UNIT 1

UNIT 1: DIDACTIC EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGES. PRESENT-DAY APPROACHES TO THE

TEACHING OF ENGLISH. THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES

1. INTRODUCTION
2. FIRST APPROACHES TO THE TEACHING OF MODERN LANGUAGES
The grammar-translation method
The direct method
3. 20TH CENT. APPROACHES TO THE TEACHING OF MODERN LANGUAGES
The audio-lingual method
The silent way
Suggestopedia
The Total-Physical response method
4. PRESENT-DAY TRENDS: THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH
4. 1. Meaning and use
4. 2. Appropriacy
4. 3. Skills and Strategies
4. 4. Syllabus design
4. 5. Methodology
5. CONCLUSION
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. INTRODUCTION
Language is a pure human activity that involves the communication of ideas from the mind of
a speaker to the mind of a listener. Great importance has been given to the study of languages
from the very early stages of human history, and especially to the study of foreign languages.
As Richards & Rogers (1992) states: the fundamental function of the earliest educational
systems was to teach religion and to promote the traditions of customs.
Languages were studied even in the most ancient civilizations. The Egyptian, Babylonian and
Assyrian Kings sent bilingual representatives in their delegations to other countries; and
wealthy Romans were taught Greek by teacher-slaves. Teaching in those days was probably
done through conversation, grammar, reading and writing, i.e.: lectio, disputatio

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Later on, Christian missionaries were forced to learn the language of the people they were
trying to convert as the only means of communication with them. During the Middle Ages, the
only languages fit for learning were Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which were taught in monastic
schools.
During the Renaissance, educators emphasized such subjects as history, geography, and
music and taught them mostly in Latin in grammar schools, but around the 16th century, Latin
gradually became displaced as a language of spoken and written communication and French,
Italian and English gained importance as a result of political changes in Europe. In the 18th
century, the study of modern languages was officially introduced in the United States and
from that century onwards, the teaching of foreign language was in the same way as classical
ones.
2. FIRST APPROACHES TO THE TEACHING OF MODERN LANGUAGES
The Grammar-Translation Method has its roots in the traditional approach to the teaching of
Latin. This method has German origins and its principal proponents were the scholars K.
Ploetz, H. S. Ollendorff and J. Meidinger. In this method, grammar is taught in a deductively
rigid way and the vocabulary learnt is predominantly literary from translating passages from
Molire, Cervantes or Shakespeare. It focuses on reading and writing, and little or no
importance is given to oral skills due to the fact that the main objective is to assimilate the
grammar to read and appreciate the literature.
Towards the 19th century, teachers and linguists began to write about the need for new
approaches to language teaching, and through their pamphlets, books, speeches and articles,
the foundation for a more widespread pedagogical reform was set up and known as the
Reform Movement.
From the 1880s, an intellectual leadership gave greater credibility and acceptance to reformist
ideas thanks to linguists such as Henry Sweet in England, Wilhelm Vitor in Germany and
Paul Passy in France. Among the earliest goals of the association, we find the leading role of
phonetics within the teaching of modern languages. Sweet set forth principles for the
development of teaching methods based on sound methodological principles an applied
linguistic approach; and for Vitor, whose name is associated with a phonetic system, speech
patters were the fundamental elements of language, stressing the value of training teacher in
the new science of phonetics.

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In general, the reformers believed that grammar had to be taught inductively and language
learning based on hearing the language first, before seeing it in written forms. However, none
of these proposals assumed the status of a method, but this led, according to Rivers (1981), to
natural methods and ultimately led to the development of what we know as the Direct
Method.
The Direct Method came as a result of interest in and observation of the way a child learns its
mother tongue. The best known early example of natural foreign language teaching dates
back to the 16th century when Montaignes father decided to have his son taught Latin by a
German tutor, totally ignorant of French, before the son even learnt to speak his mother
tongue, while the rest of the family was forbidden to speak anything but Latin in his presence.
So the basis of this method is to recreate the exposure that young children have in language
acquisition.
These ideas spread, and these natural language learning principles consolidated in what
became known as the Direct Method, the first of the natural methods, both in Europe and in
the United States. Among those who tried to apply natural principles to language classes we
must highlight Lambert Sauveur and Maximiliam Berlitz.
Sauvers method became known as the Natural Method and was seriously considered in
language teaching. In his book An Introduction to the Teaching of Living Languages without
Grammar or Dictionary (1874), he described how their students learn to speak after a month
on intensive oral work in class, avoiding the use of the mother tongue, even for grammar
explanations.
On the other hand, Berlitz never used the term natural and named his method the Berlitz
Method, and it was known for being taught in private language schools, with highly motivated
students, with native-speaking teachers and without translation under any circumstances. In
spite of his success, this method lacked a basis in applied linguistic theory and failed to
consider the practical realities of the classroom.
According to Richards & Rogers (1992), although the natural methods enjoyed popularity,
not everyone had embraced them enthusiastically, so this would led to the development of
different approaches throughout the 20th century.
3. 20th CENTURY APPROACHES TO THE TEACHING OF MODERN LANGUAGES
The Audio-Lingual Method was developed in the United States during World War II. At that
time there was a need for people to learn foreign languages rapidly for military purposes. This

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approach was strongly influenced by a belief that the fluent use of a language was essentially
a set of habits which could be developed with a lot of practice. The language habit was
formed by constant repetition and the reinforcement of the teacher.
Cognitive psychologists and transformational-generative linguists argued that speakers form
rules, which allow them to understand and create new utterances. Thus, language must not be
considered a product of habit formation, but rather of rule formation. Accordingly, language
acquisition must be a procedure whereby people use their own thinking processes to discover
the rules of the language they are acquiring.
The Silent Way, developed by Gattegno, is marked by the fact that the teacher gives a very
limited amount of input, modelling the language to be learnt once only, and then indicating
what the students should do through pointing and other silent means. The teacher will not
criticise or praise, but simply keeps indicating that the student should try again until success is
achieved. This method forces students to rely heavily on their own resources even when
under the teachers direction.
Suggestopedia, the application of the study of suggestion to pedagogy, has been developed to
help students eliminate the feeling that they cannot be successful, and thus, help them
overcome the barriers of learning.
It is a methodology developed by Lozanov in which students must be comfortably relaxed.
The students are given new names and listen to extended dialogues surrounded by
comfortable furniture and music. These things would help the students to acquire the
language.
The Total-Physical Response Method is an example of a new general approach to foreign
language instruction that has been named the comprehensive approach. It is called this
because of the importance it gives to listening comprehension. Developed by James Asher, it
is a method that finds favour with Krashens view of roughly tuned or comprehensible input.
Here the teacher gives students instructions. The students dont have to speak; they simply
have to carry out the teachers commands. When they are ready for it, they can give
commands to other students. The students thus learn language through actions, through a
physical response rather than through drills. This allows a pre-speaking phase where students
are not forced to speak until they feel confident to do so.

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4. PRESENT-DAY TRENDS: THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH

The most recent approach to foreign language teaching that is widely used is generally
described as a communicative approach. It is partially a reaction against the artificiality of the
pattern-practice and also against the belief that consciously learning the grammar of a
language will result in an ability to use the language.
During the last few years, under the influence of the communicative approach, language
teaching seems to have made a great progress. Syllabus design has become a good deal more
sophisticated and we are able to give our students a better and more complete picture than
before of how language is used. In methodology, the change has been dramatic. The boring
and mechanical exercises that were so common 15 or 20 years ago have virtually disappeared
to be replaced by a splendid variety of exciting and engaging practice activities. This progress
in course design has resulted in a real improvement in the speed and quality of language
learning.
The Communicative Approach starts from a theory of language as communication. The goal is
to attain communicative competence. This notion of competence set by Hymes states that,
when a native speaker speaks he does not only utter grammatically correct forms, he also
knows where and when to use these sentences and to whom. Hymes, then, said, that
competence by itself is not enough to explain a native speakers knowledge, and he replaced
it with his own concept of communicative competence.
Hymes distinguished four aspects of this competence: systematic potential, appropriacy,
occurrence and feasibility. Systematic potential means that the native speaker possesses a
system that has a potential for creating a lot of language. This is similar to Chomskys
competence. The native speaker knows what language is appropriate in a given situation. His
choice is based on the following variables, among others: setting, participants, purpose,
channel and topic. Occurrence means that the native speaker knows how often something is
said in the language and act accordingly. Feasibility means that the native speaker knows
whether something is possible in the language. Even if there is no grammatical rule to ban a
20-adjective pre-head construction we know that these constructions are not possible in the
language.
The origins of communicative language teaching (CLT, also called communicative approach
or notional-functional approach) can be traced in the changes in the British language teaching
tradition in the 1960s. That is the time when British applied linguists began to call into

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question some of the theoretical assumptions underlying Situational Language teaching in

different senses.
Firstly, the fact that the current standard structural theories of language did not account for the
fundamental characteristic of language: its creativity.
Secondly, the fact that a proper teaching method should focus upon communicative
proficiency rather than on mere mastery of structures. This new approach to language
teaching can also be considered as the result of different efforts and initiatives to give shape to
an improved perspective on language and language teaching. D. A. Wilkins proposed (1972)
a functional or communicative definition of language that could be used as a basis for
developing communicative syllabuses for language teaching. He organised language around
systems of meanings that lay behind the communicative uses of language.
Thirdly, the fact that the Council of Europe incorporated this semantic-communicative
analysis into a set of specific requirements for first level communicative language syllabus
These threshold levels specifications have had a strong influence on the design of
communicative language programs and textbooks in Europe.
4. 1. Meaning and use
There are two levels of meaning in language: usage and use, or signification and
value. Traditional courses taught one of these kinds of meaning but neglected the other. All
kinds of utterances can express intentions that are not made explicit by the grammatical form
in which the utterance is expressed. For example, the sentence The policeman is crossing the
road might serve a number of communicative functions, depending on the contextual and/or
situational circumstances in which it was used.
What is perhaps more novel is the suggestion that the value of any utterance in a given
situation can be specified by rules (rules of communication and rules of use), and that it is our
business to teach these rules to our students.
The precise value of an utterance is given by the interaction of its structural and lexical
meaning with the situation in which it is used. For example, if you indicate that you are
hungry, the words Theres some stew in the fridge are likely to constitute an offer, not
because you have learnt a rule about the way these words can be used, but simply because
the utterance takes on that value in that situation.
Of course, cultures differ somewhat in their behaviour, and these differences are reflected in
language. Although most utterances will retain their value across language boundaries,

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problems will arise in specific and limited cases. For instance, there may be languages where
all requests are marked as such, so that a simple unmarked statement such as Theres a
window open cannot function in these languages as requests.
4. 2. Appropriacy
This is the notion that our choice of language is crucially determined by the setting in which
the language is used, the speakers relationship with the listener, and similar matters.
So important is this that appropriacy is the real goal of language teaching. English has a
wealth of colloquial, slang and taboo expressions, for instance, whose use is regulated by
complex restrictions. This is an area where the Communicative Approach has contributed a
great deal to the coverage of our teaching.
The teaching of lexis has certainly been greatly improved by the recent concern with
communicative competence. Teachers and course designers are more aware than before of
the vast range of conventional and idiomatic expressions that have to be learnt if a student is
to be able to perform ordinary communicative tasks.
4. 3. Skills and strategies
Discussion of language skills is no longer limited to a consideration of the four basic skills.
We are more inclined nowadays to think in terms of the various specific types of behaviour
that occur when people are producing or understanding language for a particular purpose in a
particular situation, and there has been a proliferation of sub-skills and strategies in recent
teaching materials.
One of the comprehensive skills that we teach foreigners is that of prediction. It has often
been observed that native listeners/readers make all sorts of predictions about the nature of
what they are about to hear or read, based on their knowledge of the subject, their familiarity
with the speaker or writer, and other relevant features.
Another strategy that we are encouraged to teach is that of negotiating meaning. Language
learners already know, in general, how to negotiate meaning. What they do not know is what
words are used to do it in a foreign language. They need lexical items like What do you
mean by? Look at this way, etc.
Guessing, too, is something which learners are apparently unable to do outside their mother
tongue. The important thing is that students should be exposed to appropriate samples of
language and given relevant and motivating activities to help them learn. This is what the
communicative approach does.

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4. 4. Syllabus Design
Defective language learning is often attributed to defective syllabus design: the student does
not learn the language properly because we do not teach the right things, or because we
organize what we teach in the wrong way. Recently the attention of linguists has been
focused on meaning and it has come to be widely believed that the secret of successful
language teaching lies in incorporating meaning properly into our syllabuses.
Traditional language courses taught forms, but did not teach what the forms meant or how to
use them. They may indeed have failed to teach people to do some important things with
language. It is also true that many traditional courses adopted a very mechanical approach to
drilling what was taught, that is to say, meaning was often neglected during the practice phase
of a lesson.
Traditional courses taught one kind of meaning (that found in the grammar and dictionary),
but did not teach another kind (the communicative value that utterances actually have in real-
life exchanges). It is this second kind that we really need to teach.
Traditional courses failed to teach students how to express or do certain things with language.
We must incorporate these things (notions, functions, strategies) into our syllabuses.
Even if older structure-based language courses taught meanings as well as forms, they did so
very untidily and inefficiently. A communicative syllabus approaches the teaching of meaning
systematically.
For many people, the central idea in communicative teaching is probably that of a
semantic syllabus. In a course based on a semantic syllabus, it is meanings rather than
structures that are give priority, and which form the organizing principle or skeleton of the
textbook. Lessons deal with such matters as greetings, agreeing and disagreeing,
comparisons and so on.
Unfortunately, grammar has not become any easier to learn since the communicative
revolution. Some points of grammar are difficult to learn and need to be studied in isolation
before students can do interesting things with them.
When deciding what to teach to a particular group of learners, we need to take into
consideration several different meaning categories and several different formal categories. We
must make sure that our students are taught to operate key functions such as, for example,
greeting, agreeing or warning. They are also taught basic notions such as size, definiteness,
texture or ways of moving, and to discuss topics which correspond to their main interests and

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needs (music, football). At the same time we shall need to draw up lists of phonological
problems that will need attention, as well as lists of high-priority structures and vocabulary
that our students will need to learn.
A great deal of language does involve knowing what is conventionally said in familiar
situations (interrupting, asking for something, correcting oneself and so on). This stereotyped,
idiomatic side of language accounts for a substantial proportion of the things we say, and this
is the area in which the Communicative Approach is perhaps mainly concerned.
Not all language, of course, is stereotyped. Students need to learn to say new things as well as
old things. To sum up, one might say that there are two kinds of language: stereotyped and
creative. Semantic syllabuses are needed to help us teach the first; only structural lexical
syllabuses will enable us to teach the second.
Language work should involve genuine exchanges, and classroom discourse should
correspond as closely as possible to real-life use of language.
4. 5. Methodology
Each individual in a class already possess a vast private store of knowledge, opinions and
experiences, and each individual has an imagination which is capable of creating whole
scenarios at moments notice.
In fact, it is obviously desirable to use both scripted and authentic material at different points
in a language course for different reasons. Scripted material is useful for presenting specific
language items economically and effectively: the course designer has total control over the
input, and can provide just the linguistic elements he/she wishes. Authentic material gives
students a taste of real language in use, and provides them with valid linguistic data for their
unconscious acquisition processes to work on.
5. CONCLUSION
To sum up, I would like to say that the theories of learning and teaching languages I
have mentioned here must lead us to the conclusion that a sensible methodological approach
to the teaching of languages should take into account both input practice and communicative
output. While students need a lot of input, and while there must be an emphasis on
communicative activities that improve the students ability to communicate, there is also
place for controlled presentation of input and semi-controlled practice. What is required in
the classroom is a balanced approach of input and output. This balance is the essential

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ingredient of the methodology, both for pedagogical reasons and for our students continuing
interests in foreign language learning.
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brumfit, C. and Johnson, K. The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching. OUP.
Oxford, 1981.
Harmer, J. The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman. London, 1983.
Howatt, A.P.R. A History of English Language Teaching. OUP. Oxford, 1981
Johnson, K. Communicative Syllabus Design and Methodology. OUP. Oxford, 1982,
Littlewood, W. Communicative Language Teaching. CUP. Cambridge, 1981.
Stem H. H. Fundamental Concepts in language teaching, OLJP 1983.

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