Centro de Investigación y Docencia en Educación

División de Educología
Didáctica para el Aprendizaje del Inglés
Prof. Juan Pablo Zúñiga
Estudiante: Jacqueline Solís Retana

The Secret History of Methods

Scott Thornbury, a passionate collector of old course books and a 30 year

experienced teacher, gave an impressive overview of the evolution of English

language teaching course books and teaching methods over time in terms of

form and content. He explained during his lecture how methods and

approaches for teaching English as a second language have played an

important role over time which has involved the recycling of good ideas in order

to perform a better teaching.

Scott showed examples from very old book pages of sentence patterns

that make no sense at all for communicative purposes and real life issues such

as “I put my finger on your nose,” “I take my foot off your head,” and “My hand is

on your knee.” He also showed some funny titles of course books from around

the world followed: “English Made Funny,” “Laugh and Be Merry,” “Interesting

English,” and “Toil and Chat” which are related to old fashioned methods and

approaches such as the audio-lingual method. However, some of the beliefs

expressed in course books about learning a language were seen as good ideas

such as “Life must be brought to the classroom or the classroom should be

taken to life.”

That is why “changes in methodology have represented different

configurations of the same basic options,” which means changes in the way

something is organized. For example, the nature of language has been

organized either by form or by function. The learning process has been

implemented in an analytic way or in an experiential way (for example,

experiential would be by learning the grammar through speaking or through

conversation) while the goals have been based on accuracy or communication.

Also, the type of syllabus has been used either based on the systems

(grammar, vocabulary), based on skills (reading, writing, and listening),

segregated -you learn math in a math class-, or integrated –you learn

geography through English. However, a method could incorporate some desired

characteristics but not all of them.

These changes have also affected teachers’ and students’ roles. While

learners’ roles have been related either to cognitive aspects or affective

aspects, teachers have played a role by transmitting information or by

implementing symmetrical relationships. Moreover, teaching procedures have

gone from deductive (giving the students the rules) to inductive (make the

students work on the rules from examples), or from bilingual (the learners

mother tongue is used in the classroom) to monolingual (the target language is

used in the classroom).

Scott also proposed a new communicative approach called DOGMA,

which encourages teaching without published textbooks or the necessity of

technology, and instead focusing on conversational communication among the

learners and the teacher. This approach has also adopted some the good

principles from course books such as "We teach grammar through

communication, and not communication through grammar,” "Language must

not be imprisoned between the pages of a book,” and so on.

Because there is not a method or approach that groups all the good

principles together, a second language teacher must worry about learning and

understanding the advantages and disadvantages each of the methods and

approaches has, so that the students can be successful when learning the

target language.