4.1.5. Functional-notional courses

I. One form – several meanings

The designer of any language course has to begin with doing 2 things: 1) first he must choose what items or aspects of the language are to be included into the course materials. This process is called selection; 2) then he has to arrange these pieces of material into the best possible order to ensure successful learning. This is called grading. The final arrangement is the language syllabus.

As we have seen, structural grading consists mainly of arranging the structural items or patterns into a suitable order. The resulting syllabus is known as a structural, or grammatical, syllabus and can be represented by a list of language forms in a certain order.

A functional-notional syllabus is also an arrangement of ‘pieces’ of language, but these pieces are not language forms: they are functions and notions.

In any language there are many different ways of expressing the same thought. This may seem rather obvious, but the implication of this fact about language is important. It is clear that two aspects of language form and language use are not directly related in every case. The statement ‘That’s John’s car’ could be used in a variety of contexts, each representing a totally different type of interaction. E.g.:

Type 1: It belongs to John. – Simple identification.

Type 2: It’s John’s, but not yours. – Warning.

Type 3: Open the door of it. – A request to open the door of this very car.

Type 4: Open the front door of the house. – John has arrived. He is the expected guest, i.e. another kind of request.

Type 5: Call John and invite him to the party. – A request plus invitation.

Obviously, stress and intonation are of crucial importance, too.

II. Appropriacy

In other words, one form can have several meanings. The use of the form depends on the circumstances. These circumstances make the use of certain forms either appropriate or inappropriate. Hence, the relevant factor is appropriacy. In the example above, the main consideration is the relationship between the speakers: who is speaking to whom. But other considerations may also influence a speaker’s choice of words:

• setting (where the interaction takes place);

• topic (what subject is under discussion);

• channel (what the medium of communication is: telephone, radio, letter, telegram, etc.);

• any special conventions determined by the circumstances.

But, once again, all aspects brought together put forward the request of the function the language performs in a given situation.

III. Content

David Wilkins is generally agreed to be the originator of the idea of developing a functional-notional syllabus. In his book ‘Notional syllabuses’ he describes the process of designing such a syllabus as follows: ‘Instead of asking how speakers of the language express themselves or when and where they use the language, we ask what it is they communicate through language. We are then able to organise language teaching in terms of the content rather than the form of the language’.

Functions are clear examples of pieces of ‘language content’. Basically, a function is a label attached to a sentence saying what it does. But within any such sentence there may be other units of content which we might call concepts, although they are often, confusingly, referred to as notions. Examples of these are the concepts of time, space, quantity, motion, etc.

In practice, unlike functions, these concepts are closely linked to the structure and lexis of a language, but not entirely. The preposition ‘in’, for example, is used both to express time and space, e.g.: in the evening; in bed. We should finally add a very important set of concepts representing the speaker’s attitude to what he says (Wilkins calls this ‘modal meaning’). The sentences:

may

Our team will win.

must

represent a scale of uncertainty – certainty, and there are many linguistic forms which are used to express the speaker’s position on this scale. Apart from uncertainty – certainty, we have concepts such as obligation and intention. In practice, these categories overlap with communicative functions. Thus, we generalise the arrangement of functions and notions and content in the following scheme:

Communicative functions:

• requesting;

• greeting;

• agreeing/disagreeing;

• refusing;

• expressing doubt;

• asking for information;

• inducing;

• saying ‘good-bye’, etc.

Concepts (notions)

1. time, space, quantity, motion, etc.

2. modal meaning (speaker’s attitude):

• certainty/uncertainty;

• intention;

• obligation;

• interest, etc.

IV. Organisation

To organise the pieces of linguistic content into a syllabus, the course designer should do the following:

1. First, functions are much easier to arrange than concepts, or notions. Most existing courses of this kind place emphasis on the communicative functions of language and they tend to be described as functional, or functional-notional courses.

2. Secondly, all functional-notional courses have a strong situational element. Obviously functions have to be presented in the language materials contextualised in situations. But some situations, such as ‘Using the telephone’ have strict conventions that govern the language forms used. Consequently, functional-notional courses often contain units which are, strictly speaking, situational, entitled ‘Using the telephone’, ‘Asking the way’, ‘Making transport enquiries’, etc.