From Grammatical
to Communicative Approaches?
How Far are Costa Rican Teachers from these?
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post 187
Though
I am unsure whether my reader has gotten in contact with Richard-Amato’s (2003) book, Making it Happen, it is a great text to have us language teachers
reflect upon what is happening around us in terms of language learning. As a
college instructor interested in what is happening in my home country in terms of foreign language learning and acquisition, I come to ask myself how far are
we from communicative approaches to teach foreign languages in our local
context and teaching environment.
The
more graduate students start work as language professionals, the more that I question
how our teachers are being trained to deal with our teaching scenario. If humans
are born with a LAD or Language Acquisition Device (Cook, 1993)
based on Noam Chomsky’s linguistic postulates, which helps us learn language,
why is it that our teacher students continue to work so much with
non-communicative approaches? And though this is something that is re-studied
and re-taken in my Teaching Practicum class with them, grammar-oriented
approaches are the ones preferred by them.
Even
though Grammar-Translation is not exactly present in Costa Rican teaching
contexts, Audiolingualism and Direct Method are still alive in the public high
school system. As explained by Richard-Amato (2003), Audiolingualism was “a new
‘scientific’ oral method” that “was based on behaviorism” as proposed by Skinner
(1957). It still counts with many adepts in our
teaching context because they are “adhered to the theory that language is acquired
through habit formation and stimulus/response association” (Richard-Amato, 2003) . No wonder how many teachers
get to use books like Interchange Full
Contact 1 (Richards,
2013)
with lots of furmulaic scripts intending to be repeated to try to develop
correct habits of speaking. If this were used, I bet lots of language teachers would
be quite satisfied with their class performance, but this is not even happening
when instructors start only providing translations and make their students move
back in time when the Grammar-Translation approach was in vogue.
Do you still remember Lado English Series (Lado, 1978) ? I must confess that
I survived that Direct Method methodology used in the writing and production of
the books. You probably survived similar language series from the 70s. But as
Richard-Amato (2003) puts it, “books based on the direct method often move
students so quickly through new syntactic structures that their
internatilization becomes difficult, if not impossible.” And still today, the
instructors from the old school continue to use this kind of method. But once
again, teachers may spoil the whole method when they start to translate
everything to their students.
I’m not exactly criticizing the Direct Method or Audiolingualism;
I’m more into trying to make teachers aware that many people learned English,
and other languages, by using this kind of methodologies. The one and only
problem is the pervasive use of a 19th Century method called the Grammar-Translation.
It is incredible to think, and hard to believe, that teachers in Costa Rica in
the 21st Century are still transitioning to more communicative
approaches, and after five years of high school language training, students barely
know a few words and expressions in English as if these learners had been
taught within cognitive-code approaches with a big twist into grammar-translation.
Will we get into real communicative approaches some day? Only time will tell …
References
Cook, V. (1993). Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition.
Houndmills,Basingstoke, GB: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lado, R. (1978). Lado English Series 1. White
Plains, NY: Prentice Hall College Div.
Richard-Amato, P. (2003). Making it Happen. White
Plains, NY: Pearson Education.
Richards, J. (2013). Interchange Full Contact 1.
Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press.
Skinner, B. (1957). Verbal Behavior. New York:
Appleton Century Crofts.
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