ABSTRACT
To use the analogy of learning to ride a bicycle, it may well be necessary for the learner to know something of the principles of balancing one’s entire body weight on two narrow strips of rubber, but effectively expertise only comes with practice – with cycling, in fact, the teacher having ‘let go’. Perhaps it is the same with acquiring and developing language. Indeed it may well be that too great a knowledge and constant awareness of the laws of gravity – improbable as they seem – may simply cause anxiety, wobbling, and ultimately falling off. On the other hand, if our cyclist is to improve, especially when the terrain gets rough and the
3 C H A P T E R
competition hots up, some knowledge of the theories and techniques of effective cycling is surely helpful. Perhaps here, if we finally abandon the cycling metaphor, is the clue to what constitutes genuinely useful knowledge about language: the need to improve language capability for ever more sophisticated purposes and contexts in a complex and demanding – not to mention highly competitive – world. A fundamental tension does remain, between on the one hand the need to perceive the manipulative effects of language in society in order no longer to fall victim to them, and, on the other hand, the understandable but rather less laudable desire to increase one’s own manipulative powers of language.
