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Language teaching tradi t ions:884 revisited

A P R Howatt

During the nineteenth century, great progress was made in the scientificstudy of language and the first steps were taken towards establishing anindependent science ofexperimental psychology separate from philosophyand metaphysics. The most significant developments from the languageteaching point of view were the British advances in the study of scientificphonetics led by men like A. J. Ellis and Alexander Melville Bell (the fatherof the inventor of the telephone), the German research into the perceptionand physiology of speech, and the work of European anglicists like JohanStorm in Norway. In 1877 Henry Sweet drew together these strands ofdevelopment in his Handbook of Phonetics, a major milestone in the history ofthe subject which, following the centuries-old tradition of practical phon-etics in England, also contained a proposal for spelling reform. Seven yearslater, in May 1884, Sweet took his interest in the application of phoneticsone step further by presenting a report to the prestigious PhilologicalSociety on what he called The practical study of language. This paper,which I believe should be recognized as the founding document of anapplied linguistic approach to language teaching, had been drafted eightyears previously after a lengthy period of incessant thought and work, butSweet held it back until his related textbook (Das Elementarbuch desgesprochenen English/Primer o Spoken English) was ready for publication, onthe grounds that example is better than precept.1 Fifteen years later in1899 the paper reappeared in a greatly expanded form as his classic workThe Practical Study o Languages: A Guide or Teachers and Learners.

Sweets principal aim in the paper was to press for the reform of languageteaching and learning through the application of the methods and results ofmodern scientific linguistics (or philology as it was still called). He set out avigorously argued programme for improved classroom methods based onthe spoken not the written language, a new approach to teaching materialswhich would replace the isolated grammar-translation sentences (puttogether like pieces of mozaic work)2 with phonetically transcribed con-nected texts on a variety of interesting topics, and, above all, a phonetics-based system of teacher training in which the universities would beexpected to play a major role. Sweets educational concerns and the polem-ical style of the 1884 paper are muted in the better-known 1899 book, partlybecause the book served a rather different purpose, but partly also perhapsbecause Sweet himself failed to carry the profession with him in theintervening years. He was not an easy man to get on with, and a year afterthe paper he was rejected for a professorship at Oxford which he (and therest of Europe) had expected him to win. None of the institutional reformshe was advocating came about in Britain till much later, but his linguisticand pedagogical ideas survived to form the intellectual basis for the rise ofEnglish as a foreign language as an autonomous profession in the twentiethELT Journal Volume 38/4 October 1984 279

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century. Some of the problems surrounding the relationship between lan-guage pedagogy and education that Stern (1983) discusses may, it seems tome, have their roots in this early history.

Let us move on, however, to the content of the 1884 paper. He began fromthe general axiom - equally important for the practical and the scientificstudy of language - hat the living spoken form of every language should bemade the foundation of its study.3 In practice, this meant a major commit-ment to the teaching of pronunciation, which was grossly neglected at thetime, and the use of a graded series of simple connected texts written withina controlled vocabulary and presented in phonetic transcription. UnlikeWilhelm Vitor, Sweet had no experience of school teaching and he haslittle to say about the details of how such texts should be handled in class,but his favourable comments on Der Sprachunterricht muss umkehren suggestthat he would have approved of Vitors oral classwork techniques asoutlined in that pamphlet.4 On the transcription question, the reformerstook differing views: some, like Sweet, were fanatically devoted to it whileothers, Jespersen, for instance, were much more pragmatic and relaxed.With hindsight, it was perhaps a red herring which tended to distractattention from more important features of the new methods such as, forinstance, the radical changes proposed for the teaching of grammar and therejection of translation as the primary method for practising the foreignlanguage.

For Sweet as an applied linguist (if I may use the term) the grammarissue was particularly significant. Grammar, he said, which is merely acommentary on the facts of language, must follow, not precede, the factsthemselves as presented in sentences and connected texts.5 This inductiveapproach, as it was usually called, required the teacher to select certaingrammatical features of the text for more systematic study and it was theresponsibility of textbook writers to ensure that the materials containedappropriate examples. What they should not do (a point that Sweet madevery clear in the 1899 book) was to falsify the linguistic authenticity of thetext by cramming it with grammar points. Sweet, and most of the otherreformers, would have been horrified by some of the structurally gradedtexts of the mid-twentieth century. The principal purpose of grammarteaching was to help learners to see how the foreign language worked, sothat they could handle progressively more difficult texts. The modernargument that grammatical knowledge merely provides a monitor on thecorrect production of sentences would probably have struck Sweet ascuriously narrow, since such knowledge is so obviously an aid in theirinterpretation and comprehension as well.

The final point, the dont translate issue, was perhaps the most contro-versial and far-reaching of all the ideas that emerged from the variousproposals for language teaching reform in the late nineteenth century.Sweet supported it in principle, but for a more detailed study we have toturn to the second of the two seminal works whose centenary falls this year,Felix Frankes pamphlet on the practical acquisition of language (Diepraktische Spracherlernung). Some of the modern connotations of acquisitionfind an echo in Franke, who begins his argument by contrasting naturallanguage acquisition (natiirliche Spracherlernung) with more formal languagelearning in an educational context (Sprachbildung). He then sketches apsychological model of acquisition which is derived from the theory ofassociationism which was dominant at the time. If learners were to formA. P. R. Howatt

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correct associations between new words in the foreign language and theconcepts they represente, it was better that these associations should beformed directly in the new language and not indirectly via translation.Furthermore, the associations required for fluent proficiency in the foreignlanguage would build up much more rapidly if the learner were notdistracted by constantly having to switch back and forth between themother tongue and the new language. The practical outcome of Frankesstudy was the unequivocal rejection of translation into the foreign language(such translations were out of the question - ausgeschlossen6 - n his view),but at the same time he accepted the use of translation into the mothertongue as an aid to comprehension. This is very different from the moreextreme dont translate techniques associated with Frankes contem-porary Maximilian Berlitz, whose opinions on this issue eventually becamesynonymous in the public mind with the Direct Method. We have toremember, however, that Berlitz was an entrepreneur whose main concernwas to ensure that all his employees, native speakers and for the most partnovice teachers, used the same methods in his schools, and he thereforesimplified his methods into a few easily assimilable precepts. These werederived in turn from the work of a Frenchman called Lambert Sauveurwho, like Berlitz himself, was a new immigrant in the United States in the1870s. Sauveurs Natural Method, as he called it, was based entirely onconversation and did not use textbooks at all in the early stages. Thesimilarity to Krashen and Terrells Natural Approach goes beyond thealmost identical labels. Compare, for instance, Sauveurs illustration of abeginners lesson (the original was in French) with Krashen and Terrells:

Let us count the fingers: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.ten. We have ten fingers. I have ten fingers; you have ten fingers,mademoiselle. How many fingers have you, madame? (I have ten fin-gers) And you, monsieur? (And I also). And George? (And George also).Do you see the ten fingers? (Yes). Let us count the fingers together.(Sauveur 1874:ll).Let us count the number of students with blue eyes. One, two, three, four

...Are there any others? (Jim). Oh, of course, we cant forget Jim. Yes,he has blue eyes. Now, who has brown eyes? Does Martha have browneyes? (Yes). And what colour is her hair? (Brown). Is it light brown ordark brown? (Light). Is she wearing a dress today? (No). A skirt? (Yes).What colour is the skirt? (Blue). Yes, its a blue skirt with white stripes.(Krashen and Terrell 1983:81).

Appeals to 'nature are very attractive, but the answers received tend tovary a bit. Sauveur did not permit any use of the mother tongue and Berlitzfollowed suit, as we know. Krashen and Terrell, on the other hand, allowlearners to respond in the mother tongue if they wish to. Franke permittedtranslation in one direction but not in the other. One is tempted to agreewith Sweet when he says with his customary rigour: The learning of aforeign language is as unnatural a process as can be conceived.7 But Isuspect one would be wrong to do so.

Franke died of tuberculosis only two years after his pamphlet waspublished, and he therefore had no opportunity of developing his ideasfurther. His early death (he was only twenty-six) was a serious blow, sinceno one else came forward to fill the gap and explore the psychologicalfoundations of language learning in greater detail. Perhaps his departureLanguage teaching traditions 281

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had a more lasting effect on the history of language teaching in the presentcentury. It may, for instance, help to account for the fact that of the threegreat principles enunciated by Sweet and Franke in 1884 - he primacy ofspoken language, the subordination of grammar to text, and the rejection oftranslation - only the last has remained in any sense divisive or contro-versial. Be that as it may, Frankes influence in his own time was profound,and not least on Jespersen, who had formed a friendship by correspondencewith him in 1884-6 and who paid him a remarkable tribute in his FarewellLecture in Copenhagen in 1925: I was spiritually more akin to him than toanyone else.8 In spite of Jespersens interest, little is generally known aboutFranke and Die praktische Spracherlernung has never to my knowledge beentranslated into English. It is not an easy text and in some respects meritedSweets comment that it was a brief sketch in which too much space istaken up by abstract generalizations.9 Nevertheless, its historical impor-tance is undeniable, and Franke himself would be an excellent subject forthe kind of detailed research study that Stern calls for in Part 2 of his book(1983).

Even a brief look at Reform Movement writers like Sweet, Franke, andVitor shows, I think, the strength of the applied linguistic tradition10 inlanguage teaching which has continued uninterruptedly for a centuryalongside the more intuitive initiatives of gifted practitioners such asSauveur and his successors in the field. They are distinct, but related,traditions, and both have enriched language teaching in different ways. Received April 1984

otes1 Sweet 1884:578.2 Ibid.:577.3 Ibid.:579.4 Howatt (1984) contains a translation of this work

under the title Language teaching must startafresh , derived from Sweets paper under discus-sion here. Also, Howatt (1982) includes an extractdealing with the classroom techniques of theReform Movement.

5 Sweet 1884:584.6 Franke 1884:17.7 Sweet 1884:596.8 Haislund 1942:275.9 Sweet 1884:581.10 To avoid any misunderstanding on the use of this

term, it should be mentioned that applied linguisticsas an academic discipline under that name origi-nated in the work of C. C. Fries at Michigan in the1940s. My use of its derivatives (applied linguistic,applied linguist) in this article is, therefore, a deliber-ate extension to cover the whole period duringwhich academic linguistic studies have had aserious impact on language teaching. I believe thisis a legitimate distinction, though I am aware thatothers may disagree.

ReferencesFranke F. 1884. Die praktische Spracherlernung, auf

Grund der Psychologie und der Physiologie der Sprachedargestellt. Heilbronn: Henninger.

Haislund N. 1942. Otto Jespersen. Englische Studien75:273-83.Howatt A. P. R. 1982. Language teaching must

start afresh - a centenary tribute to Wilhelm Vi-tor. ELT Journal 36/4:263-8.

Howatt A. P. R. 1984. A History of English LanguageTeaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Krashen S. D. and T. D. Terrell. 1983. The NaturalApproach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom.Oxford: Pergamon Press, and San Francisco:Alemany Press.Sauveur L. 1874. Introduction to the Teaching of LivingLanguages Without Grammar or Dictionary. Boston:Schoenhof and Moeller.Stern H. H. 1983. Fundamental Concepts of LanguageTeaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sweet H. 1977. A Handbook of Phonetics, including apopular exposition of the principles of spelling reform.Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Sweet H. 1884. On the practical study of language.Transactions of the Philological Society, 1882-4; 577-99.

Sweet H. 1885. Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch.Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Sweet H. 1899. The Practical Study of Languages. A Guidefor Teachers and Learners. London: Dent. Republishedby Oxford University Press, edited by R. Mackin,1964.

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