Methods and Methodologies for Language Teaching

The Centrality of Context

Andy Curtis

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350308107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An essential guide for pre-service and in-service English language teachers. There are countless theories and approaches to language teaching, and with so many different methodologies available it can be difficult for teachers to weigh up the pros and cons of each – or even to know where to start. Written by an experienced teacher and researcher, Methods and Methodologies for Language Teaching takes a fresh look at ten approaches to classroom language teaching and learning. Each chapter includes suggested activities and further reading, presenting the origins and key features of each methodology before discussing its relation to assessment and learning outcomes. This is a clear, concise and context-driven introduction to teaching methods which reasserts the significance of methodology as a central pillar of language learning.

CHAPTER 1

Five Thousand Years in Five Thousand Words

Before reading this chapter, consider the following six points. Think about whether you agree or disagree with them, and why. Whatever your response to the statements, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with them, they may help you read more thoughtfully and reflectively. These six statements also summarize some of the main learning points in this chapter.

• Language teaching and learning, including English Language Teaching (ELT), has a much longer history than many of us may realize.
• Language teaching methodologies have been with us for a very long time indeed, and show no signs of leaving us any time soon, in spite of claims that we are in a ‘post-methods era’.
• Criticisms of methodologies are not new. Methodologies have always been criticized, and probably always will be. This does not mean we can or should do away with them.
• The development of methodologies in language education has not taken place along a nice, neat linear trajectory, in which each methodological era builds logically on the previous one. In our field, the methodological development has been circular – going in circles – and cyclical – coming and going. That development has often been chaotic, and it has been at least as much emotional, and based on feelings, as it has been rational, and based on data.
• Methodologies are at the interface of many different aspects of language teaching and learning, including knowledge, skills and understanding, as well as values, beliefs and motivations. As a result, definitions and descriptions of methodologies can be highly complex. They can also be relatively straightforward and concise.
• Language teachers need to be able to articulate their bases for accepting certain language teaching methodologies and for rejecting others, based on a principled and informed eclecticism.

Introduction and Overview

It is not possible to compress 5000 years of history into 5000 words, but in this chapter, we will cover many of the main highlights of the first 50 centuries of language teaching. We will also consider some key questions, including: What is a ‘language teaching method’? What is a ‘language teaching methodology’? And: Where do these ideas come from? In the second part of this chapter, we look at several different definitions and descriptions of ‘method’ and ‘methodology’, including some of the classic definitions that have been central in shaping our understanding of these key concepts. After looking at areas of overlap in meaning, and the complexity of these concepts, we will then discuss the ‘anti-methods’ and ‘post-methods’ period. One of the recurring points in the chapter is the importance of language teachers today knowing something about the millennia of language education we have inherited, and within that, the centuries of English language teaching and learning that are the foundation of what we do today.

The First Five Thousand Years

Have you ever wondered what it would have been like to be a language teacher 100 years ago? Or a thousand? Or even 5000 years ago? Over the many years that I have been asking language teachers this question, they often look bemused and confused, partly because such questions seem so far removed, in time and space, from the immediate and pressing classroom concerns of today and tomorrow. Another reason for such puzzled looks is that many language teachers do not know that there is a documented history of language teaching stretching back thousands of years. Even those relatively few teachers who know that our field has such a history are not sure what is the point of knowing anything about that history.

The stories in the international media about adopted children spending years trying to find their biological parents show an extremely deep-seated desire to know where we have come from. Likewise, knowing our own professional history can also help us. For example, a character in one of the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s (1948–2015) best-selling comic fantasy Disc-world books says:

It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong. (Pratchett, 2010, p. 477)

That idea also relates to the line in the song ‘Any Road’ by the Beatles guitarist George Harrison: ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.’

We do not necessarily ‘go wrong’ when we do not know our own history, but a strong case can be made that, if we want to know where we are now, and where we might be headed, we need to know how we got here. Some writers and researchers working in the field of language methodology have also highlighted the importance of teachers having some historical understanding of the field. For example, Diane Larsen-Freeman and Marti Anderson note in their Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching: ‘we believe that educators should have a sense of the history of the field, not only of contemporary practices’ (2011, p. xv). Larsen-Freeman and Anderson do not give reasons for that belief. Nor do they suggest how this ‘sense of history’ can be gained, other than implicitly, by presenting the methods along a historical timeline, but with relatively little, if any, actual discussion of the history of the field. Or, if there is such a discussion, it is usually confined to the last 50 years or so, as noted by Wheeler (2013).

This brings us to the question of how much documented, verifiable history there is regarding language teaching and learning. According to Claude Germain’s book, Évolution de l’Enseignement des Langues: 5000 Ans D’Histoire (1993), there is up to 5000 years of such history. Germain starts with the Babylonians, who lived in the ancient lands of Mesopotamia, in the part of the world that we know today as Iran. This may have been the first time and place where language teaching formally took place, as a result of two cultural and linguistic groups, the Sumerians and the Akkadians, living side-by-side, borrowing liberally from each other’s languages, competing and exchanging places, over long periods of time. Germain takes the reader on an epic journey, from Mesopotamia to ancient Egypt and ancient Greece; from there to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, on into the nineteenth century, and finishing up in the twentieth.

In terms of ELT, Howatt’s A History of English Language Teaching (1984) notes that documented ELT started in the 1400s. That is still more than 700 years of history, but compared with the teaching and learning of other languages, ELT was a relative latecomer. However, as we shall see in the following chapters, although ELT did not become established until several centuries after the teaching and learning of some other languages, the methods employed in ELT would come to dominate the language teaching and learning world.

There was a time, not so long ago, when some knowledge of the history of language teaching methodologies was considered an integral part of the education of future language teachers. However, the vocal anti-methods and post-methods critics (see below) have questioned whether such a detailed knowledge is necessary today – or even if it was ever needed. But, because our field has a much longer, richer and deeper history than many language teachers may realize, just knowing that – even without knowing any of the details – can be potentially empowering, in a number of ways. One way is by helping us see where we are going, through understanding more about how we got here. Another is by helping us realize that although language education as a discipline may appear to be relatively new, compared with, for example, medicine or law, our field has a history that is as long and as rich, as wide and as deep as (m)any of the others. So, before we launch into chapters on the different methodologies, we should spend a little time briefly familiarizing ourselves with our own history.

One of the most thoroughly researched books ever written on the history of language teaching is Louis Kelly’s 25 Centuries of Language Teaching. The book covers the period from 500 BC to 1969, the year the book was first published, and includes a list of well over 1100 primary sources (pp. 409–455). However, in spite of such an achievement, Kelly’s book appears to be largely unheard of by most of today’s language teachers. That is a great pity, especially as Kelly made many observations that still apply, including the points that ‘Nobody really knows what is new or old in present-day language teaching procedures’ and ‘much that is being claimed as revolutionary this century is merely a rethinking and renaming of early ideas and procedures’ (1969, p. ix). This is an important point, because there is always someone, somewhere claiming to have discovered – and who now happens to be selling – some new, innovative and ground-breaking method that will revolutionize language teaching and learning (see Chapter 7).

This is not to agree with the position that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. But there does appear to have been a long, strong tendency in our field to jump from one ‘methodological bandwagon’ to another. As a result, as language teachers, we can find ourselves running from one new methodology to another – and sometimes back again – without stopping to ask whether this is really the best way to move language education forward. As Mark Clarke put it, in his article ‘On Bandwagons, Tyranny and Commonsense’: ‘As a profession, we seem to have a strong propensity for bandwagons, an inclination to seek simple, final solutions for complex problems’ (1982, p. 444). Dale Lange made the same point some years later, when he commented that, in relation to foreign language teaching, ‘Unfortunately, the latest bandwagon “methodologies” come into prominence without much study or understanding, particularly those that appear easiest to apply in the classroom’ (1990, p. 253). If we can finally and fully stop bandwagoning, we can stand still for a while and step back, so we can see where we are, how we got here, and where we may be headed.

The most recent example of this tendency to jump on whatever bandwagon happens to be rolling by could be translanguaging, which is defined by Canagarajah (2011) as ‘the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system’ (p. 401). This particular potential bandwagon gained momentum and picked up speed in 2014, with the publication of the book Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education (García & Wei, 2014). Two of the proponents of translanguaging, Lasagabaster and García, claim that it is ‘a pedagogical strategy … which fosters the dynamic and integrative use of bilingual students’ languages in order to create a space in which the incorporation of both languages is seen as natural and teachers accept it as a legitimate pedagogical practice’ (Lasagabaster & García 2014, p. 557).

In most of the many hundreds of language classes that I have taught and observed, all over the world, over the last 25 years, the students were constantly shuttling and scuttling between their first languages and the target language. The main distinguishing feature was the teacher’s reaction. In my classes, and in many of those that I observed, the teacher was OK with the learners making such first language–target language moves. But in some of the more severe classes observed, use of the first language was not allowed. However, that position appears to have become increasingly uncommon, as the value of the learners’ first language has been seen as an asset rather than as an interference.

Turning a noun into a verb, in this case, making ‘languaging’ out of ‘language’, does display a healthy linguistic creativity in terms of creating neologisms. Likewise, using ‘codemeshing’ (Canagarajah, 2011) instead of the long-established ‘code-mixing’ and ‘code-switching’ to describe how language users move between their languages is an effective way to create a (meta)language of translanguaging. Also, for those relatively few language teachers who still believe in the target-language-only myth, and who do not ‘welcome other language structures into the classroom’ (Hermann, 2015, p. 2), translanguaging can remind them of the value and importance of learners’ first languages. And in terms of the politics of pedagogical practices, moving from a more compartmentalized model of bilingualism to a more open model may be helpful (Creese & Blackledge, 2010). But any claims that this is some sort of major breakthrough in the teaching and learning of second and foreign languages would be at best an overstatement, at worst an apparent attempt at rolling out the next bandwagon.

To return to Kelly, one of his more controversial claims is that ‘The total corpus of ideas accessible to language teachers has not changed basically in 2,000 years’ (p. 362). However, again, this should not be taken to mean that language teaching methodologies have not changed during that time. On the contrary, Kelly explains that ‘What has been in constant change are the ways of building methods’ from that total corpus of ideas, and that ‘the part of the corpus that is accepted varies from generation to generation as does the form in which the ideas present themselves’ (p. 362, emphases added). Kelly’s reference to shifting generational acceptability and changing preferences helps to explain why the field of language teaching has suffered from this kind of ‘bandwagoning’.

Some language teachers may be resistant to trying different methodologies that may be new to them, but not new to the field. This response is part of a normal and natural aversion to making mistakes, especially publicly, and particularly in front of one’s peers, supervisors, managers and so on, and for teachers, in front of their learners. On this point, Kelly has some reassuring words: ‘Very few inherently bad ideas have ever been put forward in language teaching’ (p. 363). That may be another controversial claim, but given the breadth and depth of Kelly’s work, it is worth considering such claims. We will look at this idea that there have been ‘very few bad ideas’ in some of the following chapters, especially Chapter 7, on alternative and humanistic methods.

One reason for many language teachers assuming that our field has only been around for the last half-century is the publication, in 1963, of Edward Anthony’s brief but important paper ‘Approach, Method, and Technique’, with those three levels arranged within a hierarchy. As Anthony put it, ‘techniques carry out a method which is consistent with an approach’ (p. 64). Fifty years later, Anthony’s paper is still being cited as a starting point. Another reason for this incorrect assumption that our field has a history of only 50 years or so are statements made in influential books, for example, Jack Richards’ and Theodore Rodgers’ Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (1986, 2001, 2014). In that book, Richards and Rodgers state: ‘The whole foundation of contemporary language teaching was developed during the early part of the twentieth century’ (2001, p. 1). However, the foundations were laid long before the twentieth century, with contemporary language teaching being built on foundations laid centuries and even millennia ago, as noted by Wheeler (2013).

Anthony (1963) also observed that ‘Over the years, teachers have adopted, adapted, invented and developed a bewildering variety of terms which describe the activities in which they engage and the beliefs which they hold’ (p. 63). Although much has changed during the 50-plus years since Anthony’s short paper was published, the ‘bewildering variety of terms’ has continued to grow and even multiply. For example, more than 40 years after Anthony’s paper, Kumaravadivelu complained that a ‘plethora of terms and labels such as approach, design, methods, practices, principles, procedures, strategies, tactics, techniques, and so on are used to describe various elements constituting language teaching’ (2006, p. 83). As explained in the Introduction to this book, this is one of the reasons for writing this book, to help language teachers understand the ever-expanding number of terms and the activities they refer to, in the context of the teacher-readers’ day-to-day classroom realities and practices.

One example of the longevity of Anthony’s three-level definition is the fact that nearly 40 years after it was put forward, Brown described it as ‘a definition that has quite admirably withstood the test of time’ (2002, p. 9). However, Larsen-Freeman initially described Anthony’s definition as ‘too indeterminate for our purposes here’ (1986, p. xi). But by the third edition of the same book, 25 years later, Larsen-Freeman and Anderson appeared to have changed their minds: ‘Following Anthony in certain of the chapters we will introduce a particular method by showing how it is an example of a more general approach to language teaching’ (2011, p. xvi). This shift demonstrates an important principle regarding the origins, history and development of language teaching methods and methodologies, in relation to the non-linear, circular, cyclical nature of such methods, but one which is not usually noted, and rarely commented on: What Goes Around, Comes Around. As noted above, that idea should not be taken to imply a belief that there is nothing new under the sun, but such shifts are compelling evidence to support Kelly’s finding, cited above, that ‘much that is being claimed as revolutionary this century is merely a rethinking and renaming of early ideas and procedures’ (1969, p. ix).

Garon Wheeler (2013) starts his book Language Teaching Through the Ages by giving several compelling answers to the question ‘Why should a language teacher be well-versed in the history of the field?’ (p. 2). One reason is t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Author’s Introduction
• Abbreviations
• 1 Five Thousand Years in Five Thousand Words
• 2 The Centrality of Context
• 3 Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning in Context
• 4 Communicative Language Teaching in Context
• 5 Content-Based Instruction and Content and Language Integrated Learning
• 6 The Direct Method and the Audio-Lingual Method
• 7 The Grammar Translation Method
• 8 Humanistic and Alternative Methods
• 9 Where Do We Go From Here?
• Glossary
• References
• Index