![]() Firstly, the label ‘Grammar-Translation Method’ has been used for more than a century in all types of professional forum as a kind of shorthand for practices involving translation and explicit, deductive grammar teaching, but only opponents of such practices seem to have ever used the term ( Howatt with Widdowson op.cit.: 151). Just two brief examples will have to suffice here. One problem with viewing the past as a ‘decontextualized, quasi-allegorical procession of methods’ ( Smith 2005: xvi) is that this is fundamentally ahistorical: statements tend to be made according to a ‘mythology’ that has been developed around methods, often as a way of stereotyping, indeed demonizing past practices, rather than being well attested in contemporary sources (cf. The structure of Larsen-Freeman’s initial sequence, which leads from ‘The Grammar-Translation Method’ to ‘The Direct Method’ to ‘The Audio-Lingual Method’, is adopted also by Richards and Rodgers in their initial overview of ‘Major trends in twentieth-century language teaching’ (Part I of their second edition), although the latter authors do give some additional attention to nineteenth-century predecessors of the Direct Method and to the pre-communicative British tradition of situational language teaching. Both of these books describe how, one after another, discrete sets of ideas and practices came to prominence in the language teaching profession, only to be replaced-seemingly en bloc-by a new method when the underlying theories were superseded. Past methods are presented as fixed sets of procedures and principles, with little attention being paid to the contexts in which these developed, the way alternatives were debated at the time, or indeed the extent to which there was continuity with previous periods. The very popular books by Larsen-Freeman (1986/2000) and Richards and Rodgers (1986/2001), used as core texts for teacher training in many countries, are the best-known examples of a general tendency in the profession to ‘package up’ the past by assigning method labels to bounded periods of history. Introduction: against ‘packaging up’ of the ELT pastĪside from Howatt’s (1984) A History of English Language Teaching, issued in a second edition in 2004 ( Howatt with Widdowson 2004), there have been very few attempts to survey the ELT professional past which do not adopt an essentially methods-based perspective. By identifying themes discussed by contemporary writers themselves, we highlight areas of continuity with ‘pre-communicative’ methodology, and diversity within the communicative discussion itself, thus subverting the assumption that there was ever a wholly distinct, unitary, or ‘classical’ CLT to be lightly superseded. ![]() Taking as a starting point the way communicative language teaching (CLT) seems to be currently in the process of being packaged up in readiness for the ‘dustbin of history’, the study combined corpus-based and qualitative procedures to explore keywords in ELTJ articles during the early communicative period. This article describes a study that was undertaken to promote an alternative view of the past. This process ignores both continuity with earlier developments and diversity of contemporary opinion and often seems to serve as a way to clear the ground for self-proclaimed ‘progress’. ![]() ![]() ELT history is often viewed as a succession of methods, but such a view tends to rest on a ‘packaging up’ and labelling of complex and often contested past developments.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |