an a la carte approach to language teaching approaches

7/31/2019 An a La Carte Approach to Language Teaching Approaches

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An A la Carte Approach to English Teaching Approaches

Kevin Stein

Clark Memorial International High School

When I was in high school, it was expected that students aiming to attend a

four-year college with name recognition would take foreign language courses.

My Spanish teachers name was Ms. Quenzal. Class met five days a week for

fifty-minute periods. We used a textbook broken into units with titles like, In

Your Town, or Jobs. There was a big chunk of grammar in each unit and

sample dialogues which were probably written to take advantage of saidgrammar. We spent a lot of time working in pairs practicing the dialogues

that first year. We also did a fair amount of grammar exercises of the change

the sentence from present to past tense type. As our language developed,

there was less dialogue work and more free conversation and authentic text

work. By the end of the second year, we were reading and holding small

group discussions on short Spanish novels. By the third year, Ms. Quenzal

had stopped using English in class, wore large red hoop earrings, spoke much

more quickly and with a much more pronounced accent, and refused to

answer any questions which were directed to her in English. I remember in

my third year, I was selected to stand up in front of the class and take part in

a role-play with another student. I was supposed to take on the role of a high

school student who is worried about what he will do after graduating high

school. My partner in the role-play was taking the role of a high school

guidance counselor. Unfortunately, my limited vocabulary did not allow me to

hone in on any specific problem such as choosing a university. Instead, I

made a bunch of general statements about feeling bad, not knowing

something, and wanting to talk. When the guidance counselor insisted I tell

her what was wrong, I blurted out the only Spanish that came to mind. My

body. My body is changing. Which resulted in an explosion of laughter from

the class.

Now that I am a language teacher myself, I sometimes look back on my first

language class and try and understand just exactly Ms. Quenzal was doing

during those 50 minutes a day with us. According to Richards and Rodgers

(1986, p. 16), "approach refers to theories about the nature of language and

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language learning that serve as the source of practices and principles in

language teaching." What was Ms. Quenzal's approach to language teaching?

Did she have a core set of beliefs about the nature of language which shaped

and formed the methods and techniques of her lessons? Did she subscribe to

an approach? And for that matter, do I?

While Ms. Quenzal's class, while certainly much more lively than the Latin

class being held two rooms down the hall, still involved a large number of oral

grammar drills, especially during that first year of class. And when I first got

to Japan in 1999, most of the text books wereand in fact still arebased on

a structural syllabus in which linguistic knowledge, and not language use, isthe focus of the course. These structural syllabi are heavily influenced by the

structural approach, born out of the work of structural linguists of the 1940s

and 1950s who, were engaged in what they claimed was a scientific

descriptive analysis of various languages. Language teaching

methodologies put this type of analysis to use in the actual teaching of

linguistic patterns (Brown, 1994, p.70). Language was like a giant Lego set,

composed of pieces from both a phonological and grammatical system. Once

students could understand how and why the pieces fit together, they would

be able to use the language. For the structural linguists, grammar, or

structure, was the starting point, of language instruction. Vocabulary was

secondary and only enough vocabulary to work with the basic grammatical

patterns was introduced (Richards and Rogers, 1986, p. 46).

While I do not know of any teachers who would start a conversation by

saying, Hey, I am a structuralist, traces of the structuralist approach still

linger in most language classrooms, beyond even the structural syllabus

forced on many teachers. In fact, I often use tabling activities when working

with lower level students. I will usually pick a subject, such as my week and

set up a table which includes one section for the subject of the sentence, one

for a verb, one for a direct object, and a final section for an adverbial phrase

dealing with time, usually day of the week and time of day. The table looks

something like:

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My Week

Day and Time Who Do WhatOn Monday morning

On Tuesday night

On Sunday evening

I

I

I

practice

watch

study

baseball

television

English

Students, one by one, compose sentences using the various components from

the table. When introducing a new grammar structure to students I will often

present it in a table form, encouraging students to produce as many

sentences as possible at the star of a lesson. To a certain extent, I, like the

structural linguists who developed the structural approach, believe that

grammar can indeed be the starting point of language instruction. Still, this

exercise is not purely structuralist in nature. While I choose the initial

vocabulary, students are free to add new words as needed and I do not

attempt to limit the amount of vocabulary out of any preconceived ideas that

a larger base of words will interfere with students being able to recognize and

become familiar with the pattern being practiced. The tabling activity has

one more connection with the structuralist approach, namely the idea that

there is also something valuable about contrastive analysis of the learners

first and second languages. During tabling work, I will sometimes ask

students or point out the difference in structure between how the table is set

up in English and how it would look in the students first language. Especially

when teaching the above pattern with Japanese learners, we usually spend

some class time focusing in on the fact that the verb-object relationship is

reversed in Japanese. Occasionally I do minimal pair exercises, and these

activities are also predicated upon the belief that the phonological system of

language is composed of phonemes which can be compared and contrastedwith each other, learned in isolation, and then used correctly during language

production. While I realize that such pronunciation work is a simplification of

language in use and does not necessarily correspond one-to-one with

language acquisition, I still find such work to can lead to higher levels of

student awareness and have indeed seen cases of dramatic improvement in

students pronunciation.

As the structural approach was heavily influenced by the structural linguists

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of the 1940s and 1950s, the behaviorist approach was similarly influenced by

behavioral psychology, a school of psychology which, advocated conditioning

and habit-formation models of learning (Brown, 1994, p. 70). The idea was

that language learning was the adoption of a set of behaviors which could be

influenced in the same way as any other behaviors, through a program of

stimulus, response, and reinforcement conditioning. Learning a language was

simply a matter of providing students with the appropriate stimulus in the

form of samples of target language, after the students responded, the

teachers praise, fellow students reaction, or the students, intrinsic self-

satisfaction of target language use, would be the reinforcement necessary to

help the students acquire a, set of appropriate language-stimulus-responsechains (Richards and Rogers, p. 50). In the behaviorist approach,

maximizing correct responses (appropriate behavior) and minimizing errors

(inappropriate behavior) was considered necessary to produce good

behaviors. Hence, language practice often focused on short dialogues and

aimed for perfect accuracy. In some ways, the structuralist approach and the

behaviorist approach were not competing approaches, but complimentary

ways of thinking about language and psychology which were both

fundamental in the creation of the Audiolingual method. The content of the

Audiolingual method classes were based on the structuralist approach, while

the classroom procedures and teaching techniques relied heavily upon the

behaviorist approach of limiting errors and reinforcing good behavior.

While we have moved a long way past believing that language acquisition is a

simple, mechanical process, vestiges of behaviorist thought still inform

modern language classrooms. Now we use different terminology such as

'extrinsic motivation' and 'graded tasks', but the ideas that students should

be praised for correct responses and that class content should be level

adjusted to provide an adequate chance of success can be tied back to the

original behaviorist ideas. And many of the fluency activities which I use in

my own classes, including 3/2/1 activities (Nation, 2007) in which students

work with the same language repeatedly in order to improve their fluency, are

also indebted to behaviorist ideas. Just because I realize that there are

complex cognitive and psychological factors which can inhibit or promote

language acquisition, does not change the simple fact that I still believe, to a

certain extent, that practice does indeed make, if not perfect, at least better.

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In the late 1960s, Noam Chomsky started a revolution within the linguistics

field when he proposed his ideas of transformational grammar. Language was

no longer a combination of simple structures, nor a result of reductionist

series of behaviors. Instead, it was the product of, innate aspects of the

mind and from how humans process experience through language (Richards

and Rogers, p. 59). Language teachers were freed from the constraints of

demanding perfection of their students, as errors were no longer simply

mistakes in behavior, but a crucial part of a cognitive process during which

learners were developing an interlanguage system.

In a cognitive approach, the structural syllabus was recognized to beunrelated to the internal syllabus students followed in developing their own

interlanguage system. Additionally, researchers and teachers began to

recognize the importance of both cognitive and psychological factors in

language learners success (Brown, 1994, p. 95).

A student was no longer a vessel to be filled with language knowledge, or an

agent reacting to stimulus in simple and predictable ways. To deal with this

new idea of just what a language learner was, a new batch of methodologies

such as Caleb Gattengos The Silent Way, and James Ashers Total Physical

Response (Brown, p. 96-100) sprung up during the 1970s. The Silent Ways

use of Cuisinere rods allowed students to use their own abilities of intellectual

creativity to intuitively understand the underlying grammatical rules that led

to sentence formation or phonetic systems. Ashers TPR allowed students to

not only relax, but to physically react to and process new language in a way

more akin to the way children acquire their first language. While it is rare to

find a language classroom which solely relies upon one of these

methodologies nowadays, the underlying ideas upon which these

methodologies rested and a number of the activities and techniques used in

these methodologies are still very much in use in classrooms throughout the

world. I have used Cuisinere rods to teach adverbials and often use TPR

activities when introducing vocabularysuch as household choreswhich

easily lends itself to psychical gestures. Asides from the teaching techniques

developed during the 1970s, perhaps the most important thing the cognitive

approach did was simply point out the limited use of both the behavioral and

structuralist approach. If language acquisition was the result of deep and

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innate cognitive factors, if teaching a grammar point did not necessarily result

integration into a students interlanguage system, the language teacher was

now faced with a frightening new question to deal with. In short, just what

exactly was teachable within the language classroom?

In some respects, the communicative approach is an attempt to answer that

question and to fill the hole left after behavioral and structural approaches

had been seen to be discredited. As opposed to attempting to answer the

question of What should be taught? perhaps one of the main questions

researchers influenced by the cognitive approach still struggles with today,

the question was recast as, What is the purpose of teaching a language?The answer to the question then becomes relatively easy. We teach English

to allow our students to communicate effectively in English. In light of this,

the focus of the language class shifts subtly, but importantly, away from the

acquisition of language knowledge, to providing an environment in which

students develop the language skills necessary for English communication; in

which students develop the communicative competence necessary to,

convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally

within a specific context (Brown, p.227). Whereas the end goal of all

language teaching has always ostensibly been to produce students who could

communicate in English, the communicative approach took as its basic

premise that the learning of English communication was in fact inseparable

from the act of English communication itself. Only through engaging in

communicative English acts could students have the chance to develop the

skills necessary to become competent English communicators. Merril Swain,

writing about collaborative dialogue, said, "It is where language use and

language learning can co-occur (Swain, 2000, p. 97)." In some ways, she

could just as easily have been writing about the communicative approach

itself.

This idea of language learning has influenced almost all aspect the modern

language classroom. In my own classes, tabling activities are not based on

disconnected sentences and grammar, but grouped around a theme and often

lead to communicative activities in which students must use the information

in the table to engage in personal and authentic conversations. Similarly, the

topics that I address within my classroom include not only grammar issues,

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but also appropriate use of gestures and the pragmatics of language use.

Part of my responsibility as an English teacher is to make sure students know

the socially and stylistically appropriate words and phrases to use within a

given situation. In short, I do not believe that discrete linguistic knowledge is

enough for students to become functional English users. Only through putting

language to use in the realistic and sometimes confusing and messy manner

in which it is used in the real world, will students have a chance to take

English out of the classroom and make it a part of their larger world.

Over 25 years ago, I took my first Spanish class with Ms. Quenzal. I do notknow if she was well schooled in the various approaches which were floating

around the academic and teaching world at the time, although I have a

feeling that, as a dedicated teacher, she did her fair share of reading of

academic journals. And something of the different techniques she used in her

class, from simple grammar tables, to role-plays, to reading groups, leads me

to think that she was on the cutting-edge of methodology when it came to

how she taught Spanish. Not because the underlying approach upon which

her teaching rested was based on the latest academic writing, but because

she taught to our needs and exhibited a genuine interest in us as people as

well as students. I think it was this attitude and her willingness to explore a

range of what, on the surface, might appear to be contradictory

methodologies, which made her, regardless of my limited language abilities,

one of my favorite teachers. In a similar way, I hope I am teaching my classes

not based on one idea of what language is or is not, but on the needs of my

students at any given moment. Structuralist, behavioral, cognitive,

communicative and more recent approaches such as the lexical approach and

emergentist school of thought all have something important to say about

language. But only when they are placed within the specific context of a

specific class of learners. Because even a unified theory of language is of

little use if it does not help us to understand our learners and how to best

assist them as they engage in the difficult work of becoming English speakers.

References:

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Brown, H.D. (1994). Principles of language learning and teaching, 3rd ed.,

Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.

Nation, I. S. P. (2007).The four strands.Innovation in Language Learning and

Teaching,1(1), 1-12.

Richards, J.C. and Rodgers, T. (1986).Approaches and Methods in Language

Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: mediatin acquisition

through

collaborative dialogue. In J.P. Lantolf (ed.) Sociocultural Theory and

SecondLanguage Learning. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press p. 97-114.

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http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/Publications/paul-nation/2007-Four-strands.pdfhttp://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/Publications/paul-nation/2007-Four-strands.pdf

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