A History of ELT [2 ed.] 0194421856, 9780194421850

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A History of English Language Teaching

Published in this series: Bachman: Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing Bachman and Palmer: Language Testing in Practice Brumfit: Individual Freedom in Language Teaching Brumfit and Carter (eds.): Literature and Language Teaching Canagarajah: Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching Cook: Discourse and Literature Cook: Language Play, Language Learning Cook and Seidlhofer (eds.): Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics Ellis: SLA Research and Language Teaching Ellis: The Study o f Second Language Acquisition Ellis: Understanding Second Language Acquisition Ellis: Task-based Language Learning and Teaching Jenkins: The Phonology o f English as an International Language Kern: Literacy and Language Teaching Kramsch: Context and Culture in Language Teaching Lantolf (ed.): Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning Meinhof: Language Learning in the Age o f Satellite Television Nattinger and DeCarrico: Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching Phillipson: Linguistic Imperialism Seidlhofer: Controversies in Applied Linguistics Seliger and Shohamy: Second Language Research M ethods Skehan: A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning Stern: Fundamental Concepts o f Language Teaching Stern (eds. P. Allen and B. Harley): Issues and Options in Language Teaching Tarone and Yule: Focus on the Language Learner Widdowson: Aspects o f Language Teaching Widdowson: Defining Issues in English Language Teaching Widdowson: Practical Stylistics Widdowson: Teaching Language as Communication

A History of English Language Teaching Second edition A. P. R . H o w a tt w it h

H . G. W idd ow son

O XFO RD U N IV E R S IT Y P R E S S

OXFORD U N IV E R S IT Y P R E SS

G reat C laren d o n Street, O x fo rd 0 x 2

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O xford U n iversity Press is a d e p a rtm e n t o f th e U n ive rsity o f O xford. It furthers th e U niversity’s objective o f excellen ce in research, scholarship, an d ed u ca tio n b y p u b lis h in g w o rld w id e in O xford N ew Y o rk A u cklan d C ape T ow n D a r e s Salaam H on g K on g K arachi Kuala Lum pur M adrid M elbo u rn e M exico C ity N airobi N ew D elh i Sh a n gh a i T aipei T oronto W ith o ffices in A rg e n tin a A u stria B razil C h ile C ze c h R ep u blic France G reece G u atem ala H u n gary Ita ly Japan Poland P ortugal Sin gapore S o u th K orea S w itzerla n d T h a ila n d T u rk e y U krain e V ie tn a m oxford

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O xford U n iversity Press in th e UK an d in ce rta in o th e r co u n trie s © O xford U n iversity Press 2004 The m o ral righ ts o f th e a u th o r h a v e b ee n asserted D atabase righ t O xford U n iversity Press (m aker) First ed ition p u b lish ed in 1984 First p u blish ed 2004 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005

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isBN-13; 978 019 442185o isbn-io: 0-19-442185-6 Typeset b y N ew gen Im a gin g System s (P) Ltd, C h en n ai, India P rinted in C h in a

To the memory of my father (1 9 1 0 -1 9 8 1 )

Contents

List of illustrations

x

Acknowledgements

xii

Note on spelling

xiv

Note on terminology

xv

Preface to the second edition Introduction PART O N E Section 1

1 1 4 0 0 -1 8 0 0

Practical language teaching

1 The early years 2 ‘Refugiate in a strange country’: the refugee language teachers in Elizabethan London 3 Towards ‘the great and common world’ 4 Guy Miége and the second Huguenot exile 5 The spread of English language teaching in Europe Section 2

xviii

9 18 37 56 65

On ‘fixing’ the language

6 An overview: 1550-1800 7 Two proposals for orthographical reform in the 1500s The work of John Hart, Chester Herald Richard Mulcaster’s Elementarle 8 Two pedagogical grammars of English for foreign learners Ben Jonson’s English Gram m ar John Wallis’s Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae 9 ‘Things, words and notions’

84 84 89 95 95 99 102

viii

Contents

10

The language‘fixed’ Latin schools and English schools Swift’s proposal for a British Academy Towards Standard English

PART TW O

1 8 0 0 -1 9 0 0

Introduction English language teaching in the Empire English language teaching in Europe Section 1 11

12

13

14

15

127 127 130

English language teaching in the Empire

Teaching English overseas: similarities and contrasts Reports on specific territories Teaching English in India Conclusion

Section 2

106 106 109 110

134 136 144 147

English language teaching in Europe

The grammar-translation method The origins of the method Language teaching in schools: some Anglo-German contrasts Language learning by adults: the ‘practical approach’ of Ahn and Ollendorff Individual reformers Overview ‘All is in all’: Jean Joseph Jacotot The Rational Method of Claude Marcel Thomas Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’ François Gouin and the ‘Series’ The Reform Movement The scope of the Movement The principles of reform The Klinghardt experiment The role of phonetics The work of Henry Sweet: an applied linguistic approach ‘Natural methods of language teaching’ from Montaigne to Berlitz Learning a language through ‘constant conversation’ Rousseau and Pestalozzi The origins of the Direct Method

151 151 152 158 166 166 169 170 175 178 187 187 189 192 194 198 210 210 214 217

Contents

PA RT T H R E E Section 1 16

1 9 0 0 T O T H E P R E S E N T DAY

English language teaching since 1900: the making of a profession

The teaching of English as a foreign or second language: a survey Phase 1 1900^16: Laying the foundations Phase 2 1946-70: Consolidation and renewal Phase 3 1970 to the present day: Language and communication

Section 2

ix

231 232 241 250

Aspects of English language teaching since 1900

17 Harold Palmer and the teaching of spoken language Palmer’s life and work Palmer’s methodology 18 Choosing the right words Michael West and the teaching of reading The Basic issue Carnegie and after 19 Old patterns and new directions The establishment of ELT and the post-war consensus A. S. Hornby and the teaching of structural patterns The early impact of applied linguistics (1941-60) The end of the Empire New directions in language teaching in the 1960s 20 The notion of communication The communicative approach Communication and language learning The Threshold Level Project English for Special/Specific Purposes (ESP) The Bangalore Project Conclusion 21 A perspective on recent trends by H. G. W iddowson

264 264 270 278 278 283 288 294 294 297 302 309 315 326 326 333 337 340 346 349

A chronology of English language teaching

373

Bibliography

380

Index

406

353

List of illustrations

Figure 2.1 Title-page of Jacques Bellot’s English Schoolm aster (1580) Figure 2.2 Extract from Jacques Bellot’s Familiar D ialogues (1586) Figure 2.3 Extract from Claudius Holyband’s French Littleton (1609 edition) Figure 3.1 Extract from Joseph Webbe’s Children’s Talk (1627) Figure 3.2 Title-page of Comenius’s Orbis Pictus (1659) Figure 3.3 Extract from Orbis Pictus (1659) Figure 3.4 Extract from Orbis Pictus (1659) Figure 4.1 Extract from Guy Miège’s English Gram m ar (1688) Figure 4.2 Extract from Guy Miege’s N ouvelle M éthode pour apprendre l’Anglois (1685) Figure 5.1 Map: The spread of English as a foreign language in Europe to 1800 Table 5.1 Selected late seventeenth-and eighteenth-century works for the teaching of English as a foreign language Figure 5.2 Title-page of John Miller’s The Tutor (1797) Figure 5.3 Extract from John Miller’s The Tutor (1797) Figure 5.4 Extract from John Miller’s The Tutor (1797) Figure 7.1 First step in John Hart’s M ethod (1570) Figure 7.2 Second step in John Hart’s M ethod (1570) Figure 9.1 Summary of John Wilkins’ Essay (1668) Figure 10.1 Extracts from Johnson’s Dictionary o f the English Language (1755) including the famous oats definition, and Webster’s American Dictionary o f the English Language (from the London reprint, E. H. Barker (ed.) 1832) Figure 10.2 Extract from Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Gram m ar (1762) Figure 10.3 Extract from Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Gram m ar (1762) Figure 12.1 Lesson 50 of Ollendorff’s German course for English speakers (2nd edition 1841) Figure 13.1 ‘The Labyrinth’ from Thomas Prendergast’s Mastery o f Languages(1864) Figure 14.1 Henry Sweet (1845-1912)

21 23 29 43 45 52 52 60 61 66 67 73 74 75 87 88 103

113 118 119 161 179 199

List o f illustrations

Figure 15.1 Maximilian D. Berlitz (1852-1921) Figure 16.1 English language teaching Phase 1 (1900-46): Strands of development Figure 16.2 An extract from the O xford English Course Figure 17.1 Harold E. Palmer (1877-1949) Table 18.1 West’s lexical distribution patterns Figure 19.1 A. S. Hornby (1898-1978) Figure 20.1 N. S. Prabhu

xi

222 233 239 265 281 299 348

Acknowledgements

I am glad that a new edition of this book has allowed me to acknowledge once again my deep sense of gratitude to the late Ronald Mackin, my teacher at the School of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh more than forty years ago. In the autumn of 1962 he delivered a series of lectures on the history of language teaching with a grace, wit, and seriousness that left an indelible memory. To a young teacher of English as a foreign language, for whom much of the attraction of the job lay in its rootlessness, he showed that there were roots in a tradition that was sufficiently weighty with achievement to command allegiance and sufficiently unpredictable to retain affection. Having retired only recently from the University of Edinburgh, I am not yet wholly reconciled to the fact that the entire experience and its consequences are now part of history. Nevertheless, I should like to record my thanks to colleagues and friends in what is now known as the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, and express again my special indebted­ ness to the scholars whom I mentioned in the first edition, conscious though I am that they are not all able to receive it: David Abercrombie, Pit Corder, Alan Kemp, and Elizabeth Uldall. If colleagues depart, they also arrive, and for all too brief a period I have been touched by the energy and expertise that John Joseph, the new Professor of Applied Linguistics, has brought to the subject as a whole and in particular to those features of it that have also been my concern. I should also like to thank my former Heads of Department, Professors Alan Davies and Ron Asher for their support and reassurance at times which since 1984 have had their turbulences. Finally, it is fitting that this time round I should be able to express my appreciation of the enthusiasm and in many instances the practical help given to me by two graduate students, Richard Smith and Stephen Evans, whose presence in Scotland was due in part at least to the existence of the book. I should also like to repeat my appreciation of the work of the Main Library of Edinburgh University which has never failed to provide unstinting help and support, and for their foresight over the centuries which has resulted in an amazingly rich collection of relevant materials from the past. In this regard, I am particularly indebted to the decision by the library to invest in the Scolar Press facsimile series in 1967-72 and the accompanying Bibliography o f the English Language front the Invention o f Printing to the Year 1800 (1965-74) compiled by R. C. Alston. It is not too much to say that this book would have been impossible without this resource, and I know

Acknowledgements

xiii

from former colleagues that I am not alone in my appreciation of its value to many similar projects. I should also like both to repeat and indeed expand my appreciation of bib­ liographical sources which have been of particular value to the present work derived from the following publications: W. H. Widgery (1888) The Teaching o f Languages in Schools, Kathleen Lambley (1920) The Teaching and Cultivation o f the French Language in England in Tudor and Stuart Times, W. F. Mackey (1965) Language Teaching Analysis, L. G. Kelly (1969) 25 Centuries o f Language Teaching, H. H. Stern (1983) Fundamental Concepts o f Language Teaching, Ian Michael (1987) The Teaching o f English from the Sixteenth Century to 1870, R. E. Asher (editor-in-chief, 1994) Encyclopedia o f Language and Linguistics, and Kirsten Malmkjaer (ed. 2002,2nd edition) The Linguistics Encyclopedia. Finally, I would like to thank the editorial staff at Oxford University Press not only for their professional help and support but also for their personal concern on many occasions. In particular, my pleasure at the opportunity of being able to collaborate closely with Henry Widdowson both in his role as Applied Linguistics Adviser to the Press and in a personal capacity is acknowledged specifically in the ‘Preface’, but I should like to repeat it here. The publishers would like to thank the following for their permission to reproduce the following material. Almqvist and Wiksell for the extracts from Joh n H art’s Works on English O rthography and Pronunciation, Part 1 by Bror Danielsson, Stockholm: 1955, pp. 87, 88 (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). Berlitz Organization for the photograph of Maximilian Berlitz (Figure 15.1). Cambridge University Press for the extract from The French Littelton, with an Introduction by M. St. Clare Byrne, Cambridge: 1953 (Figure 2.3). Professor D. R. Ladd, Head of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh for the photograph of Henry Sweet (Figure 14.1). Johnson House for the section of the page from the Johnson Dictionary with the ‘oats’ definition (Figure 10.1). The Special Collections Department, Edinburgh University Main Library for Klinghardt’s transcriptions and Sweet’s Broad Romic, Lesson 50 of Ollendorff’s German course for English speakers (Figure 12.1), ‘The Labyrinth’ from Thomas Prendergast’s Mastery o f Languages (1864) (Figure 13.1). The Scolar Press for facsimiles EL 51 (Figure 2.1), EL 141 (Figure 2.2), EL 74 (Figure 3.1), EL 222 (Figures 3.2-3.4), EL 152 (Figure 4.1), EL 216 (Figure 4.2), EL 276 (Figures 5.2-5.4), EL 119 (Figure 9.1), and EL 18 (Figures 10.2 and 10.3) from their facsimile editions in the series English Linguistics 1500-1800 (EL) edited by R.C. Alston. The Dakin Collection, University of Edinburgh, for the photograph of Harold E. Palmer (Figure 17.1) originally donated by Mrs Elizabeth Uldall.

Note on spelling

The basic principle in the main text of the book has been to use modern spelling and punctuation conventions. The following points should, however, be noted: 1 Where English and foreign language texts are presented together, for example in the dialogues of Caxton, Bellot, etc., the original spelling has been preserved in both languages. 2 Some well-known titles such as Ascham’s Scholemaster, for example, have become so well-known in their original spelling that modernizing seems unnecessary. However, for the sake of consistency, and somewhat reluc­ tantly, they have been modified. The one exception is Mulcaster’s Elementarie in which he used his own system and to change it would be like modifying the Initial Teaching Alphabet or some similar self­ contained system. 3 Original spellings have been preserved in the bibliography, a compromise that permits their appearance at least once in the book.

Note on terminology

Tracing the origins of terms and expressions is a needle-in-a-haystack task with few clear-cut answers, but the following comments may illuminate some of the issues. As a preliminary we should note that the use of terms reflects the percep­ tions of speakers as much as any ‘objective’ reality, and in our present context the contrasts in meaning they represent affect only a small proportion of the people involved in the activity. Most teachers of English around the world know for instance that they are teaching it ‘as a foreign language’, so there is no need to say so. For the rest there is a need for the generalizations the terms represent, unreliable though they may sometimes prove to be. We should also bear in mind that we are concerned here with the use of terms in ‘headline’ contexts like the titles of books, training courses, associations, and the like. The pattern of usage in ordinary running text is likely to be different. 1 English for Foreigners/Foreign Students/Overseas Students, etc. These terms with ‘for’ are probably the oldest in regular use for the purposes we have mentioned. They focus on the intended learners suggesting that they have special needs which are different from those for whom ‘English’ alone is sufficient. The ‘for’ terms were the norm until the 1950s after which they lost ground to ‘English as a foreign language’ as the profession demanded a more distinctive label. The following British publications are all designed explicitly ‘for foreign students’: Thorley (1910/1947), Marshall and Schaap (1914), Eckersley (1933, 1935, 1938-42), Kelly (1940), Eckersley and Kaufmann (1947), Allen (1947, subtitle), and Hicks (1956). In the United States a simi­ lar pattern is evident, for example, Houghton (1911, 1917) and O’Brien (1909), but there are also variants with an ‘immigrant’ overtone which does not appear in the UK until the 1960s, for example, Goldberger’s textbooks English fo r Coming Citizens (1918, 1921) and his official report on The Teaching o f English to the Foreign-Born (1919). 2 English as a foreign language This phrase places its main emphasis on the language rather than the learn­ ers, and it has become the expression most favoured by teachers. Some relatively early examples of British origin include Gatenby (1944),

xvi

N ote on terminology

Gurrey (1955), Gauntlett (1957), Catford (1959), West (1960, subtitle), and Close (1962), all of them books for teachers. In the 1960s it was adopted by the teachers’ association ATEFL (1967), later IATEFL, which popularized the EFL/TEFL acronyms, and it was also linked to the new teacher training initiatives by the RSA. In the 1960s the contrasting phrase ‘English as a second language’ had not yet been adopted in the UK. In North America by contrast it had become standard usage by the late fifties. The work of Charles C. Fries is particularly interesting in this context: he used ‘English as a foreign language’ for his 1945 monograph, but his textbook series in 1952 was designed ‘for the study of English as a second language’. 3 English as a second language (1) This label was a colonial coinage which appeared in the 1920s (for example, West 1926a: v-vi, Thompson and Wyatt 1923/1935: 192-3) to emphasize the bilingual objectives of education in the Empire. It was intended that English should function as a second language for specific purposes which could not easily be met by the mother tongue, reading in the sciences being one of the most commonly cited examples. ‘Second’ also offered a solution to the problem of using the word ‘foreign’ in an imperial context. Morris (1945, 1946) and Bowden (1957) used ‘English as a second language’ in this sense, but it was relatively rare in UK publications, which preferred geographically explicit phrases like ‘English for West Africa’. Another popular alternative was to avoid the distinction altogether by using ‘abroad’ or ‘overseas’ (or ‘oversea’). Two well-known examples were books aimed explicitly at young teachers in colonial schools: The Teaching o f English A broad I-III (1948-50) by F. G. French, and Teaching English: notes and comments on teaching English overseas (1957) by A. W. Frisby. There was also Oversea Education, the official Colonial Office journal founded in the late 1920s. 4 English as a second language (2) The second context in which the word ‘foreign’ had important and for the most part unwelcome consequences included the countries of migration. North America had long been the dominant historical example but in the post-colonial world it was joined by Australasia and the United Kingdom. It is not surprising therefore to see ‘English as a second language’ appear in America early and we have already noted its use by the Fries-Rojas Puerto Rico textbook project known as the American English Series (1952-3). By 1960 it had become the US norm (see the useful bibliography in Darian 1972: 227-46), for example, Croft (ed. 1960), The National Council of Teachers of English (1961), Allen (1965), Finocchiaro (1965), and many more. Moreover,

N ote on terminology

xvii

when the Americans established a professional association in 1966, they chose an effectively inclusive label ‘Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages’ (TESOL). In the UK the need for an alternative to ‘English as a foreign language’ started later, and the adoption of ‘English as a second language’ took a sur­ prisingly long time, possibly because of its earlier associations with colonial­ ism. For whatever reason, ‘English for immigrants’ was the dominant expression throughout the 1960s, for example, HMSO (1963), Derrick (1966, 1967), Schools Council (1969-72). The watershed came in the mid1970s with the so-called ‘Bullock Report’ (HMSO 1975) and by 1980 ‘English as a second language’ had become established (for example Nicholls and Naish 1981). 5 English language teaching This is the only term in this list with a clear-cut starting date: autumn 1946 when it was adopted as the title of British Council’s new journal, an origin which also accounts for the appearance of the ELT acronym at the same time. Its appeal lay in covering the ‘foreign’ / ‘second’ language distinction, but it never developed a wide range of use. Teachers did not choose to describe themselves as ‘English language teachers’, for instance, and it was not selected for the title of the teachers’ association in 1967. Perhaps the poten­ tial ambiguity of something like ELTA (English Language Teaching Association) discouraged its use, but it is difficult not to feel that an opportunity was missed. The use of ‘English language teaching’ in the title of this book is technically speaking anachronistic, but, paradoxically, it is the only phrase we have con­ sidered in this note which does not carry over-powerful twentieth-century connotations—provided of course that the premature use of the ELT acronym is avoided. In more recent times terms like ‘English as an international language’ and ‘English as a lingua franca’ have gained a wider currency as the roles adopted by the language continue to diversify.

Preface to the second edition

In the preparation of the second edition of this book, the text was restruc­ tured in order to provide a better coverage of the subject, particularly in the key period since 1900. It now consists of three Parts rather than four and each part contains two Sections which are chronologically parallel and look at the subject matter from complementary points of view. The most obvious instance of expanded coverage is the provision of a more explicit background to the role of the Empire as one of the key educational contexts which contributed to the emergence of the English language teach­ ing (ELT) profession in the United Kingdom after the Second World War. This adjustment has entailed certain modifications elsewhere, for instance the omission of the ‘Biographical Notes’ which featured in the first edition, but the welcome appearance of major encyclopaedic studies in the last twenty years has meant that detailed information of that nature is being catered for in a much more authoritative manner. The new edition has also omitted the translation of Wilhelm Vietor’s Der Spracbunterricht muss umkehren!, but the original is now more accessible than it was twenty years ago (see Howatt and Smith (eds.) 2002, Vol. II, pp. xiii-xviii and 1-41). The new Part Three draws on the old Part Four but the text has been largely rewritten in order to create a more coherent narrative extending throughout the twentieth century. Chapter 16 contains this narrative in full and it is followed by chapters devoted to selected aspects of the subject which merit more detailed treatment. This overhaul was made possible through the encouragement of Oxford University Press in general and the detailed advice and support of H. G. Widdowson as their senior Applied Linguistics Adviser in particular. Henry Widdowson and I have known each other well since our early years in Pit Corder’s Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in the late 1960s, and I am hugely in his debt for the suggestions for improvement which he made and the sensitivity with which he approached the entire restructuring enterprise. I am particularly pleased that he has felt able to add a final consolidating chapter of his own which pro­ vides the book with a contrasting set of perceptions from someone who has been an acknowledged leader of the profession during the twenty-year life­ time of the first edition, and who is particularly well-qualified to identify ideas and movements that are likely to occupy the attention of people in the field in the next two decades and beyond. It is, however, only fair to relieve

Preface to the second edition

xix

him of the responsibility for views and contents elsewhere in the book, particularly where these may involve undetected errors of substance or emphasis, the blame for which rests entirely with me. APRH Edinburgh, November 2003

Introduction

The basic intention of this book is to try and illuminate the teaching of English to speakers of other languages by exploring some of its origins and some of the ideas that have influenced and moulded it over the years. Like most interesting human activities the teaching of languages has inhabited many different contexts in its time and any historical study will inevitably be selective and partial. It would be absurd to try and cover ‘everything’, but the reader will notice that the book is not restricted to a narrow definition of its central topic in isolation from other pertinent aspects of the subject. Our specific concern is with the overt teaching of languages and the learn­ ing which hopefully derives from it. We cannot for obvious reasons take into account the sort of informal language acquisition that occurs when speakers of different languages come into face-to-face contact, but we need to bear in mind not only that it was the most common way of learning foreign lan­ guages in the past, and probably still is, but also that it was a key background feature to some of the contexts in which more formal tuition took place, for example, the teaching of English to Protestant refugees in late Elizabethan London when materials were published to complement the process of ‘pick­ ing the language up’. The time span covered by the book is long and is divided into three periods of unequal length represented by the three Parts in which the book is organ­ ized. Part One (1400-1800) starts with the re-emergence of English as a national language in the late fourteenth century after three centuries of subservience to French, and it ends four hundred years later as schools in Europe and elsewhere begin to take an interest in teaching it alongside other modern foreign languages, challenging at last the long-held monopoly of the classical languages. This new concern for language education is the principal theme of Part Two (1800-1900) with studies of change and development both in Europe and in the expanding British Empire overseas. Part Three (1900 to the present day) brings the subject up to date with particular empha­ sis on the emergence of English language teaching as an autonomous profes­ sion in its own right. Each Part of the book is further sub-divided into two Sections which are chronologically parallel to each other. Section 1 of Part One, for instance, follows the narrative of practical language teaching before 1800. Then as now English was learnt as a spoken language for specific purposes

2

A History o f English Language Teaching

like business, travel, and so on, but as time went on and the supply of printed books rose, the language was taken up by learners wanting to read texts that were only available in English. In addition, as described in Chapters 2 and 4, there were substantial numbers of refugees who needed a measure of spoken fluency in English as a matter of urgency. Before the nineteenth century most learners of modern foreign languages were adults (the children were doing Latin in the grammar schools) and for the most part they studied on their own, though perhaps they also partici­ pated in small groups for ‘conversation’ with a native-speaker teacher resi­ dent in the locality. Section 2 deals with the long process of making the English language teachable by providing a stable orthography, a standardized grammar, and an authoritative dictionary, otherwise questions of right and wrong could not be decided. These documents eventually appeared, but the story of their creation is a long one and takes us to the end of the eighteenth century. Part Two (1800-1900) is devoted to two main themes which relate to each other only intermittently during earlier periods of the nineteenth century, but which come together in the 1880s and 1890s (Chapters 14 and 15). The first theme is the growth in the teaching of foreign languages to children in school which, as we have already seen, was rare before 1800. This theme is looked at twice altogether: once in a colonial context in Section 1 and then in the more complex European context in Section 2. The second theme is innovation which was a hugely significant feature of intellectual life in nineteenthcentury Europe in general and Britain in particular, from Brunei to Marconi. Language teaching had its share of innovators in the ‘bright ideas’ sense, but serious progress and reform came from the application of theory drawn from linguistics and psychology. In this respect it looked forward to the next century. Finally we move to modern times in Part Three (1900 to the present day). Once again the Part is divided into two concurrent Sections, both covering the whole period. Section 1 is a narrative in three ‘phases’ which is intended to provide a fairly detailed account of the development of ELT throughout the century. Section 2 by contrast is a selective account of aspects of English language teaching that are of sufficient interest to warrant a more detailed study. The key theme in Part Three is the emergence of ELT as an autonomous profession, a process which took many years, beginning with the need to identify an intellectual foundation for the study of language teaching and learning followed by a programme of research and development which would help to bring about the desired improvements. This brief summary masks a number of general issues which deserve to be identified as part of the background to the book, though they may also impinge directly on the content of the text at times.

Introduction

3

First of all, we have become so used to thinking of English as one of the world’s mega-languages, that it requires a major adjustment of our mental maps to see it as the small minority language spoken by a population of under three million that it was when this book opens in 1400.1 In addition, this figure represents less than half the population of a century earlier before the Black Death struck the country in the 1340s. In fact it took centuries for the figures to return to their former levels and they were still under six million in 1700. However, the inclusion of English speakers living in the rest of the British Isles would have added maybe two to three million more. To put these figures into their contemporary context, the population of France in 1700 was still at least four times that of England, and the discrepancy did not change substantially until the well-known urban population surge in the wake of the industrial revolution a century later.2 In addition, the homeland of the language was a difficult and even a dangerous place to visit. The Channel was an infamously unpredictable waterway at the best of times and it was not until the arrival of the first cross­ channel steamships in 1821 that any kind of scheduled service between England and the continent became possible. Under such circumstances it is not surprising that before 1800 most learners of the language were more interested in learning to read the language than to speak it. The exceptions were of course those for whom the same difficulties of access provided the best insurance of personal safety, namely the refugees from persecution who start our story off in the sixteenth century and who recur in different contexts of peril down to the present day. The limited number of potential customers for the language in the early centuries discouraged the publication of specialized teaching materials and they often took the form of bilingual manuals which ‘worked both ways’, or so it was claimed. The very first printed manual for English was a case in point, being ‘for to lerne shortly frenssh and englyssh’ (early 1480s, see Chapter 1). A century later John Florio made the same claim for both his books of dialogues, First and Second Fruits, the former (1578) being: ‘a per­ fect Induction to the Italian, and English tongues’ and the latter (1591) containing: ‘delightsome tastes to the tongues of Italians and Englishmen’ (Chapter 2). When grammatical descriptions of English became available (and the very earliest was not produced until 1586),3 they could be sold in the same way. An early example was John Wodroephe’s M arrow o f the French Tongue in 1623 (see Chapter 2, Note 19). ‘Double grammars’, as they were called, remained popular until well into the eighteenth century, for example, Offeln (1687) for English-German, and Boyer/Miege (1718) for English-French (see Chapter 4). However, by the seventeenth century there was a growing schol­ arly interest in reading in English, particularly texts in ‘practical theology’ as John Wallis tells us in the preface to his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae in 1653.4 Such students were of course fluent in Latin, and grammars like

4

A History o f English Language Teaching

Wallis’s and Christopher Cooper’s with the same title (1685) served an important if specialist market. In addition to bilingual publications, it was also quite common for mono­ lingual mother-tongue grammars to claim that they were suitable for foreigners (‘strangers’) if they were not complete beginners in the language. For instance, Cooper claimed that the English version (1687) of his 1685 grammar was intended ‘for all Gentlemen, Ladies, Merchants, Tradesmen, Schools, and Strangers’ provided only that they ‘have so much knowledge of our English Tongue as to understand the Rules’.5 It is easy to dismiss such assertions as merely commercial promotion, but, as Ian Michael (1987), approaching the issue from the mother tongue view­ point, has reminded us: ‘until the end of the eighteenth century, teachers . . . were rarely able to conceptualize the differences in method between studying your own language and learning a foreign one’.6 One of the reasons for this seeming confusion was the fact that all grammars used the same set of cat­ egories which had been learnt at school through Latin. Since all educated Europeans knew Latin, it was assumed that they could work their way through a grammar of a language like English without too much difficulty, particularly if it had originally been written for school pupils. Another reason for understanding our subject as broadly as possible is to bring important issues into the discussion which would have to be excluded on a strict interpretation of relevance. A key example in our present context would be schooling before 1700. Modern languages like English began to creep into schools in the second half of the eighteenth century, but this was exceptional and private study was the norm. Before that date the classrooms of Europe were dominated by the teaching of Latin, most of it both bad and brutal. ‘Teaching’ meant setting texts in and about Latin grammar to be learnt by heart, testing the children individually, and beating them when they (inevitably) made mistakes. Given this background— see John Locke (1693) for a graphic account—it is of some importance in a book on the teaching of languages to note serious attempts at pedagogical reform even if the impact was not felt directly at the time. The ideas of Locke are a case in point even though he was not talking specifically about English. So too are the heroic efforts of Comenius in teaching elementary Latin in difficult circumstances in the seventeenth century, and of Rousseau and those he inspired to wholesale educational change in the eighteenth and beyond. Language teaching in our own time has been profoundly influenced by ideas with their roots in this work, in particular everything that is implied by the shorthand phrase ‘learner-centred education’. All the features of the book which we have mentioned so far were present in the first edition, though the organization was different. There is, however, a new component in this second edition which requires comment, namely the teaching of English in the Empire. The first reason for extending the scope of the book in this way is to try and offer a factual account of the educational

Introduction

5

arrangements which were put in place in the colonial territories during the nineteenth century and to consider in particular the role played by the English language. As expected, the account shows that government schools simply reproduced what was being done in elementary schools back in Britain with the same books, curricula, and so on. English was not perceived as a ‘language’ which needed to be ‘taught’, it was the medium through which everything else was learnt—just as it was in London, Manchester, or Glasgow. In other words it was seen as a second mother tongue. However, government schools were not the whole story. We have therefore presented the material as a series of ‘snap­ shots’ showing provision in different parts of the Empire which we hope will help to enrich the picture of variation that was characteristic of the enterprise as a whole. The second reason for including the topic is to provide a stronger historical context for aspects of ELT in the twentieth century and beyond. Michael West’s research in Bengal in the nineteen twenties is one specific example, but more generally it would have been unreasonable to ignore important issues which have been raised in ELT since the first edition of this book in 1984 (for example, the Makerere Conference in 1961), without trying to give them a longer historical perspective. Before leaving this Introductory statement, there are two matters of import­ ance which require comment. The first is the phrase ‘English language teach­ ing’ which is used in the title of the book; the second is a more general statement of intention. As we say elsewhere, the phrase ‘English language teaching’ was invented in 1946 as the title of the journal founded to serve the purposes of an increasingly coherent profession. English Language Teaching (ELT) was doubly significant because its foundation also represented a rival to the existing heavyweight journal Oversea Education,7 produced by the mighty Colonial Office. ELT, on the other hand, was published by the British Council and its appearance effectively put some clear blue water between the two enter­ prises. It may have been small, but it gave the profession an independent voice that was not muffled by the louder educational pronouncements of the Empire. Once ‘English language teaching’ was in the public arena, it was only a short time before the ‘ELT’ acronym also appeared. However, so far as this book is concerned, the acronym belongs strictly to the modern post-1946 world. The full phrase, however, is used throughout the book with the ‘foreign language’ connotations which it undoubtedly had when it was coined, though they are absent from the wording itself. In a sense this is a case of systematic anachronism, but it seems to me to be justified. Moreover, its studied reticence on distinctions such as those between ‘English as a foreign language, ‘English as a second language’, and ‘English as a mother tongue’ is not inconsistent with the general philosophy of the book, as we have already noted above. However, no label is perfect, and ‘English language teaching’ has two further connotations which are less helpful in some respects. The first is that

6

A History o f English Language Teaching

its British origins mean that it is less readily understood overseas, particularly in the USA where ‘Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages’ (TESOL) has become the norm, but like TEFL and TESL in Britain also has connotations of ‘membership’. ‘ELT’ successfully avoids all such overtones. You can identify with ELT and talk about it as an activity in which you participate, but you cannot ‘join’ it. By the same token you cannot ‘exclude’ anybody else from it. The second issue is a more general one: ELT is in the first instance a native­ speaker construct which, as Part Three of this book makes quite clear, grew up to provide a professional framework within which native-speaker teachers around the world could develop their work. In this respect it is designed to complement but not compete with the professional arrangements that are made by English teachers in individual countries. Finally, the history of language teaching (English included) reveals itself in a pattern of contrasts that have been repeated many times in different ways over the course of time. The basic distinction is one between the perception of a language as a set of representative texts on the one hand and as a mental system for creating new texts on the other. From a pedagogical point of view the parallel contrast between deductive and inductive methodology is essen­ tially a comparable question. In recent times, however, the significance of text has become inflated in certain contexts, and languages are often character­ ized in terms of an arbitrary sub-set of these texts, English being for instance, the language o f . . . ‘science’, ‘Shakespeare’, ‘colonialism’, ‘popular enter­ tainment’. We need to remember that English is a system for m aking mean­ ing, not merely for communicating it. The distinction has always been fundamental to all language education, but perhaps it needs to be revisited today since if it is forgotten, the language teacher runs the risk of being implicated in the creation of all the texts which are deemed to be unaccept­ able at any one time. Even worse— so is the learner.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Hatcher (1996: 74-80). Anderson (1996: 210-1). Also, Hatcher (1996: 77). William Bullokar (1586). Kemp (1972:105). Cooper (1687, A2). Michael (1987:318). This work contains an excellent textbook bibliography. Oversea Education (the use of ‘oversea’ without an ‘s’ was common at the time) was founded in 1929 and published for the Secretary of State for the Colonies by Oxford University Press (which later published ELT). It covered all aspects of education including English teaching.

PART O N E

1 4 0 0 -1 8 0 0

S E C T IO N 1

Practical language teaching 1

The early years

The teaching of modern vernacular languages began in England towards the end of the Middle Ages when French died out as the second language of the kingdom and gradually surrendered to English. The processes of linguistic change in England from a bilingual feudal community ruled by the AngloFrench Plantagenet dynasty to a largely monolingual nation under the Tudors were slow but irreversible. In 1385 John of Trevisa (1326-1412), a wellknown cleric and translator, complained that English children knew no more French than ‘their left heel’ and it was necessary for them to construe their Latin lessons in English. He blamed the Black Death of the late 1340s for this dislocation of traditional linguistic patterns, but saw certain advantages in the change: ‘they learneth their grammar in less time than children were i-woned (used) to do’. However, there were also disadvantages in this new linguistic independence when Englishmen ‘shall pass the sea and travel in strange lands and in many other places’.1 From now on French was a foreign language and would have to be learnt. So, mutatis mutandis, was English. Trevisa was writing in the reign of Richard II and was a contemporary of Chaucer who traditionally represents the waxing mood of English self­ confidence at the end of the fourteenth century. Before the end of Richard’s reign the earliest extant manual for the teaching of French in England had been written by an unknown East Anglian author in Bury St Edmunds on Whitsun Eve, May 29th 1396.2 It is a collection of useful everyday dialogues for travellers to France and was the first of a number of similar manuals, or manieres de langage as they are usually called, which appeared during the fif­ teenth and early sixteenth centuries, and were the forerunners of the situ­ ational language teaching textbooks of the Tudor period which we shall discuss later. The break with the past, represented by the usurpation of the throne from Richard II by the House of Lancaster in 1399, expressed itself in overt linguistic terms. The order deposing Richard was read in English and Henry IV himself

10

A History o f English Language Teaching

elected to use English both in claiming the crown and later in his acceptance speech.3 The tradition was carried on by his son Henry V who adopted English as the language of royal correspondence in place of French. If there is a fulcrum in the swing away from French and Latin as the normal means of written communication towards their replacement by English, it is probably the reign of Henry V which witnessed a rising consciousness of nationhood engendered by Henry’s legendary victory at Agincourt in 1415. Although Shakespeare’s portrait of Henry is obviously an Elizabethan glamorization of ‘the star of England’, the touches of linguistic self-consciousness that he gives his hero in his dealings with his French bride (‘Fie upon my false French! By mine honour, in true English, I love thee, Kate’)4 are not without some historical reality. The first extant council record written in English dates from his reign (1417),5 and his decision to follow his father’s example and publish his will in English also made a public impact.6 The London brewers, for instance, adopted Henry’s attitude as a precedent in making their decision to record their proceedings in English in 1422: Whereas our mother tongue, to wit the English tongue, has in modern days begun to be honourably enlarged and adorned, because our most excellent lord, King Henry V, has in his letters missive and divers affairs touching his own person, more willingly chosen to declare the secrets of his will, and for the better understanding of his people, has with a diligent mind procured the common idiom (setting aside others) to be commended by the exercise of writing: and there are many of our craft of Brewers who have the knowledge of writing and reading in the said English idiom, but in others, to wit, the Latin and French, used before these times, they do not in any wise understand.7 By the end of the fifteenth century even the statutes of the realm were written in English, and the affairs of state handled through the royal secretariat were conducted in the vernacular. During the same period the dialect of the EastCentral Midlands established itself as the prestige variety of English pronun­ ciation used among the nobility and others associated with the power that gathered round the new Tudor dynasty.8 Orthographical standardization was also well advanced in so far as it was subject to the scribal disciplines of the royal chancery, but suffered a setback after the introduction of printing (1476) which, in the early years of the trade, had no tradition of uniformity in craft training or practices. To the Tudors, English was the language of the nation, spoken by all from the King himself downwards. French was seen as a prestigious accomplishment necessary for anyone with ambition towards culture or advancement in high places, and Latin remained secure as the mark of a properly educated man or woman. Going to school meant learning Latin grammar and, in a sense, Latin was the only language that had a gram­ mar. French was about to acquire one in John Palsgrave’s monumental Lesclaircissement de la langue francoyse published in 1530. English, on the

The early years

11

other hand, had to wait until the beginning of the next century before any serious attempt was made to produce a scholarly description of the language, though William Bullokar’s Pam phlet fo r Grammar, a brief sketch for a longer work, had appeared a little earlier in 1586.9 In the absence of grammatical and other descriptions of vernacular lan­ guages, it is not surprising to find that early language teaching materials relied mainly on texts, and the dialogue form as a ‘slice of linguistic life’, was the obvious type to choose. There were, however, other reasons. In the first place, the use of dialogues was a long-established tradition in the teaching of spoken Latin in the Middle Ages. The best-known example of a Latin-teaching dialogue, or colloquy, as they were usually called, is one by Aelfric, Abbot of Eynsham, written in the eleventh century, before the Norman Conquest.10 The Latin text, which is accompanied by an interlinear translation in Anglo­ Saxon, consists of a series of questions and answers relating to topics and activities of everyday rural life, farming, hunting, trading, and so on. These were familiar to the youngsters who were being trained in elementary Latin before moving on to higher studies in grammar and rhetoric. The questionand-answer format itself derives from an even more basic teaching technique common in orate communities where verbatim learning of written texts is required in the education of the young to preserve essential texts from the lin­ guistic variation which otherwise accompanies oral traditions of learning. This is the catechistic technique whereby questions are used as prompts to the memory and serve to break the text into digestible chunks which can be learnt by heart. It was a common procedure in textbooks throughout the whole period to 1800, and sometimes later as well. Joseph Priestley’s Rudiments o f English Grammar written in the late eighteenth century (1761) is a typical example: Q A Q A Q A

What is Grammar? Grammar is the art of using words properly. Of how many parts doth Grammar consist? Of four: Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody. What is Orthography? Orthography is the art of combining letters into syllables, and syllables into words.11

Modern language teaching dialogues did not of course adopt all the features of the catechistic method, but they grew out of the same procedural tradition and shared some of its advantages for the teacher. The learners had to do all the work of memorization and the teacher merely had to prompt them with ques­ tions in order to ‘hear’ the lesson. The following extract shows traces of a cat­ echistic origin. It comes from a manière de langage written in the same year as Agincourt (1415). The battle is actually mentioned in an earlier section of the text, underlining the interest of these manuals in contemporary life and events. In this section, it is quite clear who the manual was written for: merchants in

12

A History o f English Language Teaching

the all-important wool trade as well as other traders in agricultural products. I have included the rather lengthy list of things for sale in order to emphasize the importance of commerce in the early stages of modern language teaching. It is likely that the book was written by William of Kingsmill, a noted teacher of French in fifteenth-century Oxford.12 Lady, where is your master? By God, sir, he has gone to the fair at Woodstock, which is ten miles from here. Lady, what goods does he wish to buy or sell there? Sir, he has to sell there, bulls, cows, oxen, calves, bullocks, old and young pigs, boars, sows, horses, mares, foals, sheep, rams, and ewes, tups, lambs, kids, she-kids, asses, mules, and other beasts. He also has to sell there 20 sacks, 3 tods, 4 stones, and 5 cloves of wool, 200 woolfells, 14 long cloths and 10 dozen Oxford mixtures, 20 Abingdon kerseys, 10 Witney blankets, 6 Castlecombe reds, 4 Colchester russets, scarlets, celestial blues or perses, sanguine and violet plunkets in ray grain, Salisbury motleys, and other various colours of several kinds of cloth to be delivered as well to lords, abbots, and priors, as to other folk of the countryside. The first textbooks designed solely to teach English as a foreign language do not appear until the late sixteenth century after the arrival of large numbers of French Huguenot refugees in the 1570s and 1580s, but there are signs of an interest in learning the language among members of the mercantile com­ munity on the other side of the Channel, particularly in Flanders, well before this. Double-manuals in the m anière tradition aiming to teach English to French speakers as well as the other way round, started to appear at the end of the fifteenth century, though it is unlikely that the market for English was particularly extensive. The customers for these manuals may have included merchants using French as a lingua franca as well as native French speakers. Perhaps they found the French of their English counterparts difficult to understand at times and so decided to learn English themselves. More likely, however, they recognized the old truth that even a smattering of your client’s mother tongue works wonders in business. It also helps to safeguard against sharp practice. The first of these double-manuals was a short book of dialogues and other texts prepared by William Caxton (c.l422-c.91) and printed on his newlyestablished printing press in Westminster in 1483 or thereabouts. The titlepage of the book has been lost but it is known by its sub-heading as Tres bonne doctrine pour aprendre briefm ent fransoys et engloys or Right g ood lernyng fo r to lerne shortly frenssh and englyssh. According to Henry Bradley, who prepared an edition of the work for the Early English Text Society in 1900, it was almost certainly a reworking by Caxton of a much older Flemish-French manual written in Bruges in the fourteenth century. Caxton had been a leading member of the English merchant community in

The early years

13

Bruges for much of his life and had presumably brought the manual back to England with him. Perhaps his experience in the textile trade in Flanders con­ vinced him that there was a market for English, and he may have wanted to do his former associates a good turn by promoting their language. There is no doubt, however, that he had the commercial needs of his learners in mind: ‘Who this booke shall wylle lerne may well enterprise or take on honde marchandises fro one land to anothir’.13 The Caxton manual follows the traditions of the older manieres except that, unlike them, it is bilingual. It is severely practical in its aims and con­ tains no linguistic information about either French or English. It opens with a set of customary greetings: ‘Syre, god you kepe! . . . I haue not seen you in longe tyme . . . Syre, gramercy of your courtoys (courteous) wordes and of your good wyll’,14 and so on. It then moves on to very simple texts which are designed to introduce useful vocabulary for household equipment (‘ketellis, pannes, basyns’),15 servants, family relationships, etc. A shopping dialogue follows with lists of words for meat, birds, fish, fruit, herbs, etc. and a very detailed dialogue on the buying and selling of textiles of various kinds, mainly wool but also hides, skins, and other materials. The second half of the book is more interesting and original. It contains an alphabetically arranged series of vignette portraits, mainly of tradespeople, such as ‘Agnes our maid’, ‘Colard the goldsmyth’, ‘David the bridelmaker’, ‘George the booke sellar’ and the following extract concerning ‘Martin the grocer’: Martin le especier Vent pluiseurs especes De toutes manieres de pouldre Pour faire les brouets, Et a moult de boistes pointes Plaines de confections, Et moult de C a n n e s Plaines de beuurages.

Martin the grocer Selleth many spyces Of all maners of poudre For to make browettys, (broths) And hath many boxes paynted Full of confections, And many pottes Full of drynkes.16

After a dialogue about finding and paying for lodgings, the book ends with a short prayer that it will enlighten the hearts of its readers.17 Caxton’s assistant in his printing shop, Wynken de Worde, produced another double-manual about fifteen years later along similar lines called A Lytell treatyse for to lerne Englisshe and Frensshe (c. 1498). The text is laid out in alternating lines of English and French rather than in columns. The opening is interesting because of the reference to the use of French as a commercial lingua franca in the last three lines of the extract: ‘so that I may do my merchandise in France, and elsewhere in other lands, there as the folk speak French’: Here is a good boke to lerne to speke Frenshe Vecy ung bon livre apprendre parler françoys

14

A History o f English Language Teaching

In the name of the fader and the sone En nom du pere et du filz And of the holy goost, I wyll begynne Et du saint esperit, je vueil commencer To lerne to speke Frensshe, A apprendre a parler fran^oys, Soo that I maye doo my marchandise Affin que je puisse faire ma marchandise In Fraunce 8c elles where in other londes, En France et ailieurs en aultre pays, There as the folk speke Frensshe. La ou les gens parlent fran^oys.18 There were other signs of a growing interest in learning English in the early sixteenth century. The polyglot dictionaries and phrasebooks, which were a popular device for acquiring a ‘survival knowledge’ of foreign languages in Renaissance times, began to include English alongside the more widely-known languages like French, Italian, and Latin. The earliest listed in the Alston Bibliography is a seven-language dictionary of 154019 (Latin, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and High-Dutch20 as well as English) published, as one might expect, in Antwerp, the busy multilingual meeting-place of north European cloth merchants in the sixteenth century. It was followed by many others. Double-manuals originating on the continent are perhaps a rather better guide to the demand for English as a foreign language than those produced in England itself. An early example is by a Frenchman called Gabriel Meurier who made his living as a language teacher in Antwerp in the mid-sixteenth century. Meurier can claim to be the first teacher of English as a foreign lan­ guage we know by name since the other books we have been discussing were written anonymously, though it is unlikely that he had as many customers for English as for French. Meurier’s double-manual was called A Treatise for to Learn to Speak French and English and was orginally published in Antwerp in 1553. The last known copy unfortunately perished in the bombing of Nuremberg during the last war, but a later edition, published in Rouen in 1641, survives and the title-page includes the further information that the book contains: ‘a form for making letters, indentures and obligations, quit­ tances, letters of exchange, very necessary for all Merchants that do occupy trade of merchandise’. The commercial interests of Meurier’s students are very clear from this list of extras that the book promises. The final example of early handbooks for the teaching of English to for­ eigners before the more serious work with the Huguenot refugees began was a manual discovered by Alston in his bibliographical research called A Very Profitable B o o k to, Learn the Manner o f Reading, Writing and Speaking English and Spanish (1554). It is reproduced in the Scolar series along with a vocabulary found bound with it. The background to the Very Profitable

The early years

15

B ook is rather curious. It is, as the title indicates, a double-manual, but both the languages have been translated from different earlier editions, the Spanish from Flemish and the English probably from Latin. It is a version of a famous sixteenth-century manual known as ‘the Vocabulary of Barlement’ which appeared in various guises at different times. According to Alston, the original of this version was probably a Flemish-Latin edition of 1551. It was clearly a rush job brought out to catch the market in 1554, when large num­ bers of Spaniards were expected in London to attend the wedding of Philip II of Spain and Mary I, a kind of Tudor royal wedding souvenir. The signs of haste are evident enough. The vocabulary list at the end of the book claims to be ‘set in order of the Alphabet a.b.c.d.’ It was in alphabetical order in the original Flemish but in translation the order disappeared and nobody both­ ered to rearrange it. More importantly, the situational background to the dia­ logues and commercial texts was reproduced unaltered, with the bizarre result that students are asked to arrange the sale of houses in Antwerp to landlords posing as Flemish entrepreneurs: I John of Barlement witness that I have let out to Peter Marschalco my house at Antwerp in the market, being at the sign of the Hare, with the ground and well, for six years.21 The ‘John of Barlement’ mentioned in the text is, presumably, an indirect ref­ erence to the author of the original Vocabulaire on which the manual was based, Noel de Barlement. He was another Antwerp language teacher work­ ing in the city a little before Meurier. Once the Spanish learners got used to addressing Tom of Wapping, for example, rather than some Low-Dutch prop­ erty agent, they would find much of practical value in the book. It is fairly short and most of the first part is taken up with a conversation over dinner which gives all the useful phrases of everyday communication. The second half is almost entirely concerned with commercial affairs including buying and selling, ways of ‘calling upon your debtors’ and ‘writing epistles’, etc. It concludes with the vocabulary list already mentioned, and the standard church texts including, diplomatically enough, the Ave Maria. Compared to some of the later manuals the dialogues are rather primitive, but serviceable. The following is part of the dining scene (the Spanish text is printed in a parallel column as usual): Hermes John, I pray God send ye a good day. John And I, Hermes, wish unto you a prosperous day. Hermes How do you? John Ask you how I do? I fare well, thanks be to God, and will be glad to do you pleasure. I say, Hermes, how go your matters forward? Hermes Verily I fare well.22 By the end of the century, teaching-dialogues were to become very much livelier and more entertaining than the efforts of John and Hermes.

16

A History o f English Language Teaching

The next stage in the development of English language teaching after these humble beginnings on the Antwerp quaysides was determined by major events in the mainstream of late sixteenth-century religious politics.

Notes 1 Polychronicon quoted in Trevelyan (1956: 234). 2 Myers (ed. 1969: 1212), Doc. 714. The title of the manual is L a maniere de language qui t’enseignera bien à droit parler et escrire doulz françois. A considerable number of manuscript copies have survived, indicating the popularity of the book (see Lambley 1920: 35-8). Though the teach­ ing of French as a foreign language was new in the 1390s, French as a second language had long been taught in England as a language of literacy, (see Clanchy 1993). 3 Baugh and Cable (1978:148). 4 Henry V, Act V, scene ii. 5 Myers (ed. 1969:1084), Doc. 634, footnote. 6 Baugh and Cable (1978: 153). 7 Myers (ed. 1969:1084), Doc. 634. 8 Baugh and Cable (1978: 191-6). The East Midlands district was a large area taking in most of eastern England between the Thames and the Humber. Of particular importance for the development of Standard English was the dialect spoken in and around London. 9 The Pam phlet for Grammar is sometimes referred to, inappropriately, as the B ref Grammar, a sub-title taken from the running page-heading. See Turner (ed. 1980). 10 Garmonsway (ed. 1947). 11 Priestley (1761:1). 12 Unlike the later manuals, the original has no English gloss. The transla­ tion comes from A. R. Myers (ed. 1969: 1195), Doc. 701. See also Lambley (1920: 39^40). The text includes some unfamiliar terms, mainly connected with the wool trade: tups (rams), tods and cloves (units of measurement of weight), kerseys (lengths of coarse narrow cloth), perses (dark purple cloth), plunkets (blankets), and ray (striped) grain (scarlet). 13 The exact date of the Caxton manual is unknown. Bradley (ed. 1900: 3-4) and Lambley (1920: 42-6) give 1483 as the probable date. Others have placed it slightly earlier, around 1480. There is also an argu­ ment that Caxton may have printed a translation written by another (unknown) Bruges merchant rather than his own, (see Blake (1965)). 14 Bradley (ed. 190 0 :4 -5 ). 15 Ibid.: 7. 16 Ibid.: 41. 17 Ibid.: 51-2. 18 Quoted in Lambley (1920: 48-9).

The early years

17

19 The dictionary was called Septem Linguarum. 20 (Low) Dutch = modern Dutch or Flemish; High Dutch = modern German. 21 Anon., A Very Profitable B oo k (1554: Dv verso). 22 Ibid.: Aii verso-Aiii recto.

2

‘Refugíate in a strange country’: the refugee language teachers in Elizabethan London

From about 1560 onwards, as Catholic reaction to the Reformation gathered momentum under the leadership of Philip II of Spain, the Low Countries, and particularly Flanders, were singled out for an exemplary show of Counter­ Reformation power. The Duke of Alva bludgeoned the Flemings into choos­ ing between submission and flight, and the younger and more enterprising among them elected exile. They arrived in large numbers in friendly neigh­ bouring countries including England and were later joined by increasing numbers of their French co-religionists. Queen Elizabeth made them wel­ come for the skills and conscientious attitudes they brought with them to England, though many of her subjects were less enthusiastic about the threat these zealous foreigners brought to their own livelihoods. There were com­ plaints and protests from guilds and apprentices, but Elizabeth and her ministers had little time for chauvinistic grumbles and restrictive practices. Besides, she had support from the more educated, and less threatened, sec­ tions of society who had sympathy for those who had ‘suffered for religion’, and welcomed them into their homes and communities. Serious unrest was inhibited to some extent by the impact of the St Bartholomew Massacre in Paris in 1572 which provoked a mass exodus of Protestants from France to safety in the countries of the reformed church. St Bartholomew was one of those events that crystalize complex historical processes and movements into a single indelible image, like Auschwitz or Stalingrad in more recent times. The details of the massacre need not detain us here but the impact on life in England in the last quarter of the sixteenth century was considerable. The French Huguenot and other Protestant refugees from Flanders, Italy, and even Spain itself, were for the most part skilled craftsmen and artisans, dyers, weavers, smiths, lacemakers, diamond-cutters, and so on, though some had a more intellectual ‘middle class’ background, among them of course the teachers. The numbers who came across in the 1570s and 1580s were formidable. It has been estimated that aliens registered in England (not all refugees, of course) rose from 300,000 to 360,000 between 1570 and Armada year (1588) to bring the total close to 10 per cent of the population,

‘Refugíate in a strange country’

19

assuming the latter to be something of the order of three-and-a-half million.1 This would be equivalent in modern terms to a foreign population of fiveand-a-half million. After the Edict of Nantes in 1598 which, for a time at least, settled the religious question in France, many Huguenots returned, including almost all of those who had made a living and a reputation for themselves by teaching languages in London and other major English cities during the previous three decades. We shall look in detail at the work of three of the refugee teachers who rep­ resent a cross-section of the language teaching community of the time. The first, Jacques Bellot (dates unknown), was the most significant in the present context since he devoted himself more seriously than the other two to the teaching of English to the immigrant French community in London, though, like the others, he also taught his mother tongue to the native population. The second is Claudius Holyband (dates unknown), the leading professional language teacher of his day and therefore the man whose work and teaching methods we know most about. Although he claimed to be ‘a professor of the English tongue’, his principal work was teaching French to young children at a succession of schools he founded in and near London. Holyband’s career gives us a clear picture of the high level of pedagogical expertise that the immigrant group at its best brought to their language teaching activities. The third teacher, John Florio (c. 1553-1625), is complementary to Bellot and Holyband in the sense that he represents the private tutors of languages who were adopted into large households by the gentry and aristocracy. Florio was, however, much more than a language teacher and textbook writer. His inter­ ests and talents took him into virtually every aspect of linguistic and literary studies in the ‘Golden Age’ of the English Renaissance in the decades on either side of the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. Like the other two, Florio was a Protestant but he was a second-generation immigrant and the only one to remain in England until his death. One interesting feature of the refugee teachers, which is of relevance to our own time, is that, leaving aside Bellot’s English-teaching activities, they were native speakers of the languages they taught. Unlike their twentieth-century counterparts, however, they did not adopt a monolingual approach, but con­ tinued the traditional bilingual method of the earlier manuals. The ability to look at one’s own language through the eyes of someone attempting to learn it requires what might be called a ‘reflexive imagination’, and the skill and knowledge to put its insights into practice. This in turn implies a need for reli­ able linguistic descriptions from which models, examples, and explanations can be drawn to clarify the teacher’s native intuitions. In the sixteenth century there were substantial descriptions of French, including Palsgrave’s magnifi­ cent Lesclaircissement de la langue francoyse (1530) mentioned earlier, but there was no comparable study of English. This helps to explain why the linguistic information in the manuals of Bellot and Florio is so scanty, and also, perhaps, accounts for the absence of native-speaking teachers of English.

20

A History o f English Language Teaching

As we have seen, most of the refugees were craftsmen and, provided they could find employment or the resources to set up on their own, would survive and even prosper without a detailed knowledge of spoken English. Most of them would pick the language up informally through their contacts in the local community. They would not, however, be able to pick up literacy skills in the same way and, although the demands made on them would have been slight compared to their counterparts at the present time, it would have been difficult to maintain the status of a skilled craftsman without some ability to handle the written language. For the wives and other members of the family, however, with little oppor­ tunity for full-time work, the situation would have been more distressing. Literacy skills would not have had much importance, but the ability to speak English would have been even more essential for them than for the men. Not only were there all the obvious situations such as shopping and getting about the city, but there were social needs as well. Local grassroots hostility to for­ eigners could break out at any time. With both the most powerful nations of Europe, France and Spain, ranged against them, the English were suspicious and ‘jumpy’. Rumours of foreign spies, Catholic agents, and conspiracies of every kind were flying about and small incidents frequently flared into ugly scenes in the overcrowded streets. The women and the elderly in particular would have been exposed to insults, if not outright physical danger, and a knowledge of everyday English was some protection against mindless scare-mongering. The two small English manuals that Jacques Bellot wrote for the French­ speaking refugees in the 1580s reflect these priorities of basic literacy and everyday conversation quite closely. Unlike the books for teaching French, they contain very little about commercial transactions or other aspects of business life. They are much nearer home and concentrate on the needs that have just been described. The first book that Bellot published after his arrival in England (some time in the late 1570s) was The English Schoolm aster (1580), obviously echoing the title of Roger Ascham’s famous educational treatise of 1570. The Schoolmaster was dedicated, rather unexpectedly, to the brother of the King of France, the Duke of Alengon, presumably because he was a well-known suitor for Elizabeth’s hand, though she was far from enam­ oured of her ‘little Frog’ as she called him. It shows that Jacques Bellot, the self-styled ‘Gentleman of Caen’, who had arrived without a penny some years before, was aiming high. His second book, Familiar Dialogues (1586) is, as the title suggests, a collection of everyday dialogues and conversations. Bellot’s Schoolm aster is a curious little book in many ways, quite unlike the general run of contemporary dialogue manuals. It starts with a fairly detailed account of the English alphabet and pronunciation, necessary information for those who had picked the language up informally and needed help with reading and writing. The bulk of the book, however, consists of a discussion of ‘difficult words’ with a few odd grammar points thrown in. We cannot blame Bellot for the inadequacy of these grammar notes, considering that the

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22

A History o f English Language Teaching

English had so far failed to produce anything substantial themselves. The section on ‘difficult words’ is more interesting. He discusses homophones with different spellings like hole/w hole, bore/boar, horse/hoarse or common ambiguities such as right, straight, and hold. He even includes everybody’s favourite minimal pair: David was a keeper o f sheep/The Katharine o f England is a fair ship. Every teacher of English as a foreign language today would recognize Bellot’s choice of problem words: well, light, stay, and fast, for instance, or contrasts such as fill/feel or cost/'coast/'cast. With examples like these, Bellot’s main aim appears to have been to help learners who had picked the language up ‘by ear’ to distinguish easily confused words by seeing them in print. Literacy needs are clearly important and, while the Schoolm aster is in no sense a systematic book, it is a practical one none the less. It ends with one of those rather charming collections of sayings that occur regularly in Elizabethan language textbooks. It does not have any par­ ticularly serious purpose, but it is attractive. It is called The Posy or Nosegay o f Love and teaches the names of flowers and vegetables in little mottoes: ‘Almond tree flowers are taken for “be content in love’” or ‘The primrose signifieth “I begin to love you’” . Then he turns to vegetables: asparagus, it seems, means ‘renewing of love’ and the radish ‘pardon me’. At that point we move on. The preface to Bellot’s second work, Familiar Dialogues (1586), makes it quite clear who the book is intended for: ‘The experience having in the old time learned unto me what sorrow is for them that be refugiate in a strange country, when they cannot understand the language of that place in which they be exiled, and when they cannot make them to be understood by speech to the inhabiters of that country wherein they be retired . . . I thought good to put into their hands certain short dialogues in French and English.’2 With this preface the teaching of English as a foreign language begins a theme that, unhappily, it has never ceased to play. Bellot’s dialogues have a domestic setting with a strong emphasis on shop­ ping. His characters visit the poulterer, the costermonger, the draper, the fish­ monger, and the butcher in a lengthy sequence of shop scenes in the middle of the book, which follows more or less the sequence of a single day. It begins with getting up in the morning and seeing the children off to school. Then comes the shopping and, in the evening, friends call in for dinner, and the conversation gets round to their present depressing predicament: The master The neighbour The master The neighbour

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‘Refugíate in a strange country’

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tnm *j | (ill,) The [mpciiinc of : academic prestige through their association with the Locals and social pre--. ■ tige by their exclusion from the ‘best’ schools. Hence, inevitably, they became ‘soft options’. This was to have unfortunate results when the universities eventually, and reluctantly, came round to the notion of instituting modem language degrees (Cambridge in the 1880s and Oxford about twenty year-, later). The university involvement in determining the content of the second­ ary school curriculum effectively stifled the reform of language teaching in England at the end of the nineteenth century by requiring academic ‘respectability’ from the modern languages. The trend of reform towards the teaching of the spoken language was, of course, quite unacceptable (‘travel courier’ learning in the eyes of at least one Cambridge don)3 and philolojA took its place. There was at least one further reason for prejudice against the teaching of English and modern languages. Girls were good at them. The Locals admit­ ted girls (amid considerable controversy and deep anxieties lest they should faint) in 1862 and from the outset they proved they were better than the bo\' at French, German, and the more ‘expressive’ aspects of English. The boys, on the other hand, excelled at classical languages and the more ‘linguistic’ side of English grammar. The girls, according to the Cambridge Syndicate Report of 1868 ‘appear to take a rational interest in the subject matter (i.e. nl French and German) which to the large majority of the boys is evidently a matter of complete indifference’.4 Given this background, it is easier to understand why the late nineteeth-century reformers paid so much attention to the universities and the examination system. Sweet, for instance, in his seminal 1884 paper said quite openly, ‘Reform must come from above—from that school of original investigation and experiment which can only be worked through some kind of university system’.5 Widgery echoed him a little later in his pamphlet on modern language teaching in schools: ‘Our present method needs a thorough reform. Who is to begin the change? What is the chief hindrance in our way? The change must come from the Universities: our hindrance lies in the exaggerated respect paid by the British public to examinations’.6 In practical terms, the fear of being labelled a ‘soft option’ forced modern language teachers and textbook writers to ape the methods of the classic-«. French had to be made as ‘demanding’ as Latin, and German as ‘intellectually disciplined’ as Greek. Textbooks had to be ‘thorough’, i.e. exhaustive in their

The grammar-translation m ethod

155

listing of exceptions and peculiarities, and based on selections from the ‘best authors’. Spoken language was, at best, irrelevant and accuracy was elevated to the status of a moral imperative. In the Cambridge Report of 1868 already quoted above, the writer complains that ‘parlez, parlé, paríais, parlaient, etc. seem to be looked upon as convertible terms to be used with impartiality’,7 ,ind recommends more regular written exercises. There was also ‘a ludicrous ignorance of grammar’, ‘indifference as to spelling’, and other inadequacies. Under pressure of this kind, who can blame the teachers for pushing the grammar-translation method even further in the direction of a tyrannical obsession with minutiae? The ‘unholy alliance’ between the public examination system and educa­ tional privilege successfully blocked the reform of modern language teaching in the late nineteenth century by institutionalizing the special status of the classics and effectively, though unintentionally, guaranteeing for this country ,in unenviable reputation for being ‘bad at languages’. At the same time, the energies of the Reform Movement were diverted into the teaching of English as a foreign language, but that is another story. If this appears a rather harsh judgement, consider, for example, the fate of one of the central principles of the Reform Movement, namely the adoption of a basically monolingual teaching methodology through the use of the for­ eign language as the norm al means of communication in the language class■■oom. (This never meant ‘banning’ the use of the mother tongue, except in rlie more extreme versions of the Direct Method.) In Britain, the monolingual principle is still a controversial issue in foreign language teaching, whereas in (iermany, for instance, visitors to secondary schools a century ago could witness monolingual foreign language lessons taking place,8 not as ‘Direct Method experiments’, but as a normal procedure in an ordinary school. For inMance L. R. Klemm, an American visitor touring German schools in the I NXOs, reported a reformed English lesson in a secondary school in Krefeld in the Rhineland that impressed him greatly. It consisted mainly of oral question.uui-answer work on the text, following standard Reform Movement principles. But what struck him most was, with his own emphasis, ‘Except \\iiere new rules had to be formulated, English was the medium o f instruc­ ts >u throughout’? Of course such lessons were not universal in Germany, or anywhere else in Europe, but their existence shows clearly that language ti-.Kihing reform was taken seriously and, eventually, its influence spread through the system. Clermany was more open to reforming influences for a number of reasons, one of which was the structure of its state-run education system. The German '•wem was rebuilt after the Napoleonic Wars on a Prussian model drawn up by Wilhelm von Humboldt (the author of Üher die Verschiedenheit des nii-nsch lichen Sprachbaues, 1836). The secondary sector, where foreign lan­ guages were taught, was divided into two levels. First there was an upper-tier ol í jymnasien with a ferociously academic curriculum based on the classical

156

A History o f English Language Teaching

languages. French was included as a compulsory subject but English w.k optional and rarely taught. This was the academic hot-house of the grammartranslation method. As another contemporary American observer put it: ‘The best that can be said for the modern-language teaching in the Gymnasien is that it is neither better nor worse than the corresponding work in American high schools. It is an open question which party is the most complimented by the comparison’.10 Below the Gymnasien, however, there was a second tier of so-called Realschulen which eventually developed a two-tier structure of their own, with the prestigiously-named Realgymnasien on top and the Oberrealschulen lower down. English was a compulsory subject in these schools from 1859 onwards, though it normally came after French and was introduced in Form III. i.e. about halfway up the school. The breakthrough in modern-languagiteaching reform in Germany came in the Realgymnasien which were presiigious enough to matter but sufficiently ‘expendable’ for change to be permit­ ted. Vietor himself was a Realgymnasium teacher in the early stages of his career, and the first experiments with the reformed method were carried out by Klinghardt in his Realgymnasium in Silesia in the mid-1880s. These are reported in detail later. Although the grammar-translation method started out as a simple approach to language learning for young schoolchildren, it was grossly dis­ torted in the collision of interests between the classicists and their modern language rivals. Intrinsically, as we shall see later, the method is so ordinan that it is sometimes difficult to see what all the fuss was about. Each new les son had one or two new grammar rules, a short vocabulary list, and some practice examples to translate. Boring, maybe, but hardly the horror story \\c are sometimes asked to believe. However, it also contained seeds which even­ tually grew into a jungle of obscure rules, endless lists of gender classes and gender-class exceptions, self-conscious ‘literary’ archaisms, snippets of philology, and a total loss of genuine feeling for living language. The real I\ bad grammar-translation coursebooks were not those written by well-known names such as Ahn and Ollendorff, but those specially designed for use in secondary schools by ambitious schoolmasters. The two discussed below, by Tiarks and Weisse, are typical. According to his publisher David Nutt, the Rev. J. G. Tiarks’ German grammar books were ‘the most extensively used series of elementary German books’ in the 1860s— and Nutt also had Franz Ahn on his list. Certainly the facts are impressive: fifteen editions of his Practical Gram m ar o f German h> 1864 and eleven of his Introductory Gram m ar (1834). Mr Tiarks, Minister of the German Protestant Reformed Church in London, starts his Preface i the Introductory Gram m ar in uncompromising mood with an attack on tin. Hamilton System of interlinear translation, condemning it for providinu ‘nothing but a smattering’ (Tiarks’ own tight-lipped emphasis). He continues: ‘the author has had the pleasure of practically convincing many of his pupils,

The grammar-translation m ethod

157

that an accurate knowledge of languages like the German and Greek, with their numerous and various inflections, can be acquired in a much shorter time, and in a much safer way, by the method he adopts’.11 Accuracy, the forelock-tugging link with the classics, the importance of ‘endings’—it is all there and we know what to expect. The book takes us through the parts of speech in German with their vari­ ous declensions and conjugations. Then there is a set of short reading texts including some poems which will ‘make a salutary impression, both moral and religious, on the mind of the young student’ as well as being arranged ‘in such a manner, that, whilst they inculcate the rules of grammar, they may, by being committed to memory, when corrected, be used instead of dialogues, and thus, at once, serve two important objects’.12 Mr Tiarks’ pomposity and humourlessness are rather exhausting. So, too, is his thoroughness. The need to prove one’s philological credentials creeps into even the most elementary coursebook. The Third Declension of German nouns, we are told, ‘originally contained all substantives of the masculine gender ending in e-. but those given in Note 1 have lost the final e, and now end in a consonant’.13 Note 1 dutifully lists forty-three e-less masculines, including useful words like those for demagogue, ducat, herdsman, hussar, Jesuit, quadrant, theologian, and fool. The grey obscurity of Tiarks’ prose continues relentlessly throughout the book. In describing how to translate a cup o f tea into German, we are informed that ‘those words, the measure, weight, or number of which is expressed by the above-mentioned substantives, are not put in the genitive, unless a part of a certain quantity or quality is meant; but in the same case u ith the preceding word’.14 At the end of the slog, the pupil is rewarded with the Reverend’s selection of uplifting poems and a few edifying texts on cowherds and Frederick the Great. • The best that can be said for Tiarks’ book is that it is only 172 pages long. The second of our grammar-translation schoolmasters, T. H. Weisse, produced a tome of over 500 pages. It was called (inevitably) A Complete Practical (irammar o f the German Language and grew out of forty years’ experience teaching ‘large classes’ in Edinburgh. It appeared in 1885 and came with a commendatory letter from the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the I ’niversity of Edinburgh who judged it ‘in all respects satisfactory’, adding, just to be on the safe side, ‘when accompanied with your personal instruc­ tions’. A perceptive professor. The book is an organizational nightmare. Even the exercises are printed in unpredictable places, Exercise 1 being unaccount­ ably on p. 333 and Exercise 15 on p. 43. The text is densely packed (‘compen­ dious’ was the professor’s word), crammed with facts, lists, cross-references to oilier parts of the book, and rules piled upon rules so that everything is as important as everything else, and nothing is important at all. His rules on the use of the article, for instance, contain the useful information that the definite article is used with the names of months, and, in the next sentence, the utterly useless information that is also used ‘before the names of celestial bodies and

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A History o f English Language Teaching

constellations, so as to distinguish them from those of the mythological personages whose names they bear’.15 So, now you can say By Jupiter, always assuming you can decide which of the two is being invoked. Weisse’s great joy in life is exception-hunting. Plurals in German provide excellent specimens, all laid out in neat lists: there are 37 feminine nouns on p. 177 that do not take n in the plural, 11 masculines on p. 180 that do not form their dative plurals regularly and an unbelievable list of 62 masculines on p. 186 which do not modify their vowels. This list contains some useful plurals like dogs, shoes, and arms but ‘thoroughness’ dictates that we should also know how to say anvils, aeries, girths, capons, awls, ostriches, gluttons, scamps, haddocks, h oo p oes, and hobgoblins. Inter alia. It is important to realize that Weisse’s book is not a reference book but a textbook for use in class (though it contains a reference section). The chil­ dren were expected to learn all this nonsense. Moreover, Weisse warns us in his Preface, ‘teachers and examiners of schools will find in the examples here supplied the most efficient means for testing the student’s knowledge of am grammatical point’.16 The crowning insult is the inclusion of no fewer than 136 ‘directions for the proper use of Dr F. Ahn’s First Course’ at the end of the book .17 The whole point of Ahn’s course was that it should be easy, practical, and short. His improvers ensured that it was difficult, scholastic, and long. With hindsight, it might have been better if modern languages had not been brought on to the school curriculum. The books intended for the adult market may have had their faults, but they at least tried to keep their customers in mind.

Language learning by adults: the ‘practical approach’ of Ahn and Ollendorff Language, as a means of communication itself, is sensitive to changes elsewhere in the network of human communications, and, in particular, to developments in transport that encourage mobility, and bring people into face-to-face contact over long distances. The expansion of air travel in our own time, for instance, which has created a new role for English as a world auxiliary language, has repeated on an intercontinental scale the processes that bound the countries of the European continent together in a railwa\ system during the nineteenth century. National rivalries, however, prevented the emergence of a generally accepted lingua franca, and, if people were to exploit the opportunities offered by the railways, they had to learn the languages spoken down at the end of the line. One result was an increase in demand for travellers’ phrasebooks like, for example, Bartels’ Modern Linguist series in the 1850s. But there was also a need for textbooks that offered a more thorough grounding while at the same time keeping at least half-an-eye on the practical needs of the aduli learner. The outcome was a growing market for ‘methods’: textbooks which

The grammar-translation m ethod

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established a basic design that was repeated from one language to the next.18 Ahn was the first to exploit this market in 1834, followed by his rival Ollendorff a year later, and between them they dominated the scene for almost half a century, until the emergence of specialist language schools like lierlitz in the 1880s and 1890s. Changes in patterns of transport were not restricted to the European continent as the new shipping lines carried people from one continent to another in increasingly large numbers. Emigration to the United States, for i-sample, from virtually every country in Europe, swelled to enormous pro­ portions as the century wore on, bringing with it a growing need for practical competence in English both among the immigrants themselves and among those left in Europe who wanted to keep in touch with relatives and friends. I'he full impact of these developments was not felt until later in the century, but the practical emphasis of Ahn and Ollendorff was a straw in the wind. More generally, the industrialization of the second half of the nineteenth century created a new class of language learner, one that had not followed an academic ‘grammar school’ education and therefore could not be expected to learn foreign languages by traditional methods. A new approach was needed u hich would suit their particular circumstances and it eventually emerged in the form of ‘direct’ methods which required no knowledge of grammar at all. Abn and Ollendorff were in some respects a ‘halfway house’. Both included grammar rules in their courses, but they adopted a grading system that ‘rationed’ the learner to one or two new rules per lesson and generally tried to keep the detail of explanation under some control. Compared to the schoolbooks of Tiarks and Weisse, Ahn and Ollendorff have hardly any grammar in them, which explains why many teachers considered them lightweight and in need of ‘improvement’. I y.mz Ahn (1796-1865) I he grammar-translation method provoked such antagonism that the only way of considering it dispassionately is to look carefully at the work of the author who used it most consistently and self-effacingly. Unlike Ollendorff, Aim was never idiosyncratic, had no ‘bright ideas’ about language teaching and never promised to teach a language in six months and, unlike his many imitators and ‘improvers’, his work was modest, compact, and useful. It was also immensely successful and it deserved to be. The public got what it was promised, a simple introduction to a foreign language, taught through a ‘new, practical, and easy method’. Franz Ahn was born in 1796. He came from the north-west of Germany and was a schoolmaster in Aachen on the German-Dutch border when he pi ¡Wished his first textbook in 1827 at the age of thirty-one. It was a French reader for German learners and the first of a series of readers and conver­ sation books (including one for English). Two years later he brought out

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a Dutch course for Germans called N eue holländische Sprachlehre (1829) which was published in Cologne. It went through six editions in the next fifteen years, no small achievement for a minority language textbook. In 1834, at the age of 38, he published a French course, the first example of his famous A New, Practical, and Easy M ethod and courses appeared in German, English, Spanish, Italian, and Russian over the next twenty years. He also applied it to the two classical languages. His principal market the private learner for whom a grammatical description and a b ilin g u a l approach were essential. Ahn’s method lives up to its title. It is both practical (in the sense discussed earlier) and easy. After a brief introduction to the pronunciation, the l\iMt learning materials begin. They are arranged in short, consecutively numbered sections. Each odd-numbered section gives a grammatical summary, usually in the form of a paradigm, and about a dozen new vocabulary items, fol­ lowed by a set of sentences to translate into the mother tongue. Each even numbered section contains sentences to translate into the foreign language, and no new teaching points. In his First Course there are sixty-eight lessons in the space of only sixty-six pages, plus a set of twelve areas of vocabulary and twelve pages of ‘easy dialogues’—phrases like ‘Are you hungry?’, ‘It is fogj;\ ‘What can I offer you?’, and so on. Ahn’s grammar notes require only a minimum knowledge of grammatical terminology: singular, plural, masculine, feminine, etc. The vocabulary is useful, on the whole, and the practice sentences are short and easy to trans­ late. They are also very dull. If a language textbook author may be known by his examples, then Franz Ahn was clearly a kind old gentleman, quiet, rather sentimental, a bit priggish but upright, moral, and eminently Victorian. I Iis situations are domestic, and there are any number of minor crises to keep the interest up: ‘our aunt has sold her scissors, Louisa has found her thimble, I have received this horse from my friend,’ and plenty of little worries: ‘I low many physicians are there in this town? Has the shoemaker brought m\ boot? Have you had the kindness to give a glass of water to this poor man?’ The disconnected sentences of the grammar-translation approach an.1 no sillier than the ‘scientific’ drills of the audiolingual method with which they share many features. Both are the inevitable outcome of two basic principles. The first is that a language teaching course can be based on a sequence of linguistic categories, and the second that these categories can be exemplified in sample sentences for intensive practice. We shall come back to both these principles when we discuss Ollendorff’s work in the next section. Ahn’s textbooks follow a method that is largely the result of his intuitive feeling for simplicity; they proceed one step at a time, with not too many words in each lesson, plenty of practice, and so on. With Ollendorff, how ever, there is a much more deliberate approach to textbook planning and the organization of materials and practice activities. There are even the glimmer­ ings of a theory.

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f/. G. O llen dorff (1803-65) Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff was bom in 1803, which makes him seven years younger than Ahn. He was, however, less versatile, and having launched his M ethod in 1835, devoted all his energies to exploiting it. The earliest examples of the Ollendorff Method, called A N ew M ethod o f I earning to Read, Write, and Speak a Language in Six Months, taught (.erman to French and English speakers. Later he brought out courses ■.idapted’ to teach French (1843), Italian (1846), English (1848) and other

SJatf fjat man gefagt ? Stan §at md}t< flffagr. SBa man t6 t&un reoKen ? They have not been willing to SBan t>at ei mdjt tt?un wotfen. n. The child learning its mother tongue is the obvious master-example of the ‘method of nature’, and the perennial question arises whether this provides ,i model for the foreign language classroom. Marcel believed that it did, pro­ vided the learners were under the age of twelve (though some older learners might benefit as well). He goes into considerable practical detail in describing lessons based on the Pestalozzian notion of ‘object-lessons’ in which he ad\ o cated the extensive use of pictures, for example, This is a nice b oo k, I open the b oo k, I shut the boo k, there are pictures in this b o o k , here is a picture, it is a nice picture, etc.11 His advice to the teacher is familiar: ‘The instructor must frequently repeat the same expressions, and always accompany them with looks, tones, gestures, and actions which explain them. The language o! action, thus used conformably to the process of nature, is, as an explanati >r\ means, preferable to translation, which would create confusion by the mix­ ture of the two idioms.’12 The only unusual thing about this, apart from its mid-nineteenth-century diction, is the date it was written, 1853 i.e. nearly 30 years before the Direct Method began in earnest. Analytical ‘methods of nature’ along Pestalozzian lines obviously deter­ mine the priority of spoken over written language and the bearing-speakin.s; branches over the reading-writing ones. Marcel was not content, however, to leave the matter there and merely impose ‘natural’ methods on all language learners regardless of their relevance to wider educational values and aspi ra­ tions. At this point, we can see how the cultural and practical demands of his time prompted Marcel to adjust his model in order to take them into account. In its final form, the two impression ‘branches’, reading and hearing, retain

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their place in the first rank followed by speaking and writing. However, since learning to read a foreign language was a more practical and useful objective in the 1850s than learning to speak, and, since it also offered a greater intrin­ sic reward in the form of access to knowledge and the literature of the foreign language, the first priority should be given to reading. In working out the details of his ‘reading-first’ programme, Marcel encountered the obvious difficulties of attempting to teach four related activities as if they had nothing to do with each other. In its modern form, the four-skills model gave primary emphasis to the spoken-written contrast and aimed to teach the two oracy skills before the two literacy ones. Effect­ ively, this meant attempting to teach literate learners as if they were illiterate in order to preserve the integrity of the model. Marcel’s problem, as we have seen, was different. He attached greater importance to the impressioni/'tpression distinction and intended to teach the two receptive skills before the two productive ones, and reading before ‘hearing’. In order to preserve the logic of his argument, he was forced to maintain that it did not matter what sound values learners attached to the orthography of the foreign lan­ guage in the initial stages of learning. Not surprisingly, this last point caught the attention of the public since he appeared to be saying that ‘pronunciation did not matter’. In fact, he thought it mattered a great deal but that it could—and should— be delayed until later in the course. ‘When a learner has gained familiarity with the written words’ he commented, ‘he requires but little practice in hearing to be able to under­ stand them when spoken’.13 After extensive experience of listening, the cor­ rect pronunciation in spoken expression would come easily and naturally. Ihe latter half of his argument would attract considerable support at the present time. The earlier part, however, would probably meet with strong disapproval, if indeed it were taken seriously at all. Giving special emphasis to reading in an integrated programme would cause little controversy, but 'giving special emphasis’ is not what a ‘four-skills’ model is all about. If there are four separable skills, or branches, and they can be ordered pedagogically, then one of them must be taught first and the other three later. Marcel’s choice of reading first meant that he required a theory of reading which would justify his decision. Marcel’s definition of the reading process is strikingly similar to modern def­ initions associated with the ‘psycholinguistic approach to reading’. ‘Reading’, he said, ‘is that operation of the mind by which ideas are attached to the written words as the eye glances over them’. And further: ‘we have here nothing to do with the uttering of sounds previously known on perceiving the written words which represent them’.14 In a more modern idiom, Marcel’s main point is that reading is a cognitive process whereby meaning is imposed t>n written symbols, or, to quote Smith (1978) ‘readers must bring meaning to print rather than expect to receive meaning from it’.15 Both writers draw the same conclusion from the initial premise. Marcel: ‘we have here nothing

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to do with the uttering of sounds’, and Smith: ‘we can read—in the sense of understanding print—without producing or imagining sounds’.16 In Marcel’s model, meaning was to be derived from a mother-tongue translation, which should be as literal as possible, and ‘by means of these explanations (i.e. the translation), practice soon associates in the mind of the learner the foreign words with the native, so that a recurrence of the former will readily recall the latter; and thus will the power of comprehending the written language be rapidly acquired’.17 In other words, the learner would move straight from meaning to print and vice versa without an intervening process of ‘decoding to sound’, to use Smith’s well-known phrase. It would be unjust to leave even this very brief sketch of Marcel’s work without stressing again the greatness of his achievement in Language as a Means o f Mental Culture. With the possible exception of Sweet’s Practical Study o f Languages in 1899, there is no single work in the history of language teaching to compare with it for the strength of intellect that holds it together over nearly 850 pages of closely-packed text, the breadth of scholarship with which it is informed, and the wealth of pedagogical detail on every aspect of language teaching and learning. It must also be admitted, however, that it never had the impact on contemporary or even subsequent opinion which it deserved. None of the Reform Movement writers in the latter part of the century refer to it, though there is much with which they would have agreed: the emphasis on text rather than sentences, for instance, and the inductive approach to the teaching of grammar. They would, however, have found Marcel’s relegation of spoken language to a secondary role in the teaching of older learners quite unacceptable, overlooking the fact that he reversed these priorities in the teaching of languages to youngsters. Nor were any of the Natural Method pioneers of the 1860s and 1870s aware of work which in many ways looks forward to their own. Perhaps part of the explanation for the neglect of Marcel is the sheer scale ot his book and at times it can be heavy-going. While it is never clumsy, it tends to sprawl and can be repetitive. More likely, however, in the inevitable process of simplification that accompanies the spread of complex ideas, Marcel became tagged in the public mind as advocating a ‘reading approach’ that neglected everything else. If something of this kind did in fact happen, it was grossly unfair, but not entirely unreasonable. While Marcel, as one would expect, argues his case with skill and lucidity, he never gives the impression of being aware of the likely reaction that such an unusual proposal might pro­ voke. His intellectual logic is stronger than his powers of persuasion. If he h.iJ met his reader halfway by admitting that there were relationships between the ‘four branches’ that were at least as important as the characteristics that persuaded him to keep them apart, he would have compromised the grand design of the Rational Method so severely that it might have collapsed. Its re-emergence a century later in the ‘four skills’ variant would have benefited from a closer knowledge and understanding of the original.

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] homas Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’ 'I iomas Prendergast (1806-1886) is the only Englishman among the earlier nineteenth-century reformers. He served in the Indian Civil Service in Madras, where he learnt Telugu and Hindustani. Returning to England in his mid-fifties, he wrote and published his ‘Mastery System’ for learning lan­ guages. The basic manual of the system, called The Mastery o f Languages, or the art o f speaking foreign languages idiomatically, appeared in 1864 and it was followed by a number of sample ‘mastery’ courses for French and (.erman (both 1868), Spanish (1869), Latin (1872), and Hebrew (1871). Prendergast fills the gap between the Ahn-Ollendorff era and the start of the Reform Movement in the eighties. His work was eventually engulfed by its successors and largely forgotten. Sweet, for instance, dismissed him along with Ahn and Ollendorff as having ‘had his day’.18 This judgement is a little harsh, and may probably owe more to Sweet’s dislike of methods that did not make use of phonetics than to a close reading of what Prendergast actually had to say. It may also derive from the distrust on the part of all the reformers for teaching methods based on isolated sentences, which Prendergast’s sys­ tem undoubtedly is. However, in spite of changing fashions, or possibly because of them, his work deserves reappraisal since it contains much that was ahead of its time. Prendergast would have made an admirable associate of writers like Harold Palmer and Michael West in the 1930s, and one cannot help feeling that if he had had other professionals to talk to, he would not have become so narrowly concerned, almost obsessed, by a single teaching technique, the famous mastery sentences. We shall come to the sentence-generating technique shortly. It is important first to look at the argument out of which it grew and which it was supposed to realize in practical terms. There is more logic and less inspired intuition about Prendergast than almost any other language teaching methodologist before Henry Sweet. ! [e started, like many from now on, with the example of language acquisi­ tion by young children. His account shows that he observed children care­ fully and did not come to them looking for confirmation of prejudices. He made a particularly telling point in his description right at the outset which many observers would have overlooked. He noticed that small infants inter­ pret the meaning of language by making use of other information available to them in the wider context, what people do, how they look, their gestures and facial expressions, and so on. As he put it, ‘the wonder is that they under­ stand at the same time so much language, and so few words’.19 His next point is equally perceptive, though his interpretation led him down the wrong path. Children, he noticed, learn ready-made ‘chunks’ of language, ‘pre-fabs’ as they have been called in recent times,20 and weave them into their utterances: ‘they employ sentences in which will be found many words which they do not thoroughly understand, and some common phrases, the precise meaning of

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which they do not, and need not, and perhaps never will comprehend, because they puzzle the grammarian himself’.21 What impressed Prendergast most about these ‘pre-fabs’ was their fluency. They seemed so well-learnt that the only explanation he could offer was that they had been memorized as com­ plete units. ‘When they (i.e. the children) utter complete idiomatical sen­ tences with fluency, with accurate pronunciation, and with decision, while they are still incapable of understanding any of the principles according ru which they unconsciously combine their words in grammatical form, it is obvious that they must have learnt, retained, and reproduced them by dint of imitation and reiteration’.22 In other words, he saw the ‘pre-fabs’ as the products of a learning process that had worked perfectly. They were, he said, ‘the rails on which the trains ot thought travel swiftly and smoothly’.23 The sentences the children produced for themselves, on the other hand, were indecisive, inaccurate, ill-learnt. At this point his argument turned the wrong corner. He had, in a sense, been miv­ ied by his own terminology. The ‘pre-fabs’ were not ‘sentences’, though thi-\ may have sounded like them. They were unanalysed chunks, ‘words’ rather than ‘sentences’, and represented the starting point or ‘database’ for the devel­ opment of fluency rather than true fluency itself. His conclusion was that an efficient foreign language teaching system would consist entirely of memo­ rized sentences, practised to the point of instant recall. This would avoid 1in inaccuracy and hesitancy of self-generated sentences altogether and lead to complete and fluent mastery. The obvious question was, which sentences arc you going to use? Prendergast recognized as well as anybody else that you could not learn all the sentences of a language. His solution was essentially the same as the behaviourist-structuralist school in the twentieth cenftm. You learn the sentences which contain the most frequently used items of the language. He actually went further than the structuralists by constructing sentences that would contain as many of the ‘basic rules’ of the language as possible in the compass of a single sentence. This reduced the number o! sentences by increasing the number of rules each sentence exemplified. Much of the later part of The Mastery o f Languages is taken up by invest­ igating the statistical properties of English in order to specify the linguistic content of the minimal set of sentences which would constitute ‘mastery’. 1 lc drew up a list of ‘the commonest English words’,24 and, although it is based entirely on his intuitions, it is remarkably similar to the frequency-based lists ot the twentieth-century applied linguists. Altogether, out of a total of 214 words, 82 per cent are among the first 500 most frequent words on the ThorndikcLorge (1944) list and another 14 per cent in the second 500. All his items, except two (lest and procure) are classified on Thorndike-Lorge either AA or A. There are, inevitably, unexpected omissions but his task was simplified b> a decision to exclude nouns and adjectives since the learner would supply these himself from his own experience and interests. In modern times we ha\c become used to thinking in terms of ‘common words’ and have spent ye.ii's

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using teaching materials based on notions of lexical control. Prendergast had no such background and the general atmosphere of the time was if anything hostile to ideas such as simplicity or everydayness. The fact that his list is a great deal less idiosyncratic than might be expected derives from his own language learning experiences. For a European to learn Telugu or Hindustani properly (as a government official, he could not get away with informal bazaarchat) requires a great deal of disciplined learning and an organized mind. These are characteristics very much to the fore in all Prendergast’s work. The ‘mastery sentences’ were, as we have noted, deliberately ‘packed’ with linguistic information. This gives them an unfortunate air of unreality. The following are typical: Why did you not ask him to come, with two or three of his friends, to see my brother’s gardens? When the man who brought this parcel for me yesterday evening calls again, give it back to him, and tell him that it is not what I ordered at the shop.25 I ! aving learnt a small set of these sentences to perfection, the learner is pro­ vided with the resources for generating hundreds more on the same models, another instance of the Jacotot motto, ‘all is in all’. Towards the end of the book, Prendergast gives a diagram called ‘The Labyrinth’ which is a kind of gigantic substitution table. It demonstrates around two hundred and fifty oi'the possible sentences that can be generated from the two model sentences .u the top of the diagram. He called these new sentences ‘evolutions’, and reckoned that the full set of possible ‘evolutions’ would require fifty more diagrams of the same size. The model sentences are numbered and the evolu­ tions presented as formulae: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 His servants saw your friend’s new bag near our

10

11 Her

20 carriage.

12 13 cousins found

14 15 my sister’s

16 17 little book

18 19 in their

house.

Among the possible ‘evolutions’ from these two models would be: 1 2 3 4 5 7. ■■/Us servants saw your friend’s bag), 11 2 13 4 17 18 9 6 7. (Her servants found your b o o k in our new bag), etc. Prendergast’s teaching method consisted of seven steps.26 Step 1 required the memorization of five or six sentences making up about one hundred words altogether. The basic aim was a correct pronunciation and a fluent control of the model sentences. Lessons should be very short, but as frequent as possible. No books were permitted and the learner imitated the teacher. Meaning was taught by glossing the sentences in the mother tongue. All attempts at conscious analysis or ‘grammar’ were ruled out since the aim was unconscious mastery not ‘understanding of structure’.

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In Step 2 the learner moved on to the written language. Prendergast ck-.ulv had in mind the non-European learner who would have to learn the Roman alphabet and his very practical suggestions on how to teach it reflect his own learning of Indian languages. Steps 3 and 4 are concerned with the manipulation of the model sentences (‘evolutions’) and the acquisition of further models. The last three steps deal with the development of reading and conversation skills. Prendergast made considerable use of translation but insisted that it should be ‘cursory obser­ vation, not close study— habituation not investigation’. ‘Nothing’, he says, ‘can be more disheartening to a beginner, than to be checked at every second or third word, by cries of No, No, No from a pedagogue’.27 The practice of translation has been condemned so strenuously for so long without any really convincing reasons that it is perhaps time the profession took another look at it. Was it really translation that the reformers objected to a hundred years ago, or, as Prendergast suggests, the way in which it was used? Prendergast would have found the twenties and thirties in this century a much more congenial time for his particular gifts and talents than the 1860s. Like Michael West years later, he had worked in India, away from the heated intellectual squabbles that tend to clog European discussions on teaching methodology. He knew what learning a new language was really like when the language in question bore no resemblance to one’s mother tongue. He came to the same basic conclusions as West—the need for sim­ plicity, a small, carefully selected minimum vocabulary and a graded set of materials. He would also have had much in common with Palmer, particu­ larly his belief in the possibility of creating a limited ‘core’, or ‘microcosm’ as Palmer was to call it, which could be thoroughly learnt and from which the rest could grow as experience with the new language increased. As it was, however, he allowed the technique of the sentences to overshadow the idea that lay behind them and he was linked in the minds of the reforming genera­ tion that was just around the corner with all the other mid-century textbook authors with ‘funny sentences’. There may be a way of realizing Jacotot’s maxim ‘learn one thing thoroughly and relate everything else to it’, but Prendergast’s sentence system is probably not the right one. u t

François Gouin and the ‘Series’ François Gouin (1831-1896) was the last of the nineteenth-century indi­ vidualists, which may help to explain why his name is better-known than Prendergast’s or Marcel’s, though the work they did was considerably more interesting. Gouin published his major work, The Art o f Teaching and Studying Languages, in Paris in 1880 on the eve of the Reform Movement, but it had actually been written much earlier and printed privately in Geneva, where he owned a language school for a time. The English translation appeared in London in 1892.

179

DIAG-SÀM, exhibiting

a few

of the

Evolutions

of Two

Sentences

of Ten

Individual reform ers

I i^ure 13.1 ‘The Labyrinth’ from Thom as Prendergast’s Mastery of Languages (1864). The num bered words in the two sam ple sentences could be com bined according to the form ulae given in the chart.

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The work of the contemporary Reform Movement attracted public atten­ tion to the inadequacy of traditional schoolroom methods of language teach­ ing, and Gouin had a clear, easily understood and methodologically simple alternative to offer in the shape of the famous ‘series’ technique. He benefited from the ‘new wave’, but he did not directly contribute to it. The origins oi the ‘series’ have passed into the folklore of language teaching and we shall return to them in a moment. First, however, the ‘series’ itself. Gouin’s central concept was that the structure of a language text reflect'd the structure of the experience it described. For reasons which we shall come to, he believed that sequentiality was the primary feature of experience and that all events could be described in terms of a ‘series’ of smaller component events, so that, for example, opening the door could be analysed into moving towards the door, turning the handle, opening it, holding it open, and so on. This sequential structure provided the framework for the associated l.mguage: I am walking to the door, I am standing by the door, I am turning the handle, etc., and the familiarity of happenings of this kind helped the learner to understand the new language and remember it more efficiently. Gouin also argued, less convincingly, that describing experiences of this kind was intrin­ sically motivating. Sweet, for one, was not impressed: ‘some of the series, such as that which gives a detailed description of opening and shutting a door . . . are as uninteresting as they are useless’.28 Gouin’s own example from his bok is the celebrated log-chopping incident which, presumably, was intended to demonstrate how the most unassuming events of life could be put to useful service. He claimed four particular advantages for the exercise: 1 Each phrase expressing a detail, a new fact, the repetition of the same subjects and same complements, has not the character of an ordin.in repetition, of a repetition pure and simple. Owing to this new detail, this step made in advance in each phrase, neither tediousness nor fatigue is m be feared. 2 This natural repetition of the same nouns, this constant and periodic return of the thought towards the same object, this reiterated efforl o! the representative or visualising faculty upon the same idea, is not all this the graver’s tool which engraves the ideas and their expressions upon the memory? 3 This same repetition, this perpetual recurrence of the same sounds, is not this the essential condition, is not this the most sure and solid guarantee of a good pronunciation? 4 The listener, feeling himself safe in this repetition of subjects and complements, turns the principal effort of his attention quite naturally upon the verb. But the verb, which is the soul of the phrase, the most important and precious element of the sentence, is at the same time the most difficult to conquer and to keep. It is important, therefore, that the attention should be fixed entirely upon this term. Now, by means ot

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the before-mentioned evolution, all the visual rays of the intelligence are verily concentrated upon a solitary fact, the action— upon a solitary word, the verb .29 After this enthusiastic introduction, we come to the exercise itself: The maid chops a log of wood The maid goes and seeks her hatchet, the maid takes a log of wood, the maid draws near to the chopping-block, the maid kneels down near this block, the maid places the log of wood upright upon this block. The maid raises her hatchet, the maid brings down her hatchet, the hatchet cleaves the air, the blade strikes the wood, the blade buries itself in the wood, the blade cleaves the wood, the two pieces fall to the ground. The maid picks up these pieces, the maid chops them again and again to the size desired, the maid stands up again, the maid carries back the hatchet to its place.30

seeks takes draws near kneels down places raises brings down cleaves strikes buries itself cleaves fall picks up chops again stands up carries back

There are others to choose from: The Housewife Goes to the Woodshed, The Cook Fetches Wood, The Housemaid Lays the Fire, and more. Gouin defies easy interpretation. His book, from which I have deliberately quoted at length in order to allow the reader to judge independently, is repeti­ tious and exhaustingly ebullient. Perhaps he was let down by his translators, hut they cannot be held responsible for all the rhetorical questions or the repetitions. The log-chopping ‘series’ itself is weird, and ‘the reiterated effort of the visualizing faculty upon the same idea’ is reminiscent of sequences in silent films where sheer technique invests banal events with apocalyptic meanings. Nevertheless, in its own curious, almost ‘hypnotic’, way it works. ( iouin has effectively extended the principle that comprehension is a function ol the predictability of utterances in context to its logical, and some might say absurd, conclusion. The commonplaceness of the incidents themselves and the tenaciousness with which they have been dissected (‘the hatchet cleaves i lie air, the blade strikes the wood, the blade cleaves the wood’) leave little room for doubt as to the meaning of the new language. The repetition of the nouns, although anything but ‘natural’, does have the effect that he intended, namely to concentrate the learners’ attention on the verbs, which, in repres­ i citing the events of the situation, have an almost mystical significance as ‘the '>oul of the phrase’. (In fairness to Gouin, it should be said that his translators’ decision to retain the ‘historic present’ rather than transform the text into the

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more normal narrative past tense accounts for at least some of the oddness »( the material.) The most obvious practical drawback to Gouin’s system is the \u abundance of third-person statements though he attempted to solve this problem by including a selection of everyday dialogue phrases. Here again, however, he offered a somewhat ornate theory that ‘the third person includes within itself the entire conjugation’ and ‘like Nature we make this third person the basis of our operations’.31 Part of the justification for this unusual view was his observation that young children frequently refer to themselves in the third person in the early stages of acquiring their mother tongue. Like PrendergaM, Gouin based his teaching method on his observation of the way language w used by children. However, while Prendergast clearly listened to the speech of children closely and objectively, for Gouin it was a source of instant inspira­ tion, a moment of truth on which he founded the whole methodology ol his ‘series’. The famous mill incident represented the climax of a much longer si . mentioned in Vietor’s sub-title. Hence the importance of curtailing home­ work, particularly the advance preparation of new texts, and of abolishing the massive rote memorization of lists of new vocabulary and ‘gramm.ir rules’.

The Klinghardt experiment The next reform milestone after the Vietor and Franke pamphlets and Swi-cA 1884 address was the decision by Klinghardt to try out the new ideas in his Realgymnasium in Reichenbach in Silesia, using Sweet’s Elementarbuch ¡lc< gesprochenen Englisch (1885). The experiment began in the spring of 1887 and continued until the March of the following year. The work was divided into two semesters, the first fn nil mid-April to September with a summer break in July, and the second fruin October to March with a Christmas holiday. The pupils were fourteen-yearold boys in Form IIIB and all beginners in English, though they had done French for three years. Klinghardt began his course with a two-and-a-half-week introduction to English pronunciation, including listening and speech exercises, during which he began to introduce the new phonetic notation. Ten hours of phon­ etics (they had four lessons a week) would not have satisfied Sweet, but such perfectionism would probably not have worked in a secondary school class­ room. Klinghardt’s instincts as a teacher told him that it was time to m o v e mi

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to the texts, and he began the first one in the third week of the course, writing it sentence-by-sentence on the blackboard because the boys had been unable to obtain the book for themselves. In the early stages, writing the text on the board was no great hardship since the class spent four lessons on each new sentence. Later on in the year, however, when they were able to cope with longer passages, it became impossible and Klinghardt had to change their textbook. Working through text at the rate of one sentence a week sounds extremely slow, but Sweet’s sentences are (deliberately) complex and contain a lot to learn (see below). Pronunciation was of central importance, so the class listened while the teacher read the sentence aloud a couple of times, and repeated it until they could say it fluently. They also copied it down in the new notation. The mean­ ing was glossed with an interlinear translation and, when it was thoroughly familiar, the new grammar point was discussed and taught. As the reader can see, Sweet’s sentences contain a large number of potential ‘grammar points’, but only one was selected for teaching purposes. The remainder (for sam ple, past tense forms in the example below) were treated as lexical items .nid left until a later part of the course. It was never Sweet’s intention to restrict the language of his texts to grammar which had been ‘introduced’ earlier in the course, but to limit the amount that was taught in detail. The new point in Lesson 1 is the contrast between the definite and indefinite niticles before vowels (the earth, an orange) and consonants (the sea, a ball). In the grammar-translation method the two values of the would probably never have been taught at all. Below is the sentence, first in normal orthog­ raphy (which the pupils did not see), then in transcription (a) reproduced from Klinghardt’s book, and, finally, transcription (b) Sweet’s Broad Romic: ‘People used to think the earth was a kind of flat cake, with the sea all round it; but we know now that it’s really round, like a ball—not quite round, but a little flattened, like an orange.’9 (a)10

» pl'pl %*stt9pir)Mi aj>*9zo l&ind»v flat Jceik, Hckta si‘8l raundit; b/ilH1 noU naititotits riali ratind, M1& Ml — not ka3it ra&nd, batdlitl ftdtnd, Idiksn oring.

(b)11

-pijpl juwsttaJtigkSi 33]? wazakaindav flset keik', -witSSa sijol raundit; bstwij non nauSatits riali -raund', :laika b o l'— not vkwait :raund, batalitl flaetnd', :laiksn oring.

Sweet’s transcription conventions replaced orthographical word boundaries by a system of division into speech units which tended to obscure lin­ guistic patterns that are evident to the eye in normal orthography. Part of Klinghardt’s classroom presentation work was to note the word boundaries by the use of commas so that he could provide his interlinear gloss.

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None of the problems that a present-day teacher might foresee with material of this kind actually occurred. The pupils were kept busy doing oral work and listening exercises, and the notation had all the advantages of novelty Moreover, they were actually speaking a foreign language from the begin­ ning, which is more than they were doing in their French classes where th ey were struggling through Ploetz’s grammar book. Once they knew the k \i well (in effect by heart, though this was not the intention), Klinghardt began to ‘induce’ the grammar patterns. All the necessary material was in the text and it was one of the cardinal principles of the method never to go outside it (no long lists of exceptions, ‘special uses of the article’, etc., only the basic point, simply illustrated). After the first month, Klinghardt began to teach the children how to ask and answer comprehension questions on the text and also how to extend them to topics in their own lives and experience. It is at this point that the Reform Method really begins to take off with question-and-answer work, discussion, retelling the story, and so on, all of it conducted in English. Klinghardt made the transition to traditional orthography at the beginning of the second semester when he switched from the Elementarbuch to a reader by Gesenius. The texts were longer, and included such perennial favourites as The Story of Robin Hood. The class was introduced to writing for the first time: copying, writing answers to questions, doing simple retells, and so on. By the end of the first year, they had made good progress in their knowledge of the language, even measured in traditional terms of ‘how much gramnur they had got through’, but the really remarkable difference was the confid­ ence with which they used the spoken language. The controversial early work with the transcribed texts paid dividends in the end. Sweet himself did not comment on the Klinghardt experiment in V/.v Practical Study o f Languages, though it is difficult to believe he did not know about it. He was not a man who compromised easily and some of Klinghardt’s decisions, especially the short introductory phonetics course and the early discarding of transcription, would not have pleased him.

The role of phonetics The Reform Movement offered language teaching something it could hardly refuse— a scientific approach. Science had become to the public mind of the nineteenth century what Reason had been to the eighteenth-centm v Enlightenment, the indispensable basis of achievement and progress. To the man in the street its magic was evident in the new technologies that created the great industries and fed the nineteenth-century passion for gadgetry. FI civ now was the opportunity for science to enter what had hitherto been regarded as the inner sanctum of the humanities, the study and teaching of language. The scientific impulse expressed itself in a number of different ways, some profound and academically rigorous, others more popular and keener tor

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practical results. On the more academic side, there was a rich tradition of historical and comparative philology pursued by German scholars such as I ranz Bopp and August Schleicher in the earlier part of the century and, later, the group of so-called ‘neo-grammarians’ (‘Jung-grammatiker’) clustered round H. Osthoff, K. Brugmann, and Hermann Paul, the author of the standard work on the subject Die Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880).12 Secondly, there were important developments in research in the physiology of speech, much of it also undertaken in Germany, and made known in Britain through publications such as M ax Muller’s Lectures on Language (1864). Iloth these traditions exerted an influence on the thinking and practice of the Reform Movement, the latter more directly than the former. The more popular side was represented by, for example, the appearance in 1837 of Isaac Pitman’s new system of shorthand in a booklet called Stenographic Soundhand, later renamed Manual o f Phonography (1842).13 I here was also a growing interest in dialect studies which chimed to some i"ctent with the ‘back-to-our-roots’ romanticism of the time, and a revival of pressure for spelling reform, partly in response to the expansion of universal education, which was accepted in principle if not immediately in practice in the Education Act of 1870. Finally, there were the ever-popular arts of elocu­ tion and public verse-speaking that had stimulated the work of actorphoneticians like Sheridan and Walker in the eighteenth century and which continued to attract audiences. The Scottish family of the Bells provides a good example of how applied phonetics produced ideas which later were to exert a considerable influence on language teaching. Grandfather Alexander Bell had been an orthoepist (‘no charge until impediment removed’)14 and an elocution teacher with .i system of Simultaneous Reading ‘adapted for classes of five hundred m: one thousand pupils’. Both his sons took up the family business .md became university lecturers in the subject: David Charles Bell rose to be Professor of Elocution at Dublin and his better-known younger brother, Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905), lectured at the University of 1dinburgh for twenty-two years (1843-65) and later at London. In 1870 Alexander Melville took his even more famous son, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), to Canada and then to the United States. He was a prolific writer on speech and elocution, but his most significant achievement was the invention of a notation system called ‘Visible Speech’, published in Visible Speech, the Science o f Universal A lphabetics (1867), a work that greatly impressed Henry Sweet: ‘Bell has in this work done more for phonetics than all his predecessors put together’,15 he said in the preface to his H an dbook (1877). Visible speech itself was impractical for general use since it did not use the Roman alphabet, but it provided Sweet with a model from which, ultimately, he developed his Broad Romic transcription system. This in turn influenced the final shape of the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association (IPA).

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By the 1880s the popular image of phonetics was a mixture of advanced technology (the telephone of grandson Bell, Edison’s phonograph, and so on) and of pure philological science. It was not unlike the image of applied linguistics in the early 1960s with its language laboratories backed by mod­ ern structural linguistics and scientific analyses of behaviour. However, the language teaching classroom of the Reform Movement was not a ‘guineapig’ research-bed for the new science (experimentalism on the twentiethcentury model would have had little appeal). The leaders of the Movement were more concerned with the educational implications of the appalling teaching methods of the time, and phonetics offered both a scientific founda­ tion for their reformist zeal and a practical technique for bringing about the improvements in the classroom that they were looking for. The reform of language teaching was a moral issue for many members of the Reform Movement, but in particular for Passy, a devout Christian and a dedicated teacher. Paul Passy came from a family in which ethical conviction and moral commitment were matters of profound importance. His father, Frédéric Passy, was the first holder of the Nobel Peace Prize, and similar pacifist beliefs led Paul to enter teaching as an optional alternative to military service. In 1878 he became a Christian, a faith that he later expressed in his attachment to the Christian Socialist movement. He was educated at home and leanu English, German, and Italian in his youth. Later he attended the École des Hautes Etudes in Paris where he studied Sanskrit and Gothic. Most of his work as a teacher was concerned with English and this, coupled with his later role as Daniel Jones’s phonetics teacher, makes him a particularly significant figure in the history of English language teaching. During his early years as a teacher, Passy devised a private phonetic alphabet and, impressed by its usefulness in the classroom, drew together a small group of other like-minded language teachers to discuss how such ideas could be expanded for the general good. The group comprised nine Frenchmen in addition to himself and his brother Jean, and a Belgian. Calling themselves the Phonetic Teachers’ Association, they quickly attracted new members Jespersen joined in May 1886 only a few months after its formation, Viëtor in July, and Sweet in September. The first issue of their journal, The Phonetic Teacher, appeared in May and continued to appear under that title for thinyears when it was renamed L e Maître Phonétique (1889). In 1897 the Association took its final title, the International Phonetic Association (IPA). Passy’s views on transcription drew on his experience with young childn n and were influential in moulding the attitudes of the IPA. They were char­ acteristically very simple. In the first place, transcription for classroom use should be as broad as possible (scientific research was another matter), and, secondly, the number of symbols should be as small as possible. Breadth and economy may seem obvious notions now but, without them, the excitement of a new technique, rivalries between competing systems, and the glitter of

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science’ could well have betrayed the needs of the classroom teacher as the specialists continued to pursue ‘completeness’, ‘accuracy’, ‘scientific rigour’, and so on. Something of the kind was to happen in the early years of the structuralist movement in America in the 1940s and 1950s. The IPA is a fitting memorial to Passy’s philosophical principles as well as his linguistic and educational interests, and his publications show the extent of his concern for different aspects of the subject. His work in descriptive and .ipplied phonetics includes the influential Les sons du français (1887, with seven editions before 1914),16 a dictionary (Dictionnaire phonétique de la langue française (1897)), and a general study {La phonétique et ses applica­ tions (1929)). His teaching materials included works for French as a mother lo n gu e and as a foreign language, as well as for English and German. He may also have been the first writer to use the term ‘direct method’ in a published work in a pamphlet called De la m éthode directe dans l’enseignement des imbues vivantes in 1899, but for him and the French foreign language teach­ ing profession in general the label carried Reform Movement connotations rather than the ‘conversational’ overtones associated with, for example, Berlitz. \\hat, in the longer term, did phonetics accomplish? The answer depends in -ome extent on how the term is understood. We have already seen that ‘using phonetics’ popularly meant teaching a transcription system to learners, and this narrow interpretation became engrained and difficult to eradicate. Abercrombie, for instance, writing in 1949, pointed to ‘this common miscon­ ception’ and stressed again that ‘phonetics is not identical with phonetic trans­ cription’.17 At the time of the Reform Movement itself, attitudes towards this ¡'''•ne varied somewhat, though the basic principle was never at issue. Sweet, for instance, believed that transcription should be used almost indefinitely in rhe ¡eaching of orthographically irregular languages like English and French, and transition to the standard (or ‘nomic’ as he called it) should be made only when the learner started to read original literature.18 Palmer took a similar hard line in 1917 and called for ‘a minimum of two years’.19 Others like, for iüM.ince, Walter Rippmann (or Ripman) were less demanding: ‘for the first term at least, employ the phonetic transcription only’,20 he wrote in an appen­ dix to his English version of Viëtor’s Kleine Phonetik. Widgery and jespersen came somewhere in between. ‘Phonetical transcription should be used for as long as possible’,21 was Jespersen’s tolerant view. By the 1930s, Rippmann’s suggestion seems to have become standard practice, as a schools inspector of the time noted: ‘most people keep on phonetics for a term, a few enthusiasts for a year’.22 It was used sparingly by post-war ELT textbook writers such as A. s. Hornby and C. E. Eckersley, and today it rarely appears in materials intended for student use. Its value in teachers’ manuals, reference materials, and so on has, of course, never been in doubt. !!lionetics is, however, much more than a system of transcription. Abercrombie put it, ‘the language teacher. . . will inevitably be a

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phonetician’.23 The important question is the amount of training that is required and the quality of that training. In his emphasis on the role of phonetics in the professional preparation of teachers, Abercrombie echoes Sweet’s eloquent demand (1884) for a scientifically trained profession whose members would know the sound-system of their own language as well as that of the foreign language they were responsible for teaching. They would aIs.) understand how sounds were produced physiologically, and they would be proficient performers themselves. In the end, Sweet’s ambitions were realized in spite of disappointments in his own lifetime, and it would be rare today to find any (non-native) language teacher who had not undergone some training in phonetics.

The work of Henry Sweet: an applied linguistic approach Henry Sweet was born in London in 1845 and lived in or near the city for most of his life before moving to Oxford in his later years. After completing his secondary school education at King’s College School, he spent a short time studying in Heidelberg and then returned to England to take up an office job with a trading company in London. Five years later, at the age of twenty-four, he entered Balliol College, Oxford, winning a scholarship in German. In IS " i he graduated with a fourth-class degree in literae humaniores. He was by that time nearly thirty years of age. The apparent aimlessness and the failure of Sweet’s early career is decep­ tive. It was the outward and public manifestation of his single-minded pursuit of excellence in his private studies, the first recognition of which camr in his first year at Oxford (1869) with the publication of a paper on Old English by the prestigious Philological Society. He later became President of the Society, and was closely involved in the early history of the O xford English Dictionary. After abortive discussions with Macmillan, Sweet wrote to the Delegates of Oxford University Press offering them, as he put it, ‘a share in what promises to be a very safe and remunerative (undertaking)’.24 This first approach was made in 1877 but it was not until February 1879 that the final agreement was ratified by the Society and, in the meantime, Sweet had fallen out with the Press. Not for the last time, Sweet and Oxford had crossed swords, though the Press was to publish most of his major works, except, as it happens, The Practical Study o f Languages. During the 1870s Sweet’s professional reputation rose with each of his published works, culminating in 1877 with the appearance of the H andbook o f Phonetics, including a Popular Exposition o f the Principles o f Spelling R eform , completed while Sweet was in Norway visiting Johan Storm, who, he was later to acknowledge, had provided the ‘main impulse’25 for his interest in the reform of language teaching methodology. As C. L. Wrenn commented: ‘This book (i.e. the H andbook), as has often been remarked, taught phon­ etics to Europe and made England the birthplace of the modern science'. '

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Figure 1 4.1 Flenry Sweet (1845-1912). Fienry Sweet's reputation as the man who ‘taught phonetics to E u rope’ has long been secure. H owever, his role as the prime originator o f an applied linguistic approach to the teaching o f languages has been less widely acknowledged. His classic w ork in this field, The Practical Study of Languages, was published in 1899 after nearly thirty years in preparation.

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This famous phrase about ‘teaching phonetics to Europe’ derives from C. T. Onions’s entry on Sweet in the Dictionary o f National Biograp!,v 1912-1921.27 It does not in fact refer to the H an dbook but to Sweet’s textbook for teaching English as a foreign language to German learners, the Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (1885) which has already been discussed. Not only does Onions misinterpret the purpose of the Elementarbuch, he also omits any reference to The Practical Study o f Languages and hence to Sweet’s contribution to the development and reform of language teaching. Wrenn, it is true, does praise The Practical Study, but it is only a brief comment in a long paper.28 In The Indispensable Foundation (1971), a collection of Sweet’s writings, E. J. A. Henderson concentrates entirely on Sweet’s work as a phonetician. It is not, of course, the fault of phoneticians that applied linguists have failed to recognize their founding genius, but it is a fact nonetheless. As we have said, The Practical Study grew out of a paper with almost the same title, ‘On the practical study of language’, delivered to the Philological Society on the occasion of the Presidential Address by James Murray, the first editor of the O xford English Dictionary, in May 1884 and we shall return u> it in detail below. In the following year, Sweet’s career suffered a blow which crippled his relationships with colleagues and fellow professionals for the rest of his life. He was passed over for the Chair of English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford. It was not the first time he had been turned down for a professorship, nor was it to be the last, but it was the fail­ ure that mattered most to him. According to Wrenn, Sweet had been so sure that he would be selected that he had omitted to canvass even his closest col­ leagues, who were therefore unaware of his interest and voted for another candidate.29 This lethal mixture of presumption and shyness, coupled with what Wrenn refers to many times as his ‘candour’, made him a difficult m.m to like. After the Merton fiasco, he nursed what Shaw described as a ‘Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thoughi more of Greek than of phonetics’.30 Shaw’s claim in his Preface that Sweet was the starting-point for his char­ acterization of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion conjures up a picture in the mind of the modern reader of a debonair misogynist with a lot of upper-class panache. But although the original Pygmalion Higgins is closer to Sweet th.m the My Fair Lady version, Shaw himself insisted that he was ‘not a portrait’. There were, however, ‘touches of Sweet’ in the character, most particularly one suspects in the perfectionist pronunciation teacher of the earlier part of the play. Academically, the second half of Sweet’s career after the 1885 disaster w.is as distinguished as the first. A Primer o f Spoken English (an English version of the Elementarbuch) appeared in 1890, in the same year as his Primer o f Phonetics, which became a standard introductory text on the subject. In the last twenty years of his life, he published four major works: A N ew English

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(,ratnmar (1892 and 1898), The Practical Study o f Languages (1899), The History o f Language (1900) and his final contribution to phonetics, The Sounds o f English (1908). After 1901 he was employed by Oxford University as a Reader in Phonetics, a consolation prize for another failure to secure a ( hair. George Bernard Shaw’s comment on this not unexpected defeat probably expressed the thoughts of most people, including Sweet’s admirers, as Shaw himself certainly was: ‘I do not blame Oxford, because I think Ovford is quite right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!)’.31 There were two passions in Sweet’s life: phonetics and England. He was an intensely patriotic man in a style that the modern world cannot easily respond i d . Both these passions were expressed in a passage towards the end of his 1884 paper on the reform of language teaching which is of great significance in the history of the subject since it articulates for the first time the partnership between the science of language and the science of learning which acts as the ^Di ner-stone of applied linguistics: The general result we have arrived at is the recognition of a science of living, as opposed to dead, or antiquarian philology, based on phonology32 and psychology. This science in its practical application is the indispens­ able foundation of the study of our own and foreign languages, of dialect­ ology, and of historical and comparative philology. It is of the greatest importance to England.33 I\ut of Sweet’s motivation in writing the last sentence was his conviction that, given the proper training rooted in the study and the practice of phonetics, native Englishmen could teach foreign languages as well, if not better, than the 'swarms of foreigners, most of them very indifferently prepared for their task’34 that dominated the profession at the time. He was a committed believer in the non-native-speaking teacher of languages: ‘For teaching Germans English, a phonetically trained German is far superior to an untrained Englishman, the latter being quite unable to communicate his knowledge; and this principle applies, of course, with equal force to the teaching of foreign languages in England’.35 He expressed the point less emotively in his 1899 book, but repeated the substance of the issue, believing it to be part of his life’s work to 'mind a strong national language teaching profession.36 Sweet’s overall aim in The Practical Study o f Languages was to devise, in a phrase he used many times, ‘a rationally progressive method’37 of practical language study which included the teaching and learning of foreign lan­ guages in schools, but it was also intended as a ‘comprehensive general view "f the whole field’. The plan of the book makes it clear what he had in mind. It is divided into three main sections. The first (Chapters 2-7) deals in detail u iih the teaching of phonetics and its practical application in pronunciation teaching and the use of transcription, culminating in a statement of his

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fundamental principle: ‘start with the spoken language’. The next seven chapters contain a superbly sustained and coolly logical exploration of methodological principles and practices covering the five major areas of practical language learning: grammar, vocabulary, the study of texts, transla­ tion, and conversation. It is unsurpassed in the literature of linguistic peda­ gogy. The book closes with a series of essays on specific topics such as the study of a foreign literature, the learning of classical and what he calls ‘remoter’ languages, and the original investigation of unwritten languages. The techniques he proposes for such ‘original investigation’ are strikingly similar to those suggested later by Bloomfield in his influential 1942 pam­ phlet with a title that must be a deliberate echo of Sweet, An Outline Guide for the Practical Study o f Foreign Languages. More by accident than by design, this document was to provide the blueprint for the ‘structural approach’ of the American applied linguists in the 1940s and 1950s. The Practical Study has little to say about education or the place of lan­ guage teaching in the curriculum and Sweet’s attempts to cover the topic in the final chapter of the book are rather perfunctory. However, this is consist­ ent with his basic aim announced in the opening pages: ‘I am not much concerned with such questions as, Why do we learn languages?. . . Our first business is to find out the most efficient and economical way of learning them’.38 This bias has, until very recently, been a recurrent feature of applied linguistic approaches to language teaching. The Study begins with the uncompromising statement that ‘all study of language must be based on phonetics’39 and then goes on to outline what this means in practice. Phonetics provides an analytic framework and a practical methodology for the acquisition of an accurate pronunciation. Secondly, it offers a more reliable system of sound-notation than traditional ortburaphy, and, finally, it serves as the scientific discipline on which a principled approach to the training of language teachers can be built. The importance Sweet attached to accurate pronunciation as the founda­ tion of successful language learning made it imperative for the learner to acquire a knowledge of phonetics himself. It was, he believed, a ‘popular fallacy’ (‘fallacy’ is Sweet’s favourite term of disapproval), to believe that a good pronunciation could be achieved by imitation alone. This was not the view of all the reformers, it should be added, particularly those with more experience of teaching in schools. Jespersen, for example, had a much miv moderate attitude: ‘Phonetics is not a new study that we want to add to the school curriculum; we only want to take as much of the science as will really be a positive help in learning something which has to be learnt anyway’.40 Widgery, while he shared the general view that children should learn how their vocal organs worked in producing sounds, treated the topic very informally with his pupils. For example, in determining the place in tlie mouth where the different consonants are produced, ‘the class must not be helped too much, but left to think for itself. At first the answers will be \

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wild, but by pitting boys with the most divergent fancies against one another, clearness comes in time’.41 The second ‘popular fallacy’ that interfered with good pronunciation teach­ ing was the notion that it did not matter very much. ‘Experience shows’, Sweet retorted, ‘that even the slightest distinctions of sound cannot be disregarded without the danger of unintelligibility’.42 This is not in fact as extremist as it sounds. What Sweet had in mind were the basic phonemic contrasts in the language, as his examples, man/men, head/had, show quite clearly. The term •;'honeme’ was not in general use in the 1890s (Firth traced it back to an essay a student of Baudouin de Courtenay called Kruszewski in 18 79),43 so sweet’s remarks about ‘the slightest distinctions’ or ‘minute distinctions’44 make him sound more finicky than he actually was. Alongside this introduc­ tion to pronunciation, the learner was expected to learn phonetic notation, to which Sweet devotes a lengthy section of the first part of the book. From Chapter 7 onwards, however, Sweet moves away from his specialist interests and begins to weave them into a broader pattern of linguistic peda­ gogy. At this point The Practical Study moves to an altogether different and higher plane of achievement. Though there had been flashes of insight in the work of earlier writers like Prendergast and, particularly, Marcel, no one before Sweet had explored the intellectual foundations of practical method­ ology with a comparable economy of expression or acuity of mind. At the heart of his approach was the partnership between linguistics and psych­ ology that he had announced at the close of his 1884 paper. Sweet adopted the theory of psychology which was dominant at the end of the nineteenth century, namely associationism. Following the associationist principle meant that the learner’s central task was to form and maintain correct associations both between linguistic elements within the language, and between these elements and the outside world. Fluency in the spoken language implied the establishment of well-practised associations along the stream of speech in the production of smooth and intelligible utterances, and the avoid­ ance of ‘cross-associations’ through, for instance, the misuse of translation. Sweet’s system of transcription, which we have already seen in the Klinghardt experiment (see p. 193), is a good example of the principle in practice. I ;rthographically distinct words are assimilated into speech units in transcrip:i lesson, the sort of individual that emerges, for example, in the writing of Jespersen. There is no doubt that Sweet’s concern for his learner is genuine enough, but in the end it is rather lonely, the perfect teacher with the perfect learner in an entirely rational world. Given the purpose of this book, the emphasis has naturally been on thov aspects of The Practical Study most closely concerned with language teach­ ing methodology. Even in this area, however, much of interest has had to be omitted: Sweet’s detailed suggestions for the teaching of grammar, lor

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example, his proposals for a ‘logical dictionary’ along Rogetian lines, his comments on translation, his advice to learners studying on their own, and many other things. It would be wrong, however, to leave the reader with the impression that Sweet intended ‘the practical study of language’ to refer only to the teaching and learning of languages. He had a wider purpose in mind, namely the establishment of a new science which could be applied to all forms of practical linguistic activity including dialectology, the investigation of hitherto unwritten languages, problems in historical philology, and so on, .is well as language teaching. Unfortunately, however, he did not give his new field of study a name, which brings me to the final point. In the key passage from the 1884 paper already quoted,62 Sweet talks .ibout the application of ‘living’ as opposed to ‘antiquarian’ philology, and uses the expression ‘living philology’ regularly throughout the book in a sense which essentially corresponds to the modern interpretation of ‘linguis­ tics’. By neglecting to label the activity of ‘applying living philology to the practical study of languages’, he left a semantic gap which was later filled by the term ‘applied linguistics’ in America in the 1940s. Sweet came tantalizingly close to calling his subject ‘practical philology’. Although he used the term, he did not pursue it.63 Had he done so, we might now be in the fortunate position of being able to distinguish between ‘practi­ cal linguistics’ as the term for activities associated with language teaching ,md other practical matters, and ‘applied linguistics’ as a more appropriate label for activities more closely dependent on theoretical studies such as, for example, devising linguistic descriptions. Nomenclature apart, Sweet’s work established an applied linguistic tradition in language teaching which has continued uninterruptedly to the present day.

Motes Most of the texts referred to in this chapter are reprinted in Howatt and Smith (eds. 2002). 1 Englische Studien, X , 1 8 8 7 ,4 8 -8 0 . 2 Widgery (1888:24). ' 5 The translation of the title as ‘Language teaching must start afresh!’ is adapted from Henry Sweet (1884: 581) but it does not quite capture the notion of revolutionary change expressed in ‘umkehren’. ‘Quousque Tandem’ comes from a well-known quotation from a speech by Cicero in 63 b c designed to force the ringleader of the Catiline conspiracy to leave Rome. The first sentence clearly reflected Vietor’s own impatience: ‘Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? (How much longer are you going to abuse our patience, Catilina?)’ which reflects Vietor’s impatience. 4 Jespersen was a founder member. See also Kabell (2000) for an account of Jespersen’s friendship with Franke. 5 Jespersen (1904:143), cf. Abercrombie (1949a: 114).

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6 Vietor (1886: 30-1). Reproduced in Howatt and Smith (eds.) 2002 Vol II, 38-9. 7 Sweet (1899/1964: 163-92). Chapter 13 is called ‘Texts; the Reading Book’, but notice that by ‘reading book’ Sweet meant the same as the modern term ‘textbook’ (or ‘coursebook’) and not ‘(supplementary) reader’. This Reform Movement terminology persisted for some time aiul it can cause confusion. 8 For example, Franke (1884: 30) and Sweet (1899/1964:102-8). See also Atherton (1996:149-168). 9/10 Klinghardt (1888: 14). The notation (modified from Sweet’s original) was italicized by Klinghardt’s printer. 11 From the third improved edition of the Elem entarbuch (1904). 12 The neo-grammarian emphasis on the rigorous study of genuine language data greatly influenced the intellectual development of the Reform Movement. See Morpurgo Davies (1998: especially Chapters 9 and 10). I am indebted to John Trim for drawing my attention to the importance of this link. 13 See Kelly (1981). 14 Firth (1946/1957a: 116-9). Also, Mackay (1997). 15 Sweet (1877: vii). 16 Translated as The Sounds o f the French Language. See Savory and Jones (1907). 17 Abercrombie (1949a: 114). 18 Sweet (1899/1964:121). 19 Palmer (1917/1968:130). 20 Rippmann (1910:142). 21 Jespersen (1904: 173). 22 Brereton (1930: 50). 23 Abercrombie (1949a: 115). 24 Murray (1977: 342). 25 Sweet (1884: 578). 26 From Wrenn’s Presidential Address to the Philological Society in 1946 to mark the (slightly delayed) centenary of Sweet’s birth. Wrenn (1946:182). 27 Dictionary of National Biography, 1912-1921: 519. 28 Wrenn (1946:191). 29 Ibid.: 9. 30 Preface to Pygmalion, Penguin edition (1967: 6). 31 Ibid.: 9. 32 In an almost identical quotation in The Practical Study o f Languages (p. 1), Sweet uses phonetics rather than phonology. His use of the two terms seems to have changed over time. In his Presidential Address to the Philological Society in 1877, they appear to be synonymous. In his History o f Language (1900), phonology refers to ‘the whole science of speech sounds’. Later it changed again, (see Henderson (1971:26-8)).

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’,3 Sweet (1884:593). Pennycook (1994:128-9) uses this quotation to accuse Sweet of planning to train teachers to ‘spread their perfectly enunciated English’ (round the world, presumably). ‘Spreading’ is the opposite of what Sweet intended. As the text makes clear, language teachers in his view should stay at home, ‘for teaching Germans English, a phonetically trained German is far superior to an untrained Englishman’ (see Note 35). Pennycook also uses Pygmalion to argue that applied linguistics is ‘prescriptive’ because Eliza is taught ‘correct pronunciation’ by Higgins, who is a ‘parody’ (Pennycook’s term) of Sweet, who was the first applied linguist. In actual fact applied linguists were among the first to wave the ‘be descriptive, not prescriptive’ banner and among them was Henry Sweet who wrote in the Preface of his N ew English Grammar. ‘As my exposition claims to be scientific, I confine myself to the statement and explanation of facts, without attempting to settle the relative correctness of divergent usages’, (Sweet 1892: xi). 34 Ibid.: 594. Ibid.: 583. ?#>' Sweet (1899/1964: 47). F Ibid.: 116. Ibid.: 5. Ibid.: 4. 40 Jespersen (1904:143). 41 Widgery (1888: 27). 42 Sweet (1899/1964: 6). 4 i Firth (1934/1957a:l). 44 Sweet (1899/1964:5). He also used the term significant sound-distinctions (p. 18), which is even closer to the phoneme notion. 45 Ibid.: 9. 46 Jespersen (1904:11). 4"' Sweet (1899/1964: 72). 48 Ibid.: 191. ■l‘V50 Ibid.: 115. 51 Ibid.: 116. 52 Ibid.: 190-1. 53 Ibid.: 190. v* Ibid.: 163. 55 Ibid.: 165. 56 Ibid.: 74. 57 Ibid.: 75. 58 Ibid.: 172. 59 Ibid.: 113. 60 Ibid.: 112-13. 61 Ibid.: 118. 62 Ibid.: 1. 63 Sweet (1884: 594).

15

‘Natural methods of language teaching’ from Montaigne to Berlitz

Learning a language through ‘constant conversation’ The communicative language teaching methods which have attracted a great deal of interest in recent decades are the most recent manifestation of ideas that have appealed to the imagination of teachers for a very long time, and which were last revived about a hundred and twenty years ago by native-speaking immigrant teachers in America. These ideas have been known by a variet) of labels (Natural Method, Conversation Method, Direct Method, Communi­ cative Approach, and so on), and the classroom techniques associated with them have also changed from time to time. But the underlying philosophy has remained constant. Learning how to speak a new language, it is held, is not a rational process which can be organized in a step-by-step manner following graded syllabuses of new points to learn, exercises and explanations. It is an intuitive process for which human beings have a natural capacity that can be awakened provided only that the proper conditions exist. Put simply, there .inthree such conditions: someone to talk to, something to talk about, and a desire to understand and make yourself understood. Interaction is at the heart of nat­ ural language acquisition, or conversation as Lambert Sauveur called it when he initiated the revival of interest that led eventually to the Direct Method. The most celebrated early example of natural foreign language teaching was the story of Michel de Montaigne in the sixteenth century, and Sauveur never ceased using his famous compatriot as the model learner. It is a vcn well-known story, but an essential component in the folklore of language teaching. Montaigne’s father was determined that his son should have every possible advantage in life, and in particular a perfect education. This led him to ihe idea of bringing the boy up as a native speaker of Latin, an experience that Montaigne himself described later in his Essay on the Education o f Children (1580): While I was at nurse and before the first loosing of my tongue, he put me in charge of a German, totally ignorant of our language and very well versed

‘Natural m ethods o f language teaching’ 211

in Latin . . . (This man) carried me around constantly; and with him he had two others less learned to look after me and relieve him. None of them spoke to me in any language but Latin. As for the rest of the house, it was an inviolable rule that neither my father nor my mother, nor any manser­ vant or maid, should utter in my presence anything but such Latin words as each of them had learned in order to chat with me. It was wonderful how much they all profited by this.1 \[ontaigne’s wry comment that everybody else got more out of the experiment than he did himself was justified, in his eyes at least, by the fact that when he u ent to school at the age of seven or so: My Latin immediately grew corrupt, and through lack of practice I have since lost all use of it. The only service that this new method of education did me was to let me skip the lower classes at the beginning. For when I left the school at thirteen, I had finished the course— as they call it— and really without any benefit that I can now note in its favour.2 In view of his later achievements in scholarship and literature, he may have been a little unfair on his father. In some ways the most interesting feature of this story is not that he learnt Latin as an infant— it would have been difficult not to have done so— but that he became one of the great masters of the I rench language which, it seems, he did not encounter until he was seven uiars old. Montaigne usefully pricks the mystical bubble surrounding the ‘deep significance of the mother tongue’. But that is another story. Natural language learning, though not on the Montaigne model, was commonplace before 1800 because of the preference among those who could afford it of having children educated at home. Many of the Huguenot refugees found employment as tutors of French in the houses of the well-to-do and i.iught the children French by talking to them. It was not necessary to be ,i member of the aristocracy to have such ambitions for one’s family. Edward ( larke, for instance, the addressee of John Locke’s celebrated ‘open letter’ Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) was a Somerset gentleman. As I ocke put it: Men learn languages for the ordinary intercourse of Society and Com­ munication of thoughts in common Life without any farther design in their use of them. And for this purpose, the Original way of Learning a Language by Conversation, not only serves well enough, but is to be prefer’d as the most Expedite, Proper and Natural.3 I.ocke goes on to explain that, while there are special categories of learner for whom a detailed knowledge of grammar is essential, the ‘natural’ approach is the fundamental one, applicable to all in the early stages: As soon as he can speak English, ‘tis time for him to learn some other Language: this no body doubts of, when French is proposed. And the

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Reason is, because People are accustomed to the right way of teaching that Language, which is by talking it into Children in constant Conversation and not by Grammatical Rules. The Latin tongue would easily be taught the same way if his Tutor, being constantly with him, would talk nothing else to him, and make him answer still in the same Language.4 Both the Montaigne experiment and Locke’s advice to his friend were concerned with the private education of individual children working with tutors at home. The application of ‘natural methods’ to the teaching of larger groups and school classes presents different problems. J. S. Blackie, a nineteenth-century Scots professor of Latin and Greek, included the fol­ lowing account of an early sixteenth-century ‘direct method’ lesson in an article he wrote for the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1845. The description came originally from a work called Polyhistor (1688)/ an encyclopaedia of contemporary knowledge, by the German historian Morhof. It depicts 1inLatin lessons of a teacher called Nicholas Clenard6 who gathered together ‘a multitude of the most motley description: there were some boys scarcely five years old; there were clergymen; negro servants; and some very old men.' Parents came along too and ‘yielded obedience to the master as pointedly the youngest tyro.’ Once this extraordinary bunch had congregated together, Clenard began to teach them: I commenced immediately talking nothing but Latin, and by constant practice, succeeded to such a degree, that within a few months they all understood whatever I said, and the smallest boys babbled Latin fluently after their fashion, when they scarcely knew their alphabet. For I did not vex their tender brains prematurely with things too hard for them, but whatever they knew I taught them in sport, so that my school became a ludus, in the original sense of that word, not in name only but in deed. Unfortunately, Clenard says little about his older learners. In this extract he describes his method in more detail: I endeavoured by every possible means, as merchants learn the idioms of various foreign countries by intercourse with the natives, to cause the ears of my pupils, in every corner, to be assailed by Latin words, and Latin words only . . . If in the course of our talking, any sentiment or adage presented itself, comprised in a few words, it was immediately set into cir­ culation through the whole class, and as hand rubs hand, communicated from one to another, while I stood by as they were talking, and made the thing more evident by gesticulations.8 The central section of Blackie’s article, which leads, eventually, to a review of new textbooks by Ollendorff and others, is remarkable for a detailed naturalmethod teaching syllabus in eighteen steps beginning with object lessons and closing with a carefully organized reading development programme.

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|r follows a vividly expressed denunciation not only of existing methods but also of public attitudes towards foreign language teaching and the appalling state of the teaching profession. Denunciations were common enough, even if few were expressed as entertainingly as Blackie’s (he was trained as an advocate and skilled in expansive rhetoric), and the article would not be worth discussing were it not for the teaching syllabus. Blackie begins by re-asserting the basic philosophy of all ‘natural methods’: All persons being healthy and normal specimens of the genus h o m o , can speak; and by the same natural capability that they do speak one language, they could speak two, three, four and half-a-dozen, if only external circumstances were favourable for such a result.9 11 sternal circumstances in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were, however, extremely unfavourable. The teachers themselves were partly to blame (‘the masters have been bunglers’).10 But they had to contend with ‘the culpable indifference and neglect of the British people to the interests of education generally.’11 Nor does Blackie exonerate his native Scotland ‘where they long delighted themselves to make loud boasts of their “parochial schools” ’ in which ‘the “dominie” was and in great measure is, the lean and meagre product which the neglect of a money-making population, the shabbiness of .1 "game-preserving aristocracy”, and the jealousy of a half-educated church, have starved out of all fellowship with living society, and banished from every possible contact with politeness’.12 Things were no better elsewhere. The teachers of classical languages had proved themselves ‘heavy and unpro­ ductive hulks’, and the teachers of modern languages were, if anything, even worse. Public neglect had meant that languages were taught by ‘any poor Polish refugee, German baron, or Italian marchese, that can find nothing better to do’.13 Blackie’s final target is the textbook writers, ‘the swarms of superficial quacks and empirics of all kinds, who perambulate the country and the booksellers’ shops, big with their own praises, and fertile every one in his own infallible method to master the most difficult language of Europe in six wirks, or it may be six days’.14 This last piece of barbed invective was directed specifically at Ollendorff with his claim to teach a language in six months. After all this, Sweet’s complaint about ‘swarms of foreigners’ dominating the leaching profession in England sounds positively restrained (see Chapter 14). What was needed was a systematic method for teaching languages which w.is neither pedantic nor promised more than it could hope to deliver. The obvious basis for such a method was Nature: The more near a method approaches to the method employed by Nature . . . ; lie more near does that method approach to perfection . . . What then are the elements of this natural method? Tis a simple affair. First: there is a direct appeal to the ear, the natural organs by which the language is acquired. Secondly: this appeal is made in circumstances where there is a direct relation,

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ipso facto, established between the sound and the thing signified . . . Thirdly; the same living appeal to the ear is continuously and for a considerable length of time repeated. Fourthly: the appeal is made under circumstances which cannot fail strongly to excite the attention, and to engage the sympathies of the hearer. In these four points, lies the whole plain mystery of Nature’s method.15 Blackie’s four points sum up everything that has been said about natural or direct methods of language teaching (he even uses the adjective direct twice in the above quotation). Teach the spoken language first, relate the words of the new language directly to their referents in the outside world, practise, and work as hard as possible to gain and keep the learner’s interest. Having pointed out where existing methods fall down on each of the four points, Blackie outlines his eighteen-step syllabus for ‘a well-ordered system of linguistical study’.16 Steps 1-4

Step 5

Step 6

Step 7

Steps 8-18

The teacher should start with objects, ‘baptizing them audi­ bly with their several designations’, and get the learner to repeat them. The new words should then be written on the blackboard, and practised along with ‘a few turns and variations’ introduced ‘ever and anon’. Writing should be introduced, ‘offering its tangible body as a sort of test to examine the more vague and fleeting element of speech’. Here Blackie suggests something very interesting, extended listening practice in the form of ‘short and easy lectures’ on ‘any object of natural history, a picture, a map, or any thing that admits of being described in few and simple sentences’. Harold Palmer was to press for the same thing in a technique he called ‘subconscious comprehension’.1' ‘Grammar may now be introduced, or rather cduced out of the preceding practice’. A remarkable statement ior its time, but, as we have already seen, the ‘inductive approach to grammar teaching’ was not invented by the Reform A'nvement, though their use of it was more consistent. The second phase of Blackie’s programme consists of a graded reading scheme starting with simple materials ‘suited to the stage of linguistical progress where the pupil stands’ and. interesting for him to read. ‘It is on this vital point that we see learned and excellent persons most apt to err’, he warns.

Rousseau and Pestalozzi We should remember that these were early days. Blackie’s article was published in 1845, Marcel’s magnum opus would not appear for another

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215

eight years and the horrors of late grammar-translation methodology had not yet been perpetrated. Blackie’s curriculum may have failed, but, a gener­ ation later, the same ideas and suggestions surfaced again, only this time the profession was faced with new demands for more practical language instruction and the new approaches seemed to offer a solution. The true roots of ‘natural language teaching methods’ lie deep in the art of teaching itself. They may owe something to organized pedagogy, but not a great deal, even less to psychology and virtually nothing to linguistics. In this sense, despite some superficial resemblances, they represent the ‘alter i-”o' of rational teaching methods such as those put forward by the Reform \lm ement. Fittingly, the modern tradition of natural approaches originated in the work and example of a teacher of genius, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), but in order to understand what Pestalozzi and his famous •object lessons’ were all about, we need to look a little further back to their starting point in one of the most influential (and most idiosyncratic) publica­ tions in the history of education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Em ile or On Education (1762). In a single if lengthy text Rousseau (1712-78) created an educational philosophy with an attendant methodology which has functioned since its inception as a powerful critique of the established order. Cast as a pseudo­ novel, the book traces the learning history of the ‘hero’ Emile from childhood to early manhood largely in terms of a developing relationship with his protective and ever-watchful tutor, presumably an idealized picture of the author himself. As in Robinson Crusoe (the first book Emile is allowed to read but only when he is at least twelve years old)18 the story takes place in ,i mvial vacuum. There are no classrooms, no families, and (until he meets his future bride Sophie) no peers. Rousseau’s fundamental belief was that Nature provides the basis for the rearing and up-bringing of all God’s creatures, but humankind had falsified the entire undertaking by preventing the child from experiencing life and the natural universe directly through the senses, a process which leads to an understanding of its deeper meaning through reflection and carefully strucimvii talk with his ever-present and all-knowing tutor. Society is a distraction, but spoken communication with his guardian is the only way to genuine comprehension for the young child. Reading on the other hand is the primary cause of confusion, error, and unhappiness since it creates a fondness for words at the expense of meanings. Some of Rousseau’s best-known quotations come from this section of his text, for example, ‘I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know’,18 and, with even greater vehemence, ‘Reading is the plague of childhood and almost the only occupation we know how to give it. At twelve Emile will hardly know what a book is’.19 To put remarks of this kind into perspective, we have to remind ourselves how serious the need for reform was in the mid-eighteenth-century school. From the start young children were forced to behave in the most unnatural

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ways—sitting still in silence on wooden benches for hours on end wi-.j, serious beatings for minor infringements was the everyday norm, not the horrifying exception, and learning meant no more than committing to memory letters, numbers, rigmaroles, and rhymes of every kind, with the ever-present threat of painful retribution if they were unable to recite what they had supposedly memorized. For Rousseau this was a distortion of nature that could never be ‘reformed’, it had to be abolished and replaced by something totally new— ‘take the opposite of the practised path, and you will almost always do well’,20 was his famous advice to the new teacher. Rousseau’s opposition to literacy for young learners was extended to all forms of language teaching. In practice this usually meant the teaching of Latin, but his attitude towards modern languages was no different. ‘Peopk will be surprised that I number the study of languages among the useless parts of education’—this is another famous quote which must not be taken out of context as the next sentence makes clear, ‘but remember that I am speaking here only o f studies appropriate to the early years’’ (emphasis added).21 The older Emile would be encouraged to ‘roam some of the great states of Europe’ and learn ‘two or three principal languages’.22 But that u a-, in the future. The young Emile must be protected from the showy verbalism that a premature encounter with reading tends to promote. (The modern phrase ‘barking at print’ to describe reading aloud without comprehension is not a Rousseau aphorism so far as I know, but it might have been.) If children are encouraged to learn too many new words, they will not learn what they mean: ‘restrict, therefore, the child’s vocabulary as much as pos­ sible’,23 advice which is still startling today even though primary education li.ii adopted many aspects of Rousseau’s work, though not of course his extremist position on the teaching of reading. Among the modern educational ideas which owe their origins to him are the notion of ‘readiness’—Emile would imi be ‘ready’ to learn to read until he was at least twelve years old; the procedures of ‘discovery learning’—‘let him [Emile] not learn science, but discover it’;24 and the whole philosophy of ‘learner-centredness’— ‘you should be well aware that it is rarely up to you to suggest to him what he ought to learn. It is up to him to desire it, to seek it, to find it. It is up to you to put it within his reach.’25 In its own day Emile attracted some attention but it is a supreme example of a work with a very long germination period, and, as we have already noted, the next steps in its journey towards fame came when its ideas were adopted by Pestalozzi in Switzerland in the early years of the nineteenth century. Like Comenius before him, Pestalozzi had a Pied Piper quality of magic that seems to have fascinated children. It is said that he could hold the attention of his class for hours at a time simply by talking to them but, unlike Comenius, he found it impossible to explain the secret of this remark­ able gift to anyone else. Following Rousseau’s example, he liked to commu­ nicate his ideas about education through the medium of ‘novels’ which were both powerful and obscure, the product of a deeply-felt sympathy for the

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poor of rural Switzerland and an emotional attachment to the simplicity of life in daily contact with the elements and the processes of nature. But he was not a good administrator, his attempts to found a school failed, and his practical classroom techniques, even the famous ‘object lessons’ themselves, often seem dull and commonplace. ‘Object lessons’ begin with the focused contemplation of an everyday object like a cup. The children are then encouraged to explore every aspect of the object through sequences of questions and answers: ‘What is it made of?’, •How big is it?’, ‘What can it be used for?’, ‘What colour is it?’, ‘Are all cups alike?’, etc., the purpose being to elicit meaning in advance of the language required to express it. Language must be the servant of thought, not the other way round. As Rousseau said: ‘Things! Things! I shall never repeat enough that we attribute too much power to words. With our babbling education, we produce only babblers’.26 When in 1853 Claude Marcel recommended a direct method of lan­ guage teaching based on object lessons, ‘This is a book. It is red. It is on the table, etc.’,27 he followed Rousseau in stressing its appropriateness for younger learners, and, as many language teachers were to find out, the method itself tends to peter out somewhere around the intermediate level. It was not until very much later that the extension of theories of meaning Ivvond the confines of words and sentences allowed language teachers to deploy a more communicative approach with older and more advanced sin dents.

l ive origins of the Direct Method ( )ne of Pestalozzi’s disciples in Germany was a schoolteacher called Gottlieb I lcness who applied the object-lesson technique to the teaching of standard Cu-rman (H ochdeutsch) to his dialect-speaking pupils in south Germany. His success encouraged him to think of broadening the method to the teaching of ( :crman as a foreign language, and an opportunity to experiment along these lines came while he was on a trip to America in 1865. He offered to teach ( =crman for nine months to a group of children of the staff of Yale University where he was working. As often happens with informal experiments of this kind, it was an outstanding success and Heness decided to extend the idea ewn further and set up a language school of his own. For commercial reasons, however, he needed to offer French as well as German and looked around for a native-speaking Frenchman to join him in the venture. He c\ entually found him in the person of an extraordinary man called Lambert Sauveur (1826-1907). Sauveur had emigrated to the United States some time in the late 1860s and came across Heness in New Haven, Connecticut. He ran a French course along Heness’s lines for faculty members at Yale which seems to have gone well. At all events, Sauveur was enthusiastic: ‘After this time they were

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almost as French as I, and I have afterwards passed with them more than one evening without hearing a word of English pronounced’.28 Like most of the Heness-Sauveur courses it consisted of a hundred hours of intensive instruction, two hours a day, five days a week, for four and a half months. Sauveur and Heness moved to Boston in 1869 and opened a School oj Modern Languages in the city. It prospered, and five years later they described their ideas and experiences in two related publications, one by Sauveur for French and the other an adaptation for German by Heness, It is Sauveur’s work, An Introduction to the Teaching o f Living Languages without Gram m ar or Dictionary (1874), that has survived and we shall concentrate on it for the rest of this section. Sauveur’s Introduction was originally intended as a kind of ‘teacher's manual’ to accompany his ‘coursebook’ Causeries avec mes élèves (also 1874). But Causeries (Conversations) was not what we would now under­ stand by a textbook. It consists of a series of idealized conversations such might have taken place in Sauveur’s classroom during the course of a lesson. To give an impression of the work, here is an extract (with a translation) from Chapter 10 called Les Oreilles— Les Ecouteurs (literally, Ears—Listeners). The material is laid out in the continuous dialogue form shown below: Revenons aux parties du corps. Nous avons deux oreilles, une de chaque côté de la tête. L’oreille est l’organe de l’ouïe. Entendez-vous?— Oui, j ’entends.— C’est un grand bonheur d’entendre. Le sourd n’entend pas, il est misérable. Est-il malheureux?— li­ ne sais pas.— C’est bien. Les misérables ne sont pas nécessairement mal­ heureux.—Le vieillard entend-il?— Oui, plus ou moins; il y a des vieillard-, qui sont presque sourds. Il y en qui sont tout-à-fait sourds.29 (Let us return to the parts of the body. We have two ears, one on each side of the head. The ear is the organ nl hearing. Can you hear? Yes, I can hear. We are very fortunate to be able to hear. The deaf cannot hear, they are unfortunate. Are they unhappy? I don’t know. Right, the unfortunate are not necessarily unhappy. Can old people hear? Yes, more or less: some old people are almost deaf. Others are completely deaf.) Sauveur’s students did not start the book until they had spent at least a month entirely on intensive oral work in class. In a sense the Causeries texts function as a written reminder of the classwork rather than as the startingpoint of a lesson. With material as unfamiliar as this, it is not surprising that the teachers Sauveur was training on his summer schools demanded a more explicit guide to the new methods, and the Introduction was the outcome.

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Sauveur was, above all, a gifted and immensely enthusiastic language teacher, utterly committed to his vocation and possessed with boundless energy. The first chapter of the Introduction conveys the spirit of his work admirably. He begins with ‘The First Lesson’: The most beautiful lesson that I can imagine of any kind, and assuredly the most interesting that there can be, is the first lesson given to a class learning a language without grammar. There is no orator, were it even Demosthenes, who can hold a public more attentive, more eagerly expectant of every word, than the professor who is giving his first lesson. Not one of his move­ ments is lost. His word, his eye, his gesture, his whole person, speaks; and he is in possession of the undivided mind of those who are before him. During two or three hours, neither they nor he have had a single distraction, even for a second. Is it astonishing, think you? And is there a work more interesting than this, or a greater?30 sauveur conveys better than any other writer what it is that makes teaching magical. It is a gift that not many people possess and it is also very difficult to translate into concrete terms. There is little doubt that his trainees would either have left his courses brimming over with enthusiasm or would have packed it in on the first day, there are no half-measures with men like Sauveur. liut whether they would know what to do in the classroom is another matter. However, Sauveur does try: What is then, this lesson? It is a conversation during two hours in the French language with twenty persons who know nothing of this language. After five minutes only, I am carrying on a dialogue with them, and this dialogue does not cease. It continues the following days, and ends only the last day of the year. Not a word of English is pronounced, and every thing is understood, and all talk. (I have never seen a single pupil who did not understand and talk from this first hour).31 ! [is boundless self-confidence obviously communicated itself to his learners. I ie expected them to understand, so they did. Also, he never ‘corrected’ them. I fe certainly picked up linguistic points and discussed them, but they were ‘investigations’ not offences against French. Next Sauveur tries to clarify his classroom technique by providing a ‘tran­ scription’ of a ‘typical lesson’. It reads rather like the extract from the i 'auseries: Here is the finger. Look. Here is the forefinger, here is the middle finger, here is the ring-finger, here is the little finger, and here is the thumb. Do you see the finger, madame? Yes, you see the finger and I see the finger. Do you see the finger, monsieur?—Yes, I see the finger.—Do you see the forefinger, madame?—Yes, I see the forefinger.—And you, monsieur? etc.32

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He claimed that this first lesson contained 120-30 words, all of which were assimilated during the two-hour class period. ‘It is a serious acquisition’, ,t> he said. The first five lessons are on parts of the body and obviously he made considerable use of gesture in conveying meaning. He does not appear to have used pictures much. What he was able to do easily, and most people find difficult, was to talk to his students in such a way that they did not fail to understand what he was getting at, even if perhaps they did not understand ‘every word’. He had an intuitive knowledge of his students’ ‘internalized competence’ and succeeded in organizing and controlling his own discourse in such a way that it ‘matched’ the interpretive capacities of his learners. He was not unaware of what he was doing, and the most interesting sections of the Introduction relate to his advice on how to talk to learners. This is, I believe, the heart of all ‘natural methods’ and cannot be replaced by ‘oral techniques in the classroom’. He followed two basic principles. 1 Ik first was only to ask what he called ‘earnest questions'. What he meant was genuine questions, not in the sense that he was seeking information he did not possess, but in the sense that he was genuinely looking for an answer. There is a view at the present time that the only genuine classroom questions are ones to which the teacher does not already know the answer, like ‘What’s the time, please?’ when he has forgotten his watch or it has stopped or something of the kind. The argument is that all other ‘questions’ are merely code-practising devices. This is not, it seems to me, necessarily the case. If, Tor instance, a teacher holds up four fingers and asks ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’, it may not be a ‘real’ question, but it is a genuine one provided the teacher takes the answer seriously. Sauveur’s second principle of linguistic organization in the use of class­ room language was coherence: ‘to connect scrupulously the questions in such a manner that one may give rise to another’.33 This principle probably explains his success in communicating with his students better than anything else. They understood what he was talking about because they were able to predict the course of the conversation. A great many ‘direct method’ courses break the rule that human learners are able to ‘learn from the context’ because they switch incoherently from one topic to another: ‘this is a house, it is big’, ‘this is a book, it is green’, and so on. The Sauveur-Heness School of Modern Languages caused a great deal of interest, locally at first and then nationally. In the early days, they had a visit from ‘an eminent minister of the city’ who was clearly sceptical of the voluble Frenchman’s claims. The class were on Lesson 10 (about 25 hours into the course) and the eminent visitor was asked what he wanted the class to discuss. ‘God’ came the breath-taking reply. No problem. ‘I talked for an hour with my pupils without a single answer being refused me’. The minister relented: ‘It is admirable’, said he, ‘I see the thing: it is done; how, I cannot imagine!’34

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Within a decade or so the Natural Method, as the Sauveur approach was known, had become the most seriously considered new development in language teaching in America. C. F. Kroeh (1887) in his review of methods for the Modern Language Association devotes more than five pages of his article to Sauveur’s work and ends: ‘I conclude from these considerations that the ‘Natural Method’ furnishes the most philosophical introduction to the s t u d y of languages which has ever been proposed for the classroom’.35 The issue that Kroeh dwells on at greatest length is one that continues to exercise language teachers: is learning a second language ‘the same’ as learn­ ing the mother tongue? In the Introduction Sauveur implies that he thinks the two processes are comparable, but argument is not one of his strong points and it is difficult to be sure. He does, however, discuss Montaigne a number of times in different contexts and presumably the Montaigne experiment was at the back of his mind. Kroeh examines the first/second language question more coherently and clearly sides with the view that ‘the conditions will never again be the same as those under which (the learner) learnt his mother tongue . . . The new language has not the same chance of success as the first. It has a habit to overcome’.36 This does not, however, lead him in condemn the Natural Method because ‘the “natural method” is not the process by which children learn from their mothers. It is, or ought to be, a great deal better than that, though based upon it. It is natural in its basis; but highly artificial in its development’.37 Kroeh makes two further points in his perceptive review, both of which were to influence many people’s attitudes to the development and wider application of ‘natural methods’. The first is the common complaint that ‘the conversation necessarily turns upon trivial subjects’.38 Kroeh is very fair to Sauveur on this point. While agreeing that the objection is a serious one, he draws on his own language teaching experience to stress that ‘many of my adult pupils even find great difficulties in these very commonplaces’ and concludes that they are ‘a necessary evil’ but ‘fortunately only a brief one’.39 Professional anxiety about ‘trivialization’ continued to gnaw away at direct methods and it helps to explain their relative failure in schools in the early years of the present century. What was needed was a stronger theoretical foundation than Sauveur was able to provide, and it is quite possible that, without the underpinning provided by the Reform Movement, all ‘modern methods’ would have been dismissed as ‘just another fad’. Kroeh’s second point is that ‘the teacher is required to do a disproportionate share of the work’.40 This, in the long run, was a more serious objection, not merely because teachers were required to work hard, though they were, but because learners came to rely too heavily on the teacher’s lead and were discouraged from taking the initiative themselves. They learnt how to answer questions very skilfully, but could not ask them. Student interaction is the most significant feature of modem versions of ‘natural methods’, but it took a long time to become accepted.

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Figure 15.1 Maximilian D. Berlitz (1852-1921). Berlitz opened his first language sch ool in Providence, R hode Island, in 1878, and his tex tbook> started to appear fou r years later. Though he did not invent the Direct M ethod, he m ade it available to large numbers o f language learners in E urope and America through his system o f schools. His success was at its height in the decade before the First World War, and by 1914 he had nearly 200 schools, the largest number (63) being in Germany. There were 27 in Britain.

‘Natural m ethods o f language teaching’ 223

‘Natural methods’ had started well and attracted professional interest and support. What they needed now was a vehicle which would bring them to the customers. The ordinary schools of America, or anywhere else at the time, would never have adopted ‘natural methods’. The teachers would not have known what to do, and parents would have been horrified at the loss of prestige that ‘ordinary conversation’ implied. Natural methods required schools of their i iwn and someone with the feel for business to see and grasp the opportunity that was on offer. Immigrants were pouring into the United States speaking virtually every language in Europe and all of them needed to learn the language of their adopted country. But they were not an educated élite with years of the Gymnasium, the lycée, or whatever behind them. They were ordinary people, the poor, the dispossessed that passed under the Statue of I iberty in the steamships from Genoa and Hamburg. Like the Huguenots in sixteenth-century England, they needed to survive in their new environment and to cope with the problems of everyday life in a new language. They also brought with them their own natural skills as native speakers of their various languages. Someone who could put these two sets of needs and talents together in a system of language teaching that made no appeal to traditional scholastic knowledge but concentrated on what was actually wanted, would make his fortune. The moment found the man, in the shape of Maximilian In-rlitz, appropriately enough an immigrant himself. Without Sauveur, the Direct Method would not have happened when it did; without Berlitz, \ery few people would have benefited from it. In some respects Sauveur and ilerlitz shared a common background. They were both immigrants, though Sauveur had arrived in the United States about ten years earlier. They were both in the teaching profession—Berlitz came from a family of teachers in south Germany— and they both ran language schools within a few miles of each other on the New England coast. According to the ‘Official History of the Berlitz Organization’ published in 1978 to mark its centenary year, Maximilian Berlitz decided as a young immigrant (he was only in his late twenties) that the most promising future he could carve for himself in America was to use his skills as a teacher and his status as a native speaker of German and open a school of his own in Providence, Rhode Island. He then advertised for an assistant who could speak French. (The parallel with the Heness-Sauveur story is very close.) The man who answered the advertisement was a young Frenchman, also a recent immigrant who had not yet learnt English, called Nicholas Joly. The Official 11;story then tells us that Berlitz, overworked by the exertion of getting the school going, fell ill and left the students to the mercies of the ‘untried’ Joly. Returning a month or so later, and expecting to find his customers in a very dissatisfied frame of mind, Berlitz discovered to his amazement that young Joly was getting on very well and talking to them in French. The Direct Method had, it seems, been discovered twice in ten years in virtually the same place,

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once in Yale and the second time in Providence. This raises a rather interesting question. There is no reason to doubt the Berlitz story as it stands, but what, if anything, did Joly know of Sauveur’s work in Boston? Had he perhaps rnlkui to teachers who had attended a Sauveur summer school, or even been present at one himself? It would be interesting to know more about him. During the next thirty years, Berlitz built up a network of language schools, first in America and then back in Europe. The first school he opened after Providence was in Sauveur’s home town of Boston, then in New York, and then Washington. By the end of the century he had sixteen American schools and another thirty in Europe, more than half of them in his native Gemum. There were five in England: in London, Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, all large industrial cities with strong commercial links abroad. His textbooks provided a framework within which the teachers he employed in his schools could work according to a predictable routine u liich would ensure, as far as possible, that all Berlitz Schools followed the s.imc basic course patterns. He began with French and German (both in 1882), and English as a foreign language followed shortly afterwards. Thereafter Spanish and Italian appeared in the early 1890s and Russian, Dutch, Danish, C./.cJi, and Hungarian had all been added by 1910 along with Swedish, Polish, Portuguese, and Japanese. The Berlitz industry was a bigger version of the Ahn-Ollendorff enterprises in the 1850s. Berlitz was not an academic methodologist, but he was an excellent s\stematizer of basic language teaching materials organized on ‘direct method' lines. His biggest sellers run to two coursebooks, but none of them is re.i!l\ ,m advanced course, or even a high-intermediate one. Berlitz catered for beginners and provided them with a useful grounding in the language. All his books con­ tain the same directions to the teacher, but this is as far as his methodolnjik.il interests went. He never, for example, wrote a manual like Sauveur’s InIin­ duction. The teacher’s directions are very clear and straightforward: no trans­ lation under any circumstances (‘teachers are cautioned against the slightest compromise on this point’),41 a strong emphasis on oral work, avoidance of grammatical explanations until late in the course, and the maximum use of question-and-answer techniques. Not all of Berlitz’s writing was quire so peremptory. In some of his textbooks, for instance, he included a short (fourpage) explanation of his methods called ‘The Berlitz Method of Teaching Languages’ which among other things gave three reasons for avoiding transla­ tion: (i) translation wastes valuable language learning time which should be devoted entirely to the foreign language; (ii) translation encourages mothertongue interference; and (iii) all languages are different (‘every language has its peculiarities, its idiomatic expressions and turns, which cannot possibly be rendered by translation’).42 Teachers in Berlitz schools were all native speakers— a cardinal principle that was never broken. In practice this meant that most of them were young and there was inevitably a high turnover of staff. Training did not go very

‘Natural m ethods o f language teaching’

225

deep, nor did Berlitz put many resources into it. The routinized methodology contained in the teacher’s directions and the layout and content of the textbooks, was the basic technique for maintaining control over aims and standards. It was a matter of pride in the Berlitz organization, according to l’akscher (1895), that a student leaving a course in New York could pick it up again at the same lesson in London, for instance, or Paris or Berlin.43 As far as the teachers themselves were concerned, the Berlitz schools, and those like them, were a splendid device for keeping body and soul together while exploring Europe and ‘finding themselves’. Some, like Harold Palmer, for instance, ended up in the profession, but most used the system for a time and then moved on to other things. One teacher who was typical of many was the poet Wilfred Owen. Owen worked at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux just before the outbreak of the First World War and, though overworked and underpaid, enjoyed his time i lu-re as his letters home showed. This extract is from one to his sister writ­ ten in February 1914: ‘I wonder whether you are doing anything at French? \i> serious advice to you is not— to work hard; but to leave it entirely! Time spent on Grammars and Translations under the direction of an English Teacher is wasted. Such is the conclusion I have come to! . . . The majority of iinglish Teachers have an execrable Accent, and what is worse, no notion o! ihe D irect M ethod. If only I could give you a few lessons a la Berlitz! But ] \i ill, too, before long! We will form a French course in the dining-room e\ety night. I guarantee I would have you all talking good French in three months! At least, there are dozens of pupils who have learnt English in that time’.44 Owen started preliminary negotiations towards opening a school of his own in Angers, but nothing came of it in the end. He was not yet i enty-one years of age. The best account of the Berlitz approach and the important role it played in late nineteenth-century adult education is contained in an article written In Pakscher for Englische Studien (1895). Pakscher was the Director of the i Dresden School, a post he had hesitated to take up as the popular view of Uerlitz schools was that they taught languages in a ‘mechanical and superficial’ manner. This is the same ‘trivialization’ point that Kroeh mentioned in his sii' vey. After a trial period, he became convinced of its value and took the job on full-time. i le describes the early Berlitz English course in great detail. It was in two parts, each subdivided into two sections. The opening section of Part I began wii hi the objects in the classroom followed by to be and the most common adjectives {big, small, thin, thick, etc.). Other vocabulary items that could be taught ostensively (parts of the body, clothing, etc.) were introduced next as well as prepositional relationships. Lexical verbs appeared from Lesson 5 onwards but the alphabet was withheld until Lesson 8, a very unfamiliar procedure for a nineteenth-century language course. The second section of Part I introduced simple texts, which were continued, along with everyday

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dialogues, in Part II. Most of the classwork consisted of question-and-answer activities, always, of course, in the foreign language. Berlitz wrote a number of short reference grammars to accompany his most popular courses. Compared with Sauveur’s intuitive style, the Berlitz Method was simple, systematic, ordered, and replicable. The most interesting feature of Pakscher’s article is his description of the typical Berlitz students of the time. Some were schoolchildren who could not keep up with their lessons at school, others were rather idiosyncratic private students like the Swedish cavalry captain who was doing English and French at the same time and coping well ‘despite his advanced age’. Tlxmost important group, however, were the evening-class students. We can see in Pakscher’s rather moving account of these students the true role of the Berlitz schools at the time. Anyone who has taught in similar circumstances will recognize it as a standard situation, but in the 1890s it was happening more or less for the first time. ‘The most astonishing successes, however, are with our evening classcv We run special further education courses for young sales assistants from 8 -9 o’clock and even occasionally 9-10 o’clock in the evening. This is thi most unpromising material one could imagine. Everyone is exhausted in the evenings and much less inclined to learn something new than during the da\. These young people have, however, been working hard all day, most have no knowledge of English at all, and many have never even studied a foreign language before, and therefore, have no notion of grammar. It is extreme I\ satisfying to see the interest with which they take part in the class, and the attention and understanding with which they follow each new activm the teacher presents. It is possible, therefore, even in these classes which only meet twice a week for an hour, where homework cannot be expected, io get through the first Berlitz book in three to four months, an achievement which would take two years at school. When one of these young people unexpectedly gets the chance to travel to England or America—and it happens quite often—they will never be at a loss for words in the hotel, on the train or in the street, and they will probably make much better progress in the foreign language while they are abroad than those who never learnt to understand an Englishman when they were at school.’45 This extract really says it all, a new language learning customer with no formal linguistic training from school who needed English in order to keep in touch with friends and relatives who had emigrated to the United States, or who perhaps wanted to emigrate there themselves. Others may have had personal links with England, or their business had English-speaking clients. The Gymnasium teachers scarcely knew such a world existed, and even the Vietor-Sweet reformers were a long way from seeing language in this straightforward, utilitarian light. Before leaving this section on ‘natural methods’ we should try and clarify the apparent confusion surrounding the use of the term ‘Direct Method’. In

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í

some contexts it seems to be narrowly synonymous with the Berlitz Method and its ‘conversational’ objectives, but in others it is understood in a much wider sense as encompassing all the techniques and principles of the Reform Movement. What appears to have happened is an interesting example of precisely the dangerous consequences of translation that the reformers were talking about. In English the phrase direct m ethod was used almost exclusively to describe Berlitz courses, including in particular their ‘don’t translate’ dictum. In French, on the other hand, m éthode directe was adopted by the government as the name for the new approach as a whole. This helps to explain why it does not appear in Sweet’s Practical Study in 1899 (he uses ■Matural Method’),46 even though it is in the title of Passy’s influential paper 1)e la m éthode directe dans l’enseignement des langues vivantes published in exactly the same year. In the longer term the narrow connotations of the ‘direct method’ turned out to have rather negative consequences for modern language teaching in twentieth-century Britain since it discouraged many language teachers in schools from looking at the broader issues of reform. I or English as a foreign language, however, it was more influential, as we shall see later.

Notes 1 Cohen (ed. 1958: 81-2). 2 Ibid.: 83-4. í Axtell (ed. 1 9 6 8 :2 7 7-8). 4 Ibid.: 266. ^ Polyhistor (1688-1707), ii, 10. (‘De curriculo scholastico’) by David Georg Morhof (1639-91). 6 Nicholas Clenard (1495-1542). Flemish grammarian and language teacher. He wrote the definitive Renaissance grammar of Greek. His educational writings include the posthumous D e m odo docendi pueros analphabeticos (On teaching illiterate boys), from which, presumably, the extract originates. v Blackie (1845:174-5). 8 Ibid.: 175. 9 Ibid.: 170. 10/11 Ibid.: 171. 12 Ibid.: 172. 13/14 Ibid.: 173. 15 Ibid.: 176-7. 16 Ibid.: 180-3. 17 Palmer (1917/1968: 90ff.). 18 Rousseau (1762/1991:184). 19 Ibid.: 116. 20 Ibid.: 94.

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21 Ibid.: 108. 22 Ibid.: 471. 23 Ibid.: 74. 24 Ibid.: 168. 25 Ibid.: 179. 26 Ibid.: 180. 27 Marcel (1 8 5 3 ,1: 328-32). 28 Sauveur (1874b: 42). 29 Sauveur (1874b). 30 Sauveur (1874a). 31 Ibid.: 8. 32 Ibid.: 10. 33 Ibid.: 28. 34 Ibid.: 8. 35 Kroeh (1887:182-3). 36 Ibid.: 179-80. 3 7 -4 0 Ibid.: 180. 41 Berlitz (1907: 7). 42 Berlitz (1898: 2-3). 43 Pakscher (1895: 311). 44 Owen and Bell (eds 1967:232), Owen’s emphasis. 45 Pakscher (1895: 317), my translation. 46 Sweet (1899/1964: 74-5).

1>.\ RT THREE

1900 to the present day

s e c t io n

1

English language teaching since 1900: the making of a profession 16

The teaching of English as a foreign or second language: a survey

Part Three is organized in a different way from the rest of the book. It is divided into two sections, the first of which (Chapter 16) provides a summar­ ized survey covering the whole of the twentieth century and the second (Chapters 17 to 21) deals with selected aspects of the subject in more detail. This means of course that the two sections run in parallel with each other chronologically. The basic theme of Part Three is the emergence from within English lan­ guage teaching of an autonomous profession with a distinctive contribution to make to language education. For our present purposes this is a narrative that can be divided into three distinct phases of differing lengths. The first is a foundation phase (1900-46) which covers nearly half the century and deals with the merging of four contributory strands which came together between 1915 and the start of the Second World War (see the chart on page 233). In 1946 the outcome was publicly recognized as ‘English lan­ guage teaching’ (ELT). The second phase (1946-70) is a rather complex middle stage which started with the consolidation of earlier initiatives that had been disrupted by the war, followed during the 1960s by a period of change which radically altered the scope and structure of ELT. One of the most far-reaching causes of change was the alteration in the socio-political landscape with the growing influence of the United States alongside the attainment of independence by most of the remaining major colonial terri­ tories between 1960 and 1965. A second cause was the arrival of applied linguistics as a source of new ideas and priorities at much the same time. The dominant theme of the third and final phase (1970 onwards) is the way that instruction in a new language can be designed to meet the needs of learners intending to use it for real-life communication. Towards the end of the

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period, however, there was a growing concern for the relationship between English, now the unchallengeable global ‘superlanguage’, and the rest of the world community of languages.

Phase 1 1900-46: Laying the foundations From a British and European perspective,1 by the beginning of the twentieth century English was being taught to speakers of other languages in four educational contexts, two of which were concerned with children at school, and two with adult learners: Contexts o f English language teaching, Phase 1 1 Secondary schools in Europe. Interest in learning English rising. Anglicists among leaders of the Reform Movement. The key British contribution was phonetics. Main representative: Daniel Jones (1881-1967). 2 Adult education in Europe. The primary context for Direct Method teaching along Berlitz lines since the 1880s. Native speaker teacher-,. Main representative: Harold Palmer (1877-1949). 3 Basic schooling in the Empire. To 1920s: English still taught as a ‘quasi-mother-tongue’; 1920s onwards: beginnings of ‘English ;is a second language’. Main representative: Michael West (1888-1973). 4 Adult education in the UK. ‘English for foreigners’. Small numbers until refugee influx in 1930s. Main representative: C. E. Eckersley (1893-1967). The four contexts have been listed in chronological order so far as ELT is concerned, though, as the chart on page 233 makes clear, the primary focus of the narrative is on Context 2 and the role of Harold Palmer as the cat,i lyst for the entire process. During Phase 1 all four contexts came together. First of all, Contexts 1 and 2 made common cause through the collaboration between Palmer and Daniel Jones during and after the First World War. In the 1930s the partnership between Palmer and West effectively merged Context 3 with the other two. And finally, by 1938 the addition of an expanded Context 4 had brought the embryonic ELT profession into existence, but it still lacked a name. Looking at each context in turn, beginning with Context 1, we can trace the emergence of ELT over a period of roughly 50 years. As we saw in Chapter 14, by the end of the Reform Movement in the 1890s English had been accepted along with other modern languages on to the secondary school curricula of most schools in northern Europe. It was not yet the automatic first choice which it was to become later, but it had passed the point where schools would only add it to the timetable ‘if they could find a teacher’ and it had become a more or less permanent fixture with appropriately qualified professional staff. The teachers were not of course native speakers, but the

The teaching o f English as a foreign or second language

The Reform Movement

The Direct Method

(Sweet, Viëtor, etc.)

(Berlitz, etc.)

233

Empire

Palmer in Belgium

1902 1905 1907

Jones studies phonetics Jones at London Univ. —

1912

Death of Sweet

West in India Palmer at London Univ.

1915

I

I

1917

Jone’s Dictionary

Palmer’s Scientific Study

1921 1922 1923 1924

Jones: Chair of Phonetics

Palmer’s Principles Palmer in Japan. IRET founded Palmer’s Grammar

1926 1927

I I

Start of West’s New M ethod Readers

- West’s Bilingualism (E. as a second lang.)

Other Events 1929 1930

Eckersley’s classes — Ogden’s Basic English

1932 1933 1934

Bloomfield’s Language British Council

West leaves India Faucett’s Oxford English Carnegie Conference

1936

West/Endicott Dictionary Palmer leaves Japan

1938

Eckersley’s Essential English

1935

I

1941 1943

Fries: ELI (Michigan) BBC’s ‘English by Radio’

1944

Firth: Chair of Gen. Lings.

1946

I

I

I

English Language Teaching (journal)

l igure 16.1 English language teaching Phase 1 (1900-46): Strands o f dt 'velopment.

increasing rigour of the qualification process more than compensated for this disadvantage, if indeed it was one—and, as we saw earlier, in the eyes of phoneticians like Henry Sweet the opposite was true.2 As the century went on, an increasing number of non-colonial countries outside Europe also began to introduce English into their schools, the most important example in our present context being Japan for reasons we shall come to.

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A History o f English Language Teaching

The importance of Context 1 in the ELT story as a whole was its role in introducing a modern ‘applied linguistic’ approach to language teaching methodology based on an understanding of the underlying disciplines of linguistics and psychology. For a variety of reasons this legacy was less influential among teachers of modern languages in British schools, but the partnership between Daniel Jones and Harold Palmer at University College London (UCL) between 1915 and 1922 ensured that it became the foundation stone of English as a foreign language. Before discussing Palmer, however, we must pick up the details of Daniel Jones’s career. Like most of his contemporaries, Jones moved into phonetics from another discipline altogether, in his case mathematics, and the change was prompted by his experience of learning German on a pre-universin summer course in Marburg, Victor’s home town, which was run on Reform Movement principles by an Australian colleague of Vietor’s called William Tilly (or Tilley). Phonetics and its use in language teaching clearly fascinated him, and, after finishing a law degree at Cambridge, he spent 1905-6 in France studying the subject under Paul Passy,3and then offered his services to London University as an extra-mural lecturer. His success led to a full-time appointment and in 1912 he became head of a Department of Phonetics at University College. Three years later he asked Harold Palmer, with whom he had corresponded earlier, to join him and their publications over tinnext few years have become the founding classics of ELT, with Jones himself contributing his indispensable English Pronouncing Dictionary in 1917 and a year later his Outline o f English Phonetics, a seminal text which introduced the cardinal vowel system in its second edition (1922).4 With Palmer we pass to the second of the four contexts, the teaching o' English as a foreign language to adult learners in Europe, and, as the chart suggests, his career acts as the spine of the narrative to which the other influences bring their specific contributions. Today Palmer would be called an EFL teacher and he began his career, as many still do, by taking a job in a private language school run on Berlitz lines in which he learnt how to teai.li English by the standard Direct Method. In his case the school was in Verviers in eastern Belgium and, unlike most of his contemporaries, he took a serious interest in his work, stayed in the town when the school folded and opened one of his own, known as the ‘Institut Palmer’. A growing interest in phonetics led him to join the IPA in 1907 and he also made contact with Daniel Jones himself, a link which proved invaluable in 1915 when, as a w.ir refugee, he returned with his family to Britain. Like Jones before him, he was offered the chance to make a name for himself as an extra-mural lecturer at London University (he spoke to lot.il teachers of French on language teaching methodology). Also like Jones, he was successful and joined the Phonetics Department in 1916. His lecture course provided the material for his first major publication, The Scientific Study and Teaching o f Languages (1917), followed by the two texts that ga\ e

The teaching o f English as a foreign or second language

235

him a worldwide reputation as a teacher: The Principles o f Language Study The Oral M ethod o f Teaching Languages, both 1921 (see Chapter 17, a n d Smith 1999). The work which went into these publications created an approach which united the linguistic rigour of the Reform Movement with a serious examin­ ation of the psychological roots of the Direct Method. What was needed now u.is a practical teaching situation in which the pedagogical consequences Li)uld be pursued. The opportunity came almost immediately with an offer from the Japanese government of the post of Linguistic Adviser for English teaching, and Palmer left Britain for Tokyo in 1922. The offer alone was a feather in his cap, but of much greater importance was the decision of the Japanese to make him the Director of an Institute for Research in English k-.idiing (IRET) in Tokyo, allowing him time to think his ideas through in the light of a teaching situation which was quite new to him (he had ik-u t taught school children before). Palmer began work at IRET in 1923 and thirteen years later he returned to Britain leaving behind him a library of publications on all aspects of language teaching: classroom materials, teachers’ handbooks, research reports, and so on. He had also earned a professional ivputation that was acknowledged round the world as the ‘Commemorative Volume’ produced for the 10th Anniversary of IRET in 1933 demonstrated with its contributions and messages from figures such as Otto Jespersen, Leonard Bloomfield, and Edward Sapir as well as Daniel Jones and, most significantly in our present context, Michael West. ( ompared to the first two contexts, where the aims and methods of 1 ni'J ish language teaching were reasonably straightforward, Context 3 in the early years was confusing in the extreme. We saw in Chapter 11 that most of the colonial territories enjoyed some form of basic education by the end of the nineteenth century though participation was never very high. There was a built-in disinclination in most government schools to refer to English as a 'foreign language’ despite the obvious fact that in most parts of the Empire it was unknown to most of the children attending school. The language problem had to ‘look after itself’ while the children were taught ‘Reading’ and ‘Writing’ as if they were in Britain, and later a small group of high flyers studied grammar and composition from the same books as those used in l»r!:=sh grammar schools.5 No doubt the teachers ‘muddled through’ with ad hoc devices for getting their meaning across using object lessons, translat­ ing, and anything else that worked. Help from others in a similar job, such as ti-.idiers of English as a foreign language for instance, was unknown before the First World War. There was virtually no contact of any kind between the groups, though there is some evidence that ideas like ‘direct methods’ had made some impression.6 i¡' itish perceptions of empire changed after the First World War and assump­ tions of permanence were re-examined, though independence remained a distant prospect. One sign of the times was the support for bilingualism that and

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appeared after the Imperial Education Conference of 1923 which was moved to call for research into its effects on ‘the intellectual, emotional and moral development of the child, and the importance of the questions of practical educational method arising out of the investigation of such facts’.7 In India, where education had been taken more seriously for longer than elsewhere, this announcement prompted Michael West, an educationalist working in the Teachers’ Training College and the University in Dacca in Bengal, to prepare a Report on the implications of the policy for the teaching of English. He began his Report by making a clear distinction between learning a foreign language, which he saw as little more than an interesting ‘option’ for schools in rich countries, and learning a second language which was a ‘hard necessity’ in countries where the mother-tongue had failed to keep abreast of the demands for modern knowledge. After a detailed study of the Bengali translation alternative, he concluded that there was a clear need for Bengal to make and sustain contact with the outside world by learning how to read a ‘second language’, i.e. English. The teaching of ‘informative’ reading should therefore be given the first priority. His research attracted attention abroad, particular^ in North America where (for different reasons) there was also a ‘reading first’ trend in modern language teaching. But the main interest of his work in English language teaching circles, including Palmer at IRET, lay in his ideas for the control of vocabulary in creating and grading reading materials. In 1934 this key inter-war research topic brought West and Palmer together with Lawrence Faucett (see below) on a project funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the first stage of which ended with a draft list oi around 2000 ‘general service’ words which was published as the Interim R eport on Vocabulary Selection in 193 6,8 but it did not appear in its final form until 1953.9 Palmer’s work had been mainly concerned with word frequency while West was exploring the idea of a ‘defining vocabulary", i.e. commonly used words which could be used to explain the meanings of more unusual items. This concept was later refined as a ‘Minimum Adequate Vocabulary’.10 With this project English as a foreign and as a second language joined forces creating the basis for a unified ELT profession, though it had to wait until 1946 before acquiring a name. There was, however, a fourth conte \r which was still small in size before 1939, but would eventually come to dom­ inate the subject. Context 4 was the teaching of English as a foreign language in the UK itself (‘English for foreigners’ or ‘for foreign students’ were the pre­ ferred labels at the time). Not a great deal is known about this constituency before the 1930s, but it is likely that most of their activities were focused in or near London. Apart from schools like Berlitz (which had opened three London schools by 1903) the most common locations seem to have been municipal adult education centres such as the commercial institutes which provided courses at all levels and prepared students for recognized exam-,. The multilingual composition of these classes encouraged the use of tin.’

The teaching o f English as a foreign or second language

237

Direct Method but there is also evidence from some of their textbooks (for example, Marshall and Schaap’s Manual o f English for Foreign Students, I 914) that phonetics was popular as well.11 ; A (rather tenuous) link with the Palmer-West mainstream came through the work of C. E. Eckersley who taught at the Regent Street Polytechnic, one of the most prestigious of the public sector establishments.12 Already a teacher in the associated school since 1921, Eckersley noticed the need for adult evening classes in English in 1929, and the number of foreigners coming to London to escape from continental totalitarianism increased substantially throughout the 1930s. He was a prolific textbook author, but his best-known work was Essential English fo r Foreign Students, published in four parts between 1938 and 1942. Perhaps through the advice of his publishers Longmans, Green (whom he shared with West), Eckersley was .linong the first to apply the Carnegie word list but he needed to supplement it because it omitted many everyday items such as bacon, beef, luggage, potatoes, and trousers.13 This was a timely reminder that word lists reflect what has been put into them and not ‘the language as a whole ’.14 The Carnegie compilers were interested in creating reading materials for overseas school children, not in describing everyday conversation in Britain, and Eckersley’s examples confirm this.15 All the various pre-war expansions of the profession we have looked at were accomplished comfortably enough, but there was one exception. This was ‘Basic English’, a brilliantly conceived project by C. K. Ogden (1889-1957) of Magdalene College, Cambridge which for various reasons was not handled as adroitly as it might have been, with the result that its possible long-term contribution was curtailed. The practical aim of the scheme was to create a ‘complete’ language, usually called Basic for short, using only 850 English words plus some grammar rules. The claim was that everything that could be said in ‘normal English’ could also be said in Basic, but the circumlocutions and other devices which made this possible tended to upset more orthodox teachers like Michael West, and this led to an unneces­ sary public dispute (see Chapter 18). Ogden’s most important practical contribution to ELT came during the war with a series of bilingual textbooks, based an earlier course called Basic Step-by-Step, which were published by his Orthological Institute in association with the British Council and intended for use by armed service personnel and others from occupied countries with ‘minority languages’: Dutch, Czech, Norwegian, and Polish.16 After the war the earlier support drifted away and Basic began to lose momentum. The research and development that sustained the profession in its format­ ive years helped to provide a stable foundation for the future, but academic reputations were not enough. English language teaching was a practical activity which needed effective teaching materials and guidance on their use in the classroom. Among the inter-war publications there were perhaps three

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which were especially significant in their influence: Lawrence Faucett’s O xford English Course (1933-6), Michael West’s N ew M ethod Series (which technically speaking preceded Faucett—it was launched in 1927— but it did not really make its mark until the second half of the thirties), and finally Eckersley’s Essential English (1938-42). It will be immediately apparent that Harold Palmer is absent from the list, but, for reasons which have never been clear, none of the formidable amount of teaching material that he wrote at IRET between 1923 and 1936 hu appeared in Britain, apart from English Through Actions (1925) which was republished in the UK in 1959, ten years after his death. Even his bilingual International English Course (1944) which, like the Ogden series mentioned earlier, started publication during the war, was withdrawn due to ‘contrac­ tual difficulties’.17 Of course his influence on Faucett’s work was substantial and he personally contributed to West’s N ew M ethod Series, but there was nothing of his own apart from reference works like the Grammar o f English Words (1938b). Faucett’s O xford English Course was a major ELT milestone and deserves a closer look. Lawrence Faucett himself (1892-1978) was an anglophile American with a missionary background who had moved into English lan­ guage teaching while serving with the Protestant Episcopal Church in China in the early 1920s.18 His experience in the country had convinced him that he could be of greater use to the Chinese people as an educator than as a cleric, and he set out to learn as much as possible from people already in the English teaching field. He went to India in 1927 to discuss the construc­ tion of readers with Michael West, and he arranged a year’s exchange visit to IRET in 1930-1. He had long been a supporter of Palmer’s oral method and they shared the general enthusiasm for vocabulary research.19 The Course was the practical outcome of these visits and was written after his return to America in 1931. It was the first course of its kind to be organized as the sort of ‘package that has become familiar in recent times. It was divided into four levels cotresponding to vocabulary counts from 500 words (Level 1) to 2000 (Level I ■. and the materials consisted of Reading Books (‘coursebooks’ in modern terms), Language Books with exercises, and Supplementary Readers. There were also two Teacher’s Handbooks (which took many of Palmer’s ideas to a wider public), Reading Cards, and a Direct Method Picture Dictionary of 200 words. Palmer’s influence could also be seen in the detailed attention given to spoken language supported (in the Teacher’s Handbooks only) by the use of phonetic transcription and, along with the strict vocabulary control, there was a serious attempt at the new art of grammatical grading through the use of ‘sentence types’ and substitution exercises. The course ai s < > widened institutional support for ELT by bringing Oxford Universi!) Press into the publishing field alongside Longmans, Green, and it acted as a model for many future courses, particularly after 1945 (see the list in Chapter 19).

The teaching o f English as a foreign or second language

T Y P IC A I LLSSO N P L \ N S A T Y P K S L R ! AD1\C. HOOK LI.SSO N V l. \ S

T h e teacher may empna&ue the listening and speaking or the silent rcaumt; and writing as he choose*. T h e ten step- pi ovule a comprehensive and balanced method.

T h e T en S tep s.

1 le a c h the com mands orally, first with open book), then with closed books L e t the pupils perform the Actions. 2 Give the num ber o f a command ¡ make the pop»* read u sik a tly , and perform the command ■j T each the questions orally, first with open books, then with closed books. T did not use his editorial role to gloss the expression, but he seems to have believed that it needed no further comment. During its first year it carried an explanatory sub-title, a periodical devoted to the teaching o f English as a foreign language, but this was dropped without explanation the following year. One can only speculate that the ‘foreign’/‘second’ language distinction was well enough established by 1947 for the choice of one of the two terms to imply the exclusion of the other, which in this case would have been the teachers that Hornby was most concerned to reach, namely the non-native teachers of English as a second language overseas. (See Special Note 28, page 261.)

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The arrival of E LT also signalled a new commitment to teacher training and development which was reinforced by the establishment in 1948 of Chair at the Institute of Education at London University,29 leading to a range of ELT-related qualifications from postgraduate certificates to doctoral theses.30 The provision of practical classroom advice was a strong theme in 1 LT publishing after the war, particularly as economic austerity tended to discourage the development of student course materials for a time. Early works came from Gatenby (1944), Morris (1945), and French (1948-50) ,md, after a short pause, there was another burst of more advanced studies as the new training courses became established, for example, Morris (1954), Ciurrey (1955), Frisby (1957), and Gauntlett (also 1957), (see Chapter 19). I here were also the ‘Teacher’s Books’ linked to specific course materials. As we have said before, the scattered and often rather isolated nature of the profession overseas meant that mobility was limited and print was the only u ay of reaching many people working in what Michael West was later to call 'difficult circumstances’ (West 1960). The consolidation theme was further reinforced with the appearance of the fruits of pre-war research in publications like The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary o f Current English by Hornby, Gatenby, and Wakefield (1952, but see Note 31), West’s A General Service List o f English Words (the final Carnegie list, 1953), and Hornby’s Guide to Patterns and Usage in English (1954), the culmination of the work on ‘patterns’ begun by Palmer in the 1930s. Research had been the engine which had powered the Palmer-West years between the wars, but it was neglected by ELT after 1945. Perhaps the reasons were economic, but there also seems to have been a feeling that the academic work had been ‘done’ and the post-war priority was for ‘practical’ initiatives in materials writing, teacher training, classroom methodology, and the like. Once research ceased, however, it was not easy to revive, and from 1950 onwards, ELT lost out to a new cuckoo in the academic nest: applied linguistics. This rather baffling label first appeared in public in the USA in 1948 as the by-product of a programme of English language teaching led by Charles C. Fries (1887-1967) at the English Language Institute (ELI) founded in 1941 at the University of Michigan. In the early years the term was understood in a more or less literal sense—the descriptive work of professional phoneticians and linguists was passed to ‘applied linguists’ who used this new ‘scientific’ data in making better language teaching materials. However, by the time it reached the UK in the name of the School of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 1957, it had acquired a rather broader meaning which included for instance a concern for language teaching methodology as well as materials. In ELT eyes much of Fries’s early work, particularly in his 1945 monograph Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language, seemed to owe a great deal to Harold Palmer, including his decision to call his methodology ‘The Oral Approach’, which carried an unmistakable echo of Palmer’s ‘Oral

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Method’. All this is discussed in more detail later,32 but the key point at this stage is the central role Fries gave to what he called ‘the features of arrange ment that constitute the structure of the language’,33 in short, the grammar. This emphasis showed up a serious gap in British ELT. Despite the work that Palmer and Hornby had done on ‘patterns’ in relation to vocabulary, there was no systematic approach to the teaching of sentence structures which could compare with the work of the Americans. In 1950 Hornby set out to plug this gap in three articles called ‘The Situational Approach in Language Teaching’.34 Although in some ways a response to an American initiative, the situ­ ational approach was typical of British ELT in its emphasis on the class­ room rather than on the linguistics of the method, and it stressed two main points: firstly, new grammatical structures should be presented in class in simple situations which made their meaning clear and secondly, they should be carefully graded. This helped to provide a systematic and replicable framework for the design and presentation of grammar which, together with the work on spoken English and vocabulary control, created a ‘tem­ plate’ for ELT that could be summarized in seven basic principles (see p. 299). The model passed the test of time by lasting without substantial modification for nearly twenty years, and, even after the changes intro­ duced by functional approaches in the 1970s, it has never been abandoned altogether. By 1950 the demand for new classroom materials had begun to reviw. mainly from teachers of English as a second language in schools in the colonies. The response was to apply the standard (‘situational’) course design framework created by the consensus, and adapt it for use in different contexts with relatively minor changes.35 In more affluent times, when there is no shortage of authorial talent and new technologies allow variation to 1\ accommodated more easily, the decision to ‘adapt’ materials rather than create them from scratch each time looks like penny-pinching. But times were hard in 1950 and the new training courses had not yet produced many young authors, making adaptation a sensible if not an ideal policy along with reprints and new editions of pre-war works like Faucett’s O xford English Course and Eckersley’s Essential English.35 Production values were also fairly basic, and most coursebooks were small paper-backed booklets with closely packed pages. Artwork was restricted to line drawings with the occasional use of colour washes to liven things up a bit. Serviceable enough, but not exactly thrilling. More important, however, than these practical arguments was the conviction that it was possible in principle to delhcr a ‘best method’ which would be essentially the same for everyone; that, it vs .i" argued, was the point of all the earlier research. This stance, which is ulti­ mately based on a universalist view of learning theory, would not be accept­ able in today’s relativist climate where the maximum that would be claimed would be a ‘most appropriate method’.

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The first signs of economic improvement came around the mid-1950s when rhe adult market for ELT, and particularly English as a foreign language, carted to revive in Europe. The first full-scale course into the ring was I [ornby’s O xford Progressive English for Adult Learners (1954-6), which was an adaptation of an earlier work for Iraq (see page 302). Burdened with a title nobody could ever remember correctly, it was known universally as ‘the I lornby course’, and its immediate rival, ‘the Eckersley course’, quickly appeared in a bright new edition in 1955 followed by an in-house competitor of its own, Foundations o f English (1956) by David Hicks. Among teachers, the Hornby/Eckersley rivalry was quite explicit. Eckersley had the edge from a motivation point of view, with his ‘cast’ of young students, jokes, and anec­ dotes, but the Hornby course, along with its detailed Teacher’s Book, was a benchmark publication in its own right, the first such work since the Faucett course twenty years earlier to offer a highly organized and linguistically sys­ tematic training in the basics of the English language over three years. It appealed to serious learners and also to an increasing number of ‘false begin­ ners’, particularly in Europe, who had ‘done’ English at school and who were hoping to make fairly rapid progress. 1960-70: Renewal The 1960s was a complex decade in which a great deal changed, but the full implications were not evident until later. To clarify the narrative, it is helpful tdiscuss English as a foreign language (EFL) and as a second language (ESL) separately, though in the real world they shared quite a lot of ground. We can then move to a few more general points like research and technology. Until 1960 most British native-speaker teachers of EFL continued to follow the kind of career pattern we saw with Harold Palmer back in 1902. The starting point might be a newspaper advertisement or a trip to some­ where interesting ‘on spec’, and if a job materialized in a Berlitz School or Mimethmg similar, fine— but, it would probably disappear next June, because '.here were no evening classes in the summer—and the process would have to start again. TEFL was a seasonal job, like hop-picking— and it was not expected to last long. Then around 1960 things started to change, and quite suddenly, or so it seemed at the time, there were enough private language schools in Britain itself to justify a formal self-regulatory body called the Aw iciation of Recognized English Language Schools (ARELS, 1960), and many of them had enough customers and resources to stay open all year round. There were also a few larger organizations which could offer serious in-house training courses and even the beginnings of a ‘network’, among the best-known in the early 1960s being the British Centre, International House, and Eurocentre, all of which had strong connections abroad. In some respects this expanding activity was merely a reflection of the burgeoning European tourist trade, but there were also more academic

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reasons, including the growing number of overseas students planning to take postgraduate qualifications in the UK. By 1961, for instance, there were over 55,000 such students of whom about 36,000 came from the Commonwealth.36 The need for specialized English tuition at this time, however, was still relatively small since most of the Commonwealth students were either native speakers or they were the product of an English-medium education back home. But a huge potential demand for specialist training in the linguistic skills demanded by academic life—listening to lectures, reading technical literature, and so on—was only just over the horizon. Within five or six years there was enough permanent EFL activity in the UK to justify the formation of a professional association known as ATE] 1 (1967), later internationalized as IATEFL (1971). Annual conferences followed including regular meetings abroad, starting with a conference in Budapest in 1974 (see Spencer 1982). And in a decade of acronyms there w.is also ETIC (English Teaching Information Centre) in 1961, CILT (Centre for Information on Language Teaching) in 1966, and BAAL (British Association of Applied Linguistics) in 1967. In the USA too, developments in English teaching, particularly for minor­ ity groups within the country itself, created the need for practitioners to have their own professional association, and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) was founded in 1966 to meet that need. As with IATEFL, it has a large annual conference and affiliates have been set up in various parts of the world (including Scotland). It is of interest to note that the founding of TESOL was in large part instigated by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) established back in 1959. The establishment of such associations presupposes, of course, that its members can claim to be professionally qualified, and there had long been a serious problem in this respect. In Britain ELT did not fit any of the standard teacher training paradigms. For a start it was a specialist activity which needed its own training programmes and in addition it did not really qualify as an appropriate beneficiary of public funding since its work was for the most part located abroad. The post-war initiative at the London Institute o! Education was well-received but it was not widely copied, and by 1960 the only new venture had been the development of an academically demanding post-experience diploma in applied linguistics at Edinburgh University in 1957. In the long run this advanced course and its many imitators provided an essential higher rung on the ELT ladder, but by the mid-1960s a ‘gaping hole’ had opened up in the provision of basic training and education. As a matter of urgency the profession had to do something for the growing numbers of experienced teachers who were still technically speaking ‘un­ qualified’, and in 1967 the Royal Society of Arts (RSA )37 was persuaded to launch a ‘Certificate in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language’ designed especially for this group, in the hope that a pre-experience qualification would follow. This did indeed happen, but it was not until the early 1980s

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when the so-called ‘Preparatory Certificate’ was first piloted. Since that time the RSA has joined forces with the University of Cambridge Local 1Examinations Syndicate (UCLES) and the labels have changed again.38 Broadly speaking, the 1960s was a good decade for TEFL with a continu­ ously rising curve of activity. In the sister field of English as a second language (ESL), however, history intervened in a somewhat dramatic way in the UK creating a wholly new professional alignment. In 1960 teaching ESL meant only one thing: teaching in the colonies or, increasingly, the Commonwealth. |iy 1970 there were effectively two TESLs (though the acronym was not yet in common use): TESL (Commonwealth) and TESL (UK). We shall take up the (Commonwealth meaning first and return to TESL (UK) later. Between 1960 and 1965 the UK, along with the other European colonial powers, accepted the independence of all the remaining colonial territories of .my size and invited them to join the Commonwealth. Except in RhodesiaZimbabwe the process was negotiated successfully and the teaching of I ¡i!;lish was taken over by the new national governments which made their own arrangements for the subject. One UK contribution to the transition was io offer assistance in the teacher training field, a topic that proved to be the key issue at a conference held at Makerere College in Uganda in 1961. But the days of large-scale British involvement at classroom level were over and the new need was for specialist expertise, an up-grading of the profession which in turn increased the demand for qualification in applied linguistics. The production of schoolbooks became a national responsibility though i Ik're were a number of joint projects with the UK. )ne of the consequences of political change was an increase in the number of permanent residents in Britain whose origins lay in various Commonwealth countries, particularly in South Asia. Some had come for economic reasons, others were refugees, but their educational needs were essentially the same, and the most immediately pressing context for help was among children in primary schools. Part of the response of government was the establishment of a Schools Council project in 1966 which was asked to produce a portfolio of materials suitable for young children whose home language was not English. The outcome (called Scope)39 is interesting historically since it represents the first attempt to reconcile the linguistic approach of contemporary TEFL with the older primary school philosophy of ‘activities’ which reaches back to ¡Vsiialozzi and ultimately Rousseau (see Chapter 15). One of the seeds of 'communicative language teaching’ had been sown. Teacher training in TESL (UK) was more orthodox than in TEFL since i here was no problem in arguing its relevance to the needs of British schools and courses began to appear as options on standard training programmes. ■here was, however, also a need for more specialist provision in a new and complex field and the services of the RSA were called on again.40 However, there was no provision for training ESL teachers of adults until the RSA set up a Certificate of Teaching English to Adult Immigrants in 1975. It was later

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re-named to accord with the adoption of ‘English as a second language’ in place of out-moded references to ‘immigrants’ and up-graded to a diploma.41 Another important milestone had been passed. In the United Kingdom generally the 1960s was a period of major educa­ tional change and expansion. There was a genuine belief in ‘improvement’ and ‘modernization’ which took a number of different forms ranging from specific issues like technological aids (the language laboratory was a typical 1960s initiative) to broadly based proposals for innovation and the wider distribution of educational opportunity. The Open University was famously emblematic of those years, but everyone was affected in different wau. including English language teaching. The new universities, for instance, wciv particularly aware of modern subjects such as theoretical and applied linguistics, which resulted in an expansion of postgraduate programmes for experienced language teachers, and soon the Edinburgh School of Applied Linguistics had some serious competition. In the new climate, research was also back on the menu and ELT benefited from a number of specific projects, four of which are summarized below. They all attracted government support in some form. 1 The ‘Survey of English Usage’ directed by Randolph Quirk was set up at London University in 1960. The ultimate outcome was the most substantial grammar of English since Jespersen’s: A Grammar o f Contemporary English (1972) which was later expanded as A Com­ prehensive Grammar o f the English Language (1985).42 2 London also played host to the ‘Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching’ (1964-71), directed by M. A. K. Halliday. This project produced a range of innovative mother-tongue teaching materials lor schools, and, in a more descriptive mode, promoted research on tiuworkings of cohesion (Hasan 1968) which were later expanded into a major study, Cohesion in English (Halliday and Hasan 1976).43 3 The Scope project (1966-72), which has already been mentioned, w.is set up by the Schools Council at the University of Leeds under the dirt-v. tion of John Ridge and June Derrick. Its aim was to produce teaching materials for English as a second language in primary schools.39 4 ‘Primary French’ (to use its popular name) was the largest language teaching research enterprise of its day. It started in 1963 and continued until 1974. Funded partly by government (the Schools Council after 1964) and partly by the Nuffield Foundation, it consisted of two projects. The first, a Pilot Scheme run by NFER, was set up to evaluaUthe proposal that French should be introduced into primary schools, and the second a project to produce course materials: the Nuffield Foundation Teaching Materials Project.44 Language and language teaching were never treated quite so generously again, and, although TEFL itself did not benefit directly from the bonanza

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24 9

period, it continued to expand as the number of learners around the world rose and it became increasingly specialized in order to meet the needs of different groups of students learning the language for a wide variety of purposes. By 1970 the first green shoots of English for Special (later Specific) I'urposes (ESP) had already begun to appear.45 If there is one word that sums up the 1960s like ‘patterns’ in the 1950s and ‘functions’ in the 1970s, it would be ‘situations’, but in more than one sense. 1lornby for instance had used it back in the 1950s to refer to the ad h oc con­ texts teachers invent in order to teach the meanings of new grammar patterns or items of vocabulary, and this remained the dominant usage in ELT for most of the following decade, for example, in Situational English (1965) and ¡'nglish in Situations (1970).46 But ‘situations’ were also events like ‘An I-\etiing Out’ or ‘A Visit to the Theatre’ depicted in dialogues designed to dis­ play a ‘chunk’ of language in use more or less as it actually occurred in real life, and not invented as a device for illustrating meaning. It was this broader sense that was intended, for instance, in the French ‘Audio-Visual Method’ which arrived in Britain around I9 6 0 .47 The ‘situations’ themselves were presented in the form of filmstrips projected on to a screen at the front of the class while the relevant language was being played on a tape recorder. This dual technology was rather unwieldy and later the pictures were transferred to books, a format that was borrowed by L. G. Alexander for his EFL begin­ ners’ course First Things First in 1967. Television was hugely popular in the 1960s and it seemed to offer an ideal medium for demonstrating language in situations. The results, however, were mixed. It did not suit ‘situational language teaching’ on the Hornby model, lor instance, because of the linguistic restrictions of grading, etc., but it was an excellent medium for presenting ‘real-life’ situations. However, language learning of any kind requires practice and in the days before video recording this was impossible. Its most useful role was probably motivational, for example, to encourage attendance at classes.48 Audio-visual methods had their own technological rival, however in the form of the early language laboratory which came on to the scene at much the same time.49 It was a major installation and the cost distorted school equipment budgets for a long time, but its initial impact was weakened by the rather old-fashioned drill-based learning which it promoted. Giving the ■p.ittern practice’ ideas of the 1950s a new lease of life under the rubric of ‘The Audio-Lingual Method ’50 was a waste of its potential. Once its real value as a library resource for listening comprehension activities had been discovered, it became a genuine asset, particularly for older learners. I>ythe late 1960s it was clear that ‘situations’ on their own did not provide a suitable framework for organizing language teaching programmes. Only in the most unrepresentative and controlled situations was there any real chance of predicting the language that might be used. What was needed was a more analytical approach which accepted that ‘situations’ were made up

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from smaller events: asking for things, expressing likes and dislikes, making suggestions, and so on. These were the categories which were to provide the functional ‘bridge’ between language use and linguistic form that came lo play a key role in the next, communicative, phase of ELT after 1970.

Phase 3 1970 to the present day: Language and communication In some respects the history of ELT in the 1970s was more straightforward than it had been earlier because it was dominated by a single powerful ide.i. communication, which found its way into almost every aspect of the subject: syllabus planning, teaching materials, testing and assessment, and so on. In other respects, however, a single narrative became increasingly difficult to maintain, partly because the field had simply grown too large and diverse, but partly also because the intellectual unity that had characterized the earlier decades of the century had disintegrated and in its place there were compet­ ing ‘schools of thought’ promoting more or less incompatible models of language and learning. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) repres­ ented a conscious choice between competing models, not as in the old days of behaviourism, the scientifically attested ‘best model’. The expansion and dispersal of both ELT and applied linguistics in the 1960s and 1970s was also in marked contrast to the past. As we have already noted, the earlier tendency of the profession in Britain was to concentrate its activities in the hands of a small number of influential people in London. This came to an end as higher education expanded across the country encouraging the older universities to add more modern subjects like linguistics, and the newer ones to adopt such subjects from the outset. ELT also diversified, par­ ticularly when general purpose EFL learners were joined by a growing num­ ber of overseas students looking for specialist pre-college instruction in English. At that point the universities entered the industry themselves with self-funded ELT enterprises of various kinds. Given the atmosphere of expansion in the 1960s it is not surprising that most of the initial energy behind the CLT movement came from those universities which had invested heavily in the language sciences and related subjects. By the end of the decade there were activities in most parts of the country, but the early commitment of Edinburgh University, which we have already noted more than once, meant that it played a particularly influential role in the early stages of the movement. Back in the 1960s it had been the location for the first wave of British applied linguistics represented by the work of M. A. K. Halliday, David Abercrombie, J. C. (Ian) Catford, Peter Strevens, Pit Corder, John Sinclair, and others, all of whom contributed to the subject in different ways. As such it provided fertile soil for some of the earliest thinking and research into the pedagogical implications of the new

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interest in language and communication, a broadly based concern that was taken up in particular by Henry Widdowson and Patrick Allen, and more generally reflected in the four-volume Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics, edited by Allen and Corder (1973 onwards). Initially, the new university departments in applied linguistics (or equivalent) were staffed in the main by people with ELT backgrounds who retained their links with the profession, and newcomers to the profession passed through one of the \.irious Master’s degree courses on their way to promoted posts in the UK or abroad. At the start the relationship between the two sectors was very close, but as time went on, it became clear that a new elite was in the driving se.it and the mood in ELT began to change somewhat. To put it rather simplistically, ELT wanted ‘something of its own’ which had not been initiated and promoted by the applied linguists. We shall return to this later. At first sight the historical narrative in the 1970s presents a rather curious contrast: five seemingly quiet years during which not a great deal appeared to be happening so far as ‘the outside world’ of ELT was concerned, followed by five years of publication and activity in almost every branch of the subject. Wl tat was happening was the creation of a new consensus to replace the post­ u ,:r model which was unable to respond to the needs of students for whom English had come to play a significant role in their lives whether they wanted it or not. What adult learners were looking for— and the communicative movement was directed at adults in the first instance—was instruction in English which was relevant to their needs and wishes. The content of courses became increasingly important—it was no longer good enough for texts to Iv merely effective vehicles for presenting new syllabus items, they also had to have intrinsic relevance to the learners for whom they were intended. And e\cn more important, the activities which they were called upon to practice in the classroom should be representative of the real-life communicative situations that they knew they would have to meet. Right from the start it was recognized that a distinction had to be drawn between general-purpose learners whose aims were widely shared by others and those whose needs were specific to a particular, often tightly defined group. v>o far as the former were concerned, the main task for the teacher was to make the needs explicit and ensure that the language which was taught actually helped learners to cope with them. Specific-purpose students, however, pre­ sented a more complex pedagogical task which ELT had never tackled in detail before. The good old days of ‘commercial English’ or ‘technical English’, with their flavouring of specialist lexis, were long gone; students wanted their purposes to be more specifically reflected in the courses they were being asked to take (the language learning motivation of specific-purpose students can iv difficult to sustain) and the demand grew for increasingly well-defined programmes as English for Special Purposes (Specific Purposes from the late 1970s) diversified into English for Academic Purposes (EAP), Occupational Purposes (EOP), Science and Technology (EST), and so on .51

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General-purpose objectives were dominant in the first major project of the decade, known generally as the Threshold Level Project, which had a vet) precise beginning in May 1971 at a symposium in the small Swiss town of Riischlikon .52 The aim of the project, which was sponsored ultimately by the Council of Europe, was to produce a detailed account of the basic language needs of adult learners and the linguistic material which was needed in order to satisfy those needs. ‘Basic’ in this context did not mean merely the ‘survival language’ of tourist phrasebooks. The Threshold Level was more substantial than that; it was designed for learners who wanted to finish their courses believing that they could cope reasonably well with the everyday communicational demands that a temporary visit to a foreign country normally entails. Under the chairmanship of J. L. M. Trim the project team undertook to write a series of foundation papers which clarified the overall aims of the scheme. Trim himself wrote a framework paper53 which set the project in the context of foreign language teaching in Europe including the implications for internation­ ally recognized certification (known technically as a ‘unit/credit system’). The others focused on different components of the scheme. The starting point was to be an analysis of the language and learning needs of adult foreign language students (Richterich 1972), which in turn meant that a new format had to be developed for syllabuses which would reflect those needs accurately and specify the language required to meet them in terms of categories of meaning as well as linguistic form. Wilkins (1972) proposed a model which included two kinds of ‘notional categories’, one concerned with the meaning of linguistic forms (‘semantico-grammatical categories’) and the other with the commu­ nicative function of utterances in context (‘categories of communicative function’). Finally, van Ek (1973) defined the concept of a general Threshold Level appropriate for all languages, and two years later (1975) he published a full specification for English and the race was on to produce syllabuses, coursebooks, tests, and so on which followed the new guidelines. Specifications for other languages followed (see Chapter 20, Note 31). The response to the Threshold Level was generally positive, one of the main reasons being the réintroduction of categories of meaning, particular!) the communicative functions. In some respects it represented a return to an older tradition of linguistic description which modern structuralism in its later brutalistic audiolingual phase had elbowed off the table—one in fact where statements of meaning were central to the descriptive enterprise. Wilkins himself reminded us of this by citing Jespersen’s Philosophy o f Language (1924) among his major sources for the T-level concept of ‘notions’,54 an influence that is particularly pertinent in the following remark: ‘there are some extralingual categories which are independent of the more or less accidental facts of existing languages; they are universal in so far as they are applicable to all languages, though rarely expressed in them in a clear and unmistakable way’.55

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Jespersen was not CLT’s only godfather. There was also the philosopher f. L. Austin (1911-60) who had rehearsed a set of ideas in a lecture series in 1955 which appeared in 1962 as H ow to D o Things with Words. Despite its unfamiliar provenance, it was well-timed to coincide with the renewal of interest in the way language was put to communicative use, and the ideas were taken up and extended by the American philosopher John R. Searle : I '■'>69). In essence the Austin-Searle point is that using language can be a form of action every bit as real as any physical action. Such ‘speech acts’, for example, promising, suggesting, and so on, are linguistically realized in more than one way and learners need to be aware of this. In the 1960s and early 1970s speech act theory joined a broader stream of thinking and research behind CLT which focused attention on the way the speech acts or communicative functions that Austin and Searle talked about in isolation were inter-related with each other to form larger units of discourse meaning— u ritten as well as spoken. This move from a structural to a functional orientation in linguistic enquiry was an enterprise with both American and British roots, though one can also trace it back to the work of linguists in Prague and Vienna between the wars. In the 1940s the message was carried across the Atlantic by refugees like Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) where it came into contact with a home­ grown tradition of anthropological linguistics forming a strand in the renewal of interest in sociolinguistics in America after the setback occasioned by the early deaths of Edward Sapir (1884-1939), and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941).56 The 1960s proved a remarkably prolific one with major fig­ ures like Jakobson himself, John Gumperz, Dell Hymes, and William Labov who with others took the study of discourse and language in its social context to new heights, and all of whom were seriously interested in the educational significance of their work. This work became more well-known in Britain after J. B. Pride and J. Holmes edited a reader in the subject in 1972 which included Hymes’s famous paper ‘On communicative competence’. The term turned into a slogan that rather over-simplified its message, but it also pi'i ¡vided a way of talking about the new developments and it received a fur­ ther boost in the eyes of language teachers when some positive classroom research results were published in America under the same rubric (Savignon l l^ 2 ) . 57

The British contribution to the linguistics of language and social meaning, like the American, owed a good deal to earlier work in social anthropology. In the British case, the key figure was Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), whose view of language as a mode of social action was in many ways closely congru­ ent with the approach developed later by philosophers such as Austin and Se.irle. This view, together with Malinowksi’s ideas about the ‘context of situ­ ation’, were taken up by J. R. Firth and his successors, notably M. A. K. Halliday .i ikt John Sinclair. Both Halliday and Sinclair, committed as they were to Firth’s definition of the subject as ‘the speaking person in the social process’,58 made

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major contributions to the growing functionalist consensus in more than one context. Halliday’s role focused mainly on his theoretical writings—his Explorations in the Functions o f Language in 1973 for instance was a usefullv accessible account of many of his key ideas59— but also on descriptions of English such as Cohesion in English (1976, with R. Hasan) and, later, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985). Sinclair too broadened our understanding of the way English worked through two important projects at Birmingham University. The first was in the 1970s and it developed an innovatory approach to the description of spoken discourse which used the classroom as the research context (The English Used by Teachers and Pupils, 1972), while the second, the so-called COBUILD project, in the following decade represented ground-breaking work in computer-based lexicography. In addition to these broad background developments, there was also considerable activity closer to the ELT chalk face during these early years with contributions in sources like ELT and its American counterpart TESOL Quarterly from leading figures in language pedagogy like W. River-* (‘From Linguistic Competence to Communicative Competence’, 1973), C. N. Candlin (‘The Communicative Use of English’, 1973), H. G. Widdowsoi i (‘The Teaching of English as Communication’, 1972) and J. R B. Allen (‘Teaching the Communicative Use of English’, with H. G. Widdowson, 1974). The culmination of this preparatory period was probably the conference at Lancaster University in 1973, organized and convened by C. N. Candlin and his colleagues under the title ‘The Communicative Teaching of English'. The large attendance by a wide cross-section of the profession effectively brought the first ‘quiet’ phase of CLT to an end. From 1974 onwards, the fruits of the new approach started to come off the presses and into ELT classrooms. Following van Ek’s specification of the Threshold Level for English (1975), the first coursebooks using the new notional and functional categories began to appear, including the Abb-and Freebairn Strategies series (1977 onwards), and the BBC English b> Television project called Follow Me by Alexander and Kingsbury (1979 onwards). Wilkins’s N otional Syllabuses in 1976 at last made the underlying ideas widely available to teachers in the field,60 and proved a key work in facilitating an informed professional discussion. It is also relevant to note that the new courses did not have the field to themselves and more traditional ones also flourished, for example, Access to English (Coles and Lord 1974 onwards) and Streamline (Hartley and Viney 1978 onwards). Turning to ESP, the picture in the late 1970s is also busy with activities of various kinds all over the world. Although the specialized nature of ESP kept much of the practical work inside the institutions for which it was originally written, there were two major exceptions to this pattern. The first was the idea of serial projects which adopted one course as a template for a set of different titles. The best-known examples were the English in Focus series edited by J. P. B. Allen and H. G. Widdowson, which began with Allen and

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Widdowson’s English in Physical Science (1974), and Nucleus, edited by M. Bates and T. Dudley-Evans which was launched in 1976 with a volume on General Science written by the series editors. (See Chapter 20.) Both series produced an impressive number of follow-up titles over the following years. The second solution to the in-house problem consisted of courses devoted to the development of so called ‘study skills’ rather than specific subject-matters, influential background publications in this area included Candlin et al. (1978) called ‘Study Skills in English’61 and in the same year H. G. Widdowson’s key applied linguistic text Teaching Language as Communication which starts ¡'mm an examination of the traditional notion of ‘the four skills’ and then moves on to a detailed study of how they can be developed in a communicative context and finally integrated together. Widdowson also participated with )1in Moore in one of the two early skills-based projects which originated overseas; it was called Reading and Thinking in English and originated in I'.ogota, Colombia. The second was a rather larger project which linked the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur with the University of Birmingham in a scheme known as UMESPP (University of Malaya English for Special Pi reposes Project, 1974-8) in which a joint Malaysian-British team under the academic direction of John Sinclair produced a rich programme of activities designed to help young Malaysian university students cope with the demands oi" reading English as part of their university studies.62 One of the unexpected benefits of the academic end of ESP was the positive signal it sent to teachers of specialist subjects in the universities and elsewhere that the monitoring of the English proficiency of overseas students did not ignore their interests, as they sometimes suspected. In the late 1970s the Kntish Council came forward with a new test of English based on ESP prin­ ciples in which candidates were able to choose test modules related to their .K.idemic interests. Also, there was more emphasis on skills and less on gram­ mar. The new test was developed by the Council’s English Language Testing Vrvice (ELTS) whose name it took (later internationalizing it to IELTS)63 and it was constructed on a detailed specification of language needs, set out by jo :m Munby in a book called Communicative Syllabus Design (1978). It was deployed for the first time in 1980 in forty different centres world wide. The \\ashback effect’ on ELT overseas was helpful in promoting specific-purpose teaching programmes for potential candidates which contrasted favourably with the more traditional linguistic content associated with rival instruments like the American TOEFL Test. Towards the end of the 1970s there was a sea-change in ELT. There was a growing belief that it was becoming too ‘technical’ and remote from the human concerns of teachers as well as learners. The ‘needs analysis’ method­ ology had started well, but had developed a ‘clipboard’ image with checklists .1iuI profiles—all very well intentioned of course, but it was somewhat at odds with the reasons why people went into teaching in the first place. Also, the rather sudden success of applied linguistics in the universities was not

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without its negative side in creating a new elite which had taken over the direction of the ship. ELT started looking for an alternative place in the sun which seemed ‘safe’ from ‘science’. Much of the new quest for significance came to be centred on a particular teacher, Earl W. Stevick, one of the grand old men of American language teaching who had been through all the twists and turns of methodology ever since the pattern practice days of the 1950s. In 1976 Stevick published a book with an arresting title that immediately set it apart from the others at the time, Memory, Meaning and M ethod. In it he took a very cool look at language learning—which had been almost forgotten in the communicarive excitement—and introduced the reader to quite unfamiliar worlds of discourse that the obsession with linguistics over the previous decade or so had tended to obscure. The chapter title ‘Memory and the Whole Person’ gives a hint of the direction in which Stevick wants his audience to explore and he ends the book with some brief notes on alternative methods which in his view contain elements that are worth re-introducing into the discussion about duclassroom. Five years later Stevick published a more extended account of much the same issues in Teaching Languages—a Way and Ways (1980). The book picked up where its smaller predecessor left off and presented a very detailed evaluation of the alternative methods that he had touched on earlier. He concluded with his own distillation from both accounts, but this was probably not what most readers found memorable. They were less interested in a new method than in new ways of looking at existing methods in order to assess the values on which they were built. Stevick’s choices reintroduced approaches and ideas, most of which had been put forward some time before, but had been overlooked because they did not fit the dominant paradigm of the time. Among these were Gattegno\ ‘Silent Way’, Curran’s ‘Community Language Learning’, Asher’s ‘Total Physical Response’ and Lozanov’s ‘Suggestopedia’,64 and they became know n as ‘humanistic’ methods, a label Stevick picked up in his summary account Humanism in Language Teaching (1990). In spite of its very American orientation (only Lozanov has a European background), the general themes ol his work struck a chord among UK teachers and contributed to an enrichment of the learning-teaching experience. Stevick’s reminder of the importance of learning was a timely one. The disinclination of CLT to develop a theoretical stance in this area condemned their methodological proposals to remain eclectic throughout. The prevail­ ing view seemed to be that the bad old days of behaviourist drilling had long gone and this left the profession free to choose from a battery of teaching techniques as and when they seemed relevant and/or useful. Three approaches in particular found favour among teachers and course designers. One was role-playing or simulation where learners either enacted a communicative event from a memorized text, or improvised one from given guidelines. The

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second was ‘problem solving’ which had considerable appeal in ESP because it carried research connotations. It was also popular with teachers of a progres­ sive turn of mind who saw it as the heir of ‘discovery methods’ going right back to Rousseau. But probably the most popular model was skill training which had the advantage of representing a reasonably holistic view of learning while at the same time permitting the exercise of specific components. All these approaches were effective enough, but they did not add up to a coherent theory of language learning, and CLT did not really want one. ! iowever, there was a theoretical model of language acquisition even if the C1 r functionalists could not make use of it. The demolition of behaviourism in the 1960s was followed by development of a new model of the human mind, hiscead of a tabula rasa on which the patterns of learning were etched by experience, the mind came to be depicted as a mechanism which was for tin- most part ‘wired up’ for a pre-determined role in life. All it needed was an appropriate environment and it would go to work. Humans were pre­ destined to acquire language just as birds were pre-destined to learn how to fly. What was language teaching to make of this story which was expressed with considerable vigour by some powerful voices? In general, the answer seems to Iuve been: leave well alone. In the real world teachers had to get on with the job of teaching foreign languages and the post-behaviourist eclecticism served them well enough. There were, however, some attempts to take the discussion into the pedagogical field. Perhaps there was some merit in the notion that learning u.is the outcome of cognitive processes triggered by environmental events and sustained by motivation. What then were the appropriate events? And how could they best be organized? Two scholars in the late 1970s came forward with comparable, but in many ways rather different responses to the question. One was S. D. Krashen, an American applied linguist, who put all his money on one specific process: the comprehension of meaning. ‘All you need is comprehensible input’ he said at one point,65 but of course compre­ hension actually has to take place. Sitting in front of a TV set listening to .1 foreign language, for instance, would do nothing for you. Learners need help in a fairly traditional sense such as graded comprehension materials, for instance (Krashen called it ‘i + 1 ’). And he also stressed that learners should not be forced to respond; they should be given time (a ‘silent period’) lasting possibly months. The internalized system did the rest. The second theory, by N. S. Prabhu in South India, was more subtle. Successful comprehension of the foreign language was essential of course, but on its own it was not enough. What was required was the successful ci ¡i npletion of what he called a communicative task. .Most of Prabhu’s tasks were inexpensive pencil-and-paper affairs which iiM-d material from other school subjects, especially arithmetic, but all of them were designed to get the children thinking and, as the task progressed, they were required to use their powers of inferencing. The linguistic processing

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needed to complete one stage of a task successfully led directly to a new challenge in working out the meaning of the next stage, then the next, and so on in the search for a solution to the problem as a whole. This inferencing activity stimulated by the search for meaning in completing the task si in­ stituted the appropriate cognitive conditions for language acquisi'.ion. provided of course that each new task built on the one before (a bit like Krashen’s ‘i + 1 ’). Prabhu’s Communicational Teaching Project (CTP), jn which these and other ideas were tried out in schools in Bangalore and other cities in South India in 1979-84, is discussed in more detail in Chapter 20.66 During the last twenty years or so the achievements of the communicative ‘revolution’ of the 1970s have remained more or less intact, though some or the details have been modified. Distinctions such as that between structural and notional-functional syllabuses, for instance, no longer have the force with which they were once credited and some of the features which fell out of use have returned to ELT materials. The overt teaching of grammar, for instance, has been re-instated as a useful way of bringing closure to a particular set of activities and exercises. This in fact takes us back to the arguments of the late nineteenth century between the Reform Movement which made exactly the same positive argument for grammar and the Direct Method which took the opposite view. However, the contrast between them had much more to do with differences between their learners, school pupils in one case and adults in the other, than the theories to which they seemed to be appealing. More generally, the legacy of the CLT classroom that distinguishes it most clearly from its predecessors is probably the adoption of the concept of \ia i\ities’. From the grammar-translation method onwards, foreign language lessons had a two-part structure: first the new material was presented i iIk learners and then it was practised. Every now and then there were rather ill-defined tasks like essay-writing or ‘conversation’, which were supposed to revise the language that had already been taught and give students an opportunity of using it to express themselves. However, the idea of fr

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listening practice in the ordinary sense, but a form of interaction without any pressure for reciprocity. If the learners wanted to participate, they could, but there was no need to do so. This ‘incubation’ period deserves very careful consideration, and appropriate support materials. Palmer’s own ideas were a first stab at the problem, but did not arouse much interest at the time. The modern revival of interest in ‘input models’ shows yet again how advanced much of Palmer’s thinking was. Stage Two, which he called Interm ediate, began with the memorization (‘catenization’ as he labelled it) of the basic ‘primary matter’ in the form of oral exercises, drills, and Direct Method speechwork activities. As soon as these primary speech patterns were assimilated, the learners were encour­ aged to derive further examples (‘secondary matter’) on the same models. Accuracy was essential in the habit-formation process and there was little room for the private use of language. Stage Three, Advanced, was devoted to the use of language in reading, composition, conversation, and other practical skills. Literature came on to the syllabus at this point, and the students made the transition from phonetic transcription to traditional orthography. Although the central idea of habitualized speech patterns derived from the Direct Method, many of Palmer’s other views were closer to the Reform Movement. His support for the extended use of phonetic transcription is a case in point. So, too, was his attitude to translation. He did not follow the Berlitz line of ‘never translate’ but took the moderate view that the whole question was a pragmatic one: ‘Let us recognize frankly’, he said,20 ‘that the withholding of an “official” or authentic translation does not prevent the students from forming faulty associations, but that, on the contrary, such withholding may often engender them.’ In view of this comment, his decision to write a bilingual course himself, The International English Course (1943-4), is not as surprising as it seems at first sight. Habit-formation was, as we have seen, Palmer’s core methodological principle. If it was derived from anywhere—and he does not make his sources very clear—one possible candidate is William James’s Principles o f Psychology published in 1890, an immensely influential work which stands, as it were, on the dividing line between speculative and scientific psychology. He was also influenced by an early work of Bloomfield’s (An Introduction to the Study o f Language (1914)), which set out the generally accepted asso­ ciationist view of the time: ‘language is not a process of logical reference to a conscious set of rules; the process of understanding, speaking, and writing is everywhere an associative one. Real language-teaching consists, therefore, of building up in the pupil those associative habits which constitute the language to be learned.’21 Despite the use of the ubiquitous term ‘habit’, associationism was not a form of ‘behaviourism’, which has much more to do with the status of psychology as a science. As J. B. Watson put it in the founding paper of the theory (‘Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It’,

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1913), psychology was ‘a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science which needs introspection as little as do the sciences of chemistry and physics’.22 In the same year, E. L. Thorndike published his important book The Psychology o f Learning in which he put forward his trial-and-error concepts for the first time. However, the bulk of the formal research into habit-formation conducted by the leading behaviourist psychologists of the 1920s and 1930s had not been done when Palmer wrote The Principles o f Language-Study in 1921. Strictly speaking, therefore, to call Palmer ‘a behaviourist’, as is sometimes done, is anachronistic, though in all prob­ ability it is a label he would have accepted without much of a struggle. In The Principles o f Language-Study Palmer put forward nine fundamental principles of good language teaching and learning, of which habit form ation is the most important. These principles are not a random list, but derive from a model of some present-day interest. Palmer took as his point of departure the distinction between language learning in real-life and learning in the classroom. Having noticed the success of the former, particularly among infants, of course, he attributed the relative failure of the latter to a misunder­ standing of the nature of the language learning process. There was, he insisted, a basic difference between the spontaneous capacities of the human being to acquire language naturally and unconsciously on the one hand, and, on the other, the trained or ‘studial’ capacities of classroom learners which allow them to organize their learning and apply their conscious knowledge to the task in hand. Palmer then made the interesting point that spontaneous cap­ acities are brought into play in the acquisition of spoken language whereas studial capacities are required in the development of literacy.23 However, he did not pursue this distinction in any depth, but concentrated his attention on what, to him, was the crucial feature of spontaneity, namely the habitualization of foreign language speech patterns. Of his eight remaining principles, three relate to habit-formation (accuracy, interest, and the importance of initial preparation), while the other five have more to do with course design and classroom teaching. Initial preparation is obviously of basic importance if good speech habits are to be established earh in the course, and accuracy must be maintained for the same reason. Palmer had no time for the kind of hypothesis-testing notions which have been influential in modern times, as the following extract makes clear: There seems to be a real danger in the misapplication of such terms as ‘trial-and-error’, ‘the selection of the successful and the rejection of the unsuccessful efforts’, ‘practice makes perfect’, etc. Misunderstanding on this point has caused many teachers to encourage, and many students to acquire, pidgin-speech, and to consider it as the inevitable or even indispensable prelude to normal speech.24 This is an interesting passage in view of the modern comparison between the development of language in the individual learner and the social development

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of pidgin and creole languages. Although Palmer is clearly using the term ‘pidgin’ in a non-technical, and indeed pejorative sense, the thought is there. Today we should probably call the interest principle ‘motivation’. Palmer made four points, each of which has as much relevance now as in 1921. The first is the essential importance of progress. Only if progress can be perceived and maintained is there a real chance for long-term success. Secondly, the learner ought to understand what is happening in a language class. This may seem obvious enough, but bewilderment may be more common than is generally supposed, particularly when a monolingual methodology is adopted. The other two points are the importance of a good relationship between teacher and learner, and the value of games and a variety of class­ room activities. ■’aimer’s five course-design and teaching principles (gradation, proportion, the. multiple line o f approach, and a rational order o f progression) follow logically from his earlier analysis of the learning process. Gradation was later to become a major preoccupation of language textbook writers, applied linguists, and others. In The Principles o f Language-Study, however, Palmer restricts his discussion to a few guidelines. Having pointed out that ‘gradation means passing from the known to the unknown by easy stages’, an uncontrovcrsial Comenian concept, he then makes what to many people must be a very unexpected point: ‘In the ideally graded course, the student first assimilates a relatively small but exceedingly important vocabulary.’25 Only later on does he combine the words into sentences and longer stretches of language. The ‘standard’ view of grading that has come down to us from the structuralist tradition is that it is almost exclusively a matter of ordering the grammatical and phonological features of the foreign language. To Palmer, however, the starting point in acquiring a new language was lexical and not grammatical. His principle of concreteness was a restatement of the direct method nodon of giving examples rather than rules, and trying to teach a foreign language as far as possible through experience as opposed to intellectual discussion— ‘teach the language, not about the language’ as a later slogan (not Palmer’s) had it. Proportion and the multiple line o f approach imply a balanced eclecticism but not merely in choosing a bit of this and a bit of that. A good method deliberately sets out to combine alternative strategies which may on the face of things appear to be in conflict with each other. Both intensive and extensive reading are needed, for example, both drills and free work, and so on, for different purposes at different times. ■ 'aimer’s rational order o f progression is a good place to end this review of The Principles o f Language-Study since it provides an excellent summary ¡'I his course design proposals. It bears, as we have said, a remarkable Minilarity to the work of Prendergast (see Chapter 13) though Palmer would probably not have approved of his predecessor’s technique of ‘packing’ sen­ tences with as much grammar as possible. However, the following quotation

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could have come from the work of either man: ‘the most successful linguists have attained their proficiency by memorizing sentences they could not analyse’.26 Here is the rational order: 1 Become proficient in recognizing and in producing foreign sounds and tones, both isolated and in combinations. 2 Memorize (without analysis or synthesis) a large number of complete sentences chosen specifically for this purpose by the teacher or by the composer of the course. 3 Learn to build up all types of sentences, both regular and irregular, from ‘working sentence-units’, i.e. ergons, chosen specifically for this purpo^by the teacher or by the composer of the course. 4 Learn how to convert ‘dictionary words’, i.e. etymons, into ‘working sentence-units’, i.e. ergons.27 At the end of the day, it was Palmer’s early experience as a native-speaking direct method teacher that provided the strongest elements in his method­ ology, in spite of his modified views on the role of translation. His apparent abandonment of the Reform Movement principle of the connected text in favour of sentence patterns introduced and practised orally by the teach in the classroom meant, as he discovered in Japan, an additional burden on the non-native teacher. However, he inherited from the Reformers a serious concern for the teaching of spoken language based on the science of phon­ etics and a desire to develop a methodology of language teaching that u.is theoretically well-grounded, intellectually ordered, and practically work­ able. He was also a follower of Sweet in one further respect. He isolated thi' teaching of languages from the rest of the education process and treated it as a separate almost ‘technical’ task that required no further justification than its own successful completion. Sweet said: ‘I am not much concerned with such questions as, why do we learn languages?’28 Such questions did not much concern Palmer either. They did, however, concern Palmer’s younger contemporary, Michael West, as we shall see in the next chapter. i t

Notes 1 The name of the school was ‘École Internationale de Langues Vivantes’. It used Berlitz methods but was not a member of the organization (Smith 1999:32). 2 For example, Cartes Palmer A/B (1906/7); Cours élémentaire de cor­ respondance anglaise (1912); Manuel d ’anglais parlé. M éthode Palmer (1913). All published in Verviers. 3 Palmer’s UCL colleague, Kinoshita Masao, was also employed at the School of Oriental Studies (SOS) where he was one of their first teachers of Japanese. The visiting official who arranged everything for Palmer was Sawayanagi Masataro. See Smith (1999: 64-5).

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4 Bongers (1947:41). 5 The Bulletin was the model for the British Council’s English Language Teaching journal after the war (also edited by Hornby). See Chapter 19. 6 The scope of Palmer’s ‘unknown work’ is very extensive. A 10-volume facsimile edition of his Selected Writings that appeared in Tokyo in the late 1990s (IRLT 1995/1999) includes 52 substantial items, all but a handful originally published in Japan. And this does not include any of the material he wrote for the Bulletin. 7 Yamamoto (1978: 158). 8 Ibid.: 159, quote. 9 Ibid.: 152, quote. 10 Bongers (1947: 79-80). |1 Handwritten note dated December 8th 1931. I am greatly indebted to Richard C. Smith for giving me sight of Palmer’s diary of this trip which formed the basis for articles in the Bulletin on his return. 12 See Strevens (1978: 103-16), where a useful distinction is made between ‘descriptivist’ grammars, for example, Sweet (1892/8) and Palmer (1924a), and ‘linguistic’ grammars, for example, Fries (1952). 13 Editions of the Course were planned in many languages but publication problems caused its withdrawal. The design of the syllabus marked a return to the ‘sentence pattern’ approach of Palmer’s earlier work. 14 See Smith (1999). 15 Palmer (1917/1968:4). 16 Ibid.: 226. 17 Ibid.: 22. 18 Palmer (1934). The full title is: Specimens o f English Construction Patterns. These being “sentence patterns” based on the General Synoptic Chart Showing the Syntax o f the English Sentence (see Smith 1999:140). Like so much of Palmer’s innovative work in Japan, this paper was unknown to the rest of the world. This general lack of Anglo-Japanese communication, made infinitely worse by the war, meant that the credit for introducing the concept of ‘patterns’, ‘pattern practice’, and so on, went to the United States. See also Chapter 19. 19 Palmer (1938b: vii). 20 Palmer (1917/1968: 65). 21 Bloomfield (1914: 294). 22 Watson (1913:176). .13 The more recent distinction between (intuitive) acquisition and (conscious) learning makes use of a similar concept (for example, Krashen 1985). 14 Palmer (1921/1964: 42). 25 Ibid.: 68. 16 Ibid.: 58. See also Tickoo (1982a). 27 Ibid.: 106. 28 Sweet (1899/1964: 2).

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Choosing the right words

Michael West and the teaching of reading The New M ethod Readers by Michael West (1888-1973) are the livsi language teaching materials to have emerged from an experimental project. The project itself was directed by West personally in his capacity as an officer in the Indian Education Service (IES) and seems to have been inspired b\ .i comment made at the Imperial Education Conference of 1923 which u as chosen as the epigraph for his Report: ‘The Conference desires to recoin ia the desirability of scientific investigation of the facts of bilingualism with reference to the intellectual, emotional, and moral development of the child, and the importance of the questions of practical educational method arising out of the investigation of such facts’. The Report itself, Bilingualism inlh special reference to Bengal), was published in Calcutta in 1926 and its title reflects the revolution in thinking that had taken place in education in India since the Resolution of 1904 which we discussed in Chapter 11. English was now to be taught as a second language alongside the mother tongue and essentially for limited and specific functional purposes which We-t characterized as ‘the international “team-work” of modern knowledge' r, i ci use a more modern phrase, as a language of wider written communication. ‘What then must the second language enable a child to do?’, West continued, ‘it must enable him to read.’1 Hence his pedagogical focus on reading. The Bengal project report ought to be better known. It contains a great deal which is of current interest in the teaching of reading and many ide.is which were not pursued very far at the time, but which have become m o r e important since. The starting point was the failure of the education system that emerged after the D espatch of 1854 (see Chapter 11) which had resulted in bilingual education for the elite, who benefited from the use of English in post-Macaulay higher education, and a vernacular education for even one else. In theory this elite was supposed to ‘filter’ their expertise down to the masses through translations, etc., but this never actually happened and the two groups grew further apart. Now it was time to extend bilingual education across the population as a whole, but West’s specific concern was how to maximize the benefits of the very limited contact with schooling that most children would get before being taken away to help support the family, a concept he called ‘surrender value’ (a term borrowed from the insurance

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industry).2He quotes some relevant figures for 1919 in his report: 32 per cent of Class 3 pupils (eight-year-olds) never even reached Class 4 and as many as 82 per cent had dropped out before the end of school in Class 10. What this meant to West was that each year in school had to be treated as a separate educational experience in its own right, not merely as preparation for the next year that large numbers of the children would never reach. In his view, training in spoken English took far too long to have any useful surrender \alue for the majority of school leavers. Basic literacy skills in English, on the other hand, could be acquired much more rapidly, particularly if the children were already literate in their mother tongue (though this sometimes turned out not to be the case). They could, moreover, be used in later life, whereas spoken English was a useless skill for most Bengalis away from the major centres of imperial influence. In order to investigate his concept of surrender value in more depth, West completed a needs-analysis survey (‘An analysis of the Bengali’s need of I nglish’, Chapter 5 of the report) stressing his interest in ‘all Bengalis, not merely a few selected individuals of the upper classes’.3 If this all sounds unexpectedly modern, one might ask why the West model was not followed more often. Perhaps it was, and, like the Bengali project, has been forgotten. ¡’he number of Bengali speakers of English in 1919 (the year to which most of his data relates) was only one in 2,407. Teaching spoken English along P.ilmerian lines was not likely to bring much benefit unless the majority of children stayed at school long enough to gain from an English-medium secondary education, and West knew this was not going to happen. Reading was the obvious alternative, and he investigated the notion which was popu­ lar at the time that translation into Bengali would ultimately solve the prob­ lem of access to information rather than a reading programme in English. i -oncentrating on informative texts, he discovered that during the twelve and a half years to 1919 the proportion of informative publications in Bengali and English was: for science, 9 Bengali to 434 English; for technology, ’ :o 686; for agriculture 4 to 228; and for business 1 to 139. In 1919 book production in technical subjects in the English language, taking both the Tinted States and Britain together, was running at forty-eight times the ISe.igali level. Clearly Bengali was unlikely to catch up. ‘The outlook is not hopeful’ as he put it, ‘human activity and human knowledge are becoming every year more complex and more specialized, and the average man desires and is required more and more to keep in touch with new developments in his occupation or profession. One hundred years ago the promoters of educa­ tion in Bengal might reasonably have hoped by vigorous translation within .i conceivable period to bring Bengal level with the knowledge of the rest of the world. The situation is now immensely changed.’4 I aced with this evidence of the importance of practical informative reading and the need to provide worthwhile learning at each stage of the school, West ile». ided that the teaching of reading must have first priority, even if this meant

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the relative neglect of the spoken language. His research also accorded with his own experience of working as an educationalist in Bengal over a fairly long period of time. He had gone to India in 1912 after leaving Christ Church, Oxford, and became the Principal of the Teachers’ Training College in Dacc.i as well as Principal Inspector of Schools for Chittagong and Calcutta. He was also an Honorary Reader in Education at Dacca University and had published in the field as well. Both his experience and his knowledge of the Bengali edu ■ cation system had prepared him for the experiment in materials development which he undertook in 1923-5. As a pilot experiment West tried his ideas out with a class of eight-year-olds whose knowledge of English on the standard tests he used was virtually zero. At this stage the reading materials were locally produced primers and elementary readers. Each new text was introduced by the teacher who selected what he thought were the new words, glossed them, and practised them on the blackboard. Comprehension questions were set, to be answered in the vernacular. The results of this first trial were disappointing and the procedures were changed so that the children were actively encouraged to tell the teacher which words they did not understand. But there were still a great many difficulties, and progress was slow. It seemed to West that there were two main ways in which the reading text' could be improved in order to help the children to achieve more. The first w.1» to simplify the vocabulary by replacing old-fashioned literary words by mi ire common modern equivalents. For example, West discovered words like plight, m ode, isle, nought, ere, and groom and substituted more frequent items such as state, way, island, nothing, before, and servant instead. This principle, which could be called a ‘lexical selection’ principle (though West did not use the term), was to become a dominant one during the next twem> years. It also echoed the ideas of Palmer, with whom West was eventually n> work closely. It is not entirely clear, however, how using ‘common words' makes reading easier for children for whom all the words are unfamiliar anyway. And on the surrender value theory, it could be argued that if words like plight were common in locally-produced texts then they should hawbeen retained in the teaching materials. What West was getting at ultimately was, as we have seen, access to ‘international English’, particularly in the shape of informative texts. Most of the texts he actually used, however, were stories and other literary pieces. West’s second and perhaps more important principle of readability could be called a ‘lexical distribution’ principle. Not only were there too main new words overall, but they were packed too closely together. Almost even sentence contained a new item, with the result that both teacher and pupils became frustrated and none of the new words was ever properly practised, in the table below, which is summarized from a longer one in the Bengal Report, West compared his ‘New Method’ materials with four reading schemes in current use at both Primer and First Reading Book levels. They were typical

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examples of English teaching materials in Bengal at the time, and similar to the ones he had used in his unsuccessful earlier experiments. In the Report West did not want to name these readers, so we shall simply call them A, B, C, ,i tid D. What Table 18.1 shows is that West not only introduced fewer words, but he also used much longer texts. So the ‘New Method’ learners did not meet new words so often as they did in the older books. In his Primers, for instance, he introduced only 208 new words in 9,296 words of running text, i.e. one new word after every 44.7 familiar ones. If we assume that each sentence in a beginners’ text has about six or seven words in it, this means one new word in six or seven sentences. If we compare these figures with the four older books (Readers A to D), we can see that they all introduced more than iiM) new words (844 in Reader D) and the total number of words of running ¡ev. was never more than 5506 (Reader D) and in one case fell to 1,797 (Reader B). So if we put these two figures together, we can see that the learners had to cope with a new word in alm ost every sentence. Even the best roi lit (Reader C with 10.9) is far below the ‘New Method’ figure of 44.7. The story is much the same with the First Reading Books, but a bit less dramatic. The ‘New Method’ materials introduce a new item after every 56.0 words of text (even better than the Primers), and the older books have improved a little with Reader C up to 20. But they are still a long way behind. West’s lexical distribution patterns meant that, in theory at least, the chil­ dren ought to be able to cover very much more material in the time available. ! !e calculated that, on the assumption that the children had two lessons per u eek and spent 40 per cent of their time reading, they should be able to get through 60,000 words of text, even at their slow reading speed of 50 words per minute. The textbook they were using contained only 5,000 words ,i:id was used as a ‘composite’ manual for all teaching purposes, oral work, reading, writing, etc. The children did not read enough, he believed, and what they did read, they did not understand. First R ead ing B o o k s

Prim ers Reader New B Method A

C

D

New Reader Method A B

313

844

236

429

572

C

D

292

377

Num ber of new words

208

353

327

Length of running text

9,296

2,358

1,797 3,415 5,506

13,217

8,371

4,639 5,853 4,842

6.7

5.5

56.0

19.5

8.1

Running words 44.7 per new word

10.9

6.5

(Adapted from W est 1926a: 275)

Table 18.1

West’s lexical distribution patterns.

20.0

12.8

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West’s first experiment with the New Method materials compared the children in Class 2 of a severely disadvantaged school with one of the best schools in the province. On entry the disadvantaged children knew an average of 9.5 letters of the English alphabet and 0.4 words. In seventeen and a half weeks they had gained the equivalent of two and a half years and were comparable to good Class IV children in the better school, who were still using the old materials. The second experiment was more impressive with a gain of two and a half years in only ten weeks. The starting-point here was higher, and all the children were literate in Bengali, which had not been the case in the first school. Research of this kind is full of uncontrolled variables of one sort or another. Nevertheless, the main point was clear enough. The children made better progress in reading with texts that did not introduce too many new words too quickly. There was also a second lesson to be learnt from the project which derived from working closely with the teachers and varying the procedures of te\r presentation in the classroom. Neither the old system of relying completely on the teacher’s intuition or memory as to which words were new and which were not, nor the system of depending on the children to volunteer informa­ tion, and thus confess their ignorance, worked particularly well. What ihiteachers needed was a clear, unambiguous indication of the new words, properly marked in the text so that the children would also be alerted to them. A controlled vocabulary with each new item explicitly indicated on the printed page, provided the model for the N ew M ethod Reader Scheme which began to appear from Longmans in Calcutta from 1927 onwards. Later they were published for the world market in London along with other AV/r M ethod series such as N ew M ethod Conversation (1933), N ew Methud Com position (1938), and, of course, the N ew M ethod English Dictionary (1935), written jointly by West and J. G. Endicott. In addition, as we h.m 1 already seen, Harold Palmer contributed the N ew M ethod Grammar (1938a) and also wrote a series of N ew M ethod English Practice books pub­ lished in the same year. There seems to have been a ‘meeting of minds’ between Palmer and West in the 1930s, mainly as a result of the events surrounding the Carnegie Conference and the ‘Basic English Affair’ which are dealt with elsewhere. While there is no doubt that West respected Palmer’s work, and in particular the Principles o f Language-Study, he was unsure of the value of starting from an oral approach when the needs for reading were more important for the children for whom he was responsible. The strengths of the two men complemented each other, Palmer in the spoken language and West in the written, with professionally beneficial results. However, West’s departure from India after the Bengal Report and his emergence as one of the world leaders of English language teaching, meant that his specialist interests in the teaching of reading did not develop in the way he had planned while he was writing the Report.

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West’s scheme for a full-scale reading development programme is of particular interest as it envisaged the training of three distinct types of read­ ing strategy. The first stage, represented by the Bengal work, was a vocabu­ lary stage in which each new word was introduced carefully and deliberately up to a maximum of about 1,500 words, the figure he decided on for the \[ew M ethod English Dictionary which defines the meanings of 24,000 entries within a vocabulary of 1,490 words. The second stage was to concentrate on the development of skills, holding the vocabulary level more or less constant. At the third stage the student would move on to strategic reading, in particular the use of skimming and scanning techniques. (West preferred the American term scanning since it did not carry the pejorative overtones of skimming.) Strategic skills did not fit very readily into the ‘nitty-gritty’ intellectual atmosphere of the mid-twentieth century with its (almost obsessive) concern for the detail of vocabulary selection, structural organization and grading. So the plan as a whole never matured as West ■.eems to have intended in 1926. It is also disappointing that West’s ‘reading first’ philosophy was later swamped in the general oral consensus that grew up after the war among the methodologists of the 1940s and 1950s who saw themselves as the vanguard of a new approach to the science of language as applied to the teaching of languages. American linguistics, in particular, stressed the primacy of speech and drew on its origins in anthropological research to create a radically different set of descriptive linguistic procedures that owed nothing at all to a literate tradition. ‘Reading first’ sounded old-fashioned and ‘literary’ in a world of phonemics and speech-sound analyses. It also has to be said that \\»-st himself rather lost sight of the early emphasis on practical, informative iva ding with which he started out in Bengal. There are more stories like Robinson Crusoe and Black Beauty in the reader-scheme than ‘How to mend a bike’ or ‘The economics of farming’. Aside from the N ew M ethod Readers Michael West’s most substantial and permanent contribution to the development of English language teaching \\.¡s the General Service List o f English Words, which eventually came out in 1953, after almost twenty years in the making since the first draft at the second Carnegie Conference in London in 1935. However, before moving to C,i rnegie, it is necessary to fill in the background in rather more detail by .) i’rief account of the ‘cause célèbre’ of the 1930s, Basic English.

The Basic issue '¡¡.isic English’ is English made simple by limiting the number of its words to 850, and by cutting down the rules for using them to the smallest necessary number for the clear statement of ideas. And this is done without change in the normal order and behaviour of these words in everyday English. This is the first point to make clear. Basic English, though it has only 850 words,

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is still normal English. It is limited in its words and its rules, but it keeps to the regular forms of English. And though it is designed to give the learner as little trouble as possible, it is no more strange to the eyes of my readers than these lines, which are in fact in Basic English’.5 I. A. Richards, whose defence of Basic English in 1943 (Basic English and its Uses) is quoted above, had worked with the founder of the ‘language’, C. K. Ogden, in 1923 on The Meaning o f Meaning, an influential text in theoretical semantics. Richards himself was the most important of Ogden’s supporters while the controversy surrounding Basic English was at its height during the 1930s and up to the end of the Second World War. He was also the co-author, with Christine Gibson, of the one application of Basic that has survived in general use. It was originally called A P ocket B oo k o f Basic English (1945) but is known to large numbers of people throughout the world as English Through Pictures, the first of a series of ‘Through Pictures’ spin-offs. Richards’ decision to modify Basic for the book led to a split with Ogden, who disassociated himself from the publication. Ogden always believed that the thought and research that had gone into Basic before its appearance in 1930 was sufficiently thorough and extensive to guarani re its integrity, and that ‘improvements’ would only damage its credibilin. From a distance this attitude may seem intransigent, but to Ogden himself it was a matter both of conviction and commonsense. Other attempts to construct auxiliary languages had suffered badly from the well-intentioned intervention of ‘improvers’. BASIC stands for British American Scientific International Commercial. It is not merely a simplified form of English but a language in its own right, a rival to Esperanto or Jespersen’s Novial or any of the other artificial lan­ guages which were proposed as a means of international communication in a divided world, and which attracted the idealism of the post-war generation with particular strength. Basic consists of 850 words, as the Richards’ quote says, and a small number of standard grammar rules. Ogden claimed that it could be learnt in a week or ‘at worst’ in a month, and once acquired, could be used to express any meaning that could also be expressed in normal English. He was, however, careful to add that specialist topics would require additional vocabularies. All 850 items could be written ‘on one side of a sheet of notepaper’, and were always printed on a detachable paper which every Basic publication included as an insert. There is no doubt that, in the hands of an expert like Richards or Ogden himself, Basic can sound quite normal and translations were made of a number of standard texts like Treasure Island or Arms and the Man to prove the point. More usefully, original texts for the teaching of elementary science were also written by Basic enthusiasts like A. P. Rossiter and H. S. Hatfield. Perhaps if this application of Basic had been pursued more single-mindedly and resulted in an extensive list of simple science and technology texts, the system might have had a much greater chance of long-term survival. It would

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not have met all the problems that it inevitably encountered as Ogden’s enthusiasm drove it towards a role as a ‘replacement’ for ordinary standard I ¡iglish. Essentially, it is a reasonably good system for writing simple texts, but it is not an appropriate medium for everyday social interaction in the spoken language. Nor, to be fair, was it intended to be. The 850 Basic words are composed of 150 items representing Qualities, 600 representing Things, and 100 representing Operations. The Qualities and Things (200 of which were deliberately chosen because they could easily be illustrated) are, effectively, adjectives and nouns respectively. The Operations, on the other hand, are difficult to characterize. They appear at first sight to be a mixed bag of verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and demonstra­ tives. However, the notion of ‘operations’ goes deeper than this, and repre­ sents the core of Ogden’s theoretical work underlying Basic. Ogden was a Cambridge philosopher and logician who had made a reputation as an authority on the works of Jeremy Bentham and had taken a particular interest in Bentham’s ‘Theory of Fictions’. ‘Fictions’ are not, of course, untruths or imaginary tales, but they characterize the propensity of natural language to ‘hide’ true meanings behind linguistic representations. This notion is somewhat akin to the Chomskyan contrast between the ‘surface’ appearance of language and its ‘deep’ structure. For example, the ‘true meaning’ of ask is put a question, want really means have a desire for, and so on. Notions like put and have represent Operations that relate the Things named by the nouns on either side of them. Looked at in this way, there are very few basic operations ‘hiding’ behind the very large number of verbs in the normal standard language. Not only can most of the so-called verbs in the language be circumlocuted by phrases such as have a desire for and put a question, but such circumlocutions represent a ‘truer’ meaning than the ‘fictions’ (want, ask) which they replace. This insight prompted Ogden into devising a kind of ‘notional grammar’ of English in which every­ thing could be expressed by translating it into terms of relationships between Things (with or without modifying Qualities) and Operations. The principal practical benefit was to reduce the number of lexical verbs to a small handful of operational items. In the end he decided on only fourteen (come, get, give, go, keep, let, m ake, put, seem, take, do, say, see, and send) plus two auxil­ iaries (be and have) and two modals (will and may). The propositional content of any statement can be expressed in a sentence containing only these operators. This allows the total number of items to be learnt to be reduced to 850. Or so it would seem. However, Ogden permits a rule whereby any nouns on the list of 850 may take the endings -ing or -ed (not all of them do, of course). The 600 Things include items such as act, end, and sleep, for instance. His -ing or -ed rule therefore allows him to produce acting, ending, sleeping, acted, and ended, and some verb phrases which can be constructed with them (He is acting as the manager, the play was acted, etc.). Suddenly, there is a large reservoir of

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A History o f English Language Teaching

‘verbs’ to be drawn on (though Basic does not permit the ending -s, so he acts or it ends would be ‘ungrammatical’). This puts the claim that Basic consists of ‘only 850 words’ in a new light. In a sense, the 600 Things are not ‘nouns’, though some of them (servant, for instance, or owner) cannot be anything else. They are ‘entities’ which can be nominalized or verbalized as occasion dictates. Secondly, Ogden permits his Operator verbs to collocate with his Operator prepositions to form compounds such as get in/on/off, etc. opening up another source of ‘verbs’. This is a much more serious teaching point than the act/acting/acted issue. There may perhaps be a sense in which com e and across in H e cam e across the river in a boat are ‘the same’ as in H e came across a R om an coin in a field, but the argument would be an abstract one of some complexity. For the average learner of English there is little doubt that they represent two different ‘things to learn’. The publication of Basic English in 1930 led to an increasingly bitter controversy between Ogden and, in particular, Michael West, though Palmer lent his support as well. In the early 1930s neither West nor Palmer were yet in a position to exploit their research work in the production of lan­ guage teaching materials on a wide scale. Suddenly, it looked as though a Cambridge academic with little if any relevant experience of teaching English as a foreign language had made a pre-emptive bid for both the leader ship and the market. West, in collaboration with Elaine Swenson and others, and with Palmer’s public approval, published a powerful attack on Basic in a paper called ‘A Critical Examination of Basic English’ which came out in 1934 in the form of a Bulletin from the Ontario College of Education at the University of Toronto (West e ta l. 1934).6 Ogden lost his temper and replied with a book nearly four times the length of West’s paper called Counter­ Offensive (1935). With hindsight this was rather unwise. His passionate and over-elaborate defence of his system contrasts rather badly with West’s heavily studied restraint. It was a case of ‘protesting too much’, at least to a reader long after the events which provoked it have passed into history. His sense of grievance was not, however, entirely unjustified. Only a year before the Bulletin appeared, West had written: ‘It (Basic) takes a very elastic vocabulary and gets the last inch of stretch out of it, and so makes it a system ideally suited to adult learning.’7 Now here was West pulling the system to pieces. Ogden ascribed purely mercenary motives to the change of heart and accused both Palmer and West of ‘ganging up’ on him. It was all very unpleasant, and many of the issues were absurdly trivial. There were others, however, which were more serious, in particular the claim that Basic was easy to learn because it contained 850 words and, secondly, the vexed question about ‘natural’ English. Ogden’s repeated claim that Basic could be learnt ‘in a week or at worst a month’ was, to put it mildly, disingenuous. What he meant, of course, was that a learner could memorize the 850 words and the list of rules in the stipulated period of time. This is not the same as learning Basic or any other

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language. The Basic system depends on the principle of reducing the number of different dictionary items to a minimum and extending their use to a maximum. Learning how to map a small number of words on to a large number of meanings is not likely to be easy. One language learning problem, the number of new words, has been exchanged for another one, the multi­ plicity of meanings that each new word is required to carry. The overall learning load has remained more or less the same, except perhaps for those learners whose native language mirrors English in the construction of compounds like get in, com e across, and so on. For the others, the net result might well be an increase in learning difficulty. There is a further problem, l Aden’s insistence that Basic was a self-contained language meant that teach­ ers had to learn it. There were obviously no ‘native speakers’ of Basic, which meant that teachers, and in particular native-speaking teachers of English, would have to be retrained. Also, it is rare to find language teachers who actually stick to the syllabus of their teaching course, even in a tightly-graded structural programme, when the need arises for direct communication with their students. In theory at least, such conversations would have to be in Basic rather than in normal English. This suggests that the most effective teachers of Basic would be those who did not know normal English, which is a rather curious state of affairs. Perhaps in practice these problems did not arise. The strongest argument against Basic by English language teachers was that it produced ‘unnatural’ English. You cannot say G ood-bye in Basic or ( i >>od evening or Thank you. You cannot use some of the commonest words in the English language such as like, big, never, sit, understand, can, or want. i i;;den’s answer to this was, of course, that you can express the same notions in a different way and the final outcome is just as ‘natural’ as it would be in normal English. This was profoundly unsatisfactory, at least in the eyes of many teachers of English as a foreign language who felt that if courses were offered which claimed to teach Basic English, they should in fact teach basic English. Ultimately, the issue is insoluble, with both sides arguing from different pivmises. Basic was a separate language into which English had to be translated, whereas the teachers were developing a grading system based on a selection of common words in standard English. Basic itself survived and expanded its activities, but it did not explore the possibilities of professional co-operation. Ogden preferred to work entirely through his own centre, the Orthological Institute, and his own contacts \erseas. Towards the end of the war, the rivalry between the two contrasting views of ‘simple English’ reached a climax. Basic had come to the attention of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and muttered speculations about the role of (British) English in the post-war world filtered down the corridors o; power. Eventually, in March 1944, the issue surfaced in the House of i ommons, in the form of a prepared answer by the Prime Minister himself.8 In his statement Churchill disavowed any concern on the part of His

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Majesty’s Government for the methodology of English language teaching, but expressed an interest in the claims of Basic English to be an auxiliary language with a strong potential for international communication. FKthought, for instance, that its use might be encouraged in the publications of colonial governments. But the Churchill statement meant the effective end of Basic since the entire question was to be left in the hands of the British Council, who undertook to promote Basic ‘where practicable’. The Council, however, insisted that it ‘had always preserved an attitude of strict neutrality among the competing systems of English teaching’,9 and, without its active support, Ogden’s system could not survive except as a minority enthusiasm. In 1950 Catford published an eloquent defence of Basic in ELT but it has been quiescent since then. Essentially, Basic dissipated its energies by seeking to replace English, a task it could not hope to accomplish. It might have been wiser to try anil carve out a specialist role as an auxiliary language for the production of written texts, particularly of a scientific or informative nature. Basic is a literate code well-suited to the purpose for which it was devised, namely the expression of propositional content. This does not mean it cannot be spoken, cledrly it can, but it does mean that it is ill-suited to the role of mediating social interaction. A lost code looking for a speech community. It is some­ what ironic that Malinowski’s paper outlining the concept of ‘context oh situation’ (‘The problem of meaning in primitive languages’) should have appeared in tandem with Ogden’s first major work in semantics in 1923. In that paper Malinowski summarized his views by saying that ‘language in its primitive function and original form has an essentially pragmatic character; it is a mode of behaviour, an indispensable element of concerted human action. And negatively: to regard it as a means for the embodiment or expres­ sion of thought is to take a one-sided view of one of its most derivative and specialized functions’.10 Basic was a work of intellectual art, ‘magnifique— mais ce n’est pas la parole’.

Carnegie and after As we have already seen, a great deal of groundwork had been done on vocabulary selection in the 1920s and early 1930s, but it was mainly uncoor­ dinated private enterprise. In addition, there was the established American work in statistical word frequency led by E. L. Thorndike. The time had conic for some resolution of the issues surrounding vocabulary selection and, if possible, a definitive list for pedagogical purposes. On West’s initiative, and with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, a conference of specialists in tin1 field was held in New York in 1934. The participants included Thorndike and other American workers as well as West, Palmer, and Faucett. Ogden was invited but, not surprisingly, he did not attend. The result of the New York discussions was a decision to a set up a sub-committee of the three

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Britons, with Thorndike as a consultant, which would meet in London the following year. This second meeting was held under the auspices of the Institute of Education at London University with the remit to prepare a report on vocabulary selection procedures and criteria, and draw up a draft list of words. The outcome was the Interim R eport on Vocabulary Selection for English as a Foreign Language (1936), usually referred to as ‘The Carnegie Report’, which eventually became the General Service List o f F^nglish Words compiled and edited by Michael West and published by Longmans, Green in 1953. The first decision of the sub-committee was to produce a general service list rather than one for any specific set of purposes. However, it is impossible io draw up lists without some purpose in mind, and the aim which was most consistent with the needs of the participants was a lexical guide for the production of simple reading materials. The Carnegie G eneral Service List (GSL) suits its basic purposes very well but it is less appropriate for other purposes such as the words needed by visitors to England or new residents, for example, for use in everyday situations. In its final published form the GSL contained frequency statistics, but these were added later. The initial choice of words made at the London meeting of the committee in 1935 was based mainly on intuition and experience guided by the contents of earlier lists and an agreed set of criteria:11 1 2 3 4 5

Word frequency Structural value (all structure words included) Universality (words likely to cause offence locally excluded) Subject range (no specialist items) Definition words (for dictionary-making, etc.) 6 Word-building capability 7 Style (‘colloquial’ or slang words excluded).

The final list amounted to around 2,000 headwords sub-classified according to their grammatical status (right, for example, is listed separately as a noun, an adjective, and an adverb) and their semantic meanings (cry meaning 'hout, for instance, as distinct from cry meaning weep). These sub-categories were a major advance on previous word lists and greatly increased the peda­ gogical value of the work. The GSL is not a frequency list as is sometimes supposed, though the presence of Thorndike as a consultant to the committee ensured that the evidence from frequency statistics was available to the team. He was the lead­ ing figure among word-frequency statisticians in America and had published an influential word count called The Teacher’s Word B o o k in 1921. Ten years later it was enlarged to reappear as The Teacher’s Word B o o k o f 20,000 Words (1932) and further expanded, in co-operation with Irving Lorge, into The Teacher’s Word B o o k o f 30,000 Words (1944). It was Lorge who did most of the research work on the GSL after the London meeting in order to

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provide frequency figures for the 2,000 headwords and for their semantic sub-categories. This Semantic Count o f English Words appeared in 1938, but the project was shelved during the war, and, by the time West took it up again, Lorge had produced a more detailed study called A Semantic Count o f the 570 Com m onest Words (1949). The final work included a supplement of scientific and technical terms prepared by West and his regular colleague in technical and scientific English, W. E. Flood. Word frequency had interested people since the first astonishing c o u n r made in the 1890s by Kaeding to help in the training of stenographers, h was on a huge scale for a manual count, eleven million words of running text were subjected to analysis by an army of research assistants under the super­ vision of the Prussian Bureau of Statistics, and the results published in H äufigkeitswörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (1898).12 The central fact that the pedagogical word lists were trying to capture was that a small number of individual words do a great deal of work. Palmer reckoned, lor instance, that the items on his 3,000-word list would account for 95 per cent of running-text, a point that Bongers (1947) investigated with a number of literary texts including Shaw’s D octor’s D ilem m a (96.1 per cent) ami Arnold Bennett’s The Card (95.2 per cent). Reducing the list to a mere 1 .ODD items would still cover 85 per cent of running-text. The more words that were included in the study (and even in pre-computer days it ran into millions) the higher the total frequency of the common wi >rds. and the longer the ‘tail’ of uncommon words. The amount of informa no n gained from massive counts was, therefore, disproportionate to the effort required to do them. Also, it is doubtful whether all the results were really worth having from a practical point of view. Once you have obtained y o u r high-frequency list, there is little point in knowing that obviously unusual words like blithesome, mugwump, epistolatory, and oubliette are as livquent (‘once in 4 million’ (Thorndike-Lorge 1944)) as everyday word- like barman, hostel, raincoat, and bike. Clearly, what must be defined are the criteria for selecting the texts for inclusion in the count since the statistics .ire a reflection of that original choice. Criticisms of this kind were familiar to the Carnegie sub-committee, which explains their insistence on multiple and, for the most part, subjective criteria in finalizing the GSL .13Nevertheless, the title of the Report (and of West’s 1953 book) tends to mask the limitations of the original objective, namely to provide a practical research tool for the preparation of basic literacy materials in English as a foreign language. The addition of Lorge’s statistics further empha­ sizes the suggestion that the GSL is a lexical study of ‘English as a whole’. This ambiguity was noted fairly early by Eckersley when he came to prepare his Essential English course (see Chapter 16) and became evident later as the need to teach colloquial spoken English (which the GSL ignores) increased. The practical application of word-frequency counts to the production of language teaching materials rested on the assumption that common words

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must also be useful words. Up to a point, this is true: the really high-frequency items are indispensable. However, words are not useful in some abstract sense, but useful for someone or some purpose. This idea was developed further in France in the 1950s during the research to establish ‘basic French’, le français fondamental ,14 In order to supplement their frequency-based vocabulary, the researchers proposed a concept they called disponibilité (usually translated as availability) in order to account for the words which ought to be ‘available’ in specific contexts, like pint in a pub or petrol in a garage, for instance, though neither of them would come very high on a frequency-count of ‘the language as a whole’. The results were used in the preparation of the CREDIF audio-visual courses. Since 1970 there has been a revolution in vocabulary selection which has taken two different forms. One has been to reject statistical procedures in favour of an intuitive approach which starts from an account of the meanings (‘notions’) that learners want to express in order to arrive at the words they need to learn. The second is the outcome of modern computer technologies, particularly their increase in memory capacity, which has allowed for corpus creation on an unprecedented scale. An example of the former was the Council of Europe’s Threshold Level project in the 1970s (see Chapter 20) which developed a variant of the ineaning-to-word thesaurus principle, as opposed to the commoner wordto-meaning dictionary principle. Starting from the situations in which adult students were likely to use the foreign language they were learning, the project team identified a set of predictable needs up to a level described as the ‘threshold’, after which needs become increasingly personal and therefore unpredictable. The ‘Threshold Level’ was limited mostly to pub­ lic contexts like shops, entertainment centres, travel facilities, etc. which provided ‘settings’ in which the foreign language would be encountered. In a setting such as a petrol station, for instance, the main event would be buying fuel and vocabulary items like petrol, oil, litre, full, etc. would be useful to know. As well as these ‘specific notions’, as the project called them, the word-list included ‘general notions’ which related to structural items: the notion ‘possession’, for example, required items like my, mine, >our, yours, John’s, etc .15 I he lists reflected the pooled intuitions of a project team and not an isolated individual, which made the selection procedures more convincing in practice than the seemingly more ‘scientific’ process of frequency counting, and the iramework of settings, events, and notions allowed the project to create vocabularies that were comparable across languages, an elaborate modern version of the polyglot glossaries we met back in the sixteenth century. The second development in lexical studies brought back number-crunching with a vengeance. The starting point was the creation of a corpus of texts of virtually unlimited extent which could be analysed and mined to provide databases for a wide range of research and development purposes. In our

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present ELT context the most significant scheme was the so-called COBU!! 1) project which was originally set up in the early 1980s by a consortium that included Collins, the publishers, and the University of Birmingham under the academic direction of John Sinclair (see Chapter 21). In the first place the massive amount of data meant that the project could provide more refined versions of familiar devices like frequency counts.16 Of greater long-term importance, however, was the use of a concordance format which allowed researchers to see the linguistic contexts before and after the items under study,16 and to discover lexico-grammatical patterns that had not revealed themselves before. The results could then be used in teaching materials for learners at all levels including a new family of dictionaries which used genuine data rather than the traditional lexicographer’s made-up examples,17 and a new type of syllabus based on vocabulary rather than grammar.18 This is an approach which seems to suit the genius of the English language rather well. Back in 1938, for instance, Harold Palmer had published his Grammar o f English Words based on what he called ‘the grammar of words’ in which he pointed out that many of the difficulties faced by learners of English deriv ed from the fact that they were not aware of ‘the grammatical peculiarities pertaining to individual words’,19 and later the same principles were built inm the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary o f Current English (Hornby et al. 1948). Once again we are reminded of Johnson’s dictum from 1747 that English Van be only learned by the distinct consideration of particular words’ along with their ‘special precedents’.20

Notes 1 West (1926a: v, vi). 2 Ibid.: 112, ‘by the “surrender value” of a subject we mean the proportionate amount of benefit which will be derived by any pupil from an incompleted course of instruction in that subject’. 3 Ibid.: 91. 4 Ibid.: 107. 5 Richards (1943: 20). 6 West later withdrew the paper and destroyed the remaining copies. 7 Quoted in Ogden (1935:22). 8 Hansard, 9th March 1944, 397,2187. 9 White (1965: 47). The point about the Council’s impartiality was a fair one: it had given Ogden substantial support during the war (see Chapter 16). 10 Malinowski (1923: 316). 11 The lists included Faucett-Maki (1932); Palmer (1930-31); Thorndike (1921, 1932); West and Endicott (1935); and Horn (1926). See Hornby (1953: 19) and Bongers (1947: 218).

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12 See H. Bongers’ study, The History and Principles o f Vocabulary Control (1947), a valuable source of information on every aspect of the subject, and in particular on the work of Harold Palmer. 13 ‘Subjective’ in the sense that decisions were reached by consensus among the committee members. 14 Ministère de l’Education nationale (1954), Gougenheim et al. (1956). 1.5 Van Ek (1975). See also Wilkins (1972,1976). 16 Sinclair (1986). 17 Sinclair et al. (1987); Sinclair (1991). 18 Willis (1990). 1.9 Palmer (1938b). 20 See page 110. Johnson (1747:19).

19

Old patterns and new directions

The establishment of ELT and the post-war consensus At the end of the Second World War the teaching of English as a foreign language to adult learners in language schools in Europe was seriously dam­ aged and would remain so for some time. In Britain itself the demand was still strong enough to justify a new edition of Eckersley’s Essential English in 1945 and a small number of other publications, notably W. Stannard Allen’s Living English Structure (1947), but there were no major new courses for adult students for another ten years or so. For the time being, therefore, i !.l was given over almost entirely to the teaching of English as a second language to children in secondary schools in the Empire. This was a limited focus but a clear one to which most of the experienced teachers and materials writers of the time could contribute, and their primary task was to develop a shared view of the main priorities and how they should be met. They could also rely on the continued support of the institutions which had emerged as important before the war, in particular the Briiish Council, which was rapidly becoming the key agency in providing a career structure for the fledgling profession, and especially for those such .1Hornby, Gatenby, and others like them who had no links with the colonial service (Harold Palmer himself had retired and, already unwell in 1945, died in November 1949). The Council’s faith in the future was made manifest in 1946 with the founding of the English Language Teaching journal, which helped to bring together a widely scattered population of individual teachers overseas, many of whom were working ‘up country’ on their own. The original idea came from its first editor A. S. Hornby using the IR E T Bulletin, which he had edited after Palmer left Tokyo in 1936, as a model but he did not copy its ‘newspaper’ image. Post-war economic constraints in Britain and a policy designed to keep the price as low as possible overseas meant that ii w.iproduced on a shoestring, but it compensated for this by appearing eight times a year until Volume 6 (1951) when it became a standard-sized quarterly under a new editor, R. T. Butlin (for a fuller history of the journal, see Note 2S to Chapter 16 and Hornby (1966)). Serving English language teachers were the obvious target readership, and a growing awareness of the foreign/ second language distinction may account for the decision to drop the limiting

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subtitle ‘A periodical devoted to the teaching o f English as a foreign language’ a fte r Volume 1. Explaining editorial policy, however, was not one of Hornby’s strong points (perhaps he thought it a misuse of expensive space), but a gloss from him on the newly-coined term ‘English language teaching’ would have been particularly interesting. The second continuing source of support was the Institute of Education at rhe University of London which in 1948 established a Chair with special responsibilities for the teaching of English as a foreign language. Bruce I’attison was the first holder, and he set about creating a programme of courses which would attract overseas students to London as well as encour­ age British teachers to work abroad (Pattison 1952). This development ,ilso stimulated a demand for books for teachers which became a staple publishing product during the lean post-war years. Finally, there were the publishers themselves, essentially the same three houses as before the war. Taken together this was a very closely knit group of men—there were very few women in ELT until it developed strongly in the United Kingdom in the 1960s—who sat at the centre of a global network over which they had considerable influence. I’he new interest in teachers’ books began in 1944 with the publication of I . V. Gatenby’s (1892-1955) short manual English as a Foreign Language: advice to non-English teachers. Before the war Gatenby had been teaching in Sendai in Japan and he had got to know Palmer and the IRET group well. His name later became familiar as one of Hornby’s co-editors on the Advanced I earner’s Dictionary o f Current English (1948/52) (see below), but he also li.ui a distinguished teaching career which took him to Turkey with the British Council after his return from the Far East in 1942. In his book ( i.uenby set out to summarize what might be called the Palmerian orthodoxy in an appropriately straightforward manner starting from the theme that ran through all Palmer’s work from the Principles (1921) onwards, namely that learning how to speak a foreign language was essentially ‘a natural process’ h.i-ed on the formation of correct speech habits. It followed that meaning should be taught as far as possible without recourse to translation, and learnc: s should be provided with plenty of opportunities for practice and revision. This rather gentle approach was characteristic of the other books at the time, including The Teaching o f English as a Second Language (1945) by I. Morris, .i teacher who had worked in Palestine for many years, and two publications in F. G. French (1889-1963): The Teaching o f English A broad (1948-50) u ntten in three short booklets and aimed, like Gatenby’s, at non-native teachers, and Com m on Errors in English: their cause, prevention and cure (1949). French’s background was in the colonial service where his reputation ■i- a practical teacher trainer was considerable. His book on errors was particularly original and helpful, coming as it did at a time when errors were rarely discussed because currently fashionable behaviourist precepts insisted that they were ‘not supposed to happen’. In addition to the new publications,

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classics such as Jespersen’s H ow to Teach a Foreign Language (1904) and Palmer’s The Oral M ethod o f Teaching Languages (1921) were re-issued in cheap editions. After a spate of new materials for learners, there was a revival of books for teachers in the mid-1950s which featured some rather more academic works suited to the new training courses. A good example is Morris’s second contri­ bution, The Art o f Teaching English as a Living Language (1954), which provides a very readable account of mainstream ELT methodology including some of its historical origins. It was also the first book of its kind to use the notion of ‘skill’ systematically, starting from ‘The Language Skills’ followed by ‘The Speech Skill’ which covered listening as well as speaking, ‘The Reading Skill’, and finally ‘The Writing Skill’. Skills also play a role in P. Gurrey’s Teaching English as a Foreign Language (1955). Gurrey had taught English in West Africa before being appointed to the London Institute, and his book is clearly designed for teachers-in-training. Teaching English: notes and comments on teaching English overseas (1957) by A. W. Frisby, a colleague of H. W. Cheeseman in Malaya, extended the teachers’ horizons with an early account of the work of Fries and the Americans (see below). Finally, J. O. Gauntlett’s Teaching English as a Foreign Language (1957) w.ithe first to take an explicitly ‘applied linguistic’ stance. It also acknowledged a major debt to Harold Palmer, whose work Gauntlett had discovered while teaching in Japan after the war. Finally there were two late works by senior members of the profession with a great deal of teacher training experience— Teaching English under Difficult Circumstances (Michael West 1960) and Teaching English as an International Language (F. G. French 1963)—and a new approach which took up the recent interest in situational language teaching (see below), Lionel Billows’ Techniques o f Language Teaching (1961) which deservedly became the basic training handbook of the 1960s. A further contribution to consensus-building was the appearance of three influential reference books, all based on spadework done in the 1930s. The first was the Advanced Learner’s Dictionary o f Current English (1952),1 edited by Hornby, Gatenby, and another former IRET colleague, Hugh Wakefield. It broke new ground in linking lexical and grammatical information in the same work by, for instance, extending the notion of ‘verb patterns’ that Palmer had used in his Grammar o f English Words in 1938. Today, the O xford Advanced Learner’s has some worthy rivals, notably the Longman Dictionary o f Contemporary English (1978) and Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1987), but for a long time it held the field alone, and enjoyed a definitive status bestowed by the profession. Just as Johnson ‘fixed’ the English of the eighteenth century, Hornby produced the standard work of ref­ erence in English as a foreign language. At just the right time, when the subject needed to declare its intellectual autonomy, the Advanced Learner’s developed the principle that a work for learners of English should exemplify the language in use and show the collocational contexts in which the words normally occur.

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This close relationship between grammar and dictionary was further underpinned by the addition of noun and adjective patterns in the second of our three reference publications, Hornby’s pedagogical grammar, A Guide to Patterns and Usage in English (1954).2 The mid-1950s were the high noon of American structuralism and, although Hornby must have been aware of the challenge this represented, he did not abandon his teaching priorities. In his title, for instance, he retained the term ‘patterns’ rather than switch to the more academic ‘structures’ and he also underlined the importance of ‘usage’, a concept that covers much more than mere formal patterning. Of particular significance in this context was the inclusion of a thesaurus-like account of the semantics of modal notions like ‘possibility’, ‘intention’, ‘cause or rea­ sons’, etc., in a fifty-page section called ‘Various Concepts and How to I \press Them’. The third publication, which was aimed at teachers and materials writers rather than learners, was A General Service List o f English Wards (1953), edited by Michael West, the only member of the original (. .i i negie triumvirate who was still active in the profession: Palmer had died four years earlier and Faucett had returned to the United States before the w.nr. After nearly twenty years in the making, the list had finally appeared along with the frequency statistics added in the US by Irving Lorge. I’he consolidation theme running through all these works was echoed in the classroom materials of the time. There were no calls for innovation, r.ulier the reverse. The new ideas of the 1930s (many of them originating tmm Palmer) had produced a workable model in courses like Faucett’s ( i.xford English Course and West’s N ew M ethod series which, taken together, could perhaps be described as a linguistically organized version of the Direct Method. There were, however, still some loose ends to be tied up if the model were to provide the basis for teacher training on a wide scale. In p.uticular it needed to grasp the nettle of ‘teaching grammar’ in a modern m.i nner which started from the acceptance of structures and patterns as the basic descriptive material. This was the task that Hornby and others .uldressed in a number of publications in the early 1950s.

A. S. Hornby and the teaching of structural patterns An we have already noted, ELT had grown up on a diet of phonetic expertise and research into vocabulary control, but grammar had lagged behind. I’.ilmer had advanced the notion of ‘sentence patterns’ back in the 1930s, but they had never been fully systematized or published in an accessible form. What was needed was a workable methodology with a distinctive label that could be used by teachers, textbook writers, and so on in teaching contexts .'.round the world many of which had very limited resources. Above all, it had to be a technique that focused as much attention on the meaning of the patterns to be taught, as on their form. Hornby himself took up the challenge in his last year as editor of E L T with a series of three articles called ‘The Situational Approach in Language Teaching’ (1950).

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What he proposed was that the practicalities of classroom method should determine both the way in which new patterns were taught and the order in which they were introduced. This was more radical than it seems because it had long been taken for granted in academic grammar books that simple forms, for example, ‘I walk’ or ‘I walked’, should ‘logically’ precede compound forms, ‘I am walking’ or ‘I have walked’, but Hornby ignored this tradition in the interests of effective teaching. He believed that the best way of demonstrating the meaning of patterns like ‘I am opening the window’ and ‘I have opened the window’ was to embed them in simple ‘situations’ and have them acted out in the classroom by the teacher and, if possible, the learners themselves, l>v contrast, patterns like ‘I walk’ and ‘I walked’ were more dependent on textual support and should therefore come later when more English had been learnt. In the early stages it was vital for the new patterns to be perceived as clearly as possible, and to make them more salient, Hornby adapted Gouin’s idea of the ‘series’ (see Chapter 13)3 to organize them together in sequences so that, over a number of lessons, there would be a simple ‘story line’, each element of which had been taught in isolation earlier. It began with T am going to open the window’ (an intention which had to be announced to the whole class before making a m ove) . . . ‘I am walking to the window’ (spoken while on the move to the window). . . ‘I am opening the window’ (again spoken while the action was in progress). . . ‘I have opened the window’ (spoken before moving away and perhaps also with one hand still on the open window— otherwise the past tense would be needed). Then the sequence would be repeated with other actions like walking to the blackboard, etc.3 Teaching meaning through class­ room actions was not new—as we saw in Chapter 15, it came originally from Direct Method teachers like Sauveur and Berlitz—but the way that Hornby put the patterns together into sequences not only made the technique more system­ atic in the classroom, it also created a syllabus of structures that could be used to underpin the design of coursebooks, particularly those intended for begin­ ners. Of course not all structures could be dealt with ostensively in this way, and Hornby suggested the use of picture-sequences to depict situations that could not occur in a classroom. In the end, however, the teacher had to rely on imagined situations introduced in specially constructed texts. With this new approach Hornby systematized a great deal of work which had already been done by, for instance, Palmer in publications like English Through Actions (1925) and Faucett in his pre-war O xford English Course (1933-4), but in doing so he devised a basic methodology for ELT which could be used by most writers of teaching materials at the time, a number of whom are mentioned in the list of ‘Selected ELT titles, c.1950’ below. In addition there was his own O xford Progressive English for Adult Learners (1954-6), referred to in its day as ‘the Hornby course’, which was accompanied by a ‘Teacher’s Book’ that included a detailed account of the situational approach in action, Later came his less well-known four-part series of exercises The Teaching o f Structural Words and Sentence Patterns (1959 onwards).

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Figure 19.1 A. S. 1lornby ( J 898-1978). H ornby’s w ork in the 1940s and 19SOs represe?-ited the culmination o f the tradition begun by Sweet and Palmer. His Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of (Current English, which first appeared under a slightly different title in 1948, is accepted as one o f the great w orks in L I T (see Strevens (ed.) 1978). The concept of ‘language in situations’ continued to be influential through­ out the 1960s, particularly when it received the support of academic linguists like J. R. Firth and in a more extended sense it became a guiding principle behind the development of audio-visual methods in France and elsewhere. Both these topics are taken up in more detail below, but for the moment we should stay with the 1950s and attempt to summarize what came to be accepted as ‘the standard model’ for the next twenty years or more. Seven basic principles suggest themselves: / /'•■ » I ' / ' i V i

pi!l.\ ; / > / ,

'

uf I I I tl' 1' 11-

1 All four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) should be taught but the spoken skills should be given priority.4 2 Learning the spoken language meant acquiring a set of appropriate speech habits.

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3 Courses of instruction should be built round a graded syllabus of si n a ­ tural patterns to ensure systematic step-by-step progress. 4 Vocabulary should be carefully selected and presented along with the new grammatical patterns in specially written connected texts. 5 Grammar should be taught inductively through the presentation and practice of new patterns in specially designed classroom situations with visual and/or textual support. 6 Wherever possible meaning should be taught through ostensive proa-d­ ures and/or linguistic context. 7 Error should be avoided through adequate practice and rehearsal. The main concerns of the Hornby era—the careful selection and grading of grammar patterns and vocabulary, the stress on pronunciation, and the importance of text—were in some ways more in tune with Sweet than am oik else: rational, civilized and, above all, literate. At first sight ‘literate’ (not, of course, ‘literary’) may seem a strange adjective to use about an oral approach to language teaching which emphasized the importance of the spoken lan­ guage. But, on reflection, it is not so inappropriate. Oral work in the class­ room certainly gave students a fair command of spoken English, but ihe language being taught conformed closely to literate norms: well-formed. Standard English sentences, which were, so to speak, ‘translated into speech’ by the teacher. The patterns on which the materials were based were arrived at by a process of idealization from the flow of common talk, and it w.is important that they should be learnt accurately. This is in essence whav Abercrombie (1963) later called ‘spoken prose’.5 Natural speech, or ‘conversation’,5 on the other hand, is of a different order altogether. It emerges out of the experience of interacting with other members of the speech community, and does not always conform to standardized notions of well-formedness. This was the reality that Sauveur had attempted to capture for the classroom back in 1870, but it is not easily tameable. Classrooms, except those designed for very young children, do not provide much opportunity for the kind of spontaneous interaction that underpins nat­ ural language acquisition. It is assumed, in fact, that they will act as an unob­ trusive setting for the deployment of language which has already been learnt. Nor is it easy to see how ‘natural’ speech processes can be promoted when the ratio of sources (‘models’) to learners is one-to-many, instead of the other way round as it is for the infant in a real-life social environment. The evolution of Sauveurian principles into the procedures of the Direct Method recognized both the constraints of the classroom and the literate experience of the learn­ ers, and, by the middle of the twentieth century, the results had achieved a high level of sophistication. But the cost in ‘naturalness’ did not go unnoticed, and it was not long before a similar challenge was raised to the imposition of norms, particularly in the controversial area of ‘correct pronunciation’. For the time being, however, the consensus remained undisturbed.

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In some ways the most significant feature of the consensus was the largely unexamined assumption that it was possible to devise a ‘methodology for all occasions’. Once it was in place, the structural syllabus remained unchanged from course to course (though grading details could be modified), and any ■special needs’ were met by different choices of vocabulary within overall constraints such as frequency and coverage. Courses for young children, for instance, might include words like toy, ball, pet, bedtim e, etc. while technical students might learn engine, lathe, electricity, and spanner, but the basic framework and much of the content remained intact. It was not until the later 1960s that this tightly constrained notion of variation was challenged by more sophisticated approaches influenced by ideas such as ‘restricted lan­ guage’ and ‘register’ drawn from applied linguistics. The justification for this belief in the universal validity of course design proposals rested on the conviction that the underlying theories of language and language learning were ‘scientific’ and hence largely unaffected by local variables. It was a conviction that was strong enough to encourage writers and publishers to create courses that could be ‘adapted’ for use in different teaching contexts. Local differences were taken into account in a limited way: different pictures perhaps, different proper names, and sometimes different text topics and vocabulary, but the essential validity of the materials was unaffected by such modifications. To modern eyes these ‘adaptations’ may seem cynically commercial, but that would not be fair. They represented a genuine attempt to meet the growing demand for more locally relevant materials while remaining true to their belief in the general validity of the approach as a whole. The following titles are typical of ELT in the late 1940s and early 1950s when European EFL had still not recovered fully from the war and more distant EFL markets were difficult to penetrate. All the materials listed were intended for use with secondary school children. Selected E LT Titles, c. 1950 Longmans, Green: N ew M ethod Malayan R eaders (Everson etal.1946) The Malayan English Course (Cheeseman and Frisby 1949) The Unit M ethod English Course (Myers 1951, for Africa) A Direct M ethod English Course (Gatenby 1952, for Turkey) N ew M ethod English for the Arab World (West 1952) The N ew English Course (Travis, Wilson, and Palmer 1952, for West Africa) A Course in Living English (Allen and Stephens 1952, for Africa) The Ship English Course (Frisby and Cheeseman 1956, for SE Asia). Oxford University Press: The O xford English R eaders fo r Africa (Fremont and French 1947)6 The O xford English Course fo r Mauritius (Fremont, French, and Campbell 1949)

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O xford Progressive English fo r Students in the Middle East (Hornbv 1950) The O xford English Course fo r Iraq (Miller, Hakim, and Hornby 1953) The N ew O xford English Course - Nigeria (French 1955) The N ew O xford English Course - G old Coast (Ghana after 1957) (French 1955) The N ew O xford English Course - East Africa (French 1956) The O xford English Course fo r H ong K ong (Stephen 1956) Macmillan: An English Course fo r Students Learning English as a Second L an guj-„v (Morris 1934, revised 1946, for Palestine).7 M acmillan’s Direct Readers (Robb 1927, revised 1948, for Egypt). M odern R eaders /M odern Language B o o k s (Johnson 1949, for Egypt). Allen Sc Unwin: English fo r You (Noonan and Elliott 1959, bilingual English-Malay) The local relevance of these materials increased as the course progressed ami more language was introduced. The texts became more varied, but the use of pictures, particularly in the early stages, could be problematical. One is reminded at times of the problems faced by the translators of Comenius’s Orbis Pictus back in the 1650s (see pp.51-3). If, as sometimes seems to ha\ ^ happened, the budget did not stretch to new pictures, the use of origin aU designed to convey an impression of ‘Englishness’ alongside a text ostensibly set in the Middle East, for example, made for some odd results. However, most of the books used specially commissioned visuals, and by the time 7 'hr Ship Course (intended for SE Asia) was written in 1956, a much more sophis­ ticated solution to the problem had emerged, namely the use of ‘stick’ figures or cartoon characters. This tradition continued throughout the culturesensitive years of decolonization and beyond to prevent materials from looking ‘too British’ or ‘too European’.8

The early impact of applied linguistics (1941-60) We have used the adjective ‘applied linguistic’ a number of times in this book to describe language teaching proposals which were consciously designed to make a systematic use of linguistic descriptions—the use of phonetics in the nineteenth-century Reform Movement comes to mind, for instance—and perhaps these uses were strictly speaking anachronistic. Useful expressions have a habit of spreading their wings, though, and no real harm is done by encouraging them to do so. However, the name of the academic discipline itself, ‘applied linguistics’, is different because it refers to a specific subject matter that was identified at a specific time and place. Applied linguistics as a recognized discipline dates from the 1940s when leading American linguists like Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949) and

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Charles C. Fries (1887-1967) became involved in the application of their theoretical and descriptive work to large-scale language teaching enterprises during the Second World War. Although Bloomfield himself had no personal connection with the project, a short pamphlet he had written for the Linguistic Society of America called Outline Guide fo r the Practical Study o f Foreign Languages (1942) was adopted as a set text by the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), a major scheme designed to teach the languages of the combatant nations to selected personnel in the US Army in 1943-4. Fries by contrast was a central figure in the setting up of the English Language institute (ELI) at the University of Michigan in 1941. Under his directorship the Institute played a leading role in establishing a new approach to the design of language teaching materials through the application of the results of descriptive linguistics and, although he was not directly associated with i he ASTP, the methodology developed for it was consistent with his own. As this early interest in foreign languages shows, applied linguistics in America seems to have started from a broader base than its later British coun­ terpart, but they both shared a common commitment to the teaching of English world wide. Fries lost no time in setting out his approach to the sub­ ject with a hugely influential monograph in 1945 called Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language, though the choice of ‘foreign’ rather than ‘second’ is a little unexpected in an American context; perhaps the contrast was not yet firmly established. Three years later he was instru­ mental in founding Language Learning, the journal that put the ELI and its u i irk on the academic map and which publicized the new discipline in its sub-title: a quarterly journal o f applied linguistics. The origins of applied linguistics lie in the American descriptivist tradition pioneered since the beginning of the twentieth century by linguists like Franz Boas (1858-1942), Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and, most importantly from our point of view, Bloomfield himself who was personally committed to the idea that his work should be of use to the outside world. For example, one of his earliest publications, Introduction to the Study o f Language (1914), con­ tains a chapter on language teaching which we know influenced Flarold Rilmer, and his classic Language (1933) ends with a chapter called ‘Applications and Outlook’ in which he sets out a programme of practical uses of linguistics in fields such as education, the creation of universal lan­ guages, and communications engineering among others. He was himself especially interested in the development of a more efficient approach to the teaching of reading to young children. American linguistics had long been motivated by a very specific aim, namely to record the indigenous Amerindian languages which were in danger of becoming extinct, and, as an extension of this work in the 1930s, the Linguistic Society of America sponsored a project called the Intensive Language Program. Bloomfield, a past-President of the Society (1935), was invited to contribute a short paper outlining the practical fieldwork

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techniques required to elicit and record previously unwritten languages, and this became the Outline Guide we noted earlier. As a source of instruction on elementary linguistic fieldwork in the days before portable sound recording equipment, the Guide is simple, clear, and practical. However, the title, with its echo of Sweet, and the inclusion of some informal advice on language learning gives the impression that it could be used as a general methodology of language teaching. This helps to explain why it became a set text for the ASTP9 which participants were required to study along with Bloch and Trager’s Outline o f Linguistic Analysis, also published by the Linguistic Society in 1942. The choice of the Guide is a little difficult to understand since Bloomfield says quite explicitly in the opening paragraph that it was intended to ‘help the reader to shift for himself’, which explains why it contains detailed instruc­ tions on how to carry out linguistic fieldwork on a one-to-one basis with individual informants. This is a long way from a teaching programme aimed at thousands of service personnel. In addition, it was designed to train future linguists how to learn a language in the real world by eliciting, transcribing, and recording data—not how to learn a foreign language in a classroom. However, the one-to-one research model probably suggested the idea of a form of team-teaching: the staff worked in pairs, one member being an English-speaking senior instructor with college experience of linguistics who acted as Bloomfield’s ‘fieldworker’, and the other a native speaker who acted as his ‘informant’. This team structure was entirely appropriate, given thal the programme would have to create all its teaching materials virtually from scratch. Most of the languages in the project had never been taught in the US before, and even the familiar ones like French and German had no teaching materials suitable for the oral approach adopted by the programme. The advice in the Guide, suitably adapted, provided the ground-rules for eliciting a list of teaching points, but it would not have been much help with the methodology beyond a general exhortation to ‘practise everything until it becomes second nature’.10 Once the linguistic content had been identified by the teaching team, the senior instructor was supposed to create the teaching materials for the students and then introduce the new items and provide any necessary explanations. He then left the native-speaker teachers, known as ‘drillmasters’. to practise the new patterns by a simple method of imitation and repetition. This became known as the ‘mim-mem’ method (mimicry and memorization), and is the obvious forerunner of ‘pattern practice’ and the Audiolingual Method. In addition there was an extensive programme of supporting activ­ ities to introduce students to the cultural background of the language they were studying. The ASTP ran for approximately nine months from April 1943 and involved about 15,000 servicemen (carefully selected ex-college students) following courses in twenty-seven different languages. Separate courses were

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set up to provide for officers. In spite of its short duration the project led to

valuable publications, in particular a set of self-study manuals (plus record­ ings) in twenty-two languages called ‘The Spoken Language series’ (1945 onwards), with specific volumes authored or co-authored by leading linguists including Bloomfield (Spoken Dutch and Spoken Russian), Bloch (Spoken Japanese), Haugen (Spoken Norwegian), and Hockett (Spoken Chinese). After the war, the work came under the aegis of the American Council of I,i\irned Societies (ACLS) to which the eminent authors of the series donated their royalties for the support of linguistic research.11 An extended version of the series was republished in the 1970s.12 It is a pity that there was nothing similar to the ASTP in the UK, a high­ profile project along ASTP lines would have improved the image of language teaching throughout the school system, just as the ‘G.I. Method’, as the ASTP uv. 3 irreverently called, aroused interest in schools in America. However, as \11>u!ton (1961) noted, the school teachers took a rather different view from the applied linguists: ‘to most language teachers what was “new” about the new method was its intensive nature and its primary emphasis on speaking; all the talk about “sound linguistic principles ” and being taught by a “trained linguist” struck them as professional exaggeration, not to say arrogance, on the part of the linguists’.13 The design of the ASTP was in line with the model that was being developed at the ELI at the same time, but Fries added an extra procedure called ‘contrastive analysis’ in which the structure of the mother tongue was compared with that of the foreign language in order to identify the differences that were likely to cause learning problems. This contrastive analysis technique was the prime difference between the American and the British versions of what would come to be called ‘struc­ tural language teaching’. In most other respects, however, they were very similar: they both stressed the importance of the early stages of learning, both adopted sentence patterns (structures) as the basis for course design, and they both emphasized practice as essential for fixing the foreign-language speech habits. The British version was stronger pedagogically—the Americans had no equivalent of Hornby’s situational approach, for instance— but the linguistic credentials of Fries’s work were unassailable, particularly after the publication of The Structure o f English in 1952. In principle, contrastive analysis is an attractive idea and there is no doubt that it was used in the preparation of the special intensive courses which the ELI ran for specific language groups in the 1940s.14 It was also a major fea­ ture of articles published in their journal, Language Learning. However, there was a problem. Phonological and grammatical differences between the learner’s native language and the foreign language did not necessarily cause learning difficulties. Sometimes they did, and sometimes not. This variability was not supposed to happen in a habit-formation learning theory, and it began to lose credibility. In addition, it was an expensive technique because it meant writing different courses for different groups of learners. So, as the

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original work of the Institute was developed for wider consumption, it was quietly forgotten. For instance, Fries’s four-volume American English Series, fo r the study o f English as a second language (1952-3) was created with P. M. Rojas in Puerto Rico,15 but it does not mention contrastive analysis, let alone apply it, despite the fact that the original learners for the materials were all speakers of Spanish. Perhaps its best-known application was not in the linguistic field at all, but in a broader cultural context, see for instance Robert Lado’s popular Linguistics across Cultures (1957). In ‘As we see it’, a position paper Fries contributed to the first issue of Language Learning in 1948, he offered a general model of applied linguistics in language teaching which gave the subject a very hierarchical structure. First there was the descriptive linguist who was responsible for producing the scientific linguistic descriptions of source and target languages. Then the applied linguist took over in a dual role: (i) to select and grade the structures to be taught while pin-pointing areas of potential difficulty through the use of contrastive analysis techniques, and (ii) to write the actual teaching mater­ ials. The last link in the chain was the teacher who used the materials in class following the applied linguist’s instructions. The authority of the approach was vested in the materials rather than the teachers using them (‘the most important principle . . . [of the ELI] . . . is the belief that only with satisfac­ tory basic materials can one efficiently begin the study of a foreign lan­ guage’).16 At a time when trained and experienced teachers of English as a foreign language were not very numerous in the USA, this dependence on materials may well have been a realistic policy, but it was also something of a hostage to fortune which contributed to the rather uncritical acceptance of machines such as language laboratories at a later date. The cult of materials would have mattered less if there had been an equally serious concern for teaching method. The Michigan Oral Approach is often credited with having applied behaviourist psychology to language teaching., but this is a rather doubtful claim. Fries himself, for instance, does not men­ tion psychology in the 1945 monograph, and Bloomfield’s attitude to lan guage learning in 1942 was strictly commonsensical: ‘above all, listen and practise without end’17 and ‘language learning is overlearning; anything less is of no use’.18 This sounds like behaviourist advice, but in reality, behav­ iourism was rather more complex. B. F. Skinner, for example, who was per­ haps the leading figure in the movement, aimed to develop new repertoires of behaviour by a sophisticated process he called ‘shaping’, which became the starting point of programmed learning in the late 1950s and 1960s. Simplistic habit-formation of the Michigan variety does not really need a the­ ory of learning and none was offered. Fries’s great achievement in applied lin­ guistics was the elaboration of a new approach to pedagogical grammar, not a new language teaching method,19 and his application of the model to English as a foreign/second language was a major contribution to a field that had been neglected in the US for some time.20 His teaching programme was

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a tough one. The students followed an intensive course of speech-habit training before moving on to an equally spare programme of structure drills and pattern practices. New vocabulary was kept to a minimum (Fries always stressed this strongly), and the emphasis was on the rapid habitualization of the essentials of English structure. It is very easy to criticize this kind of thing h o w , but it should be emphasized that Fries genuinely believed that the period of intensive practice need not last for very long (three months at the most was his claim) and once it was over everyone could enjoy themselves speaking the language fluently, exploring the literature, and so on. Things did not work out that way (even in the ELI) but his intentions were eminently sensible, and to date nobody else has solved the time problem in second language learning. The Structural Approach attracted high-level institutional support in the US throughout the 1940s and 1950s, mainly in the teaching of foreign lan­ guages to Americans, for example, the huge programme at the Army Language School in Monterey, California: ‘some idea of the size of the oper­ ation can be gained from the fact that, in 1959, over 450 teachers were giving instruction to some 2,000 students in 28 different languages.’21 English as a second language was less well-served, but in 1950 the State Department sponsored a language training programme ‘designed to produce textbooks for the teaching of English to speakers of a wide variety of foreign lan­ guages.’22 Trager and Smith’s Outline o f English Structure (1951) provided the so-called ‘General Form’, intended as a kind of contrastive-analysis template which could be adapted for learners with different mother tongues. Between 1953 and 1956, ten courses of English appeared for speakers of Burmese, Mandarin Chinese, Greek, Indonesian, Korean, Persian, SerboCroat, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.22 This impressive list shows again the concern for the expansion of education in hitherto neglected contexts, or, more cynically, the generosity of patronage for English language teaching in areas of strategic importance to US foreign policy. In the long-term the influence of the structural approach had less to do with specific projects than with the increasing popularity of its basic prin­ ciples which eventually attained the status of ‘slogans’23 summarizing the main points of ‘modern approaches to linguistics and language teaching’ in the mid-twentieth century. First there were the two principles which we have already met many times: ‘Language is speech, not writing’ and ‘a language is a set of habits’. Then came the distrust of deductive methods of teaching grammar: ‘Teach the language, not about the language’, and the need to study authentic language data: ‘A language is what its native speakers say, not what someone thinks they ought to say’ (w|iich was often shortened to ‘be descriptive, not prescriptive’). Finally there was a slogan that was more significant than it looked at first sight: ‘Languages are different’. Obviously nobody thought that languages were ‘the same’ in any superficial sense, but there had long been an assumption that the categories of traditional grammar

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(‘parts of speech’, etc.) were valid for all languages. Only by rejecting this preconception and returning to the study of real-world data could linguists claim that their descriptions were ‘scientific’. When this principle was extended to vocabulary, it cast serious doubt on the notion that a word in one language could ‘mean the same’ as a word in another language. This was an argument which had considerable influence in language teaching because it seemed to offer a convincing rationale for the widespread distrust of translation and other forms of bilingual methodology.24 The similarities between the British and American approaches to language teaching were obvious enough, but they should not be exaggerated. In par­ ticular, the Americans had nothing to compare to the concept of the ‘situation', which we have already discussed in ELT terms, but its theoretical status was also a matter of importance, particularly in the writings of the leading British linguist of his day, John Rupert Firth (1890-1960). Like Michael West, Firth had begun his professional career as a teacher with the Indian Education Service and, after war service in various places, was appointed Professor of English at the University of the Punjab. He was by this time a leading authority on what was still called the Hindustani language. In 1928 he returned to Britain, and took up a post in Daniel Jones's Department of Phonetics. Ten years later, he moved permanently to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where in 1944 he was appointed to the first Chair of General Linguistics in Britain. While working at the school, Firth came into contact with the anthropol­ ogist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), from whom he derived a central strut in his framework of linguistic analysis, the concept of the ‘context ol; situation’25 which says, in very rough terms, that ultimately the meaning of an utterance cannot be divorced from the cultural and situational context in which it occurs. Malinowski (1923) includes a fairly detailed example from a language spoken in the Trobriand Islands off north-east New Guinea which highlights the difference between the dictionary meaning of a word and what it means in a particular context or situation. The islanders were great canoeists and the phrase tawoulo ovanu came in an account of a canoe trip. Literally it meant ‘we paddle in place’, but to understand the utterance fully it was necessary to know that paddles were used (in place of sails) when the canoes were close to the shore but not so close that the men could get out and pull the boats on to the beach. In the original phrase, therefore, ‘paddle’ was used to mean ‘arrive’. In developing the notion of ‘context of situation’, Firth proposed a rather abstract three-part model. First, there was the ‘verbal and non-verbal action of the participants’ (in the example, the canoeists, the islander telling the story, and the addressees), secondly, ‘the relevant objects’ (the canoe and the paddles), and finally the observable effects of what was said (not included in the Malinowski example).26 Although the details may be a little unclear, there is no mistaking the emphasis Firth placed on the unity of language and social activity. Among the practical applications of this

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situational approach to meaning was a ‘special purpose’ course of Japanese for RAF pilots during the Second World War, a service recognized by the award of an OBE in 1946. His interest in the practical uses of linguistics con­ tinued to grow and he used the topic as the subject of his Presidential Address to the Philological Society in 1957: ‘Applications of General Linguistics’. One of the ideas on which he was working when he died in 1960 was what he called ‘restricted languages’,27 i.e. specialized varieties of language related to specific social roles, professional work, etc., a line of thought that would later develop into special/specific purpose language teaching in the 1960s and 1970s. The Firthian tradition was carried on by his former student Michael Halliday whose contribution to English language teaching has been immense over the years. In particular he has sought to preserve one of Firth’s cardinal principles, namely the unity of language and language use, no matter how complex the procedures devised to relate them. Firth liked the metaphor of the spectrum28 which disperses light into bands of colour for detailed inspec­ tion and analysis, but they always return to the original ‘white’. In the same way linguistics ‘disperses’ language into levels of analysis but always returns them to the unity of discourse. With views such as these in mind,29 Firth rejected the Saussurean dichotomy between langue and parole and, following in the same tradition, Halliday later declined to adopt Hymes’s term ‘communicative competence’ even though in many other respects they had compatible views.30 We shall return to this topic again later in the next chapter.

The end of the Empire In retrospect, the 1960s have acquired a reputation for trivial pursuits (flower power, rock music, ‘permissiveness’, etc.). In reality, however, much of the decade was politically tense and violent including, as it did, the two biggest crises of the Cold War, in 1961 (Berlin) and 1962 (Cuba), plus major military action in the Middle East, Central Europe, and above all South-East Asia. In addition Britain and France had ended the 1950s in the shadow of the preposterous Suez fiasco (1956) which nevertheless had the positive effect, in Britain at least, of silencing most of the pro-imperial rhetoric. The public did not really want to know about the Empire any more, which is not to say that British governments were about to walk away from their invest­ ments and their ‘global influence’ but, given growing indifference, there was no way that they could ‘hold down’ an empire the size of the British one, particularly against the background of rising Cold War tensions and increased local expectations of independence which were fast being met by other colonial powers. The timetable of decolonization, which had already been speeded up in the 1950s, was accelerated further in the wake of Prime Minister Macmillan’s famous speech in 1960 about ‘the wind of change’ blowing through Africa, and within five years most major colonial territories had joined countries like

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India, Pakistan, Ghana, and the Federation of Malaya (all present at the Makerere Conference, see below) in becoming independent countries, incluiling Nigeria and Cyprus (1960), Sierra Leone and Tanganyika (1961), Jamaica and Uganda (1962), Kenya and Malaysia (1963), and Tanzania, Zambia, and Malawi (1964). All the new countries joined the Commonwealth (a deci­ sion made easier by the departure of South Africa in 1961, shortly after the conference), and the feared ‘meltdown’ did not take place. It certainly seemed that the ‘fast-track’ policy had succeeded, though of course there had been serious problems and there were more to come (particularly in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe). As a contribution to this process, a conference on the Teaching of English as a Second Language was convened by the Commonwealth Education Liaison Committee at Makerere College31 in Uganda in the first two weeks c i i 1961. The basic purpose was ‘to provide opportunity (sic) for the exchange of ideas and experience’32 and ‘discuss ways and means of increasing the effi­ ciency of the teaching of English as a second language’.32 In other words, it was designed partly to encourage a ‘stay onside’ atmosphere during the potentially rather bumpy process of moving from Empire to Commonwealth and partly also to discuss possible measures of help in the ESL area after the end of British rule. The 60 participants came from 20 countries or territories, including fnc independent states (the four already mentioned plus Nigeria).33 The confer­ ence split into eight working-parties of which three were on aspects of English language teaching (beginners, literature, and English for special purposes, possibly the first time this term had appeared in public), plus two on educa­ tional policy, (the English medium question and its implications for teacher training), and one each on assessment, audio-visual aids and research. Teacher training was the principal focus of the conference, which explains the large number of education officers (18) and training college staff (15) plus a handful of school inspectors (7) and head teachers (2).33 British academia was well represented but there was one notable absentee: J. R. Firth should have attended and he had submitted a working paper, but his sudden death a fortnight before it opened deprived the conference of a forthright voice on many issues. The most obvious gap, however, was the lack of senior figures from ELT itself. One reason may have been a British Council Conference which had taken place two weeks earlier at Nutford House in London. The main topic had been the development of ELT training and research in UK universities, which had attracted the great and the good from the dreaming spires, but there were also many leading ELT figures present, among them A. S. Hornby, Michael West, George Perren, Lionel Billows, and Pit Corder.34 Some key administrative and academic figures made it to both events, including the Council’s Controller of Education Dr A. H. King, R. J. Quinault from the BBC, Ian Catford, the Director of the School of Applied Linguistics at

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I dinburgh, and Professor Bruce Pattison from the London Institute, but it seems that the ELT people were not invited to Uganda. What this meant in practice was that, apart from the staff currently employed at Makerere i ollege itself, there were no practising ELT people from the UK. Although die conference was essentially focused on local matters relating specifically to English as a second language, an ELT presence would have given added weight to many of the topics covered by the working parties. In addition, there were two ‘advisers’ on audio-visual aids and publications, plus nine ‘observers’ from Singapore (1), UNESCO (1), the Sudan (2), and the USA (5, including C. A. Ferguson, Director of the Center of Applied Linguistics, Washington, and A. H. Marckwardt, Director of the ELI, Michigan). Whether all this added up to ‘worldwide grassroots ELT teaching experi­ ence’,35 as has been claimed, is open to doubt. The teacher trainers certainly knew about ESL in their local areas, but for the most part their broader ELT credentials were not very impressive. Not surprisingly, the top two recommendations of the conference were (a) that ‘first and foremost [there should be] a substantial increase in the number of adequately trained teachers at all stages’36 and (b) ‘our aim is to provide at all levels qualified teachers who are indigenous to the country in which the teaching takes place’.37 Then came the obvious crunch, namely that this would not be an easy objective to reach and in the meantime it was likely that ‘the services of teachers from countries where the mother tongue is English will be required’.37 This sounds like conference-speak for ‘not neces­ sarily the UK’. Britain was certainly looking for the maintenance of influence through inter alia the continued use of English, but it was wary of making open-ended and potentially expensive promises. There is no doubt that the sub-text of the conference was a modern re-run of the Macaulay question: was English going to be used in the future as the medium of instruction and if so at what levels? Most newly independent countries wanted to replace the colonial language by a national language of their own, but there was not always a suitable choice. In most of the Asian countries where independence had come earliest, the adoption of a national language as the medium of education (usually with English as a compulsory school subject) was reasonably straightforward, but there were difficulties in Malaya.33 In Pakistan, for instance, there was no difficulty in the West in selecting Urdu even though it was a minority language in its spoken form, with Bengali as the dominant language in the East (modern Bangladesh). In Ceylon, which was not represented at the conference, Sinhala and Tamil had been adopted as media as early as 1946 (Walatara 1965: 3). India, however, was more complex: Hindi had been introduced as the national language after independence, but this had not proved acceptable to many non-Hindispeaking communities. The outcome was the so-called ‘three-language for­ mula’ (1961)38 which placed English alongside Hindi as an ‘associate official language’, the third language being either a classical or a regional language.

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The reasons for maintaining English had to do with preserving Indian unity, already seriously disturbed by the experience of partition, but it was not supposed to be more than a stop-gap measure. In a Report published a few years later (1967) a Ministry of Education study group explained that it had been expected ‘in the recent past’ that by 1965 ‘English would be replaced h\ Hindi as a medium of communication in every field of activity’.39 Howewr. by 1967 it was clear that ‘the idea of such replacement seems now to haw been postponed for an indefinite period of time’.39 In the two newly inde­ pendent African countries, Ghana (1957) and Nigeria (1960), the local language situation was too complex to permit the choice of a national alternative to English. It should also be emphasized that the medium quest ion was not necessarily seen as having the highest priority after independence. Schooling for all was in many instances a more pressing issue. Besides, high standards of English, which rightly or wrongly were always associated with English-medium education, could be seen as something of a national asset in a competitive world. Be that as it may, the conference was in no position to comment on the policy itself, only on its potential educational consequences, particular I\ as these affected the teaching of English, so most of their specific recommenda­ tions on future needs and resources had to be expressed conditionally. In a well-known critique of this conference Robert Phillipson (1992) has claimed that the proceedings demonstrated that five so-called ‘tenets' defined the way that ELT worked in the post-colonial world, and that in prac­ tice they were detrimental to the interests of most of the countries represented at Makerere. The conference did not in fact suggest any ‘tenets’ at all (and even if it had, it could only speak for ESL not for ELT as a whole), still less did it give anything a ‘seal of approval’,41 but it is still worth noting Phillipson’s objections since some of them (and the first two in particular) raise important general issues, some of which we have met before. The first is that ‘English is best taught monolingually’.42 Phillipson’s argu­ ment covers two unrelated issues: (i) the use of translation in the teaching of English, particularly to beginners, and (ii) the adoption of English as the medium of instruction in schools and colleges. Only the former is the direct concern of ELT; the latter is a political matter and, while English teachers have a great deal to say on the implementation of the policy, they are not responsible for making the original decisions. On the first point, there has long been a strong case for reviewing the role of translation in language teaching and particularly its educational value for advanced students in schools and universities. Properly handled, it provides a useful antidote to the modern obsession with utilitarian performance objec­ tives, but the pitfalls that were identified by the nineteenth-century reformers have not gone away, and the activity remains a demanding one. In 1961, however, the point at issue was narrower, namely the use of the ‘don’t translate’ or ‘monolingual’ principle in the conduct of foreign language

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lessons for beginners which was introduced into language teaching by the Idirect Method in the late nineteenth century. As we saw earlier, the back­ ground to the original discussion included (a) a growing distrust in the notion that words in different languages could be equivalent in meaning, (b) dissat­ isfaction with translation-based teaching strategies such as the memorization o: lengthy word-lists and the use of translation-traps in exercises, and (c) the influence of contemporary theories of psychology which stressed the import­ ance of direct associations between words in the new language and their referents. Various ostensive teaching techniques were developed to replace translation until the learner knew enough of the foreign language to let the context take most of the strain. The conference did not discuss any of this, but the point was included in a summary of the contemporary methodo­ logical orthodoxy prepared by the working party on teaching beginners. It included the following rather innocuous, Hornbyesque remark: ‘the teaching of vocabulary should be mainly through demonstration in situations’,43 and it was followed by some support for the use of translation with ‘more .ulvanced pupils’. This guarded approval for the Direct Method has always been a feature of 1 i T, but most writers on the subject from Palmer onwards have been con­ cerned to avoid the extreme position adopted, for instance, by the Berlitz schools. The following quote from Hornby writing in the second issue of I I T back in November 1946 is particularly pertinent in the Makerere con­ ic vt: ‘the British teacher who goes to India, Egypt or China, or any area where the language of his pupils is unknown to him, will teach English, often successfully, without using the language of his pupils. The Indian, Egyptian or Chinese teacher working with him will almost certainly make a consider­ able use of the vernacular. But he may well be following the Direct Method. If he is competent and if he uses the method wisely, he will almost certainly obtain better and quicker results than his British colleague who is unable to use the vernacular’.44 One could enlarge this snapshot by adding that the British teacher, if he too is competent and if he too uses the method wisely, wi il learn enough of the vernacular in an attempt to obtain results that are . omparable to those of his local colleagues. Phillipson links this ‘avoid unnecessary translation’ principle of the Direct Method to the English-medium question mentioned earlier, on the grounds that they are both ‘monolingual’.45 This is an interesting point but it is difficult to see how it is relevant. There is after all a world of difference between a lan­ guage teaching method which derives ultimately from a theory of language learning, and a national education policy which reflects a particular array of cultural and sociopolitical priorities. At the end of the day the choice of the medium of instruction in secondary schools was a matter for the incoming national governments of the former colonial territories, and the Makerere Conference, mindful of the fact that the attaining of independence was at the heart of the political context in which it was held, was careful not to express

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an opinion one way or the other. It is, however, clear from the phrasing of rh, recommendations that they expected the status quo to continue. In the longer term the English-medium question is closely related to the development of ‘English for special/specific purposes’. In a post-colonial world the only justification for the retention of the former colonial language in a role as nationally significant as higher education is the need for access to specific areas of knowledge and/or skills which cannot easily be acquired through, for instance, a programme of translation. Specificity is the basic premise of ESP and its debut at Makerere was a sign that ‘English’ was pre­ pared to move into a new relationship with its potential users. The second ‘tenet’, ‘the ideal teacher of English is a native speaker’,46 is more complex, and potentially divisive, because the work of native-speaker teachers was reflected in the origins of ELT itself. Again we have to bear in mind that the remit of Makerere was not ELT but the teaching of English as a second language in the Commonwealth. It is possible that the British tenchers of English in the Empire regarded themselves as ‘ideal’, I don’t know, but the same could not be said of teachers of English as a foreign language. There had long been a general consensus that native-speaker language teachers h.id certain strengths, particularly in relation to teaching the spoken language, which adult learners seemed to value quite highly. Their employment in schools, however, tended to be problematical unless the reasons for it were accepted by local teachers. On the specific issue of pronunciation, Phillipson is quite right to criticize the Report for failing to mention that after independence the whole question of appropriate pronunciation norms would inevitably have to be re-considered.47 It should be said, however, that the issue was not ignored by the conference itself. It appeared in Ian Catford’s working paper alongside some of the things Firth would have said if he had attended. Catford says (and we must remember he was speaking in 1961): ‘the wider setting of language-teaching deter­ mines such things as the choice of a particular regional variety of English to be taught, e.g. “British English”, “Australian English” or possibly “Indian English”, “Ghanaian English” if regional standards in pronunciation, gram­ mar and lexis are accepted by educators—and why not?’48 Finally, there was the issue of native-speaker involvement in providing extra training resources if, as seemed likely, existing provision was over­ stretched. The comment in the Report that ‘the services of teachers from countries where the mother tongue is English will be required’ 37 was almost certainly an attempt by the British to ‘spread the load’. To modern ears the inclusion of a restrictive ‘mother tongue’ clause may sound insensitive but, back in 1961, it would not have been possible for the British in particular to assume that teacher trainers from one country where English was a second language would have been acceptable in another one. National independence transformed the political context of the discussion and opened up new opportunities for reciprocal help that did not involve the UK. Also, since

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1961 there have been far-reaching changes of attitude in general. As I’hillipson himself says, quoting Kachru writing in 1986: ‘the gradual shift in recent decades has resulted in a definitive break with universal core English­ speaking norms’.49 The remaining three ‘tenets’ concern language in education, but their role in ESL contexts was not reflected in ELT as a whole. The third, ‘the earlier English is taught the better the results’,50 is one of those ‘common sense’ views which turns out to be much more problematical than it seems. |-\eryone knows that small children acquire languages well in informal reallife settings, and back in 1961 everyone thought this meant that small chil­ dren could be taught foreign languages easily in school. As we shall see later, support for ‘early start’ policies in language teaching were at their height at that time, and it is unfair to criticize the conference for going along with them. In fact, by a strange coincidence, the famous Leeds experiment in the teaching of French to primary school children which helped to launch the national policy in the UK began only few weeks after Makerere,51 and, although the eventual outcome in 1974 was rather disappointing, it was still many years down the road.52 The fourth, ‘the more English is taught, the better the results’,53 is another popular assumption which does not always work out as it should. Since it is i-qually ‘true’ across the curriculum, it has nothing directly to do with ELT, but it is com m on enough in staff rooms debating the structure of next year’s timetable. The final ‘tenet’, ‘if other languages are used much, the standards of English will drop’,S4 is oddly expressed but it suggests that the conference had a preferred view on the choice between English as a school subject and English as a medium of instruction. This was not the case— it was concerned with responding to the practical consequences of different policies, not with assessing the policies themselves. One of the specific results of Makerere was a British Council scheme called Aid to Commonwealth English (ACE), the aim of which was to create a cadre of ELT specialists whose expertise would be made available to Commonwealth t)untries. It was approved at the next conference in the series in Delhi in 1962.55 However, perhaps the most important fact about Makerere is that it happmed at all. The choice of location might be dismissed as ‘gesture politics’ mday, but at the time, it ensured that the conference was noticed, raising the profile of some of the issues it discussed—in particular teacher supply and training—and it played a part in encouraging inter-institutional links over the coming decades.

New directions in language teaching in the 1960s The history of language teaching in the 1960s is difficult to summarize since, in an archetypal ‘period of transition’, nothing was at rest and very little reached a final resolution until later. The factual account of events in ELT

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given earlier in Chapter 16 provides only a hint of the complexity and depth of the changes that were initiated during those newly affluent times, but ir is possible to discern three themes that characterized the development of FIT, and indeed language education in general, from 1960 onwards. In ascending order of generality they were: (i) an interest in the opportunities offered by the application of modern technologies, in particular ‘visual aids’ and the ta pirecorder; (ii) a new willingness by governments, including the UK, to takia positive interest in the teaching of languages; and (iii), as a background to the other two, a renewed belief in the value of research and development in helping to bring about progressive change. These three themes interacted with each other in different ways during the decade, but most of the major devel­ opments were characterized by the co-occurrence of at least two of them. In the previous section we were concerned with some of the consequences to language teaching brought about by the British withdrawal from empire in the early 1960s. The counterweight to this policy was of course a simultan­ eous move towards Europe, including an application in 1961 for membership of the Common Market (as it still was), which for a time made the teaching of foreign languages, and particularly French, more talked about in the UK than at any time since the eighteenth century. The first manifestation of this renewed energy was the interest shown in a French development known as ‘The Audio-Visual Method’, which arrived in the form of two courses origin­ ally designed for use in French Institutes overseas: Voix et images de France (1961) for adults and Bonjour Line ( 1963) for children.56 These courses were the result of a government-funded research and development project that began with a modernized frequency count of French called L e français fon ­ dam ental,57 which included a novel feature known as ‘disponibilité’ (usually translated as ‘availability’). This was a measure of how strongly people asso­ ciated particular words with the situations in which they were likely to occur. Given the situation ‘at the baker’s’, for instance, you could guess that ‘bread’, ‘cake’, and ‘biscuits’ would occur, but a measure of availability would tell you the order in which they were likely to come to mind and therefore how to rank them in order of usefulness to learners. Armed with the new linguistic information, an organization called CREDIF56 devised the teaching method which consisted of (i) a story depicted in a sequence of pictures displayed to the learners on a filmstrip, and (ii) a dia­ logue linked to the story played on a tape recorder along with the pictures. Here again was the concept that the meaning of an utterance was derived (in part at least) from the situational context in which it occurred, though the French version of ‘a situation’ was more of a ‘social encounter’ than a classroom event on the lines of Hornby’s ‘situations’. The idea was that the pictures, together with the French that had already been learnt, would contextualize the new language in the dialogue. However; as Corder pointed out in his short but influential study of The Visual Elem ent in Language Teaching in 1966: ‘we still know far too little about the relationships between the features

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of context and those of language to create unequivocally meaningful ma­ terial’.58 As he predicted, too much was expected from the pictures and teachers had to find additional ways of teaching the meaning of the language. The Audio-Visual Method caused quite a stir at the time and inspired the British Council to commission a similar course for English as a foreign language. It was called The Turners, but it did not appear until 1969, by which time a modified version of the technology, which put the pictures in a book instead of projecting them in the classroom, had been adapted for an EFL beginners’ course called First Things First (1967), the first of L. G. Alexander’s four-volume N ew Concept English. It was a skilful adapta­ tion of the ‘seven principles’ we discussed earlier in which most of the familiar features (structural grading, vocabulary control, drills, etc.) were retained, but their presentation was modernized through the picture stories which accompanied the dialogue texts and the illustrated drills and exercises. The influence of audio-visual methods was more far-reaching than this example suggests, but it was indirect. What happened was that the new inter­ est in foreign language teaching coincided with a popular movement in the 1960s to eliminate distinctions in secondary schooling which had tradition­ ally restricted foreign languages to the ‘top 2 0 % ’ in the grammar schools. If, however, languages were taught in non-selective primary schools, it was argued, then everybody would have a chance of learning them. In addition, there was a growing belief in making an ‘early start’ in foreign languages because, it was believed, young children were ‘natural’ language learners. Some interesting work had been done in America—the so-called FLES (Foreign Languages in Elementary Schools) programmes— and then quite suddenly there was a successful and highly publicized experiment in teaching French to a group of 11-year-olds in a Leeds primary school by a well-known native speaker teacher called Marcelle Kellermann.59 When a second experi­ ment in Leeds produced positive if less dramatic results in more demanding circumstances, the government decided in 1963 to fund a Pilot Scheme to assess the long-term viability of teaching French in primary schools nation­ wide. Alongside the pilot was a teaching materials development project set up by the Nuffield Foundation in collaboration with the Inspectorate.60 The overall responsibility for assessment was given to the National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales (NFER),61 and the biggest research project in the history of language teaching in the UK was under way. The teaching approach initially adopted by the Nuffield team was an amalgam of the Audio-Visual Method and our ‘seven principles’. Gradually, however, the influence of the teachers in the Pilot Project, plus new ideas trickling down from applied linguistics, began to suggest a radically different emphasis. The original ‘pattern practice’ view of language teaching was challenged by one in which there was a role for using the language as part of the learning process. In primary schools this approach involved what were

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known as ‘activity methods’, the origins of which stretched back via the ideas of Jean Piaget to teachers like Froebel, Pestalozzi, and indeed Rousseau himself. The purpose of ‘activities’ was to encourage a co-operative approach to problem-solving and the adaptation to language teaching represented the first step towards the more tightly structured activities referred to later as ‘tasks’ (see Chapter 20). This new direction in methodology was taken a step further when thiSchools Council, a government agency which had taken over the funding of the Pilot Project, set up a project in 1966 designed to help the children of immigrant families, as they were still known, to learn English as a second lan­ guage. This new scheme (which is discussed again in Chapter 20) was called Scope (Schools Council Project in Primary English). It began with primary school materials, which were published in 1969, but its remit was later extended into the secondary sector. For a time it worked alongside ‘Nuffield French’ at Leeds University and it went through a similar history of develop­ ment, picking up some ideas from ELT, notably a conventional language syllabus, but embedding it in activities which extended the children’s control of spoken English in co-operative ventures like making puppets, charts, models, and so on. The story of the decade so far is one in which language teaching has been moving fairly consistently away from the familiar stress on ‘habits’ defined in terms of formal patterns and structures, and towards a stronger commitment to teaching the meaningful use of language. This was not, however, the whole story. During the same years as audio-visual methods and materials were gaining ground among teachers themselves, another technological develop­ ment was making its bid for attention elsewhere. This was the language la­ boratory which, in its standard form, was a substantial and costly piece of equipment which was acquired by large institutions which might or might not have consulted their teaching staff or prepared them to make the best use of it. It often arrived before enough was known about what it could do, but it caught the enthusiasm of the time for both modernization and for language teaching. It did not start very well, and things got worse before they improved, but the full potential of the equipment was eventually recognized, mainly in post-school education, during the 1970s. The lab originated in the United States not long after the Second World War62 when sound recording equipment was well beyond the resources of any educational establishment. During the 1950s, however, the development of the tape recorder brought opportunities for recording into language class­ rooms for the first time. But the technology was still unwieldy: the machines were heavy, tapes were difficult to copy, the sound quality at the back of a classroom was often poor, and the pupils did not like ‘talking’ to a machine in a foreign language, particularly if it was at the other side of the room. The answer was to allocate a specific room in which an array of machines set in study booths (one per student) was connected up to a teacher’s control

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console, and the class arrived at pre-arranged times. Calling the result a ‘laboratory’ was a cute piece of word magic by its originators in American universities. From a school teacher’s point of view, limited access made it dif­ ficult to integrate the lab into the rest of the classwork, and the results were rather mixed at first. The lab could do two things which the teacher either found difficult or could not do at all. First, it allowed learners to hear themselves speak. This was a novel experience in the 1960s, and quite entertaining for a time. However, comparing your own efforts with those of a native model on the tape demanded skills that most school children did not have, though it was a valuable facility for more sophisticated adult students. Second, it was an excellent resource for developing listening comprehension and it could offer a range of different voices that went far beyond the teacher’s own resources, but, once again, this required a certain amount of sophistication from learn­ ers, particularly if they were working on their own. The timing of the language lab’s appearance in Europe in the early 1960s was rather unfortunate. Just when language teaching was broadening its outlook and devising new ways of teaching meaning, the lab appeared to be perpetuating some of the worst features of pattern practice. It was an expensive machine and, in order to justify the cost of the installation, a great deal was made of its suitability for the so-called ‘Audio-Lingual Method’ using a term introduced by Nelson Brooks in 1960 which emphasized that speech could ‘operate quite well without assistance from the eye’.63 Audiolingualism relied almost exclusively on the habit-formation theories of late behav­ iourism, and the excessive use of drills meant that many learners who had been intrigued by the novelty of the lab at a time when few people owned tape recorders lost interest altogether. Eventually, the library-like features of the lab came to the fore as the equipment became easier to manage and could be made available to students on an individual basis. The use of cassettes in lightweight machines after about 1970 helped to popularize the use of recordings generally, and the content of language tapes improved greatly when drills were finally abandoned in favour of dialogues and listening tasks. From the mid-1970s onwards, larger institutions added television as a stan­ dard facility and things were in place for the video-cassette revolution of the early 1980s. This shift of focus from formal drills to more meaningful mate­ rials, including listening materials, is well-captured in Julian Dakin’s The Language Laboratory an d Language Learning (1973). Of the remaining technologies, television was particularly popular in the 1960s, but it proved too unwieldy for educational purposes until the arrival of videos in the early 1980s. In theory the situational approach to language teaching suited it very well, and the opportunities for making programmes which worked as ‘tourist phrasebooks with pictures’ were fairly obvious. Other programmes, however, took their teaching role very seriously and tried to adapt the ‘seven principles’, but the artificially controlled language

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imposed by the structural syllabus was at odds with the realism of tiv medium, and the results could be unintentionally comic. However, for the learners themselves, this did not matter much—they were happy enough to watch the programmes provided they could understand what was being said. The best-known example of an early ‘English by Television’ course was Walter and Connie (1962-3), a hugely successful venture produced by the BBC. There was also a teacher-training series called View and Teach designed for teachers of English as a second language, i.e. in the new Commonwealth, and produced by the British Council in co-operation with the BBC in 1964, Like Walter and Connie the programmes had to wrestle with the use of sentence patterns, but at least they promoted discussion. Earlier we identified two major projects in the language teaching field: ‘Primary French’ and Scope which were funded at different times by the Nuffield Foundation and the Schools Council.64 We should also mention two further schemes which attracted government support during the 1960s, both of which were directly concerned with the description of the English language and both produced key texts of importance to ELT in the 1970s and beyond. The first of these projects was the ‘Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching’65 under the direction of M. A. K. Halliday at University College London between 1964 and 1971. It was concerned in the first instance with the teaching of English as a mother tongue, but its work proved of much wider relevance. Two early publications included practical materials kits for schools: one for the initial teaching of reading called Breakthrough to Literacy (1970)66 and the second a set of language study materials for older pupils called Language in Use (1971),67 Both of these contained ideas that could be adapted for wider ELT purposes but the key work in our present context was Cohesion in English by Halliday himself and Ruqaiya Hasan which appeared in its final published form in 1976 just as the communicative movement in foreign language teaching was becoming widely known.68 Its role in anchoring the new pedagogical ideas to actual language data was crucial to the success of the movement, as we shall see in Chapter 20. Finally, there was the ‘Survey of English Usage’ which was also located at the University of London, this time under the direction of Randolph Quirk, but it later formed close ties with other universities in the UK, the US, and Sweden. The ultimate aim of the Survey was to create a grammar of contem­ porary English, specifically ‘the standard English used by educated people in all English-speaking countries’,69 and the starting point for this description was the collection of a very substantial quantity of (spoken and written) data assembled in the days before computers were commonplace. The first version of the full grammar appeared in 1972 under the title A Grammar o f Contemporary English, and thirteen years later an enlarged revision appeared under a new title: A Comprehensive Grammar o f the English Language (1985).69 Like Cohesion in English, these grammars became indispensable to all serious students of the language.

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Practical applied linguistics on the scale of these projects was also reflected in its growth as a subject in UK universities, though not always under that label. It appeared first at the University of Edinburgh in 1957 with the estab­ lishment of a post-graduate School of Applied Linguistics under the direction of J. C. (Ian) Catford with a small staff that grew to eight members over the following decade. In the early years the influence of the original American model was quite strong, but the linguistics which formed the basis of the Edinburgh work was heavily influenced by Firth (see above), who taught for a while at the School shortly before his death in 1960. This emphasis was maintained by Halliday, at that time lecturing in the English Department headed by Angus McIntosh, who, with Peter Strevens (a former member of the Phonetics Department) as the third man, published the first British text­ book on the subject The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching in 1964. At that point Halliday moved to London (we have already noted his Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching) and the Firthian view was diminished. The original purpose of the courses given by the School was to provide an opportunity for senior personnel in English language teaching both from the UK and abroad to take a year out to reflect on key aspects of their profes­ sional work. However, as time went on and the subject spread, a qualification in applied linguistics came to be seen as an essential requirement for pro­ moted posts in English language teaching worldwide both for local teachers and their native-speaker counterparts. One effect of this change was that the age range of the participants dropped considerably, but the emphasis on descriptive linguistics and psychology, which had characterized the early years, broadened out into fields such as sociolinguistics, language planning, and language education. There was, however, a problem at the heart of the subject which its originators at Michigan had not foreseen, namely the lack of an evaluation procedure with which to judge alternative theories of lin­ guistics. In 1948 Fries had assumed that ‘linguistic science’ could only mean one thing (his descriptivist approach), but the arrival of Chomsky and his generativist colleagues in a somewhat combative mood in the late 1950s and early 1960s made that assumption redundant. The long-term effect of these and other developments was to encourage the growth of academic studies devoted solely to language teaching with applied linguistics playing the ‘input’ role once accorded to linguistics itself—but these moves lay in the future.

Notes 1 Cowie (1998). See Note 31 of Chapter 16. 2 Ibid.: 263-4. 3 Hornby (ELT, 1950, IV/5, 122). But Hornby warned readers that Gouin often exaggerated the technique by including every tiny action in the

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4

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

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sequence, which made the whole thing absurd. There is also a similarity between this technique and Asher’s Total Physical Response (TPR) in the 1960s, see for instance Asher (1969), and also Richards and Rodgers (2001), but, unlike Hornby, TPR is designed to delay the need for verbal participation by learners. Abercrombie (ELT, III/6, 1949, 141-6) used the term ‘activities’ (rather than the more common, but less apt ‘skills’): ‘Knowing a language means being able to read it, write it, speak it, and understand it when spoken. These are four distinct and separable activities . . . ’ (p.142). Abercrombie also took the view that the activities were of equal importance, so order­ ing them was inappropriate. For the distinction between ‘spoken prose’ and ‘conversation’, see Abercrombie (1963). Originally published in 1938 and adapted from Faucett’s O xford English Course (1933-4). Note the use of ‘Reader’ to mean ‘coursebook’ or ‘text­ book’ (repeated in titles later in the list). Originally entitled An English Course fo r Foreign Children (1934). See Australia (1965), Alexander (1967), and Broughton et al. (1968). The first full-scale EFL course to break with this self-imposed taboo that ELl" courses should be set in Nowhereland was Access to English by Coles and Lord (1974), which is clearly set in England. Not long afterwards pub­ lishers discovered photography and courses have never been quite so visually entertaining since. See Angiolillo (1947); Dunham (1944); Moulton (1961). Bloomfield (1942:16). The sentence is printed in capital letters. Moulton (1961: 85-6, 92). Spoken Language Services, Inc. (various dates). Reprints. Moulton (1961:101). For example, Spanish and Portuguese (Fries 1942), and Chinese (Fries and Shen 1946). Fries (1952-3). The content was based on Fries’s Structure o f English (1952). Fries (1948:12). Bloomfield (1942: 7). Ibid.: 12. ‘Overlearning’ was a term used in behaviourism to refer to the need for practice to continue even after a response had become habitualized in order to ensure that it would not be forgotten. ‘It [the Oral Approach] is not primarily a new m ethod as such’ (his emphasis). Fries (1955:11). Moulton (1961: 102). See, however, Darian (1972: 72-82) for a descrip­ tion of English teaching to immigrants before 1940. Moulton (1961: 94). Ibid.: 104. Ibid.: 86-9.

Old patterns and new directions

24 25 26 27 28 29 50 51

323

Ibid.: 89. Malinowski (1923: Sections II and III, 300-9). Firth (1957a: 182). Palmer (ed. 1 9 6 8 :2 06-9). Firth (1957a: 195). Ibid.: 179-81. Halliday (1978: 37-8). More correctly, the University College of East Africa, Makerere College, Uganda. 52 Makerere (1961: 2). 53 Makerere (1961: Annex 2: Commonwealth Representatives). ‘Malaya’ in 1961 meant ‘The Federation of Malaya’ (essentially modern West Malaysia) which had attained independence in 1957. The shift to the national language, Bahasa Malaysia, as the medium of education came in 1969 after serious social and ethnic unrest. 54 Phillipson (1992: 177) criticizes the Nutford House conference because ‘the list of participants contains few names of people with first-hand experience of ELT’. This is because the booklet he cites, Wayment (ed. 1961), does not contain a list of participants. It consists of ‘extracts from the proceedings’ and only the authors selected for inclusion are men­ tioned by name. There was of course a list of ‘conference members’ among the papers sent to participants (see British Council 1961). It included a number of ELT people because they were members of the host institution. Firth was due to speak at Nutford House as well as Makerere, but he died suddenly on December 14th, the day before it opened. A copy of his paper is printed in Wayment’s booklet. The Makerere Conference on the other hand is described by Phillipson (1992: 185) as having assembled ‘worldwide grassroots ELT teaching experience’ but in fact there was nobody with a reputation in ELT (as dis­ tinct from applied linguistics), apart from Peter Wingard and John Bright from Makerere College itself, and C. P. Hill working in neighbouring Tanganyika, as it then was. The main reason for this apparent discrep­ ancy is that Nutford House was an ELT conference, but Makerere was not. It was an ESL conference. Once this point is established, everything else falls into place. Where it leaves the ‘five ELT tenets’, however, I am not so sure. 35 Phillipson (1992:185). 36 Makerere (1961: 5), Recommendation (a). 37 Ibid.: 6, Recommendation (b). 38 India (1967: 12-13). The formula had been proposed in 1956 but it was not adopted till 1961, shortly after the Makerere Conference. See also Chapter 20, Note 57. 39 Ibid.: 15. 40 Phillipson (1992: Chapter 7).

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41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56

57 58 59 60

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Ibid.: 215. Ibid.: 185-93. Makerere (1961:13). Hornby in ‘Linguistic pedagogy 2 ’ (1946: 36). Phillipson (1992: 185-93). The link between monolingual instruction and corporal punishment (p. 187) is rivalled only by its link with bilingual instruction. Ibid.: 193. Ibid.: 194. Catford (1961:4). In 1961 this idea was well in advance of its time, and in some ways more representative of the views discussed in the School of Applied Linguistics at Edinburgh University (of which Catford was Director) than it is given credit for elsewhere in Phillipson’s book (pp.174-6). Phillipson (1992: 198). Kachru was an Edinburgh applied linguistics graduate. Ibid.: 199-209. Stern (1963/67: 64-5). Burstall eta l. (1974). Phillipson (209-12). Ibid.: 2 1 2-5. Donaldson (1984: 216) notes that the demand from Commonwealth countries was such that the number of posts was doubled from 30 to 60 Today initiatives like the ‘ACEs’ posts might be criticized because the;, benefited the ‘Centre’ and maintained its influence after independence. Perhaps they did, but they also benefited the participating Commonwealth countries. The two are interactive rather than incompatible. See also Davies (1996:492-3) on positive longer-term outcomes to the conference. Both courses were produced by CREDIF (Centre de Recherches et d’Études pour la Diffusion du Français) located at L’École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud near Paris. ‘Line’ in Bonjour Line is a character in the story. See Goldet (1969). Ministère de l’Éducation Nationale (1954). Corder (1966: 46). He also wrote a study of ELT and television (Corder 1960). The Schools Council (1969: 95-6). See The Schools Council (1969) for an account of the ‘Primary French Pilot Scheme’, popularly known as ‘Primary French’. See Spicer (1969) for an account of the related Nuffield Foreign Languages Teaching Materials Project, popularly known as ‘Nuffield French’. The latter project produced a course called En Avant. Burstall (1969). Clare Burstall was the Senior Research Officer at NFER responsible for the project. See Burstall (1968) and the final report Burstall eta l. (1974).

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62 Kiddle (1949). Other influential publications in the history of the language lab included Stack (1960/1971) and Hayes (1963/1968). 63 Brooks (1960:17). 64 When the Schools Council took over ‘Nuffield French’ in 1967 they extended it to cover French in the secondary schools and new secondarylevel courses in Spanish, German, and Russian. 65 Funded by the Nuffield Foundation and central government (1964-7) and by the Schools Council (1967-71). There was also a grant from the Longman Group. 66 See Mackay et al. (1970). 67 See Doughty et al. (1971). 68 See Halliday and Hasan (1976/1989). See also Chapter 20. 69 The Grammar was compiled under Quirk’s direction while he was Quain Professor of English at the University of London. His academic colleagues on the project were Sidney Greenbaum (University of Wisconsin­ Milwaukee), Geoffrey Leech (University of Lancaster), and Jan Svartvik (University of Lund). The project was funded partly by government and partly by private trusts, etc., including the Longman Group which published the work.

20

The notion of communication

The communicative approach As we have already seen, the notion at the heart of the ‘communicative movement’ in applied linguistics and language pedagogy after 1970 was the conviction that language teaching should take greater account of the wnv that language worked in the real world and try to be more responsive to the needs of learners in their efforts to acquire it. There were many influences which contributed to the strength of this conviction, some practical, others more theoretical, and others still that derived from the general ‘Zeitgeist’ of the late 1960s. For instance, the shift of focus in Communicative Language Teaching away from arguments over methods of teaching and towards a new emphasis on arranging the appropriate conditions for learning was in line with much of the progressive educational thinking of the time, and the suc­ cess of the new approach in a relatively short time was due, in part at least, to the fact that its ideas were generally in harmony with those of the contem­ porary educational establishment. Furthermore, the ELT profession in Britain was probably more open to change around 1970 than at any other time before or since. As we saw in Chapter 19 the responsibility for the teaching of English as a second language in the Commonwealth had been taken over by the newly independent coun­ tries themselves, but they continued to recruit appropriately qualified staff from the UK to serve in a variety of roles, mainly of an advisory nature. In addition the seemingly unstoppable spread of English worldwide generated a range of language teaching situations where a native-speaker contribution was seen as helpful. In the UK itself there was a growing professional base and the earlier domination of London and south-east England had begun to wane as new opportunities were presenting themselves around the country in line with the general expansion of tertiary education. Finally, there was a totally new departure, namely the teaching of English as a second language in Britain itself to children, and to a lesser extent adults, from the growing ethnic minor­ ity communities in the big cities. These were for the most part new challenges, and new ideas for meeting them were both needed and generally welcomed. Most critical of all, however, was the need to re-think the underlying assump­ tions of the pedagogical enterprise itself in order to identify a rationale for relating form and meaning in the real world of language use. This was a task

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tailor-made for applied linguistics which took the opportunity of extending its interests well beyond the rather narrow concerns of ‘core linguistics’ (phonology, syntax, etc.) which had tended to dominate its work in the early stages, to cover a much broader spectrum of language-related studies. ! he re-think, and the revolution it precipitated, took ten years to run its course. In 1970 expressions like ‘the communicative approach’ were virtu­ ally unknown, by 1980 they were commonplace. Looking back on it now as history, what actually happened in the decade in between appears to be a curiously ‘organized’ pattern of change. For the first five years it seemed to the ‘outside world’ that nothing was happening, these were to all outward appearances ‘the quiet years’. There were virtually no new EFL courses, for instance—presumably the publishers, who had kept a close watch on ELT developments since the 1930s, were aware of the sea change at work under their feet and were awaiting the outcome. More surprising perhaps, given the extent of university involvement, there was no ‘big book’ to launch the move­ ment. The new ideas took root in different places at more or less the same time and there was much more interaction among the participants—visits to neighbouring establishments, conferences, and so on—than might have been the case at other times. The conference at Lancaster University on ‘The C oinmunicative Teaching of English’ in 1973 was a notable example. There was nothing consciously secretive about any of this, but it makes any attempt to trace a historical ‘narrative’ not merely difficult but inappropriate. What e can do is try to identify a mosaic of enterprise that was being constructed during those years, and then pick up a more orthodox ‘story’ during the M-cond half of the decade which saw one of the richest concentrations of publication in the history of the subject. ’•ne of the more noticeable features of the quiet years was the expansion of academic theory and research, both in the UK itself and also in renewed contacts with the United States which had weakened somewhat in the 1960s as the influence of early applied linguistics declined. By 1970 the old unity of the Bloomfieldian period was long gone and in its place were different schools of thought, some more concerned with the problems of language education than others. In the present context, the key development was the emergence on both sides of the Atlantic of a new interest in how language is used and specifically in how linguistic systems interact with the world in which they operate. To place this thought in a pedagogical context, Henry Widdowson insisted in an article in ELT in 1972 that ‘it (was) a radical mistake to suppose that a knowledge of how sentences are put to use in communication follows automatically from a knowledge of how sentences are composed and what signification they have as linguistic units. Learners have to be taught what values they have as predictions, qualifications, reports, descriptions, and so on.’1 One practical consequence of this new perspective was a different kind of teaching syllabus built round a graded selection of rhetorical or commun­ icative acts which learners needed to perform appropriately if they wanted

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to be accepted as speakers of English in their chosen roles. Some students, scientists for instance, needed to know how to carry out professionally relevant acts such as definition, classification, deduction and so on, while others with less specific reasons for learning the language were content to know how to communicate effectively in everyday social situations. Everv instance of language use (every utterance) could be perceived as a commun­ icative act of speech in its own right which also fulfilled a function in a wider context of discourse. Both speech acts and functions had a role to play in the increasingly lively argument that was to propel communication into the pedagogical spotlight as the 1970s wore on. The intellectual background to the theory of speech acts is quite precise and it is different in many ways from the rest of the discussion on linguistic theory. For a start the concept came from philosophy rather than linguistics, specifically J. L. Austin’s (1911-60) H ow to d o Things with Words, a collec­ tion of lectures originally given at Harvard in 1955 and published pos­ thumously in 1962. Austin’s central insight was the realization that tintraditional view which categorized all ‘affirmative, positive utterances’ as ‘statements’ was unsafe; many of them were promises, for instance, requests, threats, apologies, and so on. He called utterances such as these ‘performat­ ives’ and they related to their linguistic exponents in a variety of different ways, some more explicit than others. For instance an utterance that started ‘I apologize . . . ’ would presumably count as an apology, but what about one that started with a phrase like ‘Fm sorry . . .’ or some other expression with a similar meaning?2 Although speech act theory was influential in academic circles in the early years of CLT, the term itself did not reach the wider market place, but was overtaken by the ubiquitous term ‘function’ in one of its many meanings. Acts like requesting and apologizing came to be called ‘language functions’ or ‘communicative functions’,3 particularly in contexts influenced by the work of the Threshold Level project, which we shall come to later. ‘Functionalism’, despite its ready acceptance as the key feature of the new approach to language teaching, has always been a rather elusive notion which is sometimes understood in a narrow technical sense to refer to a particular type of linguistic description and at other times it implies a much broader view of the relationship between language and language use. As a technical term it had its origins in central European linguistics (mainly in Prague and Vienna) between the wars where it was used to emphasize the relationships among linguistic phenomena rather than their intrinsic proper­ ties, but it was also used in a much more extended sense to refer to the way that language worked in texts and other forms of communication. When Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), a Russian exile who had been a leading member of the Prague School, was forced into a second exile in the United States during the Second World War, the functional approach crossed the Atlantic with him and appeared in various works in the 1950s.

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Of particular importance was a paper called ‘Closing statement: linguistics .•nd poetics’ which was delivered to a major conference on literary stylistics jn 1958.4 The paper outlined a model of the communication process which started from the exchange of messages between participants who alternated the roles of addresser and addressee in the developing discourse. As the inter­ action progressed, different stretches of text took on different functional values: the addresser might start by informing his addressee, then try to per­ suade or question him, and so on. At any one moment, one function was dominant but the others were latent and could as it were move up to the sur­ face later.5 It was also important that functional categories should be related to the actual language used in the text. As we saw in Chapter 19 the functional tradition in a rather different sense was taken up in Britain by the Firthian school of linguistics, and in particular by Halliday in his role as Director of the ‘Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching’ (1964-71). The immediate concern of the project was the teaching of English as a mother tongue, but at least two of the publications that emerged from it were influential in other contexts including ELT. The first was a collection of theoretical papers published in 1973 under the title I xplorations in the Functions o f Language which made an impact during what we have been calling the ‘quiet years’ by drawing together different aspects of the topic into three so-called ‘macro-functions’:6 (1) the ‘ideational’ macro-function which is concerned with the cognitive content of messages (what they are all about), (2) the ‘interpersonal’ macro-function which reflects the fact that language is a system of interaction, and (3) the ‘textual’ macro-function which relates the first two to the grammar of texts. The sec­ ond was Cohesion in English (1976), co-written with Ruqaiya Hasan, a land­ mark publication which has already been mentioned and to which we shall re: urn in more detail shortly. Finally, there was the influence of American sociolinguistics, a branch of linguistic science that had grown considerably in strength during the 1960s7 and could now boast a group of formidable scholars whose work was gaming .'.dherents around the world but particularly perhaps in Britain. It was typical of the subject that there was no one individual who clearly dominated the scene in the way that Chomsky already dominated the heartland subjects of syntax and semantics and would shortly add psycholinguistics to his repertoire. For some, William Labov came near to attaining this status with his work on dialectal variation and ‘standard English’ (for example, Labov 1966, 1969), but for most people the typical sociolinguistic publication was not ‘a great book’ by a single author, but compilations of papers on different topics which successfully combined theory and data-based practice. There may not have been a ‘big book’, but, so far as ELT was concerned, there was a ‘big idea’, namely Dell Hymes’s concept of ‘communicative competence’.8 The original source of the term was a paper written for a conference as far back as 1966 which had been concerned with language in disadvantaged children.

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Hymes had written it as a deliberate comment on Chomsky’s use of the term ‘competence’ the previous year in Aspects o f the Theory o f Syntax (1965), a book that had lifted its author’s reputation to the peak of his profession. In Aspects Chomsky used ‘competence’ to refer to ‘the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language’,9 in contrast to ‘performance’ which meant the actual use of language. But he went much further than any of his predecessors when he dedicated linguistics itself to the study of ‘competence’, and in doing so he underlined his conviction that ‘language’ was essentially a mental rather than a social process. By adding ‘communicative’ Hymes intended to remind people that Chomsky’s definition was deficient in respect of dimensions of knowledge that had to do with the communication of meaning or, to use his famous aphorism: ‘there are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless’.10 When ‘communicative competence’ reached the UK some years later (c.1972), it caught the spirit of the times and its alliterative properties no doubr helped it to become the motto of the new approach to language teaching. Also, by this time there were positive research results to report from America which further enhanced its influence.11 There was, however, a downside to the popularity of the term which came from its well-known capacity to sow confusion. Chomsky’s original choice of ‘competence’ to mean ‘knowledge’ had been a terminological tripwire ever since 1965, and the addition of ‘communicative’ did not make things easier. To many people it just meant ‘being a competent communicator’, which was understandable, but wrong. Secondly, in the rather competitive atmosphere of the time, there was a tendency to see ‘communicative competence’ as some kind of ‘alternative’ to Chomsky’s concept, but this had never been Hymes' intention: he wanted to enhance the original notion, not replace it. It is now time to try and characterize what the communicative movement meant in linguistic terms, quite apart from it might have to say about more obvious things like the use of language in social situations. The key concept is that in communicative contexts language is viewed as a unified event: for instance, ‘hallo’ is a unified event which consists of one word, so is War and Peace which consists of a lot more, and everything in between. We are concerned with wholes—utterances, texts, conversations, discourses, and so on—and not with component parts such as sounds, words and sentences. As Zellig Harris (Chomsky’s teacher) put it in a much-quoted comment made back in 1952: ‘Language does not occur in stray words or sentences, but in connected discourse’.12 In our present context, this stress on connectedness has powerful echoes of Vietor and his fellow reformers in the nineteenth cen­ tury which are both interesting and relevant. Just as the emphasis on tradi­ tional grammar had led to an excessive preoccupation with sentences and their parts a century or more ago, so too had its twentieth-century replace­ ment, structural linguistics. ‘Structures’ were identified with sentences or their components in isolation rather than with utterances in context, and they had been pushed to extravagant extremes in teaching techniques like

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‘pattern practice’ or ‘structure drills’ in the audiolingual language laboratory. Once again, it was time to reassert the centrality of connected discourse, but this time in a more sophisticated and more explicit sense than before. "Connectedness’ in language can be looked at in many different ways, but two processes are essential to our understanding of how discourse is created and how it works. In the first instance utterances should relate to each other coherently, a complex notion which depends on the efforts of all the partici­ pants in a discourse to play by the same rules. Secondly, discourse is a linguistic activity and language possesses many grammatical and lexical devices for forging links between utterances, a process normally called ‘cohesion’. ’his coherence/cohesion contrast can best be understood through an evimple, in this case a well-known one taken from Widdowson’s seminal book Teaching Language as Communication (1978). Consider the following v.o;-.versation: A: That’s the telephone. B: I’m in the bath. A: OK.13 i i > the participants this is, presumably, a coherent exchange. However, there are no cohesive, i.e. linguistic, links between the three utterances. C.'oherence is achieved because those taking part know what they are doing. They share knowledge of various kinds: some of it is no doubt private, but in this instance enough of it derives from social norms to explain why we (outside observers) can understand the interaction. Or can we? What, in particular, are we to make of the rather mysterious ‘OK’? Many modern playwrights, including in particular Harold Pinter, have made a lifetime study of the interplay between valid and invalid discoursal assumptions of this kind. There are no cohesive devices in the Widdowson example above. Later in his paper he ‘fills out’ each utterance with a possible extra comment (given in brackets below) which would make a more cohesive version: A: That’s the telephone. (Can you answer it, please?) B: (No, I can’t answer it because) I’m in the bath. A: OK (I’ll answer it).13 The extra bits of language in parenthesis create a more cohesive text because the links between the utterances are ‘spelt out’ linguistically, for example, the repeated use of ‘it’ and ‘answer’. As it stands, the second text sounds very unnatural because A and B know each other too well to need so much cohesion. It is interesting to note in passing that at one time repetition of this kind was a common fault in dialogues specially written for language teaching purposes. Writers were so anxious to increase the number of grammatical examples (here: modal verbs, ‘can’, can’t’, ‘will’) that they overlooked the bizarre effect that repetition produces on texts seen as instances of discourse. For some people

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distortions of this kind were the inevitable result of constructing texts fo r teaching purposes, and they insisted that all examples should come from ‘authentic’ real-life sources (see Chapter 21). Cohesion attracted considerable attention over the years, particularly after the publication of Cohesion in English in 1976 in which the authors offered this definition of their topic: ‘where the interpretation of any item in the discourse requires making reference to some other item in the discourse, there is cohesion’.14 Such items would include, for instance, pronouns, adverbiai sequences such as firstly, secondly, finally, elliptical utterances like Yes, I can, and lexical sets where different linguistic items are used with the same refer­ ent, Hamlet, Prince o f Denmark, royal Dane, fair cousin, etc. Coherence is a more difficult phenomenon to study, but it has been a major interest in new domains of linguistics such as text linguistics and pragmatics which grew up in the wake of the post-structural concern for communication. With books like Cohesion in English the quiet years were overtaken by a burst of activity designed to give the new ideas a practical form which would be of use to language educators of every kind: teachers themselves of course, but also materials writers, curriculum and syllabus designers, testing experts, and so on. Despite the ‘noise’, however, it is possible to discern two areas of special concern. The first was to help adult learners who wanted to acquire a basic ability to communicate effectively in the foreign country. This became the primary purpose of the largest single research and development project ir foreign language teaching in the 1970s which was run by the Council of Europe and known to most people as ‘The Threshold Level’. The second was to focus on learners with particular professional or educational reasons for foreign language study. By 1970 this was already known as ESP (‘English for Special Purposes’ until the late 1970s when it became ‘English for Specific Purposes’), but the communicative approach provided it with a rationale that it had lacked in the past and a rich source of new ideas for syllabus and materials design. We shall return to both topics later in this chapter. Before moving on, however, we should note a new development in the parallel world of English language testing— a topic which has not been given the prominence it deserves in this book, but which has a major publication to itself, Bernard Spolsky’s Measured Words (1995). The reason for raising the subject at this point is because the late 1970s brought testing and teaching together in a way that was clearly designed to challenge the dominance of the mighty American TOEFL Test and at the same time establish a form ot assessment that would positively encourage the new approaches to language teaching. The task of preparing a new test was taken up by the British Council in co-operation with the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES), a body we first noted back in the late nineteenth century.15 It was intended to assess the English of applicants for places on courses of higher education in the UK and therefore it adopted an ESP framework in which the

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language of ‘specialist subjects’ could be assessed alongside ‘general English proficiency’. The starting point was a very detailed specification of ESP by john Munby called Communicative Syllabus Design (1978) which carried a sub-title that described its aims very clearly: a sociolinguistic m odel for defining the content o f purpose-specific language programmes. The test itself was known as the ELTS (‘English Language Testing Service’) test. It was pro­ duced very quickly and administered in forty centres round the world in 1980. The design was innovative and had inevitable teething troubles before it was revised to become the IELTS (I = International) test. However, the basic deci­ sion to include modules in special subjects like science, medicine, and so on, had a face validity for its customers which guaranteed its long-term success. Before taking up specific topics like ESP, we need to take a closer look at a topic that was rather less prominent during the communicative period than it had been earlier, the psychology of language learning.

Communication and language learning I’sychology has provided the cutting edge of methodological change in lan­ guage teaching from the Reform Movement onwards. In the early years, the doctrine of associationism provided the intellectual basis for change from Sweet to Berlitz—it was, for instance, the notion behind the use of connected texts and the prime justification for the ‘don’t translate’ principle of the Direct Method. After the First World War the vagueness of associationism ;;ave way to the ultra-precise statistical procedures of reductionist behavourism allied to descriptive linguistics. Language teaching from the days of Harold Palmer onwards followed the doctrine of habit-formation to the point at which ‘pattern practice’ and allied activities took most of the interest out of language learning. Then quite suddenly in the mid-1970s the party -topped. The old alliance between linguistics and learning theory was broken and, in the much-quoted words of Noam Chomsky in 1966, ‘it is the lan­ guage teacher himself (sic) who must validate or refute any specific proposal. There is very little in psychology or linguistics that he can accept on faith.’16 With this remark Chomsky effectively let language teaching off an intellec­ tual leash that it had already begun to resent and most people probably agreed with the gist of what he said, though it seemed a bit abrupt at the time. The practical effect of this new freedom was to allow language teaching to draw on linguistics and its psycholinguistic implications as and when it saw fit. CLT, for instance, had always adopted a pragmatic and commonsensical atti­ tude towards language learning, though the crucial importance of advanced comprehension skills in domains like listening to lectures and academic reading encouraged a more theory-sensitive approach. / There were, however, two strands of thought which came to influence the communicative approach and which had their origins in psychology, though they started from quite different points on the compass. The first was

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‘problem-solving’, part of the legacy of orthodox psychology that had not been too heavily ‘tainted’ by involvement with the old behaviourist hen.-s\. The second is now called ‘second language acquisition’, but it started from a specific concern with the role of ‘error’ in language learning—a topic that had not really been taken at all seriously during the behaviourist years. ‘Problem solving’ re-entered the domain of serious psychology in the enr!\ 1960s with an influential book written from a ‘mentalist’ standpoint that reflected the general trend of psycholinguistic thought at the time. It \\.is called Plans and the Structure o f Behavior (1960) by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram and it offered a model of the way that behaviour is controlled by ‘planning ahead’ and ‘working out what to do’ (the opposite of habit forma­ tion theory). People learn, the model suggested, by devising mental ‘plans’, testing them out, and if they are successful, adopting them and moving on. In a sense this was a sophisticated update of the idea of ‘trial-and-error’ but at the time, its acceptance of a role for ‘the mind’ in human learning was a major breakthrough so far as educators were concerned. For far too long, psychology had preached a form of determinism that was increasingly at odds with the growing belief among teachers that notions like ‘discovery’ and ‘activity’ had educational consequences of a genuinely positive nature. Fur once, here was an intellectual shift that was really welcome to teachers in the classroom, and, as we noted in Chapter 19, the new ideas came to pl.iy a major role in projects like Primary French and, particularly, Scope17 which, as a programme for very young children, was able to take full advantage of the new approach. Programmes of practical activities like frieze-making, looking after animals, etc., were structured in such a way that they encour­ aged genuine communication among those who participated. It was even possible to arrange things so that they prompted the use of specific linguistic items which had been introduced into the course earlier. A few years later a rather similar project at the University of Birmingham took this notion of using language to ‘get things done’ even further with a ‘kit’ of boxed materials published under the title Concept 7-9 (a reference to the age-group for which they were intended).18 The project started as a response to the argument that children from ethnic minority backgrounds suffered from some kind of ‘language deficit’ which could only be rectified by a rather vague notion of ‘elaboration’. The Birmingham team led by John Sinclair took the alternative view that it was not the children’s know­ ledge of English that was ‘restricted’19 but rather their experience of using it to explore the more abstract concepts and relationships required in school learning. The outcome was a set of problem-solving tasks which weiv designed to focus in particular on Flalliday’s ‘ideational’ macro-function dealing with the language appropriate for notions such as spatial organiza­ tion, size, direction, shape, and so on. Most of the tasks appeared deceptively simple, like for instance describing a diagram with two triangles and a circle in such a way that the listener (who could not see the diagram) could draw

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an accurate replica. But forcing learners to use language rather than rely on non-linguistic alternatives like pointing created communicative challenges of unexpected complexity. The influence of work of this kind gradually fed into ideas for materials intended for older students and made a welcome change from over-used, and much more difficult, improvisation and simulation tasks. The study skills course Skills fo r Learning,10 for example, which was published some years later, contains examples of similar tasks, and it too derived from a project with strong Birmingham connections (see page 345). It could be argued that the rehabilitation of problem solving became one of the most valuable educational legacies of the communicative movement. (See also ‘The Bangalore Project’ later in this chapter.) The second major shift in attitudes to language learning that emerged in the aftermath of behaviourism concerned the significance of learners’ errors, to use the phrase made famous by Pit Corder in a seminal paper published in 1967.21 Corder’s paper came as a direct consequence of the new perceptions in psycholinguistics and language acquisition that had been fostered by Chomsky earlier in the decade. After a famously hostile review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in 1959, Chomsky’s early views culminated in the influential opening chapter of Aspects o f the Theory o f Syntax (1965) which we have already mentioned as the source of the ‘competence’/'performance’ distinc­ tion. More importantly, however, Chomsky used the chapter to rehearse his view that the fundamental aim of linguistics was to explain how human beings acquire language. The basic task for the subject was therefore to spe­ cify a ‘language acquisition device’22 which would account for the fact that all children (unless they were the victims of certain kinds of physiological impairment such as congenital deafness) acquired the language(s) in their environment successfully and efficiently in a very short space of time. This renewal of interest in language acquisition was very exciting to many applied linguists in the late 1960s who began to ask the obvious question: if people possess a language acquisition device that has already worked ‘perfectly’ once, will it work again? The implications for language teaching were far-reaching. If Chomsky was right, the learning of second languages should no longer be seen as the outcome of carefully constructed and welldelivered teaching programmes. Instead, teachers had to devise ways of bringing learners into contact with the second language and arranging the conditions of learning in such a way that the in-built ‘device’ could be accessed successfully for a second time. Corder’s crucial insight in approaching this task was to see that errors, far from being the evidence for failure that American contrastive analysis had assumed in the 1940s and 1950s,23 were in fact markers of success. When learners made the kind of systematic mistakes that Corder called ‘errors’ (the others were merely ‘slips of the tongue’) it was because they had moved on to the next stage of acquisition which was not fully under control yet. In a model of this kind, the concept of sequence is a highly significant one. If all

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second language learners went through ‘the same’ acquisition process, tln-y would learn new linguistic items in the same order. By chance there h.ul been some educationally relevant research in this area a few years befonwhen R. F. Mager (1961) had discovered that the learning sequences which learners generated for themselves when they were allowed a free choice, had more in common with the sequences of other learners than with the teacher­ generated sequences found in course materials, syllabuses, and so on. Corder adopted this notion, calling it ‘the built-in syllabus’,24 and it became one of the guiding concepts of his later research. (It should also be pointed out that this work was done before the publication in 1973 of Roger Brown’s famous study of regular sequences in first language acquisition which was to exeri so much influence on American applied linguistics in the late 1970s.) The Corder paper is probably best known for the rather startling asser­ tion that ‘given m otivation [Corder’s emphasis], it is inevitable that a human being will learn a second language if he is exposed to the language data'. Behind this remark is a new definition of language learning based on the notion of hypothesis-testing. Faced with the data, learners (unconsciously) construct hypotheses as to how the language works and then they try these hypotheses out to see if they are confirmed or not. Errors therefore are the traces of failed hypotheses which will, in time, die out as the system progresses— just like the ‘errors’ of infants acquiring their mother tongue. Corder expanded this work in the 1970s under the label ‘interlanguage’ introduced by Larry Selinker in 1972. Selinker also suggested that one of the features of second language acquisition that might prove important w.In what he called ‘communication strategies’, for example, how do people cope communicatively when their knowledge of the foreign language fails them? Corder himself picked up the idea later on,25 and it became a point of fruitful connection with language teaching. The pedagogical consequences of the hypothesis-testing model were not always easy to define and the optimism of Corder’s original remark about the inevitability of acquisition needed some modification. ‘Exposure’ alone (e' ui if accompanied by motivation) was not enough to ensure acquisition. There had to be some kind of successful outcome as well, as the behaviourists had always said, but for a different reason. ‘A successful outcome’ in this contcM meant of course the communication of meaning, without which exposure was nothing more than the endurance of noise. What successful learners do is use what they can understand in order to m ake sense of what they can’t. In the very early stages of learning this means using non-linguistic artefacts (pictures, objects, mimes, etc.) in order to make the new language comprehensible.26 In the late 1970s there were two rather similar responses to the direction in which this second language acquisition (SLA) argument was moving, but they occurred in two rather different contexts. The first was the work of Stephen D. Krashen among Hispanic learners of English as a second language in southern California, and the second was a school-based project in

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South India set up by N. S. Prabhu, who had already enjoyed a distinguished career in linguistics and English language teaching in India going back many years. Both came up with language teaching proposals which rested on the assumption that some form of language acquisition device was available to second language learners. At this point, however, they parted company. Krashen took the view that successful comprehension was a sufficient condition for acquisition.27 His model was more complex than this, but the comprehension point was at the heart of it, and the inclusion of reading (as a source of comprehensible input) perhaps made it more relevant to older students. Prabhu by contrast insisted on the active participation of the learners in the process of making and com­ municating meaning. His project in Bangalore is described in more detail later, but the key issue was what he called ‘a preoccupation with meaning’28 which in practical pedagogical terms meant working through a series of graded tasks (putting the task in the ELT spotlight for the first time). The tasks typically required the co-operative solution of a problem based on simple reasoning (including, for instance, mental arithmetic) which meant that the pupils had to deploy whatever linguistic resources they had available in order to reach the correct answer. We can now see that two different claims are being made for the role that ‘communication’ plays in language teaching and learning. The first and main­ stream role is that effective communication is the objective of language teaching which exists to prepare learners to use their new language communicatively whenever the opportunity to do so occurs in the outside world. To reach this objective it is the job of the teacher to provide appropriate examples of the target language and to devise activities and tasks which rehearse learners in its effective use. In contrast, Prabhu’s model (and in a more limited sense Krashen’s as well) implies a much stronger claim for communication as a necessary condition for language acquisition. We shall return to this point later.

The Threshold Level Project By the end of the 1960s it was clear that the situational approach as understood in, say, the audio-visual method, had run its course. There was no future in con­ tinuing to claim that language could be predicted from the study of situational events. What was required was a closer study of how language expressed and communicated meaning. Language was not just a set of structure-habits, nor a collection of situationally sensitive phrases like ‘Can I help you?’ or ‘How do you do’. It was a vehicle for the comprehension and expression of meanings, or ‘notions’ as Jespersen called them back in the 1920s, and as they were to be called in the new model of syllabus construction devised in the early 1970s. ‘We are led to recognize’, Jespersen said in his exposition of notional categories in The Philosophy o f Grammar (1924), ‘that beside, or above, or

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behind, the syntactic categories which depend on the structure of each language as it is actually found, there are some extralingual categories which are independent of the more or less accidental facts of existing languages; they are universal in so far as they are applicable to all languages, though rarely expressed in them in a clear and unmistakable way’.29 After a generation in which orthodox opinion proclaimed that ‘all lan­ guages are different’, here was a reminder that there existed a level of seman­ tic generalization which brought different languages into contact with each other as varying manifestations of ‘the same’ notions. The potential of this insight for a programme of language teaching across linguistic frontiers provided one of the strands in the ambitious project initiated by the Council of Europe in 1971. The Modern Languages Project, or the ‘Threshold Level’ (‘T-level’) Project as it came to be known, began with an opening symposium at Rüschlikon (Switzerland) chaired by the Project Director John Trim, as a result of which three position papers were commissioned. The first set out a model of the archetypal adult learner of foreign languages in Europe in terms of an analysis of communicative needs: A m odel for the definition o f language needs o f adults learning a m odern language by René Richterich (1972). In a sense this is the key document of the whole project since it set the parameters within which all the other elements were designed to work. It is divided into two sections, language needs and learning needs, for each of which Richterich provides a detailed taxonomy of the situations in which learners might have to use the foreign language, the roles they might have to play, and the types of communicative activity in which they might have to participate. The Richterich model later provided the starting point for Munby’s more elaborate version in 1978 which we noted earlier. The second and third papers by D. A. Wilkins (1972) and J. A. van Ek (1973) both address themselves to the same basic issue: the specification of a syllabus for the fundamental ‘common core’ which all learners would be expected to acquire before moving to their specific professional or other interests. Wilkins’ The linguistic and situational content o f the common core in a unit/credit system made a major distinction between two types of ‘notional categories’: ‘semantico-grammatical categories’ which relate directly to the grammar and vocabulary, and ‘categories of communicative function’ which were still tentative at this stage but promised a classificatory framework for the description of language use (making suggestions, agreeing, disagreeing, persuading, etc.). Van Ek’s paper The ‘Threshold Level’ in a unit/credit system is in essence a first step towards specifying the ‘common core’, now increasingly referred to as the ‘threshold level’, a metaphor which is designed to capture the notion of ‘crossing over’ from the dependency of a learner to the self-sufficiency of a trained language user. Three years later (1975) van Ek published a full account of The Threshold Level for English,30 and within the next five years or so similar specifica­ tions appeared for French (1976), Spanish (1979), German (1980), and

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Italian (1981),31 all based on the same basic categories. The underlying rationale for the scheme as a whole was eloquently articulated by Trim in 1973: ‘the major developments of the last thirty years have progressively weakened the self-sufficiency of national cultures, even in day-to-day living. Mass travel for business and pleasure over continental motorway networks and air routes, electronic media, mass movements of immigrant labour and at managerial level in multinational corporations, supranational economic, cultural and political institutions, interdependence of imports/exports in an increasingly unified mar­ ket, all conspire to render hard national frontiers . . . increasingly obsolete’.32 In 1976 Wilkins published the definitive account of the theory behind the T-level in N otional Syllabuses in which his semantico-grammatical categories and categories of communicative function have been joined by categories of modality—and all of them count as ‘notions’ of different kinds. In van Ek, on the other hand, notions and functions are kept separate, giving a threepart model consisting of: (i) general notions (essentially grammar), (ii) specific notions (vocabulary), and (iii) language functions.33 To teachers, the package as a whole became known as ‘the notional/functional approach’ and for many of them, it became synonymous with ‘communicative language teaching’. The T-level was not just a language teaching project. It was designed to set up a system of internationally recognized qualifications in foreign language skills which would promote Europe-wide employment and mobility. Once the learning objectives had been established in notional/functional terms, study ‘units’ (modules) could be put together in various ways to form instruc­ tion programmes. Students would then collect the units as ‘credits’ towards a final certificate of attainment. ‘The Threshold Level’ was not intended as a minimum survival level, but as the basic competence that people would need, as Trim himself put it: ‘to be able to make contact with each other as people, to exchange information and opinions, talk about experiences, likes and dislikes, to explore our similarities and differences, the unity in diversity of our complicated and crowded continent.’34 The use of functional categories became the best-known feature of the T-level courses that started to appear from the late 1970s onwards, for example, the four-volume Strategies series (1977-82) by Brian Abbs and Ingrid Freebairn. The new semantic syllabuses did not, however, discard the familiar structures and patterns altogether, though they did reorganize them somewhat. Teachers’ reactions were predictably mixed and later courses tended to emphasize that notions and functions should be seen as an enrich­ ment of the old methods rather than as an alternative to them. For many teachers, however, what was attractive about the communicative approach in this form was not so much the novel syllabuses as the refreshing sense of freedom that followed the end of the over-rigid structural syllabus and the welcome variety of classroom activities that accompanied the new approach. Finally, mention should be made of the fact that the T-level also allowed teachers to develop a functional approach to language testing and assessment.

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For example, the so-called GOML (Graded Objectives in Modern Lan­ guages)35 movement in Britain in the 1970s used the T-level categories to define the aims of modern language teaching in a completely new and ‘learner friendly’ way. The old grammatical categories had gone and in their place were meaningful functional objectives like ‘telling the time’, ‘buying food’, etc. The use of notional categories, on the other hand, was less successful since it implied a level of abstraction that young secondary school pupils were unable to handle, for example, using concepts like ‘duration’, ‘sequence’, ‘agency’, and so on.36

English for Special/Specific Purposes (ESP) Learning foreign languages can be a tiresome business, particularly for adults with better things to do, so it is not surprising that there have been mam attempts to make the process more relevant to their purposes. In fact the earliest printed manuals which we looked at back in Chapter 1 (pp.11-13) were full of material of special interest to merchants in the cross-Channel wool trade, and it was a common feature of all such publications to offer appropriate texts, word-lists, and the like. Flolyband’s Littleton for instance, unusually in a textbook for children, included examples of commercial French in dialogues like ‘Of the Weight’, and ‘Rules for Merchants to Buy and Sell’, then there was Miège and his coffee houses, Miller and his shipping-business students on the Ganges, and many others. Letter writing, the only method of communication at a distance before the Victorian technologies, was also a standard topic in foreign language manuals, and the need for help in that direction has continued to the present day. In his early years in Verviers, for instance, Flarold Palmer found time for two publications: a source book of words, phrases and model letters called Correspondance comm er­ ciale anglaise (1906), and a course: Cours élémentaire de correspondance anglaise in 1912.37 However, his later involvement with the teaching of school children in Japan meant that there was no opportunity to follow up this interest. In this context, it is interesting to revisit the attempt by Michael West to harness some of the motivation of ‘useful’ English to the design of his reading scheme for schools in the 1920s. As we saw in Chapter 18, he argued very convincingly that by the end of the First World War English had come to dominate the world’s production of scientific and technical literature so heav­ ily that access to it by speakers of languages like Bengali which had no strong tradition of publication in these fields could not be guaranteed through a pol­ icy of translation alone.38 West’s conclusion was that the Bengali’s ‘essential need is of the ability to read English for the purpose especially of informa­ tion’,39 i.e. non-fiction of all kinds. When he actually tried these ideas out, however, he found that the children did not like informative texts, preferring instead stories ‘which, even if European, are of international reputation’,40

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Robinson Crusoe, Sinbad the Sailor, and so on.41 The main problem was that if an informative text were genuinely to inform the reader by dealing with something new, it was virtually certain to be too difficult as well as infringing the guidelines on the use of frequent words. ‘Informative texts’ can only ful­ fil their proper function if they use a specialized vocabulary— even a simple technical text on astronomy, for instance, would have to consider including low frequency items like ‘satellite’.42 The vocabulary control issue was also at the heart of Ogden’s proposals on Basic English. On the face of it he was the only English language textbook writer of his time to take the needs of the scientific and commercial com­ munities seriously— after all, the BASIC acronym incorporated both these adjectives (see p. 283). Moreover, he and his colleagues at the Orthological Institute, in particular S. L. Salzedo, published an impressive set of titles in the 1930s and 1940s including Basic for Business, A Basic Astronomy, The Chemical History o f a Candle (Faraday in Basic), and so on. In addition, science and technology were the two subject matters where Ogden relaxed his stringent 850 word limit, by allowing for the use of technical terms which cannot legitimately be paraphrased. There is little reason to doubt that informative texts showed Basic at its best, but when it came to providing models of usage, in commercial letters for example, it offered a ‘register’ that was totally unlike the language of native-speaker correspondence. Ogden tried to make this into a virtue, claiming in Basic fo r Business that Basic was an improvement on normal English: ‘in the last hundred years’, he says (in an introductory Note in Basic), ‘business men have been building up a strange form of the English language, which has come to be respected by their secre­ taries like the language of one of the great religions’.43 The textbook itself uses a technique which compares business letters written in ‘normal’ business language with their equivalents in Basic. While one can sympathize with his rejection of unhelpful jargon like ‘inst.’ and ‘ult.’ (easy targets), does it really do the foreign learner a service to be told that the English in a standard ‘business letter’ style like: ‘apparently the goods in question sustained damage through being stowed on deck instead of in the cargo hold’ is im proved when translated into Basic as: ‘it seems that the goods in question were damaged through being kept on deck, and not in the goods hold’?44 First of all, the (intended?) informality of the Basic sentence is not likely to be appropriate. Secondly, ‘kept’ does not really mean the same as ‘stowed’, and, so far as I know, the phrase ‘goods hold’ does not exist in English at all, let alone in this particular register? What, one wonders, is actually being taught here? After the war, the focus on teaching English to children meant there was only a small trickle of specific purpose publications. A very early example was a bilingual course for doctors and medical students (El Inglés para M édicos y Estudiantes de M edicina) by R. Mackin and A. Weinberger (1949), and there were successful coursebooks in mainstream commercial English like A Com m ercial Course for Foreign Students by C. E. Eckersley

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and W. Kaufmann, and a useful Dictionary o f Scientific and Technical Wo>,l± (1952) compiled by W. E. Flood and Michael West using West’s New Method defining vocabulary to explain 10,000 scientific terms.45 However, when post-school ELT began to reassert itself in the 1960s and the number of adult students rose significantly, special-purpose teaching was again in demand. As we saw in Chapter 19, an early instance of the label ‘Teaching English for Special Purposes’ was used for one of the working parties at the 1961 Makerere Conference.46 The conference materials also included a frequency count based on seven pre-university textbooks covering subjects in both arts and sciences which was submitted by V. K. Gokak, a senior delegate from India,47 who made the interesting point that ‘purely technical’ items had been excluded on the grounds that they would have to be taught by subject specialists not by English teachers. The latter should concentrate on what later became known as ‘semi-technical’ vocabulary (examples from the list include: ‘analyse’, ‘device’, ‘substance’, and so on). This struck a note that recurred frequently in ESP as teachers of English tried to define their profes­ sional relationship with the specialist academic subjects for which ‘English for Special Purposes’ was intended to act as a linguistic bridge. These themes were taken up again in three further milestone publications later in the decade: A. J. Herbert’s The Structure o f Technical English (1965), R. A. Close’s compilation The English We Use for Science (also 1965), and J. R. Ewer, and G. Latorre’s A Course in Basic Scientific English (1969), based on a substantial frequency count. It was also noteworthy that Ewer was a teacher of English and Latorre a subject specialist, in this case an engineer, an early instance of the kind of ‘team-teaching’ that the subject often required. In 1964 Ronald Mackin began a series catering for academic interests called The English Studies Series which concentrated on developing reading com­ prehension skills with a selection of authentic texts in a variety of subject areas. There was also a late-comer from Ogden’s Orthological Institute, The Science Dictionary in Basic English (1965) edited by E. C. Graham. And in the United States, the Collier-Macmillan Program devised by English Language Services (1966) added a substantial ‘Special English’ component to their pack­ age, including topics such as aviation, agriculture, and engineering. These were swallows, and summer was not far off. The key feature of English for Special Purposes which lifted it out of the backwaters of bibliography supplements and on to the front page as it were, was the intense interest it provoked among the newly energized group of academics in British linguistics, most of whom were either the students of J. R. Firth at London University or influenced by him. In our present context a key work was a very short paper published in 1959 shortly before Firth’s death which discussed what he called ‘restricted languages’ (glossed as ‘vocational, technical and scientific languages set in a matrix of closely determined sections of what may be called the general language’).48 ‘Restricted languages’ was also used at Makerere, but within a few years it had been

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superseded by the term ‘register’, one of the few Firthian expressions to escape the confines of the linguistics lecture theatre and which was therefore used in slightly different ways by different authors. ‘Register analyses’ in the sense of linguistic descriptions of texts which were deemed to belong to ‘the same type’, ‘scientific texts’, ‘medical texts’, etc., started to appear and for a time it was assumed that these descriptions provided the appropriate material for constructing syllabuses and course materials for learners who were already professionally active in these areas, or for those who were studying to become so, assumptions that were sustained in no small measure by the first generally available textbook in applied linguistics published in the UK, The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching by M. A. K. Halliday, Angus McIntosh, and Peter Strevens (1964). However, technical register studies like Sentence and Clause in Scientific English (1968) by Huddleston et al.49 did not easily reach the notice of teachers until the appearance of specialist journals in both applied linguistics and ESP in the early 1980s. By the early 1970s the expansion of applied linguistics encouraged univer­ sities and colleges to establish ‘centres’, ‘institutes’, and the like,50 devoted to helping overseas students with their problems in academic English, initiatives that were generally welcomed by university authorities as overseas-student recruitment carrots. This institutional support meant a considerable increase in specific-purpose teaching, much of it backed by academic research and development, which did not have to be funded through publishing in the conventional way. In due course the ‘language centre’ model was adopted by overseas universities which in turn became the focal point for locally produced ESP projects, for example, Iran and Malaysia, noted below. Only a small percentage of the ESP work of these ‘units’ reached the outside world in the traditional form of textbooks and the like; most of it was too specific to be marketable. However, there were two types of publishing scheme that overcame limitations of this kind. The first was the series concept which began with a model publication that acted as a template for others which were added over a period of years. In this way the more popular sub­ jects were able to subsidize the rarer topics. Two such series started off in the mid-1970s as the ‘quiet years’ came to an end. The first (in 1974) was English in Focus with its ‘template volume’ called English in Physical Science written by the series editors J. P. B. Allen and H. G. Widdowson, and later volumes dealt with medicine, mechanical engineering, education, and so on. While the Focus series was aimed at intermediate-to-advanced students, the second was simpler and less radical in its presentation techniques. It was called Nucleus and was the first of its kind to come from a language centre overseas, in this case Tabriz in Iran. Edited by Martin Bates and Tony Dudley-Evans, it started with General Science in 1976, and then, like Focus, it added special volumes in engineering, medicine, geology, etc. These two series represented different aspects of the Special Purposes idea, but they both started from a definition of the relationship between meaning

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and its linguistic realization. In the case of Focus meaning was seen as distributed throughout a text which, when read in the appropriate way, would emerge as a coherent instance of communicative discourse. This pre-supposed an above-average, though not necessarily fluent, command of English (‘a con­ siderable dormant competence in the manipulation of the language system’,51 as the editors put it) and concentrated its efforts on trying to make explicit con nections between this knowledge and the ‘facts and concepts’ of the specific subject matter (science, engineering, etc.) which the authors also assumed to be familiar to the learner. This was achieved by a series of detailed exercises in the close reading of texts designed to be ‘representative of certain basic com­ municative processes which underlie, and are variously realized in, individual pieces of scientific writing’51 In other words they were specially constructed for language teaching purposes and not selected as examples of ‘authentic’ sci­ entific English. This constructed/authentic text argument became an issue of continuing interest in the theoretical discussion surrounding ESP. Another special feature of the Focus series was the systematic use of non-linguistic sources of information like maps, diagrams, charts, and the like. The accompanying tasks were designed to get the student to transfer the information contained in the visual materials into a textual form, and vice versa. In a bilingual mode these visuals acted as a kind of ‘bridge’ between texts in the two languages. By contrast Nucleus was originally written for young Iranian undergraduates whose knowledge of English was quite limited and derived from the structuralh organized courses used at school. The editors did not want to reject this know­ ledge, but tried to develop it by helping students to make meaningful connec­ tions between these forms and the notions they expressed, which were in turn significant to an understanding of their specialist subjects. Nucleus was among the first courses to focus on the notional side of the notional-functional formula made famous by the Threshold Level project, and appropriately so, since the study of science is as much an exercise in concept formation as in educational development.52 The second type of publication that made the journey from special in-house use to the wider market was designed to appeal to a broader cat­ egory of language instruction for academic purposes which came to be called ‘study skills’. Courses of this type were directed at students in higher educa­ tion who needed help in handling the learning situations that faced them in the post-school world. These included in particular the difficulties of under­ standing lectures, taking useful notes, and developing a range of ‘strategies' for reading different types of text. Traditional ELT had long made the dis­ tinction between extensive and intensive reading, but study skills enriched the notion by adding activities like skimming, scanning, search reading, and so on. On the productive side, essay and examination writing were particu­ larly important and, for some courses, spoken participation in tutorials and seminars.

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There were two important contributions to ELT in this field in the late 1970s both of which originated in projects for post-school students in the Third World. The first was a four volume course called Reading and Thinking in English (1979-80) which approached the authentic text issue by taking students through a very detailed course of reading activities related to texts specifically designed to engage these activities, and then moved on to a set of genuine text extracts in Book Four where the students were expected to apply the techniques they had been practising. The materials originated in Bogotá, Columbia but their publication in Britain opened the way to much wider use.53 The second of the two programmes was on a rather larger scale. It derived from a long-term and multi-faceted project known as UMESPP (University of Malaya English for Special Purposes Project) which was launched in 1975,54 and occupied an Anglo-Malaysian team in both Kuala Lumpur and Birmingham for a number of years before the international version of the materials appeared in the UK under the title Skills fo r Learning in the 1980s.55 The project was intended to help university students in Malaysia who had not followed an English-medium education to read English-language textbooks. The basic design attempted to relate a general programme of development in reading skills with the specific demands of reading in a specialized subject. It also adopted a radical stance on two issues of substance that were the focus of contemporary controversy. The first was an uncompromising insistence on the use of authentic texts throughout, and the second an unexpectedly strong view on the inter-dependence of the so-called ‘four skills’ which in this instance stressed that talking about what had been read was an integral part of understanding what it meant and spoken interaction was included as a central feature of the whole ‘package’. This new concern for skills and strategies allowed ESP (and indeed ELT generally) to develop a much more varied and sophisticated approach to the methodology of language teaching than had been the case in the early years when most of the talk had been about syllabuses. From 1980 onwards it was no longer enough for students in language teaching classrooms around the world to ‘sit there’ absorbing (or not, as the case may be) what­ ever their teachers chose to provide for them. Increasingly they were being asked to ‘do something’: fish examples of grammar points out of texts, put sentences or paragraphs in the right order, tick true/false boxes, draw arrows between matching pairs, and so on and so forth. The intention was to give learners the initiative in identifying the crucial features of text organization and to encourage the use of co-operative work in groups or pairs which would further stimulate the genuine use of language for communicative purposes. The influence of ‘problem solving’, which we noted earlier on, continued to grow until, in 1979 when in a project located in South India, ‘problems’, or ‘tasks’ as they were called, became the prime source of pedagogic activity.

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The Bangalore Project We last visited India in this book in the 1920s to note one of the more positive initiatives of the old colonial education service, namely Michael West’s research into the needs for English among Bengali school pupils, and his development of a new approach to reading materials. Under the aegis of the ‘New Method’ programme this work came to influence ELT world wide though its long-term effects in Bengal itself may have been more modest.56 The independence of India in 1947 encouraged a trend that had already started before the war to replace English as the medium of instruction in state secondary schools in favour of Hindi or one of the designated regimul languages. As we saw in Chapter 19, aspects of this policy provoked ointroversy but things were finally settled in the ‘three language formula’ which won formal approval in 1961.57 The disappearance of English-medium education led, it was widely believed, to lower standards of English because during the Raj the development of English language skills was seen as the by-product of English-medium teaching. As a result the formal teaching of English language was modelled on the British grammar school syllabus, i.e. grammar, composition, and literature, the only major difference being the inclusion of translation. There was no tradition of teaching the modern spoken language ab initio and a modern post-independence policy was urgently needed. The response was to adopt an entirely new approach which seemed well-suited to the needs of a new country—a scientific methodology based on structural linguistics and modern psychological theory which replaced the literary and cultural trimmings so beloved of the Raj with a ‘culturally neutral’ stance in which ‘skills’ and ‘habits’ were the key notions. It became known as the ‘S-O-S (Structural-Oral-SituationaP) Method’,58 a label which announced its close links with the Palmer-Hornby tradition. However, in an Indian context its teaching techniques were largely unfamiliar and required a considerable amount of in-service training before the approach could really get off the ground. (One well-known scheme known as ‘The Madras Snowball’ used a ‘rolling’ model designed to reach a large number of teachers quickly).59 Eventually the S-O-S became the standard approach, but by the late 1970s many teachers were beginning to feel uneasy—pupils did not seem to be acquiring the promised ‘habits’, for instance, despite a considerable amount of drilling. One of the responses to this anxiety was an experiment which became known as ‘The Bangalore Project’ because of links with the Regional Institute of English in the city. Its official name, however, was the Communicational Teaching Project (CTP) using ‘communicational’ rather than ‘communicative’ because by 1979 the latter had accrued notional-functional connotations which did not suit the principles of the CTP. It began work in 1979 under the direction of N. S. Prabhu, the English Language Officer at the British Council, Madras, and continued to run until

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1984 with project groups in schools in Madras, Bangalore, and Cuddalore. Unfortunately, the arrangements originally made for assessing the project ran into difficulties with the result that most of the published comment on it is retrospective. As we said, the starting point for the CTP was dissatisfaction with the apparent failure of the SOS approach to live up to its promise to deliver grammatically cor­ rect (‘habitualized’) spoken English. After considerable discussion on the merits of a number of different alternatives, including for instance a version of the notionalfunctional syllabus, Prabhu and his South India team, who were influenced by the SLA arguments discussed earlier and their generativist background, became convinced that successful language acquisition was the outcome of cognitive processes engendered by the effort to communicate. In addition, the children in South India were unlikely to need English in the kind of social and personal con­ texts that functionalist approaches to language seemed to emphasize at the time. If they required English in the future at all, it would be in educational contexts with an intellectual bias rather than an affective one, which was in any case ad­ equately taken care of by the mother tongue. This insight proved to be the starting point for the definition of communication in the CTP. The children would be given a course in simple reasoning which used English as a medium rather in the same way as it had been used in the past for other school subjects (but it was not presented to the public in quite these terms in case it was misunderstood). The project team then set about devising sets of graded reasoning tasks, based on things like mental arithmetic, map reading, timetabling, using information deductively, solving ‘crimes’, puzzles, and so on which were familiar to the children, i.e. within their cognitive capacity, either from personal experience or from the rest of their schoolwork. The tasks, called ‘reasoning-gap activities’, were designed to set the children thinking and all of them had clear, unambiguous answers— a requirement which helps to explain Prabhu’s extensive use of arithmetic. He also set sequences of tasks in the same location, for example, a railway station, and tried to make each one a little more intellectually challenging than the one before. These sequences also helped to reduce the amount of new vocabulary which was taught as and when required— ‘attention to language forms is thus not intentional but incidental to perceiving, expressing and organizing meaning’.60 The essential feature of Prabhu’s approach is the theory that the ‘meaningfocused activity’ engendered by the tasks activates the cognitive processes responsible for language acquisition. As we saw earlier, Krashen said essen­ tially the same thing only in a stronger form because for him comprehension was enough on its own, and expression was an optional extra. Prabhu did not make this distinction. It needs to be said, however, that in most classrooms around the world, and India is no exception, there are too many children for any one of them to produce very much language, so comprehension (in a broad sense to include ‘following the lesson’, ‘paying close attention’, etc.) must be the keystone of any theory of classroom-based language acquisition.

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Figure 20.1 N. S. Prabhu has been a distinguished m em ber o f the English language teaching community in India fo r many years. In 1979 he started the Communicational Teaching Project (known outside India as ‘The Bangalore Project’) designed to teach English through the use o f classroom tasks follow ing a ‘procedural’ rather than a linguistic syllabus. His w ork attracted considerable attention and its lasting influence can be seen in the continuing interest in task-based language learning.

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But comprehension sharpened by the possibility of having to respond later is a rather more focused activity than comprehension for its own sake. Although there have been no further projects comparable to Bangalore (it is a demanding approach which requires very inventive teachers), it has not been without influence, and tasks have since become a familiar resource in language classrooms. But courses consisting solely of tasks following what Prabhu called a ‘Procedural Syllabus’61 are difficult to fit into structured education systems. Assessment is particularly complicated, and there is also the question of the teacher’s self-image. Being task-masters is not quite the role that most teachers have in mind when they set out to get themselves qualified in English. Prabhu later wrote an account of his work (1987) which made it clear that the children in the project, some of whom were complete beginners, had enjoyed the novelty of the project courses and had learnt English at least as well as their peers following more orthodox programmes and in some respects, notably listening comprehension, better. With hindsight, Bangalore was rather unlucky to be cast in the role of an ‘experiment’ without having all the (expensive) resources needed to carry this role through to the end, but on a broader view there is little doubt that the project was among the most innovative of the post-war period and the part it played in promoting discus­ sion on the basics of language teaching and learning gave it a continuing importance for the profession as a whole.

Conclusion The communicative approach promised to make language learning more ‘real’. Has it succeeded? On the surface the answer certainly seems to be ‘yes’. Foreign language courses are much more sensitive to the reported needs of their learners than they were in the past, and modern technologies have made it possible to bring the real world (or, more accurately, images of it) into lan­ guage classrooms on an unprecedented scale. In fact, the ‘specific purpose’ dimension of CLT has made learning foreign languages for professional or educational reasons a very much more efficient and worthwhile process than it used to be even twenty years ago. Despite this progress, however, the questions that were raised when it began remain largely unresolved, the most serious being the absence of a coherent theory of learning. In practice this has meant that courses in the communicative mould have been free to adopt any pedagogical model they choose without fear of infringing any accepted principles of procedure. This makes for great variety in teaching materials and classroom activities. In our account we have included Prabhu and to a lesser extent Krashen under the general rubric of ‘communication’ and both are legitimate choices if our concern is with the role of communication in language learning.

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However, as we have seen, there is little in common between the psycholinguistic approaches of these two enterprises and the sociolinguistic founda­ tions of CLT orthodoxy. This reflects post-Chomskyan linguistics well enough, but ultimately it is unsatisfactory.

Notes 1 Widdowson (1972), quoted in Brumfit and Johnson (eds. 1979:119). 2 These and similar issues were taken up by many people including in particular John Searle (1969). 3 For ‘language functions’, see van Ek and Alexander (1980: 26-8, 43-51) and for ‘categories of communicative function’, Wilkins (1976: 41-54). 4 Jakobson’s ‘Closing statement: linguistics and poetics’. In Sebeok (ed.) (1960: 353-7). 5 The model is discussed in some detail in Hymes’s ‘The Ethnography of Speaking’ (1968), see especially pp. 115-24, a paper dedicated to Jakobson. On the question of multi-functionalism, Hymes says: ‘Jakobson’s way of handling this is to consider that all types of function are always compresent, and to see a given speech event as characterized by a particular hierarchy of functions’ (p.120). 6 Halliday (1973: Chapter 2, also 96ff). . 7 See Joseph (2002). In Chapter 5 Joseph traces the academic history of sociolinguistics back to the early 1940s and particularly to the work of Paul H. Furfey (1896-1992) who designed the first course in ‘The Sociology of Language’ in 1943 and whose early publications (1944) included topics such as ‘The sociological implications of sub-standard English’ and ‘Men’s and women’s languages’. He also notes the first use of the term in the work of T. C. Hodson (not ‘Hudson’) in 1939. 8 ‘On communicative competence’: excerpts in Pride and Holmes (eds. 1972: 2 6 9 -9 3 ) and also in Brumfit and Johnson (eds. 1979: 5-26). 9 Chomsky (1965: 4). 10 See Brumfit and Johnson (eds. 1979: 15). 11 For example, Savignon (1972). 12 Harris (1952: 3). 13 Widdowson (1978: 29). 14 Halliday and Hasan (1976:11). 15 See Spolsky (1995: Chapter 19). See Chapter 12 for the first appearance of the Cambridge Syndicate (the UCLES acronym is of course modern). 16 Chomsky (1966), quoted in Allen and Corder (eds. 1973:236-7). 17 Schools Council (1969). 18 The project was funded by the Schools Council 1968-72, See Schools Council Working paper 29 (Evans/Methuen Educational, 1970). The kit, published in 1972, consisted of four boxed components: Listening with Understanding, Concept Building, Communication, and a D ialect Kit.

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20 21 22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

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The Communication component included some of the earliest examples of what became known later as ‘information gap’ activities. The use of the terms ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ is an indirect reference to the work of Bernstein whose writing inspired the research which led to Concept 7-9. Bernstein (1971) is a common source reference. See Nelson, T. (publ. 1980 onwards). IRAL, V/4:161-70. Also, Corder (1981: 5-13). Chomsky (1965: 32-3). As we saw in Chapter 19, the behaviourist basis of contrastive analysis led to the claim that linguistic differences between first and second lan­ guages would cause predictable learning problems because the learner’s existing habits would automatically interfere with acquiring new ones. Error analysis, however, showed that the same errors could be made by learners speaking very different mother tongues, which suggested that the difficulties which led to errors were intrinsic to the language being learnt, and there was nothing ‘automatic’ about the learner’s attempts to discover how the new system worked. Corder (1981: 8-9). Corder (198 1 :1 0 3-6). The importance of non-linguistic information in child language acquisi­ tion was raised in Macnamara, J. (1972), and discussed in Donaldson (1978:36-7). For example, Krashen (1985). Prabhu (1987:17). Jespersen (1924: 55). Republished by Pergamon Press in 1980 as T hreshold L evel English by J. A. van Ek and L. G. Alexander. French: Un niveau-seuil by D. Coste et ale, Spanish: JJn nivel um bral by P. J. Slagter; German: Kontaktschwelle, Deutsch als Frem dsprache by M. Baldegger et al.; and Italian: Livello Soglia by N. Galli de Paratesi, Strasbourg: Council of Europe. From Trim’s introduction to Trim et al. (1973: 17). Reprinted in Brumfit and Johnson (eds. 1979:100). For example, van Ek (1975/1980). See Trim, Foreword to van Ek (1975), p.ii. Reprinted in van Ek and Alexander (1980: x). See, for instance, Harding et al. (1980) and Clark (1987). Van Ek and Alexander (1980: 56, 66, 67). Smith (1999: 37, 47). West (1926a: Chapter 5). Ibid.: 133. Ibid.: 305n. Ibid.: 203. Ibid.: 268.

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43 C. K. Ogden, prefatory Note to Salzedo (1935:1). Presumably ‘have been building up’ is Basic for ‘have developed’, but ‘respected by their secre­ taries’ is very curious. 44 Salzedo (1935: 74-5). 45 See also Flood and West (1950). 46 Makerere (1961:19-20). 47 Gokak was the Director of the Central Institute of English in Hyderabad, 48 Palmer (ed. 1968: 207). 49 R. D. Huddleston, R. A. Hudson, E. O. Winter, and A. Henrici at the Communication Research Centre, University College, London. 50 Stern et al. (1984). 51 Allen and Widdowson (1978: 59-60). See Allen and Widdowson (1974/1978). 52 See Bates (1978) for a description of the project. 53 John Moore and H. G. Widdowson (eds.). Titles: Concepts in Use (1979), Exploring Functions (1979), Discovering Discourse (1979), and D iscourse in Action (1980), all published by Oxford University Press. 54 See The British Council (1980). 55 See Nelson (1980). 56 In a contribution to a Conference on English Teaching Abroad at the Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington in 1959, R. Mackin (who had worked in Dacca himself in the 1950s) remarked that West’s long-term influence had been ‘slight’, noting that ‘it may be that if you go away from a country . . . the whole thing just disintegrates’ (Conference Report, p. 145). 57 See India (1967: Chapter 2). The ‘three-language formula’ was designed to ensure that everyone learnt Hindi, English and a regional language, bui it also allowed for Sanskrit and Persian to be taught to those who alread) spoke Hindi (India 1967:13). See also Chapter 19. 58 Prabhu (1987: Chapter 2). 59 The scheme, which was officially known as The Madras English Lan­ guage Teaching Campaign, was supposed to reach 27,000 teachers altogether. See Smith (1962). 60 Prabhu (1987: 27). 61 Ibid.: Chapter 5. See also Johnson (1 9 82:135-44).

21

A perspective on recent trends

A historical account is never just the recording of events. It also involves reporting on them, aligning them in different ways and assigning them signi­ ficance. In short, history involves interpretation. The preceding chapters of this book have recorded how different ideas about language teaching in general, and English teaching in particular, have emerged, flourished, and declined over time, but they have also traced how these ideas follow certain directions, are influenced by undercurrents of tendency. This present chapter also seeks to identify such underlying trends and influences, but does so with a different emphasis. Rather than attempt to pass under detailed review devel­ opments in English teaching that have taken place over the past twenty years or so, it focuses attention on the underlying trends and tendencies themselves. In this respect this chapter is far less comprehensive in coverage than the rest of this book. It is less of a record of the events of the recent past than an interpretation of them. At a very general level, one can see the different ideas and approaches that have been traced in this history as ways of dealing with two fundamental considerations which need to be taken into pedagogic account in deciding on any particular design of language instruction. One of these has to do with the definition of purpose, what kind of language knowledge or ability constitutes the goal that learners are to achieve at the end of the course. The other concerns the process of learning, with what kind of student activity is most effective as the means to that end. The history of English language teaching can be seen as a succession of different ways of conceptualizing purpose and process, and crucially, how they relate to each other. I will take it that the continuation of this history into the last twenty years or so can be seen in the same way. In the context of formal schooling, ideas about what purpose a course of English is meant to serve will relate to what is seen as its educational function as a subject on the curriculum, and this will, of course, influence what aspects of the language are focused on. A traditional view is that the primary purpose in studying a language, English or any other, is to gain access to its literature. Another is that the language itself is a proper object of study, something, rather like history or geography, that students should know about as part of their general education. As we have seen in earlier chapters, however, purpose has also been defined in more utilitarian terms as having to

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do with practical proficiency, and it is this view, of course, that currently predominates in the profession. Here, we might say, the emphasis shifts from language study, the acquiring of knowledge about language as an end in itself, to language learning, which involves acquiring the ability to actually use the language, and where knowing about it, if considered at all, is seen only as a means towards this end. However the purpose is defined, the question arises as to what is essential to it, what features of the language it is of prime importance to teach. This is a pedagogic question, but the answer to it has to a considerable derive depended on what linguists have had to say about what is primary abou: language from their point of view. Thus when phonetics was in the ascend­ ancy at the end of the nineteenth century, it became, as Henry Sweet pm it, ‘the indispensable foundation of the study of our own and foreign languages’. One might argue that while this may be true if our purpose is to study a foreign language so as to know about it, it is less obvious ili.it phonetics is indispensable if we want to learn it as a mode of behaviour, it is not easy to see, for example, where phonetics would figure in the proposals put forward by Michael West for developing the reading ability in Beug.il (see Chapter 18). And even when spoken ability is the objective, there is nun\ a course designed to develop this ability these days which, for better or tor worse, dispenses with phonetics altogether. When, subsequently, gramm.iiical structure was focused on as central to language study, this in turn w.is deemed to be the indispensable foundation for ELT course design. In more recent years, there has been a further shift in focus, away from the formal properties of the linguistic system conceived of as mental constructs, to the way language functions communicatively in contexts of use, from I (internal­ ized) Language (as Chomsky puts it) to E (externalized) Language.1 It would seem obvious that the students’ objective should be to learn the essentials of the language, to invest in what is indispensable for the develop­ ment of proficiency. The problem is to know how far what is essential on educational or pedagogic grounds in relation to course objectives corresponds with what is identified as essential in linguistic theory and description. ELT has always tended to defer to linguistics in defining its purpose, but the question is how far such deference is justified.2 Whereas purpose has to do with how language is conceived, process involves a consideration of the nature of language learning. Here too, of course, different theories suggest different directions to take. If there is compelling psycholinguistic evidence that indicates that certain conditions will facilitate language learning and others will inhibit it, then it would seem obvious that teachers should seek to replicate the former in class and avoid the latter at all costs. But in spite of extensive research on second language acquisition, such compelling evidence is hard to find, and this (in part at least) is because the process of learning would seem to depend on what aspect of the language is focused on.

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The various approaches to English language teaching that have been recorded in this history, then, differ in the way they define what aspects of the language students should be induced to learn on a course, and how this learn­ ing should be achieved. It is not surprising to find therefore that in one of the most influential recent accounts of these approaches,3 the principles of each one are described by reference to a theory of language (which has to do with purpose) and a theory of learning (which has to do with process). And recent developments can be described in similar terms. The first consideration focuses attention on the objectives of a language course. What is it that learners should be expected to attain at the end of it? What kind of English, and what aspects of the language, should constitute the content of a course to be taught and tested? It is generally taken as selfevident that learners are to be prepared for some eventual engagement with the language as it normally occurs, at least in some modes and domains of use. This being so, course objectives need to be set to provide for such an eventuality, directly or indirectly. Traditionally, the indirect approach was favoured: the idea was that the purpose of a course was to induce students to learn the underlying system of the language which, as a communicative resource, would serve as an investment for subsequent use. More recently, of course, with the advent of the communicative approach (see Chapter 20), the assumption was that if students were to put their knowledge to commun­ icative use, they would have to be taught directly how to do it.4 In the case of ESP, the direct approach looks to be the obvious one to take since what eventuality the students are being prepared to cope with is given in advance and the specification of objectives therefore would seem to be a relatively straightforward matter. The purpose of the students is to learn the English, in spoken or written mode, that is appropriate in specific domains of academic or occupational use. In the early days of ESP, as we have seen, what kind of English was used in such domains, and to what communicative effect, was often a matter of informed, or inspired, guesswork (see Chapter 20). Over the past ten years or so, there have been two developments in language description which allow for a much more precise account of the language of different domains of use, and so provide for a more exact specification of ESP course objectives. One of these is genre analysis.5 A genre, as defined by Swales, the principal pioneer of this kind of analysis as it relates to ESP, is a set of conventions for use which typifies the communicative activity of a particular discourse community. Such conventions are not only a matter of what lexical or gram­ matical features occur as textual markers of register, but, more crucially, how these are put to pragmatic use in managing an interaction, structuring a description, conducting an argument, and so on. Genre analysis provides a more comprehensive description of the kind of language ability that students need to acquire to meet their purposes. But at the same time, it leads to a change of conception as to what these purposes are.

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Genre is not a kind of linguistic patterning, but a social construct associated with a particular community, so ESP is no longer simply a matter of getting students to learn specific features of English that typically occur in different kinds of text (specialist terminology, for example, or commonly occurring grammatical structures) but of socializing them into different discourses: the socio-cultural modes of thought and behaviour that characterize a commun­ ity. Genre conventions are effectively entry conditions for membership of a particular discourse community so one might argue that an ESP course whose purpose is to teach students how to conform to them is not so much concerned with language instruction as social indoctrination. This raises a number of issues of wider educational significance which relate not just to ESP but, as we shall see, to English teaching in general. One such issue has to do with whether it is desirable to define objectives in reference to specific purposes at all. One might argue that the more specific­ ally designed a course is to meet a set of particular utilitarian requirements, the more confined it will be in educational scope. This is the concern expressed by Edward Said in his account of a visit to an unnamed university in the Middle East: The reason for the large numbers of students taking English was given frankly by a somewhat disaffected instructor: many of the students proposed to end up working for airlines, or banks, in which English was the worldwide lingua franca. This all but terminally consigned English to the level of a technical language stripped of expressive and aesthetic characteristics and denuded of any critical or self-conscious dimension. You learned English to use computers, respond to orders, transmit telexes, decipher manifests, and so forth. That was all. (Said 1994: 369) Said objects to this specificity of purpose on educational grounds: as he sees it, the cultural and conceptual significance of English is drastically dimin­ ished and the language is simply reduced to a rudimentary communicative tool. There is an issue here, of course, of much wider socio-political import as to whether all education, in whatever subject, should be accountable only to what utilitarian use you can put it to. But apart from the question of educa­ tional impoverishment, there is also a pedagogic objection to this kind of reductionist specificity, and one which was voiced in the early days of CLT. Critics pointed out that courses designed to enable learners to meet immedi­ ate communicative needs, usually assumed to be in respect of face to face interaction, tended to focus on a limited range of routine and rudimentary social purposes. As a result, learners were rehearsed in a kind of performance repertoire, a facility too facile, to the neglect of a more comprehensive com­ petence which would serve as a more secure investment for subsequent use. What CLT courses typically had in mind were the needs that people would have, as tourists for example, for English in service transactions and casual

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encounters. These are relatively predictable, and sometimes so fixed as to be formulaic. J. R. Firth once described spoken interaction as a ‘roughly pre­ scribed social ritual’7 but in some cases, the ritual is prescribed very precisely indeed. Flight attendants, hotel receptionists, and telephone operators at ‘call centres’, for example, are trained to conform to routine patterns of interac­ tion which leave little room for individual initiative.8 The language of ESP courses specifically designed to serve such purposes would indeed, with a vengeance, be ‘stripped of expressive and aesthetic characteristics and denuded of any critical or self-conscious dimension’. In the design of custom-made courses of this kind we can see how English language teaching (in common with many other things), is influenced by globalization, and its socio-economic consequences in the contemporary world.9 The more precisely specifications can be set and met, the more prac­ tically efficient and cost effective the course will be. What we see here is what Fairclough has referred to as ‘marketization’. This he describes as: the reconstruction on a market basis of domains which were once relat­ ively insulated from markets, economically, in terms of cultural values and identities. (Fairclough 1995:19) Of course, as earlier chapters have shown, the commercial exploitation of English has a long and honourable history, and has indeed contributed substantially to pedagogic developments. The difference lies in the kind of consumer needs that the current reconstruction of English as a marketable commodity is designed to meet. Increasingly, it would seem, this is likely to exclude the ‘cultural values and identities’, or ‘expressive and aesthetic characteristics’ that have been traditionally associated with the language quite simply because these are now seen as surplus to practical requirement. One may, like Said, deplore this neglect of cultural and spiritual values. Or one may, with (or without) regret, accept it as a fact of life and a price one has to pay for the material benefits of the consumer society. One way in which English teaching has moved over recent years, then, is towards the provision of restricted or reduced language to meet immediate utilitarian needs, which is, to some extent at least, open to the charge that it leads to the kind of depersonalization and impoverishment which Said deplores. Another way it has moved is in some ways the very opposite, and this relates to the second development in linguistic description that I referred to earlier which also comes about as a consequence of global changes brought about by electronic technology. For this technology has not only had an impact on the modes of language use and communication which have become prominent in contemporary life, but on ways in which the language so used is recorded and analysed. The most striking development in linguistic description over the past twenty years has been the use of the computer to collect and analyse vast corpora of actually occurring language data. The

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main impetus for this development came from the initiative taken by John Sinclair at the University of Birmingham (see Chapter 18). He set up the first major computerized corpus of English, the outcome of which was the COBUILD dictionary, published with himself as editor-in-chief.10 This was a strikingly innovative work: the first monolingual learners’ dictionary based entirely on the computer analysis of a corpus, and designed in accordance with its findings. As far as ESP is concerned, the advantage of this kind of quantitative analy­ sis is that can be applied to particular domains of use to give an exact specifi­ cation of their textual features.11 This, however, is not the only, nor indeed the principal, advantage that can be claimed for corpus analysis. It can also reveal common features of textual patterning that characterize the idiom of the language in general across a wide range of different domains of use. Now that the computer can make such information readily available, linguists, as corpus analysts point out, are no longer dependent on unreliable sources like their own introspection or the elicitation of native informants to establish linguistic facts: they can be adduced from the actual data of what people pro­ duce. Corpus linguistics, it is claimed, can reveal real English, as distinct from some speculative substitute. The perceived inadequacies of linguistic description before the advent of the computer were, of course, carried over into the design of language courses, as John Sinclair noted twenty years ago: We are teaching English in ignorance of a vast amount of basic fact. This is not our fault, but it should not inhibit the absorption of new material. (Sinclair 1985: 252) The past twenty years has seen a radical absorption of such material into works of reference for learners of English. The first edition of the COBUILD dictionary referred to earlier was published in 1987, and incorporated the vast amount of basic fact he refers to that corpus analysis reveals: fact about fre­ quency of occurrence and patterns of collocational co-occurrence that linguists and language teachers alike had been hitherto ignorant of. Other works of reference have followed suit, and there is now an abundance of dictionaries and grammatical descriptions which are corpus-based and which chart the patterns of the contemporary usage of English. Teachers need no longer remain in ignorance of the nature of real English. As Sinclair foresaw: Since our view of the language will change profoundly, we must expect substantial influence on the specification of syllabuses, design of materials, and choice of method. (Sinclair 1985: 252) Thus corpus findings have found their way into teaching materials, and pro­ posals have been made for corpus-based course design. The most innovative of these have shifted the focus of pedagogic attention from grammatical to

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lexical features, thus adjusting to what is perhaps the most striking finding of corpus analysis, namely the primacy of lexis as a determining factor in the patterning of usage. With English that is real in the sense of being actually attested in native-speaker behaviour it turns out not only that there are regular interdependencies across lexical items which are not mediated by grammar, but that grammatical regularities are themselves dependent on the lexis they are associated with. Corpus findings suggest, therefore, that in the lexico-grammar of the language, grammar is subservient to lexis, and not, as grammarians in the structuralist tradition have tended to suppose, the other way round, so it would seem reasonable to design teaching materials to reflect this fact.12 Corpus linguistics has undoubtedly brought new insights into the nature of language in use, and has exercised an enormous influence over recent years on pedagogic thinking about what should constitute the objective for English language teaching in general. McCarthy expresses the new orthodoxy when he says: The language of the corpus is, above all, real, and what is it that all language learners want, other than ‘real’ contact with the target language. (McCarthy 2 0 0 1:128) The case for ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ language is, on the face of it, very appealing and difficult for teachers to resist. It is proposed on the authority of linguists, to which, as has already been mentioned, ELT methodology has traditionally tended to defer. And who, after all, would want to say they are teaching unreal English. As Carter puts it: The word ‘real’ invariably carries positive associations. People believe they want or are told they want, or indeed actually want what is real, authentic and natural in preference to what is unreal, inauthentic and unnatural. (Carter 1998:43) There are, however, a number of implications arising from the advocacy of real language which are not so unequivocally positive, and which relate to other lines of thinking which have been influential in ELT over recent years. We should note, to begin with, that the real language drawn from corpus descriptions which is prescribed for ELT in dictionaries, grammars, and teaching materials is restricted to standard native-speaker usage. It is taken as self-evident that it is this usage which learners need to conform to. But a pedagogy which privileges the norms of the Inner Circle, in Kachru’s terms,13 can be seen as a means of perpetuating the hegemonic control of its speakers, and in effect of serving the interests of linguistic imperialism. Phillipson has argued in his revisionist version of the history of ELT that English was used for colonial domination of subject people as a matter of deliberate policy, and that it continued to be so used in post-colonial times.14 Inner Circle native speakers, and particularly those of the United States, it is argued, continue

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the tradition of using their language to exercise hegemonic domination, not only, or even principally, by direct military or administrative means, but through the control of the media, and of economic, cultural, and commercial globalization. In this view, to promote the norms of usage of the native­ speaking Inner Circle is in effect to collude, wittingly or unwittingly, in this continuing domination. But quite apart from such socio-political considerations, there are also grounds for questioning the practical justification for insisting on setting native-speaker norms as learner objectives, since most current uses of the language are for international communication between people who are not native speakers—a trend that looks likely to continue15—and effective commu­ nication in such lingua franca uses of English does not, it would appear, depend on conformity to native-speaker norms.16 This suggests that we need to recon­ sider the notion of communicative competence, routinely proposed as the objective for learners. Communicative competence is, following Hymes, taken to involve using the language as appropriate to context. If the contexts in ques­ tion are associated with native-speaker communities, then appropriateness involves fine-tuning language to the socio-cultural conventions that define acceptable behaviour in these communities, and these will generally include adherence to correctness and to the kind of patterns of idiomatic usage that cor­ pus descriptions reveal with such clarity. But in the contexts of lingua franca use among non-native speakers, such conventions, even if known, no longer apply. Since native-speaker norms are not in force, the criterion for effective use is not so much appropriateness as adequacy to purpose, and users can be accounted communicatively competent to the extent that they meet this criterion. An alternative to defining ELT objectives in terms of language which is socio-culturally appropriate in native-speaker communities would be to define them in terms of language which is adequate for international contexts of use. Jenkins makes the comment: There is really no justification for doggedly persisting in referring to an item as ‘an error’ if the vast majority of the world’s L2 English speakers produce and understand it. Instead it is for L I speakers to move their receptive goal posts and adjust their expectations as far as international (but not intrana­ tional) uses of English are concerned . . . [This] also drastically simplifies the pedagogic task by removing from the syllabus many time-consuming items which are either unteachable or irrelevant for EIL. (Jenkins 20 00:160) Jenkins is referring here to the phonological features of English, but the same point applies to lexico-grammatical features as well.17 The question arises, of course, as to what these items are which figure in the use of English as an international lingua franca, and a good deal of descriptive work will need to be done before there can be any reliable guide to what might be specified as teachable and relevant.18

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Recent years, then, have seen signs of an increasing recognition that the nature of English as an international language calls for a reconsideration of the assumption that learner objectives must necessarily be predicated on native-speaker norms. The arguments for lingua franca English link interest­ ingly with issues relating to ESP that were discussed earlier. In both cases the aim in view is some kind of reduction of the language in the interests of pedagogic efficiency and more effective communicative use. With ESP this takes the form of specific selection of particular linguistic features to meet the needs of a restricted range of functions. With the lingua franca proposals, there is no suggestion that any reduction should be imposed, but that the modified forms of the language which are actually in use should be recog­ nized as a legitimate development of English as an international means of communication. The functional range of the language is not thereby restricted, but on the contrary enhanced, for it enables its users to express themselves more freely without having to conform to norms which represent the socio- cultural identity of other people. As we have seen, one objection to insisting on conformity to native­ speaker norms is that to do so sets goals for learners which are both unreal­ istic and unnecessary. But it is not only that such insistence is open to objection on practical pedagogic grounds. It also has ideological implications of a more general educational significance. For it can also be seen as the authoritarian imposition of socio-cultural values which makes learners sub­ servient and prevents them from appropriating the language as an expression of their own identity. As such, it constitutes a kind of continuing colonization which has to be resisted.19 Such an appropriation of the language by different communities and its consequent divergence from established native-speaker norms has generally been conceded as legitimate as far as Kachru’s Outer Circle domains are concerned.20 The same concession has not been accorded to the English used for international communication as a lingua franca in the Expanding Circle, which is what essentially accounts for its global spread, on the grounds that here it is only normative control that can ensure the maintenance of continuing intelligibility. Nevertheless, one can argue that the same principle applies to both domains of use, and that to recognize the independent and international status of lingua franca English, and remove from it the stigma of inferiority, is to uncouple the language from its primary socio-cultural communities and so allow it to be freely associated with other values. In this way, the dominance of English as a global means of commu­ nication does not have to result in domination by imposing a kind of linguistic and cultural servitude. Even so, to the extent that English encroaches on domains of use which were previously the preserve of other languages, its spread poses a threat to linguistic diversity. Whatever materialistic advantages English might seem to offer (and these may sometimes be an illusion), its acquisition could be at considerable socio-cultural cost. The fact is that, whether or not one takes

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the conspiracy view that the spread of English is deliberately induced by commercial promotion and neo-colonial policy, this spread, dramatically accelerated by developments in electronic communication, has drastically laid other less privileged languages to waste.21 English is implicated in globaliza­ tion as both cause and effect, for good or ill, and this clearly raises issues of an ethical and political kind about pedagogic responsibility that cannoi. o,should not, simply be ignored.22 ELT has, in this sense, lost its innocence. There are different views as to what factors are involved in the spread of English as a global language and how far these are matters of historical hap­ penstance or of deliberate policy.23 There are different views too about its effects on human welfare, whether it offers an opportunity or poses a threat, and whether and how the spread can or should be controlled or contained.24 One thing, however, seems certain: English is no longer the language it was in the days of Hornby or even in the days of the Threshold Level. It has changed, and changed quite radically to become, for better or worse, not just an inter­ national language but the international language, the language of wider com­ munication, the global language and the language of globalization. This clearly has implications for how we design our pedagogy for the teaching of the language,25 including what course objectives we set for our students to achieve. But there are implications too for the other participant role in the classroom context: the teacher. The questioning of the validity of basing ELT objectives on the norms of native-speaker usage leads naturally to a ques­ tioning of another well-established assumption: namely that native-speaker teachers are necessarily the most competent to teach the subject. Even if one accepts the dubious proposition that native-speaker competence constitutes an over-riding qualification for teaching a language, if what ELT teachers teach is no longer exclusively their language, then the basis of their authority would seem to disappear. Over recent years, the relative advantages of native and non-native teachers has been much discussed.26 It is not only a matter of calling into question how reliable native speakers can be as informants about a language no longer their own, but of how far their linguistic experience qualifies them in their pedagogic role as instructors. Such a role involves the devising of an effective methodology whereby objectives, however defined, are to be achieved. This brings us to the second main consideration referred to at the beginning of this chapter, namely what has to be done in class to promote an effective process of learning. What this history is concerned with is how English has been variously conceived as a subject to be taught as a foreign or other language. This subject, ELT, covers both EFL and ESL (English as Foreign Language, English as a Second Language), distinguished in reference to the context and purpose for which the language is being learnt (see Chapter 19). A term of comparable generality to ELT is ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages), an acronym favoured in the United States.27 This is more exact than ELT in that

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it specifies who the language is being taught to. But it can also be taken as misleading in that it would seem to imply that there is an English to be taught which can be independently defined without reference to these other speakers. This would seem to lend support to the assumption, discussed in the preceding paragraphs, that there is a unitary norm, established on native­ speaker authority, which represents the objective for learning. If one inter­ prets the acronym as meaning ‘English for Speakers of Other Languages’, this allows for the possibility of defining the objective as a kind of English, not necessarily in conformity with native norms, that is best suited to learner needs. But it also allows for the possibility of defining the subject by taking into account the nature of particular groups of speakers of other languages as learners: their interests, motivations, dispositions, and so on. In this case teaching English for speakers of other languages calls for the pedagogic design of the language to promote the learning process in the most effective way. In respect to the preferred British acronym, the subject is then not English, as such, as it actually and naturally occurs in contexts of use, but English as a foreign language, and from the methodological point of view it is what makes the language foreign for learners that needs to be taken into account, and this foreigness will be different, of course, for different groups of learners. From this perspective, it is not the reality of language in contexts of native­ speaker use that pedagogy has to be primarily concerned with but the reality of the learning process in the context of the classroom. We return to the ques­ tion raised earlier about the pedagogic relevance of corpus descriptions of English. Reservations were expressed then about the validity of projecting learning objectives directly from such descriptions. But reservations have also been expressed about the prescription of ‘real’ language on pedagogic grounds.28 It was always recognized in earlier pre-computer days of language data collection that descriptive facts about language have always to be processed in reference to pedagogic factors for their relevance to be estab­ lished (see Chapter 18). Here we see an interesting example of historical dis­ continuity. Whereas, for example, there is a tendency in current thinking to suppose that descriptive findings about frequency must perforce be of peda­ gogic significance, the earlier pioneers (like West) recognized that this was but one factor, to be reconciled with others more immediate to the needs of classroom learning.29 As Cook points out: . . . there is already a wealth of long-standing ideas (dating back at least to the work of Palmer (1921) and West (1926) concerning the relationship between the frequency with which an item occurs and the point at which it should be taught—ideas which many corpus linguists, in their haste to advertise themselves as promulgating a totally new approach to lan­ guage, seem unaware. For example, an item may be frequent but limited in range, or infrequent but useful in a wide range of contexts. Or it may be

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infrequent but very useful, or appropriate for some pedagogic reason. These are factors beyond mere description. (Cook 2 0 0 3 :109) The conflation of descriptive fact with pedagogic factor is particularly evi­ dent in the precepts that Sinclair has proposed that English teachers should follow, for these, as he acknowledges, . . . centre on data, and arise from observations about the nature of language. They are not concerned with psychological or pedagogical approaches to language teaching. (Sinclair 1997: 30) The first of these precepts is: present real examples only. Two issues arise from this precept of particular relevance to recent devel­ opments in ELT methodology. The first has to do with what is meant by ‘real’ and the second with what is meant by ‘examples’. With regard to the first, the point to be made is that language is real to users only to the extent that they can key it into contexts of shared knowledge and cultural assumption, contexts which learners will, of course, generally be unfamiliar with. This reality is not captured by corpus descriptions: what they provide is information about the texts that language users produce in the process of communication. The complex contextual conditions which attended their production (and made them real for users) is not recorded, and even if they were, obviously could not be replicated. So if these textual facts are to be made real for learners, contextual conditions of some kind have to be reconstituted in class. But such conditions, the contrivance of which has always been part of conventional pedagogic practice, may well be very differ­ ent from those which are attendant on ‘authentic’ uses of language. What matters is that they are effective in motivating the learner to engage with the language in some purposeful way. So in pedagogy it is not a matter of presenting language which is real for users but that which can be made real for learners. This does not mean that what is revealed to be real in terms of actual usage is ruled out, but only that its reality for learners has to be established: it cannot simply be taken on trust. The pedagogic factor takes precedence over the descriptive fact. And so it does in respect to the second key term in this precept: ‘example’. The language presented in class has not only to get the learner engaged. It also has to promote learning. That is its specific purpose. If this purpose is to be met, some generalities have to be drawn from the particular items of data which are provided. It is not enough to present language that learners can engage with, but it must also be language they can learn from. What corpus descriptions can provide are samples of actually occurring language. But clearly if learners are to learn from them, they have to go beyond the sam­ ples as such and infer what they are examples of. This has always been taken

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as a pedagogic axiom. Although some samples may be presented to be memorized as such, as in the case of formulaic phrases and fixed routines, generally speaking the assumption is that learners are meant to go beyond the actual language presented and abstract generalities from it. In the parlance of SLA, if there is no intake beyond the input, learning cannot really be said to have taken place at all. One might go so far as to say that the history of ELT methodology is an account of the different ways that have been proposed for inducing learners to generalize by inferring what it is that it is exemplified in the language they are presented with, or they manipulate, or put to use in classroom activities. Thus in structuralist language teaching, the language samples provided are such as to make their example status quite explicit, hence their remoteness from the reality of actual use. In communicative language teaching, on the other hand, the emphasis shifts to the presentation of samples of language in as close an approximation to real use as possible on the assumption that learners would infer examples from them without explicit direction. The striving for meaning would itself be sufficient, some CLT advocates argued, to activate the necessary process of learning by abstraction (see Chapter 15). This difference is a methodological one and concerns the learning process. But it relates also to what was said earlier about purpose in respect of course objectives. I pointed out then that however course objectives were defined, the assumption was that they would serve to prepare students to deal with the language as it actually occurs in the real world outside the classroom. The structuralist approach does this indirectly by investment, by getting students to internalize encoded regularities as a resource. That is to say, they focus on examples. The advocacy of real language takes a direct approach by present­ ing students with samples on the assumption that not only will these serve the purpose but also the process of learning. I have already suggested that the process will only be served if students can be induced somehow to infer what the samples exemplify, or otherwise they are simply being rehearsed to pro­ duce fixed phrases. But there are problems with the purpose side as well. For these samples are, of course, contextually specific and belong to particular uses of language by particular groups of people, usually selected groups of native speakers. But the earlier discussion about the global spread of English and the validity and feasibility of requiring students to conform to native­ speaker norms prompts us to question whether the students’ purposes are really best served by acquiring a repertoire of such usage. They would surely be better prepared to cope with unpredictable eventualities if they were equipped with the more general capability that the indirect approach takes as its purpose to teach. Looked at in this light, a direct approach which deals with ‘real’ language is actually less realistic than the indirect approach of the kind proposed by Hornby both in respect to process and purpose. Indeed, one might argue that focusing on examples which are not tied to specific samples of ‘real’ language, the indirect approach prepares the learners to

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engage with, and learn from, a wide range of actual language use without being confined to the specifics of any particular native-speaker norm i behaviour. In this respect, such an approach can be said to bring purpose and process together in an integrated way. How generalizations can be made from particulars, how example can lv inferred from sample, has always been the crucial question in language peda­ gogy. In the most recent phase of ELT history, we see a continuation of these attempts to get learners to engage in this process. Both pedagogic experience and the findings of SLA research seemed to indicate fairly conclusively that such inference is not after all a direct corollary of realizing meaning, so that it does not follow as a necessary consequence of the learners’ sampling of lan­ guage. It needed to be deliberately induced by teacher intervention. It was not enough, it was suggested, that the language is experienced as communicate e behaviour, it had also to be noticed.30 But the noticing had to be such as ilot­ to undermine the normal functioning of language as purposeful communica­ tive activity. It could not be just the provision of examples after the manner of structuralist language teaching. Activities had to be devised that met the two requirements that were referred to earlier: on the one hand they had to be such as to have some appeal or purpose which made them real for the learner, and on the other hand they had to be such as to induce noticing. In short, language associated with these activities needed at the same time to have point as realization, and be pointed out as exemplification. An approach to ELT consisting of such activities has become prominent over the recent past under the name of task-based instruction (TBI). The notion, and the name, of task is, of course, not new. A distinction has long been made between exercises, which involve the solution of language prob­ lems (and are therefore focused on examples) and tasks, which involve the solution of problems by means of language. Such activities were widely pro­ moted in CLT and are the staple of many an ESP course.31 What is distinctive about TBI is that tasks are seen as central and not supportive activities: they are not just useful techniques, but constitutive principles of a new approach. In this respect they are historically linked to Prabhu’s Communicational Language Teaching project in South India (see Chapter 20). As such, the defining features of tasks have been subject to a much more exact pedagogic specification than existed hitherto.32 Furthermore, they are represented as having the theoretical and empirical sanction of psycholinguistic and SLA research.33 In view of the fact that TBI seems to have the credentials of both practical effectiveness and theoretical validity, it is not surprising that it has become the new ELT orthodoxy. That is not to say that it is not open to criticism.34 One difficulty is that in spite of the considerable literature published in the promotion of the approach, what actually constitutes a task, as distinct from other pedagogic activities, remains unclear. One distinctive feature that is regularly given is that tasks focus on meaning rather than form, whereas exercises do not. But

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exercises, even of the most traditional structuralist cut, do generally focus on meaning, but on semantic meaning, that which is encoded in the language. The meaning that the proponents of TBI have in mind is pragmatic meaning, that which is dependent on context. But this, of course, can be achieved with­ out paying much attention to the semantic specifics of the language, so the outcome of the task may actually not involve much in the way of the noticing that TBI is designed to promote. That hardy perennial of pedagogic problems remains unresolved: how to get learners engaged in natural communication while getting them at the same time to attend, unnaturally, to the linguistic resources that enable them to do so. Difficulties arise too with another defining feature of TBI, namely the requirement that the activity in which the learners are engaged should have a ‘real-world relationship’. This brings up again the issue that was discussed earlier about the nature and the pedagogic relevance of such reality. Activities can be designed in class which are real to learners to the extent that they find them purposeful and engaging, but such activities do not have to replicate what goes on in the real world (whoever’s real world this might be). On the contrary, it would appear that learners can make even the most apparently unreal language real for themselves by the play of the imagination. And by imaginative play.35 Language play, furthermore, to the extent that it calls for a motivated attention to formal features, might be a more effective way of learning from the language than using it to arrive at real-world outcomes which are not of any particular point or interest for the learners. So the realworld requirement in TBI, like the injunction to present real examples only, needs to be subjected to pedagogic evaluation. In actual practice, it is of inter­ est to note, the real-world relationship of many of the tasks proposed in TBI is somewhat tenuous.36 The recognition of the importance of language play can be seen as one aspect of a more general movement over the past quarter century to allow more leeway for learner initiative. The main impulse for this came from work done in the 1970s on programmes for autonomous language learning at the Centre de Recherches et d’Application Pedagogiques en Langues (CRAPEL) at the University of Nancy.37 One of the more recent developments along these lines is the design of self-access materials for computer assisted learning (CAL).38 These, it is worth noting, are often play-like activities directed at the learners’ discovery of features of the language itself, and would, in this respect, constitute exercises rather than tasks. But they would seem to be very effective in engaging the interest of learners, even though they cannot be said to have any very close resemblance to how language is used in the real world. How effective they are in activating the learning process is another matter. There are arguments that the very facility with which language can be accessed and manipulated reduces the necessary cognitive problem solving character of learning. Be that as it may, it is clear that, as with its use for the description of language, the computer has enormous potential for language

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teaching and learning.39 But in both cases, the question will be what pedagogic principles will need to be taken into account for this potential to be effectively, and beneficially realized. Ideas about learner autonomy have not only informed proposals for self-access but for self-assessment as well. The Council of Europe Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF),40 for example, includes in its specifications for a common design of language instruction a device which enables learners to assess for themselves what they ‘can do’ with the language they are learning by reference to a range of specified activ­ ities. The CEF framework is itself a development from earlier work done by the Council of Europe on The Threshold Level (see Chapter 20), and gener­ ally conforms to the same pedagogic principles. It is too soon to tell how far this more recent initiative for the regularizing, and regulating, of practices in foreign language teaching in Europe will have as great an effect on ELT as that of its predecessor. Its influence, however, is already apparent on curriculum design, and on the design of examinations—this latter being an area where the desirability of standard specifications is fairly easy to argue. How far they are desirable in other aspects of ELT is a different matter. And this brings us to a basic ques­ tion, touched on before, about the relationship between general policies and proposals and particular local interests. The CEF is, like its Threshold Level predecessor, based on the premise that all languages (in Europe at least) can, and should, be dealt with in the same way as subjects, fashioned to the same pedagogic design both in terms of the purposes and the processes of learning. Such a belief has much to commend it, of course, from the political and administrative point of view. Whether it is valid from a pedagogic and educational perspective, however, is open to question. With reference to the acronyms discussed earlier, it assumes that any language can be freely substituted for English in TEFL or TESOL: French (TFFL, TFSOL), German (TGFL, TGSOL), and so on. But this leaves out of account the varying role and status of different languages, the different purposes for which they might be learnt and how they are foreign or ‘other’ in different ways for different groups of learners. In short, the specifications proposed in the common framework are bound to have their shortcomings precisely because they are common. As specifications, they cannot take into consideration what is specific to particular teaching and learning situations. It would, of course, be unreasonable to expect that they should. That is not what they are designed to do. But in this respect the CEF project can be seen as symptomatic of a more general problem which has been touched on before in this chapter, and which comes up repeatedly, in different guises, through­ out this history. This is the problem of the relationship between global gener­ alizations and local circumstances, between specification and specificity. In ESP, as we saw earlier in this chapter, what is specified is the kind of language to be taught to meet particular objectives. Specification relates to

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the purpose, but not to the process of learning. The question arises as to how far it is possible to be specific about the process. All of the various approaches and methods that have been put forward and promoted throughout the history of ELT are based on the assumption that such specification is indeed possible, that there are precepts that all teachers should follow, method­ ological principles and procedures which apply, or should be made to apply, whatever the pedagogic circumstances. Many of these precepts, principles and procedures which are recommended as having global relevance claim credentials on the basis of findings from linguistic description or psycholinguistic research. Others are projections of practical experience in particular pedagogic contexts. But whatever their provenance and apparent validity, they are all to a degree hypothetical and speculative, general abstractions whose actual relevance to local circumstances can never be taken for granted. There is then always a gap between the different movements in the devel­ opment of ELT that have been described in these pages and what actually goes on in classrooms. The actuality of practice is for the most part unrecorded, and indeed to a large extent unaffected by the shifts of thinking that have been charted here. The usual way of looking at this disparity in the past has been to see actual practice as a constraint on the effective implemen­ tation of the proposals of expert opinion which needs to be overcome. Teachers, in this view, need to be coaxed, or even coerced, into changing their ways. More recently, however, a change in attitude has become evident. Increasingly, it would seem, it is being recognized that the local contexts of actual practice are to be seen not as constraints to be overcome but condi­ tions to be satisfied. Just as the language to be taught must be appropriate to the context of the classroom, so must the manner of teaching it, so local val­ ues and attitudes are now accorded respect in their own right, and not seen as rather irksome obstacles to the implementation of imported wisdom. What matters is that the pedagogy should be appropriate to local conditions.41 This also means, of course, that those who experience such conditions, who share the linguistic and cultural reality of the community the learners belong to, namely the non-native teachers of ELT, are particularly well placed to develop such an appropriate pedagogy. And these teachers have their own wisdom, their own cognitions which have to be understood and respected, rather than over-ridden by some supposedly superior expertise.42 This shift to localization can be seen as a kind of resistance to the forces of globalization and as a critical questioning of hegemonic authority which is evident in other domains of contemporary life: ELT engaged in its own crit­ ical deconstruction of the established order.43 But it can also be seen as a more recent version of issues first broached by West forty odd years ago when he discussed various ‘difficult circumstances’ in which English had to be taught.44 The difficulties that West had mainly in mind had to with material circumstances, inadequate accommodation, shortage of resources and so on, such as he had himself experienced in Bengal. The circumstances that are of

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A History o f English Language Teaching

current concern are of a different kind, and relate to socio-political and ethical questions that did not arise in the world of West and his contem­ poraries. Nevertheless, the problem remains in both cases of how, and how far, local circumstances need to be taken into account in the development of ] ! j . West’s own thinking about ELT was, of course, abstracted from his mv\p local experience in the Outer Circle India, as was Palmer’s from his experi­ ence in the Expanding Circle Japan, and that of Fries from his experience in the Inner Circle United States. History shows how precepts and principles are derived from particular local circumstances, and from particular claims and findings from disciplines outside pedagogy. The central question, then and now, is one of generalizability: the extent to which principles are, or can be made, relevant to different local contexts. The main difference perhaps is that these local contexts are now acknowledged, by some at least, to have a decis­ ive say in the matter. And as times change, so does the significance of the question, for though pertaining particularly to ELT, it also relates to matters of much wider and more pressing concern about the effects of globalization, which English is used so extensively to promote, and the preservation of diversity and local values.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5

6

7 8 9 10 11

Chomsky (1986). Widdowson (2003). Richards and Rodgers (2001). Note that I am using the term purpose here to refer to what is defined as course objectives, not to their desired effect or ultimate aims (see Widdowson 1983). Both direct and indirect approaches are intended to prepare students to deal with language in use. Their purposes were differ­ ent in the sense that the objective was to teach language as (actual) com­ munication in the former, for (potential) communication in the latter. Swales (1990); Bhatia (1993). There was also a separate development of ideas about genre influenced by systemic-functional linguistics and related to issues of literacy in Australian schools. See Reid (1987). The concept of communication itself in CLT tended to be reductionist. It was generally taken to mean reciprocal spoken interaction. The teaching of reading, for example, well established before the communicative era, was not considered to be concerned with communication, especially not if the reading was of literary texts. Firth (1957a). Cameron (2000). Block and Cameron (2002). The first edition of the Collins COBUILD dictionary was in 1987. The third edition, updated and revised, appeared in 2001. Biber, Conrad, and Reppen (1998); Flowerdew (2001).

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12 Hence proposals for a lexical syllabus (D. Willis 1990) and a lexical approach to ELT (Lewis 1993). 13 Kachru (1985). Kachru represents three domains in which English is used in terms of three concentric circles. The Inner Circle is where English is used as a native language (as in the United Kingdom or the United States), the Outer Circle is where it has institutional status and is acquired as an additional language (typically places where it has been colonially imposed), and the Expanding Circle is where its learnt as a foreign lan­ guage, has no established social function within the community (typically countries like Japan, or those of the European Union other than the United Kingdom and Ireland). 14 Phillipson (1992). 15 Graddol (1997); Crystal (1997). 16 Jenkins (2000), (2002). 17 Seidlhofer (2001). 18 This is an important proviso, as Seidlhofer herself points out. While the case for recognizing, and describing, lingua franca English is persuasive, teachers and learners remain dependent on textbooks and reference books which are based on established native-speaker norms. And of course, in some cases, the objective will still be to conform to such norms as closely as possible. The idea is not that lingua franca forms should dis­ place native ones, but should be acknowledged as providing an alterna­ tive, but non-stigmatized, means of communication and self-expression which has its own conditions of appropriacy. 19 Canagarajah (1999). 20 The significantly named World Englishes was founded by Kachru (together with Larry Smith) in 1981. It is described as a ‘Journal of English as an International and Intranational Language’. It is worth not­ ing that the plurality in the title (World Englishes) would generally only be taken to apply to English as an intranational language in Outer Circle domains, where independent (i.e. endonormative) development is given recognition. As we have noted, different international uses of the lan­ guage as a lingua franca are considered to be subject to external (i.e. exonormative) control, and so where they are divergent from established norms, would not generally be accorded the status of different Englishes but simply stigmatized as defective. The interesting question is why the principle of independent development only applies in one case and not in the other. 21 Nettle and Romaine (2000); Skutnabb-Kangas (2000). 22 Hall and Eddington (2000); Pennycook (1994). 23 Brutt-Griffler (2002). 24 A series of exchanges of views about global English involving Braj Kachru, Randolph Quirk, Robert Phillipson, Margie Berns, and David Crystal appears in Seidlhofer (2003) Section 1.

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25 McKay (2003). 26 Medgyes (1997); Phillipson (1996); Rampton (1996). 27 Cf. the American association Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and its journal TESO L Quarterly and the British based International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. This is associated with the English Language Teaching Journal {ELT] ) which has as its subtitle An international journal for teachers of English to speakers of other languages. 28 For opposing views see the exchanges between Ronald Carter, Guy Cook, Michael McCarthy, and Luke Prodomou in Seidlhofer (2003) Section 2. 29 See also Mackey (1965). 30 Schmidt (1990), (1992). 31 Nunan (1989). 32 J. Willis (1996). 33 Skehan (1998); Ellis (2003). 34 Swan (2004); Widdowson (2003). 35 Cook (2000). 36 Among the tasks proposed in Skehan (1998), for example, we find: ‘Completing one another’s family trees’ and ‘Solving a riddle’. 37 André (1989). 38 Johns and King (1991); Tribble and Jones (1997). 39 And, it should be added, for language study. Computer programs can be immensely motivating as a discovery device, particularly perhaps for advanced learners, who might thereby explore language patterns for them­ selves as they occur both in conventional usage and literary texts. As such, such programs can be said to have the potential for language play which counters a too rigid confinement to utilitarian purposes for learning. 40 CEF Council of Europe. 41 Holliday (1994). 42 Freeman and Cornwell (1993); Woods (1996). 43 Pennycook (2001). 44 West (1960).

A chronology of English language teaching

The following chronology is not narrowly restricted to English language teaching alone, but contains items that have, directly or indirectly, influenced the subject. Other historical events are also noted to give a context. Summary titles only are used. 1362 1380s 1386 1396 1413 1417 1422 1436 1476 c. 1483 1540

1551 1553 1554 1558 1569 1570 1572 1573 1576 1578 1580 1582 1585 1586

Court proceedings to be conducted in English. First English translation of the Bible by John Wycliffe and others. Chaucer begins work on the Canterbury Tales. First m anière de langage (manual of French dialogues). Accession of Henry V. First extant Privy Council record in English. Brewers’ decision to keep records in English. The B o o k o f Margery Kempe, first extant biography in English. Caxton sets up first printing press in England. Caxton’s Tres bonne doctrine. Septem Linguarum, one of the earliest polyglot dictionaries to include English ‘Lily’s Grammar’ authorized by Royal Proclamation (Henry VIII). Hart’s Opening. Meurier’s Treatise, no extant copy of this edition. A Very Profitable B oo k, anonymous English-Spanish manual. Accession of Elizabeth I. Hart’s O rthography. Hart’s Method-, Ascham’s Schoolmaster. Massacre of St Bartholomew. Holyband’s French Schoolmaster. Holyband’s French Littleton. Florio’s First Fruits. Bellot’s English Schoolm aster, first extant textbook specifically designed to teach English to foreigners; Montaigne’s Essais. Mulcaster’s Elementarie. Petrus Ramus translated into English. Bellot’s Familiar Dialogues; Bullokar’s Pam phlet fo r Grammar, first grammar of English.

374

A History o f English language teaching

1591 1598 1603 1604 1605 1607 1618 1621 1622 1623 1627 1631 c. 1632 1633 1639 1640 1641 1646 1648 1650 1653 1657 165 8 1659 1660 1662 1668 1670 1672 1685 1687 1688 1693 1711 1712 1718 1728

Florio’s Second Fruits. Edict of Nantes. Florio’s translation of Montaigne. First English-English dictionary (Cawdrey’s Table Alphabetical), Bacon’s Advancement o f Learning. First English colonial settlement (Jamestown, Virginia). Outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. Gill’s Logonom ia Anglica (2nd, revised edition. Original publication 1619). Mason’s Grammaire Angloise; Webbe’s A ppeal to Truth. Probable first draft of Jonson’s Gram m ar; Webbe’s Petition to the High Court o f Parliament-, First Folio of Shakespeare. Webbe’s Children’s Talk. Comenius’s Janua Linguarum published in London under title of Porta Linguarum, edited by John Anchoran. Comenius’s Great Didactic completed. Comenius’s Janua Linguarum and Vestibulum. First English trading station in India (Madras). Jonson’s English Grammar. Comenius in London. Poole’s English Accidence, earliest attempt to teach children English grammar before Latin grammar. End of Thirty Years’ War. Comenius travels to Saros Patak. Starts on the Orbis Pictus. Wallis’s Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae. Collected works of Comenius (O pera Didactica Omnia) published in Amsterdam. Comenius himself settles in the city. Orbis Pictus published in Nuremberg. Orbis Pictus translated into English, published in London. Restoration of Charles II. Incorporation of the Royal Society. Wilkins’ Essay. Death of Comenius. Festeau’s N ouvelle Grammaire Angloise. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; Miège’s Nouvelle M éthode; Cooper’s Grammatica. Offelen’s Double-Gram m ar, first grammar of English for German­ speakers. Miège’s English Grammar. Aickin’s Grammar, Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education. ‘The Brightland Gram m ar’. Swift’s Proposal; Maittaire’s Grammar. Boyer and Miège’s D ouble- Grammar. First grammar of English for Italian speakers (Altieri’s Grammatica).

A chronology o f English language teaching

1731 1747 1755 1761 1762

1766 1783

1791 1793 1795 1797 1801 1807 1819 1821 182 8 1830 1834 1835

1845 1851 1852 1853 1855 1857 1858 1862 1864 1865-6 1866 1867 1869

375

First grammar of English for Portuguese speakers (de Castro’s Grammatica). Johnson’s Plan o f a Dictionary. Johnson’s Dictionary o f the English Language. Priestley’s Rudiments. Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar; Buchanan’s British Grammar. Rousseau’s Emile. First indigenous Russian grammar of English by Permskii. Meidinger’s Praktische französische G ram m atik, the first ‘grammar-translation’ course. Independence of United States of America. Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary. Fick’s Sprachlehre, following Meidinger, first application of ‘grammar-translation’ methods to English. Murray’s Grammar. Miller’s The Tutor published in Serampore. Pestalozzi’s H ow Gertrude Teaches Her Children. Abolition of British slave trade. Cobbett’s Gram m ar o f the English Language published in London. First D over-Calais steamer service (2 hours ). Webster’s American Dictionary o f the English Language. Jacotot’s Enseignement universel, langue étrangère. First regular rail service (Manchester-Liverpool). First appearance of Ahn’s M ethod (French for German speakers). Emancipation of slaves in the British Empire. First appearance of Ollendorff’s M ethod (German for French speakers). Macaulay’s Minute published in Calcutta. Henry Sweet born. First telegraph service between Britain and France. Roger’s Thesaurus. Marcel’s Language as a Means o f Mental Culture; Ploetz’s Elementarbuch (French for German speakers). First Cook’s tour to the continent. Great Rebellion (‘Mutiny’) in India. Start of Oxford and Cambridge Local Examinations; India becomes a Crown Colony. Cambridge Overseas Examinations begin. Prendergast’s Mastery o f Languages. Heness’s experiment with ‘natural methods’ at Yale. First transatlantic telegraph cable. Alexander Melville Bell’s Visible Speech. Opening of the Suez Canal.

376

A History o f English language teaching

1874 1875 1877 1878 1880 1882 1884 1885 1886

1887-8 1888 1891 1897 1899 1901 1902 1904 1907 1912 1913 1914 1915 1917

1921 1922 1923 1924 1926 1927 1930 1931

Sauveur’s Teaching o f Living Languages. Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone. W. D. Whitney’s L ife and Growth o f Language. Sweet’s H an dbook o f Phonetics. First sound recording technology (Edison’s phonograph). First Berlitz school opened in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. Gouin’s L’art d ’enseigner published in Paris. Viëtor’s Der Sprachunterricht published under Quousque Tandem pseudonym. Franke’s Praktische Spracherlernung; Sweet’s paper to the Philological Society ‘On the practical study of language’. Sweet’s Elem entarbuch. Second, acknowledged, edition of D er Sprachunterricht; Passy founds Phonetic Teachers’ Association in Paris; Jespersen helps to found Quousque Tandem Society in Stockholm. Klinghardt’s experiment in Reichenbach. Widgery’s Teaching o f Languages in Schools. First transatlantic telephone cable. International Phonetic Association established. Sweet’s Practical Study o f Languages; Passy’s D e la m éthode directe dans l’enseignement des langues vivantes. Marconi’s first transatlantic radio message. Palmer starts teaching at a language school in Verviers. Jespersen’s H ow to Teach a Foreign Language. Daniel Jones starts lecture courses at London University. Death of Henry Sweet. Watson’s founding paper on behaviourism. Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English started. Outbreak of First World War; Palmer returns to England; Bloomfield’s Introduction to the Study o f Language. Palmer joins Phonetics Department, University College, London. Palmer’s Scientific Study and Teaching o f Languages; Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary; Inauguration of School of Oriental Studies, University of London. Palmer’s O ral M ethod and Principles o f Language-Study. Palmer becomes Linguistic Adviser to the Japanese Ministry of Education. Institute for Research in English Teaching (IRET) founded in Tokyo. Palmer’s Grammar o f Spoken English. West’s Bilingualism, report on the teaching of English in Bengal. Early New Method materials published in India. Ogden’s Basic English published. Cambridge Proficiency Examination held overseas for first time.

A chronology o f English language teaching

1933 1934

1935 1935 1936 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944

1945 1946 1947 1948

1949 1952 1953 1954 1957 1960 1961

377

Bloomfield’s Language. Faucett’s O xford English Course starts publication. West’s attack on Basic English; Carnegie Conference opens in New York; Foundation of British Committee (later, Council) for Relations with Other Countries. Carnegie Conference reconvenes in London; Ogden’s reply to West (Counter-Offensive). Faucett starts first EFL training course at Institute of Education, London. Interim R eport (Carnegie) published; Palmer leaves Japan. Eckersley’s Essential English (1); Palmer’s N ew M ethod Grammar and Gram m ar o f English Words. Cambridge Lower Examination started; outbreak of Second World War. British Council incorporated by Royal Charter. English Language Institute founded at University of Michigan. Bloomfield’s Outline Guide. The Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). First BBC ‘English by Radio’ transmissions. First Chair of General Linguistics in Britain (London) (J. R. Firth appointed); Basic English issue raised in House of Commons; Palmer’s lecture tour of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Fries’s Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language. End of Second World War. First issue of English Language Teaching. Independence of India and Pakistan. Establishment of Chair with special responsibilities for English as a foreign language at London University (first holder: Bruce Pattison); first issue of Language Learning; Hornby et al. (eds.) A Learner’s Dictionary o f Current English published in London. Advanced Learner’s from 1952. Deaths of Harold Palmer and Leonard Bloomfield. Fries’s Structure o f English. General Service List o f English Words (West) published. Hornby’s Guide to Patterns and Usage in English and O xford Progressive English for Adult Learners (1). School of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. Lado’s Linguistics across Cultures. Stack’s language laboratory guide; Association of Recognized English Language Schools (ARELS) founded. CREDIF audio-visual course Voix et Im ages de France. Commonwealth Conference on English as a Second Language (Makerere College, Uganda). Lado’s Language Testing.

378

A History o f English language teaching

1963

1964

1965

1966

1967

1968 1969

1971 1972

1973

Gattegno’s Silent Way; Nuffield Foreign Languages Teaching Materials Project (Director: A. Spicer); Hayes Report on language laboratories in America, Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens’ Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching; first congress of the Association Inter­ nationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA) in Nancy, France; Nuffield Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching (Director: M. A. K. Halliday). First administration of TOEFL Test in 34 countries. Chomsky’s Aspects o f the Theory o f Syntax; Mackey’s Language Teaching Analysis. The British Council English Proficiency Test Battery (EPTB, the ‘Davies Test’) launched. Centre for Information on Language Teaching (CILT) (Director: George Perren); Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) established in America; Chomsky’s paper to the NE Conference; Hymes’ ‘On communicative competence’ read at Yeshiva University. First Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL); Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (ATEFL, since 1971 IATEFL); Royal Society of Arts (RSA) Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language; L. G. Alexander’s First Things First (N ew Concept English 1); Corder’s ‘The significance of learners’ errors’. Death of Daniel Jones. Broughton et al. Success with English; Huddleston et al. Sentence and Clause in Scientific English. Scope, Stage 1; Conference on Languages for Special Purposes; Ewer and Latorre’s A Course in Basic Scientific English. Labov’s The Logic o f N on-standard English. Council of Europe Symposium at Rüschlikon in Switzerland. Concept 7-9; Sinclair et al., The English Used by Teachers and Pupils; Quirk et al., Grammar o f Contemporary English; Richterich’s ‘Model for the definition of the language needs of adults’; Widdowson’s ‘Teaching of English as communication’; Wilkins’ ‘Linguistic and situational content of the common core in a unit/credit system’; Selinker’s ‘Interlanguage’. Gumperz and Hymes (eds.) Directions in Sociolinguistics. Dakin’s Language Laboratory and Language Learning; Trim etal., Systems D evelopm ent in Adult Language Learning; Van Ek’s ‘The “Threshold Level” in a unit/credit system’; conference on ‘The Communicative Teaching of English’ (C. N. Candlin, University of Lancaster). Allen and Corder (eds.), Edinburgh Course in A pplied Linguistics. Vol. 1.

A chronology o f English language teaching

1974 1975 1976 1978

1979

1980 1980 1983 1985 1987 1990 1992 1995

379

Allen and Widdowson’s English in Focus. van Ek’s Threshold Level for English; Jupp and Hodlin’s Industrial English. Wilkins’ N otional Syllabuses; Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English. Widdowson’s Teaching Language as Communication; Munby’s Communicative Syllabus Design; National Association for Teachers of English as a Second Language to Adults (NATESLA). RSA Certificate in the Teaching of English to Adult Immigrants and Preparatory Certificate for the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language to Adults (pilot); ‘The Bangalore Project’ (Director: N. S. Prabhu); Brumfit and Johnson’s The Communicative Approach to Language Teaching. Applied Linguistics (journal). Introduction of English Language Testing Service (ELTS) Test; Stevick’s Teaching Languages: a Way and Ways. Stern’s Fundamental Concepts o f Language Teaching. Quirk et al., Com prehensive Grammar o f the English Language. Krashen’s Input Hypothesis. Sinclair (editor-in-chief) Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary. Willis’s L exical Syllabus. Phillipson’s Linguistic Imperialism. Spolsky’s M easured Words.

By the 1990s it was not clear which issues and publications would be important in the longer term. The following topics were, however, attracting particular interest at the turn of the millennium: • the expanding role of English in the world and the potential consequences for other languages and cultures • the relationship between native and non-native speakers of English in teaching the language worldwide • the adoption of English as the dominant world auxiliary language (lingua franca) and its socio-educational implications e the increasing applicability of linguistic research based on the study of large-scale corpora • the pedagogical implications of the growing emphasis on cognition in lan­ guage learning theory e the significance of second language acquisition (SLA) research for the lan­ guage teacher • the potential value of problem-solving activities (tasks) in developing effec­ tive second-language performance skills e the interaction between direction and autonomy in language pedagogy.

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Index Titles of publications and foreign-word terms are shown in italic: English Language Teaching. Illustrations are indicated by italic page numbers: 265.

Abbs, B. 254, 339 Abercrombie, D. 197-8, 250, 300, 322 b 4 academies (dissenting schools) 106, 107-9 accuracy 274 ACE (Aid to Commonwealth English) 315 ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) 305 acquisition language acquisition device 335 vs. learning 277«23 activities 258, 318, 322ra4 actor-phoneticians 195 adult education 232, 234-5, 236-7, 245, 294, 338 Africa see Basutoland; Gold Coast; Nigeria; Rhodesia, Southern; Sierra Leone Ahn, F. 132, 159-60 Aickin, J. 81,108 Aid to Commonwealth English (ACE) 315 Alexander, L. G. 249, 254, 317 Allen &c Unwin (publishers) 302 Allen, J. P. B. 154-5, 251, 254, 343 Allen, W. S. 294 Altieri, F. 69 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) 305 American English 129 analytic vs. synthetic methods 172 anglicists 145, 146 Anglo-mania 68 Anglo-Vernacular Schools 141, 142 anthropological linguistics 253 applied linguistics early impact 302-93 expansion 343 Henry Sweet 198-207 introduction to teaching methodology 231, 234, 296 university departments 250-1 ARELS (Association of Recognized English Language Schools) 245 ‘arithmetical fallacy’ 164, 203

Army Language School, Monterey, Cal (USA) 307 Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) 241, 303, 304-5 Ascham, R. 38-9 Asher, J. J. 256, 322n3 Asia see Ceylon; Hong Kong; India; Japan; Malaysia; Pakistan; Singapore assessment 3 3 9 ^ 0 associationism 203-4, 273, 333 Association of Recognized English Language Schools (ARELS) 245 ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) 241, 303, 304-5 ATEFL 246 Audio-Lingual Method 249, 319 Audio-Visual Method 249, 316-17 Austin, J. L. 253, 328 Australasia, settlement colonies 134 authentic language and text 344, 345, 359, 364-7 availability 291, 316 BAAL (British Association of Applied Linguistics) 246 Bacon, F. 38, 39, 42 Baconian tradition 68,106 Bangalore Project (Communicational Teaching Project) 258, 337, 346-9 Barker, E. 70 Basic (British American Scientific International Commercial) English 237, 283-8, 341 basic French (le français fondamental) 291, 316 Basutoland (Lesotho) 128, 138-9^ Bates, M. 255, 343 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 241, 254, 320 behaviourism 273-4, 306, 335 Belize (British Honduras) 141 Bell, A. 195

Index

Bell, A. G. 195 Bell, A.M . 195 Bell, D. C. 195 Bellot, J. 19-25 The English Schoolmaster 20-2, 21 fam iliar Dialogues 22-5, 23 Bengal, India 71-2, 127, 144, 236, 278-83 Berlitz, M. D. and Berlitz schools 132, 222, 223-6, 236 Bernon, A. 260«6 Bernstein, B. 351«19 Bertram, C. 70 bilingualism 235-6, 259, 283 Anglo-Vernacular Schools 141, 142 early manuals 3—4 see also English as a second language Billows, F. L. 296, 310 Birmingham, University 254, 255, 259, 292, 334, 335, 358 Blackie, J. S. 212-14 Bloch, B. 304, 305 Bloomfield, L. 202, 268, 273, 302-3, 304, 305, 306 Board of Education, Special Reports on Educational Subjects 134-6 Boas, F. 303 Bolling, F. 69 Bongers, H. 290 Bopp, F. 195 Boyer, A. 66 Bright, J. 323«34 British academy 107-9 British American Scientific International Commercial (BASIC) English 237, 283-8, 341 British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) 246 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 241, 254, 320 British Centre 245 British Committee for Relations with Other Countries 260«22 British Council advisers, officers, lecturers 242, 266, 346 Aid to Commonwealth English (ACE) 315 Basic English 288 bilingual text book series 237 English Language Teaching (journal) 242, 277»5, 294 English Language Testing Service (ELTS) 255, 332-3 foundation 240

407

Nutford House Conference (1961) 310 The Turners (audio-visual course) 317 View and Teach (series) 320 British Honduras (Belize) 141 British Institutes 240-1 broadcasting 241, 249, 319-20 Broad Romic 193, 195 Brooks, N. 319 Brown, R. 336 Brugmann, K. 195 Brumfit, C. J. 263«59 Buchanan, J. 82-3, 120 built-in syllabus 336 Bullock Report xvii, 261«27 Bullokar, J. 83»11 Bullokar, W. 78,81 Burstall, C. 324«61 Butler, C. 78, 81 Butlin, R. T. 294 CAL (Center for Applied Linguistics) 246 Cambridge, University, Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES) 247, 332 Cambridge University Press 240 Canada, Ontario College of Education 286 Candlin, C. N. 254, 255 Canzler, F. G. 69 Caribbean area 129, 141-2 Carnegie Report on vocabulary selection 236, 237, 243, 288-90, 289 Carter, R. 359 case 98, 99-100 Castro, J. de 70 catechistic method 11, 71 categories of communicative function 252, 338 categories of modality 339 catenization 273 Catford, J. C. (Ian) 250, 288, 310, 314, 321 Cawdrey, R. 83«11 Caxton, W. 12-13 CEF (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) 368 Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) 246 Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues (CRAPEL) 367 Centre de Recherches et d’Etudes pour la Diffusion du Français (CREDIF) 291, 316 Centre for Information on Language Teaching (CILT) 246 Ceylon 311

408

Index

Cheeseman, H. W. 296 Cheke, Sir J. 84 Chiefs’ Colleges 147 Chomsky, N. 271, 321, 329, 330, 333, 335 chronology 373-9 chunks of language 175-6,249 Churchill, W. S. (Prime Minister) 287-8 Church Missionary Society (CMS) 135, 137-8 CILT (Centre for Information on Language Teaching) 246 classroom method 298 Clenard, N. 212 Close, R, A. 342 CMS (Church Missionary Society) 135, 137-8 Cobbett, W. 116,122-3 COBUILD 254, 259, 292, 358 Cockeram, H. 83«11 coherence 220 vs. cohesion 331-2 Coleman, A. 268 Coles, E. 81 Coles, M. 254 Collier-Macmillan Program 342 Collins (publishers) 292 collocations 271 colloquies see dialogues Collyer, J. 82 colonies 231, 247, 309-10 see also Commonwealth Conference; Empire; linguistic imperialism Comenius, J. A. 38, 44-54, 50 Orbis Sensuatium Pictus 44, 45, 46, 51-3, 52, 54 Cominius, G. H. 40 common core (threshold level) 252, 254, 291, 332, 337-40 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF) 368 Commonwealth Conference on English as a Second Language (1961) 241, 247, 310, 342 communication 326-52 Communicational Teaching Project (Bangalore Project) 258, 337, 346-9 communicative approach 210, 250-1, 326-49, 355 communicative competence 253, 329-30, 360 communicative functions 252, 328, 338 communicative tasks 257-8 Community Language Learning 256

competence, communicative 253, 329-30, 360 comprehensible input 257, 337 computer-assisted learning (CAL) 367-8 computer-based lexicography 254, 259, 291-2, 357-8 concordance format 292 concreteness 275 conjugations 98 connected text and discourse 189, 190, 271-2, 331 Connelly, T. 70 construction patterns 272 contrastive analysis 305, 351«23 General Form 307 conversation 210, 300 Berlitz courses 132, 272 Cook, G. 3 6 3 ^ Cooper, C. 59, 78, 81, 104 Corder, S. P. 250, 251, 310, 316-17, 335-6 corpus linguistics 291-2, 357-9 Council for Cultural Co-operation 263«52 Council of Europe 252, 263 k60, 291, 338, 368 CRAPEL (Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues) 367 CREDIF (Centre de Recherches et d’Etudes pour la Diffusion du Français) 291, 316 CTP see Bangalore Project Curran, C. 256 curriculum 272-3 Dakin, J. 319 defining vocabulary 236, 239, 342 Denmark 69, 70 derivation 85-6 Derrick, J. 248 descriptive vs. linguistic grammars 277«12 dialects 10, 16«8, 195 dialogues 11, 13, 15, 22-5, 27-30, 63 difference argument 86 Dilworth, T. 71 diminution 85 direct method adult education 232 ‘don’t translate’ principle 312-13 ESP 355 link between patterns and habits 272 origins 210, 217-27 Passy 197 Webbe 41

Index

discourse 253 disponibilité 291, 316 dissenting schools (academies) 106, 107-9 ‘don’t translate’ principle 312-13 double-manuals 3, 12-15 double negative 121 double-translation 28, 38-9 Dudley-Evans, T. 255, 343 Duncan, D. 81-2,107 EAP see English for academic purposes early start 315, 317 earnest questions 220 Ebers, J. 69 Eckersley, C. E. 232, 237, 238, 239, 245, 294, 341 Edinburgh, University 131, 243, 246, 250, 321 EFL see English as a foreign language EIL see English as an international language elaboration 334 Eliot, J. 33-4 elocution 78-9, 195 ELT (English language teaching), term and acronym xvii, 5-6, 231 ELTS (English Language Testing Service) 255,332-3 Empire (British) xviii, 4-5, 127-30, 134-50, 232, 235-6, 309-15 Endicott, J. G. 239, 282 Engliscbe Studien (journal) 188 English global language 362 lingua franca xvii, 102, 259, 356, 360-1 medium of instruction 311 minority language 3 English as a foreign language (EFL) xv-xvi, 72, 75, 245-6, 362 English as an international language (EIL) xvii, 360-2 English as a second language (ESL) xvi-xvii, 72, 242, 245, 247, 362 Englishes 129 English for academic purposes (EAP) 251 English for foreigners/foreign students/ overseas students xv, 232, 236-7 English for immigrants xvii, 242 English for occupational purposes (EOP) 251 English for science and technology (EST) 251 English for special/specific purposes (ESP) 249, 251, 254, 314, 332, 340-5, 355

409

English Language Institute, University of Michigan 243, 303, 305 English Language Services 342 English language teaching (ELT), term and acronym xvii, 5-6, 231 English Language Teaching (journal) 242, 277«5, 294 English Language Teaching Journal (ELTJ) 372«27 English Language Testing Service (ELTS) 255, 332-3 English Schools, eighteenth century 82,106-9 English Teaching Information Centre (ETIC) 246 English to speakers of other languages (ESOL) 362-3 EOP see English for occupational purposes ergonic relationships 271, 276 errors 295, 334, 335-6 ESL see English as a second language ESOL see English to speakers of other languages ESP see English for special/specific purposes EST see English for science and technology ETIC (English Teaching Information Centre) 246 etymology 79 etymons 276 Eurocentre 245 Europe 65-76, 130-3, 151-228, 232, 234, 294 Ewer, J. R. 342 examinations boards 153-4, 247, 332 examples 364-6 Expanding Circle 361,370, 371«23 expression vs. impression 171-2 Externalized Language 354 Fairclough, N. 357 Faucett, L. 236, 238, 240, 244, 288, 297, 298 Fell, J. 82 Fenning, D. 82 Ferguson, C. A. 311 Festeau, P. 57-8, 66 Fick, J. C. 69,152 Field, R. 91-2 Firth, J. R. 203, 253, 308, 310, 321, 342, 357 ‘fixing’ the language 77-124 Flanders 12-13 FLES (Foreign Languages in Elementary Schools) 317

410

Index

Flood, W .E. 290,342 Florio, J. 3 0 -3 ,3 4 Focus (series) 343-4 Foreign Languages in Elementary Schools (FLES) 317 four-skills model 173, 174, 255 français fondamental, le 291, 316 France 17th century ELT 66 Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues (CRAPEL) 367 Centre de Recherches et d’Etudes pour la Diffusion du Français (CREDIF) 291, 316 University of Nancy 367 Franke, F. 187-8 Freebairn, I. 254, 339 French, F. G. 243, 295, 296 French language double-manuals 12-14 England, Middle Ages 9-10 language of Enlightenment 68 Mauritius 136-7 Russia 70 St Lucia 141 see also Huguenot refugees Fries, C. C. 241, 243-4, 303, 305, 306-7, 321 Frisby, A. W. 243, 296 Froebel, F. W. A. 318 functional categories 252-3 ,3 3 9 -4 0 functionalism 328-9 Furfey, P. H. 350n7 Gaillard, J. D. 168 Galanter, E. 334 Gatenby, E. V. 243, 295, 296 Gattegno, C. 256 Gauntlett, J. O. 243, 296 gender 97-8, 99 General Form 307 general notions 291 genre analysis 355-6 Germany 18th century interest in English 68-9 grammar-translation method 151-65 Prussian Bureau of Statistics 290 Gesenius 194 Ghana (Gold Coast) 138, 312 Gibson, C. 284 Gill, A. 78, 81

G.I. Method (Army Specialized Training Program) 241, 303, 304-5 Glasgow, University 131 global English 362 globalization 362 Gokak, V. K. 342 Gold Coast (Ghana) 138, 312 GOML (Graded Objectives in Modern Languages) 340 Gough, J. 82 Gouin, F. 1 6 6 ,1 6 7 ,1 7 8 ,1 8 0 -5 , 206,298 gradation 275 Graded Objectives in Modern Languages (GOML) 340 Graham, E. C. 342 grammar 78-82, 123, 244, 258, 269-70, 359 pedagogical grammars 95-101 grammar schools 37 grammar-translation method 132, 151-65 Greaves, P. 81 Greenbaum, S. 269, 325n69 Gumperz, J. J. 253 Gurrey, P. 243, 296 Gymnasien 151, 155-6 habit-formation 273, 274, 306-7, 319, 333 Halhed, N. B. 144 Halliday, M. A. K. 248, 250, 253-4, 309, 320, 321, 343 Hamilton, J. 168 Harris, Z. S. 330 Hart, J. 78, 83, 84-9 M ethod 85-9, 87, 88 Hasan, R. 248, 254, 320, 329 Hatfield, H. S. 284 Haugen, E. 305 Henderson, E. J. A. 200 Heness, G. 217-18 Henrici, A. 352«49 Herbert, A. J. 342 Hicks, D. 245 Hill, C. P. 323»34 Hillenius, F. 65 Hockett, C. 305 Hodges, R. 78 Hodson, T. C. 350»7 Holmes, J. 253 Holyband, C. 25-30, 33, 340 The French Littleton 25-7, 29 homophones 86 Hong Kong 142-3

Index

Hornby, A. S. 299 British Council Conference (1961) 310 on Direct Method 313 on structural patterns 297-302 publications 243, 244, 245, 269, 272, 292, 296 work with H. Palmer 264, 270 see also English Language Teaching (journal); IRET IRET Bulletin Howell, J. 70 Huddleston, R. D. 343 Hudson, R. A. 352«49 Huguenot refugees 12, 18-36, 56-64, 91, 211 humanist tradition 38 Hume, D. 68 Hutcheson, F. 133rc5 Hymes, D. 253, 263«59, 329 hypothesis-testing 274, 336 IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) 246, 372n.27 Ideal Standard programme 272-3 ideational macro-function 329, 334 IELTS (International English Language Testing Service) test 255, 333 immigrants English for xvii, 242, 247 see also Huguenot refugees Imperial Education Conference (1923) 236, 278 impression, vs. expression 171-2 India Bangalore Project (Communicational Teaching Project) 258, 337, 346-9 Bengal 7 1 -2 ,1 2 7 ,1 4 4 -7 , 236, 278-83 English as medium of instruction 311-12 Indian English 129 three-language formula 311,346 indirect approach 355 inductive approach 28, 30, 204 informative texts 236, 340-1 initial preparation 274 Inner Circle 359, 360, 370 input models 273 Institute for Research in English Teaching (IRET) 235, 238, 264-5, 267, 295 IRET Bulletin 242, 267, 294, 295 Institute of Education, University of London 240, 243, 246, 289, 295 Institutes of English Studies 240-1

411

Intensive Language Program 303 interaction 210 interaction theory (Ollendorff) 162 interest 274 interlanguage 336 interlinear translation 168 Internalized Language 354 International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) 246, 372n27 international English xvii, 280, 360-2 International English Language Testing Service (IELTS) test 255, 333 International House 245 International Phonetic Association (IPA) 187,188, 195, 196-7 interpersonal macro-function 329 intonation 269 inventional fallacy 204 IPA (International Phonetic Association) 187, 188, 195, 196-7 Iran 343, 344 IRET (Institute for Research in English Teaching) 235, 238, 264-5, 267 IRET Bulletin 242, 267, 294, 295 Italy 69-70 f 86, 117 Jacotot, J. J. 166, 169-70, 183 Jakobson, R. 253, 328-9 James, W. 273 Japan see IRET (Institute for Research in English Teaching) Jenkins, J. 360 Jespersen, O. 187, 189,190, 197, 202, 203, 207«4, 337-8 publications 101, 188, 296 Johnson, K. 2 63nS9 Johnson, S. 79, 80, 86, 109, 110-12, 292 Dictionary 110-12, 113, 114 Joly, N. 223-4 Jones, D. 185, 232, 234, 266 Jones, Sir W. 144 Jonson, B. 79, 81, 83, 95-8 ‘Jung-grammatiker’ 195 Kachru, B. 315,35 9 ,3 61 Kaeding, K. 290 Kaufmann, W. 342 Kellermann, M. 317 kernel 271 King, A.H. 310 King, J. (König, J.) 69

412

Index

Kingsbury, R. 254 Klinghardt, H. 187, 188, 190, 192-4, 206 known units 271 Kohler, J. B. 69 Kolbing, E. 188 König, J. (King, J.) 69 Kraak,I. 70 Krashen, S. D. 257, 336, 337, 347 Kroeh, C. F. 164, 168, 169, 221 Kryazhev, V. S. 71 Kullin, L .J. 70

London Missionary Society 136 Longman Group and Longmans, Green (publishers) 237, 238, 239, 240, 301, 325«65, 69 Lord, B. 254 Lorge, I. 289-90, 297 Lowth, R. 82, 86, 100, 107,108,112 Short Introduction to English Grammar 116-21, 118, 119 Lozanov, G. 256 Lund, University 325«69

Labov, W. 253, 329 Lado, R. 306 Lancaster, University 325«69, 327 language acquisition device 335 language deficit 334 language functions 328 language laboratories 249,318-19 Language Learning (journal) 303, 305 language testing and assessment 339-40 langue vs. parole 267 la Ramee, (Ramus) P. de 96 Latin 3-4, 10-11, 56, 65, 7 9 -8 0 ,1 3 1 ,1 4 3 ,

Macaulay, T. B. 145-7 McCarthy, M. 359 McIntosh, A. 321, 343 Mackin, R. 341, 342, 352«56 Macmillan (publishers) 240, 302 macro-functions 329 ‘Madras Snowball, The’ (Madras English Language Teaching Campaign) 346 Mager, R. F. 336 Maître Phonétique, Le (journal) 196 Maittaire, M. 82, 107 Malawi (Nyasaland) 141 Malaya (Malaysia) 142, 311 University, English for Special Purposes Project (UMESPP) 255, 345 Malinowski, B. 253, 288, 308 manières de langage 9, 11-12 Marcel, C. 166-7, 170-4, 217 Marckwardt, A. H. 311 marketization 357 Masao, K. 276«3 Masataro, S. 276«3 Mason, George 35 Mastery System 175-8, 271 Mauger, C. 57, 66 Mauritius 136-7 meaning-focused activity 347 meaning-to-word thesaurus principle 291 Meidinger, J. V. 152 Meisterschaft System 168 memorization 273, 276 mentalist standpoint 334 methode directe 227 ‘methods of nature’ 172 Michigan, University, English Language Institute 243, 303, 305 Miège, G. 56-64, 92, 100, 101 The English Grammar 59-60, 60-1, 63-4 Nouvelle M éthode pour apprendre l’Anglois 57, 58-63, 60-2 Miller, G. A. 334

210-12

Latin schools 106-9 Latorre, G. 342 learner autonomy 367-8 learning vs. acquisition 277n23 Leech, G. 269, 325«69 Leeds, University 248 Lesotho (Basutoland) 128, 138-9 letter-writing 107, 340 lexical distribution 280-1 lexical selection 280 lexical syllabus 371 nl 2 lexis 359 Lily, W, 37-8, 96, 97 linguistic description 358 linguistic imperialism 312-14, 359-62 Linguistic Society of America 303, 304 linguistic vs. descriptive grammars 277nl2 literacy, as political weapon 123 living philology 201, 207 loan words (foreign words) 85-6, 111 Locals (public examinations) 153-4 Locke, J. 68,211 London University Institute of Education 240, 243, 246, 289, 295 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) 240, 276n3 University College 189, 234, 266, 320

Index

Miller, J., The Tutor 71-5, 73-5 Milton, J. 49 mim-mem method 304 Minimum Adequate Vocabulary 236, 271 miologs 271 misplacing 85 mission schools 128, 135, 136, 137-8, 139, 141,143, 148 modality 339 modal notions 297 modal verbs 100 Modern Languages Project (Threshold Level Project) 252, 254, 291, 332, 337-40 monitor system 135 monolingual (‘don’t translate’) principle 312-13 monologs 271 Montaigne, M. de 210, 221 Moore, J. 255 Morhof 212 Moritz, K. P. 69 morphemes 271 Morris, I, 243, 295,296 motivation 275, 336 Moulton, W. G. 305 Mulcaster, R. 78, 83, 89-92 Muller, M. 195 multi-functionalism 350«5 multiple line of approach 275 Munby, J. 255,333 Murray, J. 200 Murray, L. 115, 116, 121-2 Nancy, University 367 NATESLA (National Association of Teachers of English as a Second Language to Adults) 261«27 National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) 248, 317 national linguistic pride 108 native-speaker norms 314, 360, 361, 362 natural methods 205, 210, 210-28 natural order 47 needs analysis 255-6, 279 neo-grammarians 195 Nesfield, J. C. 260«5 Netherlands 65-6 New Method 280-1, 282, 346 NFER (National Foundation for Educational Research) 248, 317 Nigeria 312 non-linguistic sources of information 336, 344

413

North America, colonies of settlement 128, 134 noticing 366 notional categories 252, 338 notional/functional approach 339 notional syllabuses 339 notions 291, 337-9 Nucleus (series) 343 Nuffield Foundation Nuffield Foreign Languages Teaching Materials Project (‘Nuffield French’) 248, 317, 320 ‘Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching’ 320 Nyasaland (Malawi) 141 Oberrealschulen 156 objectives of language course 355-62, 365 object lessons 137, 172, 217 Offelen, H. 68-9 Ogden, C. K. 237, 268, 284-8, 341 Ollendorff, H. G. 132, 213 New Method o f Learning to Read .. . 1 6 1 -4 ,1 6 1 ,183 Onions, C. T. 200 Ontario College of Education 286 Open University 243, 248 oral approach, Oral Method 189, 191, 241, 243-4, 265-8, 272, 306 orientalism 144, 145 orthoepy 79, 195 orthography 10, 77-8, 79, 84-94 Orthological Institute 237, 287, 341, 342 orthometry 79 Osthoff, H. 195 Outer Circle 361, 370, 371«13, «20 overlearning 306 overloading 192 Oversea Education (journal) 5 Owen, W. 225 Oxford English Course '238, 239, 244 Oxford English Dictionary 198, 200 Oxford University Press 198,238,240,301-2 Pakistan 311 Pakscher, A. 225, 226 Palermo, E. 69 Palmer, H. life and work 264-77, 265 publications and influence 197, 232, 234-5, 236, 238, 239, 282, 292, 296, 298, 340 pansophy 44, 46, 50

414

Index

Paris Evangelical Mission Society 139 parole vs. langue 267 Passy, F. 196 Passy, P. 187, 188, 190, 196, 234 patois 141-2 pattern practice 331, 333 Pattison, B. 262«29, 295, 310 Paul, H. 195 Payne, J. 170 pedagogical grammars 95-101 Pennycook, A. 209«33 performance vs. competence 330 performatives 328 Permskii, M. 71 Perren, G. 310 Pestalozzi, J. H. 139, 215, 216-18, 318 object lessons 137 ,1 7 2 ,2 1 7 Peyton, V. J. 68 Phillipson, R. 312-14, 359-60 Philological Society 198 phonemes 203 phonetics 187, 194-8, 200, 201-3,234, 237, 354 Phonetic Teachers’ Association 188, 196 Phonetic Teacher, The (journal) 196 phonetic transcription 190, 273 phonic reading 87 phonics 51 phonology 201 phrases 271 Piaget, J. 318 pidgin 274-5 ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ 133w2 Pilot Scheme/Project 317 Pitman, I. 195 Ploetz, K. 152, 183 polylogs 271 Poole, J. 81, 107 Port Royal schools 82 Portugal 70 Poutsma, H. 269 PPP (presentation, practice, and production) 258 Prabhu, N. S. 257-8, 337, 346-9, 348 practical language teaching 9-76 pre-fabs 175-6 Prendergast, T. 166, 167 Mastery o f Languages 1 7 5 -8 ,179 prepositions 99-100,120 presentation, practice, and production (PPP) 258 Pribram, K. H. 334 Pride, J. B. 253

Priestley, J. 109-10, 117, 120 Primary French 248, 317, 318, 334 primary matter 271, 273 problem-solving 334-5, 345 Procedural Syllabus 349 process and purpose 355 ‘Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching’ 248, 320, 329 pronunciation 112, 114, 202-3, 314 proportion 275 prosody 79 Protestant refugees see Huguenot refugees Prussia see Germany psycholinguistics 329, 335, 350 psychology 201, 203, 273^1, 306 of language learning 333-7 public examinations 153-4 public verse-speaking 195 publishers 240 see also Collier-Macmillan; Collins; Longman Group; Oxford University Press Puritan movement 38, 42, 68 purpose 370n4 and process 355 questions earnest 220 question and answer format 11, 71 Quinault, R. J. 310 Quirk, R. 248, 259, 269, 320 radio broadcasts 241 Ramist theory/grammar 96, 97-8 Ramus (de la Ramee, P.) 96 rationalist approach 54 rational order 275, 276 reading 72-4, 87, 279-83 ‘reading book’ 208«7 ‘reading first’ policy 268, 283 real (authentic) language and text 344, 345, 359, 364-7 Realgymnasien 156, 192 Realschulen 156 real-world relationship 367 reasoning-gap activities 347 reformers 166-86 Reform Movement 155,187-209 refugees, Huguenot* 12, 18-36, 56-64, 91,211 Regent Street Polytechnic 237 register 301, 343 Restoration 106

Index

restricted languages 301, 309, 342-3 Revised Code (1862) 130, 135 Rhodesia, Southern (Zimbabwe) 139-41, 247 Richards, I. A. 284 Richterich, R. 252, 338 Ridge, J. 248 Rippmann, W. 197 Rivers, W. 254 Robertson, T. 168, 183 Roget, P. M. 105 Rojas, P. M. 306 Rosenthal, S. 168 Rossiter, A. P. 284 Rousseau, J.-J. 214—16,318 Royal Society 56, 100,102,108 Royal Society of Arts (RSA) 246-7, 247-8 Russia 70-1, 93 Said, E. 356 Salzedo, S. L. 341 Sammer, R. 69 Sanskrit 144,146 Sapir, E. 253, 268, 303 Saussure, F. de 267 Sauveur, L. 210, 217-21, 300 Savignon, S. J. 253 Scandinavia see Denmark; Sweden scanning 283 Schleicher, A. 195 School of Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh 243, 321 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London 240, 276«3 Schools Council 319, 320, 350«18 Scope (Schools Council Project in Primary English) 247, 248, 318, 334 science 194-5 Searle, J. R. 253, 350«2 secondary matter 271, 273 secondary schools 232 second language acquisition (SLA) 334-7 Seidenstiicker, J. 152 Seidlhofer, B. 371 «38 Selinker, L. 336 semantico-grammatical categories 252, 338 semantic syllabuses 339 sentence patterns 271-2, 297, 305 sentences 271 series concept 343 Sewel, W. 66 Shakespeare, W. 68, 69

415

Shaw, G. B. 200, 201 Sheridan, T. 78-9, 195 shorthand 195 Sierra Leone 137-8 significant sound-distinctions 209«44 Silent Way 256 Simultaneous Reading 195 Sinclair, J. 250, 253-4, 255, 259, 292, 334, 358, 364 Singapore 142 Siret, L. P. 68 situational approach 244, 249-50, 299, 308-9,319 Skehan, P. 372n36 skimming 283 Skinner, B.F. 306,335 SLA (second language acquisition) 334-7 Smith, H. L. Jr 307 Smith, L. 371«20 Smith, Sir T. 78, 84 SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London 240, 276«3 social anthropology 253 socio-cultural values 361 sociolinguistics 253, 329, 350 sociopolitics (linguistic imperialism) 312-14, 359-62 S-O-S (Structural-Oral-Situational) Method 346 Spain 70 specific notions 291 speech elocution 78-9, 195 langue vs. parole 267 natural 300 physiology 195 primacy, Reform Movement 189-90 spoken prose 300 spoken skills as priority 299 speech acts 253, 327-8 spelling 77-8, 79, 91-3 Spolsky, B. 332 spontaneous vs. studial capacities 274 Sri Lanka (Ceylon) 311 standard theory 96 stenography 195 Stevick, E. W. 256 St Lucia 129,141-2 Storm, J. 198 strategic reading 283 strategies (study skills) 255, 335, 344-5 Strevens, P. 250, 321, 343

416

Index

Structural Approach 305, 307 structural linguistics 330-1 Structural-Oral-Situational (S-O-S) Method 346 structural patterns 297-302 structural syllabus 301 structural vs. functional orientation 253 structure drills 331 structures 297, 305, 330-1 studial vs. spontaneous capacities 274 study skills 173, 174, 255, 335, 344-5 subconscious comprehension 272-3 ‘Suggestopedia’ 256 superfluity 85 superlanguage 232 surrender value 278-9 ‘Survey of English Usage’ 248, 320 Svartvik, J. 269, 325«69 Swales, J. 355 Sweden, University of Lund 325»69 Sweet, H. life and work 198-207, 199 publications and influence 92, 164, 175, 185, 187,188-9, 1 9 0 ,1 9 2 -3 ,1 9 5 ,1 9 6 , 197, 209«33, 269, 354 Swenson, E. 286 Swift, J. 108-9 syllabus built-in 336 for ‘common core’ 338 Ideal Standard programme 272-3 lexical 371 nl2 notional 339 semantic 339 structural 301 syntax 79, 80, 98 synthetic vs. analytic methods 172 ‘TaaP 140 task-based instruction (TBI) 257-8, 347, 366-7 teacher recruitment, Empire 135 teachers, native and non-native 314, 360, 361, 362 Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) 372»27 teacher training 240, 243, 246-8, 310-12 Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) 242, 245, 247 Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) 242, 247-8

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) xvii, 6, 72, 246 teaching of English as foreign or second language 231-63 television 249, 319-20 template volumes 343 tense 100 testing 339-40 textual macro-function 329 Thorndike, E. L. 274, 288, 289, 290 Thorndike-Lorge list 176, 290 three-language formula, India 311, 346 Threshold Level Project 252, 254, 291, 332, 337-40 Tiarks, J. G. 156-7 Tilly, W. 189,234 T-level Project see Threshold Level Project TOEFL Test 255 Toronto, University 286 Total Physical Response (TPR) 256, 322« 3 Toussaint-Langenscheidt Method 168 Träger, G. L. 304,307 transcription 190, 197, 273 translation 168, 191-2, 259, 273, 312-13 trends 353-72 trial-and-error 274, 334 Trim, J. L. M. 252, 338, 339 Turkey 93 Überbürdung 192 UMESPP (University of Malaya English for Special Purposes Project) 255, 345 unit/credit system 252, 338 universal education 167 universality principle 260 k15 universal language 102 universities applied linguistics centres 343 public examinations 153—4 University College, University of London 189, 234, 266, 320 usage 297 using the language 317-18 Ussher, G. N. 82 usurpation 85 utterances 328 V 86, 117 Van Ek, J. A. 252,254, 338 Van Heldoran, J. G. 66

Index

Vautrollier, T. 91 verb patterns 272, 296 verbs, modal 100 video-cassettes 319 Vietor, W. 187, 188, 189, 190, 196 Viney, P. 254 Visible Speech 195 vocabulary selection 288-92 Von Humboldt, W. 155,188 Wakefield, H. 243, 296 Walker, J. 112,114,195 Wallis, J. 56, 59, 64, 65, 78, 81, 83 Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae 99-101 Watson, J. B. 273-4 Webbe, J. 39-42 Children’s Talk (Pueriles Confabulatiunculae) 41-2, 43 Webster, N. 114-16, 120 American Dictionary o f the English Language 1 1 3 ,115 Weinberger, A. 341 Weisse, T. H. 157-8 Wellesley, Sir R. 144-5 Wesleyan Missionary Society 137-8 West Indian English 129 West, M. 232, 278-83, 340-1 attack on Basic 286 British Council Conference (1961) 310 Carnegie Conference (1934) 288

417

‘difficult circumstances’ for teaching English overseas 243, 369-70 minimum adequate vocabulary 236, 271 publications 26, 238, 239, 296, 342 General Service List o f English Words 236, 289-90, 297 Wharton, J. 81 Whorf, B. L. 253 Widdowson, H. 2 5 1 ,2 5 4 -5 ,3 2 7 , 331, 343 Widgery, W. H. 187, 188, 197, 202 Wilkins, C. 144 Wilkins, D. A. 252, 254, 338, 339 Wilkins, J. (Bishop) 56,102 scheme for universal language 102-5, 103 Willis, D. 371«22 Wingard, P. 323«34 Winter, E. O. 352«49 wireless broadcasts 241 Wisconsin-Milwaukee, University 325«69 Wodroephe, J. 34 word-forms 271 word frequency 290-1 World Englishes (journal) 371»20 Wrenn, C. L. 198, 200 Wynken de Worde 13 Zandvoort, R. W. 269 Zhdanov, P. I. 71 Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia) 139-41, 247