ANALYSIS OF THE SAUDI ARABIAN SCHOOL'S ENGLISH CURRICULUM
01 What are the major assumptions about the nature of knowledge, learning, and classroom social relationships?
"Language," says Catherine Walsh (1987), "is a sociocultural phenomenon." "Individuals can only be understood in terms of their specific sociohistorical setting... Children come to school with this speaking consciousness already well developed... It is through language that individuals learn to act as members of society... It is the development of speech along with ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are culturally embedded and socially determined that constitutes language in its most essential sense" (Walsh, 1987, p. 197). M.A.K. Halliday (1975) notes that the semantic system--the system of meanings--which a child constructs develops concurrently with his social system, thus forming a unitary system (p.55).
In this perspective, it is neither scientifically correct nor pedagogically sound to separate knowledge, learning, and socialization conceptually and operationally.
Language learning, in its first stages, clearly does not resort to formal syntactical and lexical conceptualization. Nor is it formally taught this way. Carole Urzuß (1980) says it thus: "Linguistic behavior has its origins in a general social communication system to which a formal lexicon and grammar are ultimately added" (p.40). This is where the young child differs markedly from the older child, and it is the main reason why teaching/learning methodologies likewise need differ. Twelfth grade young people come to second-language learning from the formal school system which, whether rightly or wrongly, has infused (embedded, imprinted, engrammed) into students a cognitive consciousness of the form of language, i.e. of the first (school) language. There is ample evidence to show that after fifteen or so, flexibility in the acquisition of new sound patterns is greatly stunte...