Foreign language teaching has been around for a very long time. The first foreign languages were Greek and Latin, desired for their academic superiority, the learning of which meant many tedious hours of learning grammar rules and memorizing them. Little could the child scholars of old have envisioned that, 500 years later, their modern counterparts would be enjoying interactive boards, e-books and subtitle-free Harry Potter movies in their quest to learn a foreign language.
There have been many changes in the way foreign languages are taught over the years. Some of the methods have come and gone, as most fads do, but others have become ingrained in the more modern techniques as basic necessities of language learning. The eminent Moravian educator Comenius said in 1632, “Every language must be learned by practice rather that by rules, especially by reading, repeating, copying and by written and oral attempts at imitation.” Despite his wise words, change was a long time coming and it wasn’t until the 19th century that effective language learning was taken seriously.
For hundreds of years, the grammar translation method has held sway. Once hailed as a modern method itself, the name is self explanatory – rules are learnt and memorized, texts are translated and there is little in the way of practical application. The theory comes from the humanist tradition which considers knowledge for knowledge sake sufficient motive for the learning of a foreign language. This method was used in the Middle Ages in the teaching of Latin and survives even now in some classrooms. For example, the teaching of modern languages in some British schools in the 1980’s basically followed the grammar translation method. The passing of tests had less to do with how well the student could communicate in the language and more to do if they could recite the grammar rule for the past present tense.
Herein lies the weakness of this method. It does not lead to effective communication and so it is an impractical way of learning a second language. This leads to the second technique which is almost the exact opposite of the first – the audio-lingual method. This method was developed by followers of behavioural psychology who viewed learning as habit formation and in which, in the strictest sense, the learning of grammar rules had no place at all.
The audio-lingual method was very popular in the 1950s and ’60s, and few language schools worth their salt were complete without a language laboratory with tape recorders and headphones. The idea was that through overlearning through endless repetition the student would learn via imitation. While students did indeed learn the phrases they were exposed to, this is where the learning ends. What do they do with the phrases? If they had been exposed to a tape on how to book into a hotel room and then they did book into a hotel room, they would know what to do. But what if the receptionist asked a question that they were not familiar with? After all, the receptionist has not listened to the same tape and did not know the drill.
While the audio-lingual method was effective in stimulus-response scenarios, there was no attention paid to what was happening in the mind. Also, the learning of a language needs to be reinforced by practice otherwise it is basically meaningless. The method withered under harsh criticism. Chomsky, an influential American linguist, said, “learning language could not be a habit-forming exercise of stimulus-response and reinforcement since language is generated anew in each new utterance.” While learning grammar and developing listening and speaking skills are intrinsic to learning a foreign language, the knowledge is useless if the learner cannot adapt and apply what they know in any expected or unexpected situation. This became the premise of the third method, CLT, or Communicative Language Teaching.
According to CLT, a more general approach to teaching a foreign language, the aim in teaching and learning a second language must be to develop communicative competence. In CLT, grammar is not studied per se as in the grammar translation method and practice just for the sake of practicing as in the audio-linguistic method is not a part of the technique either. Rather, the method includes working on grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competence in the development of the four skills – reading, writing, listening and speaking.
The process of learning a foreign language is a more natural one, similar in many ways to that which occurs when learning the mother tongue. There are two types of CLT – weak and strong. In weak CLT, the aim is to provide the student with the chance to use language to communicate so role play is a popular teaching method. Strong CLT, on the other hand, advocates that by using the language, the language is learnt so there is not much use of supportive texts and role play scenarios. Either way, the role of the teacher is to facilitate rather than dominate and the students are active participants rather than passive learners as in the grammar translation and audio-lingual methods.
There are many other methods used in foreign language teaching, but it is rare to find one technique being used without influence from the others. Practicing teachers use a variety of methodologies to build up their own personal methodology, which is basically whatever seems to work best in the classroom. What is clear is that grammar rules do need to be learnt to some extent at least; while it may not be acceptable in theory, most teachers use translation when they can or really need to; and listening and speaking skills play a vital role in the learning of a new language – it is just that none of these things can be done in isolation.