An A la Carte Approach to English Teaching Approaches

Kevin Stein Clark Memorial International High School When I was in high school, it was expected that students aiming to attend a four-year college with name recognition would take foreign language courses. My Spanish teachers name was Ms. Quenzal. Class met five days a week for fifty-minute periods. We used a textbook broken into units with titles like, In Your Town, or Jobs. There was a big chunk of grammar in each unit and sample dialogues which were probably written to take advantage of said grammar. We spent a lot of time working in pairs practicing the dialogues that first year. We also did a fair amount of grammar exercises of the change the sentence from present to past tense type. As our language developed, there was less dialogue work and more free conversation and authentic text work. By the end of the second year, we were reading and holding small group discussions on short Spanish novels. By the third year, Ms. Quenzal had stopped using English in class, wore large red hoop earrings, spoke much more quickly and with a much more pronounced accent, and refused to answer any questions which were directed to her in English. I remember in my third year, I was selected to stand up in front of the class and take part in a role-play with another student. I was supposed to take on the role of a high school student who is worried about what he will do after graduating high school. My partner in the role-play was taking the role of a high school Instead, I guidance counselor. Unfortunately, my limited vocabulary did not allow me to hone in on any specific problem such as choosing a university. made a bunch of general statements about feeling bad, not knowing something, and wanting to talk. When the guidance counselor insisted I tell her what was wrong, I blurted out the only Spanish that came to mind. My body. My body is changing. Which resulted in an explosion of laughter from the class. Now that I am a language teacher myself, I sometimes look back on my first language class and try and understand just exactly Ms. Quenzal was doing during those 50 minutes a day with us. According to Richards and Rodgers (1986, p. 16), "approach refers to theories about the nature of language and

language learning that serve as the source of practices and principles in language teaching." What was Ms. Quenzal's approach to language teaching? Did she have a core set of beliefs about the nature of language which shaped and formed the methods and techniques of her lessons? Did she subscribe to an approach? And for that matter, do I? While Ms. Quenzal's class, while certainly much more lively than the Latin class being held two rooms down the hall, still involved a large number of oral grammar drills, especially during that first year of class. And when I first got to Japan in 1999, most of the text books wereand in fact still arebased on a structural syllabus in which linguistic knowledge, and not language use, is the focus of the course. These structural syllabi are heavily influenced by the structural approach, born out of the work of structural linguists of the 1940s and 1950s who, were engaged in what they claimed was a scientific descriptive analysis of various languages. Language teaching methodologies put this type of analysis to use in the actual teaching of linguistic patterns (Brown, 1994, p.70). Language was like a giant Lego set, composed of pieces from both a phonological and grammatical system. Once students could understand how and why the pieces fit together, they would be able to use the language. For the structural linguists, grammar, or structure, was the starting point, of language instruction. Vocabulary was secondary and only enough vocabulary to work with the basic grammatical patterns was introduced (Richards and Rogers, 1986, p. 46). While I do not know of any teachers who would start a conversation by saying, Hey, I am a structuralist, traces of the structuralist approach still linger in most language classrooms, beyond even the structural syllabus forced on many teachers. In fact, I often use tabling activities when working with lower level students. I will usually pick a subject, such as my week and set up a table which includes one section for the subject of the sentence, one for a verb, one for a direct object, and a final section for an adverbial phrase dealing with time, usually day of the week and time of day. The table looks something like:

My Week Day and Time On Monday morning On Tuesday night On Sunday evening Who I I I Do practice watch study What baseball television English

Students, one by one, compose sentences using the various components from the table. When introducing a new grammar structure to students I will often present it in a table form, encouraging students to produce as many sentences as possible at the star of a lesson. To a certain extent, I, like the structural linguists who developed the structural approach, believe that grammar can indeed be the starting point of language instruction. Still, this exercise is not purely structuralist in nature. While I choose the initial vocabulary, students are free to add new words as needed and I do not attempt to limit the amount of vocabulary out of any preconceived ideas that a larger base of words will interfere with students being able to recognize and become familiar with the pattern being practiced. The tabling activity has one more connection with the structuralist approach, namely the idea that there is also something valuable about contrastive analysis of the learners first and second languages. During tabling work, I will sometimes ask students or point out the difference in structure between how the table is set up in English and how it would look in the students first language. Especially when teaching the above pattern with Japanese learners, we usually spend some class time focusing in on the fact that the verb-object relationship is reversed in Japanese. Occasionally I do minimal pair exercises, and these activities are also predicated upon the belief that the phonological system of language is composed of phonemes which can be compared and contrasted with each other, learned in isolation, and then used correctly during language production. While I realize that such pronunciation work is a simplification of language in use and does not necessarily correspond one-to-one with language acquisition, I still find such work to can lead to higher levels of student awareness and have indeed seen cases of dramatic improvement in students pronunciation. As the structural approach was heavily influenced by the structural linguists

of the 1940s and 1950s, the behaviorist approach was similarly influenced by behavioral psychology, a school of psychology which, advocated conditioning and habit-formation models of learning (Brown, 1994, p. 70). The idea was that language learning was the adoption of a set of behaviors which could be influenced in the same way as any other behaviors, through a program of stimulus, response, and reinforcement conditioning. Learning a language was simply a matter of providing students with the appropriate stimulus in the form of samples of target language, after the students responded, the teachers praise, fellow students reaction, or the students, intrinsic selfsatisfaction of target language use, would be the reinforcement necessary to help the students acquire a, set of appropriate language-stimulus-response chains (Richards and Rogers, p. 50). In the behaviorist approach, maximizing correct responses (appropriate behavior) and minimizing errors (inappropriate behavior) was considered necessary to produce good behaviors. Hence, language practice often focused on short dialogues and aimed for perfect accuracy. In some ways, the structuralist approach and the behaviorist approach were not competing approaches, but complimentary ways of thinking about language and psychology which were both fundamental in the creation of the Audiolingual method. The content of the Audiolingual method classes were based on the structuralist approach, while the classroom procedures and teaching techniques relied heavily upon the behaviorist approach of limiting errors and reinforcing good behavior. While we have moved a long way past believing that language acquisition is a simple, mechanical process, vestiges of behaviorist thought still inform modern language classrooms. Now we use different terminology such as 'extrinsic motivation' and 'graded tasks', but the ideas that students should be praised for correct responses and that class content should be level adjusted to provide an adequate chance of success can be tied back to the original behaviorist ideas. And many of the fluency activities which I use in my own classes, including 3/2/1 activities (Nation, 2007) in which students work with the same language repeatedly in order to improve their fluency, are also indebted to behaviorist ideas. Just because I realize that there are complex cognitive and psychological factors which can inhibit or promote language acquisition, does not change the simple fact that I still believe, to a certain extent, that practice does indeed make, if not perfect, at least better.

In the late 1960s, Noam Chomsky started a revolution within the linguistics field when he proposed his ideas of transformational grammar. Language was no longer a combination of simple structures, nor a result of reductionist series of behaviors. Instead, it was the product of, innate aspects of the mind and from how humans process experience through language (Richards and Rogers, p. 59). Language teachers were freed from the constraints of demanding perfection of their students, as errors were no longer simply mistakes in behavior, but a crucial part of a cognitive process during which learners were developing an interlanguage system. In a cognitive approach, the structural syllabus was recognized to be unrelated to the internal syllabus students followed in developing their own interlanguage system. Additionally, researchers and teachers began to recognize the importance of both cognitive and psychological factors in language learners success (Brown, 1994, p. 95). A student was no longer a vessel to be filled with language knowledge, or an agent reacting to stimulus in simple and predictable ways. To deal with this new idea of just what a language learner was, a new batch of methodologies such as Caleb Gattengos The Silent Way, and James Ashers Total Physical Response (Brown, p. 96-100) sprung up during the 1970s. The Silent Ways use of Cuisinere rods allowed students to use their own abilities of intellectual creativity to intuitively understand the underlying grammatical rules that led to sentence formation or phonetic systems. Ashers TPR allowed students to not only relax, but to physically react to and process new language in a way more akin to the way children acquire their first language. While it is rare to find a language classroom which solely relies ideas upon upon one of these these methodologies nowadays, the underlying which

methodologies rested and a number of the activities and techniques used in these methodologies are still very much in use in classrooms throughout the world. I have used Cuisinere rods to teach adverbials and often use TPR activities when introducing vocabularysuch as household choreswhich easily lends itself to psychical gestures. Asides from the teaching techniques developed during the 1970s, perhaps the most important thing the cognitive approach did was simply point out the limited use of both the behavioral and structuralist approach. If language acquisition was the result of deep and

innate cognitive factors, if teaching a grammar point did not necessarily result integration into a students interlanguage system, the language teacher was now faced with a frightening new question to deal with. In short, just what exactly was teachable within the language classroom? In some respects, the communicative approach is an attempt to answer that question and to fill the hole left after behavioral and structural approaches had been seen to be discredited. As opposed to attempting to answer the question of What should be taught? perhaps one of the main questions researchers influenced by the cognitive approach still struggles with today, the question was recast as, What is the purpose of teaching a language? The answer to the question then becomes relatively easy. We teach English to allow our students to communicate effectively in English. In light of this, the focus of the language class shifts subtly, but importantly, away from the acquisition of language knowledge, to providing an environment in which students develop the language skills necessary for English communication; in which students develop the communicative competence necessary to, convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within a specific context (Brown, p.227). Whereas the end goal of all language teaching has always ostensibly been to produce students who could communicate in English, the communicative approach took as its basic premise that the learning of English communication was in fact inseparable from the act of English communication itself. Only through engaging in communicative English acts could students have the chance to develop the skills necessary to become competent English communicators. Merril Swain, writing about collaborative dialogue, said, "It is where language use and language learning can co-occur (Swain, 2000, p. 97)." In some ways, she could just as easily have been writing about the communicative approach itself. This idea of language learning has influenced almost all aspect the modern language classroom. In my own classes, tabling activities are not based on disconnected sentences and grammar, but grouped around a theme and often lead to communicative activities in which students must use the information in the table to engage in personal and authentic conversations. Similarly, the topics that I address within my classroom include not only grammar issues,

but also appropriate use of gestures and the pragmatics of language use. Part of my responsibility as an English teacher is to make sure students know the socially and stylistically appropriate words and phrases to use within a given situation. In short, I do not believe that discrete linguistic knowledge is enough for students to become functional English users. Only through putting language to use in the realistic and sometimes confusing and messy manner in which it is used in the real world, will students have a chance to take English out of the classroom and make it a part of their larger world.

Over 25 years ago, I took my first Spanish class with Ms. Quenzal. I do not know if she was well schooled in the various approaches which were floating around the academic and teaching world at the time, although I have a feeling that, as a dedicated teacher, she did her fair share of reading of academic journals. And something of the different techniques she used in her class, from simple grammar tables, to role-plays, to reading groups, leads me to think that she was on the cutting-edge of methodology when it came to how she taught Spanish. Not because the underlying approach upon which her teaching rested was based on the latest academic writing, but because she taught to our needs and exhibited a genuine interest in us as people as well as students. I think it was this attitude and her willingness to explore a range of what, on the surface, might appear to be contradictory methodologies, which made her, regardless of my limited language abilities, one of my favorite teachers. In a similar way, I hope I am teaching my classes not based on one idea of what language is or is not, but on the needs of my students at any given moment. Structuralist, behavioral, cognitive, communicative and more recent approaches such as the lexical approach and emergentist school of thought all have something important to say about language. But only when they are placed within the specific context of a specific class of learners. Because even a unified theory of language is of little use if it does not help us to understand our learners and how to best assist them as they engage in the difficult work of becoming English speakers.

References:

Brown, H.D. (1994). Principles of language learning and teaching, 3rd ed., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents. Nation, I. S. P. (2007). The four strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 1(1), 1-12. Richards, J.C. and Rodgers, T. (1986). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: mediatin acquisition through collaborative dialogue. In J.P. Lantolf (ed.) Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press p. 97-114.