发布时间 : 星期四 文章语言教学的流派第一章更新完毕开始阅读
The sentence is the basic unit of teaching and language practice. Much of the lesson is devoted to translating sentences into and out of the target language，and it is this focus on the sentence that is a distinctive feature of the method. Earlier approaches to foreign language study used grammar as an aid to the study of texts in a foreign language. But this was thought to be too difficult for students in secondary schools ,and the focus on the sentence was an attempt to make language learning easier.
Accuracy is emphasized. Students are expected to attain high standards in translation ,because of “the high priority attached to meticulous standards of accuracy which, as well as having an intrinsic moral value, was a prerequisite for passing the increasing number of formal written examinations that grew up during the century.”
Grammar is taught deductively-that is, by presentation and study of grammar rules, which are then practiced through translation exercises. In most Grammar-Translation texts, a syllabus was followed for the sequencing of grammar points throughout a text, and there was an attempt to teach grammar in an organized and systematic way.
The student’s native language is the medium of instruction. It is used to explain new items and to enable comparisons to be made between
foreign language and the student’s native language.
Grammar Translation dominated European and foreign language teaching from the 1840s to the 1940s, and in modified form it continues to be widely used in some parts of the world today. At its best, as Howatt(1984) points out, it was not necessarily the horror that its critics depicted it as. Its worst excesses were introduced by those who wanted to demonstrate that the study of French or German was no less rigorous than the study of classical language. This resulted in the type of Grammar- Translation courses remembered with distaste by thousands of school learners, for whom foreign language learning meant a tedious experience of memorizing endless lists of unusable grammar rules and vocabulary and attempting to produce perfect translations of stilted or literary prose. Although the Grammar-Translation Method often creates frustration for students ,it makes few demands on teachers. It is still used in situations where understanding literary texts is the primary focus of foreign language study and there is little need for a speaking knowledge of the language. Contemporary texts for the teaching of foreign languages at college level often reflect Grammar-Translation principles. These texts are frequently the produces of people trained in literature rather than in language teaching or applied linguistics. Consequently, though it may be true to say that the
Grammar-Translation Method is still widely practiced, it has no advocates. It is a method for which there is no theory. There is no literature that offers a rationale or justification for it or that attempts to relate it to issues in linguistics, psychology, or educational theory. In the mid- and late nineteenth century opposition to the Grammar-Translation Method gradually developed in several European countries. This Reform Movement, as it was referred to, laid the foundations for the development of new ways of teaching languages and raised controversies that have continued to the present day.
Language teaching innovations in the nineteenth century Toward the mid-nineteenth century several factors contributed to a questioning and rejection of the Grammar-Translation Method. Increased opportunities for communication among Europeans created a demand for oral proficiency in foreign languages. Emphasized the importance of meaning in learning, proposed that reading be taught before other skills, and tried to locate language teaching within a broader educational framework. The Englishman T. Prendergast was one of the first to record the observation that children use contextual and situational cues to interpret utterances and that they use memorized phrases and “routines” in speaking. He proposed the first “structural syllabus,” advocating that learners be
taught the most basic structural patterns occurring in the language. In this way he was anticipating an issue that was to be taken up in the 1920s and 1930s, as we shall see in Chapter3. The Frenchman F.Gouin is perhaps the best known of these mid- nineteenth century reformers. Gouin developed an approach to teaching a foreign language based on his observations of children’s use of language. He believed that language learning was facilitated through using language to accomplish events consisting of a sequence of related actions. His method used situations and themes as ways of organizing and presenting oral language – the famous Gouin “series,” which includes sequences of sentences related to such activities as chopping wood and opening the door. Gouin established schools to teach according to his method, and it was quite popular for a time. In the first lesson of a foreign language the following series would be learned:
Gouin’s emphasis on the need to present new teaching items in a context that makes their meaning clear, and the use of gestures and actions to convey the meaning of utterances, are practices that later became part of such approaches and methods as Situational Language
Teaching
(Chapter3)
and
Total
Physical
Response(Chapter6).
The work of individual language specialists like these reflects the