Language diversity and multilingual communication

Language Diversity

Crawford begins the article by highlighting problems associated with second language instruction in American classrooms. According to the statistics cited most approaches used in these classrooms are inadequate to provide students with the necessary skills to communicate in the target language outside of the classroom. The reason for this is a lack of focus on communication skills, combined with an inflated focus on form rather than function. Despite efforts to improve upon this by methods such as the total immersion approach and the audiolingual method, results are still shown to be poor. Chomsky, Krashen and Cummins's theories are shown to have revolutionized language acquisition theories, and thus also language teaching methods. Furthermore Crawford shows that a child's inherent feelings about his or her own culture, and consequently about the culture represented by the target language, have a significant impact upon second language learning. It is then suggested that children be taught to honor and respect their own culture, so that the native language can be used as a successful basis for second language acquisition.

It is specifically interesting to me how the adamant criticism received by the above theorists have not been specifically addressed. It appears that the language acquisition community of academics are more interested in promoting their own pioneering ideals than in addressing the needs of language learners. Addressing such needs would mean not only criticizing the newest of theories, but also debating these until improvements or confirmations are arrived at that would benefit learners.

The situation explained in the article appears to be counter-productive in terms of effective language teaching in schools. Instead of merely criticizing, evidence should be taken into account and testing should be done to either confirm or negate the effectiveness of existing theories. Also, the theorists criticized should address the specific issues raised. Only then can true progress be expected in this very important area.