APPROACH TO LANGUAGE LEARNING AND LANGUAGE TEACHING Lita Brusick Johnson The limits of my language mean the limits

of my world. In their daily work, ESL teachers may not encounter philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein who made this observation about language. However, they do encounter day-in and day out adult learners who display an analogous practical and often specific motivation for their learning: to reduce the limitations that a lack of English places on their ability to engage in their communities, their places of employment, and the wider world. This motivation can also be expressed more positively: these learners are seeking to expand fields of life in which they can confidently, effectively, and meaningfully engage. If students are to meet their goals, language teaching must include far more than activities that assist them to acquire vocabulary and understand grammatical rules, though this is indeed important. Language learning and thus, language teaching has a wider goal: that learners achieve communicative competence, which includes both linguistic competence (use of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary) and sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competencies. Together these interconnected competencies enable learners to communicate and construct meaning in contexts of their own choosing. However, once teacher and students are in the classroom, the implications of the communicative competence goal are not abstract. They are played out in the common space the learning space that students and teachers construct together, all bringing into that space knowledge and experience that contribute to the learning process. I believe that this learning process is well served by an intentionally studentcentered approach to communicative second-language teaching, an approach that commits teachers to: careful, ongoing assessment of students needs and interests and the creation of meaningful activities and tasks that are in alignment with these wherever possible, using authentic material to teach language forms. (Reference: Your Story, My Story project conceptualization and design, under the Project tab.) providing such learning opportunities in ways that scaffold new learning on what students have mastered, reinforcing learning across the four language skill areas. (Reference Textbook Adaptation section, under Content Writing tab.) enhancing learning and thinking skills that build upon the strengths students bring into the classroom and that enable students to, wherever possible, take control of their own learning. (Reference project design, noted above, and Curriculum Research Paper, under Content Writing tab.) Students production of speech and writing in increasingly less controlled and more complex ways is a critical aspect of language learning that enhances communicative competence. Teachers bring to the common learning space deep knowledge about the English language and how it is used; their instruction helps students understand the meaning of vocabulary words and elements of syntax and

grammar. But the preponderance of a teachers work is encouraging, coaching, and creating opportunities for learners to practice the forms in controlled ways and then, as quickly as possible, to use them repeatedly in authentic ways to communicate meaning, to the point where these element are automatized and incorporated into learners developing language systems. (Reference Textbook Adaptation, under Content Writing tab; and various lesson plans, under Lesson Plan tab.) Paul Nation (2007) suggests that learners benefit from language courses that weave together into an instructional whole four equal strands of opportunities for students: (1) to receive meaning-focused input, (2) to produce meaning-focused speech and writing, (3) to focus on language forms, and (4) to develop their speaking and writing fluency. I believe that this approach is both sound and workable in the classroom. It provides a conceptual and practical framework for teachers to deal intentionally with the inherent tension between accuracy and fluency, while creating opportunities for learners to produce language, which is at the heart of their language learning. The truism does, in fact, hold for teaching English as a second language: nothing is simple. There is no one clearly marked path that students can follow to become communicatively competent. The complexities of language learning and language teaching mirror the amazing and quite wonderful complexities of human cognition and communication, which reflect both differences between individuals and fundamental patterns that underlie such individual differences. Approaching these complexities with a combination of awe-filled amazement and analytical intensity enables teachers to avoid imposing on students a one-size-fits-all language learning plan even as they point to patterns that are common to all and share specific language and cultural knowledge that can help each learner achieve his/her language learning goal. This is why teaching is both a skill and an art, at the same time both practical and conceptual, requiring the balancing the part and the whole, the needs of the individual and the group. Teaching is daily work that requires an ability to hold two (or more!) opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function (in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald). And yet, in the end, it will be each student who will extract from the full array of what is taught and done in the classroom that which she or he needs to find a path to language learning. Thus, it is both the duty and delight of teachers to help each learner, in community, to advance on that path toward communicative competence.