The History of English Language Teaching
Language teaching can be viewed in three parts :
I. Traditional approaches (up to late 1960s)
II. Classic communicative language teaching (1970s – 1990s)
III. Current communicative language teaching (late 1990s to the present)
According to Celce-Murcia on her book, Teaching English as a Second Foreign Language,
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 that occur in youth culture. One reason for the
frequent swings of the pendulum is the fact that very few language teachers have a sense of
history about their profession and are thus unaware of the historical bases of the many
methodological options they have at their disposal.
Pre-twentieth-Century Trends (Traditional Approaches)
In the earlier of the twentieth century, language teaching methodology vacillated
between two types of approaches : getting learners to use a language (to speak and understand
it) and getting learners to analyze a language (to learn its grammatical rules)
Greek and Latin were the classical language. They were used as lingua francas. The
classical Greek and medieval Latin periods were characterized by an emphasize on teaching
people to use foreign languages. Higher learning was conducted primarily through these
languages all over Europe. The educated elite became fluent speakers, readers, and writers of
the appropriate classical language. At that time, the teachers and tutors used informal and
direct approaches to convey the form and meaning of language. They used aural-oral
techniques, a small stock of hand-copied written manuscripts of some sort, like a few texts in
the target language, or simple dictionaries which listed words in two or more languages.
During the Renaissance, the period of new growth of interest and activity in the areas of
art, literature and ideas in Europe, especially northern Italy, during the 14th, 15th and 16th
centuries, the formal study of the Greek and Latin grammars became popular. Eventually, Latin
began to be abandoned as lingua franca. Various European vernaculars had begun to rise and
being more popular.
During the seventeenth century, the focus in language study was back to utility rather
than analysis. Johann Amos Comenius was the most famous language teacher and
methodologist at that time. He taught the students to learn foreign language explicitly for the
first time. Some of the techniques that he used are:
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Use imitation instead of rules to teach a language.
Your students should repeat the words or sentences after you.
Use a limited vocabulary initially.
Helps your students to practice reading and speaking.
Teach language through picture.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the analytical Grammar-Translation
approach was emerged.
By the end of nineteenth century, the Direct Method began to be published by Francois
Gouin in 1880. The goal of this method is the ability to use the language rather than to analyze
it. He used the target language exclusively in the classroom. This method became very popular
in France and Germany, and in 1886, became popular in Europe.
In 1940, Michael West and his crew started to introduce The Reading Approach. It
became popular in the United States until the late 1930s and 1940s. Then, in 1945, the
Audiolingual Approach was born. It drew heavily on structural linguistics and behavioural
psychology. At the same time, the Oral or Situational Approach has emerged in Britain. In this
method, the learners should organize structures around situations, so they would be provided
the maximum opportunity to practice the target language.
Nine Twentieth-Century Approaches to Language Teaching (Classic Communicative Language
Teaching)
Besides the four approaches above, the Grammar-Translation Approach, the Direct
Approach, the Reading Approach, the Audiolingual Approach, and the Oral-Situation Approach,
there are four other approaches to foreign language teaching that were used during the final
quarter of the twentieth century. They are Cognitive, Affective-Humanistic, ComprehensionBased, and Communicative.
Celce Muria clarified the terms approach, method, and technique. They are different. An
approach to language teaching is something that reflects a certain model or research paradigm.
A method is a set of procedures. It is more specific than an approach but less specific than
technique. A technique is a classroom device or activity and thus represent the narrowest of
the three concepts.
These are some methods and their originators follow :
- Silent Way (Gattegno 1979)
- Community Language Learning (Curran 1976)
- Total Physical Response (Asher 1977)
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Suggestology, Suggestopedia, or Accelerated Learning (Lozanov 1978)
Here is the outline of the nine approaches :
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Grammar-Translation Approach: an extension of the approach used to teach classical
languages to the teaching of modern languages.
Direct Approach: a reaction to the Grammar-Translation Approach and its failure to
produce learners who could communicate in the foreign language they had been
studying.
Reading Approach: a reaction to the problem experienced in implementing the Direct
Approach. Reading was viewed as the most usable skill to have in a foreign language
since not many people traveled abroad at that time, and also, few teachers could use
their foreign language well enough to use a direct approach effectively in class.
Audiolinguism: a reaction to the Reading Approach and its lack of emphasis on oralaural skills. This approach became dominant in the United States during the 1940s –
1960s.
Oral-Situation Approach: a reaction to the Reading Approach and its lack of emphasis on
oral-aural skills. This approach was dominant in Britain during the 1940s – 1960s.
Cognitive Approach: a reaction to the behaviourist features of the Audiolingual
Approach, influenced by cognitive psychology and Chomskyan linguistics.
Affective-Humanistic Approach: a reaction to the general lack of affective considerations
in both Audiolingualism and the Cognitive Approach.
Comprehension-Based Approach: an outgrowth of research in first language acquisition
that led some language methodologist to assume that second or foreign language
learning is very similar to first language acquisition.
Communicative Approach: an outgrowth of the work of anthropological linguist and
Firthian linguists who view language first and foremost as a system for communication.
Communicative Language Teaching for the Twenty-First Century (Current Communicative
Language Teaching)
In the current communicative language teaching, Savignon identifies five components of
a communicative curriculum.
Within the last quarter century, communicative language teaching (CLT) has been put
forth around the world as the “new” or “innovative” way to teach English as a second or foreign
language. The origins of contemporary CLT can be traced to concurrent developments in
Europe and North America.
In Europe, the Council of Europe developed a syllabus for learners based on notionalfunctional concepts of language use. Other European developments focused on the process of
communicative classroom language learning. Supplementary teacher resource materials
promoting classroom CLT became increasingly popular during 1970s.
In the United States, Hymes had proposed the term communicative competence to
represent the use of language in social context. His focus was not language learning, but
language as social behavior.
At the same time, in a research project at the University of Illinois, Savignon used the
term “communicative competence” to characterize the ability of classroom language learners
to interact with other speaker, to make meaning, as distinct from their ability to recite dialogs
or perform on discrete-point tests of grammatical knowledge.
A collection of role plays, games, and other communicative classroom activities were
subsequently developed for inclusion in adaptating the French CREDIF (Centre de Recherche et
d’Etude pour la Diffusion du Francais) materials, Voix et Visages de la France.
Learners gradually expand their communicative competence, consisting of grammatical
competence, discourse competence, sociocultural competence, and strategic competence.
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Grammatical Competence → refers to level-sentence grammatical forms, the ability to
recognize the lexical, morphological, syntactic, and phonological feature of a language
and to make use of these features to interpret and form words and sentences.
Discourse Competence → concerned not with isolated words or phrases but with the
interconnectedness of a series of utterances, written words, and/or phrases to form a
text, a meaningful whole.
Sociocultural Competence → extends well beyond linguistic forms and is an
interdisciplinary field of inquiry having to do with the social rules of language use.
Strategic Competence → the coping strategies that we use in unfamiliar contexts, with
constraints due to imperfect knowledge of rules or limiting factors in their application
such as fatigue or distraction.
CLT puts focus on learner. Learner communicative needs provide a framework for
elaborating program goals in terms of functional competence.
There are five components which can be profitable blended at all stages of instruction.
They are:
- Language Arts
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Language for a Purpose
My Language is Me: Personal English Language Use
You Be, I’ll be: Theater Arts
Beyond the Classroom