Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
IX Coloquio de Humanidades: Diálogos sobre Cultura, Arte y Sociedad
Estudios del Lenguaje
Andrés Sepúlveda Rodríguez
A History of English Language Teaching
Howatt and Widdowson have made of A History of English Language Teaching
a referential book that takes the reader into a magical tour, full with history,
language, and teaching. It is a must-see book all teachers should not only read
but have at home since it contains a rich and vast discussion of the different
English teaching trends form the early past (The Renaissance) to the present
days (The XX Century).
This English language-teaching journey takes off back in the late years of
1400 after the Norman reign in England, which started in 1066. Right after the
falling of the French empire, English language began its expansion overseas,
and as a consequence Europe and America showed a peculiar interest in
teaching it. Since then a great number of English language teaching schools,
methodologies, and trends have emerged as a big necessity to learn and keep
on learning one of the most important languages of the world even nowadays.
A History of English Language is divided into three parts and each part
subsequently has two chronological sections, which are set this way.
Part One: 1400 to 1800
Part Two: 1800 to 1900
Part Three: 1900 to the present day
Part one two sections are Practical Language Teaching, which deals with
the teaching of English with specific purposes before the nineteenth century.
The audience was primarily adults since children were taught Latin in grammar
schools. The second section in part one is On Fixing the Language, which
discusses the way of making English language teachable throughout the
proposals for orthographical reform in the 1500s and the standardization of
English language with the proposal by Swift.
Part two two sections are English Language Teaching in the Empire, this
is based on the interest shown by the British to teach English to children in
England specifically. The second theme in this part two is English Language
Teaching in Europe and it is about the making of a theoretical framework to
support the approaches proposed by theorists, psychologists, and linguists all
along Europe.
Part three two sections are English Language Teaching since 1900: the
making of a profession, which describes the three phases of ELT as a
profession, and the second theme is Aspects of English language teaching
since 1900, which is focused on the communicative approach and its language
aspects such as the teaching of spoken language, reading, grammar, lexicon,
and English for Special/Specific Purposes (ESP).
All this content covers a total of 21 themes all along the book, which are
a theoretical and chronological description of the approaches and trends in
matters of English language teaching.
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Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
IX Coloquio de Humanidades: Diálogos sobre Cultura, Arte y Sociedad
Estudios del Lenguaje
Andrés Sepúlveda Rodríguez
A History of English Language Teaching
Howatt and Widdowson in this second edition start Part one (1400-1800)
describing those four centuries of English teaching from the last years of
Medieval England when French died out as the second language of the
kingdom and displaced by English passing through the most relevant contextual
agents of change to the end of it just before the twentieth century. One of the
most significant factors that made English to be known, practiced, and used
officially is the moment when Henry IV himself decided to use English both in
claiming the crown and in his acceptance speech. This practice was also
carried on by King Henry V.
By the end of fifteenth century, Royalty started to consider English as the
language of the nation and in the times of the Tudor dynasty, everybody had to
speak English from the King himself downwards. This fact, coming from the
Royal family, forced the teaching of English to be a necessary task. However, it
was up to 1586 that William Bullokar made a brief description of English
language grammar in his Pamphlet for Grammar . Since there was not a
linguistic description of grammar, the teaching of English was performed by
means of dialogues and texts using a question-based method. This was the
teaching tradition though the whole period to 1800. An example of this is
Joseph Priestley’s Rudiments of English Grammar written in the late eighteenth
century (1761).
The first textbooks designed to teach English as a Foreign Language
appeared in 1570s and 1580s as double-manuals; that is books containing a
linear translation of English and French. Then in 1540, the first polyglot
dictionaries were published, which included English alongside the more widelyknown languages like Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch, and High Dutch.
Another example of the Royal influence to the learning of a foreign language is
the wedding between Philip II of Spain and Mary I in 1554 since a lot Spaniards
had to go to London to attend the ceremony and learn the language. This
textbook was probably a Flemish-Spanish manual called ‘the Vocabulary of
Barlement’.
From about 1560 onwards, there were three important refugee teachers
in the teaching of English as a foreign language to the immigrant French
community in London. It seems that Jacques Bellot was the most significant. He
wrote the book The English Schoolmaster in about 1570s and Familiar
Dialogues in 1586. Claudius Holyband was the second teacher and the most
successful and professional of them, although he mainly taught French to
young children in the schools he had in London. He wrote The French
Schoolmaster and The French Littleton, which was written in 1566. Holyband
used a method in teaching grammar what was later was known as ‘inductive’
approach The third teacher was John Florio (c.1553-1625), who was more like a
private teacher for aristocrats and developed himself as a linguist and a literary
scholar in the Golden Age of the English Renaissance. He wrote the ItalianEnglish dictionary Queen Anna’s New World of Words in 1611. He also wrote
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Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
IX Coloquio de Humanidades: Diálogos sobre Cultura, Arte y Sociedad
Estudios del Lenguaje
Andrés Sepúlveda Rodríguez
A History of English Language Teaching
First Fruits and Second Fruits. Florio, as the other two teachers, was a
Protestant. All of them continued the traditional bilingual method of the earlier
manuals.
Another source of knowing about the history of English language
teaching Howatt and Widdowson greatly described in this awesome book is
what has been considered the best-selling language textbook ever written, A
Short Introduction of Grammar, credited to William Lily (c. 1468-1522). Royalty
has a say in this because in the late 1530s, King Henry VIII wanted to establish
a uniform method of grammar teaching in schools. That is why the book was
also known as ‘Royal Grammar’. This book was also sponsored by King Edward
VI in 1547 and by Queen Elizabeth I in 1559. Therefore it was expected to have
such a great success.
From this uniformity of grammar, some other books emerged. One of
them is Roger Aschman’s The Schoolmaster in 1570, which is focused on the
role of function of language studies, and the other book is Francis Bacon’s
Advancement of Learning in 1605, which had a more puritanical philosophy.
After these books, Webbe released his book An Appeal to Truth in 1622. The
peculiar characteristic of this book is that it contained a no grammar method,
which is also called the Direct Method. He claimed that his method was
protected by law because he patented it after submitting a Petition to the High
Court of Parliament in 1623. Teaching a no-grammar method is a watershed in
the history of English language teaching since the earlier books had been
focused on the Double-Translation Method and the Inductive Method.
After this period, Comenius completed The Great Didactic between the
years 1628 and 1632. He was looking for a universal method of teaching whose
basis was to provide a strategy for teachers to teach less and for learners to
learn more. About learning, Comenius says the following:
“He expressed the journey towards wisdom in terms of a metaphor of the
Temple: the young child approaches the porch (Vestibulum) and, with the
proper preparation, he is permitted to enter the gates (Januae). On the
inside, he finds himself in the great court (Palatium) and ultimately
progresses to the wisdom of the inner sanctum or treasure house
(Thesaurus). This four-stage progress towards knowledge was to be the
framework of all learning, including the learning of languages” (p. 47).
Howatt and Widdowson finished this point of Part one by saying that Comenius
asks one question that makes us reflect on the issue of teaching and learning a
second language. “How can the teacher come to terms with the fact that
language is not the object of learning but the outcome, the product of interplay
between the learner and ‘the great and common world’?
History continues on and in 1693 Guy Miège, a Swiss teacher, published
his book New Method of Learning English, which raised the teaching of English
3
Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
IX Coloquio de Humanidades: Diálogos sobre Cultura, Arte y Sociedad
Estudios del Lenguaje
Andrés Sepúlveda Rodríguez
A History of English Language Teaching
as a foreign language to a standard of expertise and professionalism as never
before in the history of English language teaching. Previously to this, he also
had another great contribution to this concern. In 1685, he published The
English Grammar, which attempted to standardize English language throughout
it grammar rules, but unfortunately it failed. However it gave the first step to
professionalizing the teaching of English language. After this attempt to have a
more linguistic, didactic, psychological, and professional method to teach
English, the new era was about to come. English language was not anymore a
local or national language that belongs only to England, but to all Europe and
the USA. An evidence of this necessity to take English out of England took
place in Bengal in the year of 1797. It was the first time that a book about the
teaching of English was published out of Europe. The first step for a book this
type to appear outside England happened in Netherlands. In 1705 in
Amsterdam, William Sewel published Compendious Guide to the English
Language.
The authors make a world tour of English Teaching all along the period
of the eighteenth and nineteenth century standing out important countries such
as France, Germany, USA, Denmark, Russia, among others. They also
remarked the importance of standardizing English language in England first.
This aspect of the history of English language is a priority in matters of teaching
it. The period between 1550 and 1800 was struggle to what Howatt and
Widdowson called ‘On Fixing the Language’. Scholars, grammarians, and
phoneticians as well as kings and religious authorities were concerned about
the uniformity of English language, but seemingly the languages imposed by
the peoples that conquered England did not allow that standardization of
English language so longed by the British.
A History of English Language portrays two of the most important
proposals for orthographical reform in the 1500s. In 1569, John Hart published
An Orthography containing the due order and reason, how to write or paint the
image of a man’s voice, most like to the life of nature. This book contains a
summary of the reasons Hart had for the spelling reform project. The other
proposal comes from Richard Mulcaster’s Elementarie, which focused not only
on orthography but on some other skills such as reading, writing, drawing,
singing, and playing. He wrote two major works on education and the teaching
of English, which were Positions… for the Training Up of Children in 1581 and
The Fist Part of the Elementaire, which is better known and more substantial.
Mulcaster’s main principles for spelling reformation based on reason and sound,
so it was a more phonologically ruled system.
Then from orthography and phonetics, the authors take us to another
plane that has already been discussed… grammar. One of the most important
contributors to this issue in English teaching is Ben Jonson who wrote English
Grammar and published posthumously in 1640 under the patronage of King
James I. Jonson differed from his other colleagues by stating that orthography
and prosody are not part of grammar, instead he emphasized on two elements,
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Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
IX Coloquio de Humanidades: Diálogos sobre Cultura, Arte y Sociedad
Estudios del Lenguaje
Andrés Sepúlveda Rodríguez
A History of English Language Teaching
etymology and syntax. All these approaches and books tried to ‘fix’ the
language. Apparently It was the right time (1600s and 1700s) English had
reached that level of standardization and got finally ‘fixed’. In deed it was a false
perception.
During the eighteenth century, Swift proposed for a British Academy. A
result of this proposal was the publication of Dictionary of the English
Language. Some other authors emerged as part of this necessity of
standardizing English language. Authors such as Johnson, Walker and Webster
had a great contribution in the making of dictionaries. It was a big attempt to
reach the so-longed standardization of English language. Then some of the
best versions of the Bible translation can evidence this contribution. King James
Bible and the plays of William Shakespeare were then at the reach of ordinary
people in England and English language speakers out of England. One of the
most representative works of that time and that it is present still today is the
great Oxford English Dictionary published by Webster and compliers at the end
of the nineteenth century. Webster also made his masterpiece American
Dictionary of the English Language come true in 1828 in the last productive
stage of his life. All of this is a great step to fixing the language, but even though
English did not get fixed by these authors and their contributions.
So far, Howatt and Widdowson have taken us all along this magical tour
of the history of English language teaching from the beginning up to 1800. A
new era (1800-1900) was about to come and to change he role English had had
as the teaching of a foreign language for that of a second language in the
modern world of its colonies and some other territories English Language had
an influence upon. Places like India, Germany, and USA adopted English
teaching as a necessity and by the end of 1700s the so-called Grammar
Translation Method had originated in Germany (1780s). This fact opened the
gate for the other modern methods to go through and in 1870 the ‘individualized
method’ appeared. Schools such as Berlitz in the USA got successful by
offering ‘conversation courses’ which changed the perspectives of teaching
English into a more communicative approach.
A History of English Language Teaching now rides us to the expansion
of the British Empire throughout its lands, which had to learn the language of
the empire. Countries like Ghana, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Honduras, Malaysia and
Singapure, Hong Kong, and India opened schools for learning English and as a
consequence this fact enriched the methodologies used making English
language teaching a needed job. All this happened from 1800 to the end of
1900.
Beside the authors Howatt and Widdowson have mentioned and
discussed about before, there is a number of important individual reformers of
language teaching methods. One of them is French Jean Joseph Jacotot (17701840) whose pedagogy was taken in England in 1830 by Joseph Payne through
A Compendious Exposition of the Principles and Practice of Professor Jacoto’s
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Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
IX Coloquio de Humanidades: Diálogos sobre Cultura, Arte y Sociedad
Estudios del Lenguaje
Andrés Sepúlveda Rodríguez
A History of English Language Teaching
Celebrated System of Education. The basic principle of this two-party theory
focuses on learning-by-heart thorougly ‘mining’ the text. This principle had a
motto, which is ‘All is in all’. The main point here is to relate everything that is
learned to everything else to it. After this the Rational Method of Claude Marcel
(1793-1876) appeared. The basis of this method was to look at the context and
to link what had already been learned before with the new learning. It was the
first strong approach to underline the importance of the four basic skills,
hearing, speaking, reading, and writing. He also contributed greatly to
contextualize the main agents of education, which are parents, teachers, and
method. He differentiated between Analytic and Synthetic Methods of
Instruction. The former deals with examples, practice, and experience. The
latter deals with the objects of study.
As we can see English teaching methodologies became more
pedagogical than their earlier approaches. Another important author is Thomas
Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’. Prendergast (1806-1866) is the only
Englishman among the earlier twentieth-century reformers. In 1864, he
published his ‘Mastery System’ for learning languages also called The Mastery
of Languages, or the art of speaking foreign languages idiomatically. The
principle of his method rested on the idea that children learned through ‘chunks’
of language or ‘pre-fabs’; that is pieces of language that find a coherent syntax
construction following his seven-step teaching method: 1. Memorization, 2.
Writing, 3. Manipulation of model sentences and 4. The construction of future
models, 5. Reading, 6. Comprehension, and 7. Conversation skills. The last of
the nineteenth-century individualist is François Gouin (1831-1896). He
published his major work in 1880 in Paris, The Art of Teaching and Studying
Languages. The translation of his book appeared in London in 1892. His
method focued mainly in the sequential structure provided by the framework of
the associated language. It is a ‘series’ of language events interrelated to each
other to construct the learning process.
A quite interesting point in the history of English language is the
reference Howwat and Widdowson give us when they discussed about the
Reform Movement. The core of this reform rests on the idea that phoneticians
were paying attention to the classroom process of teaching the language, but
teachers were also paying attention to the new science of phonetics.
Professionals associations and societies were formed and in 1889 the
publication of the best-known International Phonetic Alphabet appeared. On the
side of teaching the principal figure was Hermann Klinghardt (1847-1926) who
in 1887 wrote his book A Year’s Experience with the New Method. In 1904
Jespersen published How to Teach a Foreign Language. The new perception of
language teaching might have seemed cold and clinical, in a few words more
didactic. The reform was basically focused on three principles: the primacy of
speech, the centrality of the connected texts as the kernel of the teachinglearning process, and the absolute priority of an oral classroom methodology.
Phonetics played an important role in language teaching and one of the most
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Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
IX Coloquio de Humanidades: Diálogos sobre Cultura, Arte y Sociedad
Estudios del Lenguaje
Andrés Sepúlveda Rodríguez
A History of English Language Teaching
important contributors to the Phonetic Approach was Henry Sweet (1845-1912).
He stood out the importance of accurate pronunciation as the foundation of
successful language learning. Phonetics has to be a k type of knowledge that
made the learner be aware of the learning process. It was not something that
could be achieved by imitation alone.
There is a series of ‘Natural methods of language teaching’ from
Montaigne to Berlitz the authors describe in a very excellent way mentioning a
series of these. For instance Howatt and Widdowson make reference to the
following ones, Natural Method, Conversation Method, Direct Method,
Communicative Approach, and the like. As we can see there was the need to
have a more and more individualized approach that could be centered in the
student and his or her learning profile. These natural approaches tended to look
for a more interactive, conversational way of learning English. Teachers needed
to exploit the basic skills and grammar was an integral part of them, not the core
of learning a language. There are some important authors as well as their
contributions to these natural approaches. Let’s mention the ones Howatt and
Widdowson stand out. Montaigne published in 1580 Essay on Education of
Children, Rousseau wrote in 1762 Emile or On Education, Sauveur (1826-1907)
is the best proposal for the Natural Method, Berlitz (1852-1921) was an
excellent sistematizer of the language teaching and he focused on the Direct
Method. His methodology had such a great success that he opened schools of
languages in America and different countries in Europe. The basic principle of
the Berlitz Method of Teaching Languages was, as Pakscher wrote in his article
Englische Stduien in 1895, a ‘mechanical and superficial’ manner of teaching. It
is quite important to say that the Berlitz school had only English native
speakers.
Howatt and Widdowson in the last part of the book make an account on
the happenings of English language teaching from 1900 to the present day. The
main point in this part three is to explain how the teaching of English became a
profession in the broad sense of the word. During the first part of the twentieth
century Daniel Jones (1881-1967) became the main representative of the new
era teaching trends. The key British contribution was still phonetics. Jones’
major publication was The Scientific Study of Teaching of Languages in 1917.
From 1946 to 1970, the teaching of English consolidated and got a
renewal. The very years of English language consolidation happened between
1946 and 1960. One of the first important strategies to consolidate English
language teaching in all around the world is what the British Council did in the
mid of 1900. They started to publish journals and magazines for teachers or
people to subscribe yearly. An example of this is the journal called English
Language Teaching sponsored by the British Council. A.S. Hornby (1898-1978)
was one of the greatest contributors to this journal. By the year of 1945 Fries
wrote a monograph called teaching and Learning English as a Foreign
Language. By this year the concepts of foreign and second had already been
discussed and established among teachers and experts in the field. As a
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Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
IX Coloquio de Humanidades: Diálogos sobre Cultura, Arte y Sociedad
Estudios del Lenguaje
Andrés Sepúlveda Rodríguez
A History of English Language Teaching
consequence Charles C. Fries named his method ‘The Oral Approach’, which
had a great influence from Palmer’s ‘Oral Method’ created in 1902.
Howatt and Widdowson take us to the end of the 70s with the years of
the renewal. Now the central focus was to distinguish between ESL and EFL
and each approach had its own pedagogy, but in a certain way they both share
some methodologies, techniques and strategies. After the 60s, there was the
boom of certifications of teaching English for different purposes; for adults, as a
second language, as a foreign language, and the like. As a result of this need
the TESOL (Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) was founded
in 1966 in the USA. It was an epoch of change and the media had a big say in
this. With the invention of the TV and the expansion of the radio, new methods
were created and thus the Audio-visual methods showed up. The Audio-Lingual
Method became very popular and a big business for the media.
There are some important names of linguists that contributed a lot to the
development of the teaching of English in matters of language and
communication. We can mention some of them, in the field of Applied
Linguistics, M.A.K. Halliday, David Abercrombie, John Sinclair; anthropological
linguists like Roman Jackobson; sociolinguists like Edward Sapir; in the field of
discourse and language, Dell Hymes, William Labov, J. Holmes; in social
anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski; in the field of grammar and syntax, Noam
Chomsky with his conceptualization of competence and performance, and so
on. Chomsky in 1966 said: ‘it is the language teacher himself (sic) who must
validate or refute any specific proposal. There is very little in psychology or
linguistics that he can accept on faith’. (p. 333). The Communicative Approach
was supposed to make language learning more ‘real’, but the question about its
effectiveness is still in the air.
The decade of the 1980s was a remarkable epoch for English language
teaching diversity. Earl W. Stevick publish a book that became a watershed in
the field, Teaching Languages- a Way and Ways in 1980. This book introduces
the so-called humanistic methods such as ‘The Silent Way’ by Gattegno,
‘Community Language Learning’ by Curran, ‘Total Physical Response’ by
Ascher, and ‘Suggestopedia’ by Lozanov, among others. Another approach that
labeled the decade of 1970s is the affective approach whose main contributor is
linguist Stephen D. Krashen in the USA. His main concern was the
comprehension of meaning. About this he said: ‘All you need is comprehensible
input’ (p. 257). Howwatt and Widdowson seem not to agree because their
comments on Krashen’s theory sound kind of indifferent like pretending to
ignore the importance of his contribution to the teaching of English as a Second
Language.
What about the 1990s, about this respect, Howatt and Widdowson make
a quite interesting account on the new trends whose main point is the teaching
of English around the world with a business, educational, and/or cultural
purpose. English is the language of the world in a functional way. There are
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Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
IX Coloquio de Humanidades: Diálogos sobre Cultura, Arte y Sociedad
Estudios del Lenguaje
Andrés Sepúlveda Rodríguez
A History of English Language Teaching
probably more speakers of Mandarin Chinese today, but they do not use this
language as practical as English is used. The teaching of English objective is
leaning on the perspective of considering it as lingua franca. In the 1990s the
implications of teaching English are related to classroom materials, educational
technology, the making of a syllabus that meets the needs of the students
(student-centered teaching), ways of teaching, and the like.
As a conclusion, A History of English Language Teaching is way too
valuable book that traces the path the teaching of English language has walked
through. Its authors, Howatt and Widdowson, drew magnificently all the
landscapes painted by the teachers, linguists, anthropologists, sociolinguists,
psychologists, educators, universities, kings, schools, and some other agents
involved in language teaching all along its history. However, it is important to
mention that the authors also pointed out all of the odds and uneven passages
written by the history of those who made of the teaching of English a dull mirror
with no future to come. The book frames a historic perspective about English
language teaching that takes a very relevant and significative role, which was
seemingly hidden underground. Howatt and Widdowson are like two
archeologists digging up the mysteries of English language teaching history to
give them a shape that tells of the past, present, and future of this beautiful job.
Reference:
Howatt, A.P.R & Widdowson, H.G. (2004). A History of English Language
Teaching (2nd ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Andrés Sepúlveda
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