TOPIC 1

THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE (LG) TEACHING. CURRENT

TRENDS IN THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN
LANGUAGE. COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES

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 1. INTRODUCTION

AIM of this UNIT: Evolution of language from its origings , 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)
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.

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 2. 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 lg were written as a set of rules.

- Greeks and Romans. According to Howatt (1984), education is 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 secng
lanaguge, since they wanted to be ableto 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

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 3. HISTORY OF THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH AS
A FOREIGN LG. EARLY & CURRENT TRENDS
3.1 UP TO THE 18TH CENTURY
a) ANCIENT TIMES
• Earliest educational systems Religion
• Middle Ages  Christianity became a powerful force, founding many schools
• Teaching based on grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometric
• Education was a privilege
B) MODERN TIMES
• Renaissance  History, Geography, Music and PE were emphasized.
• They taught in Latin Grammar schools
• Beginning of 16th century Political changes in Europe (new languages gaining importance)
• 17th century growth of scientific knowledge
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 3.2. 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
- 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.

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 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 .

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 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

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 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
- 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
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 3.3. 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:

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 3.3. 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
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)
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 3.5. 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.

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 3.4. 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.
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 behavior of the teacher and specially, through the use of
music
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 4. 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
- CLIL

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 4. WHAT’S CURRENTLY HAPPENING? CLIL (I)

• The term CLIL was coined by David Marsh, University of Jyväskylä, Finland (1994): "CLIL refers to
situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual-
focused aims, namely the learning of content and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language.“
• There is no single blueprint that can be applied in the same way in different countries.” Coyle (2007)
• Immersion (Språkbad, Sweden)
• Bilingual education (Hungary)
• Multilingual education (Latvia)
• Integrated curriculum (Spain)
• Languages across the curriculum (Fremdsprache als Arbeitssprache, Austria)
• Language-enriched instruction (Finland)

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a dual-focused educational approach in which
an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language.
• In the teaching and learning process, there is a focus not only on content, and not only on language.
Each is in terwoven, even if the emphasis is greater on one or the other at a given time. Coyle /
Hood / Marsh (2010)
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 4. WHAT’S CURRENTLY HAPPENING? CLIL (II)

We should all challenge the idea of waiting until I think I am good enough in the
language to use the language. Rather we should use the language as a tool for
communication and learning from as early a point as possible
A key issue in ‘picking up’ languages relates to the opportunities we have for learning
languages
CLIL can offer to youngsters of any age a natural situation for language development
which builds on other forms of learning
It is not so much what we know but how we use it which is so important when we
consider effective language learning and communication
CLIL offers opportunities to use another language naturally, in such a way that students
soon forget about the language and only focus on the learning topic

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 5. CONCLUSION

- Summarize the topic with key words

- 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?

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