The Development of Methodologies and Approaches in Language Teaching

Abstract

Language is very important for human life. They need it for their daily lives to communicate. Language has very close relationship toward societies. It can't be separated from societies or cummunities. When there is a community there must be language. Besides using language for communication human being also use language for other reasons like enjoying literary works, reading books and so on. Knowing the important of language, through out history foreign language learning has always been an important practical concern. Whereas today English is the world's most widely studied foreign language, before Latin was the dominant language of education, commerce, religion, and government in the western world. Teaching English at that time was still based on the principles used in teaching Latin.

In 1940s, when the need of mastering foreign languages, especially English, became very important, linguists were called to aid language teaching. The linguists at that time thought that the existed theory was not relevant anymore to teach English. They, then. proposed some theories about nature of language that become basis of language teaching untill nowdays. Bloomfield proposed a theory which is called structural linguistics or it is wellknown as structuralism. This theory became fondation of audio-lingual method which was in 1940s widely used in America and even now is still used in most parts of the world. But it is finally found that the theory is almost similar with traditional ways of teaching and learning Latin, that is, by using repitition and drill.

In 1960s Noam Chomsky, a prominent linguist from America wrote a book entitle syntactic structure which became very famous. In this book Chomsky discussed the theory of transformational generative grammar that become basis of his theory called cognitive code learning and it is wellknown as cognitivism. Chomsky rejected structuralism. He said that language is not a set of habit. Human being, according to him has great ability in mastering language not just a result of habit-formation.

This short article discussess language teaching approaches and methods which have strong relation with theories of behaviourism and cognitivism. The methods and approaches which are discussed are grouped into two types, namely the methods and approaches based on behaviourism and the approaches based on cognitivism.