A Brief History of Language Teaching - Part 2

In Part 1, I began a brief history of modern language teaching, starting with the Reform Movement in Europe in the nineteenth century and pausing at...

The Audiolingual Method

The Audiolingual Method (ALM) of language instruction was derived out of strong theoretical conclusions in the field of linguistics and psychology. Through the findings of structural linguists and behavioral scientists, ALM claimed that language is a system of rule-governed structures arranged hierarchically, and that learning is a process of habit formation, where skills are learned by analogy and not analysis...

ALM still persists in some form to this day, but in the 1960s the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics exercised a cogent criticism of the structural and behavioral ideas supporting it, and so the popularity of ALM receded in favor of Cognitive Code Learning (CCL).

CCL was not a method in itself, but more of an approach which basically stated that language is governed by rules, and that learning is a process of rule formation. Ironically, this approach marked a modest return to some of the practices of GTM, but in the classroom it lacked the means to energize learners, and so the language teaching profession suffered. In other words, it was boring!

Accordingly, the need for viable and entertaining classroom techniques led to a period of heightened research and experimentation in the 1970s, when a variety of innovative methods were conceived.

In line with this new era was a psychological emphasis on humanistic classroom principles that acknowledged an affective domain in the minds of learners. Teachers were encouraged to minimize affective blocks by creating a positive, low-anxiety atmosphere, and to empower individuals to be responsible for their own learning. On the linguistic side, the major emphasis of this period was on developing communicative language strategies that emphasized meaning over forms of language.

In the 1970s and 80s, some ideas for future development were formed in what was called the Notional-Functional Syllabus (NFS), which again, like CCL, was not a ‘method’ in itself but closer to what we call an ‘approach’.

The emphasis of NFS was on notions or contextual domains of language as well as the functional purposes of language. This approach has been fostering communicative methodologies, textbooks, and materials for numerous language courses; moreover, it has opened up the possibility for even further development into an eclectic and enlightened approach for language teachers.

Part 1 of this blog series began by touching briefly on the era prior to the nineteenth century Reform Movement and moved quickly into a discussion of the major schools of language teaching in the twentieth century. Along the way, salient points related to the psychological and linguistic developments in language teaching were raised, culminating in a brief indication of present and future trends. I hope this has been informative!

If this history interests you, may I recommend a text that goes into much greater detail: Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching by Jack Richards & Theodore Rodgers (Cambridge University Press, 2001).