Modern Languages and Learning Strategies

In Theory and Practice

Michael Grenfell, Vee Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134683307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Every secondary school pupil studies modern foreign languages as part of the curriculum, and some do so with considerably more success than others. This book looks firstly at the ways in which languages can be taught, and secondly at case studies that highlight the practical methods that will help teachers get the best results.
The case studies included show that the best learners are those who have developed learning strategies that help them succeed. These learning strategies are examined through practical examples carried out in classrooms, and advice is given about ways in which teachers can ensure that all their pupils have the opportunity to develop these skills.
Lots of suggestions are made about the various activities teachers can carry out in order to make learning enjoyable and positive. In some cases, the results are shown to be very encouraging and any language teacher should be left with a feeling not only of renewed enthusiasm for their subject area but also a deeper understanding of how to enable learners to reach their full potential.

Part One

1 Modern-languages teaching: in search of methodology

In this chapter, we set out the background to modern-languages teaching and learning over the past few decades. We do so in order to provide a basis for answering such questions as: what are learning strategies? Why are they significant? It shows the conceptual roots to our present methodological approaches and explains the current preoccupation with learning strategies. This preoccupation entails shifts of emphasis over methodology in how the learner is viewed and in the pedagogical role of the teacher. Before considering learning strategies, the processes they involve and their practical significance in the classroom, it is necessary to know something about what has led to the present position in understanding how modern languages are taught and learned. The context for this book is modern-languages teaching and learning in Britain. However, despite a traditional reputation for sociocultural inward-lookingness, British modern linguists have never operated a ‘closed-shop’ policy when it comes to matters of pedagogy—quite the contrary. The tale of this chapter is therefore often one of progressive inventiveness and high methodological ambition. In the course of development and reform, teachers, researchers and policy makers have drawn upon a wide repertoire of theories and methods. This chapter shows how it has been so.

Decades of reform

This book is being published on the cusp of the new millennium. We are moving into a new era in all respects. As we move forward, it is natural not only to look to the future, but also to reflect back on the past. Our present century which is coming to a close is one that has been dominated by language. The revolution in communications can be summed up as a question of the directness and speed of human contact. Not so long ago the only way of communicating with someone not readily at hand was to write a message and send it overland. The journey could be perilous, and there was no guarantee that the message would be delivered. If it was, there could be problems of interpretation, clarification might be called for, and events may have already superseded what was being communicated. Where the written word was not an option, individuals resorted to visual signals, which could only convey the most basic messages. The invention of telecommunications put people at a distance in direct contact for the first time. The technology expanded fast. Telegrams were replaced by the telephone. Telephone contact became less a bookable event, surrounded by bureaucracy, than an immediate, personal option. All four corners of the world are now literally at the other end of a telephone line. Contact can be established independently simply by dialling the necessary code. And now, in the last decade of the twentieth century, as the presence of the Internet in our lives grows at a seemingly unstoppable pace, written documents can be exchanged on-line with countries on the other side of the globe. The Web is awash with printed information. Electronic mail puts individuals in direct contact in a way that means they do not even have to be in conversation with each other in order to exchange all manner of documentation, personal information and financial commitments.

Alongside these technological developments, the world of ideas has become most preoccupied with the form and substance of language. Increased participation and audiences in telecommunications have underlined the necessity to handle language. The field of philosophy, that most refined discipline of enquiry into human affairs, has focused increasingly on language; so much so that contemporary philosophy of human thought is really a philosophy of language. In all areas of the human and physical sciences, modernist ideals have given way to postmodernist doubts, founded, for the most part, on linguistic insecurity; that language does not always convey or represent what is intended. The power of language has increasingly been scrutinised, and found to act in ways which privilege and subvert (see, for example, Bourdieu 1991). The fabric of language itself has been taken apart and shown to be infinitely malleable (see, for example, Taylor 1992).

Briefly, then, it is against this sociolinguistic background that language teaching and learning have developed their own idiosyncratic course. How we teach and how we learn languages is often informed by the direct experience of teachers and learners. However, a new science of applied language studies has grown up in the past hundred years or so which specifically investigates language learning with the supposed intent of facilitating this process however it takes place. The founding father of contemporary linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, has also been adopted by postmodernists and philosophers, who use his theories on the nature and processes of language. Saussure’s Course in Applied Linguistics was published in 1916 by his students as a collection of lecture notes after his death three years earlier, and immediately set the agenda for both pure and applied linguistics. Nearly a century later, we continue to work with and develop his basic founding principles. Contemporary linguistic theory and research has had much to say about what language is and how it is processed. By implication, many applied linguists have sought to establish the way languages are learned and the nature of competence in a language. From this work, it is a short step to attempting to recommend didactic methodology as a facilitator to language learning—and it is in this tradition that we situate ourselves in this book. Before addressing current pedagogical issues, however, we want to say a little more about the paths which have brought us to our present methodological concerns. First, it is important to realise that principles of language teaching were not born with contemporary linguistics but pre-date them.

In the early part of this century, the direct method was advocated as an effective means of teaching a foreign language. Here, ‘the essential condition for acquiring a real command of a language…is to establish in connection with that language the same Direct Association between experience and expression as exists in the use of the mother-tongue’ (Board of Education Circular 797 (1912) quoted in Hawkins 1987, p. 132). In these few words, the major issues of the pedagogic debate on second-language learning are set; namely, the similarities and differences between learning one’s first language and another foreign language. The similarities and differences are of process and function, which are significant ultimately in terms of how they are understood and what is made of them in a formal teaching context. Briefly stated: is it sufficient to approach the learning and teaching of a second language as a replication of what is involved in learning a first language from birth? The Direct Method seems to reply in the affirmative to this question. Later on in this chapter there is discussion of the controversy surrounding a more recent methodological debate along similar lines—that of the so-called ‘communicative’ movement and the work of Stephen Krashen. However, even in the early part of the century, this assertion was challenged. In a much quoted statement, Harold Palmer wrote on the tensions in linking what we think we know about languages with how we subsequently believe they should be taught. ‘Ce n’est pas la méthode qui nous manque’, he asserted ‘c’est la base même de la méthode’ (1917). In other words, we do not lack formal descriptions of ways to teach, they are numerous. What is harder to establish is a sound basis for methodology, as clearly, no one has yet discovered the method.

The picture of methodological ambition and disappointment is graphically illustrated by Eric Hawkins in his review of modern languages in the curriculum (1987). Here, he lists over forty ‘names of the game’ (p. 306). It is worth pausing to name some of them:

The New Method

The Newer Method

The Reform Method

The Natural Method

The Rational Method

The Correct Method

The Sensible Method

The Direct Method

The Phonetical Method

The Phonetical Transcription Method

The Imitative Method

The Analytical Method

The Concrete Method

The Conversational Method

The Anti-classical Method

The Anti-grammatical Method

The Anti-translational Method

The Psychological Method

The Reading Method

The Drip-feed Method

The Active Method

The Eclectic Method

Method The Dual Language Method

Of course, in their chosen titles, many of them reveal the approach they take: and there are many, many more. Each has had its advocates. Some have had their disciples. All of them have had their relative degrees of success and failure. But, none have proved that they can work all the time, in all cases. There are simply too many variables: age, culture, context, personal preferences, external support, individual learning differences, and so on. What works in one time and place does not necessarily work elsewhere. However, within the disappointments which each method has necessarily experienced, it is probably worth reminding ourselves that people have indeed learned languages. They always have and they always will. Methodology alone can never be a solution to language learning. Rather, it is an aid and a support. This might lead us to ask: if effective language learning does not depend on a particular methodology, what does it depend on? It is in response to questions like these that this book has been written; why and how students learn languages has been our raison d’être. But, for the moment, it is worth pausing to consider more fully the relation between learning process and didactic methodology.

Shaping language learning: a national example

Methodology is a problematic issue. Although all the terms listed above are followed by the word ‘method’, there are vastly different practices included within each title: some proceeding through a highly prescribed set of sequences, others more loosely based around general principles. Such a distinction was realised by Anthony in the early 1960s when he wrote about the differences between approach, method and technique (1963). For him, a method is indeed an explicit plan for the presentation of materials to learners. It often follows a pre-set series or set of stages, each with a particular functional role in the overall didactic design. Approach, on the other hand, is more straightforwardly axiomatic, and follows the principles underlying the form of teaching taken. Finally, technique refers to the actual classroom activities used in implementing the approach or method. Such techniques presumably attempt to put principles into practice in terms of what they require the learner to do and what underlying justification there is for this. Anthony implied some sort of hierarchy in the relationship between these three. In other words, approach was superordinate to method; in fact, might include several methods. Technique was the practical manifestation of these methods and was consistent with them and the general approach to which they were related. Implicit in such a hierarchy is again the problematic relation between actual didactic activity and what we think we know and understand about the nature of language and the processes of acquiring it. The turbulence of this relation has become more acutely felt in recent years as methodological disappointments have set in. So much is this the case, that ‘method’ has become a term about which we are suspicious, and it has become more common to consider ‘approach’ the more helpful title when dealing with what goes on in the classroom. Approach has the advantage of being less prescriptive and even allowing techniques which might on the surface at least appear to be contradictory; for example the use of both target language and the mother tongue as part of classroom discourse.

Such issues and arguments concerning the nature of methodology can be seen in the history of modern-languages teaching in Britain in recent decades. This history might best be understood as a move from method—in this case, the grammartranslation and various audio-visual/audio-lingual methods—to the increasing adoption of a general approach to planning for language learning and teaching in pedagogic contexts. It is worth taking time to reconsider these in a little more detail.

Grammar-translation method

The most dominant second-language teaching methodology of recent time is probably the grammar-translation method. Its origins can be traced back to the annals of history, where the only languages considered worth learning were Latin and Greek. The way to learn them amounted to little more than analysis of grammar and memorisation of rules and vocabulary through classical texts. Even when Greek and Latin were joined by French and German in the nineteenth century as precursors to modern foreign-languages learning, teaching consisted primarily of organising grammar items for analysis and application. Reading and writing predominated, and oral skills were seen as very much secondary aims. The purpose of this study was to increase an individual’s culture and wit, and extend the discipline of the mind in abstract matters. Grammar rules were taught deductively and used for textual analysis and comparisons. The accuracy of resulting translations into and from English were a mark of proficiency and competence in mastering a language. English therefore dominated in the foreign-languages classroom, as did literary expression. Accuracy was all.

These characteristics conjure up a foreboding picture of the foreign-languages classroom on which a thousand stereotypical images have been built. It shows the worst excesses of tedious analysis and unusable knowledge of a language. Classes were dull for all but the classically inclined; their practical usefulness almost nonexistent. And yet as a method, it continued well into the post second-war period, and, it could be argued, has continued to provide the bedrock of most methods to this day; including those seemingly diametrically opposed at first sight to its basic tenets; for example, audio-lingualism. As outmoded as the grammar-translation method might now seem, its very form and expression does raise a number of significant issues, which continue to be pertinent to modern-languages teaching and learning to this day. Indeed, such issues have yet to be fully addressed in a satisfactory way, and this book is one latest contribution to the continuing pedagogical debate. It is worth listing some of the most important questions now in an informal manner as a way of anticipating their significance in later discussion in the following chapters.

What does it mean to ‘know’ a second language?

What is the relationship between an individual’s first and second language?

Are first and second-language-learning processes the same?

What is ‘grammar’? What is a grammar rule?

What is the relationship between the formal grammar of a textbook and the psychological grammar held in the mind in order to generate language?

What is the connection between written and spoken language?

What is the role of formal instruction in acquiring linguistic competence?

Can formally expressed rules be taught, learned, and applied in practice?

How does one individual differ from another?

How important is the topic content of language used in foreign-language lessons?

What is the role of linguistic context?

Clearly, many of these questions are only present in their absence in the grammar-translation method, or implied by the practice adopted. What is ignored by a method is as important to the practice it generates as what is explicitly prescribed by the method. The fundamental question remains, however: how does didactic method relate to internal linguistic process?

As can be seen from this discussion of the grammar—translation method, the stimulation for acquisition and conceptualisation of how to learn a second foreign language came from a classical view of education, not necessarily from the ideas to be found in linguistics about the way languages were learned. However, by the 1930s a new understanding of language appeared. It appeared as part of a new paradigm in the human sciences: behaviourism.

Behaviourism

Behaviourism is probably now and forever associated with the image of rote obedience to learned practices; for example, with rats getting their food supply by setting off the operation of a sequence of mechanisms. In essence, this approach to psychology is based on stimulus and response. Its linguistic form appeared in the 1930s in structural linguistics: the science of analysing language in terms of its component parts. Structural linguists were not interested in what happens in the human mind as such, but in the stimulus/response mechanisms observable as the product of language. Language was just another form of human behaviour. As such it was learned through exposure to ‘correct’ forms, response, and by subsequent reinforcement.

This approach to language and language learning spawned one of the most influential styles of teaching; namely, audio-visual and audio-lingual methods. These methods were at their height in the 1960s: no language class was complete without a set of slides and accompanying tapes, and expensive language laboratories were installed. Classes would consist of exposure to stock phrases, which were repeated by the learner until learned by heart. Questions and answers proceeded in a similar way. If the learner made mistakes, it was because insufficient practice had been undertaken. Such errors could therefore be eliminated by further practice. Repetition drills were the order of the day. Phonological and syntactical forms were selected for their structural significance. Language students learned these through induction rather than explicit analysis. Increased competence was defined in terms of gaining a larger repertoire of structures and forms, which could then be applied in real-life contexts. Good language learners gained good linguistic habits through drilling and practice.

Clearly, these techniques were very different from those so central to the grammar-translation method. Besides a diametrically opposed view of how to ‘learn’ grammar, audio-lingual methods stressed oral-aural work in a way hitherto unknown to teachers used to traditional analytical approaches. Visual associations were often central to the learning process; as in the audio-visual offspring to audio-lingualism.

The time-lag between the development of these theories of language and learning and the prominence of their practical application is, of course, an issue. Structural linguistics and language behaviourism were at their academic height in the 1930s and were fundamentally superseded by the 1960s. However, in pedagogic circles, in Britain at least, it was precisely during the 1960s that this style of language teaching, audio-lingual and audio-visual, took hold in schools. Tapes and film strips were de rigueur for modern-languages departments and the market was flooded by a vast array of courses aimed precisely at supplying the learner with opportunities to repeat, repeat and repeat. Repetition of stock phrases, and the drilling of stock question-answer forms were all.

Interestingly, many of these courses were used without entirely abandoning the grammar-translation method, and it was not unusual to find the two running along together side by side in unhappy union. In these cases, explicit grammar analysis took place prior to or following exposure to it through audio-lingual drilling. Reinforcement also might take in grammatical applications through such activities as translation and dictation.

As in the case of the grammar-translation method, behaviourism lives on today in a range of audio-lingual courses. And language laboratories are still common. One other significant influence of the audio-linguistic fashion is the focus it gave to linguistic context. Much of the material was based around people, imaginary or real, dealing with realistic social situations. An underlying assumption in this approach was that languages were being learned to be used. This belief found re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Conclusion
• References