Strony tytułowe zaprojektował Michał Goszko

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To Betty and Douglas

INTRODUCTION Teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) as strategic behaviour. The role of professional knowledge

This book is intended as a textbook for courses in teaching English as a foreign language within the framework of our educational system. Focus on English as a foreign language may be contrasted with teaching foreign languages in general, which has an imposingly vast literature. English as a foreign language should be distinguished from English as a second language since a second language is studied as well as learned in the community which uses it. Unlike in the case of a foreign language, learning is not confined to the classroom process, but significantly enhanced by environmental input and interaction. English has a status of a world language as well as a leading foreign language taught in Poland. It is studied for a wide variety of purposes, ranging from communicating with native speakers of British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand English to international communication with native speakers of other languages, such as Dutch, Spanish, or German.

The book aspires to be representative of the fundamental issues, but cannot be exhaustive. Its focus is on the background and origin of our teaching strategies and activities, as well as their function, but not on textbook, curriculum and syllabus design, or standardized testing, which are vital, but specialized aspects of foreign language teaching and, more often than not, are covered in separate courses. The book looks at the evolution and refinement of our ideas about foreign language teaching and their increasing anchoring in our notions of language learning. The focus is on two complementary facets of language use, comprehension and production, divided into four language skills to highlight issues of developing control of the language code. Teaching is considered to be a form of strategic behaviour which involves diagnosing the teaching problem and selecting/designing the appropriate solution. Teaching strategies are presented as basic categories with a potential for adjustment and modification. The teacher should regard them as options to choose from in real classroom conditions according to his or her diagnosis of the current didactic situation and the learners’ needs.

The book’s advantage is that in one volume we cover key topics in teaching English as a foreign language reflecting recent developments in the field, especially the idea of foreign language learning as verbal communication including its underlying mental processes. Each of these topics may be treated as a point of departure for a much more detailed and extensive study. At the same time it provides a point of departure for much more specific issues, which result from these fundamental considerations to be developed in the next volume. The main emphasis is clearly on the teaching aspect of the whole process, types of activities, criteria of their grading as well as their specific functions. It is not intended as an overview of research exploring language learning, or Second Language Acquisition Research, or research methods in the field of second language acquisition. Nevertheless, every attempt is made to link teaching principles to our current understanding of language use and learning in verbal communication.

The book is addressed to a qualified teacher of English as a foreign language or a teacher trainee, such as a BA or an MA student of English at a philology department, an applied linguistics institute, or a teacher training college. It is taken into account that the students take many specialized courses in linguistics and literature which constitute their degree programme. As a result, they develop extensive background knowledge in the British and American language and culture and are capable of integrating it with the field of teaching English as a foreign language. For this reason, the textbook aims to provide teaching principles with rational justifications rather than arbitrary tips or recipes. My principal goal here is to systematize techniques and strategies of teaching English and address the question of why and how they can be used in developing various areas of communicative ability in English. This is the reason why the word ‘professional’ is used in the title. The book is addressed to a (prospective) professional with considerable background knowledge, determined to understand reasons for his or her actions while teaching. This professional must be able to identify, diagnose and solve numerous problems and make various decisions in the classroom. Such a person will not benefit from too local or arbitrary advice. Teacher education must indeed foster the understanding of foreign language learning and teaching as well as the abilities to diagnose classroom situations, make reasonable choices, as well as adjust and evaluate. Teachers’ creativity, a most precious human resource which must not be ignored, can truly blossom only on such solid professional foundations rather than as a substitute for them, as some academics and practitioners maintain.

The key question is who can be considered a professional. In general terms, this is someone educated or trained with a considerable skill and experience in a given activity, especially the main activity for which one receives pay, as opposed to just a hobby or pastime. Such a person can demonstrate professionalism in the sense of high quality and standards of performance. A profession is an occupation or vocation requiring extended training and advanced study in a specialized field whereas a professional is a specialist whose predispositions have been developed by extended education and training.

Foreign language teaching witnesses a paradox, however: language learning, including mother tongue and subsequent languages, can happen naturally, without any deliberate activity on the part of a ‘teacher’ provided certain conditions are met: the learner is fairly young, and there is unrestricted exposure and contact with the language. However, the process is hard to replicate or evoke in the educational context when the learner is slightly older and contact hours are limited. The intricate nature of foreign language learning justifies the involvement of professionals, which is to say, people who understand the working of the process to the point that they can deliberately cultivate it in the educational setting. What should such a professional know apart from being a fluent speaker of the source and target languages of the learner, as well as a trained linguist and an expert in culture? What is the difference between a professionally trained teacher and a non-professional? Ideally, a professional is someone who can make sense of foreign language learning in the classroom, in other words, can understand the process. It is then feasible to adjust teaching procedures to the language learners, taking into account their age, needs and interests. A professional can guide and assist the learners in the process of language learning in terms of both content and strategy and provide them with feedback about their progress. A professional teacher has a clear orientation in the complex and vast domain of the target language and culture. In other words, he or she can address and cope with a genuinely complex and extensive task.

A non-professional, on the other hand, does not benefit from such a map because he or she has not been educated in this domain. It is fairly easy for him or her to get lost in the complex problem space and become preoccupied with one set of activities or techniques as universal, i.e. all-purpose solutions and forget about the others, or unnecessarily discard some techniques for inadequate reasons. Error correction may be used to illustrate such a case: a teacher may discard error correction as anachronistic to be in line with the recommendations of Communicative Language Teaching, whereas it is not only anachronistic in terms of our understanding of verbal communication, but against the teacher’s professional role expectations to leave errors uncorrected.

This state of orientation is necessary for the professional teacher to do his job well, if not to say at all. It is also absolutely necessary for him or her to establish his professional role in the classroom, which, regardless all the other claims, is the role of the leader. The teacher is a leader in the educational process, if we understand ‘the leader’ as someone who has a vision for the future and a way of convincing others to work toward this goal. What a good and honest leader needs is not only the vision, but realistic and rational understanding of what it takes to accomplish it. In the case of foreign language teachers, this ‘vision’ is tantamount to a clear idea of what it takes to learn a foreign language in the conditions afforded by the educational institutions characteristic of our culture. The clarity and practicality of the idea is relative to the level of education and specialized training. Anyone can act as a foreign language teacher once in a while, for a while, but sustaining the long-term process of foreign language learning on a mass scale calls for professionals with solid, i.e. rational foundations in the field.

Professionals have specialized knowledge of the field at their disposal, they are aware of the tradition in the field so as not to reinvent the wheel and to critically evaluate old and new ideas in their context. In other words, they have a mental map of what it takes to learn and use a foreign language in the educational context, a map which systematizes various options and strategies. As a result, they can be methodical, i.e. systematic, about their work. Both the professional and the non-professional teachers may believe in variety, but only the professional can link techniques or tasks to certain aspects of language learning and use to determine their function in the long run. Although both let themselves be guided by intuition, the professional can also deal with a host of rational questions, such as why, how, for what purpose, with what effect, under what conditions certain teaching procedures can be implemented. Whether a truly satisfactory state of professionalism can be accomplished or not is another matter, but it is certainly worth trying because teaching and learning English as a foreign language is done on a mass scale.

A professional is a rationalist who knows enough about his domain to demystify it. If one can answer the ‘wh’ questions listed above, the magic of language learning is gone. Is this state welcome? I think it is if we want to be paid for our work in the educational system. The numerous puzzles which still remain are challenging enough and undoubtedly there is still plenty of room for employing our creativity.

Three sources of information are relevant to an educated teacher: one is professional knowledge on teaching English as a foreign language, the second is the real world in which we live and communicate, and the third is our careful insight and observation of the foreign language classroom with its learners, treated both as individuals and a group. On the basis of these three sources of knowledge the teacher may start diagnosing his problems and making decisions in the foreign language classroom. This is challenging and demands creative, strategic thinking. The purpose of this textbook is to outline key elements of background knowledge on teaching English as a foreign language to be tapped as one of the three sources of information in our professional activity. The word ‘guide’ used in the title indicates that the book introduces some information, but cannot be a substitute for ‘being there’ – in the classroom – where the teacher can gradually learn about his or her educational institution, the structure of the courses being taught, the coursebooks to be used, as well as develop the idea about his or her specific group of individual learners, their personalities and needs. No guide, let alone one volume, can replace first-hand experience and the teacher’s continuous education. It is clear to me, however, that the degree to which any textbook on methods and strategies of teaching English as a foreign language can be considered practical does not depend on its abundance of ready tips and directives, but on the degree to which it helps to understand the complexity of foreign language learning and teaching, i.e. make sense of it. We badly need a map of the problem, the available options, criteria for choosing them, and the strategies of adjusting teaching to the learner and his or her needs.

PART ONE Where do our ideas on foreign language teaching come from?

1. Foreign language teaching in a historical perspective

The evolution in the ideas on foreign language teaching outlined below reflects: a) progress in our understanding of language, language use and learning from the commonsense to the scientific linguistic view regarding the key to language, and b) the progress of civilization, i.e. the invention of increasingly fast means of communication and transportation, which make the world ‘smaller’, and which justify c) the growing social demands for speakers competent in foreign languages.

1.1. The role of Latin

An important factor in the early stage of the development of foreign language teaching is the role of Latin as the lingua franca of educated Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Latin was considered as an ideal model of grammar, whereas other languages were merely imperfect reflections of this ideal. Mackey (1965:141) comments on the impact of Latin as a model of ideal grammar as well as a model of language teaching:

... other peoples began to learn Latin until that language became the international language of Western Europe, the language of church and state, and for a long time the sole language of learning, the only medium of instruction in the schools. And it remained so in some European countries until modern times. The first concern with language teaching method in Europe, therefore, had to do with the teaching of Latin. During the Middle Ages Latin was the language of teaching. Methods were mostly limited to Latin grammars designed to enable clerics to speak, read and write in their second language, the language in which nearly all academic learning was done.

The invention of printing around 1455 helped to reproduce the Greek and Latin classics to be used as texts for teaching throughout Europe. The language in which the texts were written was several centuries older than the Latin spoken by the educated users at the time, but it was considered to be the correct form of Latin on which the grammars and teaching should be based. Grammar based on these texts grew more and more complicated and became an end in itself rather than the means to reading the classics. Although Latin became a dead language and was gradually replaced by the national languages in Europe, it retained the central position as model for foreign language grammar.

Although Latin ceased to be the medium of instruction, teaching Latin grammar was regarded as beneficial mental gymnastics or a mental discipline. These advantages had their critics, such as Montaigne or Comenius, giving rise to the direct approaches to language teaching in which grammar rules were considered unnecessary.

Jan Amos Komensky, or Comenius, (1592–1670) a Czech from Moravia, who wrote and taught in various places across Europe, was the greatest educationist of the seventeenth century. Howatt (1984) considers him to be a genius, probably the only genius in the history of language teaching. Comenius was interested in general education as well as in the problems of language teaching. His works include Didactica Magna (1657, ‘The Great Didactic’), Janua Linguarum Reserata Aurea (1631, ‘The Golden Gate to Languages Unlocked’), inspired by Bath’s Janua Linguarum (‘The Gate to Languages’). The book was devoted to teaching Latin and contained eight thousand words of common use illustrated with various sentences, or even texts in Latin of increasing difficulty and translated into the vernacular. He considered language learning to be a matter of intuition, facilitated by linking words to be learned with their images which are formed through sensory experience (Titone, 1968). This idea was put to practice in Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658, ‘The World in Pictures’), where he stressed the need for the child to learn words and link their meaning to objects. His main pedagogical principle was to address all the material in language teaching to the sense of perception and learning by direct practice, such as reading, repeating, copying and imitation, rather than the rules of grammar. Although he stressed the need to order the material systematically and hierarchically from the familiar to the unknown, he believed in the necessary link between the curriculum and the inner development of the learner (Titone, 1984). Howatt (1984:43) points out: ‘It is rather ironical that Comenius should be remembered for writing Latin textbooks when what he really wanted was a system of education in which the mother tongue would play a central role and foreign languages would be learned as and when they were needed for practical purposes.’

1.2. Grammar as the key to foreign language learning. The Grammar Translation Method

Mackey makes a very important point that ‘language teachers have always tended to apply language analysis to the teaching of language; in fact, some of the first descriptions of a language were made for the purpose of teaching it.’ (quoted after Kelly, 1969:34). Mackey (1965) adds that from the point of view of teaching, language equals the description of language as presented in grammars and dictionaries, which is the material used in a particular teaching method.

As pointed out by Richards and Rodgers (1986), the Grammar Translation Method, called the Prussian Method in the United States, is the effect of the influence of Latin on a) the way the vernacular languages were supposed to be taught; and b) the goals for which Latin was taught, i.e. literacy and understanding of the classics rather than practical goals. The Grammar Translation Method provided what was expected from an educated person: the ability to read and understand the classics, and recite the rules of grammar or proverbs. Among the proponents of this method are: Johann Seidenstrücker, Karl Plötz, H.S. Ollendorf, and Johann Meidinger.

The key to learning the foreign language was the knowledge of its grammar, especially in the form of memorized rules learned by heart and accompanied by various declensions and conjugations. The Grammar Translation Method assumed a fairly good knowledge of the native grammar which was used as a point of reference. This kind of knowledge had special value: it provided mental gymnastics for the intellect. Rules, i.e. explanations about the regularities in the occurrence of language forms, were presented first and various examples followed; this form of presentation is called deductive.

The main form of activity in the class was translation from the target to the native language and vice versa. The unit of the material for translation, as well as for the whole method, was the sentence. Some sentences, for example proverbs, were learned by heart. The two forms of translation, from and into the target language, were performed both orally and in writing. The learner’s native language had an important role to play: it was used as the medium of instruction, first and foremost for talking about the target grammar as well as in translation activities.

The teaching material contained classical texts which were to be read and subjected to grammatical analysis. Reading was emphasized, but the reading matter was neither contemporary nor communicatively useful. Accuracy was emphasized, but it referred primarily to archaic forms.

Vocabulary items were presented in the form of bilingual lists to be memorized. Verbatim (word-for-word) learning had an important role to play in this method.

The various proponents of ‘grammaticalism’ in the nineteenth century advocated the inductive approach in teaching grammar, i.e. inferring the rules from examples, which would be either texts or sentences in the target language. Literary texts of the classics turned out to be too complicated for this purpose, so, to overcome this difficulty, Seidenstrücker succeeded in writing a text based on simple sentences containing most of the grammatical features of the language (1811). This innovation was taken up by Ahn, and later by Ollendorf. As Titone (1968) points out, their method was based on constructing artificial sentences to illustrate a rule. The outcome was characteristically boring and dry material, hard to remember for being far from idiomatic and real, and, ironically, completely useless in real life. Titone (1968:28) provides the following examples quoted from Sweet, which have become a laughing stock in the literature on foreign language teaching:

The cat of my aunt is more treacherous than the dog of your uncle.

We speak about your cousin, and your cousin Amelia is loved by her uncle and her aunt.

My sons have bought the mirrors of the duke.

Horses are taller than tigers.

Seidenstrücker’s disconnected sentences especially constructed for teaching grammar were turned into a principle by Karl Plötz (1819–1881), who was an influential figure in foreign language teaching in Europe long after his death. His method was divided into two parts: (1) rules and paradigms, and (2) sentences for translation from and into the target language. Throughout the nineteenth century, language teaching in schools followed Plötz’s techniques. It was a matter of using the first language to acquire the second, rote learning of grammar rules, putting grammatical labels on words, and applying the rules by translating sentences.

The Grammar Translation Method dominated foreign language teaching in the nineteenth century. Because of the activities it proposed and the emphasis on the written language, the method was appropriate for becoming skilled in grammatical analysis and reading. Needless to say, in the meantime the needs and expectations toward language learning changed rather dramatically and the method came under attack for its obsolete procedures and materials.

1.3. Reactions to the Grammar Translation Method

Alternatives which emerged in reaction to the Grammar Translation Method stressed teaching a foreign language without the mediation of explicit grammar instruction, i.e. directly from text and conversation, and the primacy of the spoken language over reading and writing. One of the representatives of this reaction was Claude Marcel (1793–1896), who sought inspiration for foreign language teaching in the way children learn their native language. He argued for the abolition of translation and grammar rules and stressed the role of meaning, making a point for the teaching of language first by comprehension of texts, listening, followed by speaking and writing. In 1867 he wrote a treatise The Study of Language Brought Back to Its True Principles, or the Art of Thinking in the Foreign Language, according to which listening and reading make up most of the instruction and formal training in grammar is avoided. Prendergast (1806–1886) also looked at children learning their native tongue to notice that they use situational clues to interpret utterances and memorize whole phrases to be used in speaking (Richards and Rodgers, 1986). By 1866, a private school for teaching languages with a natural method was opened by Henness, which was intended as an extreme reaction against the grammar translation methods of Plötz, Ahn, and Ollendorf. It was based on the recurrent idea that a foreign language is to be learned in the same way as the child learns his or her mother tongue. The method was fairly unsystematic at first, but at the turn of the twentieth century it began to follow a more definite set of principles: emphasis on the spoken language, the use of phonetic notation, presenting the meaning through pictures, gestures/dramatization and objects (realia), inductive learning of grammar, and the use of contemporary texts about everyday life and high culture of the foreign country.

The Gouin Series. Fran˜ois Gouin, a Frenchman, published his book on the art of foreign language teaching about 1880, in which he added a new element to foreign language instruction, namely physical activity. The book was written in French and translated into many languages to exert great influence in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. His ideas resulted from his own frustrations and failures to learn German from grammar books, dictionaries and rules as well as inspired by observations of his son’s playful activities coupled with the boy’s verbal commentary on what was going on. As a result, Gouin developed his own method of foreign language teaching. The pivot of his method was the verb in a sentence. He created teaching units which were series of connected sentences built around an activity broken down into minute stages, each expressed in a sentence. In this way, the sentence reflected a logical sequence of events. Teaching consisted of saying these sentences and performing their meaning. The sentences were to be presented and explained by the teacher, with the native language used for the purpose, and later practised by the learners, first in speech then in writing. Characteristically of his method, the learners were saying the sentences while performing what they meant. What is known as the Gouin Series became standard procedure in the Direct Method.

His key idea was learning through the senses, play and activity in familiar everyday situations. As pointed out by Mackey (1965), foreign language learning in this way would take 900 hours. Spoken language was stressed in that the presentation of the material, explanation and practice had to be oral first and written later. The vocabulary component related to the activities amounted to 8,000 words and was grouped around five topics: home, society, nature, science, occupations (Mackey, 1965). A sample list is quoted after Howatt (1984:163):

The maid chops a log of wood

The maid goes and seeks her hatchet,

the maid takes a log of wood,

the maid draws near to the chopping-block,

the maid kneels down near the chopping block,

the maid places the block of wood upright upon this block.

The maid raises her hatchet,

the maid brings down her hatchet,

the hatchet cleaves the air,

the blade strikes the wood,

the blade buries itself inside the wood,

the blade cleaves the wood,

the two pieces fall to the ground.

The maid picks up these pieces,

the maid chops them again and again to the size desired,

the maid stands up again,

the maid carries back the hatchet to its place.

In this way, the sentences in a cycle can be practised and remembered more easily because a) the material is logically linked and b) dramatization is linked to the verbal material. Key processes are association of the learning material, imitation of the sentences modelled by the teacher, and, last but not least, memorization. The choice of activities is connected with the everyday life and interests of the students whereas the memory processes are enhanced by the meaningful connection between each element in the activity series. However, Titone (1968) notices that the subdivision of the activity into minute components was exaggerated and in conflict with the practical needs of the students. Howatt (1984) points out that the sentences are predominantly third person statements, the drawback that Gouin tried to eliminate by including some dialogues. The material he uses is focused on only one of a number of functions of language – commenting on an activity. The advantage of the series is that the steps of the activity are easy to remember because memory processes are supported by meaningful links in the material itself. But although they follow a natural plan for the activity, there are other plans to organize language, as reflected in various language genres, for example narrative, description, argumentative writing, eye-witness accounts, etc. Howatt (1984) regards the Gouin series as too limited in the principles and the choice of the material to be called a method.

On a more general note, it should be pointed out that such advantages of the Gouin Series as the sensible links in the material, the association with real life activity (an episode), and the links between language and action comply with the more general laws of human learning. They are by no means limited to the verb-centred activities highlighted in the series, but apply to all the language material used in verbal communication: e.g. descriptions, instructions, road directions, cooking recipes, stories, dramatization of various emotions, etc.

1.3.1. The Reform Movement

A most violent attack on the Grammar Translation Method came from a German specialist, Viëtor (1850–1918), in 1882 in a celebrated pamphlet Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren! Ein Beitrag zur Überbürdungsfrage (Language learning must start afresh! A contribution to the question of stress and overwork in schools.). He first wrote it under the pseudonym Quosque Tandem, which, as pointed out by Howatt (1984:189), refers to the opening phrase in Cicero’s address to the Senate on the Catilina conspiracy and means: How much longer is this going to go on? The pamphlet heralded the Reform Movement and was especially influential in Germany. Viëtor stressed the need to focus on the spoken language, the use of connected sentences and illustrations (gestures, pictures), to teach speaking first and reading at a later stage, as well as the need to develop the knowledge of the foreign country and its culture. Grammar was to be learned inductively. Viëtor was critical of the fact that students were overburdened with work leading to mental stress and fatigue. His solution was to eliminate written homework and to introduce songs and games to the teaching process.

The key principles of the Reform Movement, according to Howatt (1984), included the primacy of speech and oral activities and the central position of a connected text used for the inductive teaching of grammar. The emphasis on the spoken language was reinforced by the role of phonetics and phoneticians such as Jespersen and Sweet. Phonetics provided foreign language teaching with scientific foundations which were hard to resist. It was essential that the learners start reading when their pronunciation was correct. The orthography was misleading in developing proper pronunciation and so was its use as the notation for pronunciation. As a result, phonetic transcription was introduced to teaching English and French. Oral techniques included question-and-answer activities, retelling, and summarizing to stimulate the learners to use the new material. The medium of communication in the classroom was the foreign language while the native language was reserved solely for providing the meaning of some vocabulary items. Teachers of the Reform Movement were non-native speakers of the target language. Howatt (1984:173) states: ‘The Reform Movement consisted of non-native teachers who accepted the basic sense of the monolingual principle, but did not see any advantage in an extremist view.’

The principle of the connected text was well accepted. The law of association was recognized by the newly emerging science of psychology, whereas the learning material consisting of absurd, disconnected sentences illustrating points of grammar was strongly criticized. To be learned, the material had to be internally connected to allow associations. Translation was discouraged for fear of undesirable associations between the native and the foreign language preventing the development of the language to be learned. The text was treated as the material for learning rules of grammar inductively, rather than the illustration of the rules already learned. Many authors suggested learning grammar after the text’s presentation.

The contrast between inductive and deductive learning of grammar rules should be clear by now. Induction is the reasoning operation in which we draw conclusions from the particular to the general. In the case of language learning, this means progressing from sample sentences in which certain forms appear to a generalization about forms and their context, expressed in the form of a rule (a statement about the principle governing the occurrence of the form). Deduction is a reverse process in which we start with the generalization and make inferences regarding the specific instances of the rule. In the case of learning grammar, this starts with the presentation of a grammar rule, which is subsequently illustrated with various sample sentences.

1.4. The Natural and the Direct Methods

The essence of the Direct Method can be explained with a quote from Howatt (1984:234): ‘The Direct Method originated in a desire to do something that the schools of the time were not doing, and could not do, namely to teach foreign languages as practical skills for everyday purposes of social survival. Questions of educational value and ‘worthwhileness’ were irrelevant, what mattered was the ability to communicate effectively in ordinary (‘trivial’) life.’

It would be impossible to make a rigorous distinction between the Natural and the Direct Method. ‘Natural’ comes from Nature, and it is based on the observation of the natural process through which children learn their mother tongue. ‘Direct’ comes from the absence of any mediating role of grammar, translation, or dictionary. Language learning is a natural ability of humans and can be done intuitively provided there are opportunities for interaction or conversation, in other words, to quote Howatt (1984:193): ‘someone to talk to, something to talk about, and a desire to understand and make yourself understood. Interaction is at the heart of natural language acquisition, or conversation, as Lambert Saveur called it when he initiated the revival of interest that led eventually to the direct method.’ Locke stated that the most appropriate and efficient way to a language is by conversation and practice rather than rules of grammar.

As has been mentioned above, the source of inspiration for the Direct and Natural Methods often came from various informal observations of children playing with their mother tongue and the effortless way in which they were able to master it without explicit instruction in grammar. The use of such methods was certainly prevalent in those families, not necessarily only aristocratic, who could afford to have their children educated at home with a live-in tutor, a native speaker of the language, most often French, but also English and German. The principle of the Direct Method was learning the language in situational context, linking new words to their meaning, e.g. naming objects in the environment, stressing oral work, introducing writing to consolidate oral work, listening practice (short lectures about interesting topics), inductive learning of grammar from texts, and graded reading.

One of the representatives of the Natural Method is Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), who lived and worked in Switzerland and is still considered to be an important figure in the history of education. His ‘object lessons’ involved learning foreign language vocabulary items through naming the respective objects as well as commenting on them and building all kinds of sentences with them. However, Howatt (1984) points out critically that it is hard to envisage what happens in the method once the teacher runs out of objects to be used and the learners are ready for more complex material. He adds that in fact it is hard to envisage the method beyond the intermediate level. Another representative of this movement was Gottlieb Henness in Germany, who used Pestalozzi’s technique to teach standard German to speakers of other dialects, established his own language school and added French as a foreign language. He emigrated to the United States and met Lambert Sauveur (1826–1907), with whom he collaborated to open a school in Boston. Its programme was quite intensive: a hundred hours of intensive instruction, two hours a day, five days a week for four and a half months. In 1874, Sauveur wrote An Introduction to the Teaching of Living Languages without Grammar or Dictionary. The most important element of the method was the dialogue of the teacher with the students, naming various classroom objects, stress on oral work and written material used mainly to consolidate oral work, delayed at least by a month. He did not use the native language so the learners had to understand the material on the basis of situational clues. Error correction was not used. Sauveur realized that there was a difference between earnest questions, through which the teacher genuinely seeks information, and other questions which are asked merely for the sake of language practice. He stressed the role of context, for example, the need to ask questions so that one would give rise to another because this continuity would guide the learners in the process of understanding.

An important figure in the commercial implementation of the Direct Method was Maximillian Berlitz (1852–1921), who opened his first language school in Providence, Rhode Island, making foreign language learning available through the Direct Method in the United States and Europe. The need for learning the spoken language was so strong at that time that his schools mushroomed in Europe and America. He also wrote textbooks and reference grammars for his method. The teachers he employed were all native speakers of the target language and under no circumstances was the student’s native language allowed to be used in the classroom. The emphasis was on oral work with everyday phrases and vocabulary, on intensive practice, ample use of the question-and-answer technique and delayed introduction of grammatical explanations. The Berlitz Method was quite systematic and replicable. Berlitz himself was proud that the courses in various places were coordinated in such a way that a student leaving school in one city could continue in another.

Critics of the Direct Method stressed that it was insufficiently focused on grammatical accuracy and systematicity and that it put high demands on the teachers’ language proficiency and energy resources. However, the Direct Method addressed the practical needs of language learners (Richards and Rodgers, 1986). Below is a list of its characteristic features:

The emphasis in this method was on speaking and listening.

Correct pronunciation was of primary importance.

The main forms of activity were oral, especially dialogues and question-and answer exchanges.

New material was first introduced orally.

Vocabulary was chosen on the basis of its practicality and its meaning was demonstrated directly, with the use of objects, pictures and gestures.

Grammar of the target language was taught inductively in a variety of oral activities.

In most general terms, the characteristic tenets of the Direct Method responsible for its name centre on using language rather than talking about it. More specifically, instead of explanation, these tenets stress interaction and focus on the learner’s active involvement, as well as practice, the primacy of speech over writing, the role of the natural pace of speaking and the use of connected text.

One of the specialists who recognized the limitations of the Direct Method was Henry Sweet. He postulated the need for the teaching method to have a sound and systematic linguistic basis. As a result, he saw a way to combine the Direct Method, especially its emphasis on language learning from text and conversation where language was arbitrary with the formal focus on grammar rules of the Grammar Translation Method where language was logically organized, on condition that the study of grammar be made more practical and linked to meaningful material.

Henry Sweet (1845–1912) was a distinguished British phonetician and polyglot, the man who taught phonetics to Europe (Howatt 1984:180), thought to have been portrayed by Shaw as Professor Higgins in Pygmalion. His most important work on foreign language teaching The Practical Study of Languages is not only an outstanding contribution to the reform in language teaching but to a balanced framework firmly based on linguistics. This book starts with the statement that all language study must be based on phonetics, which provides the basis for acquiring accurate pronunciation, and on a system of notation. Phonetics must be learned as a tool to accurate pronunciation. He stressed the role of intelligibility of cross-linguistic contrasts between sounds (now called phonemes). Literary texts were considered of lesser value to the language learner than the colloquial spoken language. Sweet believed in using texts which would be natural yet simple enough to be comprehensible as opposed to ‘monstrosities’ aimed at illustrating points of grammar. The content or the story line would hold the text together as a connected whole. His criteria for grading text difficulty were based on their typology as well as subject matter, starting with descriptions, then narratives and finally dialogues. As far as the learning component is concerned, he followed the principles of associationism in psychology and stressed the need of repetition and learning by heart after the material has been studied thoroughly.

He opposed the Natural Method which attempted to imitate native language learning by a child because it put the learner in an underprivileged position: the adult could no longer make use of the abilities of the child yet was not allowed to use the intellectual faculties s/he had as an adult. Sweet stressed the need to control the number of vocabulary to be presented (3,000 common words would be sufficient for general purposes) he also grouped them thematically. There were five stages in his approach: 1) the mechanical stage aimed at learning good pronunciation and phonetic transcription, 2) the grammatical stage, focused on building the knowledge of grammar and basic vocabulary, 3) idiomatic stage, devoted to the lexical material, and finally 4) the literary and 5) archaic stages, devoted to literature and philology.

1.5. The Reading Method

Another method which stressed the need of learning the language from text was the Reading Method. It was supposed to provide the answer to the criticisms addressed to the Direct Method, especially its attempts to attain the impossible in the school context. The Reading Method offered a solution to problems of foreign language teaching based on the reevaluation of the teaching goals: the focus was not on oral work or oral practice but on the written language. Its primary aim was comprehension of the written text to develop the ability of rapid silent reading. The texts were based on controlled and limited vocabulary but since reading is an individual matter, the teachers introduced some speaking activities to talk about the target language and culture (Mackey, 1965). A much more modern version of the Reading Method is the Comprehension Approach, as exemplified in the volume edited by Harris Winitz The Comprehension Approach to Foreign Language Instruction, Newbury House Publ., Rowley Mass., 1981. The features which this approach shares with the Reading Method include, first and foremost, the emphasis on language comprehension and retardation of speaking activities until the learner has been exposed to a sufficient amount of input for production to emerge naturally. The approach stresses the need for the learner to be exposed to authentic material and to really link the forms to their exact meaning. Understanding the material is the key to language learning.

Harold Palmer (1877–1947), a British applied linguist, had an enormous impact on the field of foreign language teaching, especially teaching English as a foreign language (Howatt, 1984), in that he was able to logically derive the principles of foreign language teaching from linguistics (phonetics, grammar, lexicology), psychology (the laws of memory) and pedagogy (the role of concretization in teaching) (Titone, 1984). Palmer began his career as a teacher of English as a foreign language in Belgium. He also collaborated with Daniel Jones and was offered a job as a lecturer on foreign language teaching to foreign language teachers. During that time he took a keen interest in foreign language teaching in general and developed many innovative ideas about his field which were published in The Scientific Study and Teaching of Languages, 1917. This is the book in which he, unlike Berlitz, takes a balanced view toward translation, especially as an exact device to semanticize the meaning of unknown words. Considering the complexity of language, Palmer argues for a multiple line of approach in language teaching, tapping all our capacities. Moreover, the key figure in the learning process is the learner, especially his language proficiency, abilities and incentive to learn. His general principles include: ‘ears before eyes’, ‘reception before production’, ‘oral repetition before reading’, ‘immediate memory before prolonged memory’, ‘chorus work before individual work’, ‘drill work before free work’, ‘equal attention to the four skills’, ‘learning by heart’, as well as the emphasis on concreteness of the material and the interest factor. His other publications from this period include The Oral Method of Teaching Languages and The Principles of Language Study, 1921. In the latter, he made a distinction between the spontaneous and the studial capacities of the learner, which, in current terms, correspond to the communicative and cognitive aspects of language processes. Practical language learning is contingent both in direct contact with the language, frequent listening practice and repetition, and conversation as well as the purely theoretical work of the intellect. In 1923 he was appointed director of the Institute for Research in English Teaching in Tokyo. The Institute was an Anglo-American undertaking with the aim of organizing annual conferences as well as disseminating professional information among teachers of English in Japan. During that time he was developing and advocating the Oral Method of teaching English as a foreign language, which, unfortunately, did not suit the traditional culture of a typical Japanese classroom. At the same time, he was also keenly interested in the criteria of frequency for vocabulary selection and produced various lists of most frequently used words for teaching English as a foreign language. This interest was reflected in his publication from 1932 called The Grading and Simplifying of Literary Material. In addition to the above, he was a brilliant phonetician as testified by his 1922 publication of English Intonation. In 1924 he wrote A Grammar of Spoken English, on a strictly phonetic basis, aimed at advanced learners and teachers of English, which is considered to be the first large-scale description of standard spoken English for pedagogical purposes (Howatt, 1984). A year later, in 1925, he and his daughter Dorothée produced English Through Actions, a set of classroom materials, especially drills, which systematically linked language learning to various activities, often likened to Gouin’s ideas. He returned to Britain in 1936 to collaborate with Michael West as well as to act as a British Council Adviser on matters of teaching English oversees. As pointed out by Howatt (1984), Palmer was instrumental in turning the field of foreign language teaching into a full-fledged profession, which is now called applied linguistics.

To conclude the section on historical developments in foreign language teaching, we should acknowledge a considerable growth and diversification of ideas at this stage. The notion of grammar as the key to foreign language learning is juxtaposed by the idea that foreign language learning should be direct, i.e. it should aim to replicate the way children learn their mother tongue. The Direct and Natural Methods, outlined above, are inspired by fairly random and informal insights into the process of first language acquisition. Nevertheless, they are significant to the development of the field in that they enrich the spectrum of possibilities in language teaching with an important alternative to sentence-based and explicit grammar-oriented strategies. The Direct and Natural Methods are time-consuming because their impact depends on the sheer quantity of the learning material and contact hours. This remains in  sharp contrast with the qualitative grammar-based strategies which strive to provide the learner with the material for language learning in a condensed form.

The demise of the Grammar Translation Method is certainly accelerated by the changing social demands regarding foreign language mastery. The world is shrinking. Greater possibilities of travel as well as its amazing speed by new means of transportation, such as the steam ship, the train, the automobile as opposed to the horse-drawn carriage, migration waves from Europe to the United States, the intensity of international contacts and the dynamic development of mass communication, i.e. the growth of the press and journalism, necessitate a redefinition of the goals of foreign language teaching from the formal, academic skills in grammar and translation of classical texts to the communicative abilities of direct, fluent face-to-face interaction in the foreign language. Foreign languages are introduced to schools on a regular basis, whereas the educational system becomes more and more accessible to young generations of learners. Unquestionable progress has been made in various areas of foreign language teaching; many activities which are used nowadays have been well-known and established in the foreign language classroom for quite a long time, as documented by Kelly (1969), e.g. drill, guided dialogue, dictation, free composition, letter writing, projects, drama, etc. Nevertheless, the state of the field of foreign language teaching in the first half of the 20th century is considered far from satisfactory to meet the challenges of the real world.

1.6. The current view on the role of grammar

Following a wave of studies of the relationship between language learning and grammar instruction, it is nowadays possible to formulate rather specific expectations regarding the function of grammatical rule in foreign language teaching. First of all, we must recognize the irony of the explicit presentation of the rule: the learner ends up learning what he or she has been taught, that is information about language, expressed as a sentence explaining some principle which governs the use of the given forms. Technically, this is an observation, a thought expressing a regularity in the grammatical system, but not the ability to behave communicatively according to this observation. For example, if we explain to the learner that the third person singular of the verb in the simple present tense must have either the -s or -es ending, the learner will understand and learn this principle as an idea expressed in a sentence, but not as the ability to implement the principle in the act of speaking. In order to accomplish the latter, the learner must have numerous, if not endless, opportunities to practise the use of third person singular simple present sentences in meaningful contexts. Observing language to notice regularities in the use of forms as in linguistic description is a cognitive operation not to be mistaken for the act of producing an utterance in the same language as a communicative operation. Unfortunately, the two aspects used to be regarded as if they had been one and the same operation: grammar rules used to be erroneously identified with the material for producing utterances. It is now recognized that they possess their distinct specificity and that each of them taps different and specialized knowledge sources in our mind. Rules are fed by metalinguistic or metalingual knowledge which comes from reasoning, while speech production – by largely automatized procedural knowledge which comes from practice. Explicit rule presentation cannot function as a substitute for communicative language practice, but it can provide the learner with useful guidance about the forms to make communicative language practice more effective. It does not matter whether we emphasize the inductive or deductive strategy for rule presentation, as long as the illustrative material is meaningful and there are plenty of opportunities for communicative practice distributed in time. For these reasons, the explicit teaching of grammar cannot be expected to provide the learner with the key to language. The key to foreign language learning is its use in meaningful practice and interaction.

Considering the communicative goals of foreign language teaching, rule presentation and learning is no longer a leading activity, the core of a teaching method. Instead, its status is reduced to one of many form-focused techniques of ‘teaching grammar’ and fostering accuracy with the function to intensify the benefits of communicative language practice. Additionally, there are two important conditions attached to this limited use of explicit rule presentation: 1) the learner must be cognitively ready to deal with the abstract information about language, which is to say, be at least at the developmental stage of formal operations, around the age of 12–14; and 2) the rule must be relevant to the learner, i.e. refer to utterances in the discourse of communication.

1.7. The current view on the function of translation

In the wake of its uses and abuses in the Grammar Translation Method, translation used to be given a bad press. The Grammar Translation Method relied too heavily on translating from the target to the native language turning it into a dominating activity. The results of such an emphasis were predictable: the learners became skilled in what they were engaged in doing – converting sentences or even whole texts into their native language. Understandably, such ability has little to do with the practical use of language in communication to express and understand meaning. But it certainly was an effective way of rendering the meaning of the text in focus. After a period of strong objections to any use of translation in foreign language teaching, a more balanced attitude has evolved.

To begin with, translation is a cover term for a variety of activities depending on the educational context.

It may be either a part of specialized translation training or of a general foreign language programme.

It may be from or into the native language.

It may be done by the teacher or the learner.

It may be used for presentation, practice, testing and error correction.

Regarding the first point, translation is not only a FLT device, but a specialized full-time professional activity which requires extensive training. In the educational context of translator/interpreter training, its leading role is quite justified: translation as well as interpretation is a natural form of practice relevant to the future tasks. Other forms of training include ‘shadowing’ (the activity performed entirely in the target language which requires the student to repeat the message with some delay, to overcome the limitations of working memory and coordinate comprehension and production in the target language), studies of terminology, learning notation, studying technical information in various specialized domains, native language stylistics, source and target language culture, etc.

In the context of foreign language teaching for general communicative purposes, the function of translation must be addressed in connection with the role of the native language in the foreign language classroom. As we recall, such approaches as the Berlitz Method ban the use of the student’s native language and especially translation from the foreign language classroom. The learners must work out meanings all by themselves. At the same time, the native language of the learner cannot be used because the teacher, who must be a native speaker of the target language, does not know it. No one is denying that the majority of classroom time must be spent on the use of the target language (Wilkins, 1976). The real issue is: when and for what purpose is it justified to use translation as the last resort?

As indicated above (see point 2), there is a difference between translating from and into the target language. In learning English as a foreign language by Polish students, the target language, English, is the weaker of the two and in need of practice. As the learner converts a sentence from English into Polish, the meaning of the English sentence is identified, but the speaking activity is performed in Polish. When the material of this activity is sizeable, e.g. a whole text is to be translated, the benefit for the learner in terms of target language practice is marginal. When the ideas for translation are provided in Polish, the learner must convert them into the weaker language, English, so the benefit in terms of target language practice is greater. What functions can we attribute to translation in the foreign language classroom, then? Sweet and Palmer as well as the proponents of the Comprehension Approach, who stress the absolute need for the learner to understand the language learning material, defend the value of translation into the native language as a precise semanticizing device. To semanticize means ‘to convey the meaning of a given unit’ (Titone, 1968). When the teacher provides the translation of a term or phrase, the learner can instantly understand it, i.e. link the form to its meaning, commit the item to memory, and move on to a more demanding part of the task. In the context of teaching English as a foreign language, we resort to translation into the native language when it is hard to convey the meaning of a given word or phrase with the help of other, direct or monolingual strategies, such as using a picture or pointing to the object to visualize the meaning, presenting a definition, a paraphrase, or examples of sentences with the given item, etc. Characteristically, hard-to-explain words happen to be abstract nouns, first and foremost technical terms. Translating them into the native language by the teacher helps to avoid any ambiguity incurred by other, monolingual or direct strategies. On the other hand, asking the learner to translate an item into Polish enables the teacher to check that he or she understands the item correctly and may be quite useful in the case of so-called false friends, such as manifestation – manifestacja. In both cases of semantizing (by the teacher and by the learner) the learner’s precise understanding of the material in the target language is given priority over the fact that for a minute or two the learner is deprived of the target language input and/or practice. Further uses of translation are connected with presentation, practice, testing, and feedback purposes, as contrastive as well as elicitation devices. Presenting two sentences, in English and Polish, with the same meaning may help to contrast the formal devices used in English and Polish. Such a contrast may – to some extent – raise the learner’s awareness of the distinctions between Polish and English syntax and counteract interference of Polish and English. With the help of the native language elicitation the teacher may check the extent to which the learner has mastered some specific teaching point in grammar or vocabulary. Translation into the native language by the teacher is a way of providing feedback and belongs to error correction techniques: when the learner produces an utterance which the teacher thinks does not express the learner’s intended meaning accurately, an instantaneous translation into Polish will help the learner to notice the mismatch and modify the utterance.

However, Wilkins (1974:82) makes an important and interesting reservation about the function of translation in semanticizing the meaning of a word, which is worth quoting here:

In fact, one can question whether one can ever ‘know the meaning of a word’, since further experience of its use will always add something more to its meaning. This is particularly the case if we consider the polysemic nature of many lexical items. Translation tends to conceal polysemy, by encouraging reliance on one-for-one equivalences between languages. The short-term advantages of translation have to be weighed against some longer-term problems that dependence on translation may cause.

These functions of translation may vary in different circumstances and at different proficiency levels. All in all, they result from the realization that the learner’s native language is a resource which can be tapped under specific didactic circumstances, but, like salt, should be used with moderation. My impressionistic estimate would be not more than 2 percent of the class time.