178 Advances in spoken discourse analysis
for control offer a stark and comparatively simple discourse structure. But it
is precisely because the tight control in the sort of lessons I analysed fails to
reflect the complexities of discourse and language use outside the classroom
that teachers are turning towards communicative activities in their lessons.
The distinction that (J.) Dave Willis (1990) makes in his book The Lexical
Syllabus between three different types of classroom activity is useful here.
I quote:
The first two, citation and simulation, both focus on language form. The
purpose of citation activities is to model target utterances for the learners.
Teachers have a range of devices for this. The important thing, as we
have seen, is that students are required to respond to a teacher elicitation
with an utterance which is appropriate in form. So Socoop’s perfectly
acceptable sentence:
‘Yes, I am, er, father of four children’
was rejected by the teacher because it did not display the form the teacher
wanted, a verb with a gerund as object. Any of the following would have
been acceptable:
‘I love/like/enjoy/dislike/hate/can’t stand being a father’ irrespective
of whether it happened to be true or not.
(p. 57)Following the system of analysis detailed in this chapter, the ‘citation language’,
i.e. the target utterances, would be classified as Inner.
Simulation activities include activities such as role plays, and writing
activities such as letters of complaint, where students pretend or imagine
themselves to be characters in a given situation, and act out a situation or
produce a piece of writing that bears a resemblance to reality but is not in
actual fact informing anyone of anything new, or communicating in the true
sense of the word. To quote again from the same source:
I call activities of this kind simulation activities because, although there
is an appearance of communication, the real purpose is to display control
of language form. Students adopt for example the roles of doctor and
patient simply in order to show that they have ‘learned’ expressions like:
‘What’s the problem?’
and
‘I’ve got a pain in my back.’
(p. 58)Role play activities like this could be considered as ‘pseudo-interaction’.
This interaction would be classified for the most part as Inner Independent
and would most likely follow one or more DVA exchanges. Student and
teacher language used while setting up, organizing, commenting on or even
digressing from the activity, e.g. deciding how to play a role, reacting to the
way someone was acting, would be classified as Outer.