Language Teaching Materials and the (Very) Big Picture

ELT materials: the 1950s to the 1980s
1. Britain and North America are the sources of much innovation in ELT methodology
2. History is neatly divided into decades, as historians are apt to do, recognising that most of the social events and materials
3. The 1950s/60s and the Cold War
  1. The ensuing tensions produced the ‘Cold War,’ so called because, although open hostilities never broke out, they were rarely far from the surface, and constantly in the rhetoric of politicians.
  2. The 1958 National Defense (Foreign Language) Act was swiftly ushered in, providing massive funds for the development of language programmes
  3. An example of a pattern practice exercise (Lado & Fries, 1958, p. 7).
    1. The nett effect is that behaviourism in one form of another has been firmly cemented into language teaching materials, with its persistence right up to the present day, as the continuing use of drills, substitution tables and such like, demonstrates.
  4. The late 1960s to the late 1970s
    1. The period from the late 1960s onwards is characterised by the emergence of numer- Language Teaching Materials and the (Very) Big Picture 287 ‘fringe,’ humanistic methodologies, which, although rarely implemented, were much talked about and cited.
    2. A humanistic language practice exercise (Moscowitz, 1978, pp. 62–63).
      1. Interestingly, we also saw the origins of another example of the rejection of mainstream, establishment methodologies in a new perspective on language acquisition theory: Krashen’s Input Hypothesis.
    3. The 1970s to the mid 1980s
      1. The process of embourgeoisement in which the increasingly affluent working class populations of the developed economies were said to be taking on the individualist mindset of the middle classes, had firmly taken root.
      2. In 1970s the ‘Me Decade.’ This became particularly evident as sub-groupings began to voice their separate identities. It is in this period, for example, that we saw the further, marked development of feminism (the so-called ‘Second Wave’), a struggle for the recognition of the status of different cultures and minorities
      3. An early example of English for special purposes materials (Pearson, 1978, p. 17)
        Also of particular note during this ‘me decade’ was the recognition that learners have their own unique ways of approaching language study, that is, their own styles and strategies.
      4. Extract from Ellis and Sinclair’s “Learning to Learn English” (1989, p. 6)
        As a clear break from the top-down regime of grammar rules and specifications of rights and wrongs in language form, CLT championed not the way language should be but rather how ordinary people use it. Users mattered, not rules.

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Language Teaching Materials and the (Very) Big Picture

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	Created by Laura Moreno over 8 years ago