Henry Widdowson:

He was born in 1935, is a British linguist concerned with applied linguistics and English
language learning and teaching. He is perhaps best known for his contribution to
communicative language teaching. However, he has also published on other related
subjects such as discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis, the global spread of
English, English for special purposes and stylistics.

For him, language is an essential human feature. It helps people to discover their
identity as individuals and social beings when they acquire it during childhood. This has
to do with the fact that it serves as means of cognition and communication. It enables
us to think for ourselves and to cooperate with other people in our community. It
provides for present needs and future plans, and at the same time carries with the
impression of past things.

Widdowson attributes some features to the language that explains the flexibility of it.
The essential flexibility of human language enables us to be proactive, to create new
meanings and shape our own reality unconstrained by the immediate context.

The first feature that distinguishes human language is called arbitrariness. It means
the forms of linguistic signs don’t have natural resemblance to their meaning. For
example, if an English speaker hears the French word “chien” meaning “dog”, he/she
wouldn’t recognize it at all, because its form doesn’t sound like a dog. If it did, then
dogs in France would be unrecognizable to English speakers, and vice versa.

The second feature is known as duality. Human language operates on two levels of
structure. At one level are elements which have no meaning in themselves but which
combine to form units at another level which do have meaning.
The sounds do not themselves have meaning. What they do is to combine in all
manner of ways to form words which are meaningful.
So although we can attribute no meaning to sounds /s/ and /z/ or /f/ and /v/ as such,
they serve to make up words which are different in meaning, as for example: face-
phase, safe-save.
Obviously this duality provides language with enormous productive power: a relatively
small number of elements at one level can enter into thousands of different
combinations to form units of meaning at the other level.

Usage and Use is one of his famous contributions to the Communicative Language
Teaching approach: published in Teaching Language as Communication (1978). He
wrote about the distinction between Usage and Use. These two concepts refer to
different abilities when speaking a foreign language.
Usage is a manifestation of the language system while Use refers to the realization of a
“meaningful communicative behavior” through an utterance.
He says “in normal circumstances, linguistic performance involves the simultaneous
manifestation of the language system and its realization as use” (pp. 3). Therefore, he
warns teachers who focus too much on Usage, because sentences may be correct but
inappropriate to the context in which they are being used.
So, teachers must help students develop two kinds of abilities: The ability to select
which form of sentence is appropriate for a particular linguistic context, and the ability
to recognize which function is fulfilled by a sentence in a particular communicative
context.
“Knowing a language is often taken to mean having a knowledge of correct usage but
this knowledge is of little utility on its own: it has to be complemented by a knowledge
of appropriate use. A knowledge of use must of necessity include a knowledge of
usage but the reverse is not the case: it is possible for someone to have learned a large
number of sentence patterns and a large number of words which can fit into them
without knowing how they are actually put to communicative use” (pp. 18-19).
Usage: correctness. Use: appropriacy.

He also makes some other distinctions to make clearer the previously mentioned
concepts. They are:

-Signification and Value: Widdowson believes that there are two aspects of meanings.
The first one is signification: “Sentences have meaning as instances of usage: they
express propositions by combining words into structures in accordance with
grammatical rules” (p. 11).
The second is value, it is the meaning that sentences and parts of sentences assume
when they are used for communicative purposes. Knowing the language means being
able to produce sentences that have signification as
instances of usage and value as instances of use.

-Cohesion and Coherence: Widdowson states that when we communicate through the
language, we produce sentences that express propositions and perform illocutionary
acts. The way in which propositions are linked together to form texts by means of a
variety of structural operations has to do with cohesion while the link between the
illocutionary functions they perform has to do with coherence.

-Text and Discourse: the Text is an actual use of language and is different from a
sentence which is an abstract unit of linguistic analysis. We identify a text because it
has been produced for a communicative purpose.
Example of Text: Considering the public notice “Keep off the grass”, we may know
what the word grass denotes and what it refer to. We must establish reference by
relating the text to the context in which it is located. Or we can do assumptions.
Purposes of texts: All texts serve a range of social puporses: to give information,
express a point of view, provide entertainment, etc. And these functions are combined
in complex ways: a travel guide for example, may provide information but also
promote the attractions he describes and he will also promote a particular point of
view.
Discourse: is the use of sentences in the texts. A discourse is made up of utterances
having the property of coherence. Is the meaning that a first person intends to express
in producing a text, and that a second person interprets from the text.
Widdowson thinks that Language Teaching will be more effective if teachers are more
aware of what they are doing and saying. Concepts or distinctions, motions are taken
for granted and we tend to generalise it, but it is important to differentiate them.