module title: theories and approaches of second …
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UNIVERSITY OF ZAMBIA
DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL SCIENCE EDUCATION (LSSE)
COURSES: LSE 3030 (332)
MODULE TITLE: THEORIES AND APPROACHES OF
SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING AND
LEARNING BY
JOSEPH M. MWANSA DIP.ED, B.A ED.(UNZA), Hon. BA (UNISA), MA, PhD ( LEEDS)
DENNIS BANDA DIP.ED. BA,ED (UNZA) CERT. (DENMARK), MPHIL ( NORWAY), PhD
(NOTTINGHAM, UK)
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TABLE OF CONTENTS MODULE INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................... 5
Module Aim: .............................................................................................................. 9 Module Objectives: .................................................................................................... 9 Time Frame: ............................................................................................................. 10
List of any Teaching Aids needed for studying ................................................. 10 Time Required ......................................................................................................... 10
Study Skill ................................................................................................................ 10 Assessments ............................................................................................................. 10
UNIT 1.0 IMPORTANT QUESTIONS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING ............... 11 1.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 11
1.2. Some important concepts and terms in language teaching ........................... 14 1.2.1. Terms used in talking about language learning ......................................... 15 1.2.1.1. English as a First language (L1) ............................................................. 15 1.2.1.2. English as a Second language (L2) ......................................................... 16 1.2.1.3. English as a foreign language ................................................................. 16
UNIT 2.0. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN ZAMBIA ........................................................................................... 17
2.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 17
2.3. Unit Objectives: ................................................................................................ 17 2.4. History of English teaching in Zambia: the colonial period ............................. 18 2.5. The language policy in Zambia ......................................................................... 19 2.5.1. The legacy of the language policy ................................................................. 19
2.5.2. The Phelps-stoke commission ................................................................. 20
2.5.3. The English Medium policy ....................................................................... 22 2.5.4. The Education Reforms of 1977 .............................................................. 22 2.5.5. The 1996 policy .......................................................................................... 23 2.6. The language policy and the language for initial literacy ................................. 24
2.7. Independence and beyond ............................................................................. 27 2.8. Educating our future and NBTL ................................................................... 28
2.9. The status of English in Zambia and the world ............................................ 29 UNIT 3: CHANGES IN THE SYLLABI IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS SINCE INDEPENDENCE ....................................................................................................... 31
3.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 31 3.2. Unit Objectives: ................................................................................................ 31
3.3. The syllabus ...................................................................................................... 31 3.3.1. Pre-independence ....................................................................................... 32 3.3.2. Independence and the Zambia Primary Course (ZPC) .............................. 32 3.3.3. Methodology: ............................................................................................. 33 3.3.4. The Zambia Basic Education course (ZBEC) ............................................ 34
3.3.4.1. Listening and speaking: .......................................................................... 35 3.3.4.2. Reading ................................................................................................... 36
3.3.4.3. Writing .................................................................................................... 36 3.3.5. Zambia Teacher Education Course (ZATEC) ............................................... 36
3.3.5.1. Integration of subjects: ............................................................................ 37
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3.3. 5.2. Structure of the course: .......................................................................... 38 UNIT 4: LANGUAGE AND CULTURE.................................................................... 40
4.1. Introduction ................................................................................................... 40 6.2. Unit objectives: .......................................................................................... 41 4.3. What are the implications for teaching English in Zambia? ......................... 42 4.4. Two views about teaching culture ................................................................ 43
UNIT 5: FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION ............................... 46 5.1. Introduction ................................................................................................... 46 5.2. Unit objectives: ............................................................................................. 46 5.3. First Language development in children: ..................................................... 48 5.4. Theories of first language acquisition ........................................................... 50 5.4.1. The role of Nurture or the environment: Behaviourists (Pavlov, Skinner). ............................................................................................................... 50 5.4. 2. The role of Nature: The Innatists or mentalists (Noam Chomsky) ........... 52 5.4.5. Other Cognitive theories ............................................................................ 54 5.4.6. Constructivist theory .................................................................................. 54 5.4.7. Cognition and language ............................................................................. 55 5.5.8. Is there a critical period for first language acquisition? ............................. 56 5.5.9. Is there a critical period for second language learning? ............................ 57 5.5.10. Implications of these findings in the teaching of English in basic schools in Zambia. ............................................................................................................ 61
UNIT 6.0: APPROACHES, METHODS AND TECHNIQUES’ IN LANGUAGE TEACHING 62
6.1. Introduction ................................................................................................... 62
6.2. Unit objectives: .......................................................................................... 63 6.4. Theories and Approaches of Language Teaching and Learning .................. 63 6.4.1. Approach .................................................................................................... 64 6.4.2. Method ....................................................................................................... 65 6.4.3. Techniques ................................................................................................. 65
Unit 7.0: THE GRAMMAR-TRANSLATION METHOD ......................................... 70 7.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 70 7.2. The goal of language teaching .......................................................................... 70 7.3. Learning a foreign language ............................................................................. 70 7.4. Strengths and weaknesses ................................................................................. 71 7.5. The learning experience .................................................................................... 72
UNIT 8: THE DIRECT METHOD.............................................................................. 73 8.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 73
8.1. The goal of language learning ...................................................... 73 8.2. Learning a foreign language ............................................................................. 74 8.3. Strengths and weaknesses ................................................................................. 75 9.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 76 8.1. A historical note ................................................................................................ 79
8.2. Structural linguistics and the structural theory of language.............................. 80 8.3. Behaviourists and the theory of language learning ........................................... 81 8.4. Techniques ........................................................................................................ 83 8.5. Hints for using Audiolingual drills in L2 teaching ........................................... 85 8.6. Strengths and weaknesses: ................................................................................ 87
UNIT 9.0 COGNITIVE CODE LEARNING APPROACH ................................. 88
9.1. Introduction ....................................................................................................... 88 9.2. Cognitive psychology: ...................................................................................... 89
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9.3. Language theory................................................................................................ 89 9.4. Principles of teaching/learning ......................................................................... 90
UNIT 10:0. THE SITUATIONAL LANGUAGE TEACHING METHOD (SLTM) 92
10. 1. Introduction .................................................................................................... 92 10.2. Theory of language in SLTM ......................................................................... 92 10.3. Theory of learning in SLTM ........................................................................... 93 10.4. Method of teaching in SLTM ......................................................................... 94 10.5. Techniques employed in SLTM...................................................................... 95 10.6. Weaknesses and strengths of SLTM ............................................................... 96
Unit 11.0 COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING APPROACH (CLT) 97
11.1. Introduction ..................................................................................................... 97 11.2. The Learning Experience ................................................................................ 98 11.3. Interpretation of the lesson ............................................................................ 101
11.3.1. Language as discourse or texts .............................................................. 101 11.4. Focus on Language functions ....................................................................... 101
11.4.1. Categories of language functions ........................................................... 102 11.5. The role play ................................................................................................. 103 11.6. Meaningful communication .......................................................................... 105 11.7. Teacher and learner roles .............................................................................. 106 11.8. Syllabus design ............................................................................................. 106
UNIT 12. 0. TOTAL PHYSICAL RESPONSE (TPR) ........................................ 108 12.1. Introduction ................................................................................................... 108
12.2. Theory of Learning ....................................................................................... 109 12.3. Theory of Language ...................................................................................... 110 12.4. Method, Syllabus and techniques ................................................................. 110 12. 5. Teacher’s and learner’s roles ....................................................................... 110 12.6. Strengths and weaknesses ............................................................................. 111 12.7. The last note on approaches and methods..................................................... 111
REFERENCES .......................................................................................................... 114
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MODULE INTRODUCTION
Welcome to this Module on Theories of Second Language Teaching in the
education sector. There are many theories propagated by various linguists,
psychologists and sociologists on the best way of teaching or acquiring a
language. These theories have various approaches, methods and techniques
that are followed in any language teaching or language acquisition. The
coming up of each given approach or method is often a reaction to the earlier
used one, though some characteristics are carried forward to the most
contemporary ones coming on the scene.
This is one of the modules you have chosen to do in the third or forth year of
your degree programme from the Department of Social Sciences Education
(LSSE). These theories will be discussed and applied to classroom situations
in the second module for you to see how each one of them works with
teachers, pupils and the chosen material. The historical backgrounds of each
one of them will also be discussed. The psychological, linguistic and
sociological influences on these theories will be discussed to give a better
understanding of them and how they propose language should be taught.
Studying this module will give you a solid foundation in the teaching of
languages. The historical background of each theory and the, psychological,
sociological and linguistic influences on them will give you a better
understanding of them and eventually make you become an eclectic teacher.
Your choice of an approach, method and technique to use in class as you
teach any of the four macro skills will be determined by prevailing situations. It
is in this vain that the second semester module will; no doubt; also cover the
teaching of all the four macro skills in language teaching, as explained later.
You are fully aware that by now you have studied a number of modules
concerned with general and descriptive linguistics. Lyons (1981:35) has
shown that there is a relationship between general and descriptive
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linguistics. General linguistics, also called theoretical linguistics,
addresses itself to the question: what is language? It is concerned with
characterising knowledge of language that people have in their heads and it
looks for universal properties of all human languages. Descriptive linguistics,
on the other hand, is concerned with the study and description of specific
languages such as English. However, descriptive linguists use terms, theories
and categories formulated by general linguists. For example, they may use
the terms and categories formulated by Transformational Generative
Grammar, Functional Systemic Grammar and so on. The findings of
descriptive linguists may also provide data to support or refute the theories
proposed by theoretical linguists (Rodgers et al, 2001).
The other modules you may have covered in the recent past were designed to
equip you with skills of language analysis and description. They are said to be
content modules. In this first semester module and the second semester
module, we will be concerned with what is called applied linguistics. Applied
linguistics is concerned with the application of concepts and findings of
theoretical or descriptive linguistics to, among other areas, language teaching.
In applied linguistics too, there are theories of how languages are acquired or
learnt and there are suggested and practical ways of teaching language skills.
This is why this first semester and the second semester modules can be
referred to as methods modules.
Welcome to the first semester module. This module will look at the
approaches, methods and techniques concerned with the teaching of English
in secondary and primary schools of Zambia. It is expected that after going
through this module, you will be an eclectic teacher competent enough to
teach all the four macro skills in language teaching using various approaches,
methods and techniques depending on prevailing classroom situations and at
various levels of the education system.
The second semester module will also focus on the application of these
approaches, methods and techniques in the teaching of the four macro skills
in language teaching such as listening, speaking, writing and reading. These
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skills are taught through the teaching of composition, comprehension,
summary, and the structure lessons. Since all language teachers are
expected to teach literature as well, the second semester module will include
the teaching of literature skills.
Reflective question Think of the way you were taught languages in school and perhaps relate
what you are reading in this module to the way you have been teaching
language yourself. Are there any particular strategies in the way introductions
to the language lessons you taught, for example, worked very well for you and
possibly some that may not have worked as expected? Are there some
activities that you did in class that you think worked very well and those that
you think may not have worked as expected? What reasons could you give for
any of the two possibilities stated above?
It is not surprising that you can recall both the good ways and the bad ways
language was taught when you were at school and if you are already a
teacher, even during the time you have been teaching. Look at the items in
the table below and see some of the aspects that you may have recalled
happened when you were in a language class at school or when you have
been teaching:
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No proper introduction to a lesson
Giving an unrelated introduction to a structural exponent
Asking pupils to open a page in a book and read the story on that page without introducing the story to the pupils ( in the case of comprehension)
Giving pupils a topic to write a story on without first teaching anything about the language to be used in the story( in the case of composition)
Telling pupils that they will learn about say a verb and ask pupils what a verb is ( in the case of a structure lesson)
Asking pupils to summarize a long passage to 100 words only ( in he case of a summary lesson)
Asking pupils to check for the so-called news words found in the comprehension lesson in dictionaries provided ( in the case of a comprehension lesson)
Asking pupils to make sentences using the structural exponent (language pattern or structure) taught).
Asking pupils to read a novel and try to answer the questions in a past examination paper ( in the case of literature)
Reflecting on what you went through as a pupil in the way English was taught
and how you have been teaching the subject yourself will make what you will
learn in this module more concrete and meaningful to you. You are advised to
keep an open mind to these ideas. You will be able to select or discard ideas
which you believe can work for you or not work for you. You may decide to
combine some of the ideas into a mixture that you believe can work for you.
Whatever you decide to do, it should be based on sound thinking informed by
a sound back ground of the different theories you will meet in this module and
elsewhere and also by what you may gain from your own experience as a
teacher in future. Once you are given assignments, ensure that you read a
few books you can lay your hands on. Do not merely transcribe what is in this
module and reproduce it as your answers for the assignment. You are
expected to synthesize and analyse information from various sources and
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organise your writing into an academic paper. Marks will be awarded for both
the content and the organisation and structuring of the material in a coherent
essay and in correct English as well. Simply reproducing what is in this
module will not earn you high marks in your assignments. You are, therefore,
encouraged to regular visit resource and other learner support centres in your
areas to read extensively.
Module Aim:
The aim of this module is to expose you to various Theories of Language
Teaching and Principles of Second Language Teaching to enable you
become an eclectic teacher. This module does not suggest any particular
method or approach as the blue print to be followed. Rather, the module aims
at producing an eclectic teacher able to use any of the methods and
approaches discussed in the module depending on the prevailing situation in
the classroom at that particular time.
Module Objectives: By the end of this module, you should be able to:
apply various theories of language teaching and acquisition in
language teaching.
apply Principles of Foreign Language Teaching in language classroom
teaching.
critically define and analyse the relationship between approaches,
methods and techniques in language teaching.
identify various teacher, learner and material roles in various teaching,
methods.
establish various classroom activities that each methods has.
identify various trends of various approaches and methods.
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Identify, on the continuum these approaches, methods and techniques
and explain how they have developed (from control to freedom).
Time Frame: This module gives a survey of theories in language teaching and acquisition.
This survey can be shown in continuum which moves from control to freedom.
The linguistic, psychological and sociological influences to each of these
approaches and method determine the amount of control or freedom each
method or approach accords the learners. This, in turn, shows which method
or approach is either learner centred or teacher centred.
List of any Teaching Aids needed for studying Charts Books Journals Magazines Videos/ CDs Modules
Time Required This module will require six months to be fully covered. This is a prerequisite
to Module 2 on the teaching of the four macro skills- listening, speaking,
reading and writing.
Study Skill Case studies
Activities
Illustrations
Questions for reflective
Assessments One test and two assignments
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UNIT 1.0 IMPORTANT QUESTIONS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
1.1. Introduction This unit introduces to you important questions in language teaching which
will help you follow the whole module on language teaching methods. In order
to effectively teach a language, you are expected to provide an answer to
each of the following three key questions:
1. What is language?
2. How do human beings learn?
3. How do we practically teach in class?
This unit is suggesting to you that you cannot hope to teach about a thing you
do not clearly understand. Therefore, you need a theory of what language is.
If you understand the nature of human learning then you will be in a position
to think of how to teach a language to children or adults. You, therefore, need
a theory of learning. Once you have formulated answers to the above
questions, you need to think of the techniques to be used that agree with our
understanding of what language is and how human beings learn. These are
the techniques or actions the teacher and pupils are involved in during the
teaching-learning process.
However, various linguists give varying answers to the above questions and
this, in turn, brings about various theories that claim to offer the best way of
teaching a language. You need to be very analytical when looking at each
given approach, method or technique so that you are effective to your
learners. However, remember that no matter how good a given approach,
method or technique there may be, teacher input is important. Look at the
activity below and try to provide key answers:
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ACTIVITY 1.1 Based on your cultural background and tribal beliefs:
1. How is language defined?
2. What is commonly believed to be the sources of our languages?
3. How are children believed to be acquiring a language and later learn a
second language?
4. When you recall your school days when you were a pupil of language,
or as a teacher of language, how was language taught in class?
5. Who talked more than the other between teacher and pupil?
There is no doubt that you have various answers to the above questions.
Look at the possible answers to the questions above and tick those that seem
to agree with what you had in mind when you looked at these questions. You
can later update your answers by adding those from the table that you did not
have:
Possible answers:
1. Language is defined as a tribal identity hence the language of a given
tribe in Zambia is said to have a language named after that tribe’s
name e.g. Nyanja for the Nyanja tribe, Bemba for the Bemba tribe; Lozi
for the Lozi tribe, Kaonde for the Kaonde tribe etc
2. It is believed that language is God given and the so many languages
we have are as a result of the confusion God caused at the time man
wanted to build a tower of Babel and God gave them different tongues
so that they could not understand one another. The term ‘babbling’ to
mean talking nonsense is said to originate from the term ‘Babel’.
3. Children are culturally believed to acquire their language from their
parents and their peers.
4. Teachers were giving us various activities such spelling, drills and
recitation in class and we would be punished if we did not perform to
the teachers’ expectations.
5. Teachers were involving us in doing a lot of language games and role
plays to practise the language pattern taught.
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6. Teachers’ talking time was more than pupil’s talking time
When you answer the questions above in Activity 1.1, you formulate your own
philosophy of language teaching. Any definition of language teaching or
acquisition based on tribal beliefs entails a tribal philosophy of language
teaching. By a philosophy of language teaching, we mean that each teacher
consciously or unconsciously has some understanding of what a language is
and how it can be taught. Each teacher has a way of justifying to
himself/herself that the actions he/she performs in class make pupils learn.
Prabhu (1990) called this self-justification by each teacher, a teacher’s sense
of plausibility. A philosophy of this nature is called an approach. Thus, a
language teaching approach is an inclusive term: In it, there is a theory of
what a language is; a theory of how languages are learnt and a procedure, or
method, of teaching a language. Method implies a conscious design (plan) of
carrying out a task. Once a teacher understands what a language is and how
a language is learnt, what remains is to set up conditions, have the resources
and to perform the actions that lead to learning of a language by learners.
These concerts are fully discussed later in this module and examples have
been given to illustrate what each of these terms and concepts mean in
language teaching.
The design or plan of action in language teaching includes formulating a
syllabus, which is “a description of the contents of a course of instruction and
the order in which they are to be taught (Richards et al., 1992).” The syllabus
will be used to make schemes of work, which are short-term plans for a term’s
work, and finally, from the schemes of work, the teacher makes daily lessons.
The actual actions the teacher performs in class to make pupils learn are
called techniques. For example, she/he might make pupils repeat phrases
after her/him in the belief that by so doing, they can remember better those
structures. Then repetition can be called a teaching technique in this case.
Approach, method and techniques have been discussed in this module
repeatedly because they seem to be relevant to various themes and concepts
discussed in any language teaching discussion.
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In other earlier modules, some definitions of language by distinguished
linguists were presented and these may have also provoked you into working
out your own definition of what language is like. In this module and unit, you
will come across some of these definitions and more, which were formulated
in relation to the teaching of languages.
Answers to the third question in Activity 1.1, about learning have come from
applied linguists, psychologists and educational psychologists. You will meet
some of their theories of learning as we examine different methods and
approaches of language teaching.
These approaches, methods and techniques are presented later in units 6 of
this module. But before we get to these, it is also important that you have a
clear understanding of many concepts used in language teaching. These are
the concepts that will work as beacons to guide learners of a language in your
classroom. You have also been availed and opportunity to look at the
teaching of English in Zambia briefly from the colonial period to the present.
Reflective question 1.1:
1. What are the possible definitions to language based on various cultural
backgrounds?
2. How can the belief that languages are God given affect the teaching of
these languages, in general?
3. In your own words try to explain the differences among approach, method
and technique.
1.2. Some important concepts and terms in language teaching
In the case of English language, there are various concepts and terms that
you must be familiar with as they are used to refer to a particular way English
is taught and for what purpose it is being taught. Look at the following terms
and concepts used to explain how English can be taught. These various ways
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of teaching English, or indeed any language, for that matter, must be taken
into account in designing particular syllabi to be followed.
1.2.1. Terms used in talking about language learning
In talking about the learning of languages we distinguish among the following
terms as illustrated below and explained later:
1.2.1.1. English as a First language (L1)
This usually refers to the first language acquired by a child or its mother
tongue. The language a child finds its parents using. For example, a child
whose parents speak Tonga will grow up speaking that as his/her mother
tongue or first language (abbreviated as L1). In some Zambian homes
parents use English, so their children grow up speaking English as their first
language. However, to conclude that English is first language to such children
growing in such homes is debatable and highly contentious as such children
spend most of their time with the peers and use language of play or a familiar
language in that locality. However, it could be true to say that sometimes the
first language is used synonymously with native language and children in
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such scenarios end up mastering the native language more than the second
language, English. Examples of countries where English is taught as the
child’s first language are England, United States of America and Australia.
1.2.1.2. English as a Second language (L2)
This is the language chronologically learnt second after the mother tongue/L1.
If a child learns to speak Chinyanja from friends after acquiring Lozi, then
Nyanja is the second language (L2). We speak of a second language context
when we mean that the second language is the language spoken in the
community in which one grows up. If a child after acquiring Bemba lives in a
Nyanja speaking area like Lusaka, then Nyanja will be a second language.
English is said to be a second language in Zambia as it is widely spoken and
used for official government purposes. We can, therefore, say that English, in
Zambia, is taught as a second language and not as the child’s first language.
Reflective questions 1.2:
Why is it that English, French, Portuguese or Spanish are often given the
status of second languages when Zambian children learn them yet when
Zambian languages are learnt in addition to the child’s mother tongue, they
are seldom or not at all counted as the children’s second languages?
1.2.1.3. English as a foreign language
This refers to a situation where English is taught purely as subject and does
not go beyond that. After that given lesson in English is over, no more English
is spoken by pupils until the next English lesson. In Zambia the languages
which are taught as foreign languages are French, Portuguese or Chinese. In
the case of French, for example, you will notice that it can be considered as a
foreign language because it is not widely spoken outside classroom. Similarly,
in a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), English is taught
as a foreign language since it is not widely spoken. French is taught as their
second language because it is the official language used in Government,
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commerce and education. You can see why French can be said to be taught
as a second language in the DRC and English as a foreign language.
ACTIVITY 1.2 1. List down countries in African use French as their second language
and teach it as such?
2. Which countries in Africa teach English as their second language?
3. Which countries in Africa teach and use both English and French as
their second languages.
4. What possible challenges could these African countries be facing in
their education systems for using foreign languages as their second
languages and languages of instruction in schools at some point?
UNIT 2.0. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING IN ZAMBIA
2.1. Introduction In this unit you are going to briefly review the history of English language
teaching in Zambia. The unit will also avail you an opportunity to explore the
legacy of language policy in Zambia as this has a bearing on challenges
teachers of language face. However, you must know that at this stage, our
main concern is with the use of English as a medium of instruction as
opposed to the other languages in Zambia. However, the unit will still point out
the importance of English in Zambia in relation to the Zambian languages and
how these languages are now being used as languages for initial literacy
along side English (MoE, 1996).
2.3. Unit Objectives:
At the end of this unit you should be able to:
give the legacy of language policy in Zambia
give a brief account of the history of English language teaching in
Zambia.
explain the changes in the syllabus from ZPC to ZBEC and ZATEC.
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explain why Zambian languages are used in the teaching of initial
literacy.
explain the status of English in Zambia and in the world.
2.4. History of English teaching in Zambia: the colonial period Did you know that English came to Northern Rhodesia at the time of the
colonization of the country in 1890s by the British South Africa Company?
You well, know that this is because English was the native language of some
of the Europeans who came as administrators, miners and so on to the
country. However, apart from those who learnt it as a result of serving as
domestic servants or workers for these Europeans who were mainly British,
there were no schools offering tuition in English to the African pupils in
schools. For much of the colonial period, mainly Catholic and Protestant
Missionaries as part of their Evangelisation process, offered education to
African children. A Brethren Missionary called Fredrick Arnot set up the first
such school in Western Province. But soon afterwards, village schools run by
missionaries mushroomed all over the country as missionaries of various
denominations scrambled to have as much influence as possible. Through
these interactions more people came in contact with the English language.
Even names of some Africans started changing. Some of the Africans working
in kitchens ended up taking kitchen utensils names for their children. In
Some parts of Zambia names like Kabiki i,(cabbage), Tomato(Tomatoes),
Foloko( folk), Sipuni (spoon) ‘Too much Mwenya’, ‘Two boys’ Zulu, Felempani
Kasonde, (flying pan Kasonde ) Forward , Syndicate Kasanda , July Mwansa,
June Chisanga etc ( Banda, 2008).
Missionaries taught people to read and write in order to understand the bible.
It was the missionaries who first reduced some local languages to the written
form and translated the bible into a number of local languages. The translated
bibles and other texts written in local languages served as the first teaching
and learning materials for teaching literacy in local languages. Local African
languages were used as media of instruction as well as school subjects.
Missionaries did not think it necessary to teach English in schools at first
because they did not see any need for this. Later on they started teaching
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English in upper primary school, starting at standard five. There was also an
element of making African children change their so-called African ‘primitive’
names to the so-called ‘civilized’ names. Names such as ‘Goodson, Bitwell,
Grandson, London, BBC, Admire, Sitwell, Scenario, Nails, Batter etc started
emerging as a symbol of modernity(Banda, 2008)..
Reflective questions
1. What were the main reasons why missionaries supported mother
tongue education at least up to four (4) years of a child in school?
2. What so called English names popular in your home area and how did
the change of African names to these so-called English or new names
impact on the African culture and identity?
2.5. The language policy in Zambia
2.5.1. The legacy of the language policy
You may agree with some educationists (Kashoki, 1978; Muyebaa, 1998;
Banda, 2002; Banda 2012) who have followed the development of the
language policy and claim that Zambia has had no clear language policy
since pre-colonial days. They feel that the policy on language has been
somehow experimental ever since. This has been cited as one major
contributor to the challenges against the fight for illiteracy among primary
school children who fail to break through to literacy in a Zambian language
and English by the time they are in grade two (2). The development of a
language policy and the use of children’s familiar languages or children’s
mother tongues can be traced to the colonial days and you will notice that the
Zambian languages were given more significance value in the education of
children than the case was after gaining independence. You are now invited
to follow the recommendation of the Phelps-stoke commission on the use of
Zambian languages (native languages) as languages of instruction in schools:
20
2.5.2. The Phelps-stoke commission
The Phelps Stokes Commission from the United States conducted a study of
the education systems of East, Central and Southern Africa and made some
recommendations on the way educational institutions should be run. Among
these recommendations were some made specifically to do with language
teaching: (Ohannessian & Kashoki, 1978: 278-279)
1. It stressed the teaching of African languages as ways of preserving the
African cultural heritage, ideas, ideals and the self-identity of Africans.
Thus it saw language as a right. African languages were to be taught in
lower grades of primary school starting with a mother tongue and then
moving into an African lingua franca in middle grades in the area.
2. It also stressed the importance of teaching European languages (which
included English), which they saw as offering many opportunities and
advantages to the Africans. European languages were seen as means
of acquiring information and “uniting Africa with the great civilisations of
the world” (ibid, p.278). These were to be taught in upper grades of
primary school.
Following these recommendations, in 1927, the Advisory Board of Native
Education of Northern Rhodesia, made a decision to use four local languages
as media of instruction in the first four years of primary school viz: Sikololo
(Lozi) in Barotseland, Chitonga-Chila in Northwestern Rhodesia, Cibemba in
North Eastern Rhodesia west of the Luangwa river and Chinyanja North-
eastern Rhodesia east of the Luangwa (Ohannessian & Kashoki, 1978:287).
In1930 it was decided that wherever there were teachers qualified to teach in
English, it should be used as a medium of instruction after pupils had acquired
the mechanical skills of literacy. This means that after initial literacy in local
languages had been acquired (ibid: 288-289). This decision was made in view
of the fact that there was no lingua franca (i.e. common language of
communication) among Africans for interethnic communication. Basically
there was no departure from the practice of the missionaries in that a mother
tongue was used in the first two years of primary school and then a dominant
21
regional lingua franca (Silozi , Chitonga, Chinyanja and Icibemba) was taught
up to the fourth year where this was different from the mother tongue. English
was used as a medium of instruction from the fifth year and throughout
secondary school.
This practice continued into the Federation years after 1953. Schools for
Africans, referred to as unscheduled schools (non-fee paying), They used
English as a medium of instruction after the fifth year of primary education
while fee paying schools for Europeans, Asians and Coloureds used it from
the first year of primary school. The latter were called scheduled schools and
were, unlike African schools, under the Federal government. The Northern
Rhodesia government controlled African schools.
However, there were increased calls for the introduction of English much
earlier in primary schools so that by 1956, English was being taught as a
subject in the second year of primary school in some unscheduled schools.
And by 1962, it had found its way into the first grade.
Just before independence, the clamour for English especially by the settler
community became more insistent, and as a result UNESCO was requested
to study the educational system and to make recommendations. In the report
that came out of this study by a team of Australian Educationists headed by
Dr W. C. Radford, it was recommended that English be introduced as medium
of instruction from the first grade of primary school. This recommendation was
supported by another report by a British language officer, Hardman in 1965.
The argument was that the earlier pupils started learning the language the
better would be their spoken and written language. English was also said to
have more literature and would provide access to a greater store of
knowledge and information. This would lead to a general improvement in the
education of children and help them to learn with ease other subjects in upper
grades and secondary school, which would be taught in English. It was further
argued that children would transfer literacy skills to local African languages
once they had acquired literacy in English.
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2.5.3. The English Medium policy
This policy was, in 1961, considered in the Northern Rhodesia Legislative
Council after one member of parliament moved a motion that English should
be the main teaching medium in African schools from standard one (now
Grade 3) onwards. In response, the then Minister of African Education stated
that the ideal medium of instruction in the first 4 years of primary school is the
mother tongue, while the main African languages of the Territory, in this case
the four languages mentioned above (Citonga-chila, Chinyanja, Chibemba,
Silozi) would continue to be used as medium of instructions (Ohannessia,
1978:12). The UNESCO sponsored commission led by Dr Radford, stated
that the newly independent Zambia was to introduce English, in 1965, as LoI
in all schools from Grade one, though it allowed for continued use of the
Zambian languages mediums of instructions for Grade1-4 in all “unscheduled”
schools. This was finally enacted into the 1966 Education Act. This is the act,
which according to Kelly (2000), Kashoki (1990) and Muyebaa (1998), just
“schooled” illiterates graduated from primary schools because initial literacy
was done in English, a language completely alien to most pupils.
Reflective question 2.1
1. Have you ever imagined that the policy of using English as LoI from
grade one to University was a decision by the UNESCO sponsored
commission led by Dr Radford and not by the people of Zambia?
2.5.4. The Education Reforms of 1977
After realising that the 1966 language policy was leading the education
system into problems, the drafters of the revised Reform document re-stated
in their submission to the ministry of Education:
In the first 4 Grades of primary school, the 7 official Zambian languages will be the LOI but the teachers will be encouraged to use any other language familiar to the child for purposes of
23
communication and better teaching and learning (Agreed Draft 11th May1977: 9)
However, when the final document was published in 1977, it contained a
complete reversal of this proposed policy. The reforms acknowledged that:
It is generally accepted by educationists that learning is best done in the mother tongue, this situation is found to be impracticable in the case of every child in multi-lingual societies, such as Zambian society. (MoE, 1996:22)
Reflective question 2.2:
What would you say could be the possible reasons why the Education
Reforms of 1977 draft has a different language policy from that in the final
copy of the same document?
2.5.5. The 1996 policy This is the latest policy in Zambia and it comes as a result of serious
questions that arose as to the focus and relevance of the curriculum at all
levels. Grade 1-4 failed to exhibit expected basic reading, writing and numeric
skills. The policy that is officially known as “Educating Our Future” takes note
of the problem of LOI and it has this to say:
For over 30 years, (i.e. since the 1966 policy) children who have very little contact with English outside school, but have been required to learn concepts through English medium have had unsatisfactory experience (MoE, 1996:39)
The 1996 policy further states that:
The fact that initial reading skills are taught in and through a language that is unfamiliar to the majority of children is believed to be a major contributory factor to the backwardness in reading shown by many Zambian children. It is also a major factor in fostering rote learning. Since from the outset the child has
24
difficulties in associating the printed forms of words with their real, underlying meaning (MoE, 1996:39)
Muyebaa (1998) says that the 1996 policy from the surface is very
concerned with the falling standard of education in our schools, which
have been brought about by a wrong medium of instruction. In one other
paragraph the policy agrees with the general opinion that:
There is strong evidence that children learn literacy skills more easily and successfully through their mother tongue and subsequently they are able to transfer these skills quickly and with easy to English or another language. Successful first language learning is, in fact, believed to be essential for successful literacy in the second language (MoE, 1996:39).
This statement does not only support the use of MT in the initial literacy
acquisition but also emphasizes a successful learning of MT. This is to enable
a successful transfer of skills from MT learning to second language learning.
This, therefore, may suggest that any initial literacy programme to succeed,
the language policy followed must support it.
2.6. The language policy and the language for initial literacy Muyebaa (1998) points out that the 1996 language policy which had wanted
to correct the confusion brought about by the erroneous 1966 policy makes a
complete “about turn” by stating the following:
These considerations do not obscure the fact that the use of English in primary education has played a significant role in promoting a sense of national unity. Neither do they overlook the fact that English is the official language of public life and the sine quos non-for all further education in Zambia. It must be born in mind that the introduction of a language other than English as the official medium of instruction would encounter insoluble implementation problems and would entail enormous costs born in developing and producing materials and in training teachers to use them, (MoE, 1996:39).
25
To justify the use of English as the language of leaning and teaching from
Grade 1 the 1996 policy further states that:
Where as English will remain as the official medium of instruction, all pupils will be given an opportunity to learn initial basic skills of reading and writing in a local language. By providing for the use of local language for initial literacy learning, children are learning of essential reading and writing skills and should be better assured of transferring those acquired skills to the learning of English later. By providing for the use of English as official language of instruction for other content areas, children’s preparation for the use of this language in school and subsequent life will be facilitated, while the implementation problems of changing over to other languages will be avoided (MoE, 1996:40).
You notice that Kashoki (1990), Mwendende, (1997) and Brock-Utne (2000)
refute the arguments of cost, if the LOI would be changed from English to the
MT, for example, any of the seven official Zambian languages. These
researchers argue that it would be cheaper to spend more money in providing
meaningful education in the local languages than “save” funds by continually
providing education through the medium of English. This type of education
benefits nobody at all. What are views on these sentiments? Do you support
them or not. If you do, what could be the sources of your strength?
Muyebaa (1998:5) sees a mismatch between the PRP and the 1996 language
policy, for example. He argues that “you cannot expect to achieve a
meaningful initial literacy programme through local languages while a foreign
language remains in control as the language of learning and teaching at the
same level. It’s like serving two masters at a time and expects to succeed, or
please both of them”.
Muyebaa (1998:5-7), further, agues that one of the two languages would
eventually stand in the way of the other, and thus cause confusion. He says
that by declaring English as LOI from Grade 1, it means that all other content
subjects, except Zambian languages, will be taught in English. He cites a
lesson in Science or Maths where the following two words may have been
26
taught and copied into pupil’s books: “one”, “make”. If the child were to meet
the same words in an initial literacy lesson (NBTL), the word “one” would in
Chitonga, one of the seven official Zambian languages, either mean “four
days” or “hoes”, while in Chinyaja “one” would mean, “see me”. The word
“make” would in Kikaonde mean “eggs” while in Chinyanja it would mean
“mother of”.
The mismatch is also seen in the running of the pre-schools. In Zambia, Pre-
schools are organised forms of educational provision for children between the
ages of three and six. According to the 1996 policy document (Educating Our
Future, 1996:8) “the provision and funding of early childhood and pre-school
education will be the responsibility of Councils, local communities, non-
governmental organizations, private individuals and families”.
This loose arrangement of the provision of early childhood education has
given rise to various forms of education being provided as the main aim in
many of these organisations is not the provision of the much needed early
childhood education but to make good business out of it. The teaching of oral
English has been a very good market material in these schools especially
with this misconception among many Zambians that “education is equal to
English” (Muyebaa, 1998). So, the use of English as LoI at this level creates a
problem for those children who find themselves in NBTL schools where now
the local Zambian languages are the languages for initial literacy1. While ROC
aims at children building up their reading skills in both English and Zambian
languages, its only nowadays that the Zambian languages are being
considered as passing subjects at Grade 7 for promotion to Grade 8 2.
The use of a child’s familiar is seen here as a tool that would benefit a lot
children. Research world over has proved that progressive language policies
1 Research needs to be conducted in this area in order to ascertain how children, who have had pre-school education in English, perform in NBTL classes where the language of literacy is not English. 2 The Ministry of Education issued a circular to all schools announcing that local languages would be included for selection to Grade 8. This was announced in 1997 but up 2001, this was not implemented. During my data collection, I visited two schools in Lusaka on the day the Grade 7 examination timetable indicated that Zambian languages were to be written. The two schools were almost empty as pupils absented themselves for that examination which they, apparently, considered not worthy writing, as it did not count for selection but the policy says it will.
27
are those that take into consideration the use of MT as a LOI in the early
childhood education, perhaps even up to Grade 4, like the situation is in many
neighbouring countries as stated in earlier units in this module.
In conclusion we would say there have, as a result of these conflicting
sentiments stated above, been proposals and counter proposals to use local
languages as in the colonial period in lower primary grades before English is
introduced. Such recommendations were made in between 1975-77 by the
curriculum development centre but were rejected and so did not appear in the
1977 educational reform document. The position of English remained the
same. It was, however, recommended that the teaching of Zambian
languages be strengthened. Again in the subsequent educational reform
document entitled Focus on Learning (MOE, 1992), as explained above, the
policy of teaching English from the first grade was reaffirmed.
Activity 2.1
1. Identify as many challenges as possible which have come about as a
result of the mismatch between the Zambian language policy since
1965 and the languages used for initial literacy in Zambian schools
under the Primary Reading Programme (PRP)?
2.7. Independence and beyond
Zambia gained its independence from Britain in 1964. It fell to the new
nationalist government to make a decision on whether or not to implement the
Radford recommendation of teaching English from the first grade to university.
In 1965, the new government decided to go for the English from the start
policy and in the following year, 1966, this was enshrined in the Education act.
Because of anticipated difficulties in implementing this policy, unscheduled
schools were allowed to continue using local languages as media of
instruction in the first four years of primary school until such time when
28
English materials would be distributed, teachers trained to use them and
inspectors put in place to supervise (Kelly, 1995).
Kelly (1995) believes political considerations may have played a major part in
the decision by the new government to introduce English as a medium of
instruction. Zambia is a multilingual and multiethnic society, English was
chosen because it was a neutral language belonging to no tribe in the country.
Thus it was hoped it would foster national unity. Zambian languages
continued being taught as school subjects but were not used as media of
instruction.
The policy of using English from the start has had its opponents and
supporters. Those opposed view the use of English as a medium of
instruction as neglecting the cultural heritage of the children and killing the
African personality (Manchishi, 2004). There is a break between the language
of the home and school that alienates children. It is also said to arrest
development of conceptual thinking in children and makes transfer of literacy
skills difficult to the mother tongue. Research elsewhere in the world has
clearly demonstrated that:
Strong promotion of students' primary language literacy skills not only develops a conceptual foundation for academic growth but also communicates clearly to students the value of the cultural and linguistic resources they bring to school.” Cummins (1998:1)
Did you know that African languages are phonetically regular and it is thus
easier to learn to associate sounds to letters in the process of learning to read
(because there is correspondence between phonemes and graphemes)? That
is why it can be argued that refusing to use local languages in preference for
English makes it more difficult for children to acquire literacy skills. They have
to grapple with two unknowns: a foreign language and learning to combine
strange sounds with letters of the alphabet.
2.8. Educating our future and NBTL
There has been a change in the latest reform document entitled Educating our
Future (1996) in which, while upholding English as the official medium of
29
instruction, it has been decided that learners should learn initial literacy in a
local language in grade one. Literacy in English will be delayed until grade
two. This has been done to facilitate acquisition of literacy skills, which have
been seen to be falling among primary school pupils (Kelly, 1998). The need
to arrest declining literacy rates has led to this. The use of Zambian
languages for initial literacy is called the New Break Through to Literacy
(NBTL). It was piloted in some schools in Northern Zambia and found to be
successful. Now it is to be used through out the country. It involves the use of
the language experience approach. Children’s language is used so that
there is no break between home and school. A child through picture prompts,
suggest sentences in the local language that are used as starting points for
teaching literacy. We have thus come full circle to the language policy in the
colonial period. There are many private schools where children, however,
start with English from grade one.
2.9. The status of English in Zambia and the world English has a high status in Zambia and world wide it is becoming a global
language of commerce, science and education. It is a first (or native)
language for millions of speakers in the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand
Australia and South Africa; a second language in many former colonies of
Britain in Asia, Africa, Caribbean islands; a foreign language in many other
countries and it is a preferred foreign language in China, the world’s most
populous country. Hundreds of millions are learning it or speaking it in the
world.
In Zambia it is the official language of government-administration, judiciary,
education, mass media and commerce.
Activity 2.1:
1. Some writers have used the term linguistic imperialism to describe
the propagation of English as a medium of education, official language
of government and commerce which has led to the neglect of mother
tongue literacy, and the exclusion of those not literate in it from social
30
and economic progress. How far do you agree with this description?
2. Consider the table below which has three columns: the level column
indicates the status of the type of language shown in column two and
the last column indicates the domains of use i.e. what we use the
language for in Zambia. Complete the table by filling in uses in the
domains of use column.
LEVEL TYPE OF LANGUAGE DOMAINS OF USE
1 Official national language (English) 2 Regional language 3 Foreign language (French)
4 Individual language Intra-ethnic communication,
family interaction.
Adapted from Batibo, H.M. (2005).
This should give you an idea of the importance of English in Zambia. Do you
agree with the relative statuses of each type of language as suggested by the
levels column above?
In conclusion, we would say that there has been so many factors influencing
the language policy in Zambia and that there is need to sensitise the
communities and parents on the need to use the children’s MT or familiar
languages to children s languages for initial literacy and LoI at least for the
first four years a child starts school (grade 1-4).
Reflective question
1. How is the English language viewed by many as the language of
instruction in schools for all the children?
2. Generally, how do people view children who speak their Zambian
languages better than English or the other way round?
3. How do pupils treat teachers of Zambian languages as opposed to
those teaching English and other subjects?
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UNIT 3: CHANGES IN THE SYLLABI IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS SINCE INDEPENDENCE
3.1. Introduction In this unit you will be availed a rare opportunity to look at how English
teaching has been done in the historical periods mentioned above. You will
also consider the types of syllabi and the techniques employed in the teaching
of English.
3.2. Unit Objectives: After reading the unit you should be able to:
a. explain the changes in syllabi that have occurred since independence
b. account for such changes (in a.)
c. explain what has influenced these changes in syllabi.
3.3. The syllabus Syllabus in language teaching refers to the way items are selected,
sequenced and presented to learners. Syllabus design depends on the
approach that is assumed in language teaching. For example, if language is
considered to be a list of structures, then it will be presented as a list of items
32
to be taught or if it is taken to be made up of functions of language, then the
syllabus will have a list of what people use language to do e.g. ask or things,
apologise, greet, etc.
3.3.1. Pre-independence
We can surmise that in the earlier period of the pre-independence days, any
English language teaching that took place in mission schools was based
largely on a mixture of grammar translation and audio-lingual methods. The
latter become more dominant as we moved towards independence in line with
language teaching trends in other parts of the world. The poor training of
teachers meant that teaching methods were perhaps more idiosyncratic:
teachers used whatever they felt could work to teach. Most European
missionaries had had a classical type of education in their countries of origin
and must have used similar methods that had been used to teach them to
teach those who became teachers in this country. Indeed, Latin used to be
taught in many mission secondary schools even up the 1960s. The syllabi in
most of the schools must have been structural: lists of grammatical structures,
reading comprehension and composition.
3.3.2. Independence and the Zambia Primary Course (ZPC) Following the adoption of English as a medium of instruction, efforts were
made to make a syllabus and produce materials to be used throughout the
country to teach English from grade one. Foreign expertise was elicited, such
the British Council, teachers from Canada and Australia worked with
Zambians to produce the materials. These people worked at the English
medium Centre of the Curriculum Development Centre. It took some time
before the new materials could be used throughout the country so that four
years after the first schools had started using such materials in 1966; only
25% of the schools in the country had the materials by 1970.
Efforts were made to orient the teachers in the use of the new materials. This
retraining lasted between, in some cases two weeks to two years for those in
colleges. CDC and the inspectorate provided supervision and inspections. The aims of the syllabus were:
33
to make primary school leavers as proficient as possible in the use of
English.
to ensure that children who proceed to secondary school and other
forms of post primary education are well equipped to take advantage of
the opportunities offered (Mc Adam, 1978 in Ohannessian and
Kashoki, 1978)
to give primary school children the lexis and structures necessary to
understand and use English in other areas of the curriculum, which are
taught in the medium of English.
The syllabus involved a careful selection of vocabulary for each grade that
took into consideration the requirements of other subjects such as science
and maths; similarly the structures were selected and graded for each grade.
At the end of primary school it was expected that the pupils would have met at
least 2,720 words.
3.3.3. Methodology: The main methodology was the audio-lingual method (see unit 8). This is
evident from the types of exercises in the textbooks; there is a preponderance
of drills and dialogues. There were three types of books for teaching English:
teachers had handbooks for each grade and term, which had all the lessons
to be taught. They contained very detailed instructions for the teacher on what
to do, say, write etc and what was expected of the pupils. Then there were
pupils’ books containing language, reading passages and exercises to be
done. The third book was the reader and there were 120 readers to be read
by end of grade 7.
There were lessons on language, reading, controlled writing and speech work.
The language lesson procedure had these stages:
Revision
Speech work
New work
Presentation
34
Practice: (Consisted mainly of drills, repetition, substitution, conversion,
ripple, question and answer, completion)
Production: written work
This lesson procedure is referred to as a PPP because of the three Ps:
presentation, practice and production. It is the standard lesson procedure of
Audiolingual lessons.
The reading lessons started with pre-reading activities such as picture-loto,
jig-saw, picture matching, colour charts etc. The first written words pupils were
exposed to were their names on cards. Other words were presented on flash
cards, labels attached to classroom objects, characters and sentences found
in books introduced through pictures.
Composition was in form of Controlled writing and it was meant to reinforce
the structures learnt orally. Creative writing was not taught. The subject matter
was drawn from other subjects since English was considered a part of an
integrated ZPC.
3.3.4. The Zambia Basic Education course (ZBEC)
Following discussions with teachers and other stakeholders nationwide, it was
found that the ZPC had some weaknesses because of the following:
it was too prescriptive: teachers were like automatons guided at each
stage. There was very little freedom on the part of the teacher to
innovate.
it encouraged rote learning.
it didn’t lead to communicative competence. Although pupils learnt the
structures of English they could not use them spontaneously in social
interaction.
It was too teacher centred. Pupils were just passive recipients of
information.
It led to poor literacy development.
Therefore, ZBEC was an attempt to:
35
bring in communicative teaching of English and a pupil centred
orientation. There are fewer drills.
give pupils freedom to experiment with language.
make it clear to pupils that language is meant for purposeful
communication.
This course is also an integrated one. Integration was done by using a
reading passage as a way of introducing work in speaking and listening and
writing. The pupils’ books were written by teams of teachers, inspectors and
curriculum specialists drawn from various parts of the country. The teachers’
books are now called guides and not handbooks because they merely
suggest a procedure that a teacher can vary. There are two types of
guidebooks for each grade. Part A is a more theoretical guide which explains
and justifies the methodology used in teaching various aspects of the
language while part B is the practical guide to teaching; it lays down the
teaching techniques. There are also pupils’ books.
The syllabus can be divided into three subsections:
3.3.4.1. Listening and speaking: in the first four grades oral work is the main basis of all language work
although some reading and writing is taught. From grade five onwards,
emphasis shifts to reading and writing.
Speaking and listening objectives are stated in functional terms (asking
for things, ordering etc) and the structural exponents (the actual
structures to be used e.g. May I borrow .(.when the function is asking
for things) are provided to realise the functions.
In the lower grades the structural exponents and vocabulary are
practised orally.
Interactive activities are used such as pair and group work and games
in keeping with the communicative teaching approach.
In upper grades, skills are integrated i.e. based on a reading passage,
the listening, speaking, writing and reading components are related.
36
There is progressively more grammar work in the upper basic section
where some structures are explicitly explained and taught.
The same functions are stated at each grade level but the structural
exponents vary becoming more complex as we proceed through the
grades. The arrangement is cyclical becoming more advanced as
pupils progress. In higher grades, functions are presented in written
form before being practiced orally which is the reverse of the practice in
lower grades.
3.3.4.2. Reading It is envisaged that in the first two grades pupils will achieve masterly of basic
literacy. The language of instruction is English. The Look and say (learning
words as wholes), as well as the phonics method (learning words by sounding
out the letters), are used. Emphasis is placed on reading for comprehension
from the beginning, however. There is also gradual introduction of pupils to
functional reading i.e. reading for a specific purpose such as looking for
specific information.
3.3.4.3. Writing This in the initial stages consists of handwriting exercises: learning to form
letters, writing legibly and neatly and learning to spell. Some writing is also
done during grammatical exercises.
As for actual composition work, progression is from controlled and guided
writing to free writing that includes some creative writing.
3.3.5. Zambia Teacher Education Course (ZATEC)
Zambia Teacher Education Course is an attempt to improve the training of
teachers for the Basic Education sector. The course is meant to
“…develop competences, which allow teachers to plan, implement and
evaluate effectively pupil learning, taking full account of the needs of the
nation, the community, the school and the learner.” (TED 2001:5). While it is
37
meant to implement some reforms in the way teachers are trained, there are
also implications in the organisation and teaching in the basic schools.
The implementation of this programme followed three years of a pilot
programme in three teacher-training colleges on the Copperbelt began in
1997 under the Teacher Reform Programme (ZATERP). The success of this
pilot programme led to the full implementation of the programme in all 10
Basic Education Teachers’ colleges in the country. The main features of this
programme are:
3.3.5.1. Integration of subjects: Instead of having a large number of subjects in the primary school curriculum
which appear to be unrelated, an effort has been made to group subjects in a
more holistic way into study areas. This is because life is not
compartmentalised into knowledge areas or experiences. In this way,
students are given an opportunity to see links among the subjects which
makes for more meaningful and purposeful learning.
For example, mathematics, science, agriculture science and geography now
make up (contribute to) the mathematics and science education. Similarly
local languages, English and any other foreign language contribute to the
literacy and language education. This has meant a reduction from eighteen
subjects to six study areas. These study areas are integrated by establishing
links among the former subjects with additional cross cutting themes such as
gender issues and HIV/AIDS.
Activity 3.1: Why are issues like gender and HIV/AIDS considered to be crosscutting (i.e.
cutting across boundaries, literally)?
Primacy in the ZATEC programme has been given to literacy, numeracy and
a number of these crosscutting issues.
38
3.3. 5.2. Structure of the course: ZATEC is a two year course organised as follows: the first year is a college
based year which students spend in college attending lectures, tutorials, etc.
The second year is spent in basic schools that are selected by the colleges on
the basis that they have mentors (trained teachers) who can help in
continuous training of the students as they do teaching practice. At the same
time, the students continue writing assignments (both formative and
summative) and are periodically observed by their tutors as well as school
based mentors. So the second year is designed to be a continuation of
training and not a probationary period.
It is suggested that college tutors in preparing the students employ a more
learner centred methodology. The students are, therefore, given more
opportunities to take charge of their learning through tutorials, group work,
class visits, demonstration teaching, individual study and lectures. It is
envisaged that by applying all these methods, the tutor will take on a variety of
roles as instructor, counsellor, enabler and monitor to avoid being a dominant
figure.
The ZBEC syllabus (Grades 1-7) (CDC 2003) has been revised to conform to
what has been mentioned above. The new curriculum is now an Outcomes-
Based Education (OBE) one. The outcomes refer to what the learners can
demonstrate as a result of their learning. OBE “is a learner centred, result
oriented approach to education and training that builds on the notion that all
learners need to and can achieve their full potential but this might not happen
in the same way or within the same period” (The South African Department of
Education 1998). The other feature is the use of continuous assessment
which is more effective in monitoring the pupils’ learning, remedying their
deficiencies and ensuring their success in learning.
As in teacher education, there has also been an integration of traditional
subjects into six learning areas:
Literacy and languages
Mathematics
Integrated Science
Creative and technology Studies
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Social and development studies
Community studies (local curriculum content)
Crosscutting themes and issues are also integrated in this curriculum. These
include such issues as HIV/AIDS, Reproductive Health, Water and Sanitation,
Environmental Education and Good Governance (CDC 2003:vii).
In relation to literacy and language education, the changes to the ZBEC
syllabi have been in the integration of language and literacy skills. The
recommended methodology is still Communicative Language Teaching.
However, there is another important change in the literacy and language
syllabus. In grade one, a local language is used to teach initial literacy while
English is taught orally. This is what is being called the New Breakthrough to
Literacy (NBTL) explained above. In grade two, literacy in English is
introduced. And literacy and reading in both Zambian and English languages
are further consolidated and developed in grades 3-7.
Activity 3.2:
1. Briefly explain the main differences between the ZCP and ZEBC syllabi in
English.
2. What is ZATEC and how has it affected the educational practices in Basic
Schools?
3. Although the school based year in the ZATEC programme was meant to be
a continuation of teacher training, it has not been easy to keep it that way
because of the shortage of teachers in many basic schools. Find out if you
have a ZATEC trained teacher in the school where you work or in your area
about his/her experience. What do they think of their experiences during the
school-based year? Find out too what they would want changed or maintained
in the ZATEC programme. Ask them to justify their opinions.
40
UNIT 4: LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
4.1. Introduction Language and culture are intricately intertwined. Herbert (1993:2 in Finlayson
et al. 1997:85) has defined this relationship in the following way:
“Culture can be defined as the sum total of transmitted behaviour patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions and all other products of human word and thought characteristics of a community. These characteristics are all transmitted by language and not inherited by genes. Culture and language are so tightly related that they may be considered as parts of the same thing. It is true that language and culture reinforce each other.” (Emphasis added)
It is indeed through language that many aspects of a people’s culture become
evident: songs, stories, poetry, religious ceremonies and rituals, greetings,
41
forms of address, spells, cures and many others all depend on language.
Much of human morality has to do with the use and abuse of language in
social relations and, in fact, moral lessons are imparted through language to
the young ones.
Many writers for example, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf went further to
claim that we “…cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe
significance as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to
organise it in this way-an agreement that holds through our speech
community and is codified in the patterns of our language.” (Whorf, 1956:212-
214). This means that language influences the way we see the world or how
we behave. This has been criticised because it is not true that our languages
impose on us only one way of seeing the world. Nevertheless, this claim
called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis underscores the importance of the link
between language and culture. The beliefs, values and needs of a particular
culture often correspond with the content and form of a language. For
example, African cultures have no colour words for blue, yellow etc but often
make do with just distinctions between white, red and black. In English,
however, we find many more words for various shades of colour. This might
be partly due to the different interests or needs of the people
6.2. Unit objectives: By the end of this unit you should be able to explain:
a. the link between language and culture
b. when to teach about the culture of the target language.
c. what it means to have positive or negative attitudes to the target
culture.
d. the importance of teaching about the target culture
.
Reflective question:
42
Can you think of other cultural differences that are also expressed in
language?
Is it true that our languages restrict how we think, feel and talk about the world
around us? The Sapir-Worf hypothesis is also known as linguistic relativity or
linguistic determinism. You can read more about it in encyclopaedias.
There are many other concepts that may be found in one culture and
language but are absent in another because they may not be considered
important or the object(s) they refer to are absent in that culture. Pastoralists
like the Tonga may have more words to do with cattle than the Bemba who
are not animal keepers. The environment in which a culture evolves
influences the language also. Compare also the elaborate kinship system of
the African with Europeans-there are more words describing family relations
in African languages than in European ones. Note, however, that languages
like cultures are not static; they are for ever evolving. But it is true that
language is, essentially, the main tool of cultural transmission.
4.3. What are the implications for teaching English in Zambia?
It is said that even among native speakers of English such those in the USA
and Britain there can be communication breakdowns due to differences in
their cultural systems. We would therefore expect even greater problems
between native speakers and non-native speakers who are culturally more
distant for example between the Japanese and the English. Such differences
often involve the pragmatics of language e.g. how to apologise, praise,
complain, what is taboo etc. It appears, therefore, that cultural aspects are
important in language teaching.
People are motivated by different factors in wanting to learn a foreign
language. If the desire to learn a second language is to enable one to get a
better paying job, we call this instrumental motivation. The language is the
instrument one needs to achieve some specific personal benefit. There are
also some people who may find a particular people’s language and culture so
43
fascinating that they want to be a part of that culture and to be able to speak
the language as natives. This is called integrative motivation. We can guess
that the latter group of people with integrative motivation are more likely to
want to absorb the target language’s cultural system than those with
instrumental motivation. It is also usually the case that those with integrative
motivation may want to live in the country were the target language is spoken.
Activity 4.1:
Where can we place Zambian children in basic schools in relation to these
two types of motivation? Consider also the parents of the children’s attitudes
to English in Zambia. What are their desires for their children?
4.4. Two views about teaching culture There are two views that have been expressed concerning the teaching of
cultural aspects of a foreign or second language. One is that it is not expected
that many of our pupils will have opportunities of interacting with native
speakers of English here in Zambia or abroad. Therefore, even as we teach a
foreign language we try to make it convey our cultural values and norms. One,
as Larsen-Freeman (1987:5) puts it, can be bilingual (able to use two
languages) without being bicultural (have two cultural systems). We have to
accept the fact that English has become an international language and it is
acceptable that there can be different varieties of English as indeed there are
Indian English, South African, etc. and why not Zambian? Moreover, many of
our teachers in basic schools are Zambians who have learnt English as a
second language and their knowledge of English culture might be sketchy.
These teachers share a culture with their pupils. The situation would be
different if the teachers were native speakers of English because then there
would be a possibility of cultural conflicts.
44
The other view is that it is important for pupils to learn about the culture of the
target language (the language they are being taught) for them to develop
good attitudes, values and beliefs about the target culture. In the process they
too come to have a heightened sense of self-awareness. A positive attitude
towards the target language speakers’ culture can be a motivating factor in
learning the target language. Moreover, it can also foster a good world view
(ibid:5). In fact, it is not possible to learn a language without also absorbing
however unconsciously, some elements of the culture behind that language
going by what we have said above. Language and culture are intricately
intertwined.
To support this second view, teachers have to make pupils aware of some
cultural differences when these arise in their teaching. It is also important for
teachers to challenge the pupils’ prejudices and stereotypes they might
harbour about the target culture and its people. They should provide enough
information or point pupils to sources of reliable information for them to be
better informed, to become critical thinkers; to develop favourable attitudes to
the native speakers of the L2 they are learning. In the global environment that
we are living in, we can no longer ignore outside influences on our lives; we
have to come to terms with them. This is why teachers need to have a
heightened interest in understanding their own culture as well as that of the
foreign language that they teach in order to be in a position to explain
differences between the cultures in a way that does not belittle any of the two.
Cultural awareness can be taught in various ways. Teachers can use
literature, films and radio broadcasts from the target culture. In the classroom,
role plays in which pupils for example act out interactions between native
speakers and foreigners of the target language or through debates on cultural
differences e.g. about differences in life styles, dressing, sports, eating habits,
family relations- in extended and nuclear families-festivals, etc. Where
possible, even native speakers can be invited to speak to the class on some
cultural issues. All these and many other ways can help develop intercultural
45
awareness in the pupils and make them more accommodating to different
world views.
Activity:
Do you agree with this statement?
Many urban pupils in basic schools are already so exposed to European
and English culture that they may not even know the differences between
their own culture and these foreign ones.
Do you think it is possible for one to teach all aspects of a foreign culture?
The following could have been some of the aspects you may have come up
with on pupils’ cultural behaviours as a result of being exposed to the foreign
cultures:
1. Greetings elderly people while standing instead of kneeling down
2. Particular about the greetings following the English manners
3. Particular about the meals for the day such as breakfast, lunch, supper,
dinner etc
4. Wearing clothes as per the weather
5. Calling elderly people by their first names
6. Using English terms to describe some of their relatives thereby
reducing the family tree e.g. calling sisters to one’s mother as aunt
instead of either ‘’small mother’’ or ‘’big mother’, calling children of your
mother’s’ as cousins instead of sisters and brothers, calling brothers to
your father as ‘uncles’ and not as either ‘’small father’’ or ‘’big father’’.
7. Observing European holidays
8. Familiar with European football teams and players more than local
teams and players
9. Unable to express themselves in their own mother tongues to an extent
of feeling shay to be identified with their own culture and languages
10. More knowledgeable and familiar with European celebrities than their
own
11. Enjoying European music more than the local ones
46
12. Rejecting African names in preference to European ones
Reflective question
Do you think it is fair for Zambian children to ignore their own culture in
preference to the foreign European culture in aspects such as values,
attitudes, respects, dress
UNIT 5: FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
5.1. Introduction You have already been introduced to this topic of language acquisition in
Introduction to language and linguistics (module EDS2). In this unit, we briefly
compare mother tongue acquisition and second language learning. We make
a distinction between the two in that while children seem to acquire their
mother tongues naturally and apparently easily, it is not so with second
language learning in schools. Even after many years of formal learning in
classrooms, many people can still not speak the second language with native
fluency and for many these never happens. Krashen (1985:1) proposed the
use of acquisition to describe how a child comes to possess its first language
or mother tongue in the informal environment and learning for the way we
come to know a language as a result of formal schooling. The table below
summarises what has been noticed about the two ways:
5.2. Unit objectives: By the end of this unit you should be able to:
a) explain the importance of language acquisition studies.
b) explain the difference between the first and second language
acquisition.
c) explain the differences between learning and acquisition as
proposed by Krashen.
47
d) explain what is meant by the critical period hypothesis and whether
it exists for second language acquisition.
Reflective question Think of how you learnt other languages in your community rather than your
mother tongue when you were growing up? What were the main differences
between how you learnt those other languages and your mother tongue?
Compare your answers with these provided in the table below and see which
ones you had also provided as your reflections based on your passed
experiences and knowledge.
LEARNING (L2) ACQUISITION (L1 or Natural L2)
Learning Is done consciously-i.e.
one is aware of what one is doing.
There is conscious attention to
rules of grammar.
Acquisition is done subconsciously-
i.e. babies are not aware of learning
or being taught.
No conscious attention to rules.
The language a learner is exposed
to is controlled so that only what is
to be taught is used. Thus the
input is fine tuned.
The language a baby hears is not
usually controlled-people say all sorts
of things in the presence of the baby.
Most often, the motivation to learn
is extrinsic-learners are forced to
learn.
The motivation is intrinsic-the baby
has a desire to acquire a language to
enable it communicate its needs.
There is a syllabus -giving a break
down of what is to be learnt and
the order of presentation.
There is no syllabus of what a baby
should know about a language. It is
just exposed to it.
There are very few language
models (i.e. native speakers) a
learner is exposed to e.g. teachers.
There are many language models
around the home and among play
mates.
There is focus on the form of the Language is acquired through
48
language, rules of grammar, error
detection and correction.
meaningful interaction, very few or no
corrections.
Applied linguists study first and second language acquisition in order to
understand the processes involved in gaining proficiency in language and the
stages of development. From these findings they hope to derive information
that can help in devising effective methods of teaching additional or foreign
languages, understanding language disorders and finding ways of treating
them (Hoff, 2001:3). They hope, too, to gain a better understanding of the
nature of language and as a window into the human mind.
When you examine the various second language theories you may notice that
they are based on theories of how the first language acquisition occurs.
Some theorists have assumed that second language learners go through
some of the developmental stages that children undergo before they become
fluent speakers of their mother tongue. In the learning of structure, for
instance, some errors that native English children make have been found to
be similar to those made by adult English second language learners
(Lightbown, 1985: 176) e.g. the overgeneralisation of the past participle (ed)
with irregular verbs as in * I goed home. Because of this, they speak of
language learners going through stages referred to as interlanguage before
they reach maturity or full fluency in the L2. This Interlanguage should be
understood as a learner’s systematic language that has not yet reached the
maturity of a native speaker’s competence. It is being continuously modified
as a learner becomes more proficient- as he/she gets rid of some errors so
that each subsequent stage is better than the preceding. (Interlanguage might
also have features of language transfer where L2 learners borrow patterns
found in L1 when they are unable to express themselves adequately in L2).
Now we briefly review the developmental stages of first language acquisition.
5.3. First Language development in children:
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It is believed that language development in human infants starts with the first
cry a baby makes at birth. It is the first use a baby makes of the vocal organs
that will later be used for speech. Children are said to pass through these
stages below up to the time they became fluent users of a language in a
speech community:
Stage (Milestone) Age
Crying Birth
Cooing 6 weeks
Babbling 6 months
Intonation patterns 8 months
0ne word utterance one year
Two-word utterance 18 months
Word inflections 2 years
Questions/ negatives 2 ¼ years
Complex sentences 5 years
From Aitchison, J.1983.The Articulate Mammal: Introduction to
Psycholinguitics.2nd Ed. London: Hutchinson
The actual age at which each of these milestones or stages is reached in a
child sometimes varies from child to child a little but the order is invariably the
same for all children the world over.
How can we explain this remarkable feat children perform in becoming full
fledged communicating members of a speech community within their first five
years life? Various theories have been proposed to account for this miracle
that any normal child manages to perform.
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5.4. Theories of first language acquisition
5.4.1. The role of Nurture or the environment: Behaviourists (Pavlov, Skinner).
The roots of behaviourist thinking can be traced to the English philosopher
John Locke (1632-1704) who lived in the seventeenth century (some argue
that it goes even further back to ancient Greeks such as Aristotle). Locke
wrote that children are born with blank minds or intellects like blank slates
(known as tabula rasa in Latin) devoid of reason or knowledge. It is the
people, the environment around them that shape these intellects, fill it with
ideas. Thus Locke stressed the importance of a carefully programmed and
sequenced education. For example, instruction should proceed from simple,
plain things to complex ones and should also introduce one item at a time.
Behaviourists assert that language is a form of behaviour-verbal behaviour-
and, like any other form of human behaviour or that of other animals, is
‘nurtured’ or shaped by the environment. Behaviourists believe language
acquisition is done through habit formation. A child acquires a language
through imitation of what he/she hears and if the child is praised when it
imitates correctly, she will repeat what she has said. Therefore, through
imitation and repetition, good language habits are formed. Bad imitations or
use of language if they go unrewarded or are punished, for instance by a
parent saying “Peter that is wrong” or “don’t say that” cannot be repeated.
Behaviourists believe that human and animal behaviour should only be
studied in terms of physical processes that can be observed. They thus do not
talk about ideas or the mind, which are not observable. In the Russian Ivan
Pavlov’s (1849-1936) physiological classical experiments with dogs, for
example, an external stimulus the sight of food was said to cause a
physiological response in dogs of salivating.
(Stimulus) sight of food – dog – salivating (Response) (S-R)
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Pavlov found that if he rung a bell (a neutral stimulus) at the same time as he
fed his dogs, the dogs tended to associate the sound of the bell with the food
so that when he rung the bell alone, the dogs salivated. The dogs had thus
learnt to associate the bell with food. The dogs were said to give a
conditioned response to a neutral stimulus, the bell. So one way animals can
learn is through conditioning. Pavlov’s experiments are known as classical
conditioning.
Bell (conditioned stimulus)-conditioned response (salivating)
B.F. Skinner, (1957) another more famous psychologist published a book
called Verbal Behaviour in which he explained language as a set of habits
which are built up through what he called operant conditioning in children. He
argued that verbal behaviour, like any other type of behaviour is controlled by
its consequences. He argued that if a child, for example, emits an utterance
such as “want water” and is given water by a caregiver, the child will repeat
this statement because it has had a good consequence, in future. The child’s
utterance is the operant or response that may or may not have an obvious
stimulus. Giving the child water is the reinforcement. In this case, it is positive
reinforcement as it rewards the child for making the utterance. If, however, a
child utters an obscenity and it is spanked as a result, it will avoid making
such an utterance in future because it has been punished. Skinner argued
that in these similar ways a child forms good language habits.
Skinner arrived at these conclusions from experiments he conducted using
rats and pigeons which he taught to perform complicated movements through
the use of reinforcement schedules and punishments. He argued that any
complicated task could be taught if it was broken down into smaller steps or
tasks that are learnt in a sequence and most importantly, there should be a
reward or reinforcement immediately following the desired response. Skinner
managed, for example, to teach pigeons to play table tennis. Any behaviour
that is rewarded is bound to be repeated but that which is punished or not
rewarded can become extinct. He believed language is also learnt in this way;
52
there is no need to argue that children are born with ideas about language or
that they use their minds in any way. Children are born like blank slates,
tabula rasa. They learn to behave in certain ways because of the stimuli in
the environment to which they respond and if they are rewarded they get
conditioned to those behaviours or habits.
Thus language acquisition is due to the influence of the linguistic stimulation
and reinforcement in a child’s environment: it is nurture not nature that brings
about language acquisition.
Please note that there are other variants of the behaviourist theory which
were proposed by other researchers which in some cases modified Skinners’
ideas or predated his ideas. They are, however, not radically different from the
ideas presented here.
5.4. 2. The role of Nature: The Innatists or mentalists (Noam Chomsky) It is true that children learn vocabulary and some structures from hearing and
imitating what other people around them say and the fact that they learn a
language spoken in their environment shows that the environment plays a role
in language acquisition. However, the Behaviourist theory fails to account for
many other aspects of language acquisition in children. Chomsky (1959,
1965) has argued that the Behaviourist theory of language acquisition does
not take into consideration the complex nature of language and the fact that
children appear to acquire language without being exposed to enough stimuli
of good quality. Chomsky argued that behaviourism cannot explain how
children manage to make sentences they have never heard. Furthermore, he
claims, the language children hear around them is not of perfect sentences;
adults often make incomplete sentences, they hesitate in what they want to
say or merely mutter words and so on. The latter has been called the poverty
of stimulus argument. This type of input cannot explain how children learn to
make perfect grammatical sentences. Moreover, parents or caregivers do not
deliberately instruct children. Therefore, in Chomsky’s opinion, language
acquisition must depend on an innate ability that is not the same as general
intelligence because even children who are subnormal do learn to speak.
53
Chomsky pointed out that it is not true in all cases that children learning a
language are rewarded every time they make an utterance and to say that
external stimuli ‘control’ or cause human beings to behave in some fixed way
is also not true. For example, when one sees a beautiful flower one may say
something completely unpredictable like ‘The leaves are wilting’, or ‘There are
ants on the leaves’ or nothing at all, etc. Rats on the other hand, are
conditioned to respond in a fixed way. Children do not just learn to say fixed
phrases, Chomsky argues, they internalise rules from the language they hear
around them which enable them to say and understand an infinite variety of
sentences. Language knowledge is not just a set of fixed habits, but a creative
thing. One good counter example is that of developmental errors children
make: for example they over-generalize the formation of the past simple tense
to irregular verbs such as go to goed (mentioned above). They would not say
such things because their parents do not make such mistakes. They do so
because they are constantly making hypotheses, or guesses, about the rules
governing the language they hear around them and through trial and error,
learning to modify such hypotheses until they arrive at a correct set of rules of
the language. Once they have internalised the grammatical rules, they can
then use them to generate an infinite set of new sentences as well as to
understand any sentence in that language. This is what Chomsky refers to as
the creative nature of language knowledge.
Chomsky claims children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD)
that enables them to work out the rules of any language to which they are
exposed. They are biologically pre-programmed to acquire language. This
LAD must contain a universal grammar-some ideas of how languages are
organised - which enables children to work out the grammatical rules of a
language. This must be so because it is not possible, according to him, for a
child to manage to acquire a complex thing such as language in just a few
years.
This argument, above, appears to be supported by the order of stages (or
milestones) above that all children go through in acquiring a language which
54
indicates that language acquisition must have a biological basis, just like
starting to walk or just as it happens in birds which are not trained to sing. The
milestones give us the impression that children merely mature biologically in
their ability to speak. Most likely, it is passed on in genes.
5.4.5. Other Cognitive theories
There are some psychologists who acknowledge the importance of mental
processes in language acquisition but they find Chomsky’s claim of the
existence of the LAD inadequate in that it does not explain the processes that
go on in the brain in the acquisition of language. Some of these compare the
way human beings process information to computers. They are, as
McLaughlin (1990,in Macaro, 2003:30) put it, interested in the mental events
in the brain: how information about language is stored, structured, accessed
or retrieved. They see the brain working in similar ways but more complicated
than, computers. Information is stored in neurons (nodes) and these nodes
are connected to other related nodes. Retrieval is merely activating these
nodes. Rules or regularities form in the brain because certain related nodes
are constantly being activated. As an example, we can assume that after
repeated activation of ‘ed’ in association with the expression of ‘past events’,
the node denoting ‘ed’ would be activated by a child acquiring English when
the need to express a past event with an irregular verb ‘eat’ arose and this
would result in the incorrect ‘eated’. With time, the child might get many
instances of the correct input ‘ate’ to create a new node that would store this
information. This is a very simplified example of a connectionist model of
language processing.
5.4.6. Constructivist theory
Jean Piaget, a developmental cognitive psychologist, can also be said to be a
nativist but unlike Chomsky he gives a greater role to the physical
environment in language acquisition. Children, according to Piaget, construct
their own models of reality by actively exploring their environment. This is
55
done through two processes: assimilation and accommodation. By the first
individuals form models of reality based on their previous experiences. By
accommodation they alter their models to incorporate new information or
experiences. They use their innate abilities but operating on the environment
to make hypotheses about the language, for example that they hear. They
learn through trial and error. Piaget’s theory is called Constructivism. Another
psychologist subscribing to this view is Lev Vygotsky who is more socially
inclined. He maintained that social interaction is critical in the cognitive
development of a child and did not support the idea of predetermined stages
of development that Piaget claimed existed (Brown, 2000: 11).
5.4.7. Cognition and language There appears to be some evidence indicating that language ability does not
depend on general intelligence (nor general ability to think). There seems to
be a split between general cognitive abilities and language. Evidence often
cited comes from cases of specific language impairment. For example, some
people are born with inherited disorders that affect inflectional morphology
and syntax but leave other skills unaffected. There are also cases of Williams
Syndrome-a genetic condition causing severe mental retardation. Sufferers
can have IQs as low as 50. They may be unable to tie shoelaces or get
things, say from a cupboard. Nevertheless, their language usually is at or near
normal levels.
It should be noted, however, that once language has been acquired, cognitive
developments speeded up. This is the case because children can, as
Vygotsky would put it, benefit from the experience of the able others. Parents
and older siblings help children understand things that they may on their own
find difficult to understand or do. Languages also help then find more effective
ways of structuring experiences because they provide concepts with child to
label social and physical items in their environment. The link between
language and cognition is a very intricate one and it is difficult to separate one
from the other.
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5.5.8. Is there a critical period for first language acquisition?
If language has a biological basis, it must have a critical period after which its
development becomes very difficult or impossible. Those who subscribe to the
innatist theory of language development believe that there is a critical period
in a child’s life after which acquiring a language becomes very difficult or
impossible. This is called the critical period hypothesis. The argument is
that if a child is not exposed to language before puberty, it may never acquire
a language. This happened in the case of Genie, a13-year-old girl, who was
kept locked up with her almost blind mother by her mentally ill father (Hoff,
2001: 63). When she was discovered she could not speak because up to that
time nobody had been speaking to her. Efforts were made to teach her
language but she never fully mastered syntax; her sentences were telegraphic
lacking grammatical morphemes and her comprehension of language was
poor (Hoff, 2001: 63-5). It was discovered that Genie used her right cerebral
hemisphere (of the brain) for language processing like aphasic patients. It is
believed language is processed in the left cerebral hemisphere for many
normal people. And when people have accidents that cause some damage to
the left part of the brain, their language speaking ability is sometimes
completely destroyed or they may produce very defective speech-a condition
that is called aphasia. There have been cases of children and few adults who
have recovered their ability to speak by having their right cerebral
hemispheres take over the language functions.
Would this, therefore, suggest that Genie’s left cerebral hemisphere was no
longer available to process language because she had reached puberty? This
might appear to be the case because there is another case of a girl called
Isabelle who was also neglected and abused and when found was unable to
speak. She had been living with a deaf-mute mother hidden in a darkroom in
the 1930s. She was six and half years old. It was possible to teach this child
language and she successfully acquired English lexicon and grammar
(Brown1958 in Hoff, 2001:62). Thus a child needs early exposure to language
to acquire it.
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5.5.9. Is there a critical period for second language learning? The idea of a critical period in first language acquisition has implications for
the way a second language is acquired or learnt. If it is true that a language is
best learnt early by say puberty in childhood, this implies that it might be very
difficult, if not impossible, for one to learn a second or foreign language and
become as proficient in it as a native, after this. There has been a heated
debate over this issue. It is this issue of the critical period hypothesis that is
referred to when decisions of when to start teaching a second language in an
educational system are made (see unit 2). Some would argue for an early
start others for some delay. Below is an extract on this argument. Read it
carefully to see what type of evidence has been gathered for the two
decisions (this is not to be learnt by rote, merely get the gist of the argument):
When should children start learning a second language? Are children better at learning a second language than adults?
In second language learning, some researchers have argued that children
below puberty can acquire a native–like accent but it is not possible for adults
to do so. This is attributed to what is called psychomotor factors. The term
psychomotor refers to neurological circuits that control the movement of
muscles and, in connection with the articulation of speech in particular, the
muscles in the mouth, throat, larynx, lips, tongue and others that are involved.
Some researchers have theorised that the macroneural circuits that control
the muscles involved in the articulation of speech mature early in children and
are less adaptive. Semantic relations, on the other hand, depend on neural
circuits that mature late (Walsh and Diller 1981 in Brown 2000:56). These
claims are compatible with the claim that in first language (L1) acquisition a
child’s acquisition of phonology is complete by age six or seven. Syntactical,
morphological and lexical aspects of language that depend on semantic
relations take longer (up to age ten) to acquire and vocabulary acquisition
continues into adulthood (Karmiloff-Smith 1979, Menyuk & Menn, 1979 in
Harley 1986:31-32).
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The information above has been used to lend support for the existence of a
critical period for first language acquisition. The concept of a critical period
refers to a supposed biological optimal period in the development of a child in
which a language can be easily acquired. Penfield (in Stern 1983:362), a
neurophysiologist, based his proposal on his observations of people who
suffered brain damage through accidents, surgical operations and tumours
that affected speech. He saw that those below puberty recovered from these
better than adolescents or adults and he interpreted this to mean children are
more receptive to acquiring language at this stage than later. Lenneberg
(1967 in Brown 2000:54) also argued for the existence of a critical period but
based his arguments on the lateralisation of brain functions. He argued that
starting from age two, the brain assigns different functions to either cerebral
hemisphere so that by puberty each hemisphere is specialised in cognitive
functions different from the other. For example, language is processed largely
by the left cerebral hemisphere. Acquisition of a language is thus best done
before this lateralisation is complete when there is cerebral plasticity. When it
is completed, learning a language becomes very difficult. Krashen reduced
the period it takes lateralisation to be completed to five. He based this
proposal on findings from his re-examination of the cases of speech
impairment due to brain damage. He claimed from these that only when
malfunctions occurred before the age of five could the recovery of language
skills occur.
From the explanations given in the first paragraph and the discussion of the
critical period for first language acquisition in paragraph two, we can
reasonably conclude that if a critical period for second language exists, it must
coincide with that of the first language (Scovel, 1969 in Brown, 2000:55). In
addition, we can also speculate on the role of psychomotor factors in second
language acquisition by surmising that once the neural circuits that control
speech muscles have matured in early childhood, for instance by the age of
six or seven years (see above), it becomes increasingly difficult for an older
child or adults to control the muscles involved in articulating sounds to
achieve a native-like accent of a second language. There are thousands of
these muscles, as Brown (2000:58) puts it, which require “…a tremendous
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degree of control to achieve the fluency of a native speaker of a language.”
The adult or older child, it is claimed, fails to do this because of the stiffening
of the muscles, a diminishing of the neuromuscular plasticity.
Research findings on the existence of a critical period in second language are
flout with inconsistencies that can not easily be explained away. Some
findings support the existence of a critical period while others refute these
claims. A further problem is in the definitions of what a child, an adolescent or
adult is. In some studies the ages of those considered children is given as up
to 15 (Patkowsk 1980 in Harley 1986:35), as up to 11 (Oyama in Harley
1986:34) and so on which makes cross study comparisons difficult. When we
take into consideration the ages by which phonological acquisition is
completed in first language and, by extension, the optimal period for second
language phonology- we find it very difficult to reconcile ages like 7 and 15.
Then there is the issue of how a language is acquired: whether in a classroom
situation or naturally in meaningful interactions with native speakers. Some
researchers think classroom situations favour the older children and adults
because the type of learning is more cognitively demanding
(cognitive/academic language proficiency-CALP ) than that in natural settings
( Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills-BICS )to use Cummins’
terms(1980 in Singleton 1989: 112). It would, therefore, appear that one could
only perhaps speak of easy acquisition of a language in natural settings.
However, in natural settings too, social factors might compound the whole
issue as intervening variables. Finally, comparisons on acquisition sometimes
focus on rates of acquisition and not ultimate achievement. When all these
and many other problems are considered, no clear conclusion can be
reached.
Nevertheless, if we accept Cummins’ distinction of CALP and BICS types of
language above, we may be inclined to say that there is some evidence that
shows that at least there is a sensitive period for second language
phonological acquisition. We use this term to mean that there is a period
when second language phonology might be more efficiently acquired but that
it is not impossible to acquire it after such a period (Lamendella 1977 in
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Marinova-Todd et al 2000:10).
We present below some research findings that generally indicate that younger
children are more likely to acquire a native-like accent than older children and
adults. One study, which exemplifies this argument, is Fathman’s study (1975
in Singleton 1989:109). This researcher tested the English of 140 immigrant
children to the United States aged 6 to 15. An oral production test was used in
which a series of pairs of pictures were used. The children were required to
complete sentences, phrases or supply words when prompted by the
examiner who first pointed to one of the pair of pictures and then to the other
giving an appropriate stimulus. In the second test, they were asked to
describe a composite picture. While the older children outperformed the
young on more syntactic and morphological aspects, the younger children
between 6 and 10 were rated higher than those older in pronunciation.
Another study typical of these results is Burstall et al (1974 in Harley
1986:25). They, for example, found after comparing native English children
who had started learning French in brief sessions daily at the age of eight to
those who started at eleven that the older pupils did better in listening, reading
and writing. However, in a speaking test that was more communicative, the
younger learners did better. This would indicate that phonology is easier to
acquire by children than by adults although the age issue puts even these
children above the critical age of phonological acquisition.
In a natural setting, Oyama (1976 in Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991:158)
studied 60 Italian immigrants to the USA whose ages on arrival there had
ranged from 6-20. It was found that those who had arrived in the country at an
early age were more native-like in their accent than the older ones. Those
older than 12 had accents and also a few below this age. But generally, the
research seemed to confirm that there is a sensitive period for phonological
acquisition. Asher & Gasia (1969 in Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991:158)
found similar results in their study of 71 Cubans. Those who had arrived at the
age of one to six were judged more native-like, followed by those aged seven
to twelve and the thirteen to nineteen were the poorest.
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Singleton (1989:110) concluded from a number of studies, which showed
superior performance by the younger children against adults and older
children in pronunciation that they provide plausible suggestions for the
existence of different maturational influences. These might be due to different
maturation rates of neural circuits. It seems reasonable to conclude that for
the acquisition of phonology at least, there is empirical evidence that seems to
indicate that there is a sensitive period for its acquisition. The cut off ages of
six and seven suggested by in Harley (1986) above appear to be supported
by some of the findings but others push the limit higher to twelve.
5.5.10. Implications of these findings in the teaching of English in basic schools in Zambia.
The discussion above suggests that there is a sensitive period for the
acquisition of phonology in children put at 6-7 years of age. Therefore,
it is in order to teach oral English to grade one pupils at this stage so
that their accents can be native-like. However, there is a problem in
this: there are very few native English-speaking teachers in Zambia
(except in a few private schools) who can impart this native accent to
the children. In the absence of these native speakers, children will
tend to speak a Zambian variety of English and it would appear we can
not use the evidence above as justification for teaching in English from
grade one.
Older children and adults seem to learn syntactical, morphological and
lexical aspects of language, which depend on semantic relations, faster
than younger children. Thus even if there was a delay in starting the
teaching of English say until the age of nine (to allow for the learning of
initial literacy in Zambian languages), children would learn the grammar
quite easily. After all, the type of language required for successful
performance in school is, as Cummins (1979) put it is CALP type (i.e.
Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). This is the
decontextualized type of language used in books. The language used
for problem solving, defining, analysing, synthesising and evaluating
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and not mere interpersonal communication. It is more demanding
cognitively and, according to the discussion above, the biological basis
for it takes longer to develop. It is important to note that some research
has shown that 5-25% of people aged above puberty achieved native-
like proficiency in a second language (Birdsong, 1999 quoted by Hoff,
2001: 70).However, ultimately, those who start learning a language
earlier acquire greater proficiency in the second language.
Activity:
1. What are the major differences between the Nativist and Behaviourist
theories of first language acquisition?
2. What is the relationship between cognition and language?
3. What is meant by a critical period and a sensitive period?
4. What is the constructivist theory of language acquisition?
5. What reasons would you give for teaching English in grade one?
UNIT 6.0: APPROACHES, METHODS AND TECHNIQUES’ IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
6.1. Introduction Starting with unit 2, we start examining various methods and approaches that
have been proposed for teaching second and foreign language. The units are
not structured in the same way but they all contain information about
underlying theories of language and learning and techniques. In some cases,
I have also mentioned the teachers’ and learners’ roles and even presented
sample lessons to illustrate the approach or method practically. The
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information is not exhaustive on each method and so you need to supplement
it with further reading from the required and recommended books.
An attempt has been made to sequence the approaches and methods
chronologically so as to illustrate the paradigmatic changes- i.e. changing
patterns in thinking about second and foreign language teaching. It would help
you in comprehending these methods by comparing them to your own
learning experiences or teaching experiences if you are a serving teacher.
Can you recognise any features in these methods/approaches that may have
been used in teaching you or in your own teaching? Try to read the methods
critically but with an open mind. Consider also how they could be combined or
selections made from them to make your teaching more effective.
After the last approach, unit 12, I have put down eight points which some
theorists feel explain features that applied linguists seem to have been
seeking in the development of teaching methods. It would help to evaluate all
the methods against them. Which ones have addressed all or most of those?
Is there any best method? You alone can answer this question.
6.2. Unit objectives: After reading through all the methods you should able to:
-explain the theories of language and learning underlying each method or
approach.
-explain the strengths and weaknesses of each approach/method.
-make informed choices in their use of methods or techniques.
6.3. A Language Theory is:
The thought underlying language teaching (Stern,1990);
A system of thought
A conceptual framework in which to place different observations,
phenomena, or activities
A ‘hypothesis’, or a set of hypotheses verified by observations or
experiment
6.4. Theories and Approaches of Language Teaching and Learning
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6.4.1. Approach A set correlative:
• Theories;
• Ideas;
• Beliefs;
• Concepts;
• Assumptions
about the nature of language teaching (Richards and Rodgers ,1986;
Anthony, 1996,Chishimba, 2009)
• An approach may have a number of methods
• An approach describes the nature of the subject matter to be taught
(Chishimba, 2009)…
• An approach is axiomatic i.e.it is obviously true, or is accepted as true
Richards and Rodgers quote Anthony who defined approach as “theories
about the nature of language teaching” (1986:16). Seaton on the other hand,
refers it to as “.....the way you deal with something” (1995:44). Going by the
first definition nature of language would be the way language is, then the way
we can teach it. Hence, this ties well with Seaton’s explanation that it is the
way we advance in teaching a language. Approach has an element of stages
or steps or procedures one takes to teach language (or a skill or concept of
(a) language).
TECHNIQUE
APPROACH
METHOD
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6.4.2. Method This is an overall:
• plan;
• Way;
• Procedure;
• System;
for the orderly prosecution of language materials based on the selected
approach (Richards et al;1986; Anthony, 1996; Chishimba, 2009).
Seaton also defines a method as “.... a way of doing something, especially an
ordered set of actions or processes. ...... good planning or efficient
organisation” (Ibid : 592). An approach, according to Rodgers and Richards is
a set of correlative assumptions dealing with the nature of language teaching
and learning. An approach describes the nature of the subject matter to be
taught. A method is an overall plan for the orderly prosecution of language
materials, no part of which contradicts, and all of which is based upon, the
selected approach. An approach is axiomatic, a method is procedural. Within
one approach can be many methods. Axiomatic since an approach is
obviously true, or is accepted as true.
6.4.3. Techniques It is the:
• strategy;
• trick;
• tactic;
which is actually taking place in a classroom used to accomplish an
immediate objective
• It is consistent with a method as well as an approach
The three are hierarchical. One approach can have many methods and one
method can have several techniques.
This is implementation (can be carried out). It is that which is actually taking
place in a classroom. A particular trick, strategy etc used to accomplish an
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immediate objective. Techniques are within, and be consistent with, a
method. It must be in harmony with an approach, therefore.
Defining the above concepts serves to explain that language teaching follows
approaches, which are generally ways of teaching language. These
approaches are disbursed in methods which are procedures/stages/steps
prescribed at the planning stage using which you teach language. Methods
happen to have techniques, which are actual sets of activities one uses to
deliver a lesson. To exemplify this we can find dramatisation as a method.
This method will have steps we take when presenting a lesson using drama,
which are techniques.
APPROACHES
METHODS
TEACHNIQUES
N/B: 1 APROACH = MANY METHODS & 1 METHOD= MANY TECHIQUES
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ILLUSTRATION
When male students come to University of Zambia, many have their own
versions of what good life on campus is. A good number of them, however,
think that having a girlfriend on campus signifies good life. We would say that
to such students an approach to good life on campus is having a girlfriend. In
order to achieve their goal, they need to come up with a method. There a
various methods lying around of presenting their manifestos? These would
include writing a letter, doing assignments for the lady, buying the lady all
sorts of gifts with a hope that one day she would realize that the gifts-giving
were not just mere acts of charity but silent ways of registering love, sending a
third party to convey the love message or just gazing at the lady each time an
opportunity arises. So, one approach to good life on campus can be achieved
using many methods.
Let us imagine that the gentleman has decided to use one particular method,
that of writing a letter, can he just pull out a paper from a mathematics
exercise book and write his letter on it, you think? Do you think any other
ordinary paper would do? Don’t you imagine seeing this gentleman looking for
a flowered writing pad from shop to shop? If buying gifts was the method to be
used, what kind of gifts do you think the gentleman could be buying? If the
gifts included food stuff, do you see him buying ordinary food that every Phiri
and Banda are buying? This is where techniques come in. All those small
things such as looking for writing pad with flowers, buying special food stuff
are techniques used in a given method implying that one method can have a
ray of techniques to be used.
There area a number of approaches, methods and techniques which are
followed in the teaching of any particular language. These approaches,
methods and techniques have developed with time and notable among the
most used ones in language teaching are the following:
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As said already, these approaches, methods and techniques have developed
progressively with each one of these coming as a reaction to the other. They
have also moved from teacher control to pupil freedom in a classroom
situation. The continuum below shows how the progression has moved with
teaching trends changing from teacher control to pupil centeredness
classroom situation. Using your experience a s a teacher, you may recall how
you have used some of these approaches, methods and techniques in class
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ENGISH LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODS CONTINUUM LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODS
(CONTROLLED RESPONSES TO FREE INTERACTION) CONTROL FREEDOM (EFL STRUCTURAL BEHAVIOURAL TRANSFORMATIONAL COGNITIVE SOCIALINGUISTICS PSYCHO-LINGUISTICS LINGUISTICS PSYCHOLOGY GRAMMAR PSYCHOLOGY SEMANTICS AUDIO-LINGUAL METHOD (1940S) COGNITIVE –CODE SITUATIONAL APPROACH (1960S) METHOD (1960S) COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH (1970S) MEANING IN USE (1970’S) NOTIONS MIXTURE INDUCTIVE ISOLATED DEDUCTIVE RULE EXPLANATION INDUCTIVE/DEDUCTIVE FUNCTIONS OF SYNTHETIC ANALYTIC MECHANISTIC LISTENING-SPEAKING LANGUAGE PRACTICE MEANING EMPHASISED SITUATIONS STRUCTURES/ READING-WRITING ANALYSIS THRO’ SITTUATIONS REFLECT TEXTS MEMORISATION DRILLS, TABLES TRAIL & ERROR NO DISTINCTIVE ISOLATED PATTERNS LEARNER’S DRAMA + MIMICRY DIALOGUES (HYPOTHESIS METHOD NEEDS ROLE PLAY TESTING) AVOIDANCE CHORAL RESPONSES MENTALISTIC DRILLS, DIALOGUES & COGNITIVE COMMUNICATIVE ERROR LANGUAGE LABS & CREATIVE WRITTEN EX. BASED ACTIVITIES ON VISUAL + LING. SITUATIONS DEDUCATIVE AUTHENTIC MATERIALS NEGLECT OF INTERGRATEL MEANING LANGUAGE SKILLS TRENDS 1. Control to Freedom (Role of Teacher) 4. Addition of Meaning in ELT 2. Attitude to error 5. Interaction Types (variety of 3. Theoretical Influence 6.Changes in Teaching/Learning materials
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The Journey you have seen above is what will follow through out the coming
unites in this module. Now, let us look at then one by one:
Unit 7.0: THE GRAMMAR-TRANSLATION METHOD
7.1. Introduction As language teachers yourselves, you may be aware of the fact that this
method of teaching foreign languages came before the development of
language theories and also theories of learning. It developed from what was
known as the classical method that had been the dominant way of involved
mainly the study of philosophy, mathematics, natural science and classical
languages like Greek and Latin. Latin was considered useful in developing
logical thinking and as a way of introducing learners to the great writings of
this dead language. Between 1840-1940s, the classical method was also
used for teaching other foreign languages in Europe and elsewhere.
7.2. The goal of language teaching The main goal of teaching a language in this method was to enable a learner
to read the literature of the foreign language and to be able to translate texts
from it into the first language and vice versa.
7.3. Learning a foreign language Learning a foreign language consisted of memorising lists of bilingual
vocabulary i.e. a list of words in the foreign language with their translations in
the first language. Grammar was taught deductively. This means that the
teacher would first give a rule and then find examples to illustrate it. For
example, a teacher would state the following rule to illustrate how the past
simple tense is formed in English:
The past simple tense for the regular verbs is formed by adding the past
participle to a verb (verb+ ed.) And then give illustrations like the following:
John walked home from school.
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It involved memorising grammatical rules and translations of texts from the
target language into the mother tongue and back again. Accuracy in such
translations was stressed. Learners were made to read difficult texts in the
foreign language and this started early enough in the programme. The
medium of instruction was the mother tongue and learners were not
encouraged to communicate in the target language as this was not one of the
goals of teaching the language.
7.4. Strengths and weaknesses As can be seen from this brief description, there was emphasis on
grammatical rules, vocabulary and translation of texts. The language was
stilted, formal and inauthentic; it was impersonal and non-contextualized.
There was no real-life interaction. As a result, the method did not develop
communicative competence in the foreign language. Pronunciation was not
stressed and activities involving communication among learners were not
important. The main emphasis was on reading and writing the language.
Students found learning foreign languages very tedious and boring as it
involved memorising long lists of words or grammatical rules. There was also
no theory of learning or language to justify what was being done in schools.
On the other hand, it had some advantages in that it did not require
specialisation on the part of the teacher to teach a language. It was also easy
to construct grammatical and translation exercises and tests and also to score
them objectively. It also led in some cases to reading proficiency in a foreign
language and some learners were able to grasp the abstract system of the
language they were studying as a body of knowledge.
This method persists to day. It is also possible to find many teachers resorting
to it in basic schools in Zambia. There are many parts of the world were
foreign languages are still being taught in this way.
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Consider the following lesson and comment on whether it is possible to find
this being done in our basic schools. Are there some aspects that are related
to the Grammar Translation Method?
7.5. The learning experience
Case study A teacher enters a grade 5 class. She tells the pupils to open their class reader on page 50 and asks one child to read a few lines. She then asks another to translate into the local language what has been read. She comments on the accuracy of the translation dwelling in particular on a few troublesome vocabulary items before asking another pupil to read a few lines after which another pupil is told to translate. The process goes on until the passage is read to the end. Then the teacher asks pupils to answer the comprehension questions on the passage in their exercise books and they do this in English. After they have answered the questions, the teacher goes through the questions discussing the answers with pupils in a mixture of English and a Zambian language. Pupils who can not use English answer or ask
questions in the local language. When a pupil fails to answer one question, the teacher refers it to another pupil until a correct one is answered. Since the answers are of the multiple choice type, the teacher tells the pupils to exchange books and mark each others exercises.
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Activity:
1. Are there aspects of this method that you may have noticed in the way
you were taught in primary school?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of teaching in this way?
3. In your own words summarize the advantages and disadvantages of
this method.
4. What were the goals of the Grammar Translation Method?
5. From what is explained about the method, what do you think were the
teacher’s and pupils’ roles in the teaching learning process?
UNIT 8: THE DIRECT METHOD
8.1. Introduction Brown (2000:43) recounts the story of François Gouin whose experiences of
learning German using the Grammar Translation method (above) left him
unable to engage in communication with native speakers of German; unable
to understand anything they said in spite of having memorised all the
grammatical rules and thousands of words of German and translated two
books into the language. Gouin compared his efforts at trying to master
German to his three-year nephew who was acquiring French as a mother
tongue. He noticed that the boy was fluent in the language by three. This
made him take interest in the way children acquired their first language. He
concluded from these observations of his nephew and other toddlers that they
used language as a means of representing the world to themselves; that they
changed their perceptions into concepts. He concluded that the best way to
learn a language was to do so directly in it i.e. with no translations. This he
said was the naturalistic way.
8.1. The goal of language learning
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These insights were developed into a teaching method that came to be known
as the series method and later as the direct method. The goal was to enable a
learner to communicate in the target language and be able to think directly in
it with no translation.
8.2. Learning a foreign language
It was originally known as the series method because the teaching procedure
centred on the use of a series of sentences based on some key verbs were :
e.g.
I walked toward the window. I drew near to the window. I opened the
window…etc.
These sentences involved various word classes and vocabulary but were
taught without grammatical explanations. Children are believed to acquire a
language naturally without explanations. Children can work out the
grammatical rules on their own inductively. We learn inductively when after
hearing many examples of a structure, as in a dialogue-a favourite teaching
tool- one is able to deduce the underlying rules e.g.
Mary married Peter.
Peter worked in a bank.
Mary walked home from work everyday.
From these sentences, a child should tell that to talk about the past, one
needs to add to words indicating activities (verbs), ed. This is inductive
learning that depends on working out rules from examples given.
The target Language was used as the medium of instruction. The vocabulary
used was of everyday objects and activities and so were the sentences.
These concrete objects, pictures and activities were used to demonstrate
abstract words or concepts. They were illustrated through association of
ideas. Speech and listening comprehension and correct pronunciation were
emphasised. Everything was taught orally first before being presented in
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written form. There was careful grading of oral communication skills to be
taught. Advanced learners were made to read the literature of the target
language but no grammatical analysis of the text was done. Literature was
read for comprehension and pleasure.
Pupils through what they learnt orally such as dialogues and what they later
read learnt about the culture of the target language inductively. Culture was
considered an important aspect of second or foreign language teaching.
8.3. Strengths and weaknesses
This method became very popular towards the end of the 19th Century up to
the early 20th especially through private schools called the Berlitz schools. It
worked well in schools with small class sizes and well motivated learners who
could be given individual attention. Teaching was intensive. It also worked
well when native speaking teachers or those with near native competence
were used because correct pronunciation of L2 was stressed.
However, it did not work well in public schools with large class sizes, poor
resources and poorer teachers. It did not produce pupils who were able to
communicate properly in writing but those who could speak the language well.
Like the grammar translation method, this too did not have any theoretical
underpinnings to justify its existence.
It is worth noting that this was the precursor of the audio-lingual method that
came into force and was revolutionary in second and foreign language
teaching later.
Activity 8.1:
1. What are the major differences between the grammar translation method and the direct method? Which one, in your opinion, is a better method?
2. What are the main principles of the direct method?
3. Discuss the possible roles of the teacher and pupils in the teaching learning process of this method?
4. How much freedom do you think pupils were allowed?
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UNIT 9.0: THE AUDIO-LINGUAL METHOD
9.1. Introduction
In this unit, you will explore the Audio Lingual method, starting from its
historical development, the linguistic and psychological theories behind it and
its characteristics in language teaching and classroom practices. The unit will
present to you cases studies for you to look at and try to visualize the theories
behind Audio Lingual method at work in classroom situations.
Case study
Read this case study in form of a learning experience in which a number of
principles of the Audio-lingual method are used to teach a number of
vocabulary items. Imagine you observing a teacher teaching a grade 2 class.
She has planned to teach the following vocabulary items: “something,
anything and nothing”.
Pupils have just come back from break and as they settle down the teacher
tells them.
“Now it is time for English. “ The teacher announces in English. She holds up
a closed right hand. “I have something in my right hand. I have something in
my right hand. What is it?” since she hasn’t signalled to the pupils to answer
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they merely gaze at her expectantly. She opens her hand and then says, “It is
a rubber.” She puts the rubber on the table and shows the pupils her empty
right hand.
“Have I got anything in my right hand? Have I got anything in my right hand?
No, I haven’t.” She repeats the actions and expressions using her left hand.
Then she picks up another object, a coin and holding up her right hand says,
“All of you say, “Teacher, you have something in your right hand.” The class in
a chorus answers: “Teacher, you have something in your right hand.” “Again!”
calls the teacher. “Good,” cries the teacher satisfied it has been said correctly.
The class once again choruses, “Teacher, you have something in your right
hand.” The teacher says, “Good. Yes, I have something in my right hand.
Look I have a rubber.” The teacher picks up a small box in the right hand. “All
of you say, ‘‘You have something in your right hand.” The class says as
required. This continues with groups and individual pupils.
The teacher then announces to the class, “All of you say, Have you anything
in your hand? Have you anything in your hand?”
Class: Have you anything in your hand?
Teacher: No. I haven’t. (Teacher shows his empty left hand.) I haven’t
anything in my left hand.
The teacher repeats this with groups and individuals.
Teacher calls a pupil to the front. She shows the pupil her right hand. “I have
something in my right hand. What is it? “
Pupil: “It is a pencil.” The teacher gives the pupil the pencil and tells the pupil
to show the pencil to another pupil and to say: “I have something in my hand.
What is it?” The teacher praises the pupil. The second pupil repeats this with
a third pupil and this continues around the class. The teacher walks around
listening as the pupils practice the structures. The lesson continues with the
teacher teaching the word, “nothing” in a similar way. (Based on a lesson in
MOE. 1970. English Language: Grade 2. Zambia Primary Course: Teachers’
Handbook. Lusaka: Neczam.
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ACTIVITY 8.2 After reading the learning experience in the case study above in 8.1, how
would you answer the following questions?
1. What role is the teacher playing?
2. On the other hand, what roles are learners playing in this learning
experience?
3. What would you consider to be the main characteristics of the methods
employed by the teacher in this lesson?
4. What are the chances of pupils making mistakes in the drill they are
engaged into by the teacher?
Look at the table below and see which answers seem to agree with those you
gave in your answers to the question above. Update your answers by adding
those you have found in the table below:
The teacher is the controller of the class room situation
The teacher controls the material and the pace of the lesson
The pupils are merely repeating after the teacher
The main characteristics in this lesson are repetitions, choruses by pupils,
total control by the teacher with no pupil contribution to the new language
being taught.
No possibility of errors on the part of the learner unless the teacher is the
one who has made that error being repeated by the learners
Pupils are treated as if they do not know anything
The above scenario gives a preamble of the method you are considering in
this unit- the Audio-Lingual methods. What about its historical background?
As a method, where did it come from and when did it find itself on the market
of language teaching methods?
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8.1. A historical note Although some of the principles and procedures of the Audio-lingual method
were adapted from the direct method, the real impetus to the development of
this method was break out of world war two. It became evident to the United
States of America when it got involved in the world war that its army
personnel required training in many foreign languages that the army came in
contact with during the war. They needed people to decode, translate and
interpret messages from and into English from a variety of foreign languages.
The army thus sought a quick method of training such personnel. It had
contracted a total of 55 universities to deal with this issue by 1943. In some
universities even before this there had been developments aimed at finding a
scientific and objective way of studying and describing languages. This
generally referred to as the scientific method involved the use of native
informants (those speaking a foreign language as a mother tongue) working
with a linguist who had been trained in systematic ways of eliciting linguistic
information.
This scientific method was train army personnel. A linguist would elicit
linguistic information form a native informant and then use that to drill a
student. As this method became established it became known as the army
method and also sometimes the intensive method because it required
concentrated hours of study put at 10 hours per day for a six -days week.
In 1957 when the Soviets launched their first satellite sputnik, Americans
moved quickly not only to improve the teaching of science in schools to catch
up with Soviet science but also to improve the teaching of foreign languages.
This is when the Audiolingual became dominant with the application of some
of the ideas from the army method and others from linguistic and
psychological studies being conducted in universities. Before this, the method
was known by many names: oral approach, structural approach, and aural-
oral. Audiolingualism persisted into the early 1970s and indeed variants of it
are still being practised in schools worldwide today.
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8.2. Structural linguistics and the structural theory of language
In the 1940-50s, linguists such as Leonard Bloomfield, Edward Sapir, Charles
Fries, Charles Hockett were working on ways of scientifically describing
languages as opposed to the prescriptive traditions that had been dominant in
linguistics. Prior to this, language description was based on Latin grammatical
terms even though languages like English are different from Latin in being
less inflected. Because of this dependence of Latin grammar, some of the
rules prescribed for the correct use of English were not really what people
naturally used in everyday speech. The linguists above went back to
collecting linguistic information as it was used directly by native informants
and merely described the patterns that they noticed. They ignored anything
that could not be demonstrated empirically.
Central to their thinking was the idea of structure. Language is a self-
contained relational structure, the elements of which derive their existence
and their value from their distribution and oppositions in sentences. There are
different levels in a language structure starting with sounds, then words,
phrases, clauses and sentences (or phonological, morphological and syntactic
levels). Each sentence can be thought of as having slots into which words fit:
nouns, verbs, adverbs etc. Further more each word also has slots for
phonemes. At each level, therefore, there are rules (grammatical) governing
their distribution elements and also how they can be added, shifted, joined or
transformed. The elements make sense because they are different from each
other i.e. lead to different meanings as in bat and cat. The initial phonemes in
these two words have the same distribution but are different in because they
help realize different words. We say there is opposition.
Since languages differ from each other in the linguistic patterns their
structures have and according to structural linguists like Bloomfield, no
preconceptions should be entertained when studying a foreign language. This
why a linguist can only describe what he/she finds attested (used by
speakers) in a language but can not prescribe rules as to how a language
should be used.
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Another very important principle of structural linguists is that language is
primarily oral and their language description was based on oral language from
native informants. Written language is derived from the spoken language.
8.3. Behaviourists and the theory of language learning At the time structuralists were formulating the ideas about language above,
there was also a school of thought in psychology led by Skinner. Like the
structuralists, skinner and other Behaviourists had a similar understanding of
what they considered a scientific study; that it should have nothing to do with
intuitions, consciousness or even thought in that all these can not be
empirically demonstrated. We have seen in unit 3 how the Behaviourists
explain the process of language development in children. From what was
been mentioned there and in this 8.2. we can draw some principles about
second language learning.
a) Like the direct method above, the goal of teaching a foreign or second
language is to enable learners to communicate in L2; they have to over
learn the language so that it becomes second nature i.e. can be used
automatically as language habits. There was emphasis as seen in the
learning experience above on pupils being able to speak the language.
b) If language is a form of habit formation, it follows that learning a
language is forming new habits. These habits are learnt through
practice and in the classroom this is better done through drills (more is
said about drills below). In the learning experience above, can you
identify some drills that the teacher used? The teacher made pupils
repeat sentences in which the vocabulary items she was teaching were
used. Repetition is an important technique in Audiolingual method
because it can aid memorization which eventually can lead to
automaticity in using language structures by pupils. Therefore, is a
tendency to stress over-learning in the Audiolingual method. The
patterns that are drilled are identified through structural analysis.
c) Structures are carefully selected and sequenced and taught one at a
time. Thus lessons have a specific behavioural objective centred on the
masterly of a pattern by the end of the period. Each language pattern
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has to be mastered before pupils move on to the next. Teaching is from
simple to complex, known to unknown. Vocabulary is also carefully
selected and sequenced in terms of teaching e.g. from concrete to
abstract.
d) Because stress is put on correct language habits, the teacher has to
ensure that she is a good model of the language. In the lesson above,
she first models the sentences a number of times, stressing the new
vocabulary item (shown in bold type) so that the pupils get not only the
correct pronunciation but also the correct sentence structure.
e) Pupils are told when to speak and to say what they are told to so that
errors are avoided. Errors corrected when they appear in children’s
speech.
f) Since language is primarily oral, teaching should start with listening,
then speaking, reading and writing. One must first listen correctly
before imitating and written language must come later as it is a mere
derivation of spoken language. There has to be an extended pre-
reading stage before any writing can be taught.
g) Since languages are said to differ from each other, similarly, learning a
new language is like learning new language habits. Pupils should only
use the target language in class and the teaching is in the same
language. The old habits have to be suppressed in order for the new
ones to take hold. Thus proponents of this method recommended
contrastive linguistic analysis (CLH) of the L1 and L2 to find differences
between the languages which would potentially make it difficult to learn
a new language and those similarities which would facilitate its
learning. In this way negative transfer of habits from the L1 to L2 could
be avoided while allowing for positive transfer of similar linguistic
features.
h) There should be immediate reinforcement of pupils’ responses: positive
if they are correct and negative if not. In the lesson above, the teacher
praised pupils for making correct responses.
i) Grammar is taught inductively. Note that in the lesson above the
teacher did not explain how something or anything are used.
Vocabulary just like sentence patterns is taught in a linguistic context.
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For instance, pupils were expected in the lesson above to note that we
use anything in questions and negative sentences. This is learning
from the example presented, from the language used for practice and
formulating for oneself rules. Notice that the teacher does not have
also to explain the meaning of a word or even a structure. This should
be deduced by the pupils from the linguistic context. Teachers should
also use audio-visual aids, physical demonstrations to get the meaning
across. New items sometimes can be learnt by analogy.
Activity 8.3:
1. Look at the lesson again and try to deduce the roles played by
the teacher and learners in an audio-lingual class.
2. What type of materials and activities were used in class?
3. What is contrastive linguistic analysis?
4. One major problem Zambian children face is the mastering of
question tags in English. Can you account for this difficulty using
the contrastive linguistic analysis?
8.4. Techniques Among the techniques used in teaching in audio-lingual classes are dialogues
used not only to present and practice language patterns but also to aid
memorisation of language patterns. Dialogues are also used to encode
cultural information so that in the process of practising the structures, pupils
also learn something about the culture of the people; how they live, work,
dress etc.
The other technique is the use of various types of drills. Drills are, in a way, a
method of conditioning pupils to the use of language patterns in a target
language. As can be seen from the learning experience, teaching using drills
requires that the teacher model the correct way of saying some language item
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while pupils listen carefully and then the pupils are asked to repeat what the
teacher said. Drills help to focus attention on language forms and to improve
accuracy in the production of the same. Since teachers can immediately give
feed back to the pupils it helps pupils to know when they are correct or wrong
and helps them make corrections when necessary. In this way teachers can
also notice problems, deficiencies in the pupils language and to find remedies
for them. They also help with class management as the teacher is totally in
charge. She is able to make all the pupils active. When used properly,
therefore, drills can be very effective tools of language teaching and can lead
to fluency. To make drills more meaningful teachers should start by first
explaining language structures before bringing drills to increase accuracy for
example in pronunciation. Teachers should also use drills sparingly-limiting
them to for example vocabulary teaching, or to language chunks that may
cause problems for pupils to pronounce such as consonant clusters like /gr/
and sounds that are absent in the L1.
In the lesson above two types of drills were used viz : repetition and ripple
drill, respectively. In the former, pupils were made to repeat some sentences
by the teacher and in the latter, the teacher uttered a number of sentences to
a pupil and then told the pupils to say similar sentences to another pupil and
that other pupil also did the same to another until it went round the class.
ACTIVITY 8.4
Look at the other types of drills which are briefly illustrated. In these examples
below, T stands for teacher and P(s) pupil or pupils. Go through all the drills
given and list down the characteristics that emerge clearly in these drills:
Substitution or replacement:
T: This a boy.
Ps: This is a boy.
T: Girl.
Ps: This is a girl.
Completion:
The teacher has a series of pictures showing children engaged in various
activities. The teacher shows one of these to pupils and says:
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T: John is riding a bicycle.
Ps: John is riding a bicycle.
T: shows a picture of a boy walking. Chanda.
Ps: Chanda is walking.
Conversion or transformation:
T: Muntinta is tall.
T: Is Muntinta tall?
T: I say: Muntinta is tall.
T: You say: Is Muntinta tall?
T: Muntinta is tall.
Ps: Is Muntinta tall?
Integration:
T: A man was killed. He is a policeman. The man who was killed is a
policeman.
T: A boy stole a shirt. He is a pupil at this school.
T: The boy… (Signals to pupils to complete the sentence)
Ps: The boy who stole a shirt is a pupil at this school.
Etc.
8.5. Hints for using Audiolingual drills in L2 teaching (Based on Mora, J.K. 2002 found at http://coe.sdsu.edu/people/jmora/ALMMethods.htm#ALM accessed on
14/07/07) The notes below do not strictly follow the Audiolingual practice. There are
some modifications made to make drilling less mechanical and more
meaningful. The assumption here is that drills are still a useful technique of
teaching certain aspects of a second or foreign language.
1. The teacher must be careful to insure that all of the utterances which
students will make are actually within the practiced pattern. For example, the
use of the auxiliary verb have should not suddenly switch to have as a main
verb.
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2. Drills should be conducted as rapidly as possible so as to insure automaticity and to establish a system.
3. Ignore all but gross errors of pronunciation when drilling for grammar practice.
4. Use of shortcuts to keep the pace of drills at a maximum. Use hand motions, signal cards, notes, etc. to cue response. You are a choir director.
5. Use normal English stress, intonation, and juncture patterns conscientiously.
6. Drill material should always be meaningful. If the content words are not known, teach their meanings.
7. Intersperse short periods of drill (about 10 minutes) with very brief alternative activities to avoid fatigue and boredom.
8. Introduce the drill in this way:
a. Focus (by writing on the board, for example)
b. Exemplify (by speaking model sentences)
c. Explain (if a simple grammatical explanation is needed)
d. Drill
9. Don’t stand in one place; move about the room standing next to as many different students as possible to spot check their production. Thus you will know who to give more practice to during individual drilling.
10. Use the "backward build up" technique for long and/or difficult patterns.
--tomorrow
--in the cafeteria tomorrow
--will be eating in the cafeteria tomorrow
--Those boys will be eating in the cafeteria tomorrow.
11. Arrange to present drills in the order of increasing complexity of student
response. The question is: How much internal organization or decision
making must the student do in order to make a response in this drill. Thus:
imitation first, single-slot substitution next, then free response last.”
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8.6. Strengths and weaknesses: Some of the weaknesses were mentioned in unit 3 when we discussed
behaviourisms as one of theories of language acquisition.
1. They In terms of language teaching and learning, Audiolingualisms is
one of the methods which have been referred to as the transmission
model of teaching. It is assumed in these methods that the teacher is
the one who has knowledge of the language and pupils are blank. So
the teacher pours knowledge into the blank minds. Thus pupils are
passive in learning and only speak or make contributions when
required. It is a teacher centred method.
2. Pupils find learning especially when language drills are used, tedious
and boring. Learning is not meaningful as language patterns presented
are often isolated discrete elements out of context. Pupils also find it
difficult to engage in meaningful extended discourse that is, to transfer
what they have learnt to real social interaction. 3. Emphasis is put on speaking not writing. So pupils produced tend to
be good at using oral language than in writing or even reading. 4. The desire to have pupils speak like natives was unattainable in most
cases because of the absence of native speaker teachers. 5. The Audiolingual method required expensive equipment to work
properly such as language labs and audio-video equipment and
personnel trained to use them. These were difficult to provide in third
world countries. On the other hand there are also some strengths, which were noted about
the method.
1. The principles of teaching from simple to complex were useful and
effective.
2. It led to fluency in speaking in L2 and where native teachers were
used, pupils’ pronunciation was noticeably better.
3. The systematic selection, ordering and sequencing of language
patterns and vocabulary made it easier to teach the essential patterns
of the language. It also made planning of lessons easier.
4. Errors in the use of the language were also minimised.
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UNIT 9.0 COGNITIVE CODE LEARNING APPROACH
9.1. Introduction The decline of the Audiolingual method, which lasted up to the 1970s, made
applied linguists take more interest in theories of learning coming from
cognitive psychology. They were in part influenced by Chomsky’s criticism of
Skinners’ Behaviourist theories of learning. As we have seen, Skinner’s
Behaviourist theory fell short of adequately explaining the way language is
acquired since conditioning alone could not explain how speakers manage to
utter new sentences and understand equally infinite novel ones. It could not
also explain what meaning was and the part that played in language without
bringing the mind in! Neither could it explain the abstract nature of language.
So they turned to cognitive psychology to see how meaning could be
incorporated into the teaching and learning of languages.
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9.2. Cognitive psychology: Cognition refers to every mental process involved in the experience of
knowing. It includes how we perceive information, process, understand, store,
retrieve it and learn concept formation. All these have to do with what goes in
a person’s brain (or mind), which Behaviourists ignored because they said the
mind was inaccessible. The branch of psychology that deals with the study of
the nature and learning of systems of knowledge, such as the processes
mentioned above, is called cognitive psychology (Richards et al. 1992).
Psychologists who subscribed to this approach included Jean Piaget, Lev
Vygotsky, Jeremy Brunner, David Ausubel etc., and of course, Noam
Chomsky’s theory of language acquisition is compactable with cognitive
psychological thinking.
We have referred to aspects of cognitive psychology above. In spite of
differences between Piaget and Chomsky and others in approach, there are a
number of commonalities in that all believe human beings are born with a
mental endowment that makes them active processors of information which
enables them to learn but differ in the way they acknowledge the role of the
environment in learning. Below we mention a few principles which applied
linguists found useful in thinking about teaching a second language.
9.3. Language theory
The theory of language came from Chomsky’s theory of transformational
generative grammar, which he first proposed in his book Syntactic structures
(1957).
Let us remind ourselves of a few of Chomsky’s ideas. He asserted that
children are born with LAD. It is this LAD that enables babies to tell what is a
language from what is not. They are pre-programmed to look for linguistic
features in the environment. He also argued that languages have a system of
common principles of organisation constituting a universal grammar that is “…
available to each individual prior to experience.” (Chomsky 1981 in
Haegaman, 1994:13). Universal grammar is species specific to human
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beings. These principles only differ in the way they are implemented or set,
what he calls parameters. For example, the concepts of subject, verb, and
object are universal concepts in the world’s languages. However, there are
differences in the way they are ordered lineally in sentences. In English, the
word order is usually SVO (SUBJECT VERB OBJECT) e.g. John hit a ball,
but there are other languages such as Japanese, which have SOV so that this
same sentence would be John ball hit. The different ordering SVO or SOV are
the parameter settings. This means while all languages have universal
properties, there are differences in the way those principles are set for each
specific language.
Universal principles speed up the acquisition process in that a child does not
need to learn them (they are already in his/her mind) only the parameter
settings for a particular language such as Citonga have to be learnt from the
linguistic data the child is exposed to.
Learning a language is internalising the grammar rules and the lexicon. Once
the rules are internalised, a child can use them and the words, to generate an
infinite variety of sentences that have never been heard before and can also
use them to understand any and all sentences in that language.
Chomsky separates knowledge of language into two parts: knowledge of
internalised rules of grammar is called linguistic competence. The ability to
use language in communication is linguistic performance. He claims linguistic
competence is more important than performance in that what people say is a
poor reflection of the underlying knowledge, linguistic competence, which their
heads possess. Since his orientation is to understand what it means to know
language and not really use it, this is understandable. Chomsky believes
knowing how language works can reveal much about human cognition.
9.4. Principles of teaching/learning From these assertions and what was said about the cognitive theories of
language acquisition, we can conclude that in the cognitive code, a learner is
considered to be an active processor of information. To teach a second
language is to teach grammatical rules. This can be done deductively as in
grammar translation. When a learner is given a rule, he/she should be able to
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construct his/her own sentences based on those rules. So unlike in the audio-
lingual method, the learner should take some responsibility for his learning.
He/she can make use of different cognitive learning strategies (thinking
strategies) to make learning a new language easier. Learning in the cognitive
code can be by trail and error through hypothesis testing. This means making
errors are accepted as part of the learning process.
Then there is also stress on meaningfulness. David Ausubel (in Brown
2000:83-4) has criticised rote learning promoted by Behaviourism in that it is
not meaningful learning. It involves learning isolated, discrete parts that have
nothing to hold them together. Meaningful leaning involves relating and
anchoring information to established entities (ideas or concepts) in the
cognitive structure (in the mind). New information has to be subsumed (made
part of) under more inclusive concepts. This is better remembered in the long
term. This means teachers should make an effort to relate new information to
what they have taught before so that a meaningful unity is created.
Since human minds are processors of information, they are able to process
linguistic data and as such can be taught rules so that once they have such
rules they can generate new sentences with them. So for example, to teach a
tense one needs to state a rule: use has/has and the verb and past participle.
Then find examples. Learning a language should be meaningful, involve also
knowing rules of grammar, creativity,
The cognitive code did not develop techniques for language teaching but it
helped teachers to free themselves from the rigidity of Audiolingualism; to
recognise the importance of the learner as an individual capable of thinking,
solving problems and one able to learn on his/her own.
Activity9.1: Define cognition.
What did Chomsky mean by Linguistic competence?
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What are some of the useful principles of L2 teaching that we can use from
the cognitive code approach?
What is meaningful learning according to Ausubel?
UNIT 10:0. THE SITUATIONAL LANGUAGE TEACHING METHOD (SLTM)
10. 1. Introduction The Situational approach grew out of what was called the oral approach,
which was developed as early as the 1920s by British Applied linguists. This
had many features in common with the direct method and the Audiolingual
method that developed later in 1940s in the USA. The term situational language teaching became much more popular in the 1960s when A.S.
Hornby used it in a series of articles on methodology (Richards & Rodgers,
1986:34). The other important proponent of this approach is Harold Palmer.
10.2. Theory of language in SLTM
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As in the American Audiolingualism, the underlying theory of language of this
approach was structuralism, (albeit a British variant of this). The assumptions
of this theory were that language is basically speech; and knowing how to
speak presupposes knowing the structure of a language and hence masterly
of structure is masterly of a language. What differentiates this approach from
Audiolingualism is the oral practice of structures in situations. This is the
practice of controlled sentence patterns done in situations that help to clarify
the meaning of those structures. The idea of a situation, as used in this
approach, was rather limited. It referred to the use of objects, actions,
gestures, pictures and relia (real objects) in a classroom to demonstrate the
meaning of a structure or lexical item.
Activity10.1:
Compare the definition of situation to the one used under communicative language teaching below in unit 11.
Nevertheless, the idea of a situation came from the British functional linguists
such as J.R. Firth and M.A.K. Halliday who had proposed a grammar that
connected forms (i.e. structures) to functions (what language is used for) of
language in society. These had argued that language is a purposeful social
activity involving a complex interplay of participants, contexts, situations and
objects and, meaning comes from these.
10.3. Theory of learning in SLTM
This came from Behaviourist theories of learning. Learning a language is by
habit formation. The focus is on the process of learning. Learning is receiving
information, fixing it in memory through repetitions and using it in practice until
it is a personal skill (Palmers’ view quoted in Richards & Rodgers 1986:36)
This, as in Audiolingualism, involves the use of drills to develop automaticity.
Also there is no rule explanation in this approach; grammar and vocabulary
learning must be done inductively. It is expected that learners can generalize
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what they learn to other situations within and outside the classroom. The use
of the first language was discouraged.
10.4. Method of teaching in SLTM
The goal is to teach all the skills of language but through structure. These
structures and vocabulary are first introduced and presented orally through
situations. When they have been mastered orally that is when they can be
presented graphically to be read and later to be written down. Accuracy in
speech and grammar was emphasised, so errors had to be avoided at all
cost. Initially there is tight control on what the pupils have to say or do but this
is relaxed when learners show that they have mastered the structures and
they can be allowed to free choice of structures and vocabulary.
As in Audiolingualism too, the syllabus was structural and had the following
features:
a) Grammar control: a list of sentence patterns were carefully selected starting, for example, with basic sentence patterns such as statement,
questions, command. With these as many structural words (e.g.
demonstratives, articles, prepositions, etc) as possible were also
selected and sufficient content words (verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc).
For example:
Sentence pattern vocabulary
This is … a, car, house,
Is this…? a, dog, house, etc.
b) Grading: the sentence patterns are graded according to levels of
difficulty as well as usefulness.
c) Vocabulary control: as said above there was a careful selection of
vocabulary-both structural and content words- graded for each grade
such as Michael West’s A General Service of English words. The latter
is a list of frequently used basic words in written texts that a learner
needs to learn to read. Dictionaries were also available which used a
limited vocabulary of the basic 2000 words in the definitions of other
words. The syllabus was thus essentially structural because did not
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include a list of real life situations were the structures could be
expected to be used e.g. shopping, at the post office, etc.
10.5. Techniques employed in SLTM In this approach, as mentioned above, situations referred to the way the
sentence patterns and vocabulary were presented in classrooms. There were
two types of situations:
a. A linguistic situation: this involved the use of for instance a story or
anecdote to illustrate the use of a language pattern. The example to
teach the past simple tense one could use this short narrative:
Yesterday Betu Secondary school played a footaball with Satu
secondary school at Betu President’ stadium. Many people watched
this exciting match. Satu secondary school scored first …
As you can see the bold words are all in the past simple tense. After
presenting this linguistic situation orally, the teacher would then ask
questions to draw the learner’s attention to the tense.
b. A visual or auditory situations: This as the name implies is the use
of visual or audio material such as a picture strip story, or just a picture,
tape and video recordings, actions and mime that could be used to
demonstrate the meaning of some language patterns or lexical items.
Apart from the use of situations above other techniques included the use
of drills e.g. substitution, repetitions, dialogues, dictation. Reading and
writing came as mentioned after the oral work was done. The move is
always from controlled to less controlled exercises.
Roles of the teacher and learner: As in the Audiolingual method, the
teacher was a dominant figure in this approach. He/she was like a
conductor fully in control to determining the pace the lesson and practice.
He/she was also the model of the language in the presentation stage.
He/she had also to ensure that errors were avoided and corrected when
they occurred. The learner was rather passive and only responded to
questions and instructions of the teacher in the presentation and practice
stages of the lesson. The learner is expected to merely imitate and
memorize what is being taught. Later on learners were allowed some
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freedom to choose their own words and patterns. The procedure was
always from control to free use of language.
10.6. Weaknesses and strengths of SLTM We have already referred to one weakness above when we mentioned that
the idea of a situation is rather limited in the way it is used in this approach.
The syllabus did not actually list situations where language patterns and
vocabulary would be used in real life. As a result the same fault mentioned
under Audiolingualism cane be cited here. These are that language is taught
as a collection of discrete vocabulary and sentences patterns. Emphasis is
put on masterly these structures without paying attention to building
communicative competence of the learners, that is, the ability to use the
language appropriately in various social situations. (see the other criticisms
levelled against Audio lingualism which also apply here).
Activity 10.2:
1. Which schools of thought influenced the theories of language and
teaching in the situational language approach?
2. What are some of the most important techniques you would expect to
see in a situational language class?
3. What are the roles of the teacher and pupils in this approach?
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Unit 11.0 COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING APPROACH (CLT)
11.1. Introduction In the 1960s as we have seen, there was dissatisfaction with the Audiolingual
and the situational language teaching approaches. The cognitive code that
replaced these two did not provide clear methods or techniques of language
teaching. The cognitive code also shared one important weakness with both
the situational approach and Audiolingual method: it was based on the
teaching of isolated structures and did not deal with complete and meaningful
chunks of language, discourse or texts. We will deal with issues these issues
below.
Secondly, the need for communication in Europe following the creation of the
European common market led to a demand for more effective language
teaching methods. CLT was a result of these attempts to find a way of
teaching learners how to communicate effectively in a second or foreign
language. Many linguists played a part in this such as Christopher Candlin,
Henry Widdowson, and others who will be mentioned later.
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11.2. The Learning Experience We start this unit by presenting a lesson that has aspects of communicative
language teaching, which we will use to explain the main features of CLT. We
enter a grade seven classroom where a teacher is teaching a lesson on the
use of the unlikely condition.
The teacher begins his lesson by asking the learners to listen to as he reads a
short passage. “I want you to listen carefully because I will ask you some
questions when I finish reading,” he announces. He reads a passage entitled:
The Sun as a source of the earth’s energy. Learners listen quietly. After
reading the passage, the teacher asks a number of questions such as:
“What is the passage about?”
“What would happen to life on earth if the sun stopped shining?”
“What would happen to water on earth if the sun stopped shinning?”
“What would happen to us if the sun stopped shining?” etc.
He gets a few correct sentences such as:
e.g. Trees would stop growing if the sun stopped shining.
We would stop coming to school if the sun stopped shining. (laughter in
class)
Etc.
Explanation
The teacher then writes one of the sentences on the board and underlines the
following words: We would stop coming to school if the sun stopped
shining.
Then goes on to explain these are the words that can be used to talk about
what we imagine would happen if something happened. He gives a few more
examples before asking learners to make some sentences using the unlikely
condition.
Role-play Pupils are next told to be in groups of four according to their sitting
arrangement. They are told to imagine that they are part of a production unit
committee in the school, which runs the school tuck shop. The chairperson of
the committee is the Deputy Head of the school, the other three members are
the production unit manager and two teachers who are committee members.
The Deputy explains that they need a new tuck shop salesman because the
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one who had been working there has to be dismissed for being dishonest.
Each of the members has a person in mind but also knows something about
at least one of the other candidates the other members have in mind. Below
are the cards to be given to the four pupils in each group. They have
information about the candidates. Each member will be asked whether his
candidate would be a good worker, or whether he would be hard working and
so on. The pupil playing Deputy Head can vary the questions. The other
members can come in any time if they know something about the candidate
under discussion. In addition to using the condition being practised, pupils are
reminded to use language appropriately as they had learnt in previous
lessons when asking, disagreeing, etc. e.g.
Deputy: Mr Ngosa, do you think Kapaso would do the work if he was
employed?
Mr Ngosa. Yes, he would. He is a very hard workingman.
Mr Chanda: Excuse me sir. I don’t think he would be a good salesman
because he is so shy. Etc.
Below are the cards:
Mr Ngosa , PU Manager’s Card
Lazarous Lupiya
Dismissed from ZCBC –reason
unknown
too talkative
Kapaso, John
20 years old, male
honest, hard working
grade nine certificate
worked as cleaner in Shoprite
Mr Chanda, Committee Member’s card
Lazarous Lupiya
27 years old
form three certificate very active,
John Kapaso
not active
very shy, rarely speaks to strangers
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cheerful
worked as sales man in ZCBC
Mr Bwembya Committee Member’s card
Chanda Mpepo
30 years old
honest, pleasant
personality
grade 11 dropout
The Deputy Head’s card
Ask Mr Ngosa if Kapaso would be a
hard working man.
Ask Mr Chanda if Lupiya would be a
good salesman.
Ask Mr Bwembya if Mpepo would have
problems reporting for work etc.
Ask all present who they think would be
the best qualified for the job.
Chanda Mpepo
smokes dagga
lives far from the school
The learners are given a few minutes to study their cards before they start the
role-play. The teacher goes around the class stopping at each group to listen
to what they are saying before moving on to another group. He does not
interrupt their conversations but merely signals to those who are speaking too
loudly to lower their voices. The role-play continues for about twenty minutes
before the teacher tells the class to stop playing.
Activity
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Pupils are asked to write a two-paragraph composition about what would happen if the sun stopped shining. In one paragraph they will explain or describe what would happen to the plants on earth and the other to the animals including human beings. The teacher tells the pupils that writers of the best compositions will be asked to read them to the class the following day.
11.3. Interpretation of the lesson
11.3.1. Language as discourse or texts Teacher reads a passage to introduce the use of the unlikely condition. One
of the shortcomings of previous methods and approaches discussed above,
was that they dealt with isolated language items taken out of context. We
know that people do not just utter isolated language items but stretches of
connected speech called discourse. Similarly written language also normally
exists as unified and meaningful texts. We understand what we read or hear
spoken because we can relate what is said to the context in which it is said.
So in this introduction, learners are given a chance to hear the structure used
within a linguistic context, the text, before focusing on it as an isolated item.
This is why communicative language teaching is said to be analytic because
we start with whole language, the text, and understand its meaning before we
look at the parts making it up as in this case, the unlikely condition.
There has also been a focus on what makes a text coherent, that is, a unified
and meaningful piece of language.
11.4. Focus on Language functions Another criticism of previous methods and approaches was their emphasis on
form or structures rather than language functions. Language functions are the
uses to which language is put in communication. For example, we use
language to ask for things, to apologise, to command, to name people and so
on. But in all the methods discussed so far, this was ignored. Learners learnt
about sentence patterns, practised, memorised them but often failed to deploy
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them in social interactions. They failed, it was claimed, because they did not
learn how to use language to express various social or communicative
functions. In communicative language teaching, we move from a language
function to its structural exponent. This means, for example, that we first teach
a function such as how to politely ask for something and then explain the
different language forms (exponents) that can be used for this purpose.
In our lesson above, the use of the unlikely condition was made clear in the
context of the text before the teacher and learners discussed its usage. Notice
also that the teacher reminded learners before they played the role-play to
use appropriate language befitting their roles and situation. It should be
mentioned that both form and function are focused upon in CLT although the
starting point is the function.
11.4.1. Categories of language functions The concept of functions comes from sociolinguists such as the British
functional linguists Michael Halliday and John Firth and the American
sociolinguist Dell Hymes, among others, who criticised the sentence based
grammars of the structuralists and the transformational generative linguists.
Dell Hymes, coined the term communicative competence, in particular to point
out the inadequacies of Chomsky’s concept of linguistic competence. Hymes
pointed out that if a person only knew the rules of grammar and the words of a
language but did not know the social rules of language use, such a person
would be considered mad. Communicative competence is the ability to use
language appropriately in social interaction. It therefore, includes linguistic
competence (knowledge of grammar rules), meaning, pragmatic competence
(or use of language in context) and strategic competence or the ability to use
language tactfully, making corrections when one misfires and also knowledge
of how a stretch of language-discourse-holds together and has meaning.
Children acquire languages in society as social tools of communication, in a
cultural context, in which they learn how to use the language appropriately.
We do not just utter sentences anyhow but purposefully to achieve some
specific social goals. Language is used to perform social functions. Many of
these linguists have presented lists of such social functions of language but
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here I give one example by etc. Finocchiaro and Brumfit (1983:65-6) with a
few examples under each:
1. Personal function-the use of language to express personal thought
and feelings e.g. joy, love, surprise, etc.
2. Interpersonal function-when a language is used to establish and
maintain social relations e.g. greeting, inviting, introducing,
3. Referential function-the use of language to talk about or report on
things, events actions or people in the past and future e.g. talking
about language (also called the metalinguistic function), describing
people, defining, comparing, etc.
4. Imaginative function-language used to discuss works of art and other
creative activities e.g. discussing a poem, solving a mystery, etc.
In summary the view of language in CLT is that:
a) it is a vehicle for expressing meaning
b) it is essentially for social interaction and communication
c) its primary units should not be seen to be just grammatical categories
and structures but, and more importantly, functional categories and
communicative meaning as used in discourse(Richards & Rodgers,
1986:71).
11.5. The role play A role-play, one of the important techniques of CLT, was used in the lesson
above to practice the unlikely condition in a simulated social interaction. It is
believed in CLT that when learners are engaged in tasks that are meaningful,
learning is promoted. In role-plays learners play different social roles and
pretend to be in some social contexts. Because of this, the language that they
use is socially appropriate as it has to fit their assumed social roles and social
contexts. Let us explain a little about social situations. Situations, according to
Finocchiaro and Brumfit (1983) have the following elements: people who are
involved in the speech act (the conversation), the place where the
conversation is taking place, the time of the conversation and the topic of
discussion. In the role-play learners have to pretend they are members of the
PU committee at a school engaged in recruiting a tuck shop salesman. The
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code, or language of the community that they are using will be influenced by
their situation. It is likely to be formal because they are dealing with a serious
issue.
From what has been said here, we can see that role plays are important
because:
-they help pupils rehearse the types of language they would be required to
use when they find themselves in similar social situations.
-they help learners understand the unpredictable nature of language. For
example that they may be forced to say things they did not practice and have
to think on their feet.
-they help learners collaborate to make the communication work. This is
different from merely receiving information from their teacher. In this way they
take responsibility for their learning (Clandfield et al, undated: 2).
There are other important techniques apart from role plays but most of them
attempt to provide opportunities for learners to involve themselves in activities
which have the three features of real communication: information gap,
freedom to choose structures and words and feedback. Some of these
activities are language games, use of picture strips, rewriting scrambled
sentences (to teach text cohesion and coherence), problem-solving tasks
where learners might collaborate to find answers to a problem. It also possible
to find pre-communicative exercises such as learning about and using
structures which might even include some drills. These as in the lesson above
are done to prepare students for communicative and social interaction
activities.
Proponents of CLT also recommend use of authentic language unadapted
e.g. from magazines, books, recordings, etc.
From what has been said here we can deduce that the theory of learning in
CLT appears to be based on these principles:
a. The communicative principle: activities that promote real
communication lead to learning.
b. The task principle: meaningful tasks lead to learning
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c. The meaningful principle: language meaningful to learner promotes
learning. So there is need for meaningful and authentic language to be
used in teaching (Richards & Rodgers 1986:72).
Activity 11.1:
Go through the role play to work out what the teacher had to prepare and how
he explained the procedure to the learners. Why do the learners need role
cards or cue cards?
11.6. Meaningful communication Previous methods were criticised for not promoting communicative
competence because the exercises, the grammar practice their learners did,
were not genuine acts of communication. Keith Morrow (quoted in Larsen-
Freeman, 2000:129) has argued that activities that are truly communicative
have the following features: they involve an information gap, that is, people
engaged in a speech act exchange information they do not know from each
other. The other feature is that people are free to choose different structures-
words and sentence- patterns they feel like using. They are not restricted to a
particular structure as in grammar practice in Audiolingualism. The third
feature is the presence of feedback. People involved in a speech act respond
to what the other says, they give feedback. These features were not built into
the language practices in previous methods and so were not helping learners
communicate genuinely.
The role-play in the lesson is an attempt to make learners practice language
in ways that are truly communicative. Each pupil has information on his/her
role card that others do not know and as they discuss they provide feedback
to each other for example by contradicting each other. They are involved in a
negotiation of meaning. They are also free to use their own words or
structures in addition to the unlikely condition. In CLT even recourse to the
use of L1 when communication fails is not frowned upon. Note too that the
teacher did not interrupt the learners even when they made mistakes in order
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not to disturb the flow of language. CLT stresses fluency more than accuracy
and learners’ feelings are respected. They do not have to feel inhibited.
However, the teacher might take note of some errors and do revision
exercises in later lessons.
In the lesson above there is also integration of language skills-called mode
integration in that the learners start by listening, read examples on the board
and then they speak both in language focus and role play and later write a
composition. There is also content integration in that learners use a science
text to learn about and use a language structure. Integration of knowledge is
an important principle of CLT, learners will write more effectively about what
they know.
11.7. Teacher and learner roles From the lesson, we can see that the teacher assumed different roles in the
lesson. At the beginning, he was more dominant; read the passage, asked the
questions. He was an instructor. But in the role-play, the teacher was more of
a facilitator than instructor, he organised the resources required and explained
the procedure to make it possible for the pupils to do the role-play. In
communicative language teaching the teacher can have a number of roles
such as this one we have mentioned of facilitator but can also be a counsellor,
participant in learning, needs analyst and group process manager (Richards &
Rodgers 1986: 78). The teacher assumes the latter role when he/she
monitors and encourages the learning process and at the end debriefs the
pupils.
The learner since he/she involved in communication is a negotiator of
meaning-using the language rather than learning about it to achieve a
communicative goal.
11.8. Syllabus design As mention in 11.0, the need to promote the learning of languages in the
European Common market led to innovations in language teaching
introducing the unit credit system: a language was broken down into units
depending on learner needs. This led to the creation of the notional functional
syllabus in which language was segmented into notions or ideas such as
shopping, time, location, etc and communicative functions we mentioned
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above. These ideas appeared in a book Notional Syllabuses by D.A. Wilkins
(1972) who had worked with other linguists to develop this type of syllabus.
These ideas were used to develop teaching learning materials and also
played a major role in the development of communicative language teaching. What are language functions?
The Audiolingual and situational language teaching approaches have been
criticised for assuming that learners can construct full understanding of a
language by being taught isolated language items one at a time. CLT
approaches language teaching in the opposite direction: from full texts, whole
language that is then analysed to see how it is held together. This is the
discourse approach. The idea of being up is called the synthetic approach
while the idea of breaking it up is analytic. Which of the two, in your opinion, is
the best method of teaching a language?
What according to Morrow are the three requirements of meaningful
communication.
How can we make use of Morrows ideas in designing lessons based on CLT?
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UNIT 12. 0. TOTAL PHYSICAL RESPONSE (TPR)
12.1. Introduction How would you teach a class of pupils who did not know a single word of
English but whose first language you understood and spoke fluently? One
way would be to use the grammar translation method but if they did not even
know how to read and write, you might try teaching them through actions. Tell
them in the native language that you will command yourself in English to
perform a number of actions. They should observe you and later they will be
expected to respond correctly to the commands:
Stand up, sit down, touch the table, etc.
They see you performing these actions after the verbal commands. Then you
ask them to respond to the commands together with you. Then you just give
the commands and the students perform the actions. After this, you tell one
student at a time to issue commands to which the class has to respond. Now
the roles are reversed, the students give commands while the teacher
responds together with the class. As the students get used, the commands
can be varied, recombined in new ways and even new sentences can be
produced.
What we have presented here is based on a method of language teaching
called total physical response. A psychologist James Asher introduced it in
1977.
The Goal of language teaching is to teach basic speaking skills to produce
people uninhibited to communicate with natives. It is based on the
comprehension approach. In this approach, listening comprehension is
considered to be very important in language learning. Why do you think
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listening comprehension is considered to be very important in this method?
Ideas of this nature appeared in the 1960s and 1970s.
12.2. Theory of Learning Total Physical Response claims to mimic first language acquisition. It has
much in common with the behaviourist views of learning where the words
uttered (commands) are the stimuli for physical actions or responses on the
part of the learner. Asher equated second language learning to the first
language. When a child learns the first language he/she starts by first listening
before he/she attempts to speak. This is because children have a bio-
program: their brains and nervous system are programmed to acquire
language in a particular order with listening coming before speaking.
During the process of language acquisition, children are involved in a lot of
motor activity, grabbing, holding, pulling, looking etc. Learning should start
with physical activity before speech. The right brain is the one that deals with
motor activity. It is the part that should be activated first and then the left
hemisphere will be triggered off after it has been watching the right
hemisphere (Richards & Rodgers 1986:91).
Children understand a lot but cannot speak. At this stage they build a mental
model of the language, which will later help them to speak. Once listening
comprehension is built up, speech development follows naturally. This is why
this method is said to be based on the comprehension approach.
In TPR, therefore, Learners are allowed to speak only when they are ready to
do so. In this way, anxiety in the learner is lessened and learning is made
enjoyable. Learners are made to feel successful, and because of this,
teachers avoid introducing too many commands at a time, as this would tend
to confuse the learner and increase anxiety. Asher shares this concern for the
emotional well being of a learner, with humanists who have argued that the
affective domain (emotions) is important in language learning. The learner
should feel free and comfortable to learn properly just as babies do; they are
relaxed and natural with no anxiety.
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12.3. Theory of Language
Asher recommends the use of the imperative mood, commands, e.g.” Stand
up” “Sit down” “Point to the window”, etc. to get learners to move about, to
‘loosen up’. The need for complexity in syntax is dealt with by combining
orders e.g. “Walk to the door and open it”, producing action sequences.
Similarly interrogatives could be shown to be understood through actions:
“Where is the chair?” learners point at the chair. It is not necessary for
learners to give verbal responses. Meaning is interpreted through actions
rather than through abstractions. And as is clear here, language is not taught
in single words but meaningful chunks. As in the Audiolingual method oral
language is primary; vocabulary and structure are emphasised. Teaching of
grammar is inductive.
12.4. Method, Syllabus and techniques
From what has been said, TPR obviously must have a sentence-based
syllabus, which, however, has focus on meaning rather than form. The choice
of vocabulary depends on the classroom situation. This means the teacher
decides what can be learnt with ease. There are a fixed number of structures
to introduce at a time to facilitate differentiation and assimilation.
As for techniques, Asher sees the need for variety and recommends that
instructors draw on other techniques apart from what we have presented
here, imperative drills. Instructors can also use role-plays on every day
situations e.g. shopping at a supermarket. Reading and Writing comes later to
reinforce oral work.
12. 5. Teacher’s and learner’s roles The teacher plays a number of important roles. She decides on the content of
the course and is the one who models commands for learners. It is also the
teacher who decides on turn taking and initiates and controls the interaction.
Almost everything is teacher directed.
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These roles have been likened to those of parents. Like a parent, the teacher
has to be tolerant at first with mistakes but correcting as children advance in
their learning. The roles have also been likened to those of stage directors of
stage plays in which pupils are the actors being directed on stage.
On the other hand, Learners are primarily listeners and performers.
Although the learners are expected also to respond to novel commands or
combinations of commands and also produce novel ones once they have
internalised some of the language. Learners are also expected to monitor
and evaluate their own learning. They are ultimately expected to be able to
communicate verbally.
12.6. Strengths and weaknesses This method is said to work more effectively in the elementary stages of
education but as learners become more advanced it becomes less distinctive.
Nowadays it is used more as a classroom activity incorporated in the
communicative activities providing both auditory and physical activity (Brown
2000:107).
Activity 12.1:
1. Compare this method to Audio lingual method and see if you can add a
few more weaknesses and strengths.
2. Explain the steps involved in using commands to teach an L2.
3. Explain the features of the comprehension approach.
12.7. The last note on approaches and methods Jacobs & Farrell (2001:4-5) in trying to explain the trends in language
teaching have presented the following eight points, which they claim, explain
the shifting patterns or paradigms in language teaching methodology. We
have modified them slightly to fit into our discussion. Now these ideas are
considered as important in decisions that teachers make in their choices of
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methods of language teaching. As you read through these think about the
different approaches and methods discussed above and decide which ones
have included them:
1. Learner autonomy : the freedom a learner has to make his own choices of words and sentence patterns, the learner’s ability to take charge of his/her own learning and also to learn from peers. We see this movement away from teacher domination in the cognitive code where the learner was seen to be an active processor of information capable of problem solving.
2. Cooperative or collaborative learning: allowing learners to work together in groups as opposed to learning on their own individually. Learner’s benefit more when they work in groups with peers as they are free to learn from each other with fewer inhibitions compared to learning from a teacher. It involves learning how to use language appropriately with each other e.g. polite requests, disagreement, etc. Project work is one of the ways in which learners can collaborate. There are elements of group work in Audiolingualism but learners in these groups merely chorused together. They did not interact with each other communicatively.
3. Integration of knowledge: language is an indivisible whole. The practice of learning a language as discrete objects to be later put together known as the synthetic approach was seen to be wrong. Learning should start from the whole to parts. The latter is called the analytic view of language.
4. Focus on meaning: there was a tendency to focus on structure in almost all the methods above. In all of them the unit of language study was the sentence as an isolated element. There was little or no effort at presenting language in complete and meaningful wholes. However, in the cognitive code there was an acknowledgement of meaningful learning as propounded by Ausubel. Meaningful learning involves learning unified or integrated information instead of memorising isolated facts. What is learnt should also have meaning in the learner’s own life.
5. Diversity: in addition to learner autonomy is the recognition of individual differences in the learners. This is taking note of the fact that different learners have different learning styles, different uses in learning strategies, intelligence, sex, ethnic, social-economic status and so on. These individual differences have to be taken into consideration when designing methods of teaching.
6. Thinking skills: the recognition of the importance of teaching learners cognitive strategies that can help them learner more efficiently and effectively.
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7. Alternative assessment: the move away from discrete point testing-that is, testing knowledge of isolated items of language instead of how language works as a whole. There has been a move to communicative language teaching that is criterion referenced testing i.e. which grades learners according to how they perform against set criteria of communicative goals. In the audio-lingual method, testing tended to compare learners against each other, what is called norm referenced testing. There was no consideration of how effective the learners were in terms of communicating appropriately.
8. Teachers as co-learners: as mentioned about learner autonomy, there has been a trend in the methods and approaches to lessen the dominant role of the teacher in the teaching learning process to or an enabler, facilitator and even a co-learner. The move away from the transmission model of education where teachers are the ‘experts’ and learners passive receipts of knowledge to a transactional model where teachers and pupils learn from each other.
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