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
brief explanation in the student’s native tongue would have been a more efficient route to comprehension.
The Harvard psychologist Roger Brown has documented similar problems with strict Direct Method techniques. He described his frustration in observing a teacher performing verbal gymnastics in an attempt to convey the meaning of Japanese words, when translation would have been a much more efficient technique to use.
By the 1920s, use of the Direct Method in noncommercial schools in Europe had consequently declined. In France and Germany it was gradually modified into versions that combined some Direct Method techniques with more controlled grammar-based activities. The European popularity of the Direct Method in the early part of the twentieth century caused foreign language specialists in the United States to attempt to have it implemented in American schools and colleges, although they decided to move with caution. A study begun in 1923 on the state of foreign language teaching concluded that no single method could guarantee successful results. The goal of trying to teach conversation skills was considered impractical in view of the restricted time available for foreign language teaching in schools, the limited skills of teachers, and the perceived irrelevance of conversation skills in a foreign language for the average American college student. The study- published as the
Coleman Report- advocated that a more reasonable goal for a foreign language course would be a reading knowledge of a foreign language, achieved through the gradual introduction of words and grammatical structures in simple reading texts. The main resulat of this recommendation was that reading became the goal of most foreign language programs in the United States. The emphasis on reading continued to characterize foreign language teaching in the United States until World WarⅡ.
Although the Direct Method enjoyed popularity in Europe, not everyone had embraced it enthusiastically. The British applied linguist Henry Sweet had recognized its limitations. It offered innovations at the level of teaching procedures but lacked a thorough methodological basis. Its main focus was on the exclusive use of the target language in the classroom, but it failed to address many issues that Sweet thought more basic. Sweet and other applied linguists argued for the development of sound methodological principles that could serve as the basis for teaching techniques. In the 1920s and 1930s applied linguists systematized the principles proposed earlier by the Reform Movement and so laid the foundations for what developed into the British approach to teaching English as a foreign language. Subsequent development led to Audiolingualism (see Chapter4) in the United States and the Oral Approach or Situational
Language Teaching (see Chapter3) in Britain.
What became of the concept of method as foreign language teaching emerged as a significant educational issue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? We have seen from this historical survey some of the questions that prompted innovations and new directions in language teaching in the past.
1 What shoul the goals of language teaching be? Should a language course try to teach conversational proficiency, reading, translation, or some other skills?
2 What is the basic nature of language, and how will this affect teaching method?
3 What are the principles for the selection of language content in language teaching?
4 What principles of organization, sequencing, and presentation best facilitate learning?
5 What should the role of the native language be?
6 What processes do learners use in mastering a language, and can these be incorporated into a method?
7 What teaching techniques and activities work best under what circumstances?
Particular methods differ in the way they address these issues. But in order to understand the fundamental nature of methods in
language teaching, it is necessary to conceive the notion of method more systematically. This is the aim of the next chapter, in which we present a model for the description, analysis, and comparison of methods. This model will be used as a framework for our subsequent discussions and analyses of particular language teaching methods and philosophies.