Page 216 - Beyond Methods

CHAPTER 9
Contextualizing Linguistic Input (L)anguage takes place in social contexts and makes con-
nections with the realities that make up those contexts. —HALLIDAY AND HASAN, 1976, p. 305
Language communication is inseparable from its communicative context. Taken out of context, language communication makes little sense. What all this means to learning and teaching an L2 is that we must introduce our learners to language as it is used in communica- tive contexts even if it is selected and simplified for them; otherwise, we will be denying an important aspect of its reality.
The reality of language is represented in some of the terms used recently to refer to language: language as text (Halliday, 1974), lan- guage as communication (Widdowson, 1978), language as context (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992), and language as discourse (McCarthy and Carter, 1994; Celce-Murcia and Olshtain, 2000). These terms, taken from the fields of theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics, and anthropology, are used interchangeably and have one thing in common: they all treat language as something that invokes context as well as something that provides context (Goodwin and Duranti, 1992, p. 7).
In spite of the importance given to context in linguistic and an- thropological circles and in spite of its widespread use, the term context eludes a clear definition. In fact, as anthropologists Charles Goodwin and Alessandro Duranti (1992, p. 2) point out: “It does not seem possible at the present time to give a single, precise, technical definition of context, and eventually we might have to accept that such a definition may not be possible.” They also point out that the term comes from the Latin contextus, which means a joining together. The opening quote from Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan mentions the joining together of realities that make up a