The teaching of oral skills in second languages: an abbreviated history

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A cursory look at the history of pedagogical approaches to learning and teaching English as a second language (ESL)   reveals that attention to oral skills started gaining saliency only in the middle of the last century. Prior to that, the focus of language learning had been placed on learning to read in the L2, understanding its grammar, and working with lists of vocabulary to translate literary texts from the L2 to the L1. Throughout the history of second language development, practice has lagged behind theoretical propositions, and empirical evidence — linked to encompassing theories — has fallen further behind.

 

Audio-Lingual Methods

In the 1950s, audio-lingual methods were born from a behavioristic conception of learning, which proposed that learning was a matter of conditioning and reinforcement (Skinner, 1957). This notion was linked to a then-popular structuralist view of language (Hockett, 1958) that considered language to be a system of systems (grammatical, phonological, lexical), which needed to be mastered by the second language learner sequentially in bits and pieces at a time. With automaticity as a goal, students practiced rapid responses to basic English patterns. The pedagogy proposed included the memorization of dialogs (which exemplified the learning target in each of its turns), repetition of prototypical sentences, substitution of elements in sentences conducted orally, and transformation drills, all of which dominated second language classes, along with reinforcement. For example, the English teacher would offer the following sentence: I am going to go swimming tomorrow (where go + V + ing was the pattern to be practiced). She would then say: dance, and the students would respond: I am going to go dancing tomorrow. The teacher would then repeat the correct form of the transformed sentence to reinforce the correctly sounding sentence in the students’ minds. She would then continue offering other transformation alternatives: shop, dance, skate. Students could produce the correct response without having to understand what they were saying. These drills later on received the name of mechanical drills or exercises, since they required no understanding on the part of the learner; they were just intended to create good language habits. In audiolingualism (the name the method received), listening and speaking were important, but they were constrained to predetermined sentences and phrases. Memorization of dialogs and mechanical drills focused on correct pronunciation, intonation, and rhythm. Accuracy (formal correctness) was primary, not understanding or participating in real conversational events.

 

Cognitive Methods

The cognitive revolution in learning (Anderson, 1983) and mentalist views of language (Chomsky, 1957, 1959, 1965) proposed that human beings had a universal innate knowledge of the key structures and operations in their first language. Chomsky proposed that there were two components of language knowledge: linguistic competence, the ideal knowledge of language rules that the native speaker possesses mentally; and linguistic performance, the often imperfect realization of that competence under real-life limitations. Applied to second language learning, emphasis was given to the development of students’ linguistic competence in the L2. A marked shift from habit formation to input and cognitive-rule learning took place. The goal of ESL teachers was the cognitive development of the language in its correct form, linguistic competence.

 

Two main strands derived from cognitive theories of language: strategy teaching, which emphasized the development of metacognitive and metalinguistic skills (Rubin, 1987; Chamot, 2009), and the natural approach (Krashen & Terrell, 1983). The first strand proposed that learners be explicitly taught strategies that would help them learn more efficiently. These strategies were sequenced so that they would progress from the most frequent and general to the more specific, for example moving from taking notes to monitoring and recognizing problems. In the natural approach, comprehensible input, the language offered English Learners by teachers, which was supposed to be one level higher than what the student understood, was supposed to trigger the natural language device learners possessed and build their knowledge of English. In both cognitive approaches, the development of oral production to communicate was decreased, and mental activities as well as reading and listening became central. For the first, the goal was that learners know what strategies to apply in specific situations, while for the second, the central work consisted of learners listening to comprehensible input (language deliberately set one level above students’ ability to comprehend) and reading silently for the most part.

 

Communicative Methods

In the mid and late 1970s, inspired by Hymes’s iconic article On Communicative Competence (1972), the linguistic world started paying attention to what Chomsky had dismissed as imperfect in language: the variations in use that language displayed across situations and contexts. Not only did these variations constitute the essence of social interaction (how one requests the same thing varies if the request is made to a hierarchical demanding boss or to an intimate friend), but Hymes (1972) went on to point out the absurdity in real life of, for example, answering questions with complete sentences that repeated elements of the question (a common L2 teaching practice then and now). The shift at the time moved from linguistic competence as a goal to communicative competence, from the grammatical production of sentences to the appropriate use of language in its social context, and from listening and reading to the consideration that speaking and listening purposefully were essential to accomplishing communicative acts.

 

Before the communicative shift, language teaching had established instructional progressions that took students from (apparently) simpler forms of language to increasingly more complex ones, or from strategies that were more useful or generic to specific ones. What then would be the sequencing criteria for second language communicative courses? European applied linguists (see van Ek’s Threshold Level, 1977, for example) engaged in research to determine what language functions (e.g., self-identification, asking for directions, complimenting somebody) were important to work on in beginning, intermediate, and advanced L2 courses. The threshold level, the specifications of functions and notions (concepts) that a second language learner needed to command in order to survive being placed in an L2 environment, guided the design of L2 courses. Instructional materials and classes placed emphasis on the oral use of casual expressions that resembled what people who spoke the language as a family language said under normal circumstances.

 

One of the first communicative books to be published was Strategies, written by Abbs, Ayton, and Treebain (1975). I was a brand-new ESL teacher at the time in Perú and loved the book, which was organized by functions. It seemed at the time to be so much more natural than the exercises based on grammar that we had used before. One chapter, for example, was called Expressing surprise and disbelief and, as the title suggests, it led students into situations where they needed to use typical phrases British people used to indicate surprise. The opening exercise had the imaginary first pages of a series of newspapers (pictures and all) and the headlines read: Princess to marry a footballer, Woman to be Prime Minister (this was after all, the mid ’70s) and other such absurd news. Students were to work in dyads where one would elaborate the headline into Good heavens, listen! The princess is going to marry a footballer. The partner would then reply, She isn’t, is she? I don’t believe it! And so the class would proceed through all the headlines in the exercise.

 

There were many advantages to courses that included these types of activities, especially when compared to the more constrained mechanical substitution drills used before. While practice was still mechanical, it added conversational elements to exchanges bounded by the directions set up for the activity, and students could not improvise. The activity created animation in class. All students had to participate at the same time in simulated interactions, using conversational markers and phrases typical of the communicative function being practiced. At the end of the chapter, situations were provided for students to take roles — specified in cards — and simulate a conversation in which surprise was central. These role-plays turned the conversation meaningful in that attention needed to be paid to participate in appropriate ways, but no novel communication transferred from one student to the other. My students enjoyed the activities, as they had been bored before with isolated, disconnected sentences and an emphasis on correctness. Classes were full of “conversations.” However, as Widdowson (1979) pointed out, the shift from structures to functions and notions had changed little, since “in both cases the essential design is an inventory of language units in isolation and in abstraction” (p. 247).

 

An interesting development of the communicative approach that was also relevant to the education of K-12 English Learners was the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) movement. The idea behind it was that the selection and sequencing of what was to be taught in the L2 should be guided by the needs of students. In English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) courses, students of English as a second language were taught the language they needed to perform their jobs well. Somebody training to work in the restaurant service industry, for example, initially had to learn a reduced number of functions and notions to communicate with guests in a restaurant. In English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses, the goal was to support the study needs (typically reading) of advanced university students who wanted to keep abreast of developments in their field. Analysis of the communicative needs of students was a prerequisite for the design of these types of courses (Munby, 1978). In EOP classes, emphasis on oracy was quite important — the adequate use of registers to communicate in specific situations. In EAP classes, oral production in English was not important since students focused mostly on the reading of academic texts, which were discussed in the L1, given that they already knew quite a bit about the topic at hand.

 

Sociocultural/Ecological Approaches

Influenced by Vygotsky’s ideas formulated in the 1930s and developed further by multiple sociolinguists and educational linguists (Larsen-Feeman, 2003; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Lantolf, 2006; van Lier, 2002, 2004), sociocultural theories dramatically changed conceptualizations of second language teaching. Vygotsky’s (1999) proposition that “human development is the product of a broader system than just the system of a person’s individual functions, specifically, systems of social connections and relations, of collective forms of behavior and social cooperation” (p. 41) conceptually shifted our understanding of a learner who responds to teacher initiations to that of an active learner who perceives, acts, and engages in interactions, and as a result, learns. Learning thus takes place in two planes: first socially, and then mentally. Learners notice elements from the environment teachers create for learning and, guided by scaffolds (the supports they are offered to engage in activity) (Walqui & van Lier, 2010), they use these affordances (van Lier, 2008) to support their language development.

 

As van Lier (2008) states, “The dialogical nature of all language and language use has profound implications for language learning. At once, the nature of language is changed from a product, a static system that can be described in terms of its inner structure and components (structuralism), to a process of creating, co-creating, sharing, and exchanging meanings across speakers, time, and space” (p. 599).