Подходы к обучению английскому языку. Из истории вопроса.
материал по английскому языку по теме

The Language Teaching Methodology

(From the history of the question)

Language teachers lead their students down the road of pattern practice, only to find themselves confronted by a great chasm at the end. On the other side lies real communication, but the students are stranded on the side of drills because the teacher sees no strong bridge across.

Although linguists have not found that final answer – if there is one – directed conversation practice is probably the most reliable route to true communication. Where students are interested in learning to read and write the new, directed conversation practice has little relevance. But it is rare for people who study another language not to have a desire to speak it. Most students are eager to converse in the new language, and conversation practice therefore assumes primary importance in their learning experience.

        In directing conversation sessions the teacher will help the student to move from pseudo-communication, in which his use of English is fictitiously concocted and predictable, to communication where he expresses his personal ideas and needs in the context of reality. During the early stages of conversation practice, you are bound to maintain a fairly controlled situation in which the student interacts with you and other students within the constraints imposed by his limited knowledge of the language. During later stages, you will gradually remove the controls until they are eliminated altogether, and the student enters a realm of real communication.

Clifford Prator suggests that there are four major phases in the language learning process:

1. the completely manipulative phase
2. the predominantly manipulative phase
3. the predominantly communicative phase
4. the completely communicative phase

A Phase One  activity might be a drill in which the student merely repeats sentences after the teacher, while a Phase Two activity might require the student to take a sentence  from the textbook, such as “My father is a doctor”, and restate this with information about his own father, as in “My father is a farmer”. Paraphrases of dialogues and various kinds o

f question-and-answer exercises might be Phase Three activities, whereas a Phase Four activity might be a free conversation among class members. According to Prator, the mastery of a foreign language involves a prolonged and very gradual shift from Phase One to Phase Four which is accomplished through progressive decontrol. Directed conversation practice can, and should, begin as early as Prator’s Phase Two - the predominantly manipulative phase.

Let’s review the language teaching methodology that normally prepares the students for conversation practice. Before it, obviously they must be familiar with some grammar patterns and vocabulary words – how these are pronounced and how they are combined to form meaningful utterance. If students have learned the basic patterns of English in a formal classroom context, these were probably taught one of two major methods or a combination of both: the audio-lingual approach (sometimes called the aural-oral method), and cognitive-code learning. There are, of course, other language teaching methods in use today but they generally incorporate modified forms of the audio-lingual approach or cognitive-code techniques.

The Audio-Lingual Approach

Probably the most popular method currently, this language teaching approach is based on the premise that learning a new language means a new system of habits. It is an outgrowth of behaviourism, a school of psychology which proposes that all learning is a  process of conditioning – a process based on stimulus-response-reinforcement – and structural linguistics, a school which looks on language as a structured system of sounds learned through stimulus-response-reinforcement. Basic assumptions in the audio-lingual approach are:

1. A linguistic analysis of the new language and the mother tongue is essential for organizing classroom material.
2. The new language should be learned through imitation and analogy.
3. Every language is patterned. Students must practice these patterns through intensive drills such as repetition of dialogues or through exercises (substitution, transformation, etc.).
4. The new language habits must become so automatic that the student calls them forth without conscious effort.
5. Allowing the student the possibility of making errors should be avoided, since it is thought that mistakes will lead to bad habits.
6. Listening and speaking are viewed as primary activities, and reading and writing secondary; therefore, the habits learned first are those involving auditory discrimination responses and speech responses.
7. Function words (words like articles, prepositions or auxiliary verbs that tie other words together) should receive greater attention in the initial stage of language learning than content words (words such as nouns and adjectives which have lexical meaning)
8. Audio-visual aids can assist the student in his formation of new language habits.
9. Use of the student’s native language for explanations of new vocabulary and syntax should be avoided.

Cognitive-Code Learning

This approach, in some respects a modern (for that period of time) version of the classic grammar-translation method, is gaining favour as more language teachers become familiar with transformational (generative) grammar theory. The major implications in cognitive-code learning are:

1. A language is a rule-governed system. Students must learn the rules in a new language through analysis in order to use the language competently.
2. Language learning is more to be as mentally active as possible in all assigned work.
3. Drills and exercises should be meaningful – rote learning is to be avoided in most cases.
4. The student’s creative involvement in the learning  process is viewed as more important than the avoiding of errors.
5. Reading and writing  should be taught at early stages along with listening and speaking.
6. Occasional use of the student’s native language for explanation of new grammar and vocabulary is beneficial.

(From the materials of Julia M. Dobson, an American language teacher at Georgetown University, first published in 1974 by Newbury House Publishers)