1.2 Theoretical background of teaching English
There are a lot of differences between how to teach English in Primary
Education and how this subject is taught at schools. This work is divided in
several parts, the first part exposed the theory learned at University, continuing
with the reality observed during my Teaching Practice Period at school. Of the
4,000 to 5,000 living languages, English is by far the most widely used. As a
mother tongue, it ranks second only to Chinese, which is effectively six
mutually unintelligible dialects little used outside China. On the other hand, the
300 million native speakers of English are to be found in every continent, and an
equally widely distributed body of second language speakers, who use English
for their day-to-day needs, totals over 250 million. Finally, if we add those areas
where decisions affecting life and welfare are made and announced in English,
we cover one-sixth of the world’s population
3
.
Barriers of race, colour and creed are no hindrance to the continuing spread
of the use of English. Besides being a major vehicle of debate at the United
Nations, and the language of command for NATO, it is the official language of
international aviation, and unofficially is the first language of international sport
and the pop scene. Russian propaganda to the Far East is broadcast in English,
as are Chinese radio programmes designed to win friends among listeners in
East Africa. Indeed, more than 60 per cent of the world’s radio programmes are
broadcast in English and it is also the language of 70 per cent of the world’s
mail. From its position 400 years ago as a dialect, little known beyond the
southern counties of England, English has grown to its present status as the
major world language. The primary growth in the number of native speakers
was due to population increases in the nineteenth century in Britain and the
USA. The figures for the UK rose from 9 million in 1800 to 30 million in 1900,
to some 56 million todays. Even more striking was the increase in the USA
(largely due to immigration) from 4 million in 1800, to 76 million a century later
and an estimated 216, 451, 900 today. Additionally, the development of British
3
Geoffrey Broughton and others “Teaching English as a foreign language”, 2003
19
colonies took large numbers of English-speaking settlers to Canada, several
African territories and Australasia.
The field of English language teaching and learning has moved forward
from language teaching methods into a post-method era. This section will
provide the rationale in how a postmethod pedagogy evolved, with an
explication of the theoretical frameworks, and the principles associated with it.
There are three parameters of postmethod pedagogy: particularity, practicality,
and possibility.
There are fourteen key concepts: postmethod condition; parameters of
particularity, practicality, and possibility; macrostrategies (i.e., Maximize
learning opportunities; minimize perceptual mismatches; facilitate negotiated
interaction; promote learner autonomy; foster language awareness; activate
intuitive heuristics; contextualize linguistic input; integrate language skills;
ensure social relevance; and raise cultural consciousness). Different language
teaching methods have been proposed, evaluated, and researched since 1940.
The purpose was to find the most effective way to teach students language, for
efficient language learning to happen; and thus, if we compare the methods over
time, we can see how the teacher’s role, learners’ role, classroom procedures
evolve along the way.
The problem with methods is that language teachers often do not adhere to
only one method, because they often rely on their intuitive ability and
experiential knowledge for more effective language teaching pedagogy.
Language teachers in Uzbekistan often recycled the same ideas, which created a
postmethod condition – characterized by the need to create an alternative for
method, not just recommending to language teachers the best method. Another
characteristic of the postmethod condition was the fact that teachers needed and
had, in fact, autonomy – freedom from external control. Every day in their
20
classrooms Uzbek teachers made the necessary decisions they felt benefited the
language development of their students
4
.
The discussion of a single method no longer suffices when we speak of
language teaching pedagogy, as we are now in a Post-Method Era. The
postmethod pedagogy is characterized by particularity, practicality and
possibility, and could contain ten macrostrategies that language teachers could
think about:
maximize learning opportunities;
minimize perceptual mismatches;
facilitate negotiated interaction;
promote learner autonomy;
foster language awareness;
activate intuitive heuristics;
contextualize linguistic input;
integrate language skills;
ensure social relevance and
raise cultural consciousness.
The teaching of Foreign Languages in the Elementary School—the FLES
movement, to use the American label— attracted strong support from the
Council of Europe and flourished in a number of countries during the 1960s.
The economic crisis of the following years, however, had a major impact on the
early teaching of English in state schools: not only was it felt to be something of
an educational luxury, but it required specialised materials and teacher training.
Although a number of FLES schemes continue to flourish in France, Germany,
Italy and Yugoslavia, among others, major enterprises have been halted; the
French Ministry of Education has banned further experiments, the ambitious
plans to make Holland a bilingual nation by 1980 have been shelved.
4
David L. Chiesa Ulugbek Azizov Svetlana Khan Kalara Nazmutdinova Komila Tangirova “Reconceptualizing
language teaching: an in-service teacher education courses in Uzbekistan”, T.:2019
21
But the twenty years of English teaching in foreign state primary schools
must be seen against a much longer background of English language teaching to
young children in second language situations. In East and West Africa, in
Cyprus and Malaysia, in Fiji and Hong Kong, the long tradition of teaching
English to young children continues. But primary school English in second
language areas was for long a sectional filter for secondary, English-medium,
education; and was frequently taught by semi-formal intelligence-bound
methods. It was the twenty years of experimentation, research and enthusiasm of
the FLES movement which gave clearer identity to the aims and methods
appropriate to the primary classroom.
There are many approaches and methods for language teaching and
learning. In the last decade, in Uzbekistan, CLT has become popular. This term
is closely associated with CEFR. We would like to associate CLT with learning
through practice, real-life situations, where each single element of the language
is trialed. Exploring the world through speaking orally and explaining in a
written form. I think it is most important for us language teachers to not think of
our language teaching as a content area of knowledge. I think we should enable
our learners to be competent communicators. Language is therefore a tool for
real communication and not a thing to be studied. I think we should think about
communicative competencies and how to better organize a class, in which a
teacher enhances students’ four competencies simultaneously. CLT is a topic
that needs to be integrated in teaching foreign languages in Uzbekistan. Such
integration should take place by distinguishing from a traditional language
teaching (GTM) and arriving at the key principles of CLT. Below is a
comparative table of GTM and CLT.
Listening within Grammar Translation Method (GTM) classes in
Uzbekistan has been an activity within which purely linguistic features such as
phonetics (i.e., whether one pronounces sounds correctly), grammar (e.g.,
whether tenses are used properly), semantics (i.e., whether one can translate
what is heard within the meanings fixed in dictionaries) have been taught and
22
assessed. As such, listening and the comprehension of it have depended upon
knowing these linguistic features. With an outgrowth of the works of
anthropological linguists such as Hymes and Halliday
5
, listening has started to
be regarded as an activity of interpretation, and not just understanding the
linguistic rules/features. An interpretation of what is
listened to is closely connected with the term discourse – a social event
happened in a particular time and space within which prior knowledge,
sociocultural knowledge, shared norms and rules as well as a certain regime of
truth determine the meaning of a conversation. This definition implies that
comprehension of a listening activity is closely connected with interpreting a
particular discourse, and not the text itself. This section will show how one can
teach listening via discourse in the context of communicative competence.
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