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The Significance of Simplification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

H. G. Widdowson
H. G. Widdowson
Affiliation:
University of London
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Extract

The notion of simplification has been a familiar one in language teaching for a long time. It underlies not only the production of “simplified readers” but also the whole process of syllabus design. Essentially, it is the pedagogic analogue of the linguist's idealization of data, from which it ultimately derives: the teacher simplifies by selecting and ordering the linguistic phenomena he is to deal with so as to ease the task of learning, and the linguist idealizes by selecting and ordering the linguistic phenomena he is to deal with to ease the task of analysis. In both cases the purpose of the operation is essentially a methodological one. And in both cases there is a danger that something crucial may be left out of account for the sake of methodological convenience. In this paper I want to suggest that something crucial IS generally left out of account and that the notion of simplification can be given a more general, and significant, definition. In the first part of the paper I shall try to work my way towards this definition and in the second part I shall cry to draw out a number of implications for language teaching pedagogy that seem to arise from it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , Fall 1978 , pp. 11 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

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