[Escriba aquí]

Soco García de Leániz Salcedo

TOPIC 1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE (LG) TEACHING. CURRENT TRENDS IN THE

TEACHING OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE. COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES

AIM of this UNIT: To study the evolution of language from its origins, as the OBJECT of study,
to a THEORY of LG TEACHING.

Bibliography:

- David Crystal, Linguistics (1985)

- Howatt, A History of English Language Teaching (1985)

- WilgaM.Rivers, Teaching Foreign Language Skills (1981)

- Krashen,S.D. and T.D. Terrel, The Natutal Approach : Language Acquisition in the
Classroom (1983)

BALWAYS BEARING IN MIND: As Albert C. Baugh (1993) states, the basis for an understanding
of present-day English and for an enlightened attitude towards questions affecting the
language today is knowledge of its origins.

THE ORIGINS OF LG TEACHING

The study of language has always been of great importance from the very first stages of the
human race. The study of different languages as means of establishing communication with
people from different cultures has been of particular relevance within the study of language.

How language teaching began:

- Around the Vth century BC in India we find the early states of language written as a set of
rules.

- Greeks and Romans. According to Howatt (1984), education is both the acquisition of
knowledge together with the holistic development of the individual, as the early Greeks aimed
to do (since they prepared intellectually young people to take leading roles in the activities of
the state and of society) and the Romans inherited from them. (Although the Greeks were not
interested in learning other languages, as they were the one who owned most knowledge
there were interpreters and translators. Much later, the Romans were interested in learning
from the Greeks and here we find learning a second language, since they wanted to be able to
to read first hand Plato and Aristotle)

- In the 17th century—>Didactics of language (Comenius): understanding principles underlying

languages and, in doing so, teaching languages better. Language study and therefore,
language teaching was to be promoted in subsequent centuries through the fields of
philosophy, logic, rhetoric, sociology, and religion, among other.
[Escriba aquí]

Soco García de Leániz Salcedo

HISTORY OF THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LG. EARLY & CURRENT TRENDS

A) ANCIENT TIMES (language teaching traces back to ancient civilization)

• Earliest educational systems to teach Religion and to promote the traditions of

people

• Middle Ages  the early educational systems of the nations of the Western world
emanated from the Judea-Christian religious traditions, which were combined with
traditions derived from ancient Greece philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Christianity became a powerful force, founding many schools

• Teaching based on grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometric and the chief
storehouse of learning were the monasteries, which maintained archives that
preserved many manuscripts of the preceding classical culture

• Education was a privilege of the upper classes, and most members of the lower classes
had no opportunity for formal learning.

B) MODERN TIMES

• Renaissance  History, Geography, Music and PE were emphasized.

• They taught in Latin Grammar schools

• Beginning of 16th century French, Italian, and English gained in importance as a

result of political changes in Europe, and Latin gradually became displaced as a
language of spoken and written communication.

• 17th century a rapid growth of scientific knowledge, which gave rise to its inclusion
in courses in the universities of the European countries and led to the exchange and
spread of scientific and cultural ideas throughout Europe

19th CENTURY: APPROACHES AND METHODS

A. THE GRAMMAR- TRANSLATION METHOD

- Same basic procedures as for Latin

- Emphasis on GRAMMAR RULES; LISTS OF VOCABULARY; SENTENCES FOR

TRANSLATION

- Speaking was not the goal

- Oral practice only when sentences where translated and read

- Still used to understand literary texts

[Escriba aquí]

Soco García de Leániz Salcedo

- Failures : it does not sound natural to a native speaker, it produces mistakes difficult
to eradicate, tedious memorizing, little or none stress on accuracy of pronunciation,
it creates students’ frustration.

B: INDIVIDUAL REFORMERS in the mid-late 19th

• C. Marcel emphasized the relevance of MEANING in learning, taking the child as a

model for lg teaching

• T. Prendergast developed a structural syllabus to work on basis structural patterns

ocurring in language

• Gauin recognized children needed SPEAKING proficiency rather than reading/ writing

C: THE REFORM MOVEMENT (Foundation for developments of new ways of teaching

languages)

• Linguists such as Henry Sweet, W. Viëtor and Paul Passy gave credibility and
acceptance to the reformist ideas.

• Reformist ideas:

- Role of phonetics within the teaching of modern languages

- Grammar had to be taught inductively

- Translation was avoided

- Hearing the language first

THE REFORM MOVEMENT LEAD TO THE DIRECT METHOD

D: THE DIRECT METHOD

The Direct Method, a natural language method setting the foundations introduced by the
Reform Movement, stood for the following principles and procedures

- Activities are presented orally

- Exclusive use of the target language in class

- Mother tongue is never used

- Classroom instructions in target language

- Only everyday vocabulary and sentences were taught

- No translation
[Escriba aquí]

Soco García de Leániz Salcedo

- Grammar is taught inductively (rules are generalized from practice and experience)

- Oral work is emphasized

- Culture is very important in lg learning

- New teaching points were introduced orally

- Concrete vocabulary was taught through demonstration, objects, and pictures:

abstract vocabulary was taught by association of ideas

- Speech and listening preceded reading and writing

- Drawback: native teachers are needed and too many similarities between L1 and L2

20th century

Throughout the twentieth century many methods and approaches to the teaching of
languages were developed.

1st . The Communicative Language Teaching Approach.

Communicative Language Teaching has its origins in two sources. Changes in the British and
American linguistic theory in the mid-late sixties and secondly and Changes in the educational
realities in Europe.

Meanwhile, the role of the European Common Market and the Council of Europe a
significant impact on the development of Communicative language teaching since there was
an increasing need to teach adults the major languages for a better educational cooperation.
In 1971 a system in which learning tasks are broken down into “units” is launched into the
market by a British linguist, D.A. Wilkins. (It attempts to demonstrate the systems of meanings
that a language learner needs to understand and express within two types: notional categories
(time, sequence, quantity or frequency) and categories of communicative function (requests,
offers, complaints))

The rapid application of these ideas by textbook writers and its acceptance by teaching
specialists gave prominence to what became the Communicative Approach or simply
Communicative Language Teaching.

Beginning in the mid-1960s: there has been a variety of theoretical challenges to the audio-
lingual method. Scholars such as Halliday, Hymes, Labov and the American linguist Noam
Chomsky challenged previous assumptions about language structure and language learning,
taking the position that language is creative (not memorized by repetition and imitation) and
rule governed (not based on habits) resulting in:

20th century: COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH

Origins learner needs to learn in an INDEPENDENT WAY

Approach (Hymes): language teaching goal is to develop a tool so that the learner is
communicative competent in the target community
[Escriba aquí]

Soco García de Leániz Salcedo

Design (Canale and Swain): there are four comtences to master: gramatical; sociolinguistic,
discourse, strategic

Procedure to attain coomunicative competence:

Presentation + practice + production

Material can be: - task- based; text- based ; authentic material

(Halliday (1970) elaborated a functional theory of the functions of language, and Canale and
Swain (1980) identified four dimensions of communicative competence: grammatical,
sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competence. Chomsky leveled some criticisms at
structural linguistic theory in his book Syntactic Structures (1957). He demonstrated that the
fundamental characteristics of language –creativity and uniqueness of individual sentences-
were not part of the structural theories of language)

INFLUENTIAL THEORIES ON LG LEARNING

1. Stephen D. Krashen (MONITOR MODEL and NATURAL METHOD). He distinguishes two

concepts here, acquisition and learning, where acquisition is seen as the basic process
involved in developing language proficiency. For him, it is the unconscious
development of the target language system as a result of using the language for real
communication. Learning would be related to the conscious representation of
grammatical knowledge and non-spontaneous processes. He developed the Monitor
Model on which the Natural method was built

2. Tracy D. Terrel , together with Krashen, wrote The Natural Approach (1983), and their
theories emphasize the nature of the human and physical context in which language
learning takes place. Their learning theory is supported by three main principles.
Firstly, they claim that comprehension precedes production, secondly, they state that
production may emerge in stages and students are not forced to speak before they are
ready; and thirdly the fact that the course syllabus consists of communicative goals,
thus classroom activities are organized, by topic, not grammar.

OTHER APPROACHES

1. ORAL APROACH 1920s and 1930 This approach involved principles of selection,
organization and presentation of the material based on applied linguistic theory and practice.
Thus, the role of vocabulary was seen as an essential component of reading proficiency, and
parallel to this syllabus design was a focus on the grammatical content. This classification of
English sentence patterns was incorporated into the first dictionary for students of English as a
foreign language, and some grammatical guides which became a standard reference source for
textbook writers.

2. AUDIOLINGUAL METHOD (Behaviourism/Drills/Oral strategies) It is based in structural

linguistics (structuralism) and behaviouristic psychology (Skinner’s behaviourism). Therefore, it
is primarily an oral approach to language teaching and there is little provision for grammatical
explanation or talking about the language.
[Escriba aquí]

Soco García de Leániz Salcedo

The audio-lingual method aims at teaching the language skills in the order of listening,
speaking, reading, and writing, and is based on using drills for the formation of good language
habits.  students are given a stimulus, which they respond to. If their response is correct, it is
rewarded, so the habit will be formed; if it is incorrect, it is corrected, so that it will be
suppressed

3. GENERATIVISM (Chosmky- creativity mistakes, free expresion) (Apart from showing the
weaknesses of structural grammar, Chomsky demonstrated that creativity and individual
sentences’ formation were fundamental characteristics of language, not part of the structural
theories of language. His approach provides a humanistic view of teaching where priority is
given to interactive processes of communication)

4. SILENT WAY (Teacher silent, students make the effort) (which focus on the conditions to be
held for successful learning without specifying the learning processes)

5. TOTAL PHYSICAL RESPONSE (Asher) information + skills through kinesthetic sensory

system (1977) centers on both processes and conditions aspects of learning. Thus coordinating
language production with body movement and physical actions is believed to provide the
conditions for success in language learning.)

6. COMMUNITY LANGUAGE LEARNING (Charles A. Curran)developed a holistic approach to

language learning, since human learning is both cognitive and affective. This process is divided
into five stages and compared to the development of the child. Thus, feelings of security are
established; achievement of independence from the teacher; the learner starts speaking
independently; a sense of criticism is developed; and finally, the learner improves style and
knowledge of linguistic appropriateness.

7. SUGGESTOPEDIA (1980s-90s, Georgi Lozanov)arcane terminology and neologisms, and

secondly, the arrangement of the classroom to create an optimal atmosphere to learning, by
means of decoration, furniture, the authoritative behaviour of the teacher and specially,
through the use of music

WHAT’S CURRENTLY HAPPENING?

- Carrying on with refinement of COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH

- Current curriculum development of cognitive strategies

literature, gramar, phonetics and…technologyICTs!!! (on-line collaboration)

- Content: Literature and language

- Learning to learn

CONCLUSION

- Which approach will you take to your lessons? Why? Why do you think it’s useful?
How do you think it’s the one to help your students?

- Summarize the topic with key words