Contradiction in L2 instruction

As far as language development is concerned, second or foreign language development is viewed as a metalinguistic process, not unlike the development of scientific concepts—which is sustained on the development of everyday concepts—, since the semantic system of the native language mediates the acquisition of concepts in the second language. What needs to be internalised is the psychological structure of the target language, that is, as Gal’perin (1992d) asserts, the ‘circumstances of speech’ (pp. 82-83). Thus, second or foreign language instruction presents a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, it relies on the acquirer’s native language (and presumably on highly coded methods of instruction) but, on the other hand, in order to bring the psychological structure of the utterance in the foreign language as close as possible to that which operates in the native language, acquirers are required to create links between linguistic functions in the mother and target language within recognisable communicative contexts. Those contexts, for the most part, are socio-communicative and rely, for their transmission, upon naturalistic instructional methods. Instruction in those context demands the communication readiness observed in operationalised functions. In consequence, instruction has to provide for pedagogical moves that go from meaning to sense within a contextual naturalistic platform set from sense to meaning. The weak and strong versions in communicative language teaching (CLT) reflect this dialectical contradiction.