Specialised education of uzbekistan the uzbek state world languages university the english teaching methodology department

npocBeizteHne, 1978. - C. 58.
See: Milrud R.P. English Teaching Methodology. -M.: Drofa, 2007. —P. 111.


⁷ Current trends in the development and teaching of the four language skills. Edited by Esther Uso.-Juan, Alicia Marti.nez-Flor. — Berlin, 2006. —P. 140.
of good habits. In this pattern, speakers were first exposed to linguistic input as a type of external stimulus and their response consisted of imitating and repeating such input. If this was done correctly, they received a positive reinforcement by other language users within their same environment. The continuous practice of this speech-pattern until good habits were formed resulted in learning how to speak.
Consequently, it was assumed that speaking a language involved just repeating, imitating and memorizing the input that speakers were exposed to. These assumptions deriving from the environmentalist view of learning to speak gave rise to the Audiolingual teaching approach. This instructional method emphasized the importance of starting with the teaching of oral skills, rather than the written ones, by applying the fixed order of listening- speaking-reading-writing for each structure. Thus, learners were engaged in a series of activities, such as exercises and substitution exercises, which focused on repeating grammatical structures and patterns through intense aural-oral practice.
However, rather than fostering spoken interaction, this type of oral activities was simply a way of teaching pronunciation skills and grammatical accuracy. Consequently, although it can be assumed that this approach to learning and teaching speaking stressed the development of oral skills, speaking was merely considered as an effective medium for providing language input and facilitating memorization rather than as a discourse skill in its own right. In fact, significant aspects, such as the role that internal mental processes play when learning to produce new and more complex grammatical structures, were neglected under this view. The task of paying attention to those processes was the focus of study in the following years.
Another approach is speaking within an innatist. By the late 1960s, the previous view of learning to speak as a mechanical process consisting in the oral repetition of grammatical structures was challenged by Chomsky’s theory of language development . His assumption that children are born with an innate potential for language acquisition was the basis for the innatist approach to language learning. Thus, as a result of this assumption and together with the discipline of psycholinguistics that aimed to test Chomsky’s innatist theory, the mental and cognitive processes involved in generating language began to gain importance.
Within such an approach, it was claimed that regardless of the environment where speakers were to produce language, they had the internal faculty or competence in Chomsky’s terms, to create and understand an infinite amount of discourse. This language ability was possibly due to the fact that speakers had internalized a system of rules which could be transformed into new structures by applying a series of cognitive strategies. Given this process, speakers’ role changed from merely receiving input and repeating it, as was the view in the environmentalist approach, to actively thinking how to produce language. Consequently, it was assumed that speaking a language was a descontextualized process which just involved the mental transformation of such an internalized system of rules.
These innatist assumptions about learning to speak did not result in any specific teaching methodology. However, the emphasis on practicing exercises and repeating grammatical structures advocated by the audiolingual approach was replaced by “an interest in cognitive methods which would enable language learners to hypothesis about language structures and grammatical patterns ⁹. In this type of methods, learners took on a more important role in that they were provided with opportunities to use the language more creatively and innovatively after having been taught the necessary grammatical rules. Although this approach recognized the relevance of speakers’ mental construction of the language system in order to be able to produce it, speaking was still considered to be an abstract process occurring in isolation. In fact, this innatist view of learning and teaching