According to Bell (1981: 79), from the very beginnings of the study of language teaching there has been a fundamental difference between those who regarded language as a logical system and emphasised the form, and those who saw it as arising from social and individual needs and emphasised the function of language. There have also been divisions between those who sought to discover those universal characteristics which are the same for all languages and those who wanted to draw up systems for each particular language.
The grammar-translation method has been used since at least the sixteenth century. Learners are taught by means of translating, rote learning of vocabulary and traditional grammar exercises. The literature of the language being studied was the main focus of this method (Stern 1983: 458). It is a “method for which there is no theory” (Richards and Rodgers 2001: 3, 4, 7). In South Africa the translation aspect of the method has not generally been used, except in teaching foreign languages, but the legacy which Howatt (2004: 130) describes lives on in second-language classrooms:
[I]t … contained the seeds, which eventually 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 the language (my emphasis).
At the beginning of the twentieth century the direct method arose in reaction to the grammar- translation method (Richardson 1983: 19) and attempts were made to develop language-teaching principles from “naturalistic principles of language learning” (Richards and Rodgers 2001: 11). Learners are exposed to the spoken language and they are expected to speak it (Richardson 1983: 19). The language is taught inductively and learners have to work out the rules on their own (Krashen 1982: 135).
From about 1920 until 1960 there was little significant change in the way second-language English was taught in Britain (Allen 1973: 30). Palmer, Hornby and others developed systematic principles regarding selection, gradation and presentation leading to the oral approach and situational language teaching. This was regarded as a British structural approach coming from a “behaviourist habit- learning” theory, with one difference from the American view discussed below – the pre-eminence of the situation, leading to “purposeful activity .... in the real world” (Richards and Rodgers 2001:
40). On the other side of the Atlantic American linguistics was dominated by the descriptive linguistics (structuralism) of Bloomfield and Fries from 1933 to 1957 (Whitehead 1973: 153 - 155).
As Howatt (2004: 306) points out, the simplistic habit-formation employed by Fries does not really need a theory of learning. The methods such as the Army Method and audiolingualism were rather a matter of over-learning built on commonsense. Language learning meant that there was to be lots of practice, with “constant repetition” (Bloomfield 1933b: 505). “Real language teaching [constituted] a building up in the pupil those associative habits” of the language and was mainly accomplished by linguistic and phonetic drills (Bloomfield 1933a: 294, 299).
B.F. Skinner’s behaviourist theories had a very strong influence on second language teaching (Richards and Rogers, 2001; Howatt, 2004). In these theories language was viewed by behavioural scientists as a set of habits which could be taught and learned if there was the necessary feedback and reinforcement. Learners had to memorise pattern sentences and dialogue, which were followed by exercises in which the learning had to be applied. The teacher had to control the classroom activities so that learners would avoid making errors, seen as undesirable habits to be avoided and the main aim was the learning of the grammatical structures of the language (Rivers 1968: 35; Chastain 1976: 109, 112 – 113; Larsen-Freeman 2000: 41). An obvious criticism is that this presupposes a control over language learning that teachers simply cannot have – a criticism which also could be made of outcomes-based education with its emphasis on predetermined learning outcomes (3.4, 3.7.2 ). The major criticism of audiolingualism and associated methods is that it decontextualises language, ignoring its social dimension and its essentially dynamic nature.
In 1957 another “scientifically”-based view, namely language as a cognitive code, came to prominence. This postulated that, in order to acquire the necessary “system of abstract knowledge” (linguistic competence), a learner had to “actively formulate rules (or hypotheses) and test these against experience” (Branigan and Stokes 1984: 5).
The basic idea was that a language has an underlying system of rules and that a language learner internalises this rule system in the process of acquiring a language. Once a learner had acquired the rule system of the language, he or she would be able to make many different, also unique, utterances. Teaching learners the structures of a language was done in the belief that the rules underlying a language were the same as the traditional grammar rules. Getting learners to do exercises was used as a complementary mechanism and also a means of testing whether the learner had mastered the structures which had been taught (Chastain 1976: 147, 150; Rivers 1984: 6, 33).
Other proposals trying to account for human grammar include Archangeli and Langendoen’s Optimality Theory, which links language knowledge and language usage and suggests that “there are no fixed bounds on language” (Aitchison 1998: 263, 264).
The cognitive code advocated by Chastain (1976) and Jacobovits (1970), among others, supported the explicit teaching of grammar, since the learner would have to make use of his/her cognitive skills in the process. It did, however, recognise that learners needed opportunities to use the language creatively in “language-demanding situations” (Ellis 1990: 38, 39). Nevertheless, it does not make adequate provision for the role of meaning-making in language development. Learners learn a language by actively integrating and applying the language they know in meaningful interaction with others. The need for learners to interact in “real communicative experiences” (Ellis 1997: 79) of this kind in a learner-centred approach gave rise to the approach known as Communicative Language Teaching and “marks the beginning of a major paradigm shift within language teaching in the twentieth century, and whose ramifications continue to be felt today”, the principles of which “are today widely accepted around the world” (Richards and Rodgers 2001: 151). It is to this approach that I now turn.