English Language Teaching in its Social Context

COMPREHENSION AND PRODUCTION STRATEGIES 87deal of the time. Since it is meanings which are primary, as long as the speaker feels thatcommunication is proceeding satisfactorily, the need for precise syntax is diminished. Thiscontrasts very clearly with the younger language learner who has much less schematic andcontextual knowledge available personally, and who is also much less able to imagine whathis or her interlocutor has by way of knowledge in each of these areas. As a result, the childhas much less scope to take syntactic liberties and short cuts.We are now facing quite a changed picture regarding the usefulness (or lack of it) ofconversation for language development.There is less need, for the older learner, to producecomplete and well-formed utterances, because most interactions require collaborativeconstruction of meaning rather than solipsistic party pieces. Further, when communicativeproblems occur, the strategies second language learners adopt are not likely to push forwardunderlying system change in any cumulative way. Finally, there is the issue that, even ifconversation were by means of complete, well-formed utterances, and attempts to copewith communicative problems were useful, there is still the likelihood that attempts to copewith ongoing processing demands would not allow the learner to capitali7e upon such atemporary breakthrough, establish a memory trace of it, and use it in the future.ConclusionThe central theme of this chapter has been that syntax has fragile properties. Normalcommunication is pervaded by the pressures of processing language in real time. Wecomprehend and produce language not by exhaustively analysing and computing (althoughwe can do these things if we have to, for reasons of creativity or precision) but instead bydrawing shamelessly on probabilistic strategies which work effectively enough (given thesupport and potential for retrieval of miscommunication that discourse provides) atconsiderable speed of processing. We rely on time-creating devices, context, predictionskills, elliptical language, and a range of similar performance factors to reduce the processingload that we have to deal with during conversation. And the older we become (up to a point)the more adept we can be at exploiting these resources.The central point is that language use, in itself, does not lead to the development of ananalytic knowledge system since meaning distracts attention from form. But clearlycommunication does proceed, so one can infer that speakers draw upon other non-analyticknowledge systems which, one assumes, have qualities relevant to real-time communication.Note1 In one sense, of course, this point is addressed through the distinction betweencommunication and learning strategies. The former emphasizes solutions to immediatecommunication problems, while the latter are concerned with activities which are intendedby the learner to lead to longer-term development. In some cases this distinction is clear,as when, for example, a communication strategy deals with (say) how to express an ideawhen a lexical item is missing (and has no lasting effect) or when a learner deliberatelyorgani7es a list of words for memorization, not attempting to use these words immediately,but instead working towards the extension of an underlying vocabulary. But the centralissue is that one can also regard the operation of many communication strategies ascontaining learning potential, for example when a useful communication strategy becomesproceduralized and so reusable. It is precisely this type of communication strategy that isrelevant in this section.