Language Teaching Through Gricean Glasses

Abstract

Foreign language learners resemble readers of literature in that they must use their imagination and creativity in constantly adjusting and readjusting their interpretations of opaque and shifting meanings. Irrespective of that fact, the popular aim of formal language teaching is to establish unambiguous reference, disregarding any benefit that may come from a particular understanding or, in Kramsch’s words, from the ‘profit of distinction’ (Kramsch, 2001: 16). In theory, intake allows for variety (Ellis, 1994: ch. 7), but in practice ‘ECP’ (my coinage: English for Communicative Purposes) still advocates impersonal clarity, appropriateness primarily based on the communicative function. One could even say that the language teaching that overemphasizes the communicative function against the expressive and the integrative functions paves the way for some kind of advanced Pidgin, a language to do business in. What can the washback effect be of a testing requirement which holds that the reading task should not require imagination or creativity on the part of the candidate? No tolerance of ambiguity, no extensive reading for pleasure, no ‘to me it says’: the target language ego is that of a preferably globalized professional, ‘stale as railway station sandwiches’ and ‘sober as Sunday’, to borrow from Dylan Thomas.¹