English Language Teaching in its Social Context

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EFL METHODOLOGY 153independence and the development of the learner’s own facility to assess correctness. Thesegoals are typical of modern language methodologies; it is the way they are to be achievedthat is unique. The roles of teachers and learners are the key to this.Teachers, although silent much of the time, should be constantly monitoring thelearners as learners’ errors are used to shape future input. Learners are expected to beresponsible for their own learning, to make their own generalisations from the languagepresented to them and to self-assess their own output. Peer correction is encouraged, solearners are expected to becomc comfortable with each other. It is also thought that learnerscan ‘learn’ what thcy have been exposed to while they are sleeping.Silent Way lessons are characterised by the use of Cuisenaire rods (coloured woodenrods of different lengths), Fidel charts (colour-coded pronunciation charts), vocabularycharts and the fact that the teacher is silent whenever possible. Typically, the teacher willmodel an utterance using the rods and charts and elicit student responses to it, which theteacher will accept or ask to be rephrased.The Silent Way takes an essentially traditional structural view of language. It does,however, see the spoken language as paramount. Reading and writing are not explicitlytaught, but are seen to follow from the spoken language.Community Language LearningCommunity Language Learning (CLL) is the name given to a teaching methodologydeveloped by Charles Curran in the 1970s based on psychological counselling techniques(Curran 1972, 1976).The teacher acts as thc ‘counsellor’, and the learners are the ‘clients’.In practice this means that the teacher provides a translation of what the learners wish tosay from their L1 to the target language, thus allowing the learners to interact using thetarget language. Dialogues developed in this way then form the basis for furthcr study.It is a crucial part of the teacher’s job to create an unthreatening supportive atmospherewithin the classroom as this is seen to be crucial for successful learning. In addition,teacher-learner interaction should not be limited to the exchange of ‘information’ butshould include the discussion of the learners’ feelings about the learning process. Thisrelationship has been compared to that of a parent helping a child attain greater levels ofindependence (Richards and Rogers 1986).The desired outcome of CLL is not only that thc learner should be able to communicatein the target language, but also that he/she should learn about his/her own learning andtake increasing responsibility for it (Larsen-Freeman 1986).Initially CLL was not based on any new theories of language; La Forge, Curran’ssuccessor in promoting CLL, saw the learners’ job as being to master the sound andgrammatical systems of the language (La Forge 1983), which suggests a traditional structuralsyllabus. However, he later went on to suggest a theory of language which sees language asa social process.This seems more consistent with the wider foundations of CLL as it focuseson the interactional nature of language, something mentioned earlier by Curran but notexpanded upon.SuggestopediaSuggestopedia, the system espoused by Gcorgi Lozanov, is perhaps the best-knownhumanistic method due to the media interest it attracted and the extent of the claims madeby its proponents (Lozanov 1978). It is famous for its use of music to create a nonthreateningatmosphere conducive to learning.