How has our thinking about language learning changed
through the years?
June K. Phillips
What’s the history of foreign-language teaching? Have there been a lot of diff erent methods? How diff erent are they? Are today’s methods best?
Th e fi rst language taught to anyone in America was, of all things, Algonquian. New arrivals from England learned native American languages so that they could survive in a foreign land. Th e goal:
communication. But in the years that followed, language teaching became more formalized. Th e new settlers built schools. And when they, as good Europeans, started teaching languages in the schools, they wanted the best of European tradition. So before the 1800s, learning a language in America meant learning Ancient Greek or Latin—and oft en both.
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When modern languages came on the scene—and that included only French, Spanish, Italian, and German at fi rst—people studied them the same way they studied Latin and Greek, and for the same reasons. Here’s what Th omas Jeff erson said in 1824, a year before his new University of Virginia opened:
‘Th e Latin and Greek languages constitute the basis of good education and are indispensable to fi ll up the character of a well educated man.’ Th e next year he wrote, ‘We generally learn languages for the benefi t of reading the books written in them.’ So much for interpersonal communication.
For the next century and more, Americans mostly studied languages, not to talk with native speakers but to learn to read.
Language classes were all about reading, translating, and analyzing grammar—not just in Latin and Greek but in modern languages too. So if you studied a language before the middle of the twenti-eth century, you probably didn’t learn to speak it, because no one intended that you should. Speaking wasn’t the goal.
And then came World War II. Suddenly the U.S. urgently needed a way of mass-producing speakers of foreign languages—soldiers and civilians—who could not just conjugate French verbs or read Don Quixote but actually talk with people in all parts of the world. And what was needed included a dazzling variety of languages—every-thing from Dutch to Burmese.
Th e linguistic profession was pressed into war service … and the teaching of languages dramatically changed. Th is time was also the heyday of behaviorism as an explanation for learning. Teachers were trained to use stimulus and response to imprint language patterns in student minds. Students were to learn by memorizing dialogues and producing rapid-fi re responses in all kinds of oral drills, even though they rarely produced messages of their own.
It worked to an extent. More people became more fl uent, in more languages, faster, through these ‘audiolingual’ courses than they ever could through the grammar-and-translation model with its emphasis on the written word. World War II needs carried over
into the Cold War, and demand for language learning—Russian in particular—remained high. Ancient Greek fell off the charts. Latin experienced ups and downs in popularity and was widely taught for its potential to build vocabulary competency in English.
By the early 1960s, the audiolingual method was widely used across America. But its fl aws began to show up. Th ere were severe limitations on stimulus-response as a model for learning something as complex as a language. Researchers looked more closely at how language is acquired, and came to see acquisition as an evolving process rather than something one could master through thirty-minutes-a-day exercises. Language teaching changed again to refl ect those insights.
In recent years teaching has changed further, because we now know more about how language is acquired for communicative purpose. We know more about how factors such as age, contexts (classrooms, immersion programs, or overseas study), and learning styles interact. And students are pushing the envelope. Th ey talk across continents with instant messages. Th ey read Web sites. Th ey download news and entertainment. Th ey want to learn more about the cultures that use the languages they study. So in classrooms today, students take on real-world tasks.
If Jeff erson were brought back to see what’s happened since 1824, he’d mourn the diminished status of Greek and Latin. But he’d no doubt be fascinated by today’s students, the variety of languages they study, and the ways they develop language skills. If he could visit a typical classroom he’d see them working in pairs, moving around the room, chattering in short sentences, using imperfect but understandable grammar, and fi lling in meanings with gestures when necessary. Above all, communicating. I sus-pect it looked a lot like that when their ancestors were learning Algonquian.
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About the author
June K. Phillips is Dean of Arts and Humanities at Weber State Univer-sity in Utah. She has taught French (at the junior high school through college levels) and methods of foreign-language teaching. She served as President of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) in 2001. She was ACTFL’s project director for the National Standards for Foreign Language Education; she also co-chaired the development of Program Standards for the Preparation of Foreign Language Teachers, jointly promulgated by ACTFL and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. She has served as a consultant to the National Assessment of Educational Progress evalua-tion of Spanish teaching in the U.S. and to the WGBH/Annenberg Video Library for Foreign Languages, a non-profi t educational resource. She has published and edited extensively on pedagogical topics.
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: Adult language-learning is also discussed in chapters 15 (lan-guage and the brain), 27 (foreign accents), 29 (adult advantages in lan(lan-guage learning), 30 (language-learning tips), 31 (history of language-teaching methods), 32 (study abroad), and 34 (language-teaching technology).
Elsewhere:
National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project. Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century (Allen Press, 1999).
Th is book provides background information on the standards for for-eign-language education that are now in part or in full adopted by most U.S. states. Th e standards, a wider set of goals than were aimed at in past language learning, are commonly called the ‘Five Cs’: Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities.
Omaggio Hadley, Alice. Teaching Language in Context (Heinle & Heinle, third edition 2001), Chapters 1–3. Th e introductory chapters of this text on language teaching trace the various instructional methods over time and set out the basic theories of language acquisition that dominate thinking today.
Shrum, Judith L. and Eileen W. Glisan. Teacher’s Handbook: Contextual-ized Language Instruction (Th omson-Heinle, third edition 2005), chapters 1–2. Th e early chapters of this text explore theories of second-language acquisition and link them with the Standards for Foreign Language learning as the basis for instructional practice.