The Heart of the Matter: A Short Personal History of SLA Research and What It Has Meant to My Classroom Teaching – Part One

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

"In the field of language teaching, Method A is the logical contradiction of Method B: if the assumptions from which A claims to be derived are correct, then B cannot work, and vice versa. Yet one colleague is getting excellent results with A, and another is getting comparable results with B. How is this possible?"

(Earl Stevick)

When Earl Stevick was working through his initial thoughts on methodology, memory and language teaching, I was a student in the third Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages program (MATESOL) at the School for International Training (SIT) in Brattleboro, Vermont, U.S.A. Earl often visited our program – he was a board member of the school – and posed his pedagogical riddles to us. One of Earl’s great strengths was to take a fundamental concept, say affect in the classroom, and get people to talk about it through a Socratic style dialogue with his audience and in small groups.

As a student in the MATESOL program at SIT, I had the privilege of studying with Earl Stevick, Caleb Gattegno, John Rassias, H. Douglas Brown, and other leaders in this new field, in which it seemed the possibilities for creative teaching were without bounds. It was a time of methodologists, set free from the previous orthodoxy of the audio-lingual method by Chomsky’s insights into grammar, his acknowledgement of a Cartesian pedigree, and the consequent research into language acquisition that took place when the behaviorist paradigm was toppling over. Stevick had done work with Peace Corps trainees in target languages such as Korean, using a modified audio-lingual approach, but his own inquiry into the riddle of how theoretically opposed methods could both succeed had lead him to research memory and affect; two subjects which he carried forward as far the present century. John Rassias, then a professor of foreign languages at Dartmouth, continued his dramatic reading of the audio-lingual approach, using costumes, role play and strong visuals to augment the method. Then there was Caleb Gattegno and later Paolo Freire.

Having taught two years of EFL in the Republic of Korea (ROK), I was less an enthusiast of teaching than I was a seeker of new cultural adventures. Fortunately for me, SIT fostered both in its graduate students. Freed from the Audiolingual training I had had and likely misapplied as a college and middle school English teacher in Taegu and Cheju City, ROK, I quickly became a devotee of the so-called “designer methods” of TESOL such as the Silent Way and Community Language Learning (The term ‘designer method’ was meant as a disparagement, but I embrace it because I knew such methods first hand, unlike those who sought to belittle them.). I also was reinforced in my essential cultural relativism and desire to learn in community. I became a Silent Way teacher at every opportunity. I studied with Gattegno in New York City and I accepted his theories about the nature of learning, especially language learning. First among these was his belief that the only thing one could educate in another was awareness. Once that was done, the individual then assumed responsibility for learning while the instructor concentrated on creating economical and logically patterned lessons for students based on the dictates of each target language. One only had to look at the Fidel Charts (sound to color coded pronunciation and spelling charts) for English and Spanish to see these great differences in target languages.

Gattegno’s theories, based on the same sort of introspection as research as Chomsky had done, were my guide in my early career as an ESL teacher. Then I began to absorb more and more of the student-centeredness of Community Language Learning (CLL). I carried a portable tape recorder and blank tapes around to my language lessons, and I based the next lesson on what had gone on in the group previously. My theoretical background was Charles Curran’s research at Loyola University into foreign language learning. I absorbed the terminology of teacher as knower and student as learner, of teacher as counselor and learner as client, of the student being born into the foreign language and finally emerging as an adult, along the way removing the self from dependence upon the teacher/knower.

Now I had come to the point at which I felt comfortable working in two methods: The Silent Way and Community Language Learning. While I was spending my time learning these methods, the larger ESOL community was moving towards a communicative methodology in which student needs, communicative goals, and sense of efficacy took on new meaning in the classroom. In the heyday of Audiolingualism, students were treated much as the tabula rasa image indicated. Freire referred to this as “banking education,” the teacher made deposits into the empty accounts – minds – of the students. Students were empty vessels to be filled with the correct version of the target language. Mistakes were to be erased in the classroom by native speaker teacher models, and personal expression was not on the classroom agenda, but mastery of patterns was. I realized that both the Silent Way and CLL had a lot to add to the dialogue on what a communicative methodology might be. I had no difficulty conceiving of myself as an instructor who believed in communicative methodology and whose pedagogy could best be described by a once in vogue term, eclectic.

As first language acquisition studies fostered the even newer field of second language acquisition (SLA) studies, researchers began asserting the effectiveness of methodology based on their findings about SLA. Krashen drew on morpheme accuracy order studies to advocate a methodology, which he and Tracy Terrell termed “The Natural Approach.” It became the orthodoxy in 1980s California. The Natural Approach advocated an initial silent period for the second language learner, just as a baby goes through a silent period in learning its first language. Morpheme studies of English language learners showed remarkable resemblance to the accuracy order of first language learners of English. Beginning and elementary ESL instruction was focused on comprehensible input – Asher’s Total Physical Response got a big leg up because of Krashen’s recommendations for comprehensible input - and later lessons were content based. Pleasure reading was reckoned to be a strong catalyst for second language learning.

Though Chomsky had little to say about language learning, those that followed his theories of the biological basis of language in humans did. Learning language became part of the discussion of human development. Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, and Carl Rogers entered the picture as mentor figures. None of these men focused primarily on language acquisition although Piaget did write about it in The Language and Thought of the Child.
Piaget, in fact, represented an alternative view because he included language as part of the symbolic function in human development, and not solely an attribute of genetic endowment.

While communicative methodology – in all its nebulousness – became the standard reply to the teacher interview question, “What is your approach to classroom teaching?” new methods came into being from unexpected sources. First among these was the Bulgarian Georgi Lazonov’s Suggestopedia, which combined positive suggestion, a pleasing environment, role play and relaxation as the foundation of a language teaching methodology. Lazonov’s fortunes grew in the late seventies, in part due to UNESCO, which found the method to be effective. Theater games also began to find a role in teaching methodology. Many teacher trainees had undergone activities in their training courses: warm up exercises, elocution and interpretation exercises or attempts to expand creativity – all related to the training of actors. Such training, while well-tested in drama, was new to the language classroom. Although I did not know any instructor who taught classes solely based on theater games and exercises, it is safe to say that many instructors, myself included, used these activities as part of their eclectic methodology. I can point to no research which indicated the effectiveness of theater games as a method of teaching, but I can surely attest that employment of such activities had an immediate impact upon my classroom on any given day.

As a classroom teacher, teacher trainer, writer and later researcher, I had developed by mid-career a clear repertoire of teaching strategies based upon my understanding of Stevick, Gattegno, Curran, and an assortment of other methodologists. My theoretical bent was always toward the cognitivist position of “Cogito Ergo Sum.” I was a believer in Chomsky’s theory of language, and accepted the research of first and second language acquisition based on that biologically-driven theory. Language acquisition researchers after Chomsky soon found reason to add developmental awareness to the basic theory. I accepted both, and did my own reading in Chomsky, Piaget and Gattegno. I attempted to reconcile the differences among the three to arrive at my own unified theory. I corresponded with Gattegno, knowing that he had once been a translator of Piaget. However, I had yet to assimilate the teachings of Paolo Freire, though I had read him at the beginning of my graduate studies. I had not yet understood how his work related to my ESOL classroom, at home or abroad. That is what I would learn later.

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