Practice held hostage to theory: Why it is so hard to learn a foreign language at school

An attempt is made to answer the question why the efficiency of school programs in foreign languages (e.g., English) is next to nothing, and secondary school graduates do not, as a rule, possess skills and abilities required by the educational standard. The reason, it is argued, is not that the communicative method, on which most school courses are based, is fundamentally faulty. Rather, the blame must be laid on the ideology of structuralism adopted by educational institutions in the mid-20th century; this ideology underlies educational programs in foreign languages as well as all other linguistic courses in institutions of secondary and tertiary education. Viewing language as a sign system ‘in itself and for itself' used in communication as exchange of information equates it with a code; learning this code constitutes the process of language ‘acquisition'. As the structuralist theory of language, along with its model of linguistic communication, leans on the Platonic notion that the objects and events in the world are merely flawed instantiations of ideal forms (which modern science and philosophy have long rejected), it is not only inadequate, but unscientific. Counter to structuralist dogmas, linguistic behavior is not a kind of autonomous activity independent of other kinds of human activity; it is an integral part of the complex dynamics of human behavior, and is interpreted as such. Such an understanding implies a different set of initial assumptions that define the logic of naturalizing language rather than rationalizing it the way orthodox linguistics has done since Descartes. Approached from a naturalistic standpoint, communication is seen not as exchange of meanings encoded in words, but as finding common ground in interpreting socially conditioned behavior in a consensual domain. To learn a foreign language is to learn to interact with others in a consensual domain by establishing a set of shared values that orient coordination of interactive linguistic behavior. Such learning may, and should, be based on the learner's pragmatic (implicit) linguistic knowledge as accumulated experience of interactions in the consensual domain of the learner's mother tongue, such as Russian. Rejecting the ideology of structuralism would help to increase the efficiency of linguistic education.

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