A COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH IN TEACHING
OF ITALIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Proceedings of the refresher seminar for teachers of Italian abroad organized by’ESI
24 May 2003 – Hilton Hotel – Amsterdam
Speaker: Prof. Giuseppe Ballero (synthesis by Catia Bossoni)
PART ONE
The main approaches and methods of the twentieth century
There are two “canonical” histories of language teaching, Kelly's (1971) and that of Titone (1982); some historical excursus are present in specific sections of Stevick (1980); Balboni (1985), Richard, Rogers (1986), Cold (1994), Serra Borneto (1988), Pichiassi (1999).
Let's begin to look at language teaching more closely starting from a diachronic vision, historical: not being able to, and not even wanting to, make the history of language teaching from its origins to the present day, we will focus on the approaches and methods that, despite having origins even distant in time, they extend their influence to this day.
Formalistic or "grammatical-translation" approach
In 1700 a type of approach to the study of languages begins to take shape which will be fundamental to this day: the so-called formalistic approach. In this period, in fact, Latin loses its character as a lingua franca, used in trade and literature and begins its transition from a living language status, learned for communication purposes, directly, to one with a dead tongue; at the same time a concept of translation as a skill emerges which must render the original text as faithfully as possible, respecting first of all the grammar rules, morphosyntactic. Latin therefore remains a subject of school curricula, but it is no longer a communication tool, it becomes only a mental "exercise" for the development of logical abilities: the language becomes "immobile", it crystallizes in the language of the classics, becomes a set of grammar rules and their exceptions, without contact with its living reality, physics, oral, without any consideration for its aspects of social variability, geographical and situational-contextual. Even to living languages, modern, this language didactic model derived from classical languages was soon applied: the morphosyntactic rules and the lexicon are presented through the pupils' mother tongue, they are memorized and applied in the translation from one language to another, strongly reducing oral and conversation activities.
| Reference theories: traditional descriptive linguistics, education seen as respect for the rules; Path: deductive; rules are given, linguistic behaviors will be deduced; The student: it is a blank slate to engrave on, a personality to "shape"; The teacher: it is a source of information, model to follow, unquestionable judge; The tongue: it is a set of rules that allow you to transfer from the mother tongue to the foreign language, regardless of the fact that meanings are also conveyed; Culture: it is the literary one, classical; Operating models: the curriculum consists of the list of pronunciation and morphosyntax rules, the teaching is conducted for lessons centered on the various rules; Didactic techniques: translation, dictation, text manipulation exercises The materials: print manuals; Technological devices: nobody. |
DIRECT METHODS
Already in the 19th century there were the first reactions, both in Europe and in the USA, the most immediate of which are collected under the DIRECT METHOD label (although it would be more appropriate to speak of a DIRECT APPROACH), method that had great success between the end of the 19th century and the 40s of our century: is the method adapted and made famous by the Berlitz Schools, born in New York in the early 1900s and soon exported to Europe as well.
The basic assumption of the direct method was that knowing a foreign language was equivalent to knowing how to think in it, as happens with the mother tongue, and therefore the same path of acquisition of the mother tongue must be recreated. The foreign language is learned: 1) by "contact" with the environment in which it is spoken or practiced in class, through conversation with the teacher, who must be a native speaker and must use only authentic materials; 2) without the help of the mother tongue; 3) without worrying about the grammatical aspect, which must be discovered inductively, and which constitutes the end point of the learning path.
The method still has valid ideas, even if it appears quite naive today and if the main criticism that can be leveled at it is that it is impossible to reconstruct the process of acquiring the mother tongue for learning a foreign language.
Direct method of Berliz
| Reference theories: there is no explicit theoretical reference, although it must be remembered that in the same years in which Berliz created his school in Geneva, in the same city De Saussure discussed the dichotomy between words, that is, the ina tto language that interests Belriz, as opposed to langue, to the abstract system of the formalistic approach then in vogue; Path: strongly inductive; The student: is autonomous in learning, he must strive to induce the rules, to make generalizations; The teacher: strictly mother tongue, use only the language to be learned; The tongue: it is a communication tool; Culture: it is involved in language, then we deal with those models that emerge spontaneously, without any planning; Operating models: fairly impromptu lessons, with the focus on some grammatical points; Didactic techniques: conversation with the mother tongue teacher; And materials: very few; Technological devices: nobody |
STRUCTURALIST APPROACH
Approaching our times and approaches and methods that are still used now, and which are represented in textbooks still in use, we arrive at the period from the second post-war period to today: it is the period of the boom in language teaching.
STRUCTURALIST APPROACH: it established itself in the 1950s, even if its roots go further back in time, and is based on the behavioral theory of language learning, which in turn was based on Skinner's theory of neo-behavioral learning, according to which the individual is born as a blank slate on which an uninterrupted series of stimulus sequences (positive or negative) create mental habits, of the unconscious mechanisms of reaction to stimuli.
It is very important to note that, for the first time, at the basis of a language didactic approach we find a more general theory of learning: the passage of language teaching from a set of "recipes" for learning a language to a scientific discipline is thus sanctioned.
STRUCTURALIST MATRIX METHODS:
THE AUDIO-ORAL METHOD
Several methods converge in the structuralist approach, the main of which is certainly the AUDIO-ORAL METHOD: the resulting language teaching sees the language in its minimal structures and learned essentially through structural exercises (pattern drills) repeated many times the phrases or words that are presented orally and manipulate them through: 1) replacement; 2) expansion; 3) transformation of a part of them, without any creative participation. There is no mention of the cultural aspect of the foreign language, the material is completely decontextualized, the language is fragmented into discrete elements that follow one another according to precise taxonomic tables.
Fundamental in this method are didactic technologies such as the language laboratory, rather, the success of this method went hand in hand with the development and enormous diffusion of these technologies after the war: structuralist materials are still used in language laboratories today, especially for pronunciation exercises.
However evident its limitations are, however, this method still has some valid aspects, such as, for example, the care of language testing and the importance given to the phonetic aspect, of pronunciation, which can be resumed with appropriate measures: pattern drills contestualizzati, use of testing to evaluate both execution and competence
| Reference theories: Bloomfield's taxonomic linguistics and Skinner's necbehavioral psychology; Path: deductive, behavioral aiming at the creation of automatic processes, in mental habits; The student: it is a clean slate in the hands of the teacher and the machines; The teacher: manages the language laboratory and corrects the written exercises; The tongue: it is a set of rules that should turn into living and authentic communication once you leave the language laboratory; Culture: not very relevant; Operating models: short lessons; Didactic techniques: structural exercises (pattern drill) based on the stimulus-response-confirmation correction sequence; Materials: drums of structural exercises on tape and in print; The technological tools: the audio-active-comparative linguistic laboratory |
COMMUNICATION APPROACH
THE COMMUNICATION APPROACH takes its first steps already in the 1960s, it is the basis of numerous methods and is still the approach underlying the teaching of foreign languages today; its basic assumptions are:
1) the purpose of teaching a foreign language is not the achievement by the pupil of simple linguistic competence (which concerns the set of rules and knowledge that make meaning feasible, communicating and expressing oneself with verbal language), but the achievement of a much more complex and articulated communicative competence, who is interested in all aspects of a communication capable of conveying meaning, and that includes: 1-linguistic competence, which deals with all aspects closely related to the language, to verbal language, Which: phonetics, o phonemics, the graph, morphosyntax, lexicon and textuality; 2-sociolinguistic competence, which deals with varieties: geographic, temporal; of the registers; of linguistic styles; 3-paralinguistic competence, which deals with prosodic elements that are not strictly linguistic: speed of speech, tone of voice, use of breaks,… used in order to change the meaning; 4-extra-linguistic competence, which deals with meanings not conveyed by verbal language and understands skills: kinesics; persemic; sensory.
2) pragmatics is placed on the same level as correctness: that is, formal correctness is placed on the same level as the ability to pursue goals and produce effects through linguistic acts: with this in mind, formal correctness is functional to pragmatics.
3) a foreign language can only be used if the culture of the foreign country is known, or the foreign countries in which it is spoken: language and culture are therefore closely linked and above all, with a bond that cannot be severed, worth studying an absolutely unnatural language (see audio-oral method).
COMMUNICATIVE METHODS: SITUATIONAL METHOD
The first communication method developed between the 1960s and 1970s, and it is the SITUATIONAL METHOD: it reacts to the mechanism of the audio-oral method by putting the concept of situation in the foreground, taken up by sociolingiuistics: the language is presented not aseptically, not focused only on language content to learn, but inserted in a communicative situation: each lesson begins with the global presentation of a strongly contextualized dialogue, attentive to the real communication conditions within which it is likely to take place: roles of the speakers, key or registry, times, places, arguments,…). in the first situational methods, if the initial situation provides context, the learning of the language contained in it is conducted with techniques typical of the structuralist approach, with pattern drills and repetition exercises of the initial stimulus, techniques aimed at helping the student in his grammatical formalization process.
| Reference theories: anthropolinguistics derived from Malinowsky and Firth, Fishman's sociolinguistics, the linguistic and contrastive anthropology of Lado. References also to Dewey's activist pedagogy and methodologies related to the teaching unit and problem solving; Path: still deductive, but also with the growing role of induction and autonomous acquisition; The student: it is no longer tabularasa, on the contrary, he is called to take an active part in its acquisition process; The teacher: becomes a guide, a tutor, a director, even if there remain phases in which he is a model and a judge; The tongue: it is still seen as a formal reality, in which grammar plays a strong role, but it is also beginning to be seen as a communication tool; Culture: it becomes more and more important; Operating models: the teaching unit model is applied to the language, the curriculum is described in terms not only mophosyntactic but also situational; Didactic techniques: techniques of listening and interaction appear. The translation is banned and even the dictation ends up under accusation; And materials: books accompanied by audio cassettes; The technological tools: the language laboratory, but also the new cassette recorders, film. |
Second generation situational methods extend the concept of situation to practice and testing as well, giving them a dynamic and lively character, which make the method still valid and still used in its general principles, especially if combined with and integrated with another method deriving from the communicative approach: the NOTIONAL-FUNCTIONAL METHOD.
The method was not born intended for school from the very beginning (as often happens: the audio-oral method was also born in a military context, for soldiers who had to move to a foreign country), but it was developed for adults in the 1970s by the experts of the Council of Europe within the Living Languages Project, project that led to the definition of the so-called "threshold levels", that is, the language that must be known by a foreign speaker to survive in the country where it is spoken: therefore it has a strong instrumental value, rather than formative. According to this method, the language to be proposed is not analyzed in terms of formal description (Name, verb, adjective, subject, predicate,…), but in terms of universal communication purposes, speech acts called "functions" such as "greet", "to show up", "to offer",… that imply, in order to be able to realize the knowledge of specific "notions": space, temporal, of number, gender, of possession, of quantity, of relationship,… which often vary from culture to culture and which require knowledge of a certain basic vocabulary; the functions are carried out through exponents or structures chosen in a way strictly correlated to the social situation.
The curriculum within the notional-functional method is drawn up starting from the analysis of the students' communication needs, constant use of the foreign language is encouraged in authentic communication situations, the oral language is strongly favored to the detriment of the written one; while not excluding fixation techniques similar to structuralist ones (pattern drills in which exponents of functions are used instead of grammatical structures), it is the pragmatic component that dominates, so the most used techniques are those that refer to simulation and dramatization in its various forms, from role taking to freer role making.
The basic assumptions of the communicative approach are now the basis or integrate almost all of the methods or approaches developed after the 1970s, even those that are applied to early teaching of a foreign language.
| Reference theories: sociolinguistics and pragmalinguistics, especially in the versions of Hymes which he blends in the concept of "communicative competence"; Path: increasingly markedly inductive; The student: becomes the center of attention; The teacher: its leading role is accentuated, the tutor; The tongue: it is seen as a communication tool, of social action, the pragmatic value prevails over formal accuracy; Culture: it is relevant as a solid socio-cultural competence is required to communicate; |
HUMANISTIC-AFFECTIVE APPROACHES
The HUMANISTIC-AFFECTIVE APPROACHES they are approaches and methods that include a series of methods developed mainly in the United States since the mid-1960s, as a reaction to the excessive mechanism of structural techniques and the impersonality of the language laboratory, and later they continued to develop also as a reaction or alternative to Chomskyan innatism and cognitivism.
They arrived in Italy rather late (at the end of the 1970s, structuralism was still experiencing its golden age in our country; today I am very much in vogue in language teaching, especially as an integration of the communicative approach, as the pursuit of communicative competence is the key objective of both types of approach.
There are various methods that go under the label of humanistic-affective, among which we remember: Total Physical Response, Suggestopedia, Natural Approach, Silent Way, but they all share the following characteristics:
1-interest in all aspects of the human personality, not just the cognitive ones, but also the emotional and physical ones; in this regard, we recall the importance it has been assuming in recent years, and not only in language teaching, the theory of multiple intelligences of H. Gardner, studies on cognitive styles, the NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) or the concept of multisensoriality: each person has a favorite channel to experience the world and to learn, channel that should also be used for language teaching; the latter must also involve all the senses of the person, to activate the greatest number of brain areas and put them at the service of learning.
2-Absence, or at least as much limitation as possible, of anxiety-generating processes, to lower what Krashen calls "affective filter" and which is able to block any form of learning.
3-Centrality of the person's self-realization in a social climate, that is, the search for a full realization of one's potential, that are not necessarily the same as the people around us, nor do they develop through the same tools, but which can integrate and mutually enhance each other.
Humanistic-affective communicative approach: Krashen's natural method
| Reference theories: various theories of psycho-teaching and relational psychology; studies on emotional intelligence and linguistic acquisition at an early age; research on the natural order of language acquisition and on interlanguage; Path: strongly inductive; The student: protagonist of his learning, “emotional” and not only rational fulcrum of the process; The teacher: guide, film director, landmark; The tongue: pragmatic communication tool, where formal correctness is secondary, the lexicon becomes prevalent with respect to morphosyntax; Culture: must be taken into consideration as it can create communication problems; |
NOTE – The tables are taken from: P. Balboni, The Challenges of Babel, Utet 2002, Torino
Conclusions
Today, however, we are increasingly witnessing the use of methods that, even within the basic coordinates of the communicative approach, they are called "integrated", as they welcome principles or stimuli from different sides of language teaching and more generally of the psychology of learning.