1.5.Language teaching fads
There is a popular metaphor for the development in teaching styles: the pendulum. Though with the added complication that this pendulum can swing along more than one axis.
In their article "Weighing the Ways of the Flow: Twentieth Century Language Instruction" Cheryl Brown Mitchell and Kari Ellingson Vidal give a good overview over the different trends that have dominated language teaching in this century (although with little concern for the independent language learners out there who study without the assistance of a teacher).
The first 'school' was dubbed the "Grammar Translation Method", and it had its roots in the way Latin was taught to pupils after the time where it was in active use. The purpose was now mainly to teach the pupils to read the classical authors (in the unproven belief that learning to read Latin would 'sharpen their wits' in a general way). This method was adapted to living languages, but still with the focus on grammar studies and translation exercises in both directions. I'm actually old enough to have had a teacher in school who taught both Latin and German in this way. The course in Latin was a pure reading course. OK, we did translate small texts from Danish into Latin, but even that activity stopped when we reached the Punic wars. I later added a course to bring me up to the second of three available levels, which was a condition for studying French at the time, but even that course was first and foremost a reading course. So after I stopped caring about languages in early 1982 I didn't read any Latin texts, and pouff.. I lost my Latin. Well, later (after 2010) I decided to relearn Latin, and then I discovered to my amazement that I remembered most of the grammar, and I just had to read and think and write in the language (and find a dictionary that provided me with words for modern phenomena like teachers and video clips and zippers) to see it spring to life again. The lesson of this is that the Grammar Translation Method in it strong form is excellent at what it does - it just doesn't cover the things that turns a studied language into something you can use actively.
However I also experienced the more moderate version of the method with the same teacher in German classes, where we did learn to say simple sentences and write small essays. And with this plus German TV programs and occasional visits to Germany I actually learned to speak German. So my experiences with the Grammar Translation Method are actually quite positive. And even though the method has been vilified as the teachers' version of the Spanish Inquisition I didn't feel it as a punishment to be taught along these lines.
However not all school children felt like this, and there was definitely a need to upgrade the part of the teaching that dealt with the spoken language and verbal interaction. This lead to methods like no. 2 in the Mitchell/Vidal article, the 'direct method', and to the whole gamut of 'natural' methods. In the most extreme of these languages are supposed to be taught exclusively through oral sources and without recourse to grammar books and - in some cases - even dictionaries. Like in the Michel Thomas courses. Later on this movement was epitomized in the figure of Krashen, but in between there was one more swing of the pendulum. When the US needed to educate a lot of soldiers in foreign language there wasn't time for 'soft' speak, and the military mind then conceived of a methods based upon drills and root memorization. Actually it worked: FSI has become one of the most successful language teaching institutions on the planet. And there are people who like its methods, which together with some similar programs are collected under then name Audiolingualism.
A technical contraption aided the drilling process: the tape recorder, and during my study years in the 70s I experienced the use of this thing in the pride of the institute: its language laboratory. Here a whole roomful of students could be sitting in each his/her own box, listening to spoken sentences and trying to repeat them. One teacher could supervise all the students, switching from one box to the next and making comments wherever necessary. In retrospect I do believe that this kind of activity is/was an efficient way to train a lot of persons at the same time through acoustic drills, but it was also quite boring. And I haven't heard much about such laboratories in recent times.
When it became time for the pendulum to swing away from the drills it basically went towards the supposedly 'natural' methods, but with some weird little fellahs lurking in the background - like the 'Total physical response' school in the 70s, which basically was the communicative approach with added body movements - like playing in a theater. I would have hated that method, but luckily it didn't reach my sphere. In contrast the Lozanov method recommended physical relaxation with suitable music. OK, I like to relax, but not while I study. Or rather: my studies provide a kind of relaxation for me - with or without music running in the background.
The name 'The natural approach' was coined by Tracy Terrell in 1977. The article by Mitchell and Vidal describes it as follows:
Terrell's method had much in common with the Natural Method of the 19th century, which had eventually become the Direct Method. However, it differed from that early Natural Method and the Direct Method in that it did not withhold reading or writing until the learners had some oral and aural proficiency. Terrell's arguments for his Natural Approach grounded its practices in the theoretical ideas behind communicative competence (the idea of learners being able to do what they needed with the language with the desired outcomes) and in the language acquisition theories of Stephen Krashen.(...) The theoretical grounding of this method was sufficient, the description of the approach was clear, and the article by Goldin made evident when and where it made sense to use the approach.
Krashen became one of the leading proponents of teaching based on input, and in one of his books
- "Principles and Practice" from 1982 - he proposed five hypotheses about 'Second Language Acquisition':
The acquisition-learning distinction
The natural order hypothesis
The Monitor hypothesis
The Input hypothesis
The Affective Filter hypothesis
For me there is one notion in Krashen's work which I find very useful, namely the one concerning "comprehensible input" (aka the 'monitor' hypothesis), i.e. input which is "just a little beyond where we are now". Or in other words: slightly above the level where the student or pupil can understand everything, but still low enough to allow subconscious processing to take place. Which leads us directly to the first of the five hypotheses - and the one which I find the least convincing:
The acquisition-learning distinction is perhaps the most fundamental of all the hypotheses to be presented here. It states that adults have two distinct and independent ways of developing competence in a second language. The first way is language acquisition, a process similar, if not identical, to the way children develop ability in their first language. Language acquisition is a subconscious process; language acquirers are not usually aware of the fact that they are acquiring language, but are only aware of the fact that they are using the language for communication. The result of language acquisition, acquired competence, is also subconscious.
(...)
The second way to develop competence in a second language is by language learning. We will use the term "learning" henceforth to refer to conscious knowledge of a second language, knowing the rules, being aware of them, and being able to talk about them. In non-technical terms, learning is "knowing about" a language, known to most people as "grammar", or "rules". Some synonyms include formal knowledge of a language, or explicit learning.1* Some second language theorists have assumed that children acquire, while adults can only learn. The acquisition-learning hypothesis claims, however, that adults also acquire, that the ability to "pick-up" languages does not disappear at puberty.
The reason that I scoff at these statements is that I know that most of my language learning (in the general sense of this word) has been at least partly conscious - and this holds true for both my grammar studies and my vocabulary studies. And in spite of Krashen I know that elements I have learnt consciously blend imperceptibly with elements I must have absorbed subconsciously because I can't explain where I else got them from. What really is at play here is a distinction between passive knowledge and active skills - you may be able to recognize a word, but before you have used it yourself a couple of time it won't pop up out of the blue when you need it. The training - which can be in a purely mental, written or spoken form - should eventually end up in something that functions almost automatically, and you can most definitely help that process along by using your conscious mind.
Later on in the book he tries to kill grammar... or put it into its place, as he formulates it. And there I definitely think he has been lead astray by his insistence on the acquisition-learning distinction - more about that later.
So just to make things clear: in the rest of this book there won't be any distinction made between acquisition and learning. And among the processes I accept when speaking about 'acquiring' from comprehensible input some will be conscious - Krashen or no Krashen. One thing more: the use of a bilingual version is in my view one of the most efficient ways to make a text comprehensible. I am not quite sure Krashen would accept that, but I know that it works - at least for me.
Statistics: Posted by Iversen — Thu Jan 28, 2016 2:16 pm