Lecture 1: General problems of Foreign Language teaching

The Oral Approach and Situational Language Teaching
Palmer, Hornby, and other British applied linguists from the 1920s onward developed an approach to methodology that involved systematic principles of selection (the procedures by which lexical and grammatical content was chosen), gradation (principles by which the organization and sequencing of content were determined), and presentation (techniques used for presentation and practice of items in a course). Although Palmer, Hornby, and other English teaching specialists had differing views on the specific procedures to be used in teaching English, their general principles were referred to as the Oral Approach to language teaching. This was not to be confused with the Direct Method, which, although it used oral procedures, lacked a systematic basis in applied linguistic theory and practice.
An oral approach should not be confused with the obsolete Direct Method, which meant only that the learner was bewildered by a flow of ungraded speech, suffering all the difficulties he would have encountered in picking up the language in its normal environment and losing most of the compensating benefits of better contextualization in those circumstances. (Patterson 1964: 4)
The Oral Approach was the accepted British approach to English language teaching by the 1950s. it is described in the standard methodology textbooks of period, such as French (1948-50), Gurrey (1955), Frisdy (1957), and Billows (1961). Its principles are seen in Hornby’s famous Oxford Progressive English Course for Adult Learners (1954-6) and in many other more recent textbooks. One of the most active proponents of the Oral Approach in the sixties was the Australian George Pittman. Pittman and his collegues were responsible for developing an influential set of teaching materials based on the situational approach, which were widely used in Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific territories. Most Pacific territories continue to use the so-called Tate materials, developed by Pittman’s colleague Gloria Tate. Pittman was also responsible for the situationally based materials developed by the Commonwealth Office of Education in Sydney, Australia, used in the English programs for immigrants in Australia. These were published for world-wide use in 1965 as the series Situational English. Materials by Alexander and other leading British textbook writers also reflected the principles of Situational Language Teaching as they had evolved over a twenty-year period. The main characteristics of the approach were as follows:

1. 
   Language teaching begins with the spoken language. Material is taught orally before it is presented in written form.
   
2. 
   The target language is the language of the classroom.
   
3. 
   New language points are introduced and practiced situationally.
   
4. 
   Vocabulary selection procedures are followed to ensure that an essential general service vocabulary is covered.
   
5. 
   Items of grammar are graded following the principle that simple forms should be taught before complex ones.
   
6. 
   Reading and writing are introduced once a sufficient lexical and grammatical basis is established.
   

It was the third principle that became a key feature of the approach in the sixties, and it was then that the term situational was used increasingly in referring to the Oral Approach. Hornby himself used the term the Situational Approach in the title of an influential series of articles published in English Language Teaching in 1950. later the terms Structural-Situational Approach and Situational Language Teaching came into common usage. To avoid further confusion we will use the term Situational Language Teaching (SLT) to include the Structural-Situational and Oral approaches.
Procedures associated with Situational Language Teaching in the fifties and sixties are an extension and further development of well-established techniques advocated by proponents of the earlier Oral Approach in the British school of language teaching. They continue to be part of the standard set of procedures advocated in many current British methodology texts (e.g., Hubbard et al. 1983), and as we noted above, textbooks written according to the principles of Situational Language Teaching continue to be widely used in many parts of the world. In the mid-sixties, however, the view of language, language learning, and language teaching underlying Situational Language Teaching was called into question. We discuss this reaction and how it led to Communicative Language Teaching in Chapter 5. but because the principles of Situational Language Teaching, with its strong emphasis on oral practice, grammar, and sentence patterns, conform to the intuitions of many practically oriented classroom teachers, it continues to be widely used in the 1980s.

LECTURE 6: Contemporary methods of teaching English

Plan:
1. The audio-lingual method.
2. Situational Language teaching.
3. Communicative language teaching
4. The cognitive approach of language teaching
In the first half of the twentieth century, the Direct Method didn’t take hold in the United States as in Europe. While one could easily find native-speaking teachers of modern foreign languages in Europe, such wasn’t the case in the United States. Also, European high school and university students didn’t have to travel far to find opportUnities to put the oral skills of another language to actual, practical use. Moreover, US educational institutions had become firmly convinced that a reading approach to foreign languages was more useful than an oral approach, given the perceived linguistic isolation of the US at the time. Thus schools returned in the 1930s and 1940s to Grammar Translation (Bowen, Madsen, and Hilferty, 1985).
Then World War II broke out, and suddenly the US was trust into a worldwide conflict, heightening the need for Americans to become orally proficient in the languages of both their allies and their enemies. The time was ripe for a language teaching revolution. The US military provided the impetus with funding for special, intensive language courses that focused on oral skills; these courses came to be known as the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) or, more colloquially, the “Army Method”. Characteristic of these courses was a great deal of oral activity – pronunciation and pattern drills and conversation practice – with virtually none of the grammar and Translation found in traditional classes. Numerous foundation stones of the discarded Direct Method were borrowed and injected into this new approach. Soon, the success of the army Method and the revived national interest in foreign languages spurred educational institutions to adopt the new methodology. In all its variations and adaptations, the Army Method came to be known in the1950s as the Audiolingual Method.
The Audiolingual Method was firmly grounded in linguistic and Psychological theory. Structural linguists of the 1940s and 1950s were engaged in what they claimed was a “scientific descriptive analysis” of various languages; teaching methodologists saw a Direct application of such analysis to teaching linguistic patterns (Fries, 1945). At the same time, behaviouristic psychologists advocated conditioning and habit-formation models of learning that were perfectly married with the mimicry drills and pattern practices of audiolingual methodology.
Here the characteristics of the Audio Lingual Method:

• 
  New material is presented in dialogue form.
  
• 
  There is dependence on mimicry, memorization of set phrases, and overlearning.
  
• 
  Structures are sequenced by means of contrastive analysis and taught one at a time.
  
• 
  Structural patterns ate taught using repetitive drills.
  
• 
  There is little or no grammatical Explanation. Grammar is taught by inductive analogy rather than by deductive Explanation.
  
• 
  Vocabulary is strictly limited and learned in context.
  
• 
  There is much use of tapes, language labs, and visual Aids.
  
• 
  Great importance is attached to pronunciation.
  
• 
  Very little use of the mother tongue by teachers is permitted.
  
• 
  Successful responses are immediately reinforced.
  
• 
  There is a great effort to get students to produce error-free utterances.
  
• 
  There is a tendency to manipulate language and disregard content.
  

The Audio Lingual Method was firmly rooted in respectable theoretical perspectives of the time. Materials were carefully prepared, tested, and disseminated to educational institutions. “Success” could be overtly experienced by students as they practiced their dialogues in off-hours.