Enseñanza del Inglés: Historia, Enfoques y Métodos

Learning guide

Welcome to
Enseñanza del Inglés: historia, enfoques y métodos /
ELT: history, approaches and methods
Academic year 2012-2013

You will travel throughout the history of English Language Teaching from the 5^th millenium BC until the 21^st century. Are you ready for the journey?

Our motto in the preparation of this course has been the following quotation by the North-American politician, scientist, philosopher and writer Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790):

Tell me and I forget.
Teach me and I remember.
Involve me and I learn.

We have prepared all the materials with great enthusiasm. We have always placed ourselves in your shoes and have tried to adopt the best pedagogical practices that we believe that can involve you, make you work hard, arouse your eagerness for acquiring new knowledge and encourage your love of learning.

Please read this file carefully as it includes basic preliminary information on the organization of the course. We strongly recommend you to read this file before consulting the next links.

Enjoy the course!

Contents of this file

1. General aims of this course
2. General structure and contents of the OCW portal hosting this course
3. Contents and materials related to each unit of the syllabus
4. Tentative calendar schedule

1) General aims of this course

Theoretical Aims

1. Acquire detailed explicit knowledge of the most important language teaching methods throughout history, with special emphasis on the approaches and methods focused towards English as a Foreign Language (EFL).
2. Acquire detailed explicit knowledge of concepts, key ideas and terminology in language teaching.
3. Educate students about the importance of knowing the past methodological practices to facilitate understanding and assess the current ones.
4. Understand the relationship between theory and pedagogical practice methods for teaching foreign languages in general and English in particular.
5. Recognise and understand the links between research on Second Language Acquisition and pedagogical theory and practice in different contexts and situations.
6. Educate students about the importance of cognitive factors as an essential parameter to evaluate the methods of language teaching in general and English in particular, especially since the 19th century.
7. Educate students about the importance of other factors – affective, cultural and activity sequencing – in current EFL teaching.

Practical aims

1. Discuss concepts, ideas and basic topics in the teaching of foreign languages in general and English in particular.
2. Develop the comprehensive and analytical capacity necessary to identify the teaching method applied in the classroom and / or present in textbooks in language classes for youths and adults.
3. Critically analyse, from a pedagogical and cognitive angle, actual samples of EFL materials representative of methods from the 19th century, through audiovisual classes and written textbooks.
4. Develop the critical skills necessary to analyse how the bases of the methods in the classroom and / or textbooks are representative thereof or facilitate the achievement of objectives (officially) set out in these methods.
5. Discuss the position of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages in relation to pedagogical aspects.

Summarising, at the end of the course students should have learned the knowledge and skills necessary to participate in theoretical discussions and practical analyses related to foreign language teaching and to exercise their critical thinking about real problems and situations in contemporary foreign language teaching in general and English in particular.

In parallel, it is intended that students achieve the following objectives which are not exclusively related to this course:

a) develop and perfect their use of oral and written academic English;
b) develop and establish connections with specific knowledge about other subjects in the BA in English Studies;
c) develop and refine skills related to academic study, both meta-cognitive (work planning), and cognitive (critical thinking, organisation, analysis, synthesis, re-elaboration and application of information);
d) motivate and foster the student's intellectual curiosity about situations / real problems related to language teaching and their powers of observation, reasoning, reflection, creation and research;
e) develop responsibility and independence through cooperative learning activities implemented in groupwork.

2) General structure and contents of the OCW portal hosting this course

All the materials for this course are hosted by the Open Course Ware (OCW) web page http://ocw.um.es/

When you click on this address, you will find a left-hand menu which includes the following sections:

1. Página principal / Home. This includes basic metadata of the course (code, degree, year, type, number of ECTS credits, semester, languages, faculty, degree, pre-requisites) as well as other information such as general description of the course, its objectives and the teaching methodology followed.
2. Programa / Syllabus programme: the list of blocks and their corresponding units.
3. Guía de aprendizaje / Learning guide. The present file.
4. Material de clase / Materials (see section 3 of this file)
5. Prácticas / Practice activities (see section 3 of this file)
6. Evaluación / Assessment. A description of the evaluation components, criteria and marks associated to each component.
7. Prueba de evaluación / Sample test. This includes a sample of summative assessment (exam):  15 multiple-choice-option exam questions with their keys.
8. Bibliografía / Bibliography: basic general references for this course and References and bibliography (specific compilation of works for each unit, which include both the references (works cited) in the Materials plus other pertinent works that the teaching team has deemed convenient to include).

3) Contents and materials related to each unit of the syllabus

This course is structured in six blocks which amount to 30 units. You can see the list of blocks and their corresponding units on the Programa link (Syllabus programme).
For each unit there are the following resources:

a) Class materials, located in the left-hand menu of the OCW web page for this course.

This comprises the extended outlines and the theoretical contents of each unit.

• • Sometimes for each unit there are not only two files –the extended outline and the theory file– but also a third file which includes very specific theoretical content due to formatting issues. This happens in Units 4.3.2, 4.3.4 (one file in each one) and Block 6 (three additional files).
  • All the theory files have the following common sections: outline and objectives (in this order).
  • In these theory files you will see three types of icons (all of them taken from http://office.microsoft.com/es-es/images):

	This is intended to make you aware of the link between the treated aspect and elements that have already been covered, or to draw your attention to future elements that you will study and which are related to the aspect highlighted by this icon.
	This signals the Type A Practice Activities described in the Methodology link of the Home section and whose purpose is to complement the participative lectures (theory sessions). This type of practice activities has different purposes: to arouse your motivation, to activate your background knowledge, to make you learn by yourself certain contents (i.e. learning in an inductive way) and to show that you have understood the contents explained, among others.
	This symbol refers to the Type B Practice Activities explained in the Methodology link of the Home section. It indicates that you have to do the corresponding Practice activities (unnumbered if there is only one or numbered when there is more than one). With these practice activities you will either read reference material so that you can dwell more in the topic or apply and expand the theoretical knowledge attained in the participative lecture. You should be able to exercise your reasoning abilities, restructure your knowledge, establish connections between parts of the same unit or between units and start the autonomous study of a topic related to the studied contents.

b) Practice activities, available in the Practice link from the left-hand menu of the OCW web page for this course. Sometimes the practice activities require the completion of tables or the analysis of scanned units/lessons from real-life course books; such materials are included in separate PDF files linked to for such contents.

c) References and bibliography. Specific compilation of works for each unit, which include both the references (works cited) in the Class Materials plus other pertinent works that the teaching team has deemed convenient to include.

Other materials

List of the abbreviations used in this course and list of tables of the practice activities

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ALM: Audio-Lingual Method

AVSG: Audio-Visual Structuro-Global Method

CEFR: Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (2001)

CBI: Content-Based Instruction

CLL: Cooperative Language Learning

CL: Community Language Learning Method/Counselling Learning or Collaborative Learning

CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning

CLT: Communicative Language Teaching

CPM: Communicative Processes-based model of activity sequencing

DM: Direct Method

EFL: English as a Foreign Language

ELT: English Language Teaching

ESOL: English for Speakers of Other Languages

FL: Foreign Language

FLT: Foreign Language Teaching

G-T: Grammar-Translation Method

L1: Mother tongue/native language

L2: First foreign language

L3: Second foreign language

MI: Multiple Intelligences

N-F Syllabuses: Notional-Functional Syllabuses

PPP: Presentation-Practice-Production model of activity sequencing

P1: Presentation

P2: Practice

P3: Production

SLA: Second Language Acquisition

SLT: Situational Language Teaching Method

TBLT: Task-based Language Teaching

TEFL: Teaching English as a Foreign Language

TESL: Teaching English as a Second Language

TESOL: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

TPR: Total Physical Response Method

LIST OF TABLES OF PRACTICE ACTIVITIES

Unit 1.2

Table 1. Elements of language teaching method: Comparing authors’ different terminology
Table 2. Getting to know the elements of a language teaching method

Unit 2.1

Table 3.  Language teaching in the Medieval Ages

Unit 2.2

Table 4. Language teaching from the Renaissance until the 18th century: Main pedagogical works

Unit 3.1.

Table 5. Comparing Ollendorff’s “practical approach” and the traditional Grammar-Translation Method (G-T) in the school system

Unit 4.1.3.

Table 6. Comparing the Structurally based Methods: ALM, SLT and AVSG

Wrap-up activities for Blocks 3 and 4

Table 7. Summarising table of main methods and approaches from the 19th century onwards (based on Larsen-Freeman and Anderson’s (2011) ten questions for the description of methods)

Block 6

Table 8. Pedagogical and cognitive emphases of main foreign language teaching methods from the 19th century onwards and the fulfillment of officially intended objectives accordingly

4) Tentative calendar schedule (possibly subject to slight  modifications deriving from learning and teaching needs)