We speak with Anne Carmichael, Trinity Diploma in TESOL course director and moderator about what it was like to experience the changes from grammar-translation to audio-lingualism to communicative language teaching. Anne tells us about learning from grammar-translation coursebooks, teaching in a language lab and some of the surprising advantages of grammar-translation and the audio-lingual approach.
Before we talk about your career as a teacher, can you first of all tell us what was it like for you as a student learning a language back in the 1950s?
For some reason, my brain is just wired to pick up language patterns, not numerical, but linguistic. And I had no trouble acquiring French. I had little trouble acquiring Latin and then even less trouble acquiring German. And our very first French teacher was a native speaker and she used to talk about the bangy verbs, the verbs that had past forms that were different from the regular. And we all had to go like this, thumping on our desks. I mean, you never forget that. And you just recited them. And it was the same with Latin. Now, our German teacher, she wasn't a teacher at all.
They couldn't find one because in the 50s, German was really not popular. It was still a byproduct of the war. But I wanted to be in the Air Force as a sort of intelligence officer.
And I thought, well, German would be really good to know, you know, if we're going to be spying on them, that's a good thing to do. So I picked up German from this Austrian refugee lady, Jewish lady, a lovely lady. She had no idea how to teach.
So they gave her a grammar book and we just chatted. We looked at the grammar and she kind of explained it, but everything became personalised. So we were able very quickly to make clever little conversations using the present simple.
You know, Ich heiße Anne. Ich komme aus Aberdeen. Ich stamme aus Schottland.
All this sort of stuff. It was so good. And by the end of maybe six years of that, I was virtually native speaker pronunciation.
Hey, that's amazing that that teacher, almost because of a lack of training, was actually able to do a really good job of personalising the language for you and making it communicative. So can you tell us a bit more then about those grammar translation materials that you mentioned? What was in there?
Well, you've got your chunk of grammar, but then you've got a little story in German, which you had to translate into English. So that was the grammar translation bit.
It was the same, exactly the same in French. You got a little anecdote or something in French or in English, which you had to translate into French. And it was all carefully based on whatever you'd been learning in that chapter.
And then it would be marked and then all the wrong bits would be underlined and then you'd be asked to account for them. And of course, it always included a really difficult verb or a really difficult anomalous expression of some kind in both languages. But then you learn to look out for them.
We're not stupid. We thought, aha, they're going to include one of those. Let's really revise that one.
But those are the things I would concentrate on now. If I were still taking class, I would concentrate on the rather anomalous, difficult ones, issues so that they really got them conceptually in their heads. So my grammar is, I would say, almost impeccable because it's so ingrained.
So that was you as a student. Do you want to tell us about when you first started teaching? What was the situation and what were some of the common classroom practises that were being used back in the 1960s?
The first proper teaching job I had in Montreux's academy, the French teacher was very progressive. And he said, you're not allowed to use the written word.
And this is between August and Christmas. You may only speak in the classroom and it's up to you. You do whatever.
Now, I was young. And I mean, like you, I like to challenge. And I had this class of about 30 first-year boys.
And they were amazing. And we went around and they would shake hands and say, bonjour, monsieur. Bonjour, monsieur.
Comment ça va? Et cetera. Montrez-moi la fenêtre. Show me the window.
Show me the door. Go to the corner. What's the time? All that sort of stuff.
And we did that for the whole four months. And that was kinaesthetic. And it was lively.
And it was fun. And then in January, he introduced a little grammar book. And thereafter, their pronunciation went down when they started reading it.
And it became slower. And it held things up. Now, I then moved to another school in Nottinghamshire, where they were introducing French to the nine-year-olds.
And that was very progressive also. Of course, I had all the experience to do it and use the same tactics, keeping them engaged, keeping them interacting, which just wasn't at all the thing with the grammar translation model that we'd been taught at college and I'd been taught by at school. I mean, again, it's really interesting that a lot of what you're doing sounds very communicative.
But before anyone, I guess, ever put a label on that, calling it communicative language teaching. Anyway, do you want to tell us about the audiolingual method? Like, when did you first encounter that? And what was the impact on how you taught your students and how they would learn?
By this time, I was teaching at a further education college, and they decided that they would invest in a whole language laboratory. I mean, this was so exciting at the time.
I will never forget it and being taught how to use these massive tapes the size of dinner plates that you had to put on. And then you had all the students in their booths with their headphones on, and you could actually give attention individually. And because at that period, most of the students I was teaching were Chinese, the loss of face issue didn't come into it because you were able to be individual feeding back to them.
And I think they quite liked that rote approach because they were so good at memorising. I thought they could easily memorise a fairly simple or even a compound sentence of some kind. They could remember that.
They wrote it down. They remembered it. They said it to themselves over the weekend.
I did say to them, well, you know, you can try it on each other and so on. But I will listen to you on Monday and give you feedback. And I think that was a motivating thing to do in those days.
I know it was because they passed their exams. So it was a four-phase, a stimulus response. It was usually a four-phase little exchange that they were to learn.
For example, the stimulus might be, oh, my dog died last night. And then the response had to be chosen from congratulations or I'm so sorry. But you could have a laugh about it.
And the Chinese, as you know, have a tremendous sense of humour. And they would learn it, you see. And then they would bring it out in class occasionally.
I would say, I'm sorry I'm late. I couldn't get my car parked. And they would say, oh, congratulations, you're a terrible driver.
So that was applicable and communicative. But it was extraordinarily boring. And it was set pieces.
You couldn't digress from that. And it was a lot of listening for them. They had a little book along with it.
And it was impossible with the headphones on and everything else to use a board, because at that stage, we only had blackboard and chalk. But in the laboratory, you do all that. Now, they had normal classes as well.
When I say normal, they had grammar books that we were using. And it was just translation, essentially. But then, of course, with all my previous experience, I was able to personalise a lot of that to get them to tell their own anecdotes and respond to one another.
Like, if I held up like my five fingers for five are really good or four, can you correct that sound or whatever it might be? But the trick was to make it the basis to carry on and just to motivate them a wee bit, because you couldn't just plug them in and let them chant away. And they were all chanting at the same time. But they played the tape and paused it at their own speed.
And then they could go back and repeat, repeat, repeat until they felt they had it. Some of them did it better than others. So it sounds like it wasn't all bad then, and that it did work for some students.
Can you tell us a bit more about some of the advantages of the audio-lingual method, maybe especially in terms of pronunciation? It is a really useful thing for me as a language learner. I would happily listen to something 10 times until I felt I was getting it right. And this is something that Barbara Bradford put forward.
What she recommended was that a candidate would go away, tape a little anecdote of her own, leave it in her tutor Barbara's pigeonhole. Barbara would then listen to it. She would then record after that tape her feedback and her model, give it back to the student, and then it would come back the same bit.
And each time, the pronunciation should have been improved. Now, that was in the days, you know, the very unhandy days of physical cassette tapes and so on. But a lot of the colleges now are doing that using the IT that is available and the apps.
So students are sending work to their tutors, and tutor has to respond to all of that in their marking time. If some sort of audio-lingual individual feedback to a student makes such a difference, and it can also be done, I found, in a pretty motivating way. And especially if somebody who's been getting twos and twos, and on a Friday, I might give them a sentence to remember.
It might be a silly sentence, like, you know, the squirrel met the pink elephant and gave it a kiss, and they'd have to come back on Monday and say that to me. And if it was only a two on Friday, if they came up with a four or a five on Monday, I was so happy. So in those audio-lingual classes, as the teacher, Anne, how were you able to keep a track of what all the different students in the class were doing? If they're all sitting there with headphones on and everything, how do you actually know what's going on, and make sure that you're able to help all the different learners?
Well, you're sitting, you've got a little console in front of you, and you can pick any individual booth.
So if you think that Norman Lee is reading his Chinese magazine, you click on Norman, and you say, Norman, are you doing your exercise? Let me hear. And it was all individual. They were in booths, you know, they were separated by booths, and they had the headphones on and a little microphone, so you could speak to them individually.
And I used to give them marks out of five for their pronunciation. So I would say to them, say it again, again, and I would model it, because you could model it when they were stopping their tape, and their tapes would all be at different stages. I would give them five out of five.
I said, I cannot tell the difference between you and a native speaker. That is fantastic. Now, when they got that feedback, that really spurred them on.
That was good. And if anybody mumbled, I would say, I'm sorry, that's only a two. You have to try again, try again, listen to your tape.
I'll come back to you later. So you would come back and monitor that person to see if they were really working at it. But it's not unlike some of the online things they can do now, when you think about it.
Yeah, that's such a good point. And that's definitely occurred to me before that a lot of the language learning apps out there really involve students repeating a dialogue after hearing it and getting a score afterwards for pronunciation. And that's very, very similar to what you were just talking about.
Now, obviously, all that audiolingual stuff, well, even though we just said it's coming back, it did end. Can you tell us about that? What was the beginning of communicative language teaching like?
Somebody in the department decided that they would furnish us all with new coursebooks, starting out and first things first with the two coursebooks. If you Google them, you'll see.
And they often had a little audio tape with them in those days. But you would be able to do integrated skills, which was much better than just doing the grammar or the audiolingual. But then a lot of the coursebooks, it wasn't so much EAP at that time.
It was more to keep them entertained, a little story that would thread itself through the book, Arthur and Mary. Some people will remember that Arthur and Mary had a little kind of romance and they started off meeting somewhere near Oxford. And the little story went on and it developed through different grammar and lexis, situational, functional language, etc.