Section 1 ELT Methods and Approaches Outside China

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Brainstorming

English language teaching has a long history both in and outside China. Different teaching approaches and methods have emerged over time and many are still contributing to today's classroom practice. Can you list some English teaching methods?

The history of foreign language teaching has witnessed the emergence of different approaches and methods over different periods of time. The major approaches, with the relevant dates indicated in brackets, are: the Grammar-Translation Method (1840s to 1940s), the Direct Method (1860s to 1920s), the Situational Approach (1930s to 1960s), the Audiolingual Method (1940s to 1960s), the Humanistic Approach (1970s to 1980s), and the Communicative Approach (1970s to date) (Richards & Rodgers, 2001). These approaches and methods emerged in different contexts as solutions to particular language teaching problems and as responses to beliefs about language learning and use. Through examining these approaches and methods we will gain a panoramic view of how language may be best taught.

I.The Grammar-Translation Method

1.Background

The Grammar-Translation Method originated at the end of the eighteenth century in Germany, or more exactly, in the grammar schools of Prussia. It could thus be called “the Grammar School Method”.

An adapted Grammar-Translation Method followed this traditional scholastic approach, but made changes for the teaching of grammar in schools. It preserved the basic framework of grammar and translation, but replaced traditional texts with exemplifying sentences, hoping to make language learning easier.

2.A brief review

Several aspects of the Grammar-Translation Method have attracted criticism.

(1) The focus on the sentence. In the Grammar-Translation Method the sentence is the basic unit of teaching and language practice. Sentences exemplify the grammar in a concentrated and clear way and serve grammar and translation practice well. However, they can be meaningless or even absurd when they are separated from contexts and merely coined as examples of grammatical rules (Howatt, 1984: 173).

(2) The ignorance of the spoken language. The major focus of the Grammar-Translation Method is on reading and writing skills, but it is evident that the acquisition of these skills represents only part of the goals of learning a foreign language.

(3) The native language as the medium of instruction. The connection between a native and a foreign language is “an indisputable fact of life” in language learning, and how the native language influences foreign language learning has received considerable attention in the literature. One concern is that the use of the native language in class may reinforce the learner's reliance on processing via the native language, and therefore hindering fluency.

(4) The use of translation. In the late nineteenth-century Reform Movement, the notion of association in psychology was employed to question the use of translation as it could lead to the formation of cross associations and hinder the development of the foreign language ( Howatt, 1984: 172-173) .

The Grammar-Translation Method has its strengths.

(1) For example, it is easy for teachers to manage as it makes few demands on teachers, teaching tools and classroom facilities. There are situations where the goal of foreign language learning includes acquisition of both speaking and writing skills, but there are also situations where understanding literary texts is the primary goal and there is little need for speaking skills. That is to say, in some cases the Grammar-Translation Method is appropriate.

(2) Today there is a more positive attitude to the Grammar-Translation Method due to recent research findings on the influence of the native language on language learning; the use of translation as an aid to language learning; the usefulness of translation as a testing device and the practical applications of translation as an invaluable skill in itself.

Simply put, grammar-translation might not be highly rated as a language teaching approach, but it does have a role in language teaching as an alternative teaching technique.

II.The Direct Method

1.Background

The Direct Method is characterized by an emphasis on the spoken language and conducting classroom instruction exclusively in the foreign language. It grew out of the late nineteenth-century Reform Movement when opposition to the Grammar-Translation Method developed.

The development of natural methods led to the emergence of the Direct Method. At the turn of the century, the Direct Method was officially accepted in France and Germany, and in the United States, Berlitz ( 1852-1921) and his colleagues brought the method to prominence through the success of their commercial language schools.

2.Theoretical assumptions

Though their interpretations varied, writers of the Reform Movement agreed upon three basic principles ( Howatt, 1984: 171) : (1) the primacy of speech, (2) the centrality of the connected text as the kernel of the teaching-learning process, and (3) the absolute priority of an oral methodology in the classroom.

In parallel to these principles providing the theoretical foundations for a new approach to language teaching, principles for language teaching were developed out of naturalistic principles of language learning, as seen in native language acquisition. Efforts as such led to what have been termed natural methods, and ultimately the most widely known of these, the Direct Method.

3. A brief review

(1) The Direct Method was subject to a degree of criticism due to the difficulties experienced in implementing it in public secondary school education. It seemed to overemphasize the similarities between naturalistic native language learning and foreign language learning in the classroom.

(2) It also failed to consider the practical realities of public schools. Public school teachers, for example, were not native speakers of the target language and the students were not as motivated as paying clients in private language schools.

(3) In addition, the principle of conducting instruction exclusively in the foreign language often caused problems and frustration for teachers. Instead of using a quick translation or explanation in the native language, teachers needed to spend a lot of time and effort clarifying meaning in the target language.

(4) The Direct Method was also cited as an approach which limited innovation at the level of teaching procedures.

III.The Situational Approach

1.Background and classroom characteristics

The origins of the Situational Approach began with efforts by a group of British applied linguists to develop a more scientific foundation for an oral approach to language teaching than was evidenced in the Direct Method. Two key findings of such efforts were the principles of vocabulary and grammar control in language teaching. Research on frequency counts revealed that a core of two thousand or so words occurred frequently in written texts, and it was reasoned that knowledge of these words would greatly facilitate the learner's reading in a foreign language.

The following were the main classroom characteristics of the approach ( Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 39) :

●Material is taught orally before it is presented in written form.

●The target language is the language of the classroom.

●New language points are introduced and practiced situationally.

●Vocabulary selection procedures are followed to ensure that an essential general service vocabulary is covered.

●Items of grammar are graded following the principle that simple forms should be taught before complex ones.

●Reading and writing are introduced once a sufficient lexical and grammatical basis is established.

2.Theoretical assumptions

Underlying the Situational Approach was the notion of structuralism, emphasizing that the basis of language was spoken language, at the heart of which was structure. Based on a behaviourist theory of learning, the Situational Approach considered language learning to be habit formation.

Similar to the Direct Method, it adopted an inductive approach to grammar teaching. New words or structures were presented in a situation so that students could deduce the meaning from the situation in which the form was used and then apply this new awareness to new situations by generalisation.

3.A brief review

The Situational Approach is a grammar-based language teaching method which focuses on oral language and sentence patterns, and emphasises the principles of grammatical and lexical gradation and using situations to present and practise new language items.

It is worth noting that in spite of its emphasis on the notion of situation, the Situational Approach uses a structural rather than situational syllabus. The syllabus is a list of basic structures and sentence patterns rather than a list of situations and the language associated with them. The presentation of new language items in this approach tends to incorporate objects, pictures, and realia together with actions and gestures.

IV.The Audiolingual Method

1.Background

The Audiolingual Method came into being in the United States in the 1950s as a result of the increased attention given to foreign language teaching during and after World War II.

2.A brief review

Characteristics:

The Audiolingual Method is a grammar-based language teaching method which emphasizes the teaching of listening and speaking before reading and writing. Dialogues and drills form the basis of audiolingual classroom practices and contrastive analysis is often used.

Criticism

●Linguists such as Noam Chomsky questioned structural linguistics and behavioural psychology for being unsound in terms of language theory and learning theory.

●In practice, students found the audiolingual classroom boring and unsatisfying, and experienced poor transfer of the skills acquired through Audiolingualism to real communication outside the classroom.

Comparisons

●The Situational Approach and the Audiolingual Method share many similarities, for example, in the order in which language skills are introduced, and the focus on accuracy through drills and practice in the basic structures and sentence patterns.

●The Audiolingual Method had strong ties to structural linguistics and behavioural psychology. Though they were developed from different traditions, the Situational Approach and the Audiolingual Method share similar views about the nature of language and of language learning.

V.The Communicative Approach

1.Background and development

Theoretical foundations

(1) The Communicative Approach was developed in early 1970s, though its theoretical foundations dated back to earlier breakthroughs in two lines of research about the nature of language. The prominent American linguist Noam Chomsky, on the one hand, revealed the fundamental characteristic of creativity in the development of language competence. On the other hand, British linguists such as M.A.K. Halliday emphasised another fundamental characteristic of language—the functional and communicative potential of language, which was inadequately addressed in approaches to language teaching at that time. This led to the proposal to focus language teaching on the development of communicative proficiency.

(2) Another impetus for the Communicative Approach came from the work to investigate the possibility of developing communicative syllabuses. Wilkins published a book titled Notional Syllabuses in 1976, marking a milestone for the Communicative Approach.

We may conveniently identify two phases of the development: Earlier Communicative Language Teaching ( 1970s to 1990s) , and Current Communicative Language Teaching ( 1990s to the present) ( Richards, 2006; see also Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 172-173)

2.Theoretical assumptions

The new Communicative Approach posited that the goal of language teaching was to develop the student's communicative ability given that language was a system for the expression of meaning, and communication the primary function of language.

We can discern, however, elements of an underlying learning theory in some CLT practices. These include the following principles ( Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 161):

●The communication principle: Activities that involve real communication promote learning.

●The task principle: Activities in which language is used to carry out meaningful tasks promote learning.

●The meaningfulness principle: Language that is meaningful to the learner supports the learning process.

3.Earlier Communicative Language Teaching

In the phase between the 1970s and the 1990s, earlier Communicative Language Teaching focused on two problems. One was how to develop a syllabus that was compatible with the notion of communicative competence, and the other was how to identify learners' communicative needs.

The overarching principles of CLT classrooms are as follows ( Richards, 2006: 13):

●Make real communication the focus of language learning.

●Provide opportunities for learners to experiment and try out what they know.

●Be tolerant of learners' errors as they indicate that the learner is building up his or her communicative competence.

●Provide opportunities for learners to develop both accuracy and fluency.

●Link the different skills such as speaking, reading and listening together, since they usually coincide in the real world.

●Let students induce and discover grammar rules.

4.Current Communicative Language Teaching

Current Communicative Language Teaching has evolved into several variants, which draw on a number of different educational paradigms and traditions but which also incorporate general principles of the approach. These variants make the following ten core assumptions ( Richards, 2006: 22-23) :

(1) Second language learning is facilitated when learners are engaged in interaction and meaningful communication.

(2) Effective classroom learning tasks and exercises provide opportunities for students to negotiate meaning, expand their language resources, notice how language is used, and take part in meaningful interpersonal exchange.

(3) Meaningful communication results from students processing content that is relevant, purposeful, interesting, and engaging.

(4) Communication is a holistic process that often calls upon the use of several language skills or modalities.

(5) Language learning is facilitated both by activities that involve inductive or discovery learning of underlying rules of language use and organization, as well as by those involving language analysis and reflection.

(6) Language learning is a gradual process that involves creative use of language, and trial and error. Although errors are a normal product of learning, the ultimate goal of learning is to be able to use the new language both accurately and fluently.

(7) Learners develop their own routes to language learning, progress at different rates, and have different needs and motivations for language learning.

(8) Successful language learning involves the use of effective learning and communication strategies.

(9) The role of the teacher in the language classroom is that of a facilitator, who creates a classroom climate conducive to language learning and provides opportunities for students to use and practise the language and to reflect on language use and language learning.

(10) The classroom is a community where learners learn through collaboration and sharing.

Classroom activities of current Communicative Language Teaching share the following characteristics ( Richards, 2006: 23-24) :

●They seek to develop students' communicative competence through linking grammatical development to the ability to communicate. Hence, grammar is not taught in isolation but often arises out of a communicative task, thus creating a need for specific items of grammar.

●They create the need for communication, interaction, and negotiation of meaning through the use of activities such as problem solving, information sharing, and role play.

●They provide opportunities for both inductive as well as deductive learning of grammar.

●They make use of content that connects to students' lives and interests.

●They allow students to personalize learning by applying what they have learned to their own lives.

●Classroom materials typically make use of authentic texts to create interests and to provide valid models of language.

5.Content-based instruction

Content-based instruction and task-based instruction can be referred to as process-based methodologies since they share as a common starting point a focus on creating classroom processes that are believed to best facilitate language learning. Text-based instruction and competency-based instruction, on the other hand, are product-based methodologies since they focus more on the outcomes or products of learning as the starting point in course design rather than classroom processes ( Richards, 2006) .

Content-based instruction, which emphasizes the use of content as the driving force of classroom activities, is a recent development of Communicative Language Teaching. Language learning in content-based instruction is the by-product of the content learning process.

The following are the underlying assumptions of content-based instruction in respect of language learning (Richards, 2006: 28):

●People learn a language more successfully when they use the language as a means of acquiring information, rather than as an end in itself.

●Content-based instruction better reflects learners' needs for learning a second language. For example, content-based instruction makes it possible for foreign students in American universities to start immediately learning the subject matter of their studies, rather than spending time first on specific language training.

●Content provides a coherent framework that can be used to link and develop all of the language skills.

Development:

Content-based instruction has been widely implemented in different settings since the 1980s. From its earliest application to ESP (English for specific purposes) and immersion programmes, it is now widely used in many other contexts such as K-12 and university second or foreign language programmes.

Questions:

●There are questions about to what extent a focus on content provides a sufficient basis for the development of language skills.

●Another issue concerns whether language teachers have sufficient grounding to teach subject matter in which they have not been trained.

●Lastly, assessment is a problem. Will learners be assessed according to content knowledge or language use or both?

6.Task-based instruction

Task-based instruction, also known as Task-Based Language Teaching, is a development of Communicative Language Teaching which emphasises the use of tasks as the primary unit in syllabus design and in classroom teaching. Task-based instruction claims that learners can better develop their grammar and other dimensions of communicative competence when they are engaged in interactive tasks.

The following are some of the key characteristics defining a task in task-based instruction:

●A task is something that learners do or carry out using their own linguistic resources.

●A task has a clearly defined communicative outcome.

●A task involves a primary focus on meaning rather than linguistic forms.

●A task involves real-world processes of language use.

Background:

Task-based instruction began with the Bangalore/Madras Communicational Teaching Project ( often referred to as the Bangalore Project) by N. S. Prabhu and colleagues in India between 1979 and 1984.

Some of the claims of the project were “not English for communication”, but “English through communication”; not “learn English so that you will be able to do and say things later” but “do and say things now so that as a result you will learn English” (Prabhu, 1980: 23, cited in Beretta, 1989: 283-284).

Evaluation

Few would question the value of employing tasks as a vehicle for promoting communication and authentic language use in second language classrooms.

Many aspects of task-based instruction have, however, yet to be justified, e.g. task categorisation, task sequencing, and evaluation of task performance. In classroom practice in China today, particularly since the educational authority officially promoted the approach, teachers are often confused about, and have difficulty working with, the definition of task. This reflects the fact that task-based instruction is a developing approach on the one hand, and on the other, that there is a need for a workable definition of task for practitioners in everyday classroom practice.

7.Text-based instruction

Text-based instruction, also known as a genre-based approach, is a recent development of Communicative Language Teaching which develops learners' communicative competence through the mastery of different types of texts. Texts in text-based instruction refer to structured sequences of language that are used in specific contexts in specific ways. This view of language owes much to Halliday's functional account of language.

A brief review

●Text-based instruction focuses more on the products of learning rather than the process involved. In other words, based on Halliday's theory, it emphasises the correlation between communicative competence and the use of different types of texts. It is not yet clearly explained how a learner's ability to use different text types appropriately develops.

●Critics have highlighted a missing emphasis on individual creativity and personal expression as the methodology is heavily based on the study of model texts and the creation of texts based on models.

●Likewise, there is a danger that learners in a text-based syllabus will become unengaged over time if lessons are organised repetitively in the following five cycles of text-based teaching: (1) building the context; (2) modelling and deconstructing the text; (3) joint construction of the text; (4) independent construction of the text; and (5) linking to related texts.

8.Competency-based instruction

Competency-based instruction is another product-based methodology like text-based instruction. It is a form of Communicative Language Teaching which seeks to teach students the language skills or competencies they need in work-related or everyday life situations.

Eight key features of competency-based instruction can be identified as follows:

●A focus on successful functioning in society: The goal is to enable students to become autonomous individuals capable of coping with the demands of the world.

●A focus on life skills: Rather than teaching language in isolation, competency-based instruction teaches language as a function of communication about concrete tasks. Students are taught just those language forms/skills required by the situations in which they will function. These forms are normally determined by needs analysis.

●Task-or performance-centred orientation: What counts is what students can do as a result of instruction. The emphasis is on overt behaviours rather than on knowledge or the ability to talk about language and skills.

●Modularized instruction: Language learning is broken down into manageable and meaningful chunks. Objectives are broken into narrowly focused sub-objectives so that both teachers and students can get a clear sense of progress.

●Outcomes are made explicit: Outcomes are known and agreed upon by both learner and teacher. They are specified in terms of behavioural objectives so that students know exactly what behaviours are expected of them.

●Continuous and ongoing assessment: Students are pre-tested to determine what skills they lack and post-tested after instruction on that skill. If they do not achieve the desired level of mastery, they continue to work on the objective and are retested.

●Demonstrated mastery of performance objectives: Rather than the traditional paper-and-pencil tests, assessment is based on the ability to demonstrate pre-specified behaviours.

●Individualized, student-centred instruction: In content, level, and pace, objectives are defined in terms of individual needs; and prior learning and achievement are taken into account in developing curricula. Instruction is not time-based so students progress at their own rates and concentrate on just those areas in which they lack competence.

A brief view

●Competency-based instruction is often employed in programmes whose learners have very specific language needs.

●In competency-based instruction, the course design starts with the identification of the tasks the learner will need to do within a specific setting ( e.g. in the role of a restaurant employee or nurse) , and the language demand of those tasks.

●Often little more than intuition is involved and decisions are not justified either empirically or theoretically. Competency-based instruction is also questioned for being reductionist in approach since language learning is reduced to a set of lists of competencies, and such aspects as thinking skills are ignored.

9.The Natural Approach

The Natural Approach is another form of current Communicative Language Teaching. It was first proposed by Tracy Terrel in 1977 when she was a Spanish language teacher in the State of California, the USA. The approach grew out of Terrel's Spanish teaching experience and drew on the theory of second language acquisition advocated by Steven Krashen.

The Natural Approach is no different from other developments of the Communicative Approach. It is, however, different in that it was not proposed based on the Communicative Approach.

The term natural, as in the Direct Method, indicates that the underlying principles of the method were believed to conform to the naturalistic principles of native language learning in young children. On the other hand, the Natural Approach, as defined by Krashen and Terrel, is believed to conform to the naturalistic principles in successful second language acquisition.

Principles are applied in the Natural Approach ( Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 183) :

●As much comprehensible input as possible must be presented.

●Whatever helps comprehension is important. Visual aids are useful, as is exposure to a wide range of vocabulary rather than study of syntactic structure.

●The focus in the classroom should be on listening and reading; speaking should be allowed to “emerge”.

●In order to lower the affective filter, student work should centre on meaningful communication rather than on form; input should be interesting and so contribute to a relaxed classroom atmosphere.

A brief view:

●Natural Approach classroom techniques are often borrowed from other methods.

●The Natural Approach regards the goal of language teaching as developing learners' communicative competence, but it is built on Krashen's theory of second language acquisition which focuses on comprehensible language input and meaningful communication practice.

●The Natural Approach continues the tradition of teaching a second language based on observation and interpretation of how learners acquire first and second languages in a naturalistic environment.

●It rejects grammar-based teaching and emphasises language comprehension, meaningful communication and suitable comprehensible input, which are believed to provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for successful language acquisition.

●This offers the approach a rationale to integrate and adapt classroom techniques used in other methods.

VI.The Humanistic Approach

From the 1970s through the 1980s there was a major paradigm shift in language teaching as grammar-based approaches and methods were no longer favoured. Noteworthy is the Humanistic Approach to language teaching, based on the notion of humanistic education. Some of the premises underlying humanistic education are as follows:

●A principal purpose of education is to provide learning opportunities and an environment that facilitate the achievement of the full potential of students.

●Personal growth as well as cognitive growth is the responsibility of the school. Therefore, education should deal with both the cognitive or intellectual, and the affective or emotional dimensions of learning.

●For learning to be significant, feelings must be recognised and put to use.

●Significant learning is discovery for oneself.

●Human beings want to actualize their potential.

●Having healthy relationships with other classmates is conducive to learning.

●Learning about oneself is a motivating factor in learning.

●Increasing one's self-esteem is a motivating factor in learning.

Community Language Learning, the Silent Way, and Suggestopaedia are considered typical humanistic language teaching methods.

1.Community Language Learning

Background:

Community Language Learning was inspired by Carl R. Rogers' counselling theory and developed by Charles A. Curran and his associates in the 1970s. Community Language Learning represents the use of Counselling-Learning theory to teach languages.

A brief view

Simply put, psychological counselling is one person giving advice, assistance, or support to another who has a problem or is in some way in need. Community Language Learning redefines the roles of the teacher and learners as the counsellor and the clients. In the class, learners or clients sit around a tape-recorder and form a community. The teacher or counsellor stays outside the community, but, where necessary, supplies target-language equivalents of utterances produced by the clients in their native language.

Community Language Learning obviously demands more than usual from teachers. They have to be highly proficient in both the target language and the learners' native language. They also need to be familiar with, and sympathetic to, the role of counsellors in psychological counselling. They must be able to operate without materials in the traditional sense, and shape and motivate the class depending on the students' wants and needs.

Evaluation

There are therefore questions about whether the counselling metaphor is appropriate, and whether teachers without special training should attempt counselling. The approach is also cited for the lack of a syllabus, making objectives unclear and evaluation difficult to accomplish.

Nonetheless, Community Language Learning has its own strengths. It is a learner-centred method with an emphasis on the humanistic side of language learning rather than merely its linguistic dimensions.

2.The Silent Way

The Silent Way is a language teaching method which seeks to enable learners to be independent, autonomous, and responsible. The classroom teacher remains silent as much as possible and the learners are encouraged to produce as much language as possible. Caleb Gattegno ( 1911-1988) developed the Silent Way in the 1960s and 1970s, basing some elements of the method on his previous experience in mathematics education.

Three learning hypotheses

Gattegno's claims about education in general underlie the Silent Way. There are, broadly put, three learning hypotheses underlying Gattegno's work ( Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 81) :

●Learning is facilitated if the learner discovers or creates rather than remembers and repeats what is to be learned.

●Learning is facilitated by accompanying ( mediating) physical objects.

●Learning is facilitated by problem solving activities involving the material to be learned.

Tools

Applying these hypotheses, a set of tools have been developed for the Silent Way. These include:

●Sound/Colour chart. This is a wall chart with rectangles of different colours printed on a black background. Each colour corresponds to a phoneme of the target language. With this chart in the class, the teacher can only point at a series of rectangles without saying anything, but the learners can produce any utterance in the language according to the corresponding sound.

●Fidel. This is an expanded version of the Sound/Colour chart. It groups the rectangles according to each colour ( i.e. each phoneme) , and thus all the possible spellings for the phoneme.

●Word charts. These are charts with the words printed in colour. The correspondence between the colours and the phonemes is the same as in the Sound/Colour chart and the Fidel.

●Cuisenaire rods. A set of ten colour rods measuring 1cm to 10cm. It was invented by a Belgian primary school teacher named Georges Cuisenaire ( 1891-1976) but later developed and popularised by Gattegno in mathematics and language teaching in many countries around the world. In the Silent Way classroom, particularly for low level classes, Cuisenaire rods are often used to create directly perceptible symbolic situations. For example, a green rod standing on the table can represent a person, and a combination of rods can signal the plans of houses or cities.

Evaluation

●Generally speaking, the Silent Way is innovative in its philosophy rather than in its actual practice in language teaching. It uses a rather traditional syllabus based on structures and vocabulary. Its teaching exemplifies many of the features found in more traditional methods such as the Situational Approach and the Audiolingual Method.

●The innovations of the Silent Way basically derive from the manner in which classroom activities are organised. For this, the teacher assumes an indirect role in directing and monitoring learner performance, and the learners have the responsibility to figure out and test their hypotheses about how the target language works.

3.Suggestopedia

Suggestopedia, also known as Desuggestopedia, was devised by the Bulgarian psychiatrist-educator Georgi Lozanov in the 1970s. It was proposed based on suggestology, a study Lozanov started concerned with the non-rational and/or non-conscious influences on human behaviour.

Suggestopedia is intended to make use of these influences to optimize language learning. Suggestopedia distinguishes itself from other methods in the decoration, furniture, and arrangement of the classroom, the use of music, and the authoritative behaviour of the teacher. The centrality of music is a most conspicuous feature of Suggestopedia. Music is used in Suggestopedia to relax learners as well as to structure, pace, and punctuate the presentation of linguistic materials.

Suggestopedia emphasises the centrality of music in language teaching. Quite a number of teachers today also like to have background music on while students read. Discuss the impact of background music on reading with respect to your own English learning experience.

The following principles are therefore followed in Suggestopedia ( Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 101-102, citing Bancroft, 1972) :

●An emphasis on teacher authority. People remember best and are most influenced by information coming from an authoritative source.

●Infantilization of the learner. Authority is also used to suggest a teacher-student relation like that of parent to child. In the child's role the learner regains the self-confidence, spontaneity and receptivity of the child.

●Double-planedness. The learner learns not only from the effect of direct instruction but from the environment in which the instruction takes place. The bright décor of the classroom, the musical background, the shape of the chairs, and the personality of the teacher are considered as important in instruction as the form of the instructional material itself.

●Varying the tone and rhythm of presented material. This helps both to avoid boredom through monotony of repetition and to dramatize, emotionalize, and to give meaning to linguistic material.

●Coordinating intonation and rhythm with a musical background. The musical background is felt to be optimal for learning in that anxieties and tension are relieved and the power of concentration for new material is raised.

Suggestopedia is a language teaching method characterized by including concert reading to music in language classes with an emphasis on the influence of suggestion on human behaviour. Whereas Suggestopedia is recognised as a humanistic method, it is also questioned for being a pseudo-science and any success it has is explained by its placebo effect. It will be, as Richards and Rodgers ( 2001, p.106) suggest, more productive to identify and validate the techniques from Suggestopedia that appear to be effective than to further labour the science/pseudo-science issue.

VII.The Constructive Approach

1.Constructivist theory of education

Constructivism as a paradigm for teaching and learning is based on a combination of research in cognitive psychology and social psychology. John Dewey is generally recognised as the philosophical founder of the approach, and the key theorists are David Ausubel, Jerome Bruner, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky, to name a few.

Constructivism as a psychological theory of knowledge argues that human knowledge is generated from experience. It emphasises the learner's role in learning and views learning as a process in which the learners construct knowledge themselves while the teacher is in a secondary role, supplying guidance, help, and assessment. With a focus on the learning process, constructivism has become an important theoretical orientation for today's educational reform movements.

In recent years, constructivism has come to embody a number of major perspectives which all share the following assumptions:

●Knowledge is not a static reality, but develops with human society. It does not exist outside of individuals but has personal meaning as it is created by individual learners based on their prior knowledge.

●The learning process is not a process of transferring knowledge from teachers to students, but a process in which learners construct their own knowledge by looking for meaning and order.

●In the learning process, learners are not passive receptacles of information, but active agents who construct their own knowledge.

Some guiding principles of constructivist teaching are:

(1) Posing problems of emerging relevance to students.

(2) Structuring learning around primary concepts. Present problems and ideas holistically to students so they can select their own unique problem-solving approaches and use them as springboards for the construction of new understandings.

(3) Seeking and valuing students' points of view, as they are instructional entry points at the gateway of personalized education.

(4) Adapting curricula to address students' suppositions.

(5) Assessing student learning in the context of teaching. Differentiating between teaching and assessment is both unnecessary and counterproductive. Assessment through teaching tells us more about student learning than tests and externally developed assessment tasks. It can be done through participating in student/teacher interactions, through observing student/student interactions, and through watching students work with ideas and materials.

2.Constructivist teaching methods

(1) Scaffolding instruction

Jerome Bruner was one of the earliest proponents for scaffolding instruction. He defines scaffolding as the process of setting up a situation to make the child's learning easy and successful and then gradually pulling back and handing the role to the child as he becomes skilled enough to manage it.

Scaffolding is closely related to Vygotsky's theory of the zone of proximal development ( ZPD) . The ZPD refers to the distance between the actual development level and the level of potential development. The actual development level is determined by independent problem solving, and the level of potential development through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers. Scaffolding instruction associates teaching with the ZPD, providing learners with support so that they can reach a better development level than what they achieve through working independently.

Six main types of instructional scaffolding can be identified in English teaching:

●Modelling. Provide clear examples of what is expected from the students.

●Bridging. Build new concepts and language on previous knowledge and understandings.

●Contextualising. Provide contextualisation of teaching content based on students' experiences.

●Schema building. Help students build schema that connects knowledge and understanding.

●Re-presenting text. Re-present texts in a different genre through re-writing, adapting and acting-out.

●Developing metacognition. Encourage the application of metacognitive learning strategies.

It is worth noting that in scaffolding instruction, the teacher should not only provide support, but also know when to pull back support so that learners can come to use the target language independently.

(2) Anchored instruction

Anchored instruction was an approach to instruction developed in the 1990s by the Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt University headed by John D. Bransford. Its major idea is to situate, or anchor, learning in meaningful problem-solving environments so as to help students develop effective thinking skills and attitudes for problem-solving and critical thinking.

Two principles of anchored instruction are as follows:

(1) Learning and teaching activities should be centred at an anchor, which is a situation that includes a realistic issue or problem of interest to the students.

(2) Instructional materials should include rich resources which allow students to explore for the best solution to solve a problem ( e.g. interactive software programs) .

Anchored instruction provides students with the opportunities to think about and work on problems either individually or in groups for collaborative problem solving. These types of instruction are in keeping with the principles of social constructivism. In English language class, a teacher can create context or even design tasks on the basis of students' real-life experience to help them study.

【Practical Analysis】

Please analyse the following activities in an English language class ( Table 2-1) with respect to the language teaching approaches and methods discussed in the above section.

Table 2-1 An English language class

VIII.Summary of this section

Since the emergence of the Grammar-Translation Method in the 1840s，there have been different proposals for language teaching methods and approaches. The major ones in chronological order are as follows： the Direct Method，the Situational Approach, the Audiolingual Method, the Humanistic Approach, and the Communicative Approach. The Communicative Approach came into being in the 1970s and since then has brought language teaching into a communicative era. In recent years，there have been quite a few strands of development in Communicative Language Teaching based on the general principles and assumptions of the Communicative Approach. These include content-based instruction，task-based instruction, text-based instruction，competency-based instruction，and the Natural Approach. Since the 1990s，however，mainstream language teaching has recognized criticism of the notion of all-purpose methods or approaches. Instead of searching for a best method or approach，the use of context-appropriate teaching methods or approaches are encouraged，following the general rules and principles of language teaching and learning.