Interpretation / 162
5.6 Conclusion: interaction In the Classroon
5.6.1 The development of L2 oral competence
Texts of dialogues between adults and children used for classroom oral
practice in L2 have been examined to see to what extent they reflect
patterns prevalent in adult-child interaction at home. Their setting,
topics and the purpose were found to be consonant with the out-of-school
experience of children in rural settings, but discourse patterns in the
structure and process of interaction were found to he discrepant in a
crucial aspect of communication: the cooperative negotiation of meaning.
Dialogue Texts do not represent samples of genuine communication because
speakers do not employ their usual communicative strategies to construct
meaning nor make use of turns and moves to sustain interaction as they
would do in more natural settings. The contexts of Dialogue Texts are not
likely to motivate talk, in that the Sociolingulstic conditions for
communication are not adequate.
Texts that appear more concerned with the medium than the message are
common in language teaching materials, and need not be a cause for great
concern in syllabuses adopting a coherent grammatical approach favouring
reading and translation, ɪt is when a 'communicative* approach is
espoused, which stresses the need for oral competence and fluency, that
problems arise if discourse and text in teaching materials do not match.
As long as they are presented as models of 'natural' Interactions, texts
should simply be records of discourse <see page 36 >. The pitfalls of a
language methodology which claims to teach language as and for
CU
communication without accepting the full implications of such position
are discussed in Vlddowson (1978, 1984).