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[nomad soul]

No more fairy tales
EL Gazette | April 2018
Source: http://digital.elgazette.com/april-2018/no-more-fairytales.html

(Excerpt)

IATEFL Special Interest Group (SIG) representatives and EFL specialists question unproven assumptions that underpin many of our methodological beliefs.

In 1878, Maximilian Berlitz hired Nicholas Joly to teach French at his college in the US. According to the Berlitz website, Maximilian fell ill for six weeks and when he recovered, he found that Joly’s class ‘were engaging in lively question-and-answer exchanges with their teacher, in elegantly accented French.’ Berlitz argued that the Direct Method, as it came to be known, is a much better way to learn a language than grammar translation.

On one level, this story represents the early beginnings of communicative language learning. But it introduces the following three myths:

• that native speakers are always better,
• that the target language should always be used in the classroom, and
• that we don’t need to teach phonology because all students will simply acquire it effortlessly.

Chair of IATEFL Pronunciation SIG Wayne Rimmer takes on the myth that learners will pick up ‘elegantly accented’ English simply by being asked to listen and repeat. The neuroscience supports him, at least for adult language learners. Research in Finland suggests that only multilingual adults who started learning languages at a young age retain the ability to perceive and remember foreign sounds; the rest of us do not even hear them.

Harry Kuchah concurs that only the target language should be used in the classroom and points out that in large under-resourced classes of multi-lingual children, the best resource a teacher has is the existing linguistic ability of the students. He also questions the myth that children naturally acquire a language faster than adults.

(End of excerpt)

[RedLightning]

[scot47]

Alas, these myths about foreign language acquisition are now widespread.

[fluffytwo]

If Joly were using anything like the "dialogues" that Sauveur (a contemporary with his own methods teaching in nearby Boston, whom Howatt in his A History of ELT hypothesizes had directly or indirectly been a possible influence on Joly) employed, then one has to take those claims of 'lively question-and-answer exchanges with their teacher' with a pinch of salt:

[scot47]

Among the myths which continue in the Middle East

1. A competent teacher never sits down
2. A competent teacher never uses the students' first language
3. A competent teacher always respects authority
4. A competent teacher follows the syllabus