Lecture 1: General problems of Foreign Language teaching

Behavior method
The chief tendency in the development of Methods abroad may be characterized by a scientific approach to the teaching of foreign languages, extensive use of linguistic science, psychology, psychoLinguistics, and experimenting. The progress made in the sphere of phonetics, vocabulary, and grammar study has shed fresh light on the content of teaching, i.e., on what to teach, what linguistic material should be used for developing audio-lingual skills and written language (reading and Writing). Different approaches are followed in the selection of linguistic material for teaching speaking and reading; for the former, recorded speech should be analyzed with the aimof selecting those language units which are characteristic of spoken language and are necessary to cover the most frequently used situations; for the latter, printed texts are analyzed and the occurrences of words, phraseological units, and grammatical structures are counted in order to select those which the learner needs to read foreign texts.
The practical application of some theoretical views of American descriptive structural linguists and psychologists such as the primacy of the spoken over the written language, has led to the oral approach to foreign language teaching: the treatment of language as a complex of habits and skills as a from of social Behaviorhas been realized in teaching a foreign language, i.e. a reaction of the organism as a whole to a social environment. The learner should know what a native speaker's response would be in a certain situation. In this article "Learning English as Behavior". M. West gives the following examples of wrong and right responses.


Wrong Right
What's this? What's this?
This is a book. It's a book.
Where is the book? Where is a book?
The book is on the table. It's on the table.

In order to understand the English it is not enough to know what they speak but how they speak, or rather how they converse. In a behavioral method of teaching it is necessary to combine a correct and systematic build-up of linguistic elements (structures and carefully selected vocabulary) and a vital and behavioral use of the language. M. West says: "Ideally one needs televisions or a film so that the pupil may not merely hear how the English Language is behaved as well".

The behaviouristic stimulus-response and reinforcement theory in Psychology adopted by foreign language teaching has resulted in repetitive drill of certain patterns of language or in pattern practice, for this purpose language laboratories, programmed instruction and other innovations have been offered. However this has not brought the result which were promised and expected. The behavioral method has begun to be strongly criticized by psychologists and by the teachers and students themselves.