Evolution of Language Teaching Methods: 19th Century to Present
Grammar-Translation in Language Teaching
At the close of the nineteenth century, in European schoolrooms, the teaching of modern foreign languages was heavily influenced by the more established and prestigious academic study of the dead classical languages. It’s important to take note of grammar-translation assumptions about language learning, if only because they were so thoroughly rejected in later years. These assumptions can thus provide a key insight into ways in which ideas about languages and language learning have changed.
The Direct Method
Language-learning populations were already changing in ways which were to gather momentum throughout the twentieth century. Language-learning experts responded to this challenge with radical new ideas about how languages should be taught. They advocated a direct method in which the student’s own languages were banished and everything was to be done through the language under instruction.
“Natural” Language Learning
In practice, grammar rules had to be worked out by students from examples because an explanation would demand language beyond the level of the rule being explained. The meaning of new vocabulary had to be either guessable from the context or perhaps illustrated or mimed. These endemic problems of the direct method were bypassed by radical “new” ideas. The so-called natural approach revived the notion that an adult learner can repeat the route to proficiency of the native-speaking child.
This approach was based upon theorizing and research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) which purported to show that learners, whatever their first language, would follow an internally determined natural order of their own, and that neither explicit instruction nor conscious learning had any effect. The natural approach is an object lesson in what applied linguistics should not be.
The Communicative Approach
At roughly the same time as the development of the natural approach, there emerged a far more durable new movement known as the communicative approach or Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). This became the dominant orthodoxy in progressive language teaching. Both CLT and the natural approach can lead to similar meaning-focused activities, and for this reason, they have often been confused. The focus of CLT was primarily and necessarily social, concerned as it was with the goal of successful communication. The natural approach was essentially psychological, based upon the idea derived from first-language acquisition studies. The essence of CLT is a shift of attention from the language system as an end in itself to the successful use of that system in context. Language-learning success is to be assessed neither in terms of accurate grammar nor pronunciation for their own sake.
Two Changes of Emphasis
- In addition to mastery of form, learners need other kinds of ability and knowledge if they are to communicate successfully.
- Forms should be approached in the context of their usefulness rather than as an end in themselves. In other words, the traditional sequence of language learning was reversed.
Teachers and materials designers were urged to identify things learners need to do with the language (needs analysis) and simulate these in the classroom. At the macro level, there has been the development of Language for Specific Purposes, such as English for Specific Purposes (ESP), which tries to develop the language and discourse skills that will be needed for particular jobs. At the micro level, there has been the development of Task-Based Instruction (TBI), in which learning is organized around tasks related to real-world activities, focusing the student’s attention upon meaning and successful task completion.