If I were to recommend an essential first book for foreign language teachers, it would be Kelly’s (1976) 25 Centuries of Language Teaching, for within the covers of this book one can find ancient and modern references to almost all current methods of language instruction. For example, there is reference to audio-lingual, behavioral, cognitive, and classroom approaches to language teaching. Under the heading “Mime and Demonstration” there is recognition that some methods use objects and activities, rather than translation to convey meaning in the second language. Although Kelly provides a historical perspective of language instruction, mentioning past and present approaches and activities, he does not necessarily endorse a particular method of instruction.
This book, unlike Kelly’s book, is not a review or summary of current or past language teaching methodologies, although a historical perspective of foreign language teaching methods is an important ingredient in understanding new approaches and theoretical positions. The focus of this book emphasizes comprehension-based instruction for consideration in foreign language instruction. It provides for instructors of foreign languages and student majors in a foreign language the background and development of the Comprehension Approach as an alternative teaching methodology.
The critical issue in foreign language teaching and learning is that of discovering the conditions under which the process of language learning can be maximally effective.
There is a certain degree of disappointment among foreign language professionals in that interest in achieving success in acquiring a second language is not evident among the majority of high school and college students. Students often become discouraged in their study of a foreign language after taking a first course that entails memorization of grammatical structures and endless drill work.
After many centuries of discussion and deliberation, the art of teaching a foreign language still remains an active area of study and disagreement among language professionals. There are academic journals devoted to investigation of almost every facet of foreign language learning. Some of the current topics are theoretical linguistic issues and their relevance for language teaching, when and how to introduce grammatical rules, the role of listening in acquiring a foreign language, reading procedures to teach vocabulary, the use of computer programs to deliver lessons, the age at which language instruction should begin and a host of many other important issues. The list of topics is lengthy as is the number of journal articles that are devoted to these topics, all of which have the singular goal of improving the effectiveness of foreign language teaching and learning.
Effective teaching and learning also includes consideration of attention to student retention rate. American universities generally require one or two years of foreign language study, but it is generally known that the majority of university students do not enroll in foreign language courses beyond that which is required of their major area of study. Part of the problem can be attributed to the evaluation students make of their foreign language courses. Generally they are unconvinced that by taking additional foreign language courses they will become speakers of a new language. Contributing also to the low retention rate of students in foreign language study is the knowledge students have of foreign language course curricula. They know its primary emphasis is the study of literature and that the acquiring of conversational fluency in their respective disciples is only incidentally emphasized.
Despite the number of investigations and serious essays on foreign language methodology, the American system of language instruction, with the exception of programs that emphasize the immersion methodology, has remained essentially the same since the beginning of the twentieth century. To be sure grammar-translation foreign language textbooks have been modified to include practice in listening and in conversation, but the central core of the American introductory high school and college beginning textbooks is an overwhelming emphasis on syntactic (sentence) grammar and the acquiring of vocabulary by memorization of paired lists of English and their respective foreign words. The general teaching procedures of almost all textbooks is to introduce a grammatical rule followed by a list of vocabulary items in English and the respective foreign language, followed by sentences illustrating the application of the grammatical rule. The grammatical principles are largely syntactic rules, that is, rules of sentence construction, verb conjugations, noun declensions, and case endings. These rules are not the complex and abstract rules of linguistic grammars, but still these rules are relatively difficult for beginning student to apply in conversation and writing.
In the majority of academic settings the foreign language course syllabus makes use of the principles of the grammar-translation system of language instruction. It is implemented in the following way: Note the grammatical components and the vocabulary items of an English sentence. Select the corresponding vocabulary items from the second language and convert the grammar of the English sentence into the grammar of the foreign sentence.
Consider the following English sentence which is converted into Spanish.
English: She mixed the salad. Now she is serving it.
Spanish: Ella mezcló la ensalada. Ahora, la está sirviendo.
The translation of the above English sentences is indeed elementary and yet it is not a simple reproduction of the English sentences. In addition to knowing the correct Spanish vocabulary elements, the student must know that the gender of the word “ensalada” is feminine, and, therefore, the definite article is “la” for the English “the.” The translation of the second Spanish sentence is somewhat more complex than the first Spanish sentence. The pronoun “she” can be omitted in Spanish, known as the pro-drop rule, and the pronoun “la” for “it” appears following “Ahora,” the equivalent of the English word “now,” and not at the end of the sentence as is the placement of “it” in the English sentence.
The English-speaking learner of Spanish, who uses a grammar-translation method of instruction, must take into account the grammatical correspondence between English and the foreign language and the appropriate translation of English words into Spanish words. When speaking, this process must be done at a normal conversational rate which is perhaps slightly longer than the time it takes an English speaker to say each of the above two English sentences, probably no more than five seconds. Conversation involves relatively rapid responses if one is to keep the attention of the listener. For sentences of greater complexity than those listed above, a word-by-word conversion cannot easily be made within the framework of normal conversational time limits. Excessive pauses in conversation are not usually tolerated in conversation.
Let’s now turn the task around and consider the listening responsibilities of the second-language learner. To understand a foreign language sentence, the process of listening is essentially the reverse of speaking. In order for the listener to derive the meaning of a sentence using a word-by-word translation requires attention to the grammatical units and to the meaning of the words. The listener must conduct the process of translation rapidly as the speaker moves from sentence to sentence. This process is extraordinarily complex because the listener must perform the translation rapidly for sentences that exceed ten words. If the translation of a sentence is not done rapidly by the listener, attention to the immediate following sentences cannot be made. In fact the immediate following sentences will not be heard by the listener who is completely engaged in applying previously rote-learned grammatical rules that are not easily retrieved from memory and cannot be quickly applied.
Trained language translators achieve their spectacular translation skills by attending to the meaning of the source sentences. They do not engage in word-for-word translation or apply directly grammatical rules. They work at the meaning level. The meaning of the source sentences is translated using native or near native understanding of the two respective languages. That is, the translation process for trained translators involves little or no conscious attention to grammar or to the isolated meaning of each of the words of the sentence, but rather attention is given to the totality of meaning that is provided by each sentence.
In reading, translation time is not a consideration. The learner of a second language can take time to convert a sentence by giving it considerable thought, seeking a translation rule from a grammar textbook, and finding the meaning of unknown words, phrases, expressions, and idioms from dictionaries and other source materials. This approach is recommended by language teachers who take the position that reading is the primary goal in foreign language education. Nonetheless, reading of foreign language texts is still a complex process for students because reading material requires an understanding of many thousands of words and expressions that cannot be translated directly.
The real time of sentences in spoken speech is not a critical component in written homework assignments. Students can take as much time as they need to identify the correct units necessary to compose or to translate a sentence. However, written assignments for students in the first or second year of foreign language study can prove to be difficult because the grammatical units for a particular target sentence may not be the same for two languages. Even if students know well the respective grammars of two languages, they cannot translate a sentence correctly without knowing the correspondence between the grammars of the two languages. Additionally without knowing how a particular thought is expressed in a foreign language a correct translation cannot be easily made. Language textbooks may cite a few examples for sentences for which grammatical units and expressions do not correspond directly between two languages, but they do not provide a formula or set of correspondence grammatical rules for the large set of non-convergent grammatical rules and expressions among languages in order to enable students to formulate a correct translation of sentences in a first language to sentences of a second language. Also word usage may differ considerably between respective languages. In this regard the use of a bilingual dictionary is not particularly helpful.
The process of applying the same grammatical units to the source language and the second language would seem to work best when two languages are from the same language family, but nevertheless the differences that prevail are still great. Consider the Spanish equivalent of the English sentence: What is in this soup?—¿Qué tiene esta sopa? (What has this soup?). To translate this sentence correctly into Spanish, the student must know that the use of the verb “is” in this particular English sentence corresponds to the Spanish verb “tiene” which is roughly the equivalent of the English verb “has.”
Native speakers of a language do not have conscious knowledge of the deep-rooted grammatical principles of their language. Consider the use of “in” and “on” to describe the following events: The ball hit him on the chest; the ball hit him in the stomach. The ball hit him in the eye. The ball hit him on the leg. Two questions immediately surface: (1) Why do we use “in” and “on” in English to describe what appears to be the same kind of event? And (2) how, as native speakers of English, have we learned when to use “in” and “on” correctly with regard to a ball hitting a body part? A third question can immediately be asked: Were we teaching English as a second language, what grammatical principle would we apply to impart to our students the correct use of “in” and “on” for the simple situation of a ball hitting various body parts?
In our description of the teaching procedures for second-language learning, called the Comprehension Approach, we emphasize listening for meaning similar to the now historic approach practiced by teachers of the direct method (Kelly 1976) in which only the second language is used in the classroom, with two differences: (1) Students are not asked to talk, only to listen, but they are not prohibited from volunteering to talk, and (2) there is no discussion of the grammatical rules of the second language.
The approach presented in this book will include a description of comprehension procedures that are employed to teach the vocabulary and expressions of a second language without translation. The learning of words by translation from one language to another can cause the words in the second language to lose their flexibility because each newly learned word in the second language is tied to the meaning or several meanings of an English word. For example, in German it is common to say, “The doctor measures the pulse” (Er misst den Puls.) rather than “The doctor takes his/her pulse.” A beginning student would be inclined to use the German word for take which would be inappropriate in German. In English one waters a tree, but in German the word for “pour” is “gießen” (giessen), which is used for the English “to water,” as in “Sie gießt den Baum” (She waters the tree.). In the Comprehension Approach, students hear the exact way in which native speakers express themselves in a large number of contexts and situations.
Collocations are word sequences that are bound together. These bundles of words in every language are enormous in number and differ in their use across languages. Consider the collocation involving the word sign in English. Sign is collocated with the word say, as in “The sign says.” In German the word steht (stand), in this context, is equivalent to the English word “says,” as in: Das Schild steht. (The sign says.). The English phrase—sign says—is a commonly used collocation. With regard to coffee there are two frequently used collocations: weak coffee and strong coffee. These two adjectives, weak and strong, cannot be used with soup. The collocations for soup are watery soup and thick soup. The term thick coffee can be used, but not with the meaning of strong coffee.
Collocations are pervasive in every language and their number is enormous (Benson, Benson, and Ilson, 1997). Almost every object referred to in a language can be defined by a set of standard collocated modifiers. Toast can be light, medium, and dark whereas the corresponding terms for steak are rare, medium, and well done.
A Spanish colleague, a teacher of English in Spain, while visiting her sister in the United States was offered some chocolate candy from a box with two layers. When seeing the box, she remarked, “Oh a candy box with two levels.” Her sister immediately corrected her, saying “Yes, the box has two layers.” That incident alone reinforced my belief that the learning of collocations in a second language requires extensive contact with the second language.
Word extensions for second-language learners are difficult to acquire. Recently, a newspaper reporter wrote, “Investors began to doubt Europe’s ability to cauterize its worsening debt.” Although I have never heard the medical term cauterize used in this particular way, it did not strike me as particularly odd. Contemporary expressions often develop from the media’s use of newly formed stylistic phrases. In this particular case English speakers do not need to know the medical use of the term cauterize to assume that the general meaning here of cauterize is “to stop quickly or abruptly.” Those readers who know the meaning of cauterize will reflect perhaps fo...