From Unity to Diversity
:Twenty-five Years of Language-Teaching Methodology
Number
2 English Teaching Forum
BY DIANE LARSEN-FREEMAN
This
article was first published in Volume 25, No. 4 (1987).
The English Teaching Forum for this special anniversary issue
is to describe methodological developments in our field over the past 25
years. In order to put the developments in perspective, it would be helpful to
step back in time, to remind ourselves of how things were 25 years ago.
It is 1962. We have been invited to observe a beginning EFL class.
Since the class has already begun, we take a seat at the rear of the classroom,
trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. The teacher is a young man. He is
speaking in English to a class of approximately 40 15-year-old students. Let’s
listen to what he is saying.
“All right, class. I am going to repeat the dialogue. Please
listen carefully. Two friends named Peggy and Sue are at a restaurant. They are
discussing what to order. Peggy speaks first.”
The
teacher then reads both Peggy’s and Sue’s lines of the dialogue. He makes the
meaning of the lines clear through the use of mime and pictures. Following this
second reading of the dialogue, the teacher asks his students to take the part
of Peggy, while he takes Sue’s. The teacher reads Peggy’s lines and the
students try their best to imitate his model. The teacher and class then switch
roles so that the students have an opportunity to practice the other part.
After a few repetitions, the teacher has one-half of the class say Peggy’s
lines and the other say Sue’s. They perform the dialogue with minimal prompting
from him. They trade roles. After the teacher is satisfied that the class has
learned the dialogue, he leads the class in a number of drills. A single-slot substitution drill
is the first. The teacher recites a line from the dialogue and then gives the
students a cue word or phrase. The students repeat the line from the dialogue,
substituting the cue into the line in its proper place. The first cue he gives
is a subject pronoun. The students know that they are to substitute this cue
into the subject position in the sentence. The teacher gives them a different
subject pronoun, and the drill proceeds. The students recognize that sometimes
they will have to change the present-tense verb morphology so that
subject-verb agreement is achieved.
The substitution drill is followed by a transformation drill, a
question-and-answer drill, and a chain drill. The pace is brisk; the teacher
slows down only when an error has been committed. When a pronunciation error is
made, the teacher offers another word that is minimally different from the one
the students are struggling with so that the students can hear the difference
between the familiar sound and the one that is causing them difficulty.
When
correct drill responses are given by the class, the teacher says “good” and
smiles approvingly. The lesson concludes with the teacher reviewing the lines
of the dialogue with which the lesson began. The dialogue is performed
flawlessly. The teacher smiles, “Very good. Class dismissed.’’ If we
were to compare this lesson with one presented today, what would we find? What
is striking is that such a comparison could not be easily made. There is such
methodological diversity in 1987 that it would be impossible to identify a
typical class. There is no single acceptable way to go about teaching language today. Indeed,
the existing approaches to language teaching differ in fundamental ways: There
is little or no accord on syllabus type, on materials used, on the order of
skill presentation, on the value of explicit error correction, or even on such
a basic issue as the role of the students’ native language.