Authors

Pavel Gudoshnikov¹;  ¹ University of Leeds, UK

Discussion

While the communicative classroom is the best way to impart communicative proficiency, the arguments for this classroom being physically located on a UK campus are weakening as we speak. One way to guarantee the continued survival of university language departments in the UK is to focus on what universities are traditionally good at: work with texts. More specifically, I advocate giving a central role to various activities involving work with adapted texts. Current technology makes it possible to produce such texts quite quickly and from a broad variety of materials. Consequently, we no longer have to rely on the mostly literary graded readers that are already in print. This approach allows us to make the content of language practice more intellectually engaging and better tailored to the students' interests. It also allows for much closer integration between the language and culture sides of undergraduate programmes. The other thing I advocate is actively pushing our students in the direction of more independent research into the meaning, acceptability, and aptness of larger units of language (i.e. phrasal rather than lexemic). Again, current technology makes this comparatively easy. The immediate advantage is that the learners' written output becomes more native-like. More broadly, this approach promotes greater learner autonomy and fosters a more collegial relationship with the teacher.