TEMA 1

The Evolution of Language Teaching. Contemporary Trends in the

Teaching of English as a Foreign Language. The Communicative
Approach.

The need to teach and learn foreign languages has always existed but the methods used
have changed considerably, especially over the last two or three decades.

In today’s world, it is becoming increasingly more important to be able to communicate

in other languages, especially English. Therefore, I consider that a survey of the
evolution of language teaching is a necessary task for a foreign language teacher. We
must be aware of this evolution in order to adapt our teaching to the different students
and groups and to develop our own teaching style.

In this brief essay I will describe the different language teaching approaches and its
methodologies through history. I will start with the Grammar-Translation Method and
its evolution towards a Communicative Approach. Herewith, we have to mention the
Natural or Direct Method, the Audiolingual Method, the Oral and Situational Approach
as well as Chomsky’s Cognitivism. As contemporary trends in the teaching of English
as a foreign language it is important to understand different methods which have
contributed to our current way of teaching, all based on communication. We have to
mention the Silent Way, the Community Language Learning, Suggestopedia and Total
Physical Response.

Within the Communicative Language Teaching, in the last 30 years some new
approaches appeared as the Affective Dimension, the Computer Aided Language
Learning, Content-Based Instructions, Negotiated Syllabus and Task-Based
Approaches. There are not yet many studies on their effect on Second Language
Learning, but they represent a great evolution and innovation within the Teaching area
of Foreign languages.

Before coming to the main topic it is important to differentiate between the concepts
approach, method and technique. Richards and Rodgers define approach as the level at
which assumptions and beliefs about language learning are specified. Method is the
level at which theory is put into practice and finally technique is the level at which
classroom procedures are described.

1. Looking back in history, I will start with the Grammar-Translation Method,

labelled at its beginning as the Prussian Method as it has its origins in Germany
with intellectuals as for example Johan Seidenstücker and Karl Plötz. This
method was concerned with the language as a set of rules, focusing on
correctness, not taking into account usage practice and concentrating on written
texts. They adapted the way Latin was taught but even when Latin was no longer
the main language taught in schools, the teaching way continued the same,
concentrating on abstract rules, lists of vocabulary and sentences for translation.
In this sense we should point out that the Grammar-Translation Method,
dominant from the 1840s to the 1940s, had as ultimate goal the study of
literature and culture associated with the foreign language, reducing oral work to
a minimum. We can therefore conclude that this was a non-communicative and
non-motivational method.
2. But the society changed and with the extension of railroads oral proficiency was
becoming more and more demanding within Europe and at the end of the
nineteenth century teachers and linguists perceived the urgent need for new
approaches for language teaching. In 1860 Sauveur reacted against the
traditional Grammar-Translation Method with his Natural Method, later on
called Direct Method. He believed together with Berlitz that language could be
learned without translation if meaning was conveyed throughout demonstration
and action. Some of their innovations were for example that all communication
in the classroom should be in the target language and that oral communication
had the highest priority. Grammar had to be taught in an inductive way and they
started promoting situational and contextualized teaching.
3. This innovative method led to the Audio-Lingual Method. Its origins may be
found in the Structuralism, which concentrated on the contrastive analysis of
languages, and the behaviourists as Vigotsky and Pavlov, defending that
learning is a mechanical process of habit formation, created by repetition and
drills. The combination of these two approaches developed the Audio-Lingual
Method. We have to point out that within this method the learner had a passive
role, no translation was done and the first skills used for learning a foreign
 language were listening and afterwards speaking with frequent repetition as an
essential way for effective learning and immediate correction of errors.
4. In the mid-sixties Chomsky had a great influence with his book Syntactic
Structures arguing that the main characteristics of language are derived from
mental and innate aspects and through them, humans experience through
language. On the contrary as the behaviourists he defended that learning is not
based on habits formation, but on rational acquisition of a set of rules. This was
the well known Cognitivism, which already considered the learner as an active
participant of the learning process.
5. Within this period and after Chomsky’s innovative theories, several methods in
teaching a foreign language appeared. Gattegno developed the Silent Way.
Herewith the teacher tries to speak as little as possible and communication with
the learners is carried out in a non-verbal language that means with gestures,
mimics and visual aids. The teacher leads the activity but tries to achieve the
highest degree of intervention by the learner. As another method we should
mention the Community Language Learning from Curran who focused on the
affective needs of the learner and emphasises that language must be understood
as a social process. This method is therefore student-centred. Lozanov made a
great innovation with his method called Suggestopedia. He believes that the
human mind can reach unsuspected memory levels if learning takes place in the
right conditions, which includes decoration, furniture and even music. However,
the main target in language teaching is not memorization, but comprehension
and the ability to solve situations and problems. Later on appeared the Total
Physical Response developed by Asher, which is a learning process through
physical actions. He believes that a second language learning process in an adult
is similar to the acquisition of a native language by a child.
6. In 1983 the theories of Krashen together with Tracy Terrell led to the Natural
Approach. In order to understand the evolution within language teaching I
would like to deepen into Krashen’s theory commenting roughly his five
hypotheses. He believes that language is acquired through an unconscious
process, by means of comprehension and language use in significant
communication. According to Krashen, conscious learning monitors the process,
controlling and correcting the linguistic production of the learnt system. Another
aspect is that grammatical structures are acquired in a predictable order and
 learners of one foreign language with different mother tongues make similar
mistakes. And finally the attitude or motivation of the learner may facilitate or
hamper the learning of a Second Language.
7. We can appreciate with all these approaches and innovative theories that plenty
researches have been done on Language Teaching, arriving finally to the
Communicative Approach. As we have seen, already Chomsky emphasized
the functional and communicative potential of language and focused language
teaching on communicative proficiency. Some contemporary approaches which
are worth to be mentioned are the Affective Dimension,.considering learning a
social process, the Computer Aided Language Learning, which tries to find
the way of using the computer for teaching, and the Content-Based
Instructions, oriented towards information and knowledge acquisition. Other
approaches which are still developing are the Negotiated Syllabus, where the
teacher first finds out what the students want and test them to find out what they
need and then negotiate the syllabus with them. In the Task-Based Approaches
communicative tasks are given to require students to work in groups in a
collaborative way and ask questions to the teacher who has a supportive role. I
just would like to add the Noticing Model, which has two functions: to provide
free-speaking scenarios and to show what language points still need more focus
and practice.
8. Having learnt about these different communicative approaches we can conclude
that Communicative Language Teaching has to be considered an approach,
with several possible methods, some of them quite innovative and still
developing. The main goal of Communicative Language Teaching is the
teaching of communicative competence, that means what a speaker needs to
know to be communicative competent in a speech community. Another
important aspect is that the four language skills must be taught in a
comprehensive way. Therefore we can conclude, that to speak a language
properly implies not only knowledge of the language, but the ability to use it in
different registers, according to different situations. This implies the learner’s
autonomous learning process being himself the participant. This approach
allows uncountable activities and takes into account diversity and plurality. The
teacher has to act as a supporter, analyzer of the needs of the group and the
individuals, as well as a manager guiding the tasks. In Communicative Language
 Teaching the materials should be text-based, task-based and authentic and real-
life materials.
9. After having travelled in a quick way through history, we have got a rough idea
how language teaching and learning has developed. I have described the
traditional teaching procedures in the Grammar-Translation Method based on
the way of teaching the classical languages as Latin focusing on correctness.
Many linguists developed new theories and the Direct Method gave already a
priority to the oral skill. The Audiolingual Method defended the learning process
through repetition and drills and finally not many years ago linguists agreed that
the main goal for learning a language is the communication. Within the
Communicative Language Teaching I have presented several innovative
methods as Suggestopedia, Total Physical Response and others. Currently new
approaches have arosen as the use of computers or content-based teaching.
There is sill a lot to be analysed, but we can conclude that no method is wrong
or can considered the best. Teachers have to be flexible and affront the reality
that our society is multicultural and plurilingual and the group class in not
homogeneous. Every individual has his/her own needs and the teacher has to
adapt his/her way of teaching to each situation using the more adequate method
or a combination of some of them.

As I tried to synthesizes the evolution of Language learning and teaching in these few
lines I just mentioned some authors, but we have to bear in mind that many linguists,
psychologists and other intellectuals contributed to the development of Language
Teaching. Here are the references I used for this essay:

CHOMSKY, N. (1957), Syntactic Structures, The Hague/Paris: Mouton

KRASHEN, S. and TERREL, T. (1983), The Natural Approach. Language
Acquisition in the Classroom. Oxford: Pergamon Press
RICHARDS, J. And RODGERS, T.S. (1986), Approaches and Methods in
Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001