A Methodological Histiry of Language Teaching

a.       THE GRAMMAR TRANSLATION METHOD

A historical sketch of the last hundred years of language-teaching must be set in the context of a prevailing, customary language-teaching “tradition.” For centuries, there were few if any theoretical foundations of language learning upon which to base teaching methodology. In the western world, “foreign” language learning in school was synonymous with the learning of Latin or Greek. Latin, thought to promote intellectuality through “mental gymnastics,” was until relatively recently held to be indispensable to an adequate higher education. Latin was taught by means of what has been called the Classical Method: focus on grammatical rules, memorization of vocabulary and of various declensions and conjugations, translations of texts, doing written exercises.

As other languages began to be taught in educational institution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Classical Method was adopted as the chief means for teaching foreign languages. Little thought was given at the time to teaching someone how to speak the language; after all, languages were not being taught primarily to learn oral/aural communication, but to learn for the sake of being “scholarly or, in some instances, for gaining a reading proficiency in a foreign language. Since there was little if any theoretical research on second language acquisition in general or on the acquisition of reading proficiency, foreign language were taught as any other skill was taught.

In the nineteenth century The classical method came to be known as the Grammar Translation Method. There was little to distinguish Grammar Translation from what had gone on in foreign language classroom for centuries beyond a focus on grammatical rules as the basic for translating from the second to the native language. Remarkably, the Grammar Translation Method withstood attempts at the turn of the twentieth century to “reform” language-teaching methodology (see Gouin’s Series Method and the Direct Method, below), and to this day it is practiced in too many educational contexts. Prator and Celce-Murcia (1979:3) listed the major characteristics of Grammar Translation:

1.        Classes are taught in the mother tongue, with little active use of the target language

2.        Much vocabulary is taught in the form of lists of isolated words.

3.        Long, elaborate explanations of the intricacies of grammar are given.

4.        Grammar provides the rules for putting words together, and instruction often focuses on the form and inflection of words.

5.        Reading of difficult classical texts is begun early.

6.        Little attention is paid to the content of texts, which are treated as exercises in grammatical analysis.

7.        Often the only drills are exercises in translating disconnected sentences from the target language into the mother tongue.

8.        Little or no attention is given to pronunciation.

It is ironic that this method has until very recently been so stalwart among many competing models. It does virtually nothing to enhance a student’s communicative ability in the language. It is ‘remembered with distaste by thousands of school learner, for whom foreign language learning meant a tedious experience of memorizing endless lists of unusable grammar rules and vocabulary and attempting to produce perfect translations of stilted or literary prose.” (Richards & Rodgers 1986:4).

On the other hand, one can understand why  Grammar Translation remains so popular. It requires few specialized skills on the part of teachers. Tests of grammar rules and of translations are easy to construct and can be objectively scored. Many standardized tests of foreign language still do not attempt to tap into communicative abilities, so students have little motivation to go beyond grammar analogies, translation, and rote exercises. And it is sometimes successful in leading a student toward a reading knowledge of a second language. But, as Richards and Rodgers (1986:5) pointed out, it has no advocates. It is a method for which there is no theory. There is no literature that offers a rationale or justification for it or that attempts to relate it to issues in linguistics, psychology, or educational theory.” As you continue to examine language-teaching methodology in this book, I think you will understand more fully the “theory-lessness” of the Grammar Translation Method.

b.      GOUIN AND THE SERIES METHOD

The history of “modern” foreign language teaching may be said to have begun in the late 1800s with Francois Gouin, a French teacher of Latin with remarkable insights. History doesn’t normally credit Gouin as a founder of Language-teaching methodology because, at the time, his influence was overshadowed by that of Charles Berlitz, the popular German founder of the Direct Method. Nevertheless, some attention to Gouin’s unusually perceptive observations about language teaching helps us to set the stage for the development of language-teaching methods for the century following the publication of his book, The Art of Learning and Studying Foreign Languages in 1880.

Gouin had to go through a very painful set of experiences in order derive his insights. Having decided in mid-life to learn German, he took up residency in Hamburg for one year. But rather than attempting to converse with the natives, in engage in a rather bizarre sequence of attempts to “master” the language. Upon arrival in Hamburg, he felt he should memorize a German grammar book and a table of the 248 irregular German verb. He did this in a matter of only ten days, and hurried to the academy (the university) to test his new knowledge. “But alas!” he wrote, “I could not understand a single word, not a single word!” (Gouin 1880:11)-Gouin was undaunted. He returned to the isolation of his room, this time to memorize the German roots and to memorize the grammar book and irregular verbs. Again he emerged with expectations of success. “But alas …” the result was the same as before. In the course of the year in Germany, Gouin in memorized books, translated Goethe and Schiller, and even memorized 30.000 words in a German dictionary, all in the isolation of his room, only to be crushed by his failure to understand German afterward. Only once did he try to ‘make conversation” as a method, but this caused people to laught at him, and he was too embrassed to continue that method. At the end of the year Gouin, having reduced the Classical Method to absurdity, was forced to return home, a failure.

But there was a happy ending. After returning home, Gouin discovered that his three-year-old nephew had, during that year, gone through the wonderful stage of child language acquisition in which we went from saying virtually nothing at all to becoming a veritable chatterbox of French. How was it that this little child succeeded so easily, in a first language, in a task that Gouin, in a second language, had found impossible? The child must hold the secret to learning a language! So Gouin spent a great deal of time observing his nephew and other children and came to the following-  conclusions: language learning is primarily a matter of transforming perception into conception. Children use language to represent their conceptions.  Language is a mean as thinking, of representing the world on oneself (see PLLT, Chapter 2). This insights, remember, were formed by a language teacher more than a century ago!

So Gouin set about devising a teaching method that would follow from this insights. And thus the series Method was created, a method that taught learners directly (without translation) and conceptually (without grammatical rules and explanations) a “series” of connected sentences that are easy to perceive. That first lesson of a foreign language would thus teach the following series of fifteen sentences: I walk towards the door. I draw near to the door. I draw nearer to the door. I get to the door. I stop at the door.

I stretch out my arm. A take hold of the handle. I turn the handle. I open the door. I pull the door. The door moves. The door turns on its hinges. The door turns and turns. I open the door wide. I let go of the handle. The fifteen have an unconventionally large number of grammatical properties, vocabulary items, words, and complexity. This is no simple Voici la tabe lesson! Yet Gouin was successful with such lesson because the language was so easily understood, stored, and related to reality. Yet he was a man unfortunately ahead of his time, and his insights were largely lost in the shuffle of Berlitz’s popular Direct Method. But as we look back now over more than a century of language-teaching history, we can appreciate the insights of this most unusual language teacher.

c.       THE DIRECT METHOD

The “naturalistic”-simulating the “natural” way in which children learn first language-approaches of Gouin and a few of his contemporaries did not take hold immediately. A generation later, applied linguistics finally established the credibility of such approaches. Thus it was that at the turn of the century, the Direct Method became quite widely known and practiced.

The basic premise of the Direct Method was similar to that of Gouin’s Series Method, namely, that second language learning should be more like first language learning-lots of oral interaction, spontaneous use of the language, no translation between first and second language, and little or no analysis of grammatical rules. Richards and Rodgers (1986:9-10) summarized to the principles of the Direct Method:

1.        Classroom instruction was conducted exclusively in the target language.

2.        Only everyday vocabulary and sentences were taught.

3.        Oral communication skills were built up in a carefully traded progression organized around question-and-answer exchanges between teachers and students in small, intensive classes.

4.        Grammar was taught inductively.

5.        New teaching points were taught through modeling and practice.

6.        Concrete vocabulary was taught through demonstration, object, and pictures; abstract vocabulary was taught by association of ideas.

7.        Both speech and listening comprehension were taught.

8.        Correct pronunciation and grammar were emphasized.

The Direct Method enjoyed considerable popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was most widely accepted in private language schools where students were highly motivated and where native-speaking teachers could be employed. One of the best known of its popularizers was Charles Berlitz (who never used the term Direct Method and chose instead to call his method the Berlitz Method). To this day “Berlitz” is a household word; Berlitz language schools are thriving in every country of the world.

But almost any “method” can succed when clients are willing to pay high prices for small classes, individual attention, and intensive study. The direct Method did not take well in public education, where the constraints of budget, classroom size, time, and teacher background mad such a method difficult to use. Moreover, the Direct Method was criticized for eats weak theoretical foundations.its success may have been more a factor of the skill and personality of the teacher than of the methodology itself.

By the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century, the use of the Direc Meyhod had declined both in Europe and in US. Most language curricula returned to the Grammar Translation Method or to a “reading approach” that emphasized reading skills in foreign languages. But it si interesting that  by the middle of the twentieth century, the Direct Method was revived and redirected into what was probably the most visible of all language teaching “revolutions” in the modern era, the Audiolingual Method (see below).  So even this somewhat short-lived movement in language teaching would reappear in the changing winds and shifting sands of history.

d.      THE AUDIOLINGUAL METHOD

In the first half of twentieth century, the Direct Method did not take hold in the US the way it did in Europe. While one could easily find native-speaking teachers of modern foreign languages in Europe, such was not the case in the US. Also European High School and university students did not have to travel far to find opportunities to put the oral skills of another language to actual, practical use. Moreover, US educational institutions had become firmly convinced that a reading approach to foreign languages was more useful than an oral approach, given the perceived linguistic isolation of the US at the time. The highly influential Coleman Report (Coleman 1929) had persuaded foreign language teacher that it was impractical to teach oral skills and that reading should become the focus. Thus schools returned in the 1930s and 1940s to Grammar Translation, “the handmaiden of reading’ (Bowen, Madseu, & Hilferty 1985).

Then World war II broke out, and suddenly the US was thrust into a worldwide conflict, heightening the need for Americans to become orally proficient in the languages of both their allies and their enemies. The time was ripe for a language-teaching revolution. The US military provided the impetus with funding for special, intensive language courses that focused on aural/oral skills; these courses came to be known as the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) or, more colloquially, the “army Method.” Characteristic of these courses was a great deal or oral activity-pronunciation and pattern drills and conversation practice-with virtually none of grammar and translation found in traditional classes. It is ironic that numerous foundation stone of the discarded Direct Method were borrowed and injected into this new approach. Soon, the success of the Army Method and the revived national interest in foreign languages spurred educational institutions to adopt the new methodology. In all its variations and adaptations, the Army Method came to be known in the 1950s as the Audiolingual Method.

The Audiolingual Method (ALM) was firmly grounded in linguistic and psychological theory. Structural linguists of the 1940s and 1950s were engages in what they claimed was a ”scientific descriptive analysis” of various languages; teaching methodologists saw a direct application of such analysis to teaching linguistic pattern (Fries 1945). At the same time, behavioristic psychologists (PLLT, Chapter 4) advocated conditioning and habit-formation models of learning that were perfectly married with the mimicry drills and pattern practice of audiolingual methodology.

The characteristics of the ALM may be summed up in the following list (adapted from Prator & Celce-Murcia 1979):

1.        New material is presented in dialogue form.

2.        There is dependence on mimicry, memorization of set phrases, and over-learning.

3.        Structures are sequenced by means of contrastive analysis and taught one at a time.

4.        Structural pattern are taught using repetitive drills.

5.        There is little or no grammatical explanation. Grammar is taught by inductive analogy rather than by deductive explanation.

6.        Vocabulary is strictly limited and learned in context.

7.        There is much use of tapes, language labs, and visual aids.

8.        Great importance is attached to pronunciation.

9.        Very little use of the mother tongue by teachers is permitted.

10.    Successful responses are immediately reinforced.

11.    There is a great effort to get students to produce error-free utterance.

12.    There is a tendency to manipulate language and disregard content.

For a number of reasons, the ALM enjoyed many years of popularity, and even to this day, adaptations of the ALM are found in contemporary methodologies. The ALM was firmly rooted in respectable theoretical perspectives of the time. Materials were carefully prepared, tested, and disseminated to educational institutions. “Success” could be overtly experienced by students as they practiced their dialogues in off-hours. But the popularity was not to last forever. Challenged by Wilga Rivers’s (1964) eloquent criticism of the misconceptions of the ALM and by its ultimate failure to teach long-term communicative proficiency, ALM’s popularity waned. We discovered that language was not really acquired through a process of habit formation and over-learning, that errors were not necessarily to be avoided at all costs, and that structural linguistics did not tell us everything about language that we needed to know. While the ALM was a valiant attempt to reap the fruits of language-teaching methodologies that had preceded it, in the end it still fell short, as all methods do. But we learned something from the very failure of the ALM to do everything it had promised, and we moved forward.

A.    COGNITIVE CODE LEARNING

The age of audio lingualism, with is emphasis on surface forms and on the rote practice of scientifically produced patterns, began to wane when the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics turned linguistics and language teachers toward the “deep structure” of language. Increasing interest in generative transformational grammar and focused attention on the rule-governed nature of language and language acquisition led some language-teaching programs to promote a deductive approach rather than the inductivity of the ALM. Arguing that children subconsciously acquire a system of rules, proponents of a cognitive code learning into language (see Carroll 1966) began to inject more deductive rule learning into language classes. In an amalgamation of Audiolingual and Grammar Translation techniques, class retained the drilling typical of ALM added healthy doses of rule explanations and reliance on grammatical sequencing of material.

Cognitive code learning was not so much a method as it was an approach that emphasized a conscious awareness of rules and their applications to second language learning. It was a reaction to the strictly behavioristic practices of the ALM, and ironically, a return to some of the practices of Grammar Translation. As teachers and materials developers saw that incessant parroting of potentially rote material was not creating communicatively proficient learners, a new twist was needed, and cognitive code learning appeared to provide just such a twist. Unfortunately, the innovation to the rules, paradigms, intricacies, and exceptions of a language overtaxed the mental reserves of language students.

The profession needed some spice and verve, and innovative minds in the spirited 1970s were up to the challenge.

B.     “DESIGNER” METHODS OF THE SPIRITED 1970s

The decade of the 1970s was historically significant on two counts. First, perhaps more than in order decade in “modern” language-teaching history, research on second language learning and teaching grew from an offshoot of linguistics to a discipline in its own right. As more and more scholars specialized their efforts in second language acquisition studies, our knowledge of how people learn languages inside and outside the classroom mushroomed. Second, in this spirited atmosphere of pioneering research, a number of innovative if not revolutionary methods were conceived. These “designer” methods (to borrow a term from Nunan 1989a:97) were soon marketed by entrepreneurs as the latest and greatest applications of the multidisciplinary research finding of the day.

Today, as we look back at these methods, we can applaud them for their innovative flair, for their attempt to rouse the language-teaching world out of its audio lingual sleep, and for their stimulation of even more research as we sought to discover why were not to godsend that their inventors and marketers hoped they would be. The scrutiny that the designer method underwent has enabled us today to incorporate certain elements thereof in our current communicative approaches to language teaching. Let’s look at five of these products of the spirited 1970s.

1.      Community language learning

By the decade of the 1970s, as we increasingly recognized the importance of the affective domain, some innovative methods took on a distinctly affective nature. Community Language Learning is a classic example of an affectively based method.

The classroom is not a class but a group that needs therapy and counseling. Interpersonal communication to facilitate learning. Capitalized the needs of the learners. The learners move away from complete dependence on the teacher (translation) to gradual independence as they gain more familiarity with the foreign language.

2.      Suggestopedia

Capitalizes on relaxed states of mind for maximum retention of material. Music is central in this method. Leads us to believe in the power of the human brain.

3.      The silent way

Characterized by a problem-solving approach to learning. Students have to help each other in the process of solving language problems. They should develop independence, autonomy, and responsibility (discovery-learning method). The learner discovers and creates instead of remembering and repeating. The teacher, silent most of the time, is a stimulator.

4.      Total physical response

Associates language with physical activity. Motor activity is a right-brain function that should precede left-brain language processing. Students do a great deal of listening and acting. The teacher is very directive. No verbal response is necessary. Humor is easy to introduce. Eventually, students give verbal responses to questions, ask questions, etc.

5.      The natural approach

Speech should emerge naturally, and then production comes. Learners should be as relaxed as possible in the classroom. A great deal of communication and acquisition should take place, as opposed to analysis. There is a delay of oral production (silent period). The teacher is the source of the learner’s comprehensible input and the creator of interesting classroom activities.

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