Computer Application for English Language Teaching

 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.