Attend and Recycle Realizations of Meanings that Are Most Recurrent
The third point is somewhat different in that it does not refer directly to context. Discount Merrell Shoes Widdowson points out that grammatical meanings are common and recurrent, to which could be added that they are also general and abstract. Instead of considering grammar in terms of forms or formulae, rules or strait jackets, and structures or patterns, the perspective adopted is on notional meanings that are frequent, repeated, less tangible, and contextual or contextualizing.
It is therefore logical and necessary to attend to and recycle the realizations of those meanings that are most recurrent. One of the main shortcomings of drills and drilling was the emphasis on the forms and the patterns rather than the co-occurrence of frequent general meanings in relation to the less frequent specific meanings, within communicative contexts that required choice and selection.
Inevitably, as Wilkins (1976) understood, if there is similarity in the expression of a meaning space, there will be diversity of form, which complicates acquisition. This refers to language production, but initially the language learner needs to be exposed to contextualized language exemplars in input as Krashen (2004, 2008) or VanPatten (2002) has reiterated. In the receptive mode, it is precisely the more common forms that have the greater diversity of meanings, and which have to be disambiguated meaningfully, in context. So, where do I differ from Cullen Basically, on the importance of an emphasis on meaningful purpose in context and the types of classroom task he proposes? I did not find any of the activities Cullen proposes particularly communicative and his first two criteria are open to speculation. Learner choice is as relevant for lexical meaning as grammatical meaning and maybe more so. It is possible that in acquisition terms, lexical base forms are more visibly prevalent initially than syntactic features, Cullen’s lexis-to-grammar criteria, but that do not mean that lexical choices are made in a contextual vacuum. As for Cullen’s actual tasks, newspaper headlines are newspaper headlines and are understood as such. They can be fleshed out, of course, but presumably they are in their original form precisely because contextually they were considered sufficiently comprehensible. If the headlines are fleshed out, is it the fleshing out that is the point or the possible interpretations in relation to the actual news report In the former case, such tasks are not very communicative since the target meaning is more or less understood, and the fleshing out what has already been (potentially) understood: a productive task based on a receptive one. In the latter case, it is more a question of the interpretation than the fleshing out, surely.
The other tasks, such as Merrell Shoes on Sale sentence combining, picture compositions, or dictoglosses, are not communicative since the content is already given. Admittedly, these tasks, like the newspaper headlines, go from given lexical content to requiring grammatical elaboration or precision, but the purpose or reason for this is purely cosmetic.
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