Chapter 4

Popular Methodology
Linguistics (ELT) – 4th year – 2nd term / Lecture 7
A1 Grammar-translation, Direct method and Audiolingualism

• Before the nineteenth century many formal language learners were scholars
who studied rules of grammar and consulted lists of foreign words in
dictionaries.
• Countless migrants and traders picked up new languages in other ways, too.
• But in the nineteenth century moves were made to bring foreign-language
learning into school curriculums, and so something more was needed.
• This gave rise to the Grammar-translation method (or rather series of
methods).
❑ Grammar-translation methods
Procedure:
Students were given explanations of individual points of grammar, and then
they were given sentences which exemplified these points. These sentences
had to be translated from the target language (L2) back to the students' first
language (L1) and vice versa.

Features:
1. language was treated at the level of the sentence only, with little study,
certainly at the early stages, of longer texts.
2. There was little if any consideration of the spoken language.
3. Accuracy was considered to be a necessity.
❑ The Direct method
It arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, and was the product of a reform
movement which was reacting to the restrictions of Grammar-translation.
Features
• Translation was abandoned in favour of the teacher and the students speaking
together, relating the grammatical forms they were studying to objects and
pictures, etc. in order to establish their meaning.
• The sentence was still the main object of interest, and accuracy was all
important.
• Crucially, it was considered vitally important that only the target language
should be used in the classroom.
• Allied to the increased numbers of monolingual native speakers who started, in
the twentieth century, to travel the world teaching English, it created a powerful
prejudice against the presence of the L1 in language lessons.
❑ Audiolingualism
• When behaviourist accounts of language became popular in the 1920s
and 1930s, the Direct method morphed into the Audiolingual method.
• Using the stimulus-response-reinforcement model, it attempted, through
a continuous process of such positive reinforcement, to engender good
habits in language learners.
• It relied heavily on drills to form these habits.
• Substitution was built into these drills so that, in small steps, the student
was constantly learning and, moreover, was shielded from the possibility
of making mistakes by the design of the drill.
The following example shows a typical Audiolingual drill:
• Much Audiolingual teaching stayed at the sentence level, and there was
little placing of language in any kind of real-life context.
• A premium was still placed on accuracy; indeed Audiolingual methodology
does its best to banish mistakes completely.
• The purpose was habit-formation through constant repetition of correct
utterances, encouraged and supported by positive reinforcement.
A2 Presentation, practice and production
• It’s a variation on Audiolingualism and a procedure most often referred to as PPP,
which stands for presentation, practice and production.
• This grew out of structural-situational teaching whose main departure from
Audiolingualism was to place the language in clear situational contexts.
Procedure
1. Presentation: the teacher introduces a situation which contextualises the language to be taught. The language, too, is
then presented.
2. Practice: The students now practise the language using accurate reproduction techniques such as:
a) choral repetition (where the students repeat a word, phrase or sentence all together with the teacher
'conducting’),
b) individual repetition (where individual students repeat a word, phrase or sentence at the teacher's urging),
c) cue-response drills (where the teacher gives a cue such as cinema, nominates a student by name or by looking
or pointing, and the student makes the desired response, e.g. Would you like to come to the cinema?).
Cue-response drills have similarities with the classic kind of Audiolingual drill we saw above, but because they
are contextualised by the situation that has been presented, they carry more meaning than a simple
substitution drill.
3. Production: the students, using the new language, make sentences of their own.
➢ See the elementary level example that demonstrates this PPP procedure on
page 65
❖Some notes on the this PPP procedure example:

• The kind of drill conducted by the teacher in the practice stage (cue-response drill) is
slightly freer than the audiolingual one (simple substitution drill).
e.g. TEACHER: Can anyone tell me? ... Usha? ... Yes, Sergio.
STUDENT: She's reading a book.
TEACHER: Good.
ETC.

• The teacher keeps everyone alert by:

A. cueing before nominating a student (Sergio) (in the example above)
B. Avoiding nominating students in a predictable order.

• Some trainers have called the end point of the PPP cycle (production) ‘immediate activity’.
A3 PPP and alternatives to PPP
• The PPP procedure was offered to teacher trainees from the middle of the
1960s onwards.
• It came under a sustained attack in the 1990s.
• Critics argued:
- It was clearly teacher-centred, and therefore sits uneasily in a more humanistic and
learner-centred framework.
- It also seems to assume that students learn 'in straight lines' - that is, starting from no
knowledge, through highly restricted sentence-based utterances and on to immediate
production. Yet human learning probably isn't like that; it's more random, more
convoluted.
- PPP was inadequate because it reflected neither the nature of language (which is full
of 'interlocking variables and systems’) nor the nature of learning.
- It was 'fundamentally disabling, not enabling'
❑ In response to these criticisms many people have offered variations on
PPP and alternatives to it:
• Keith Johnson (1982) suggested the 'deep-end strategy' as an alternative,
where by encouraging the students into immediate production (throwing
them in at the deep end), you turn the procedure on its head. The teacher
can now see if and where students are having problems during this
production phase and return to either presentation or practice as and when
necessary after the production phase is over.
• Donn Byrne (1986) suggested much the same thing, joining the three phases
in a circle (see Figure 1, p. 66). Teachers and students can decide at which
stage to enter the procedure.
• Harmer (2007) suggested a differenttrilogy of teaching sequence elements,
which is ESA: Engage Study and Activate.
❖ The ESA model
E stands for engage:
• Unless students are emotionally engaged with what is going on, their learning
will be less effective. (As we saw previously (on page 58 / chapter 3), ‘arousal’
and ‘affect’ are important for successful learning).
S stands for study
• It describes any teaching and learning elements where the focus is on how
something is constructed, whether it is relative clauses, specific intonation
patterns, the construction of a paragraph or text, the way a lexical phrase is
made and used, or the collocation of a particular word.
• Study may be part of a ‘focus on forms’ syllabus, or may grow out of a
communicative task where the students’ attention to form is drawn to it
either by the teacher or through their own noticing activities.
A stands for activate
• This means any stage at which students are encouraged to use all and/or any
of the language they know. Communicative tasks, for example, (see page 70)
are designed to activate the students' language knowledge.
• But students also activate their language knowledge when they read for
pleasure or for general interest. Indeed any meaning-focused activity where
the language is not restricted provokes students into language activation.

➢ ESA allows for three basic lesson procedures:

1. Straight arrows lesson procedure
2. Boomerang lesson procedure
3. Patchwork lesson procedure
1. Straight arrows lesson procedure (figure 2)
• The sequence is ESA, much like PPP.
• The teacher engages students by presenting a picture or a situation, or by
drawing them in by some other means.
• At the study stage of the procedure, the meaning and form of the language
are explained. The teacher then models the language and the students
repeat and practise it.
• Finally, they activate the new language by using it in sentences of their
own.
2. Boomerang lesson procedure (Figure 3)
• It follows a more task-based or deep-end approach. Here the order is EAS; the
teacher gets the students engaged before asking them to do something like a
written task, a communication game or a role-play. Based on what happens
there, the students will then, after the activity has finished, study some aspect
of language which they lacked or which they used incorrectly.

3. Patchwork lesson procedure (Figure 4)

• It is different from the previous two procedures and may follow a variety of
sequences.

• For example, engaged students are encouraged to activate their knowledge

before studying one and then another language element, and then returning to
more activating tasks, after which the teacher re-engages them before doing
some more study, etc.
❑ What the Engage/Study/ Activate trilogy has tried to capture is the fact
that PPP is just '... a tool used by teachers for one of their many possible
purposes'. In other words; PPP is extremely useful in a focus-on-forms
lesson, especially at lower levels, but is irrelevant in a skills lesson, where
focus-on-form may occur as a result of something students hear or read. It is
useful, perhaps, in teaching grammar points such as the use of can and can't,
but has little place when students are analysing their own language use after
doing a communicative task.

❑ Nevertheless, a look at modern coursebooks shows that PPP is alive and

well, but in a context of a wide range of other techniques and procedures.

❑ PPP is a kind of ESA, but there are many other lesson sequences, too, such
the Boomerang and Patchwork sequences.