Key developments in language teaching

What have been the key developments over the last few decades in language teaching?

Here is my top ten, not in rank order. Yes, it had to be ten. Feel free to shoot me down in flames. As a group game you could rank them!

1. The near death of grammar-translation.
2. The invention of the tape recorder and language laboratories.
3. The rise and fall of audio-lingualism.
4. The widespread growth of "direct methods" or "oral-situational approaches".
5. The rise of authenticity of resources.
6. The rise of the communicative approach and information gap.
7. The four skills approach. Focus on speaking and listening.
8. The arrival of the computer and the internet.
9. The rise of generic formative assessment techniques.
10. Eclectism and the resurrection of grammar.

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What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought. ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

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Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

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