The field of secon language teaching
has undergone many fluctuations and shifts over the years. Different from
physics or chemistry, in which progress is more or less steady until a major
discovery causes a radical theoretical revision, language teaching is a field
in which fads and heroes have come and gone in a manner fairly consistent with
the kinds of changes that occur in youth culture.
Pre –twentieth-
Century Trends :
A Brief Survey
Prior to the twentieth century,
language teaching methodology facilitated between two types of approaches :
getting learners to use a language versus getting learners to analyze a
language. Both the classical Greek and medieval Latin periods were
characterized by an emphasis on teaching people to use foreign languages. The
classical languages, first Greek and then Latin, were used as lingua francas.
During the Renaissance, the formal
study of the grammars of Greek and Latin became popular through the mass
production of books made possible by the invention of the printing press. In
retrospect, strange as it may seem, the Renaissance preoccupation with the
formal study of classical Latin may have contributed to the demise of Latin as
a lingua franca.
Since the European vernaculars had
grown in prestige and utility, it is not surprising that people in one country
or region wants to learn the language of another country or region. Some of the
techniques that Comenius used and espoused were the following :
»
Use imitation
instead of rules to teach a language.
»
Have your
students repeat after you.
»
Use a limited
vocabulary initially.
»
Help your
students practice reading an speaking.
»
Teach language
through pictures to make it meaningful.
Thus Comenius, perhaps for the first time,
made explicit an inductive approach to learning a foreign language, the goal of
which was to teach use rather than analysis of the language being taught.
By the
end of the nineteenth century, the Direct Method which once more stressed the
ability to use rather than to analyze a language as the goal of language
instruction, had begun to function as a viable alternative to Grammar
Translation.
The
Direct Method became very popular in France and Germany, and has enthusiastic
followers among language teachers even today as does the Grammar Translation
does. In 1886 the International Phonetic Association was established by
scholars such as Henry Sweet, Wilhelm Vietor, and Paul Passy. These
phoneticians made some of the first truly scientific contributions to language
teaching when they advocated principles such as following :
»
The spoken form
of a language is primary and should be taught first.
»
The findings of
phonetics should be applied to language teaching.
»
Language
teachers must have solid training in phonetics.
»
Learners should
be given phonetic training to establish goo speech habits.
The Reading Approach, as reflected in
the work of Michael West (1941) and others held sway in the United States until
the late 1930s and early 1940s, when World War II broke out and made it
imperative for the US army to quickly and efficiently teach foreign language
learners how to speak and understand a language. At this time, the Audiolingual
Approach (Fries 1945) which drew heavily on structural linguistics (Bloomfield
1933) and behavioral psychology (Skinner 1957), was born.
Nine Twentieth
Century Approaches to Language Teaching
There are four other discernible
approaches to foreign language teaching that developed and were widely used
during the final quarter of the twentieth century. There are nine approaches
altogether that shall be referring to :
1.
Grammar-Translation
2.
Direct
3.
Reading
4.
Audiolingualism
(United States)
5.
Oral-Situational
(Britain)
6.
Cognitive
7.
Affective-Humanistic
8.
Comprehension-Based
9.
Communicative
Namely, what do we mean by approach,
methods, and technique? Anthony (1963) has provided a useful set of definitions
for our purposes. An approach to language teaching is something that reflects a
certain model or research paradigm. A method, on the other hand, is a set of
procedures, a system that spells out rather precisely how to teach a second
language. A technique is a classroom device or activity an thus represents the
narrowest of the three concepts.
The most problematic of Anthony’s three terms is method.
Some methods and their originator follow
»
Silent Way
(Gattegno 1976)
»
Community
Language Learning (Curran 1976)
»
Total Physical
Response (Asher 1977)
»
Suggestology,
Suggestopedia, or Accelerated Learning (Lozanov 1978)
At this point I will outline each of nine approaches
listed above :
1.
Grammar
Translation Approach
2.
Direct Approach
3.
Reading
Approach
4.
Audiolingualism
5.
Oral-Situational
Approach
6.
Cognitive
Approach
7.
Affective
Humanistic Approach
8.
Comprehension
Based Approach
9.
Communicative
Approach
To sum up, we can see that certain
features of several of the five arose in reaction to perceived inadequacies or
impracticalities in an earlier approach or approaches. The four more recently
developed approaches also do this to some extent.
A Note on Approach, Method, and Syllabus Type
An
approach is general, that a method is a specific set of procedures more or less
compatible with an approach, and that a technique is very specific type of
learning activity used in one or more methods. Most of them have used a
structural syllabus, which consists of a list of grammatical inflections and
constructions that the teacher is expected to teach and the students is
expected to master.In the Communicative Approach, one type of syllabus is
organized around notions and functions.
CONCLUSION
ESL / EFL is to learn more about the
various approaches and methods available and to find out which practices have
proved successful. There are also five other things the teacher should do to
make a good decisions concerning the choice of an approach, a method and
finally techniques and materials :
- Assess the
student needs.
- Examine
instructional constraints.
- Determine the
attitudes and learning styles.
- Identify the
discourse genres, speech activities, and text types that students need to learn
so that you can incorporate them into materials and learning activities.
- Specify how the
students language learning will be assessed.
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