Introduction to English Language Teaching

How to define common structural, sociolinguistic, and historical-political characteristics in the face of numerous varieties and differences

Features of standard English are often disregarded:

• pronunciation of the phoneme / th/: */dis/
• inflection of verb in 3rd person singular: *he talk
• ‘would’ in if-clauses: *If she would come, I would be there

English gained some ground in German schools

• education of urban middle class
• reading literature and works of philosophy or
• practicing oral communication

• Three-tiered and class-based system :
• Volksschule for common people (grades 1-8)
• Realschule (grades 5-10)
• Gymnasium (grades 5-13) for middle and upper classes

majority of population was not taught any FL

• Gradually, English became second modern FL (next to French in Realschule)
• third or fourth option next to Latin and Greek in Gymnasium
• Grammar-Translation Method
• explicitly teaches vocabulary and grammar
• enable students to read literary and philosophical ‘classics’
• support their general education 

Vietor: Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren! (1882/1905): called for a new kind of language teaching

- against elitist form of higher education

- FL teaching should concentrate on ...

• functional skills of oral communication
• knowledge about the target country (‘Realienkunde’)

- Advocates Direct or Natural Method

• FL as medium of instruction
• oral skills besides studying authentic texts
• Berlitz schools implemented monolingual, direct method of immersion

Target culture taught in comparison to one’s own culture:

• enhancing awareness of national culture
• construction of stereotypes

Fascists elected English as first FL:

• learning about culture in order to prove superiority of German national culture
• traditional class discrimination in education
• majority of learners in Volksschule had no FL classes

• BRD: English as first FL in all secondary schools 
• DDR: Russian as first FL

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT, Kommunikativer Fremdsprachenunterricht (1970s)

--> Piepho: Kommunikative Kompetenz als übergeordnetes Lernziel im Englischunterricht (1974):

=> shifted priority from teaching knowledge about language (grammar and syntax) to performance in    language (e.g. listening comprehension and speaking)

The Common European Framework (CEF):

• has changed educational standards from focus on content to testable output
• Native-speaker standard replaced by plurilingual speaker-norm
• Early foreign language teaching and learning (Fremdsprachenfrühbeginn)
• Bilingual or Content and Language Integrated Learning (bilingualer Unterricht)
• Digital revolution
• Policy of inclusion 

  --> demise of native-speaker model

  --> learner as social agent

  --> language as (inter-)action

lead to a revision of language teaching and learning for the 21st century

1. Communicative skills in foreign languages
2. Intercultural communicative competence
3. Individual education and emancipation
4. Social skills and values
5. Economic empowerment and mobility
6. Political participation in a democratic and multicultural Europe
7. Learner-centered methods of teaching

1. Declarative knowledge (savoir): knowing what, including socio- and intercultural knowledge
2. Know-how and skills (savoir-faire): including socio- and intercultural know-how
3. Existential competences (savoir-être): personality traits, points of view, attitudes
4. The ability to learn (savoir apprendre): learner strategies, metacognitive awareness, media literacy

• Linguistic competence about language structures and how to use these: vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and intonation, spelling
• Reception: listening and reading
• Production: speaking and writing
• Interaction
• Mediation

from A1 (basic user) to B2 (independent user)

Has shifted attention from input of teaching to output of learning + testing of functional competences

Enormous impact:

• on educational policy making (curricula)
• on test design (DESI, VERA)
• on teaching (educational objectives)
• on academic debates (teacher education)

Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK) used CEF as framework of national educational standards

e.g. Germany: new national educational standards and more testing

• The Bildungsstandards ignore Bildung in the sense of personal growth, orientation, and reflection
• The narrow focus on functional communicative competences and testing is detrimental to intercultural and methodological goals
• Competence comes with little content as if content was less relevant
• The descriptors and scales of language proficiency are not always clear and distinct
• Average standards (Regelstandards) should be changed to minimum standards (Mindeststandards, for weaker learners) and maximum standards (Maximalstandards, encouraging best performance)
• Standardization jars with individualization and differentiation.
• Output orientation neglects standards of good teaching and the insight into processes of language acquisition and learning
• Output standards encourage teaching to the test (backwash)

• KMK: Educational Studies, Psychology, FL

Deutscher Anglistenverband, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien: English/American studies, TEFL 

Problems: 

-The education of language teachers within the two stages (university education + 1st state examination and traineeship + 2nd state examination) varies across German federal states:

• subjects of academic education
• link to practical teacher training
• education of teachers at primary schools often separated from that of teachers at secondary schools

-In-service teacher training (Lehrerfortbildungen) less systematically structured and implemented than first two stages

-Need to bridge the gap between English/American Studies as an academic subject and its teaching at school

• quantitative conditions (money!)
• quality of schools
• quality of teaching

• guides his instruction by a preplanned curriculum
• carefully orients students to lessons
• has high expectations for student learning
• provides clear and focussed instruction
• uses class time for learning
• establishes smooth and efficient classroom routines
• has high standards for classroom behaviour
• interacts positively with his or her students
• provides incentives and rewards to promote excellence 

- "Klassenführung"

- Major problem for new teachers

- Aim: not (primarily) discipline, but increased learning time

- Means:

• Uniform school-wide regulations
• Withitness: teacher knows what is going on at all times
• Overlapping: teacher can handle several things at a time
• Momentum: teacher avoids both unnecessary interruptions and hectic atmosphere
• Smoothness: teacher maintains direction in the lesson without being diverted by irrelevant information or incidents
• Group Alerting: teacher keeps all students actively participating by creating interest or suspense 

• operational plausibility

• developmental plausibility

• neurological plausibility

• they use language as a world-manipulating tool
• for them, language serves as an identity-building tool
• matching phonological strings and meanings (tracing patterns in shapeless material), segmentation
• length of string undeterminable for the child (because they have no idea of written language yet)

• Linguistic knowledge is a store of individual words and morphemes as well as rules to assemble them
• Language is not dependent upon other cognitive processes
• speakers can produce an infinite number of sentences from a limited set of rules and words
• children have an innate predisposition to learn a language (universal grammar), they acquire the rules to produce grammatically correct sentences from the words in their language intuitively, according to the input

linguistic knowledge is a store of units of different sizes; the child learns language on the basis of SEGMENTATION —> tracing patterns in material that at first appears to be shapeless and identify differently sized chunks of language (matching phonological strings and meanings) and acquire a repertoire of collocations and colligations

The ability of children to identify recurring chunks of language / the boundaries between words, syllables, and phonemes in phonological strings

‘break down the larger units only when you need to and as much as you need to‘ --> children break down phonological strings only in as many segments as needed

Advantages:

• avoids overgeneralization and overregularization (producing too many rules)

• minimizes the amount of processing needed

native speakers

•  formulaic pairings which become loosened

non-native speakers

• words in L1 and L2 that become paired (Wray 2002)

• neural plasticity
• transfer (of collocation)
• memory of phonological sequences
• nature of student interaction and output
• frequency and nature of input
• perceived closeness of L2 to L1; type of collocations (phrases vs. two-word collocations)

• The principle of least effort is developmentally and neurologically plausible (cf. first language acquisition)
• word-based teaching should be avoided (instead: collocations+colligations!--> words should be learnt in context)

lexical constructions: a sequence of specific words or terms that frequently occur together in a language: Word A + Word B (+Word C)

ex.: conventional wisdom

Combinations of a specific word and a grammatical placeholder, any grammatical pattern surrounding a word

a particular type of grammatical pattern that a word occurs in

ex.: infinitive-clause, that-clause, -ing-clause etc.

constructions (consists of pre-fabricated chunks of language)

• language is not built in words, but in constructions (recurring combinations of particular words, lexis and grammar) 
• because at least 80 per cent of all text consists of collocations (same underlying structure and meaning components, pre-fabricated chunks of language, variation only on the surface)
• many of these are fully transparent ‘probabemes’ (esp. phrases, difficult to learn, normally not noticed)

--> words should be learnt with their respective collocations and colligations, teaching words in context

• non-native speakers use fewer phrases more often (smaller repertoire of of collocations and colligations, less variation in written texts)
• in speech, no routinized ways of interacting
• errors traceable to overgeneralization in L2, e.g. *perform a project (-> carry out a task/project, perform a task)
• errors traceable to first language influence, which is strongest in the case of literally translatable bases (e.g. *make a photo)

1. Vocabulary has to be taught and learnt explicitly + intentionally
2. Teaching vocabulary does not just mean teaching single words
3. Grammar and vocabulary are closely related

• those who try to learn through unintentional / incidental learning only remember about 5-10% of the new words)
• after the Oberstufe: typically less than 3000 individual words --> too little to understand the details of a text and to produce adequate texts
• guessing the meaning of words is not an efficient strategy
• easily understandable words are not transferred into long-term memory
• necessity to repeat new words (esp. for items of lower frequency)
• intentional and explicit learning = very effective (chance of remembering items 2 weeks afterwards: 40-60%!)

Grammar slots / structural slots that can be filled with words:

The view that language consists of grammatical constructions with empty slots that can be filled with any lexical item (thus grammar and vocabulary could technically be taught separately)

e.g. S – V (- O) (Subject-Verb(-Object) as the typical sentence structure)

• result: creative fallacy (*Ships sail.*Houses stand.)
• --> vocabulary and grammar cannot be separated like that!: => N (ship) + sail + ADV(place) 
• The model disregards the constructional nature of text

• texts consist of frequently occuring structures and patterns that are taken from a large repertoire of patterns (idiomacy)
• same underlying structure and meaning components, variation only on the surface