Language Teaching Research Paper

2. Historical overview of Language Teaching

The following chapter will focus on the development of Language Teaching, but due to the fact that many different methods and approaches have developed over the years, this section will not focus on all of them in detail but briefly explain the mayor developments.

Latin was the dominant language of education for centuries and only at the end of the 17th century, English slowly began to be taught at schools (Gehring 2006: 31). The English lessons were based on the traditional Latin teaching which normally starts with the explanation of a grammatical rule by the teacher, followed by translation exercises from the mother tongue into the target language and vice versa (Gehring 2006: 31). The major

Apart from those translated sentences, the dominant language in the classroom was the mother tongue which was used to explain the rules and to compare the mother tongue to the foreign language (Richards & Rodgers 2001: 6). This method was taught in schools until well into the 19th century and became known as the Grammar-Translation Method (Gehring 2006: 31). At the end of the 19th century, teachers and linguists, influenced by the efforts of specialist like Gouin, Marcel and Prendergast, saw the necessity for alternative approaches to foreign language teaching (Richards & Rodgers 2001: 9). This so called Reform Movement focussed more on the phonetic side of the language and the systematic teaching of speech which led to the Direct Method (McArthur 1998). The reformers based this method on their observations of a child learning the first language and in comparison to the Grammar-Translation Method, grammar was taught inductively without translation and the language in the classroom was the target language (McArthur 1998). Vocabulary was taught through mime, demonstrations, pictures and objects (Richards & Rodgers 2001: 11). In this method,

Two more popular examples are the Audiolingual Method and the Situational Language Teaching or also called Oral Approach. In Situational Language Teaching “speech was regarded as the basis of language, and structure was viewed as being at the heart of speaking ability” (Richards & Rodgers 2001: 40). In contrast to the Direct Method, the focus was therefore on the oral practice of the structure of English (Richards & Rodgers 2001: 40). The common ground between these two methods is the inductive approach. The students are supposed to understand the meaning of structures and words from the situation it is presented in without the use of the native language (Richards & Rodgers 2001: 41). Like in the Direct Method, pictures, realia, gestures and mime are important in the classroom and the teachers again fulfil the role of a model (Richards & Rodgers 2001: 43). The rejection of the Direct Method and the “combination of structural linguistic theory, contrastive analysis, aural-oral procedures, and behaviourist psychology” led to another method, the Audiolingual Method (Richards & Rodgers 2001:53). In this method, structural patterns of the language are taught