English Language Teaching in its Social Context

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EFL METHODOLOGY 149This challenge to grammar-translation in the 1 qth century and the increasing interestin child language learning led to the development of natural approaches to language teachng.Sauver’s focus on oral interaction and avoidance of the mother tongue in his language schoolin the later part of the century became known as the Natural Method, the theoreticalPrinciples of which were outlined by Franke in 1884. This led to what became known asthe Direct Method, which was in turn popularised as the ‘Berlitz Method’ by MaximilianBerlitz.In the first decades of the 20th century, the forerunners of today’s applied linguistsstarted to take the ideas of the Reform Movement further. In the United States thefoundations of Audio-Lingualism were being laid, while in the UK the Oral Approach wasdeveloped by Palmer, Hornby and others. The Oral Approach proposed principles ofselection, gradation and presentation which had been lacking in the Direct Method (Richardsand Rogers 1986: 33). The principle that language should be introduced and practised insituations, that is, it should be contextualised, led to the Oral Approach becoming knownas Situational LanguageTeaching.This did not mean that a situational syllabus was proposed,rather that references should be made to the real world in order to teach a structuralsyllabus, e.g. by using pictures, realia and actions (see Figure 8.1 for example). By the 1950sthis was the standard British approach to language teaching. It shared with Audio-Lingualismboth a structural view of language and a belief in behaviourist models of learning, but itsfocus on situations made it distinct.Audio-LingualismThe Second World War and its aftermath provided a great spur to language teaching,especially in the USA. The Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) was established in1942 to provide the large number of foreign language speakers required by the military.This programme influenced the dcvelopment of what became known as Audio-Lingualismand was a focus of attention amongst applied linguists long after it was wound up by themilitary.Audio-Lingualism saw itself as the first ‘scientific’ language teaching methodology.Charles Fries, when he outlined the ‘Oral Approach’, a forerunner of Audio-Lingualism,saw the SUCC~SS of teaching as depending not only on classroom methodology, but also:fundamentally upon having satisfactory materials selected and arranged in accord withsound linguistic principles. (Fries 1945)The principles he is referring to here were those of structural linguistics, whosc main tenetswere that language is primarily oral, and that it is a rule-governed system understandablein terms of increasing levels of complexity. These principles were most famously outlinedby Bloomfield in a number of works between 1914 and 1942 (Bloomfield 1914, 1933,1 942).The other important strand underlying Audio-Lingualism was that of behaviouristpsychology. Behaviourist models of learning essentially saw language as a behavioural skillwhere learners receive a stimulus (such as a cue in a drill), respond (by providing the correctutterance) and then have correct responses reinforced. Error was not tolerated orinvestigated as it was thought that this will lead to the errors being reinforced and ‘badhabits’ engendered. Language had been viewed in terms of habit-formation before; in 1921Palmer outlined a theory based on what would later have been called behaviourist principles