History of Language Teaching

L. Sauveur, who used intensive oral interaction in the target language, employing questions as a way of presenting and eliciting language.

Grammar Translation dominated European and foreign language teaching and in modified form it continues to be widely used in some parts of the world today. The principal characteristicis of the Grammar Translation Method were these: The goal of foreign language study is to learn a language in order to read its literature or in order to benefit from the mental discipline and intellectual development that result from foreign language study.

Henry Sweet argued that sound methodological principles should be based on a scientific analysis of language and a study of psychology.

In Germany, the prominent scholar Wilhelm Vietor used linguistic theory to justify his views on language teaching. He argued that training in phonetics would enable teachers to pronounce the language accurately.

L. Sauveur, opened a language school in Boston, and his method soon became referred to as the Natural Method.
Oral communication skills in graded progression.
Communicative exchanges between student-teacher.
Grammar taught inductively.

Opposition to the Grammar Translation Method gradually developed in several European countries. This Reform Movement, as it was referred to, laid the foundations for the development of new ways of teaching languages and raised controversies that have continued to the present day.

Practically minded linguists such as like Henry Sweet in England, Wilhelm Vietor in Germany, and Paul Passy in France began to provide the intellectual leadership needed to give reformist ideas greater credibility and acceptance.

Vietor published his views in an influential pamphlet, "Language Teaching Must Start Afresh", in which he strongly criticized the inadequacies of Grammar Translation and stressed the value of training teachers in the new science of phonetics.

The German scholar F. Franke wrote on the psychological principles of direct association between forms and mean­ings in the target language and provided a theoretical justification for a monolingual approach to teaching.

The International Phonetic Association was founded, and its International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) was designed to enable the sounds of any language to be accurately transcribed.

Sweet's book "The Practical Study of Languages" set forth principles for the development of teaching method. These included: careful selection of what is to be taught, imposing limits on what is to be taught, arranging what is to be taught in terms of the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and grading materials from simple to complex.

This approach based on the study of Latin had become the standard way of studying foreign languages in schools. Each grammar point was listed, rules on its use were explained, and it was illustrated by sample sentences.

Texbook compilers were mainly determined to codify the foreign language intro frozen rules of morphology and syntax to be explained and eventually memorized.

The European popularity of the Direct Method caused foreign language specialists in the United States to attempt to have it implemented in American schools and colleges, although they decided to move with caution. A study on the state of foreign language teaching concluded that no single method could guarantee successful results.

Applied linguists systematized the principles proposed earlier by the Reform Movement and so laid the foundations for what developed into the British approach to teaching English as a foreign language.

No single method could guarantee successful results.
Conversational skills were impractical in view of the restricted time.
Limited skills of the teachers.
Irrelevance of conversational skills for average American students.

Coleman, the main result of this recommen­dation was that reading became the goal of most foreign language pro­grams in the United States. The emphasis on reading continued to characterize foreign language teaching in the United States until World War II.

In the 1970s, a reaction to traditional language teaching approaches began and soon spread around the world as older methods such as Audiolingualism and Situational Language Teaching fell out of fashion. The centrality of grammar in language teaching and learning was questioned, since it was argued that language ability involved much more than grammatical competence.

The use of the Direct Method in noncommercial schools in Europe had consequently declined. In France and Germany it was gradually modified into versions that combined some Direct Method techniques with more controlled grammar-based activities.

The Harvard psychologist Roger Brown has documented similar problems with strict Direct Method techniques. He described his frustration in observing a teacher performing verbal gymnastics in an attempt to convey the meaning of Japanese words, when translation would have been a much more efficient technique to use.

The Direct Method can be regarded as the first language teaching method to have caught the attention of teachers and language teaching specialists, and it offered a methodology that appeared to move language teaching into a new era.

This decade saw the rise and fall of a variety of language teaching approaches and methods. The most active period in the history of approaches and methods is from 1950 to 1980.

People often associate CLT with a strictly no-grammar approach, epitomised by Krashen’s Input Hypothesis.

The most principled attempt to develop a coherent approach for the promotion of formulaic sequences has been made by Gatbonton and Segalowitz; their proposed methodology is called ACCESS, standing for ‘Automatisation in Communicative Contexts of Essential Speech Segments’, and it offers a principled adaptation of communicative language teaching that aims to generate fluency by drawing on the theories of automatisation and formulaic language.

Within the last quarter century, communicative language teaching (CLT) has been put forth around the world as the ‘new’ or ‘innovative’ way to teach English as a second or foreign language. Teaching materials, course descriptions, and curriculum guidelines proclaim a goal of communicative competence.

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.

In his famous ‘idiom principle’, Sinclair also underscores the important role idioms (i.e. formulaic sequences) play in discourse. As he concludes, “The overwhelming nature of this evidence leads us to elevate the principle of idiom from being a rather minor feature, compared with grammar, to being at least as important as grammar in the explanation of how meaning arises in text”.

Many applied linguistics and language teachers moved away from a belief that newer and better approaches and methods are the solution to problems in language teaching.

The 21st century skills can be summarized by the 4Cs:
Communication
Critical Thinking
Creativity
Collaboration