Mark Lowe studied philosophy at Cambridge University. His first jobs were in the British Council (Iran and Argentina). He spent 18 years as an EFL publisher for Longman and other publishers, and is now back in the classroom as DoS for International House in Azerbaijan.

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) offers a fundamental framework for understanding the nature of language: language evolved to meet human needs, it is functional and it has many purposes. Wittgenstein’s analogies between language and games – and how we follow rules when playing games and using language – also suggest fruitful methods. Wittgenstein’s notion that philosophy is a therapy for sorting out confusions in our thinking is another important insight for our profession. Linguistic analysis can resolve many of the puzzles of our field, such as whether grammar is innate and universal, and acquisition versus learning. Wittgenstein thought that grammar is not innate, that there is no universal grammar, and that language is learned and not acquired – conclusions which have profound consequences for language teaching methods. Wittgenstein’s central relevance to language teaching is that he provides a coherent account of what language is and how it really works.

J L Austin took Wittgenstein’s functional ideas much further, developing a theory of ‘performatives’, set out in his posthumous book How to Do Things with Words (OUP, 1962). Performatives are language that does things instead of describing things. Examples: ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’, ‘I do’ after being asked in the marriage ceremony whether we take this man/woman to be our lawful, wedded wife/husband, and ‘Out’, said by the umpire when a fielder in cricket shouts ‘How’s that?’ Austin posited five categories of ‘performative’:

Verdictives (e.g. judging, estimating, sentencing, accusing, acquitting, diagnosing)
Exercitives (e.g. appointing, dismissing, excommunicating, ordering, urging)
Commissives (e.g. promising, agreeing/disagreeing, planning, opposing, intending)
Behabatives (e.g. thanking, apologising, complimenting, commiserating, voting)
Expositives (e.g. stating, meaning, denying, telling, repudiating, objecting)

Austin’s work was central in the development of functional/notional theory. His categories and examples also provide a rich source of classroom activities.

Paul Grice is best known in language teaching circles for his article ‘The Logic of Conversation’. Grice offers a set of rules to be followed in effective conversation. The overarching rule is ‘cooperation’.

We can only converse effectively if both sides agree, as it were, to play the game. Under the large rule there are four smaller maxims:

Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as required. Do not make it more informative than is required.
Quality: Say only what you believe to be true. Do not say that for which you lack evidence.
Relation: Be relevant.
Manner: Avoid obscurity. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief. Be orderly.

Grice’s article has come in for a good deal of criticism, and many of these criticisms were echoed by members of the audience. ‘Most conversations are not really like this, as Harold Pinter’s plays demonstrate’; ‘These ideas are very culturally bound – Arabs have different ideas of what is relevant, for instance.’

John Searle is Professor of Philosophy at Berkeley, California, USA. He was a student of Austin’s, and has since developed a wide-ranging theory of language in which the ideas of Austin and Wittgenstein are central. He has published a succession of influential books, each relating language to a broader canvas. Intentionality explores how language relates to the outside world. The Construction of Social Reality explores how language affects and is affected by social institutions such as money, war, marriage, law and government. His more recent The Rediscovery of the Mind both summarises his previous work, and leads into a new dialogue with neuro-physiology, setting out what we know of the functioning of the brain in processing language. This research is taken a step further in his most recent published work Consciousness and Language.

Searle has made many important contributions to our field and provides a principled justification for language teaching methods that focus on the use of language in society rather than on formal grammar-in-the-head. He takes much further Wittgenstein’s ‘language therapy’ idea, and provides convincing critiques of fashionable theories such as those of Chomsky. Searle is still writing. His ideas have a relevance and power that is vastly refreshing.