essentially, at this point, the student will havegone beyond the institution of learning.

Hedge’s conclusion to this section accentsassessment, not just of the student, but of thecourse itself as a two-way process. She stresses theimportance of ‘evaluating our assessments’,deciding whether they are useful along the linesthat Yalden (1983, 1987) proposes in her model ofcontinuous assessment and the revision of a

syllabus (although she does not draw on Yaldensignificantly). The emphasis on assessment isstrong in this last section of the book, but this isassessment see as a ‘positive, informative, and fairexperience’ (p. 396).

Does the book achieve its declared aim, which is to‘encourage reflection and the building of a criticalperspective’? Most emphatically, yes. This is theproduct, as I have said above, of a career in teachereducation, and its breadth is as impressive as itssheer common sense. If the intended reader—thein-service teacher of English as a second or foreignlanguage—would, if they kept company with thebook from introduction to appendix, they wouldreceive a thorough grounding in English LanguageTeaching theory and practice from the 70s to thepresent day. And the mature practitioner, I havefound, can use this work as a reference book—thiscould be the bedrock of a teacher educationprogramme, or something to reach for as amanager of teaching programmes or an ELTpundit.

My only caveat would be that in eschewing themore speculative reaches of English LanguageTeaching/Applied Linguistics, Hedge omits seriousdiscussion of how, for example, new educationaltechnologies will impact upon English LanguageTeaching. For the mid-career TEFLer there are fewsurprises, and too much received wisdom.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with receivingwisdom, is there?

ReferencesAzar, B. 1981. Understanding and Using EnglishGrammar. Englewood Hills: New Jersey.Krashen, S. 1982. Principles and Practice in SecondLanguage Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.Murphy, R. 1994. English Grammar in Use: A Self-Study Reference. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.Sinclair, J. (ed.). 1987. Collins Cobuild Dictionary.London: Collins.Tribble, C. 1996. Writing. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.Wilkins, D. 1972. Linguistics in Language Teaching.London: Edward Arnold.Willis, J. and D. 1988. Cobuild English Course 1.London: Collins.Yalden, J. 1983. The Communicative Syllabus:Evolution, Design and Implementation. Oxford:Pergamon Press.Yalden, J. 1987. Principles of Course Design forLanguage Teaching. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

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The reviewerGeorge Kershaw is an author and lecturer in thedepartment of English Language and Literature atthe United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, UAE.Email: gkershaw@emirates.net.ae

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