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Stages of development methods of foreign language teaching
The history of language teaching throughout much of the twenties century saw the rise and fall of a variety of language teaching approaches and methods. Common to most of them are the following assumptions;
An approach or method refers to a theoretically consistent set of teaching procedures that define best practice in language teaching.
Particular approaches and methods, if followed precisely, will lead to more effective levels of language learning that alternative ways of teaching.
The quality of language teaching will improve if teachers use the best available approaches and methods.
The history of “methods” foreign language teaching may be said to have begun in the late 1800s with Francois Gouin, a French teacher of Latin with remarkable insights. History doesn’t normally credit Couin as a founder of language-teaching methodology because, at the time, his influence was overshadowed by that of Maximilian Berlitz, the popular German founder of the Direct Method.
Some attention to Gouin’s unusually perceptive observations about language teaching helps us to set the stage for the development of language teaching methods for the century following the publication of his book ‘The Art of Learning and studying Languages’ in 1880.
Gouin had to go through a painful set of experiences to derive his insights. He decided to learn German in midlife. But rather than attempting to converse with the natives, he engaged in a rather bizarre sequence of attempts to “master” the language. He memorized a German grammar book and a table of the 248 irregular German verbs in 10 days. But he wrote that, he couldn’t understand a single word (Gouin, 1880, p.11). again he emerged with expectations of success, but the result was the same as before. He memorized books, translated Goethe and Schiller, and even memorized 30,000 words in a German dictionary, all in the isolation room, only to be crushed by his failure to understand German afterward. After returning home, Gouin discovered that his 3 year old nephew had, during that year, gone through the wonderful stage of child language acquisition in which he went from saying virtually nothing at all to becoming a veritable chatterbox of French. How was it that this little child succeeded so easily, in a first language, in a task that Gouin, in a second language, had found impossible? So Gouin spent a great deal of time observing his nephew and other children and came to the following conclusions: ‘Language learning is a primarily a matter of transforming perceptions into conceptions. Children use language to represent their conceptions. Language is a means of thinking, of representing the world to oneself’. These insights were formed by a language teacher more than a century ago!
The different teaching approaches and methods that have emerged in the last 60 or so years, while often having very different characteristics in terms of goals, assumptions about how a second language is learned, and preferred teaching Techniques, have in common the belief that if language learning is to be improved, it will come about through changes and improvements in teaching methodology. This notion has been reinforced by professional organizations that endorse particular teaching approaches and methods, by academics, who support some and reject others, by publishers who produce and sell textbooks based on the latest teaching approaches for the “best” method of teaching a language.
The most active period in the history of approaches and methods was from the 1950s to the 1980s. the 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of the Audiolingual Method and the Situational Method, which were both superseded by the Communicative Approach. During the same period, other methods attracted smaller but equally enthusiastic followers, including the Silent Way, the Natural Approach, and Total Physical Response. In the 1990s, Content-Based Instruction and Task-based Language Teaching emerged as new approaches to language teaching as did movements such as Competency Based Instruction that focus on the outcomes of learning rather than methods of teaching. Other approaches, such as Cooperative Learning, Whole Language Approach and Multiple Intelligences, originally developed in general education, have been extended to second language settings.
In the 1990s, however, many applied linguists and language teachers moved away from a belief that newer and better approaches and methods are the solution to problems in language teaching. Alternative ways of understanding the nature of language teaching have emerged that are sometimes viewed as characterizing the “the post-methods era”.
However during the period between the two wars it became possible to revive the main principles of the Direct method:
a) by careful experimentation;
b) by taking note of the new developments in the field of Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure) and psychology (Thorndike);
c) by insisting that clear statements be made as to the aims and objectives of teaching. This was done by H. Palmer and M. West, prominent English methodologists.
We greatly appreciate H. Palmer and M. West for their contribution to Methods. These English methodologists have enriched the technology of foreign language teaching:
They have raised the problem of careful selection of language material, worked out criteria of selection, and selected the material.
They have raised the problem of the necessity for rationalizing teaching Materials and worked out systems of foreign language teaching: H. Palmer – speaking, M. West – both reading and speaking.
They have compiled series of guide books: H. Palmer for teaching speaking; M. West for teaching reading and speaking.
They have introduced a lot of new effective exercises: H. Palmer for the development of speaking skills, M. West for the development of reading skills and comprehension of a foreign text as well as for the development of speaking.
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