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Grammar Translation
How language was taught in most schools:
- Grammar was taught as a set of rules.
- Practice was done through written exercises.
- The medium of instruction was the mother tongue.
- Vocabulary was learnt via translated lists.
- Written texts were sees as the real language.
- Speaking and listening were seen as less important. -
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Direct Method
In the Berlitz school , speaking and listening were most important skills, students learnt sequences of strictly chosen grammatical phrases by listening and repetition, grammar rules were avoided, and replaced by phrases, vocabulary was learnt either incidentally. The method is still the basis of lower level teaching in Berlitz schools. -
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Audio lingual method + Structuralist view of language
The linguistic suggested that language was a set of “structures”. The most important skills were speaking and listening; the learning method was based on behaviourist psychology. The language exercise for speaking were mostly listening and repeat. The audio-lingual revolutionize language teaching so most learners need people as teachers, not machines. -
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Structural situational method
This was pragmatic version of audio – lingualism, the key difference from the audio-lingual approach was that the language presentation and practice was situationalised and so was always given social meaning.
Speaking and listening were the most important skills.
This approach gave rise the idea of PPP (presentation, practice, production). -
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Humanistic approaches
The philosophy of the humanistic approaches was valuable, and since then, it has become an essential precept of language teaching that students assimilate things best when they are talking about themselves. -
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Functional syllabuses – Communicative Language Teaching I
(Called “speech acts” in USA) like apologizing, requesting, and advising. It was rare for a direct relationship between function and language to be established because functions can be expressed by a vast range of expressions and non-verbal cues but a clear direct relationship could be found for apologizing and for asking permission. It covers the range from formal to informal and could be related to each key function. The listen and repeat and extend methods persisted. -
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Communicative methodology – Communicative Language Teaching 2
The key principle was the separation of classroom work into ‘accuracy’ work and ´fluency ‘work, accuracy work was for concentrating on learning bits of language, fluency work was for getting the students to speak freely.
- The principle of all communicative activities in the classroom was the´information gap´.
- An influential version of second language learning theory was developed by Stephen Krashen, which postulated that learners acquired language if fed a diet of genuine communication -
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Test - Teach - Test
Was an inventive variation of traditional PPP, the students are given a task, such as a role play, without any prior teaching of the relevant language points, and this is the first test phase, if the students have problems and make mistakes, the teacher knows that they have to teach the biggest errors, this is followed by the practice exercises, which is the second test phase, this is a popular methodology which brings together a number of principles, and has stood the test of time. -
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Negotiated syllabus
The principle was that we first find out what students want and test them to find out what they need and then, negotiate the syllabus with them. It has to be applied carefully, depending on whether it is appropriate to the specific context. -
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Task based approaches
It is a methodological idea which attempts to get away from PPP altogether, students are not taught language points in advance, but rather are given communicative tasks to prepare for, these tasks require them to ask the teacher to give them whatever language bits they might need in order to fulfil the task.
in the final phase, the students actually do the complete task and they use the language they have asked for and been given. -
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Lexical views of language
Academic linguists noticed that the language was full of set phrases.
- Pawley and Syder showed that these set phrases are actually part of memorised store of pre-fabricated chunks which, once learnt, each native speaker has automatically at their disposal.
- The lexical view of language has become a central plank of both Business and General English teaching, it particularly affects what we teach, lexical chunks rather than single items of vocabulary. -
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Output – Feedback
We can use the ensuing language “output” as data for feedback or reformulation. This feedback is one form of language focus, and can take many forms such as individualized feedback sheets, etc. For example, the teacher listens to the students discussing something, notes the problems down, so that the students come to a reformulated version of the selected language errors, then corrected it and recycled in a similar way to the next few lessons. -
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Noticing ( Also known as ‘consciousness-raising´)
It is what a teacher teaches in one lesson and what students learn in that lesson as conscious learning, at the same time. Rutherford put forward the idea of using the classroom to gradually raise students. Teachers can teach it for active reproduction by endless practice. In other words, we are helping the students to notice it and little by little to take it on board in a process of ‘successive approximation’ or ‘layered noticing’. It is to raise the noticeability in the mind of students. -
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Grammaticisation
There has been a growth of interest in classroom tasks which help the studentto see grammar in its global and truly communicative context.
Some modern academic linguists take the view that language is
grammaticalized lexis, using this principle for language syllabuses. -
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The modern Integrated Language Teacher
The modern teacher is able to use any approach from the past as long as it is appropriate and useful. The term principled integration forces us to remember that everything has come from what has been before, and that everything that has gone before remains relevant today.