Unit 8: A brief history of the English language and English language teaching

The history of English and its current role in the world

English as a lingua franca

English is currently the world's foremost lingua franca – a language used between people with diverse backgrounds and ethnicities who do not share a common first language. Other terms for lingua franca are bridge, trade or common language.

English is now widely used as the de facto lingua franca in academia, business, technology, diplomatic relations, entertainment, and so on. Different lingua francas (for example, Latin and French) have existed at other times in history, but English is the most dominant global language at this time.

Global languages gain prominence largely because of the power of the native speakers of the language in question. This can be political, military, cultural and/or economic power. For example, the British imperial and industrial rise in power from the 17th to 20th century helped spread English around the world. During this time, English was also the prominent language of science. In the 20th century, the economic and cultural rise of the US also helped cement the global prominence of English.

According to Professor David Crystal, English has established itself and grown as a global language over the past 400 years because the language somehow always managed to "show up at the right place at the right time".

Short history of English Language Teaching

Approaches to teaching English

You may come across accounts of the history of language teaching – particularly English language teaching – that seem to imply that all language teaching was completely disastrous and unsuccessful until the advent of the Communicative Approach in the 1970s. Obviously, this cannot be true.

There has always been a need for people to learn foreign languages, and there is ample evidence that people did so successfully long before modern teaching methods were developed.

Broadly speaking, an approach means a way of teaching which is based on certain beliefs about the way language operates and how languages are learned. A method is more prescriptive and describes exactly what procedures teachers should follow in individual lessons. In this topic, you’ll look at some trends in language teaching over the last hundred years.

It will help you understand why we do, and don’t do, certain activities in a TEFL classroom today.

The following will be explored:

Grammar Translation method
Direct method
Audiolingualism
Oral Approach/Situational English
Behaviourism and Innatism
Communicative Language Teaching
The Natural Approach
Alternative ‘humanistic’ approaches
Total Physical Response
Suggestopedia
The Lexical Approach
The Competency Based Language Teaching (CBLT)
Task Based Language Learning (TBLL)
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
The Dogme Approach

The history of teaching English as a foreign language

Most historical accounts of English language teaching start around the mid-19th century with the Grammar Translation Method. This was how foreign languages were taught in most schools (in Europe, the British Empire and the USA).

The approach was influenced by the study of the classical languages (Latin and Greek). Pupils were taught through their L1, and the focus was on written, not spoken, language – written language was seen to be superior to and more 'correct' than spoken language.

Vocabulary was learned through translated lists of words. Grammar practice focused on the manipulation of language at sentence level. The main aim of language teaching was to develop students’ ability to translate texts to and from L2.

This approach continued to be used in many schools as late as the 1950s. 'Conversation classes' would sometimes be given in addition to the main classes, which focused on reading, writing and translation.

While grammar translation continued to be the main language teaching approach used in schools, there was a reaction against it in private language schools. In the late 19th century, Heness and Sauveur opened a language school in the United States teaching German and French.

They employed what they called the Natural Method because it was felt to mirror how children naturally learn their first languages. However, the approach came to be more commonly referred to as the Direct Method.

The principles of the Natural/Direct Method, as outlined by Richards and Rogers (2001), are:

Classroom instruction was conducted exclusively in the target language.
Only everyday vocabulary and sentences were taught.
Oral communication skills were built up in a carefully graded progression organised around question-and-answer exchanges between teachers and students in small, intensive classes.
Grammar was taught inductively.
New teaching points were introduced orally.
Concrete vocabulary was taught through demonstration, objects and pictures; abstract vocabulary was taught by association of ideas.
Both speech and listening comprehension were taught.
Correct pronunciation and grammar were emphasised.

The Direct Method was introduced in France and Germany at around the turn of the 20th century. In the USA, this approach was taken up and was very successfully commercialised by Berlitz in his chain of language schools. He retitled the approach the Berlitz Method and it is still used in Berlitz schools today.

You will recognise many of the principles behind the Direct Method in the teaching approaches we have suggested in this course. These ideas are still current although few modern teachers (outside Berlitz schools) realise that their teaching is influenced by this approach, which is now almost 150 years old!

Because of the popularity of the Direct Method, language teaching experts in the United States considered introducing it into mainstream education. However, it was felt that the teaching staff had insufficient time and expertise to teach speaking skills, and the ability to converse in a foreign language was not seen as necessary for American students.

The Coleman Report on language teaching in American schools was published in 1929. It proposed that schools and colleges should focus on the ability to read in the foreign language. The Reading Method became the most commonly used one in American schools – the emphasis being on the ability to read texts in the foreign language with little attention being paid to the other skills. Both L1 and L2 were used in language classes.

At the same time as the Direct Method was developing and gaining popularity, a movement known as the Reform Movement developed in Europe. It was members of this movement who founded the International Phonetic Association in 1886, which developed the International Phonetic Alphabet we looked at in Unit 3.

The Association wanted to improve foreign language teaching and some of their teaching principles are similar to those of the Direct Method. They argued, for example, that language teaching should emphasise the study of spoken rather than written language, that pronunciation should be given a high priority, that grammar should be taught inductively (see Unit 7), and that new vocabulary should not be taught through translation.

British linguist, Henry Sweet, who was part of the Reform Movement, believed that sound teaching methods would be based on linguistic analysis and psychological study. This belief identified two crucial elements that inform all approaches to language teaching: a view of what language is and a view of how learning takes place. Although language teachers may often be unaware of their own views on these two matters, unconscious assumptions about how language operates and how we learn undoubtedly inform the way we teach.

Audiolingualism

The involvement of the USA in World War II led to a reassessment of the need for Americans to speak foreign languages. It was clear that some military personnel did need to speak foreign languages, and starting from the early 1940s, special language training programmes were developed for the army. These courses were incredibly intensive and were fairly successful, probably because of the number of hours students spent in contact with the foreign language (about 60 hours a week).

It was an adapted form of this Army Method that became the very widely practised teaching approach known as Audiolingualism. Audiolingualism emerged in the mid-1950s, primarily to provide English language teaching for foreign students studying in US universities.

As the first part of the name – 'audio' – implies, this approach places emphasis on listening. Essentially, it is a 'listen-and-repeat' methodology. It is based largely on drilling, which we saw as part of the PPP procedure we looked at in Unit 4. There is no explicit grammar teaching, simply repeated exposure to target forms. The belief was that when the students listen to, repeat and practise manipulating a given form enough times, it will become automatic.

The approach was influenced by contemporary language and learning models (structuralism and behaviourism) and modern technology – the availability of tape recorders meant that 'language laboratories' (classrooms equipped with booths providing a tape recorder with headphones for each student) could be set up in schools and universities.

Oral Approach/Situational English

Although audiolingual approaches were used in the UK, British teaching (1940s–1960s) tended to focus on what was originally known as the Oral Approach but later became more widely referred to as Situational English.

Some of the main principles of Situational English are:

Teaching material should be taught through listening and speaking first – students should hear new language before they see the written form.
L1 should not be used in the classroom; new language should be introduced through 'situations', i.e., in context.
Students begin by learning simple grammar items which gradually become more complex as they progress.
Students do not start reading and writing in L2 until they have a basic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar.

You should be able to see some overlap with both Audiolingualism and the Direct Method. However, practitioners argue that the Oral Approach/Situational English had more solid theoretical foundations than the Direct Method because the language was properly graded. The PPP procedure for presenting new language in context was first used in Situational English.

Behaviourism and Innatism

In the 1960s and early 1970s, a number of factors contributed to changes in language teaching. One was the perceived need to improve adults' foreign language proficiency in order to promote European integration. Another was developments in linguistics, which led to a rejection of the structuralist view of language. This saw language primarily as a set of related structures which need to be mastered in order to learn a language.

Noam Chomsky (see Unit 4) proposed that all languages have an underlying shared universal grammar, and that humans are born with an innate capacity to acquire language (LAD - Language Acquisition Device). Additionally, work in various fields, such as the philosophy of language, sociolinguistics and functional linguistics, contributed to a view that language was primarily about communicating meaning rather than about a series of related grammatical structures.

Finally, there was a general dissatisfaction with the levels of attainment reached by most people trying to learn a foreign language. Most students weren’t able to use a foreign language effectively outside the classroom. In addition, many found the teaching methods of drilling and repetition boring. Chomsky rejected the view of language and language learning underlying the then current methods of language learning, stating: “Language is not a habit structure. Ordinary linguistic behaviour characteristically involves innovation, formation of new sentences and patterns in accordance with rules of great abstractness and intricacy.” (1966)

Certain aspects of these behaviourist methodologies still influence ELT teaching today. As we saw in Unit 7, it can be useful to drill language or have students repeat certain phrases to try to make them into a habit, e.g., a polite phrase on the telephone for business students, or question forms for students who understand the grammar, but are having a hard time ‘training their brain’ to use the correct form in fluency practice.

The Communicative Approach/Communicative Language Teaching

In Unit 6 we looked at teaching functions. This is an approach to language teaching that was proposed by a group of linguists commissioned by the European Council for Cultural Cooperation to investigate and propose improvements to modern foreign language teaching in the early 1970s.

One of the eventual outcomes of this was the book Notional Syllabuses (Wilkins, 1976). Wilkins tried to categorise language according to concepts and functions rather than the traditional categories of grammar and vocabulary. It was from this work that the Communicative Approach or Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) emerged.

CLT had become mainstream by the 1980s and remains the approach that most syllabuses claim to follow today. CLT sees the primary goal of language teaching and learning as communicative competence – the ability to successfully communicate and understand messages in the target language. Grammatical accuracy is seen as less important than the successful communication of meaning. This approach believes that grammatical competence will be acquired through the use of language for communicative purposes.

A CLT lesson typically has three main stages. First, students learn some ‘target language’ (vocabulary, grammar or expressions). Second, students practise the target language orally in pairs, until they can use it correctly. Finally, students interact in a life-like activity, such as a role-play, to develop fluency.

This is the three-stage PPP approach used in this course (Presentation, Practice, Production).

Communicative Language Teaching has a functional view of language learning: language is a way of doing things in the real world. CLT developed lists of ‘functions’ students need to learn, such as how to make a request, how to invite someone somewhere, or how to express an opinion.

The Natural Approach

Strict adherents of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) would argue that language lessons should consist only of communicative activities (using all four skills, not just speaking), and that activities such as the formal study of grammatical structures or the repetition of phrases are not about communicating meaning and, therefore, should have no place in the language classroom.

This version of CLT is similar to Tracey D Terrell's Natural Approach, which was developed in the USA in 1977. The Natural Approach was based on Stephen Krashen's theories of second language acquisition (L2A), which were developed through his research (with Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt) into the way people learned foreign languages.

Krashen argues that there is a natural process by which we acquire second languages: all that is needed is adequate exposure to 'comprehensible input' in stress-free situations, and the L2 will be acquired in much the same way as children learn their first language. This is called the Input Hypothesis.

Krashen draws a distinction between the type of learning involved in this natural process, which he calls acquisition, and the conscious study of language rules, which he calls learning. Krashen and Terrell argue that students should be allowed a 'silent period' in which they can acquire new language but are not required to produce it.

However, for various reasons discussed in Unit 4, there is strong resistance to the complete removal of grammar teaching from foreign language learning syllabuses. Many students and teachers dislike the absence of grammar teaching in stronger versions of this approach.

While most language teachers and language schools would say that they use a 'communicative' approach, an examination of modern textbooks shows the influence of many different methodologies.

The core of most modern textbooks is, in fact, a grammar syllabus rather than a functional syllabus, but plenty of functional/communicative work is included, and most teachers would agree that it is important to maximise student-centred activities and reduce teacher-centred learning.

Alternative ‘humanistic’ approaches

In the 1970s, a number of experimental methodologies emerged, which can be viewed in retrospect as having been influenced by fashionable thought in the 1960s and 1970s.

These alternative approaches shared a number of characteristics – they all emphasised that individuals should take charge of their own learning, they rejected mainstream methods, and they were all founded by individuals who came to hold a rather ‘guru’-like status. The various teaching methods were all quite prescriptive – their founders insisted that teachers should follow a particular lesson procedure.

Four of the most well-known approaches are:

Total Physical Response
The Silent Way
Community Language Learning
Suggestopedia

Total Physical Response

This method was developed by the American psychologist James Asher in the late 1970s. Asher felt that second languages could be acquired by the same processes as first languages and observed that much of the language directed at children is in the imperative form: look at the plane, give me the dolly, eat your soup, etc. These commands generally require a physical response from the child, which Asher felt served to reinforce the meaning of the language.

TPR is intended only for the early stages of second language learning.

It mirrors the process described above in that students are taught solely through imperatives which they must obey:

stand up,
walk to the window,
touch your nose,
etc.

Language taught in this way can be more advanced than you might initially assume. The imperative forms used by the teacher can become quite complex, for example, ‘walk over to the fruit bowl, take a piece of fruit which is yellow and give it to the student sitting on your right’.

The approach has some similarities to Krashen and Terrell's theories. For example, in TPR students are not required to produce the target language until they feel like it, which is the same as the silent period in the Natural Approach.

As with Audiolingualism, the learning theory underlying TPR is a behaviourist model, seeing learning as taking place through repetition and reward.

TPR techniques are widely practised when teaching beginners and young children although teachers may not be particularly aware that this is the approach they are using.

The Silent Way

The Silent Way takes its name from the fact that the teacher is supposed to be almost completely silent. It takes to a rather extreme point the idea that the lesson should involve student-student interactions rather than the teacher addressing the class.

The approach was developed by Egyptian educationalist, Caleb Gattengo. Gattengo believed that learning is more likely to occur when students discover things for themselves instead of simply repeating and memorising information.

The teacher is a facilitator rather than an instructor and sets the students problems that they have to solve cooperatively by communicating with each other. There is a strong emphasis on pronunciation, and coloured pronunciation charts and Cuisenaire rods are used to prompt students' language.

It is unlikely that you will be expected to teach using ‘The Silent Way’, but as we have seen with other theories, there is a crossover and it is likely that you will use elements of ‘The Silent Way’, such as the idea of the teacher being the ‘facilitator’ and students being encouraged to work things out for themselves.

Community Language Learning

Charles Curran, a professor of psychology and a counsellor, developed Community Language Learning. Essentially, the method consists of using psychological counselling techniques in the language classroom. The class must be small – maximum 12 students. The students sit in a circle and think about what they are going to say.

The teacher is referred to as the 'knower'. The knower's role is to assist the students to articulate what they want to say in L2. When an individual student is ready to say something, they say it to the knower in L1, and the knower translates the message into L2. The student repeats the translation while the rest of the class listens until the teacher feels it is being produced adequately. The student then addresses the message to another student. The same procedure would then be followed for that student's response.

Opportunities to implement this approach would obviously be somewhat limited in that the teacher needs to be very proficient in both L1 and L2, all the students need to share the same L1, and it is only suitable for small classes. Additionally, the teacher may need some counselling skills to cope with whatever comes up as students try to communicate with each other on the topics they have chosen.

Suggestopedia

Georgi Lozanov, a Bulgarian educator and psychiatrist, pioneered Suggestopedia as a language teaching method in the 1970s, but the term and some of the ideas emerged in Bulgaria in 1965. Lozanov was influenced both by Soviet psychology and yoga. He believed that the power of positive suggestion (suggesting what students are capable of) combined with the removal of inhibition could enable students to learn foreign languages with ease.

Lozanov argued that in order to learn, students need to feel totally relaxed. The classroom should be furnished with comfortable armchairs and be pleasantly decorated and lit. Teaching should be accompanied by the playing of classical music. The teacher plays an authoritarian (but not aggressive) role so that the teacher-student relationship is similar to a parent-child relationship.

In a Suggestopedia lesson, music is played in the background while the teacher reads a fairly long text twice, typically a dialogue, and the students just listen. The idea is that this promotes subliminal learning. The students are then given a copy of the text with the translation, and the next part of the lesson focuses on language work.

The approach attracted some enthusiastic followers, and it is probably quite nice to sit in comfy armchairs listening to classical music. However, there is not much evidence to support some of the claims made about the effectiveness of the approach and it has sometimes been described as a pseudo-science.

More recent approaches

The five approaches listed below are not the only new trends, but they are perhaps the most widely known ones.

The Lexical Approach
Competency Based Language Teaching (CBLT)
Task Based Language Learning (TBLL)
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
The Dogme Approach

They can all be seen as developing from the thinking that underlies CLT. Modern language teaching approaches all agree on the need for students to actually use the foreign language they are trying to learn through communicative activities, rather than to learn it primarily through translation and the formal study of grammar rules.

The Lexical Approach

Lexical approaches to language teaching emphasise the importance of vocabulary in language learning. A lexical syllabus is organised according to the vocabulary that is to be taught, rather than the grammar or the functions. Researchers observe that a large proportion of the language we produce seems to be memorised 'chunks of language', rather than original creations generated through combining our grammatical and lexical knowledge.

These 'prefabricated chunks' are given various names such as lexical phrases, holophrases, gambits and lexicalised stems. What they are called does not really matter, but it is very useful for the language teacher to recognise and teach these chunks.

Examples are:

Collocations: take a nap; take a break; take time etc.
Two- and three-word phrases (binomials and trinomials): e.g. rough and ready; tall, dark and handsome etc.
Idioms: think on your feet; a pain in the neck; high wind; square meal etc.
Sentence stems: If I were you…; I was sorry to hear that…; I'm writing to... etc.
Sentence frames: not only... but also; the -er ...the -er (e.g. the longer, the better); If had(n't)…; would(n't) (e.g. If he hadn't gone to Blackpool, he would never have met her) etc.

Just as the availability of tape recorders was influential in the development of Audiolingualism, the increasing availability and sophistication of computers enabled researchers to be more systematic in the study of the way vocabulary is used.

Computers made it possible to build up large collections of both written and spoken language which could then be analysed to find out, for example, which words and phrases are most frequently used in English and which words commonly collocate (occur together). A body of linguistic examples of this type is known as a corpus, and the programs which analyse the corpus are called concordancers.

Competency-Based Language Teaching

CBLT is said to differ from the other approaches described in that the main focus is not on input – what language should be taught to the students – but on output – what the students should be able to do. It is not a language teaching approach in itself, but rather the application of competency-based education to language teaching.

Competency-based education emerged in the USA in the 1960s and has become increasingly widespread since the late 1980s.

What students need to learn is broken down into individual 'competencies', each of which a student should master before moving on to the next one. This approach is used in English language teaching to immigrants in Australia, America and the UK.

The approach considers the various situations, such as work and social situations, in which students will need to use English and the types of meaning they might need to convey.

Cast Study:

Component skill, knowledge and understanding:

1. Engage in discussion

2. Speak and listen in simple exchanges and in everyday contexts

3. Adults should learn to take part in social interaction. They should be able to:

(a) greet: Hi, how are you?

(b) respond to a greeting: Fine, thanks. And you?

(d) invite and offer (e.g. using would like): Would you like a sandwich? Yes, please.

(e) accept and decline invitations and offers: Would you like a ham sandwich? - No, thanks. I'm sorry. I don't eat ham.

Task-Based Language Learning / Content & Language Integrated Learning

We mentioned TBLL (also known as Task-Based Language Teaching – TBLT, and Task-Based Instruction - TBI) in Unit 7. This approach was developed by Prabhu in India in the 1980s. Prabhu observed that the children he was teaching seemed to acquire English well through doing tasks in English where the focus was on the task rather than the language.

TBLL can be seen as a type of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), where the emphasis is on using the language, not on the structure of the language. It is a very student-centred approach as the students work out how to complete the task themselves, and – in the 'strong' version of TBLL – they use whatever language they want to when doing the task.

As with other forms of CLT, 'weaker' versions of TBLL have emerged where the task is treated more like a PPP lesson. In the weaker versions, the teacher presents the vocabulary and grammar they feel the students will need for the task at the beginning of the lesson before students are asked to do the task.

In the original version of TBLL, language is studied at the end of the lesson after the task has been completed, so the required language emerges through the way the students have tried to express themselves.

Jane and David Willis (who developed The Lexical Syllabus) were enthusiastic proponents of this approach, and you can find out more about it, along with sample lesson plans, on their website.
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)

This term was first used by David Marsh in 1994. It means the teaching of other subjects, such as maths, science, and geography to students through the target language. Although the term is new, the practice is not; this, after all, is how immigrant children most often learn the language of their new host country.

Learning a second language by studying the whole curriculum, or a large proportion of it, through the target language, rather than having formal language lessons is also referred to as bilingual education or immersion, and is commonly practised in bilingual countries, such as Canada.

An ambitious programme of bilingual English/Spanish education has been introduced in Spain this century. There is currently great excitement among English Language Teaching professionals about this approach. If you want to teach children, you may be required to use TBLL or CLIL.

Dogme

The ideas about language learning that underpin Communicative Language Teaching in general and TBLL especially can be seen to underpin one of the most recent 'new' approaches in language teaching: Dogme. This is particularly associated with Scott Thornbury and Luke Meddings.

Dogme rejects course books and grammar-based teaching. The focus is on 'emergent' language. Lessons are based around the language the students produce.

This approach is probably more suitable for more experienced teachers because you work without a lesson plan and develop the lesson according to whatever comes up in class.

This means that you need to have a very good knowledge of language and to feel confident about your teaching techniques. Because of this, the Dogme approach may not be suitable for less experienced EFL teachers.

How do you decide which method or approach to use?

Now that we’ve gone over the different methods and approaches in ELT, you may find yourself wondering which one you should follow. The answer is there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Perhaps the best advice we can offer is to try out different ideas and see which might fit well with the particular group of students you are teaching. We recommend you also take such things as age, background and personality into account.

For example, you may find TPR methods working very well with groups of young students, whereas university students respond better to the lexical approach. Business English students who must master certain skills may benefit from aspects of CBLT to ensure they have a command of the target language before moving on.

CLT works great with many groups of students, but weaker or very shy students may also learn well with aspects of TBLL brought into the lessons.

Many modern course books also follow an eclectic approach, mixing many different approaches and methodologies, which can be adapted and/or supplemented by the teacher depending on the aim of the lesson and the students in the group. For example, a lesson may include different activities which employ TPR, CLT and the Lexical Approach with various activities to provide a balanced focus on different approaches and methodologies as well as practice of the four skills.

Once you have become more experienced and knowledgeable in your teaching, you may also decide to move away from course books as mentioned in the Dogme method. However, they can still provide a solid structure in the early days. You should feel free to experiment with different approaches and allow yourself the freedom to learn as you go.

Unit wrap-up and assessment

Now that you have reached the final section of Unit 8, it’s time to reflect upon everything that you have explored.

Key takeaways:

English is a Germanic language.
English is the lingua franca in many settings around the world.
Up to 1 billion people speak English as a second language.
English belongs to the Indo-European group of languages.
There are many different teaching methodologies, and it is likely that your teaching will involve a mixture of many of them.