Translation and Language Education

Pedagogic Approaches Explored

Sara Laviosa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317654605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The revival of translation as a means of learning and teaching a foreign language and as a skill in its own right is occurring at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in universities.

In this book, Sara Laviosa proposes a translation-based pedagogy that is grounded in theory and has been applied in real educational contexts. This volume draws on the convergence between the view of language and translation embraced by ecologically-oriented educationalists and the theoretical underpinnings of the holistic approach to translating culture. It puts forward a holistic pedagogy that harmonizes the teaching of language and translation in the same learning environment.

The author examines the changing nature of the role of pedagogic translation starting with the Grammar Translation Method and concluding with the more recent ecological approaches to Foreign Language Education.

Translation and Language Education analyses current research into the revival of translation in language teaching and is vital reading for translators, language teachers and postgraduate students working in the areas of Translation Studies and Applied Linguistics.

1 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

DOI: 10.4324/9781315764542-1

This chapter provides a brief history of the place and role of translation in second language education starting with the Grammar-Translation Method and concluding with the advent of Communicative Language Teaching. The ebb and flow of various forms of translation is examined in relation to the ways in which the purpose and process of learning are conceptualized in pedagogical approaches. As defined by Henry Widdowson, purpose refers to ‘what kind of language knowledge or ability constitutes the goals that learners are to achieve at the end of the course’ (Howatt 2004: 353). ¹ Process, defined here from the point of view of the course provider, refers to ‘what kind of student activity is most effective as the means to that end’ (Howatt 2004: 353). Purpose determines the aspects of language that the method focuses on and is generally informed by linguistic theories. Process designs the most appropriate teaching techniques and is normally underpinned by Second Language Acquisition theories. The admission or exclusion of translation as a language learning exercise depends on how process is conceived; this in turn is influenced by how purpose is defined in a given methodology.

1.1 The Grammar-Translation Method

The Grammar-Translation Method began in Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century with the publication of a French coursebook and an English coursebook for secondary school pupils, authored by Johann Valentin Meidinger in 1783 and Johann Christian Fick in 1793 respectively (both cited in Howatt 2004: 152). The method was developed during the nineteenth century and became the dominant method of teaching foreign languages in European schools from the 1840s to the 1940s. The aim of Grammar Translation was to enable learners to read literary classics and ‘to benefit from the mental discipline and intellectual development that result from foreign language study’ (Richards and Rodgers 2001: 5). Grammar rules were presented in the learner’s first language one by one and in an intuitively graded sequence. Each grammar point was exemplified with a set of sentences created ad hoc in the L2 alongside their literal translation in the L1. Vocabulary was learnt by memorizing bilingual lists of lexical items and phrases.

For example, Franz Ahn’s New Practical and Easy Method of Learning the German Language (1869) started with the declensions of German nouns, specimens of handwriting and the pronunciation of simple and double vowels, diphthongs, consonants and syllables. Then, in Part I, it introduced singular and plural subject personal pronouns with the present simple tense of the verb sein (to be) in the affirmative and interrogative forms (Ahn 1869: 1–12).

PART I.

1.

Singular.	ich bin, I am;du bist, thou art;er ist, he is;sie ist, she is;
Plural.	wir sind, we are;ihr seid, you are;sie sind, they are.

Gut, good; groß, great, large, big; klein, little, small; reich, rich; arm, poor; jung, young; alt, old; müde, tired; krank, ill, sick.

Ich bin groß. Du bist klein. Er ist alt. Sie ist gut. Wir sind jung. Ihr seid reich. Sie sind arm. Bin ich groß? Bist du müde? Ist er krank? Ist sie jung? Sind wir reich? Seid ihr arm? Sind sie alt?

2.

I am little. Thou art young. We are tired. They are rich. Art thou sick? You are poor. Is she old? Are you sick? Are they good? He is tall (groß). Am I poor?

Knowledge of lexis and grammar was applied in exercises involving mainly the accurate translation of invented sentences and texts into and out of the mother tongue ‘either viva-voce or in writing or in both – and this from the very beginning’ (Sweet 1900: 203). Reading and writing were the major focus of language teaching. Speaking involved rehearsing a series of questions and answers to be translated from the L1 and then used in conversations between teacher and student, as in the so-called Ollendorff Method (Howatt 2004: 161–5). The medium of instruction was the student’s native language, which was used to explain new items and make comparisons between the L1 and the L2.

Two basic principles informed the process of learning expounded in Grammar- Translation textbooks. The first is that a language course can be based on a sequence of linguistic categories, most notably parts of speech. The second is that these categories can be exemplified in sample sentences and then practised by constructing new sentences on a word-for-word basis. It was also assumed that all that was required for translating into a foreign language was a knowledge of the grammar and the possession of a good dictionary. This belief was based on the ‘arithmetical fallacy’ that ‘sentences could be constructed a priori by combining words according to certain definite rules’ (Sweet 1900: 202). In more recent times, Grammar Translation was adopted in self-study guides like The Penguin Russian Course in 1961 (Fennel in Cook 2010: 11), which remained in print till 1996. Today the method continues to be used in situations where the primary focus of foreign language study is understanding literary texts (Richards and Rodgers 2001: 6–7). So, Grammar Translation has stood the test of time and proved to be remarkably resilient to the innovations that have been introduced in language teaching from 1830 till the present day, as will be shown in the following sections.

1.2 The pre-Reform approaches

In the mid-nineteenth century, the early reformers Jean Joseph Jacotot, Claude Marcel, Thomas Prendergast and François Gouin elaborated very detailed individual techniques that differed significantly from the traditional Grammar-Translation Method. Jacotot’s (1830) approach to teaching French to Flemish-speaking university students in Belgium was one of the earliest examples of monolingual instruction by a non-native speaker of the students’ mother tongue (Howatt 2004: 169–70). It consisted in studying a literary text in French alongside a Flemish translation. The teacher read the first sentence and repeated the opening phrase, asking students to look for other examples of those words in the remaining text. Then the teacher returned to the initial sentence adding the next phrase and so on till the whole text had been learnt by heart. These searches were complemented by comprehension questions and other exercises whose aim was to enable learners to discover how the foreign language works through hypothesis formation, observation and generalization. Explanations were considered not just unnecessary but wrong, since the instructor’s role was to respond to the learner, rather than directing and controlling him by explaining things in advance. Jacotot’s pedagogy was inspired by his egalitarian educational doctrine (enseignement universel) that believed in the individual’s ability to achieve all his or her aspirations if he or she could marshal sufficient strength and determination.

Claude Marcel’s Rational Method in 1853 (Howatt 2004: 170–4) was articulated in 20 ‘axiomatic truths’ elaborated from two principled distinctions. The first one is between ‘impression’ and ‘expression’. Impression refers to the process whereby the mind is impressed with the idea before it comprehends the sign that represents it. Expression is the process whereby we use language knowing the meaning as well as the form of the words we utter. It follows that understanding meaning should precede knowledge of form; hence reading and listening should come before writing and speaking. The second distinction is between ‘analytical’ and ‘synthetical’ methods of instruction. The analytical method is inductive; it presents the learner with examples to decompose and imitate through practice. The synthetical method draws the learner’s attention to principles and rules that enable him or her to understand deductively how the foreign language works. The way in which these techniques are implemented pedagogically depends on the characteristics of the learner and the relationship between the learning task and the goals of education. An emphasis on analysis was thought to be beneficial for young students up to the age of 12. For them the teacher’s frequent repetition of the same foreign expressions that are explained through looks, tones, gestures and actions is preferable to translation, which would be confusing. For older students, on the other hand, meaning is to be derived from the translation into the mother tongue. This should be as literal as possible in order to associate the foreign word with the native one so that each new encounter of the former will promptly recall the latter, thus expediting reading comprehension, which takes priority over the other language skills, in keeping with the educational aims of the 1850s.

The Mastery System devised by Thomas Prendergast in 1864 (Howatt 2004: 175–8) derives from his observation of how children learn their mother tongue. He noticed that young children infer the meaning of language using clues derived from non-verbal communication such as the way people look at you, their gestures and facial expressions. Also, children memorize, through imitation, prefabricated chunks of language and they use them convincingly and fluently even without understanding either the meaning or the grammar. In contrast, self-generated utterances are tentative and ill-formed. These considerations led Prendergast to posit that an effective way of learning a foreign language would consist in memorizing model sentences rather than producing them anew. These so-called ‘mastery sentences’ would contain the most frequently used items of the language and as many of its basic syntactic rules as possible. So he first drew up a list of high-frequency English words, and then he created sentences that exemplified English syntax and provided the learner with a model for generating variations from the original structure. Prendergast’s Mastery System is organized in seven steps. Step 1 consists in learning by heart five or six model sentences of about 20 words each, uttered by the teacher and repeated by the learner to achieve fluency and accurate pronunciation. Meaning is taught by translation into the native language, but grammar is not explained, since it is to be mastered unconsciously. In Step 2, the focus is on written language. Steps 3 and 4 involve the formation of variants of the model sentences and the acquisition of additional ones. The remaining steps concern the development of reading and oral skills. In these stages translation is used extensively, not to investigate the two language systems, but to help the learner to become accustomed to the foreign language through rapid renderings of L2 sentences.

Like Prendergast’s system, the Series Method elaborated by François Gouin in 1880 (Howatt 2004: 178–85) is based on personal observations of the way young children use their mother tongue. By listening to his nephew reliving a visit to a corn mill in Normandy, Gouin realized that language reflects the structure of the experience it describes, and experience is primarily understood and organized sequentially. From this insight, he formed the idea that all events can be described as series of smaller ones. Gouin’s language teaching method consisted in presenting learners with a series of sentences, each expressing a component action of an event such as The Maid Chops a Log of Wood, which was described in 16 sentences. It was believed that the repetitive use of the same subjects and complements would facilitate memorization and accurate pronunciation as well as enabling the mind to focus on each different action and the verb expressing it, this being considered the most important element of the sentence and the most difficult to master. The system was taught in Geneva, where Gouin founded his own school, and enjoyed considerable fame for a time. In contrast with the prevailing paradigm, the methods adopted by the early reformers laid emphasis on monolingual versus bilingual instruction, meaning versus form, oral versus written skills and inductive versus deductive learning. They were the forerunners of the Reform Movement, a new orientation in language teaching that vigorously shook the very foundation of the Grammar-Translation Method.

1.3 The Reform Movement

In 1882 the publication of Wilhelm Viëtor’s pamphlet Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren! (Language teaching must start afresh!) marks the beginning of the Reform Movement, initiated by a group of phoneticians from different European countries: Wilhelm Viëtor in Germany, Paul Passy in France, Otto Jespersen in Denmark and Henry Sweet in England (Howatt 2004: 187–209). The movement soon began to influence secondary scho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Frontmatter
• Introduction
• 1 Historical overview
• 2 The revival of translation
• 3 Ecological approaches
• 4 Kramsch’s multilingual language pedagogy
• 5 Tymoczko’s holistic cultural translation
• 6 Holistic pedagogic translation
• 7 In the Italian language classroom
• 8 In the English language classroom
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Appendix III
• Appendix IV
• Appendix V
• Appendix VI
• Appendix VII
• Appendix VIII
• Bibliography
• Index