tesol: art & craft
Another article | Robert Haines | July 13th, 2005
Here is the first portion of a very readable article that should be of interest to us as action researchers on a TESOL MSc program. The article was contributed to a debate entitled 'TESOL is a Science, not an Art' proposed by David Nunan after the topic had generated a heated discussion at the 1995 TESOL Convention in Long Beach, California. The entire article can be read here, along with papers on the same topic by Dianne Larsen-Freeman, Elana Shohamy, and G. Richard Tucker.
Again, happy reading!
TESOL: Art and Craft
By Henry Widdowson
Dr. Henry Widdowson previously held chairs at the University of London and the University of Essex, and is now Professor at the University of Vienna. He began his career with the British Council, working in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, before talking up an academic career in Edinburgh where he obtained his doctorate in 1973. He has published many books and articles, the most recent of which are Aspects of Language Teaching, Practical Stylistics and Linguistics, the first in a new series of which he is editor, Oxford Introductions to Language Study. All are published by Oxford University Press.
Science is seductive because it seems to tell us the way things really are, in spite of what they seem to be. It gets rid of what is incidental and reveals the essential, sees through the symptoms and gets at the real cause of things, the general laws underlying the variety of actual appearances. It is an impressive performance. And you can indeed see it as a performance: like that of a stage magician performing tricks that show the admiring audience how wrong they are to trust the evidence of their own eyes. You saw the gentleman's watch smashed to pieces with my hammer, but you were wrong. Hey presto! Here it is intact. Round of applause. The hundred-dollar bill was burned to ash, but abracadabra! Wrong again. Appearances are deceptive.
But there is more to science than conjuring tricks, you will say. It does not deliberately set out to create illusions, but to dispel them: it does not conceal causes, but reveals them. It explains reality. The earth really does go round the sun. The illusion is to suppose otherwise. That may be so, but whose reality are we talking about? Science necessarily undermines our trust in experience. The world of the senses and common sense turns out to be insecure, a kind of fiction of appearances. But it is real for us. Science may prove that the earth goes round the sun, but not in my experience. The sun rises and sets: sunup, sundown. Why should I be so persistent in the error of my ways? Now that I know what really happens, why do I not alter my attitudes accordingly so that they are consistent with the way things really are'?
with 
and 
