应用语言学

Proficiency or the Native Speaker:

What are We Trying to Achieve in ELT?

There are two very different views of the goal of language teaching, the goal of the native speaker and the goal of a proficiency level. This paper examines both views, concluding that they are if necessity interrelated. This paper was written by Alan Davies. Alan analyzes the two goals for language teaching respectively. Then he compares proficiency with achievement and pointed out native speaker of a second language.

Alan argues that there are two very different views of the target or goal for language learning/ teaching, the first is the goal of native speakerhood; the second that of a predetermined level of proficiency. I want to point out that the “goal” in Alan’s paper means a long target, which should take a long time to achieve and it should be the final aim. It is neither the same with the target of one lesson for a few new words or a few sentence patterns nor the target of English teaching in high school for a high score in examination. So the “goal” in this paper means a lifelong target. The native speaker seems at first more obvious, less abstract. On the other hand, proficiency appears to be less easily graspable.

What do we mean by native speaker? The native speaker is often appealed to but difficult to track down. Tay(1982) points out two features usually appealed to as evidence for or against native speaker status are priority of learning and an broken oral tradition. Paikeday(1985) suggests that native speakerhood consists of two unconnected factors, that is mother tongue acquisition and proficiency. Alan gives an example: In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Caliban, half monster, half man, complains to Prospero: You taught me language, and the profit on’t. Is I know how to curse…Alan pose the question that is Caliban a native speaker of English? Later, he gives a partial answer: he is a native speaker of his own code and he can give any name to that code or language.

Alan also gives an example of the problems related to the native speaker identity that can arise in real-life encounters, which suggests, incidentally, that it is possible to

perform too well in a foreign language and that a foreign accent may be a good badge to display. This implication of such an observation for language teaching seems to differ for second language teaching and foreign language teaching. Then he poses another question: whether an L2 learner can become a native speaker of the target language? This question is related with the characteristics of native speaker. Alan first suggests that the native speaker is commonly characterized in the following six ways: childhood acquisition, intuitions about the idiolect, intuitions about the standard language, fluent spontaneous discourse, creativity and interpret and translate. All except the first one are contingent issues that L2 learners can become a native speaker of a target language. Given the interlingual differences and the lack of agreement about norms that certainly occur among all such groups, it does appear that the second language learner has a difficult but not an impossible task to become a native speaker of a target language.

As for the proficiency goal, we first need to get acquired that what proficiency is. Proficiency can be defined in a number of ways: a general type of knowledge of or competence in the use of a language; the ability to do something specific in the language and the performance as measured by a particular testing procedure. There is now considerable overlap between the notion of language proficiency and the term communicative competence. Debates about the nature of language proficiency have influenced the design of language tests. One way of clarifying the notion of proficiency is to examine what it is not. To this end, the tradition of distinguishing clearly between proficiency is a convenient one. Proficiency is general, achievement specific and local. Proficiency is theoretical or theory-based; achievement is dependent through the syllabus and materials on some proficiency construct.

The increasing use of proficiency scales in a language assessment has both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side they are authentic examples of language in use; on the negative side it must surely be pointed out that all test (not just indirect or semi-direct ones) lack authenticity. What we always measure is achievement. Our test instruments are always context-sensitive. Achievement is never proficiency, only an attempt to iconize proficiency. Proficiency scales are simulations,