A Psychoanalytic Approach to Teaching English as a Foreign Language1

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has emphasized more personal, interactive, “functional” and “social” aspects of language use “in real situations and real time” (Littlewood xi; 1-7).2 With the advent of CLT, EFL learners need to develop skills in “processing” social and situational factors beyond fixed linguistic forms, “selecting” acceptable language forms, and finally “using” them for communicating meanings as efficiently as possible (see Reivers; Littlewood 4, 89). To this end, EFL learners are also to be empowered to “freely” create meanings with the English language they have learned, which they want to convey to others, while doing “creative play with patterns of meaning” (Carter, Investigating 158—63) in “free, spontaneous interaction” (Savignon 24). However, CLT in Korea has to date remained at the level of what Rinvolucri calls “semi-communicative” exercises in which learners merely do “rehearsal activities” with a piece of prepackaged text of “psychologically contentless information” “in a mood of relative communicative apathy” (195-96). This is because most EFL practitioners and specialists in Korea have mistaken communication for “information transfer” such as ordering food, asking for directions, taking messages, buying items, describing places (or people/things), giving information about objects, and so on. Here, communicating in English is far from “interactive activities that depend on varying types of relationships with others”—the relationships which involve “more personal aspects of one's being, such as feelings” (Arnold and Brown 8—9):

Indeed, the most fascinating subject we can learn about and talk about is ourselves. And we learn about ourselves through others. So communication which satisfies these deep, innate needs develops from sharing about ourselves while others actively listen to us, showing understanding and accepting us as we are. (Moskowitz 178; emphasis in the original).

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