System Vol. 8 1-22Pergamon Press Ltd. 1980 Printed in Great Britain

DEVELOPING LISTENING; FLUENCY BEFORE SPEAKING:
AN ALTERNATIVE PARADIGM*

JAMES R. NORD

Michigan State University

In The Structure of Scientifc RevolutionsThomas Kuhn articulates a theory of intellectual change that has had significant impact on the history of science. According to Kuhn once scientific communities have reached a certain level of maturity they begin to operate on the basis of "some implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief"¹that he calls a paradigm. The paradigm is the shared conception of what is possible the boundaries of acceptable inquiries the limiting cases. The development of a successful paradigm enables a scientific community to maintain and share criteria for the selection of problems which might be amenable to solution. It allows a number of "local road maps" to be drawn up tested and validated by many independent researchers. When difficulties arise when conflicts occur and when an extraordinary set of investigations begins which leads to a new set of commitments to a new world view to a new paradigm a scientific revolution is taking place. ²

The "comprehension approach" to foreign language teaching is more than a simple switch from an emphasis on speaking to an emphasis on listening. It is more than a shift from one language skill to another. Rather it is a fundamental shift in the basic assumptions underlying the psychological and linguistic framework from which language teaching methodologies emerge. It is a shift in what is meant by the term "language" and a shift in what is meant by the term "learning". It involves a shift in our assumptions about the "nature of man" and the "nature of mind" . It is what Kuhn calls a shift in "the standard by which the profession determines what should count as an admissible problem or a legitimate problem solution".³The "comprehension approach" involves what Kuhn has termed a "paradigm shift" a "scientific revolution".

During and right after World War 11 paradigm shifts took place in the fields of linguistics and psychology; and for over two decades much of the foreign language instruction which took place in the United States reflected those shifts. The new orthodoxy has been labelled with some inevitable confusion "the oral approach" "the linguistic method" "the New Key" and "audiolingualism". Nelson Brooks who coined the term "audio-lingual" has since claimed that he only meant to refer to the "sound" language as contrasted to the "written" form when he used the term.⁴But the basic change in the goals of foreign language teaching the basic change in the methodology of foreign language teaching the basic change in the paradigm guiding the foreign language teaching community which took place in the 1940's and the 1950's was far more than a shift from the written form to the sound form. It was also a shift from a psychological paradigm which focused on the

*Presented at the Fifth World Congress of Applied Linguistics, University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, August 25th, 1978