Scott Thornbury’s

30 Language
­Teaching
Methods
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Scott Thornbury’s
30 Language
­Teaching
Methods
Scott Thornbury

Consultant and editor: Philip Kerr

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Contents
Thanks and Acknowledgements vi
Why I wrote this book viii
A: Natural methods 1
  1 Total Immersion 2
2 The Natural Method/Approach 6
3 The Direct Method 10
4 The Oral Method 14
5 The Reading Method 18
6 The Audiolingual Method 22
7 Total Physical Response 26
B: Linguistic methods 30
8 Explication de Texte 31
9 Text Memorization 35
10 Grammar-Translation 39
11 The Lexical Approach 43
12 Text-based Instruction 47
13 The Comparative Method 51
C: Communicative methods 55
14 The Situational Approach 56
15 Communicative Language Teaching 60
16 Task-based Language Teaching 64
17 Competency-based Teaching 68
18 Whole Language Learning 72
19 Content-based Instruction 76
20 Dogme ELT/ Teaching unplugged 80
D: Visionaries 84
21 Community Language Learning 85
22 Suggestopedia 89
23 The Silent Way 93
24 Crazy English & the Rassias Method 97
E: Self-study methods 101
25 Orientalists 102
26 Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’  106
27 Brand name Methods: Assimil, Michel Thomas, Pimsleur  110
28 Programmed Instruction: Duolingo  114
29 Online Polyglots 118
F: Beyond methods 122
30 Principled Eclecticism 123
Index 127

Contents v
Thanks
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Philip Kerr, whose rigorous and insightful feedback
kept me focused throughout the writing process, and to Alison Sharpe, equally vigilant,
during the editing. And thanks to Karen Momber and Jo Timerick at Cambridge for their
constant support and encouragement.

Scott Thornbury

Acknowledgements
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If any omissions are brought to our notice, we will be happy to include the appropriate
acknowledgements on reprinting and in the next update to the digital edition, as applicable.

Text

Cambridge University Press for the text on p. 2 from ‘Reexamining the critical period
hypothesis: A Case Study of a Successful Adult SLA in a Naturalistic Environment’
by Georgette Ioup, Elizabeth Boustagui, Manal El Tigi, and Martha Moselle in Studies
in Second Language Acquisition, Vol. 16 (01), p. 77. Copyright © 1994 Cambridge
University Press; National Geographic Society for the text on p. 4 from ‘Don Francisco’s
Six Steps to Better English’ in How I Learned English: 55 Accomplished Latinos Recall
Lessons in Language and Life by Tom Miller. Copyright © 2007 National Geographic
Society; Graham Greene for the text on p. 10 from The Confidential Agent by Graham
Greene, published by Penguin Books Ltd. Copyright © 1939, 1971 Graham Greene.
Rosetta Stone Ltd. for the text on p. 11 from ‘Learn Languages: Rosetta Stone’, https://
play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.rosettastone.mobile.CoursePlayer&hl=en.
Copyright © Rosetta Stone Ltd. Reproduced with kind permission; The University of
Chicago Press for the text on p. 13 from Teaching Foreign-Language Skills by Wilga M.
Rivers. Copyright © 1968, 1981 The University of Chicago Press. John Wiley & Sons
Inc. for the text on p. 19 from ‘The Reading Approach and The New Method System’
by Michael West, The Modern Language Journal, Vol 22. (03), pp. 220–222. Copyright
© 1937 John Wiley & Sons Inc. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons Inc.
granted via the Copyright Copyright Clearance Center; The University of Michigan Press
for the text on p. 23 and p. 24 from English Pattern Practices: Establishing the Patterns as
Habits by Robert Lado and Charles C. Fries. Copyright © 1943, 1970 The University of
Michigan Press; Robert M. Ramsey for the text on p. 24 from English Through Patterns
by Robert M. Ramsey, published by Editorial Teide S.A. Copyright © 1969 Robert M.
Ramsey; Taylor and Francis for the text on p. 36 from Foundations of Foreign Language
Teaching: Nineteenth-Century Innovators, Volume 1 by A.P.R. Howatt and Richard C.
Smith. Copyright © 2000 Routledge, a Taylor and Francis imprint; Helbling Languages for
the text on p. 45 from Teaching Chunks of Language: From Noticing to Remembering by
Seth Lindstromberg and Frank Boers. Copyright © 2008 Helbling Languages. Reproduced
with kind permission; Deakin University for the text on p. 47 from Linguistic Processes in
Sociolinguistic Practice by Gunther R. Kress. Copyright © 1985 Deakin University Press;
T. F. Mitchell for the text on p. 48 from The Language of Buying and Selling in Cyrenaica:

­vi Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

A Situational Statement reproduced in Principles of Firthian Linguistics by T. F. Mitchell.
Copyright © 1975 Longman; The University of Michigan Press for the text on p. 51 from
Linguistics across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers by Robert Lado.
Copyright © 1957, 1971 The University of Michigan Press; Oxford University Press for
the text on pp. 57–58 from English in Situations by Robert O’Neill. Copyright © 1970
Oxford University Press. Reproduced with permission; Oxford University Press for the
text on p. 58 from English in Situations by Robert O’Neill. Copyright © 1970 Oxford
University Press; Brian Abbs and Ingrid Freebairn for the text on p. 61 from Building
Strategies: Teacher’s Book by Brian Abbs and Ingrid Freebairn, published by Longman.
Copyright © 1984 Brian Abbs and Ingrid Freebairn. Reproduced with kind permission;
Cambridge University Press for the text on p. 62 from Touchstone 1 Teacher’s Edition by
Michael McCarthy, Jeanne McCarten and Helen Sandiford Copyright © 2005 Cambridge
University Press. Reproduced with kind permission; Council of Europe for the text on
p. 69 from Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching,
Assessment. Copyright © Council of Europe. Reproduced with kind permission; Marie
Wilson Nelson for the text on p. 74 from At the Point of Need: Teaching Basic and ESL
Writers by Marie Wilson Nelson, published by Heinemann, a division of Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. Copyright © 1991 Marie Wilson Nelson. Reproduced with kind
permission; Delta Publishing for the text on p. 82 from Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in
English Language Teaching by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury. Copyright © 2009
Delta Publishing. Reproduced with kind permission; University of Alberta for the text
on p. 85 from Language, Consciousness and Personal Growth: An Autobiographic Study
of a Second Language Learner by Zhou Wu. Copyright © 1993 University of Alberta.
Reproduced with kind permission; Natural News for the text on p. 90 from ‘The Top
Ten Technologies: #10 Superlearning Systems’ by Mike Adams, Natural News website,
14.07.2014. Copyright © 2014 Natural News; Da Capo Press for the text on p. 95 from
How Children Fail by John Holt. Copyright © 1982 Da Capo Press, a Hachette Book
Group Company; Oxford University Press for the text on p. 96 from The Multilingual
Subject by Claire J. Kramsch. Copyright © 2009 Oxford University Press; Trustees of
Dartmouth College for the text on p. 99 from ‘The Method’ http://rassias.dartmouth.
edu/method/. Copyright © 2017 Trustees of Dartmouth College. Reproduced with kind
permission; Condé Nast for the text on p. 99 from ‘Crazy English: The National Scramble
to Learn a New Language Before the Olympics’ by Evans Osnos, The New Yorker
website, 28.04.2008. Copyright © 2008 Condé Nast; The Mezzofanti Guild for the text
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Donovan Nagel. Copyright © The Mezzofanti Guild; Lindsay Does Languages by ‘Why
Social Media is the Best Free Language Learning Tool’, Lindsay Does Languages website,
15.11.2016. Copyright © 2016 Lindsay Does Languages; HarperCollins for the text on
119 from Fluent in 3 months: Tips and Techniques to Help you Learn any Language by
Benny Lewis. Copyright © 2014 HarperCollins; Alexander Arguelles for the text on p. 120
from ‘Foreign Language Expertise’, http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/about.html.
Copyright © 2011 Alexander Arguelles; Speaking Fluently for the text on p. 120 from ‘The
Secret of Learning Languages’ by Richard Simcott, Speaking Fluently website, 11.02.2016.
Copyright © 2016 Speaking Fluently.

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Acknowledgements vii
Why I wrote this book
‘Another book about methods? I thought methods were dead. I thought we were
now in a post-method era.’

It’s true that the concept of ‘method’ is generally shunned in the literature on
language teaching nowadays. Even as long ago as 1969, L.G. Kelly, in his survey of
language teaching over the last 25 centuries, contended that ‘methods are of little
interest’. In similar fashion, H. H. Stern (1983) announced ‘a break with the method
concept’, due in part to the failure of researchers to find any significant advantage
in one method over another. In 1990, N.S. Prabhu wrote an influential paper called
‘There is no best method – why?’ and in the following year Dick Allwright published
another called ‘The Death of Method’.

Subsequently, B. Kumaravadivelu (1994) identified what he called the ‘postmethod

condition’, a result of ‘the widespread dissatisfaction with the conventional concept
of method’. At around the same time, Adrian Holliday (1994) was arguing the case
for ‘appropriate methodology’ which must, first and foremost, be sensitive to the
local culture – something which imported methods are probably not.

Nevertheless, in the popular imagination at least, faith in the idea of method persists.
Websites advertising new and improved methods for language learning abound. Here
are some promotional slogans taken at random:
Learning a foreign language is easy with the XXX Method.
The highly acclaimed YYY Method lets you pick up a new language naturally.
Over a period of more than 15 years, ZZZ has developed and perfected a unique
method of teaching languages.

What’s more, training courses regularly include a component on the history of

language teaching methods. Teachers in general are intrigued by the variety of
methods that have been proposed, and are often keen to experiment with them.
Indeed, as D. Bell (2007) discovered, when he canvassed a number of teachers,
‘methods, however the term is defined, are not dead. Teachers seem to be aware of
both the usefulness of methods and the need to go beyond them’.

One attraction of methods is that they offer coherent templates for generating
classroom routines. The method helps structure what – to both teachers and learners
– is a potentially haphazard experience. It provides answers to questions like: Where
do I start? What materials and activities should I use? In what order? To what end?
For novice teachers, in particular, methods offer a lifeline. For more experienced
teachers, they offer a toolkit. As Richards and Rodgers (2014) put it, ‘methods
can be studied not as prescriptions for how to teach but as a source of well-used
practices, which teachers can adapt or implement based on their own needs’.

Of course, a method is of not much use if we don’t believe in it – if, in Prabhu’s

(1990) terms, it contravenes a teacher’s ‘sense of plausibility’. Methods are
underpinned by beliefs about learning and language and, even if these are not always
made explicit, we need to feel in harmony with them.

­viii Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

But if the method does fit, if it does resonate with our beliefs, then it has every
chance of working – not because it is intrinsically sound (remember ‘there is no
best method’), but because it confers on a teacher a degree of confidence in his or
her own efficacy. Jane Spiro (2013) puts it very well: ‘The critical factor in success
is the commitment and belief of the teacher in the methods he or she is using, and
the continuing reflection of the teacher as to whether these methods are making a
positive difference’.

This book, then, aims to unpack – not just the history of methods – but the
beliefs that underpin them and the benefits that still might possibly accrue from
experimenting with them.

Some notes on terminology

Not all the methods included in this book have method as part of their label: some
are called approaches, and one is simply a way. But they are all consistent with
David Nunan’s (2003) definition: ‘A language teaching method is a single set of
procedures which teachers are to follow in the classroom. Methods are usually
based on a set of beliefs about the nature of language and learning’. Researchers
are quick to point out, of course, that no two teachers will implement a method in
exactly the same way – hence the idea of a method being ‘a single set of procedures’
is necessarily an idealized one. For this reason, I am ignoring the distinction that is
often made between method and approach, because, in terms of what happens in
actual classrooms, it is of little consequence.

Methodology, on the other hand, is a more general term to characterize the

classroom procedures and activities that teachers select – such as error correction,
group work, or video viewing – and the way that these are managed, irrespective of
the specific method that they subscribe to.

How this book is organized

Most training courses and methodology texts include a section on ‘the history of
methods’ and this typically takes the form of a ‘modernist’ narrative, i.e. one of
uninterrupted progress from ‘darkness into light’. In actual fact, a closer reading of
the history suggests that this account is over-simplified, and that methods not only co-
exist, often for long periods of time, but are continuously re-invented out of the same
basic ingredients. This book, then, aims to counteract the traditional narrative by
grouping methods according to what they have in common, even if separated in time,
and to dispel the view that methods ‘die’ and no longer have anything to offer us.

The choice of methods to include has been motivated by a number of factors:

primarily, the strength of their influence over time (e.g. the Direct Method,
Communicative Language Teaching), but, conversely, their relative failure to gain
wider acceptance, despite their intrinsic merits (e.g. the Comparative Method,
text memorization). Rehabilitating these ‘lost methods’ because of what they still
might have to offer us has been another reason I wrote this book. Also included are
those ways in which people learn languages that are not classroom-based, thereby
stretching Nunan’s definition (above) to extend to self-study and even immersion.
At the same time, this book does not hope to be exhaustive, neither in terms of the
methods that it covers nor in terms of the detail with which each one is described.
Space simply does not permit.

Why I wrote this book ix

Despite these limitations, it is hoped that you will not only have a broader
understanding of the enormous variety of ways that languages are – and have been
– learned, but also be in a better position to evaluate some current practices – a
necessary step in our continued professional development.

Abbreviations

To save space, and repetition, here is a list of common abbreviations used in this book:
EFL = English as a foreign language
ELF = English as a lingua franca
ESL = English as a second language
ELT = English language teaching
L1 = first language/mother tongue
L2 = second (or additional) language
SLA = second language acquisition
TESOL = teaching English to speakers of other languages

Bell, D. (2007) Do teachers think that methods are dead? ELT Journal, 61: 135–143.

Holliday, A. (1994) Appropriate methodology and social context. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Kelly, L.G. (1969) 25 centuries of language teaching: 500 BC – 1969. Rowley, MA:
Newbury House.

Kumaravadivelu, B. (1994) The Postmethod condition: (E)merging strategies for second/

foreign language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 28: 27–48.

Nunan, D. (ed.) (2003) Practical English language teaching. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Prabhu, N.S. (1990) There is no best method – why? TESOL Quarterly, 24:161–176.

Richards, J. C. and Rodgers, T.S. (2014) Approaches and methods in language teaching
(3rd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spiro, J. (2013) Changing methodologies in TESOL. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Stern, H.H. (1983) Fundamental concepts of language teaching. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

­x Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

A: Natural methods

This first section looks at a number of

methods that are loosely characterized
as being ‘natural’ – in the sense that
they replicate, or aim to replicate – the
processes by which first languages are
acquired, or by which second languages
are picked up without any formal
instruction.

1 Total Immersion
2 The Natural Method/Approach
3 The Direct Method
4 The Oral Method
5 The Reading Method
6 The Audiolingual Method
7 Total Physical Response

Natural methods 1
 1 Total Immersion

What more natural way of learning an additional language

than immersing yourself in the culture that speaks it? It
is also the most widely practised way: more people have
acquired a language through total immersion than by any
other means.

The background

It may seem odd to begin a book on methods with a ‘zero-method’.

After all, total immersion pre-dates the concept of ‘method’ by several
hundreds of millennia. Ever since people first moved – or were forced
to move – away from their local speech community, they have come
into contact with other languages. And, given time and motivation,
they have learned them – often to impressive levels of ability. Hence,
total immersion supplies the benchmark against which the success of
all other methods can be measured.

Take ‘Julie’, for instance. Julie was a British woman who married an
Egyptian and settled in Cairo aged 21. She never attended classes in
Egyptian Arabic, and could not read or write in it, but within just
two and a half years she was able to ‘pass’ as a native speaker of the
language. How was she able to achieve this? Probably because she was
totally immersed in Arabic. As the researchers who studied her (Ioup et
al 1994) describe it:
Nine days after arrival, her husband was unexpectedly called to
military service and she was left with non-speaking-English relatives
for 45 days. Since there was no one to assist her in English, she relied
on context and gesture to interpret utterances and express meaning.
Thus, at this initial stage her language acquisition situation resembled
the environment for child L1 acquisition.

By the time her husband returned she was able to communicate with
her in-laws using simple sentences and idiomatic expressions and, after

­2 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

six months, she was fairly fluent. The immersion process continued
when she took a job in an Egyptian school, and, after three years in
Egypt, she no longer used English with her husband or children: Arabic
had, effectively, become the home language (although her children did
grow up bilingual).

Julie’s case is only exceptional in that, despite being a late starter, she
achieved a degree of proficiency in her second language that is relatively
unusual in adults. But the situation of being suddenly immersed in a
language and having to pick it up ‘naturalistically’ is one that is familiar
to most immigrants, even if they don’t always ‘pass’ as native speakers.
And, while it may be arguable whether immersion is a ‘method’ as such,
there is a widespread view – supported by stories such as Julie’s – that,
if you have to learn a second language, then the best thing you can do
is hop on a plane and go to the country where the language is spoken.
Many ‘off the shelf’ methods, such as the Natural Method (see chapter 2),
in fact, attempt to simulate the immersion experience.

Of course, not all naturalistic (i.e. non-instructed) learners are

successful. In another seminal case study of an immigrant’s command of
English, ‘Alberto’, an adult Costa Rican who had been living in Boston
for a year and a half, was incapable of producing anything more than
very basic (‘pidginized’) English. This was attributed to his lack of
integration into the dominant English-speaking culture. Conversely, in
another case study (Schmidt 1983), an adult Japanese immigrant (‘Wes’)
living in Hawaii, who was seemingly well integrated, also showed
little language development over the three years he was studied. He
did, however, achieve impressive levels of communicative effectiveness,
such that many who knew him rated his English favourably. (English
teachers, on the other hand, were less impressed!)

How does it work?

Total immersion on its own seems to be less effective than total

immersion plus. That is to say, as well as round-the-clock exposure,
there needs to be some ‘push’ for greater precision, and there needs
to be some focused attention on form. (It’s probably the lack of both
that accounts for the limited language development in the case of both
Alberto and Wes.)

Total Immersion 3
For example, to help her cope with the initial experience of total
immersion, Julie kept a notebook in which she jotted down any
words or expressions she could make sense of. She started to include
grammatical information, such as verb endings, too. But, at this initial
stage, of most use were formulaic ‘chunks’, which gave her a toe-hold
into real communication. She also took (grateful) note of the corrections
and re-phrasings that her relatives offered her when communication
broke down.

In similar vein, another self-taught learner, the Chilean Marcos

Kreutzberger (better known as the TV personality Don Francisco)
devised a number of proactive strategies for learning English when he
was ‘immersed’ in New York, aged 19. On the streets of the city, for
example, he would seek out ‘older people who didn’t seem to be in a
hurry’, and, on the pretext of asking directions, initiate a conversation.
He would write down any new words that might come up in a personal
lexicon for later recycling. He supplemented this routine by watching
TV, reading newspapers ‘and trying to translate everything that was
going on’ (Kreutzberger 2007). He adds:
The system really worked for me. After 90 days I could navigate pretty
well, and after a year I felt I had enough ability to join in conversations
and understand almost everything being said.

Does it work?

For Julie and Marcos, immersion was clearly successful. For Wes less so,
and for Alberto hardly at all. What made the difference? As mentioned,
the use of deliberate strategies to filter and record the input, to pay
attention to corrections, and to plan subsequent exchanges, all seemed
to play an important part in the success of Julie and Marcos. Just as
important may have been their willingness to take risks, which, in turn,
may have been driven by sheer necessity: in Julie’s case in particular, she
had no choice but to learn Arabic.

Of course, Julie and Marcos were successful speakers of their target

languages. But we don’t know a lot about their reading and writing
skills. Whereas total immersion can lead to very high levels of
proficiency in oracy (speaking and listening), literacy skills typically lag
behind. This is because, outside of an academic context, learners simply

­4 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

don’t get the exposure to written text, or the practice producing it, that
literacy requires.

What’s in it for us?

The idea that classroom instruction can be adapted so as to replicate

the conditions of total immersion is a seductive, but ultimately
doomed, one. For a start, we have seen that only highly motivated
and resourceful learners may truly benefit from a total immersion
experience. More realistically, it is virtually impossible to recreate the all
day, every day quantity of exposure that total immersion provides. On
the other hand, technological innovations have exponentially increased
contact opportunities outside the classroom. Training learners in the
strategies that enable them to take advantage of these opportunities
may be one way forward. These could include using online means to
interact with speakers of the target language through websites such as
‘HelloTalk’ (www.hellotalk.com), for example.

Ioup, G., Boustagoui, E., Tigi, M., & Moselle, M. (1994) Reexamining the critical period
hypothesis: a case of a successful adult SLA in a naturalistic environment. Studies in SLA,
16: 73–98.

Kreutzberger, M. (2007) Don Francisco’s Six Steps to Better English. In Miller, T. (ed.)
How I learned English, Washington, DC: National Geographic.

Schmidt, R. (1983) Interaction, acculturation and the acquisition of communicative

competence. In Wolfson, N., & Judd, E. (eds.) Sociolinguistics and Second Language
Acquisition. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

Total Immersion 5
 2 The Natural Method/Approach

Total immersion works because, like first language

acquisition, it is ‘natural’. That, at least, is the argument
made by proponents of the so-called natural methods.

The background

It’s fair to say that the history of language teaching has swung back
and forth between just two poles. On the one hand, there have been
methods that take the position that additional languages have to be
learned – through the application of some kind of mental effort. This is
because additional languages are not picked up on our mother’s knee,
as it were. At the other extreme are the methods that are grounded in
the belief that, given the right conditions, additional languages can be
acquired in the same way we acquired our mother tongue. Because
they attempt to replicate at least some of the conditions of uninstructed
acquisition, these latter methods are loosely grouped together as ‘natural
methods’. Over time, one or two have explicitly labelled themselves as
being the Natural Method, or the Natural Approach.

Perhaps the strongest argument supporting natural approaches is not

that we learned our first language naturally, but that many, many
people have learned a second language naturally – that is, without
formal instruction but solely through contact with speakers of the
language – in a manner often referred to as naturalistic learning (see
chapter 1 Immersion). For early scholars, naturalistic learning was
equated to ‘learning through conversation’. As the enlightenment
philosopher John Locke put it, in Some Thoughts Concerning
Education (1693): ‘The Original way of Learning a language by
Conversation, not only serves well enough, but is to be prefer’d as the
most Expedite, Proper, and Natural’.

One of the first attempts to formalize such a philosophy for the teaching
of modern languages was instituted by a teacher of French. In a book

­6 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

called Causeries avec mes élèves (Conversations with my students,
1874a), Lambert Sauveur describes the first lesson: ‘It is a conversation
during two hours in the French language with twenty persons who
know nothing of this language. After five minutes only, I am carrying on
a dialogue with them, and this dialogue does not cease’. Sauveur opened
a language school in Boston and before long his conversation-based
method had attracted a great deal of attention and became known as
the Natural Method.

Almost exactly a century later, Tracy Terrell, a teacher of Spanish in

California, proposed a ‘natural approach’ to teaching second languages.
Drawing on the distinction made by Stephen Krashen between learning
(i.e. conscious study), on the one hand, and, on the other, acquisition
(i.e. unconscious ‘absorption’ of the language through exposure and
use), Terrell argued that communicative competence could be achieved
in the classroom, not through learning-type activities, but through
activities that fostered ‘natural’ acquisition. Such activities would
be communicative, in that the focus would be entirely on meaning –
initially simply understanding meaningful input, and then producing
meaningful output. Perhaps more firmly grounded in research than
Sauveur’s method, the Natural Approach nevertheless shares many of its
basic principles.

How does it work?

In his Introduction to the Teaching of Living languages without

Grammar or Dictionary (1874b), Sauveur explains the principle
underpinning his ‘conversations’:
I raise quickly my finger before you, and show it to you. Do you not
understand, whatever your language may be, that that means there
is the finger? And if I point my extended forefinger towards the table
or the door, do you not understand that I say, There is the table; there
is the door? And if, on showing you the finger, I say in my French
language Voilà le doigt , do you not understand that the French
pronounce these words to indicate that thing?

Simply by extending this idea almost indefinitely, Sauveur was able

to weave conversations out of the ‘here-and-now’, with the learners
responding minimally at first, but participating more fully as they

The Natural Method/Approach 7

became familiar with the material. The ultimate aim was that the
learners would be able to interact with one another with minimal
reliance on the teacher. Although the conversations were available in
print form, Sauveur discouraged teachers from using the book in class:
‘Give the pupils the book to read at home as preparation for your
teaching, but forbid them to open it in the class; their ear alone must be
occupied there’.

In similar fashion, Terrell’s approach involves exposing learners to

‘comprehensible input’, e.g. in the form of commands (see chapter 7
Total Physical Response) and question-and-answer routines using real
objects or visuals, to which the learners (unlike Sauveur’s learners) are
allowed to respond using their L1. Production is withheld until learners
feel ready, and grammar explanation and error correction (being
associated with learning and not with acquisition) are discouraged.
Activities likely to cause stress or anxiety are also avoided, since,
according to Terrell (1977) ‘affective (not cognitive) factors are primary
forces operating in language acquisition’.

Does it work?

Apart from the attention that Sauveur’s method attracted at the time, its
effectiveness was not really put to the test: we only have his word for
it. He reports, for example, a class whose conversation, after four and
a half months of five two-hour lessons a week, was ‘so animated and so
interesting’ that, listening to them, he thought he was back in France.
Certainly, compared to the prevailing grammar-translation methodology
of the time, his Natural Method must have been a breath of fresh air.
So, too, in its own way, was Terrell’s Natural Approach, contrasting as
it did with the forced production and rigorous correction associated
with audiolingualism. However, in its outright rejection of learning-
type classroom procedures, such as error correction, the Natural
Approach might have let the pendulum swing too far in the direction
of acquisition. The classroom, after all, is not a ‘natural’ context
for language learning: apart from anything else, the amount of real
exposure and practice that individual learners get is inevitably limited.
At best, so-called natural approaches might serve as a relatively stress-
free introduction to a language, after which more conventional methods
might take over.

­8 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

What’s in it for us?

Despite those caveats, there is a lot to be learned from natural

acquisition, whether of the first language or of an additional one. Basing
language learning on ‘conversations’ (however we define these) makes a
certain sense. As a number of researchers have observed, the grammar
of first language acquisition emerges out of the conversations that the
child has with his or her caregivers. Grammar is not a prerequisite
for these conversations. It follows, therefore, that an approach to
second language learning that foregrounds conversation might provide
a fertile environment for the emergence of the second language
grammar – especially if the conversations are ‘enhanced’ with explicit
attention to the formal features of the language. So-called ‘instructional
conversations’ are central to approaches that view learning as socially
constructed, and mediated by talk – ‘so that the knowledge that is
created carries with it echoes of the conversations in which it was
generated’ (Mercer 1995).

Mercer, N. (1995) The guided construction of knowledge. Clevedon: Multilingual

Matters.

Sauveur, L. (1874a) Causeries avec mes élèves. Boston: Schoenhof and Moeller.

Sauveur, L. (1874b) Introduction to the Teaching of Living languages without Grammar

or Dictionary. Boston: Schoenhof and Moeller.

Terrell, T. (1977) A natural approach to second language acquisition and learning.

Modern Language Journal, 61: 325–336.

The Natural Method/Approach 9

 3 The Direct Method

‘What is the method … that I allude to?’ asked Otto

Jesperson in 1904, in attempting to pin down the way that
the Reform Movement had transformed language teaching.
‘The method is by some called the “new” or “newer”; …
by others the “reform-method,” again the “natural,” the
“rational,” the “correct,” or “sensible” …; the “direct”
comes a little nearer… .’ In fact, it was the ‘direct’ that stuck.

The background

In The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene (1939), the agent of

the title, known simply as D., has to make contact with another spy,
Mr K., who works in a language school in London. Mr K. teaches
Entrenationo – an invented language like Esperanto. The director of
the school, Dr Bellows, welcomes D. before taking him to his private
lesson with Mr K. On the way, Bellows warns D.: ‘We teach by the
direct method. We trust – to your honour – not to speak anything but
Entrenationo’. This is confirmed by Mr K. when the lesson starts: while
loudly teaching words from a wall-chart and numbers using wooden
blocks, he whispers: ‘We are forbidden by the rules to talk anything but
Entrenationo. I am fined one shilling if I am caught’. This, of course,
makes the exchange of secrets with K. somewhat difficult, especially
since Dr Bellows periodically enters the room to check that the rules
are being followed.

As exaggerated as this scene is, it does capture the flavour of the Direct
Method in its heyday, especially as practised by large language teaching
franchises, such as the Berlitz chain. Maximilian Berlitz is, of course, the
name that is indelibly associated with the Direct Method: he opened his
first school in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1878, and, at the time that
Greene was writing The Confidential Agent, there were Berlitz schools
in most major cities in Europe and the Americas.

­10 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

Berlitz was the first to mass-market the Direct Method, but he was by
no means the first to argue that second language learning should be
taught ‘directly’, i.e. unmediated by translation. The Reform Movement
of the late nineteenth century provided the intellectual climate out of
which a number of methods, including Berlitz’s, emerged. All had in
common a focus on teaching the spoken language, and on teaching
it entirely in the L2. Early reformers – such as Lambert Sauveur (see
chapter 2 The Natural Method/Approach) – had looked to first
language acquisition for their inspiration. In the same fashion, Berlitz
claimed that ‘the Berlitz Method is the systematized application of the
psychological laws which enable a child to learn its mother tongue’
(1911/1917). These psychological laws took the form of what was
called ‘associationism’ – the theory that language learning is essentially
the forming and strengthening of associations between language items
and their referents in the real world. As Henry Sweet (1899/1964)
put it, ‘the whole process of learning a language is one of forming
associations’. Translation into or out of another language, on the other
hand, might cause ‘cross-associations’, which interfere with the more
direct links on which accurate and fluent production depends.

The view that learning a second language should replicate first language
learning, and that it results from forming tight associations that are
‘uncorrupted’ by translation, is a core tenet of a number of mass-
marketed online courses, such as Rosetta Stone:
Learn a new language the way you learned your first. Fun, intuitive,
immersive lessons teach you to speak and think in your new language.
Develop fundamental language skills naturally with no translation or
memorization required!

How does it work?

In Berlitz’s schools, teaching was based on two ‘fundamental principles’

which he spelled out in the preface to his First Book (1911 edition):

1. Direct association of Perception and Thought with the Foreign

Speech and Sound.
2. Constant and exclusive use of the Foreign Language.

The Direct Method 11

Like Sauveur, Berlitz based his lessons – especially at elementary stages
– around question-and-answer routines, using the objects and people in
the here-and-now:
I am writing on the blackboard. What am I doing? What am I writing
on the blackboard? I am reading a book. What am I doing? What am I
reading? Who is reading?
I write letters; I write words; I write a sentence. What is this, a word
or a letter? How many letters are there in the word table? How many
words are there in this sentence? Etc.

Other features that characterize the Direct Method are the use of visual
aids and real objects that substitute the need to use translation. The
wall-chart described in The Confidential Agent is typical of its time:
‘A family sat eating in front of what looked like a Swiss chalet. The
father had a gun, and one lady an umbrella; there were mountains,
forests, waterfalls; the table was crammed with an odd mixture of food
– apples, and uncooked cabbage, a chicken, pears, oranges and raw
potatoes, a joint of meat. A child played with a hoop, and a baby sat up
in a pram drinking out of a bottle’.

Does it work?

There are few better accounts of experiencing the Direct Method first-
hand than that of the linguist Roger Brown’s attempt to learn Japanese
at a Berlitz school in the 1970s (Brown 1973). It starts: ‘My skilled and
charming teacher began with the words: “How do you do? That’s the
last English we will use.” And it was’. As a researcher of first language
acquisition, Brown is particularly interested in the claim that the Direct
Method replicates the experience of children acquiring their mother
tongue – but he is sceptical:
Working only in the new language can be a great strain on both teacher
and student. Sometimes I think it really does lead to experiences akin
to those of the preliterate child but often, surely not. […] The insistence
on avoiding the first language sometimes seems to lead to a great waste
of time and to problems children [learning their first language], for
some reason, seem not to have. One long morning my teacher tried to
put across three verbs, kimasu, yukimasu, and kaerimasu, with the aid

­12 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 of paper and pencil drawings of pathways and persons and loci, and
by much moving of herself and of me – uncomprehendingly passive
as a patient in a hospital. But I could not grasp the concepts. I feel Mr
Berlitz would have suffered no great dishonour if she had said to me
that the concepts in question sometimes go by the names come, go,
and return.

What’s in it for us?

Despite Brown’s misgivings, there is a lot to be said for maximising

the use – by both teacher and learners – of the target language, and for
discouraging an over-reliance on translation. Sustaining a monolingual
lesson with elementary learners requires considerable inventiveness, and,
if done well, can be immensely motivating. But withholding the use of
the learners’ L1 simply through a dogged faith in Berlitz’s fundamental
principles may be counterproductive. For this reason, some scholars
(e.g. Wilga Rivers 1981) have argued for a ‘modified’ form of the Direct
Method in which:
teachers have reintroduced some grammatical explanations of a
strictly functional kind, given in the native language, while retaining
the inductive approach wherever possible. […] They have also
reintroduced occasional translation of words and phrases as a check
on comprehension.

Berlitz, M. (1911/1917) Method for teaching modern languages. First Book (revised
American edition). New York: Berlitz.

Brown, R. (1973) A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.

Jespersen, O. (1904) How to teach a foreign language. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Rivers, W. (1981) Teaching foreign-language skills (2nd edition). Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Rosetta Stone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.rosettastone.mobile.

CoursePlayer&hl=en

Sweet, H. (1899/1964) The practical study of languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Direct Method 13

 4 The Oral Method

‘The Oral Method will re-awaken and re-educate

those spontaneous capacities for language study which
are inherent in the human race; those innate powers
manifested in the earliest years of childhood …’
(Palmer 1921a).

The background

In 1902, a 24-year- old Englishman from Hythe in Kent moved to

Verviers in Belgium where he started teaching English – with no
previous experience or training – in a Berlitz-type school. Like many
before and after, he was captivated by the method that was practised
(see chapter 3 The Direct Method), and, within a year or two, he felt
confident enough to go it alone and set up his own language school
in the same town. His name was Harold Palmer, and he called the
school the Palmer School and his variant on Berlitz’s direct method he
called the Palmer Method. Soon, not only English was being taught in
his school but also German, Spanish and even Esperanto. Twenty years
later, the insights into learning and teaching that he had gained in those
formative years in Verviers were condensed into two books: The Oral
Method of Teaching Languages (1921a) and The Principles of Language
Study (1921b).

How does it work?

The principle underlying Palmer’s approach is that ‘language-study

is essentially a habit-forming process’ (1921b) and that learners need
first to be trained to draw on their innate capacities for learning to
ensure that the habits that are formed are good ones, not bad ones. This
requires, among other things, learning to listen, i.e. an initial focus on
receptive skills. So, although its name suggests that – like other natural
approaches – the Oral Method prioritizes speaking, Palmer recognized

­14 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

the need for a purely receptive stage: an ‘incubation’ period which
‘consists simply in the teacher’s talking to the students in that language
which is the object of study’ (1921a), while ensuring, through his or her
actions, that the talk is comprehensible:
I’m touching the table – the floor – the chair. I’m going to touch the
ceiling. I can’t. I can’t touch the ceiling; it’s too high. I can touch the
blackboard easily because it isn’t too high … etc.

Students are not expected to respond in any way to this ‘shower’

of language: ‘Their only efforts should be devoted to making out
the general sense of what is being said’. ‘Exercises in conscious oral
assimilation,’ on the other hand, involve listening activities that
require the learners to focus their attention, and to respond non-
verbally. This might include what Palmer called ‘imperative drill’
(what is now better known as Total Physical Response, see chapter 7),
in which learners physically respond to commands from their
teacher. But in all reading and listening work, the learner must be
clear on the meaning of the content. For Palmer, there were four
ways of presenting meaning: by direct association with the thing
itself (as in ‘This is a book’); by translation (and, unlike other,
stricter direct method practitioners, Palmer considered translation
‘perfectly harmless and in many cases positively beneficial’ (1921b); by
definition; and through contextualization. For Palmer, exemplification
was worth any number of rules: ‘A well-chosen example or set of
examples may so completely embody the rule that the rule itself will be
superfluous’ (1921b).

Oral production activities involve simple imitation initially, on the

grounds that until a word or phrase is articulated, it is not remembered,
and if it is not remembered, it is not learned. Articulation need not be
out loud, though: subvocalization (repeating under your breath) was
considered sufficient. What follows the imitation stage is a succession
of drill-type activities, involving learners responding orally to different
kinds of prompts from the teacher. The object is always to ‘fix’ the
target items in memory. These ‘conventional conversations’, as Palmer

The Oral Method 15

called them, must be conducted at speed, so as to ensure ‘automatism’
and to discourage mental translation. Here’s an example:

What’s this? It’s a piece of chalk.

What’s the colour of it? It’s white.
Who’s holding it? You are.
What am I doing with it? You’re writing with it.
What am I writing on? You’re writing on the
blackboard.

Etc.

(1921a)

To ensure that learners are familiar with the vocabulary in these

exchanges, unfamiliar items are either translated on the spot, or learners
memorize word lists in advance of the lesson.

An important principle for Palmer was what he called ‘gradation’:

‘Gradation means passing from the known to the unknown by easy
stages, each of which serves as a preparation for the next […] In the
ideally graded course the student is caused to assimilate perfectly a
relatively small but exceedingly important vocabulary; when perfectly
assimilated, this nucleus will develop and grow in the manner of a
snowball’ (1921b). Palmer also came to recognize that the mental
lexicon consists of more than individual words. Rather, fluency is
a function of having a store of memorized ‘word-groups’ – what
we might now call ‘lexical chunks’. As he wrote in 1925 (translated
in Smith 1999): ‘Progress in conversation is proportionate to the
number of common and useful word-groups perfectly memorised by
the student’. Later, Palmer was to extend this insight to encompass
‘sentence patterns’, prefiguring the pattern drills of audiolingualism
(see chapter 6).

Finally, and all being well, the more advanced student might be allowed
to take part in what Palmer called ‘normal conversation’ – where the
students talks and the teacher gently prompts with ‘a quiet and leisurely
suggestion from time to time’ (1921a) while resisting the urge to correct
every error as it occurs.

­16 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

Does it work?

There are so many features of the Oral Method that have subsequently
been validated by research into SLA that is hard not to think that,
in the right hands, it must have been effective. Among these features
are: the value of implicit learning; the importance of ‘comprehensible
input’; the need to associate form and meaning; the role of automaticity;
the part that formulaic language plays in fluency, and the usefulness of
‘scaffolding’ the learner’s output. The single most negative aspect of the
approach is, perhaps, Palmer’s obsession with accuracy: ‘The principle
of accuracy requires that the student shall have no opportunities for
making mistakes until he has arrived at this stage in which accurate
work is reasonably to be expected’ (1921b). It is now generally agreed
that errors are not only an inevitable part of language learning, but
that, with appropriate feedback, they provide powerful learning
opportunities.

What’s in it for us?

Harold Palmer has been rightly credited with establishing ELT as a

profession in its own right, and (along with his contemporaries Daniel
Jones and A.S. Hornby) for laying the foundations of what came to
be known as applied linguistics. He combined an intuitive feel for
sound pedagogy with a scholarly, often innovative, understanding of
how language works. For these reasons alone, he is worth re-visiting.
But what particularly resonates is his intuition that proficiency is, first
and foremost, the result of having a store of memorized phrases or
expressions (see chapter 11 The Lexical Approach).

Palmer, H. (1921a) The Oral Method of Teaching Languages. Cambridge: Heffer.

Palmer, H. (1921b) The Principles of Language Study. London: Harrap.

Smith, R. (1999) The Writings of Harold E. Palmer: An Overview. Tokyo: Hon-no-

Tomosha.

The Oral Method 17

 5 The Reading Method

The major impact of the Reform Movement was to shift

the emphasis away from literacy and on to the teaching of
the spoken language. The Reading Method was unusual in
attempting to reverse this trend.

The background

What’s the easiest, least stressful way of getting a foothold into a

foreign language – especially if time is at a premium? Arguably, it
might be through reading, especially reading of texts that are not
only intrinsically interesting, but are graded to the learner’s level of
competence.

This, at least, was the conclusion reached by Algernon Coleman, whose

report on the state of foreign language teaching in the US, published
in 1929, challenged the current view that oral and written fluency
were desirable and achievable instructional outcomes. Coleman noted
that most students in American schools studied a foreign language
for at most two years: not nearly enough time to be able to speak the
language at anything beyond the most basic level of proficiency. He
proposed, therefore, that a more realistic objective might be (as he put
it) ‘the ability to read the foreign language with moderate ease and with
enjoyment for recreative and for vocational purposes’ (1929/1930).

The ‘Coleman report’ had considerable influence, offering an antidote

to the culture of failure: through reading, learners could achieve a
‘critical mass’ of familiarity with the target language which might, in
turn, serve as a springboard for subsequent development of the skills
of speaking and writing, should the learners need them. Having been
widely adopted for the teaching of foreign languages in the US, the
Reading Method spread to other contexts, such as India, and was
adapted for the teaching of English, principally by Michael West, whose
‘New Method Readers’ were based on the word frequency counts that

­18 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

West would later publish as The General Service List of English Words
(1953), the forerunner of modern corpus-based frequency lists.

How does it work?

In an article published in 1937, West provides us with a description of

the basic stages of a typical lesson:

The teacher introduces the new words of the section [of the text];
gives the meaning of each and gives some drill so as to fix it in
the mind.
The teacher makes sure that the pupils understand the questions
[that accompany the text].
The pupils read the questions; then they read the book and search
for the answers. (This reading is done in a low whisper. Silent
reading is not used until pupils can read faster than they speak.)
When everyone has finished reading, the pupils write the answers.
The teacher checks to see that the answers are right.
Some reading aloud may follow.

The texts used in the Reading Method take the form of graded readers,
i.e. simplified texts, graded according to measures of word frequency,
the easiest texts being those using only the most frequent words in the
language. Words likely to be unfamiliar are pre-taught or defined in
footnotes, but only in the target language: there is no use of translation,
on the assumption (shared by the Direct Method, see chapter 3) that
use of the students’ own language would interfere with or inhibit fluid
reading. Students are also encouraged to infer the meaning of unfamiliar
words from the context. The learning of vocabulary from word lists,
again organized according to frequency, is another key ingredient of the
method. But there is little or no overt teaching of grammar, apart from
some basic structures and inflections without which comprehension
would be at risk. Writing tasks are also limited to those that provide
practice of the vocabulary and grammar that have been previously
studied.

Speaking is limited to answering questions about the texts and reading

aloud: proponents of the Reading Method recognized that reading
fluency was facilitated when learners could relate the written word to

The Reading Method 19

the spoken one. Hence, in the first lessons learners are introduced to
the sound system of the target language. Reading aloud enables them
to ‘hear’ the written word in their ‘mind’s ear’, as preparation for later
silent reading.

A distinction is made between intensive reading and extensive reading.

The former is developed by close reading of individual sentences, short
texts, or parts of a text, so as to extract every detail, including features
of the grammar. Extensive reading involves the students working on
their own, reading longer texts. For both reading modes, comprehension
is typically checked by the teacher asking questions.

Does it work?

The Reading Method was a practical response to a real educational

dilemma – and one that persists to this day – i.e. how do you balance
the need for second language learning with the limited time available
for it in mainstream education? By focusing on comprehension alone,
the method offered the potential to ‘fast-track’ learners into a working
familiarity with the language without the anxiety associated with
the need to speak or write it. For West, the Reading Method was a
precursor to speech: ‘Learning to read a language before learning to
speak it has the advantage that when the pupil begins to speak he
possesses some general idea of the form of the language and some sense
of right or wrong idiom’ (1937).

In this sense, it anticipates by half a century the principle of

‘comprehensible input’ as argued by Stephen Krashen (see chapters 2
The Natural Method/Approach and 7 Total Physical Response).
Moreover, the staged approach to reading, including familiarizing
learners with the sound system, and the use of reading aloud as a means
of consolidating the relationship between printed text and spoken word,
offers a plausible – if neglected – pedagogy for the teaching of receptive
skills generally. Also, the emphasis placed on acquiring a sizeable
vocabulary conforms to the view that the more words you know, the
easier it will be to read authentic texts. (It has not been conclusively
shown, though, that the more you read, the more words you will learn:
it seems that, unless attention is consciously directed at unfamiliar
words, they tend to go ‘in one eye and out the other’.) And the use of

­20 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

texts to embed features of grammar, and as a vehicle for teaching them,
is consistent with the view that grammar is best learned in context.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, research into extensive reading seems to

confirm the view that ‘extensive reading improves students’ reading
proficiency’ (Nakanishi 2014), although – as mentioned – the effects on
other areas of language development, such as vocabulary growth, are
less conclusive.

On the down side, an exclusive focus on developing reading skills

might reasonably frustrate learners who equate proficiency in a second
language with spoken fluency. Nowadays, it would be difficult to ‘sell’
the idea of a language school where the main focus was on reading.
Also, if learners are not yet skilled readers in their first language, they
may have difficulty developing these skills in a second.

What’s in it for us?

There is a refreshing sense of pragmatism in the Reading Method which

acts as a useful counterbalance to the almost obsessive focus on spoken
fluency that distinguishes most language teaching methods of the last
100 years. For many learners, speaking a second language is a highly
stressful experience. Reading, on the other hand, seldom is. Gently
graduating from receptive skills to productive skills may alleviate some
of the anxiety associated with second language learning.

Coleman, A. (1929/1930) The teaching of modern foreign languages in the United

States. New York: Macmillan.

Nakanishi, T. (2015) A meta-analysis of extensive reading research. TESOL Quarterly,

49/1: 6–37.

West, M. (1937) The “Reading Approach” and “The New Method System”. Modern
Language Journal, 22/3: 220–222.

West, M. (1953) A general service list of English words. London: Longman.

The Reading Method 21

 6 The Audiolingual Method

The image of a class of language students wearing

headsets and confined to the narrow cubicles of a language
laboratory neatly captures the confluence of scientific
method, technological innovation and structural linguistics
that gave birth to audiolingualism. But was it as bad as it
looked?

The background

‘TO LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE ONE MUST ESTABLISH ORALLY

THE PATTERNS OF THE LANGUAGE AS SUBCONSCIOUS
HABITS’ (Lado 1943/1970, emphasis in original).

In this fashion, the founding principle of the method that would be

known as the audiolingual method was (loudly) proclaimed. Robert
Lado (author of the above) was born in Florida of Spanish parents who
moved back to Spain before Lado had had a chance to acquire English.
On his return to the US, aged 21, he started learning English for the
first time – thus giving him a privileged insight into second language
learning, and also into the differences between Spanish and English. Out
of this experience, Lado developed an interest in contrastive linguistics,
which he studied at the University of Michigan’s English Language
Institute (ELI) under its director, the structural linguist Charles Fries.

At the time, a furious effort was being made to develop intensive

language learning programs as part of the war effort. The Reading
Method (see chapter 5) had resulted in a generation ill-equipped
to converse fluently in other languages. Respected linguists, like
Leonard Bloomfield, were recruited to advise on the problem. Fries
and Lado took up the challenge, each bringing their unique expertise
to the enterprise: Fries his interest in the structures – or patterns – of
languages, and Lado his belief that it was the differences between
languages that were the cause of learning difficulty.

­22 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

Out of their collective efforts evolved the Audiolingual Method
(so called because an earlier name, the Aural-oral Method, was difficult
to pronounce!). Adapted to the emerging technologies of the time, it
provided the methodology for programmed learning. It was widespread
in the 1950s, particularly in the US, peaked in the mid-1960s, and then
virtually disappeared without trace – only to return in recent years
in the guise of adaptive learning apps (see chapter 28 Programmed
Instruction: Duolingo).

How does it work?

In his best known book, The Structure of English (1952), Fries argued,
‘if adults of foreign speech are to learn English they must, among other
things, learn to respond to and to give the signals by which a language
conveys its structural meanings. The most efficient materials for such
learning are those that are based upon an accurate descriptive analysis
of the structural patterns’. Accordingly, lists of sentence patterns were
devised, such as these (from the contents of the book that Lado helped
produce in 1943):

Lesson IV

1. WHEN DID YOU ARRIVE? [Word order of questions with WHAT,

WHEN, WHERE, WHO(M)]
2. I’M STUDYING GRAMMAR. WHAT ARE YOU STUDYING?
[AM, IS, ARE + the -ING form of a Class 2 word in statements and
questions]
3. IT’S A GOOD CLASS. IT’S A GRAMMAR CLASS. [Single word
modifiers before Class 1 words]

The two basic principles on which the teaching of these patterns was
based were habit formation (through repetition) and avoidance of
translation (through fear of L1 interference). Both were core tenets of
the Direct Method (see chapter 3) that were simply adopted and refined,
and both were justified on the grounds that they characterize first
language acquisition (which is why we are labelling audiolingualism a
natural approach). Because imitation – i.e. mimicry – and memorization
were prototypical practices, the method was sometimes called the Mim-
mem Method.

The Audiolingual Method 23

Only later were developments in behavioural psychology enlisted
to support the case for habit formation. But, even before stimulus-
response-reinforcement became the name of the game, the defining
activity of the audiolingual method was the pattern practice drill. Here
is how Lado (1943/1970) describes it:
In PATTERN PRACTICE … the student is led to practice a
pattern, changing some element of that pattern each time, so that
normally he never repeats the same sentence twice. Furthermore, his
attention is drawn to the changes, which are stimulated by pictures,
oral substitutions, etc., and thus the PATTERN ITSELF, THE
SIGNIFICANT FRAMEWORK OF THE SENTENCE, rather than the
particular sentence, is driven intensively into his habit reflexes.

Developments in technology, including the language laboratory, would

make this mechanical practice more mechanical still, but would at least
relieve the teacher of the need to become a drill-master. But it was not
all drilling. Here’s how a typical lesson might be structured, according
to an audiolingual textbook of its time, called English through Patterns
(Ramsey 1969):
New patterns are introduced at the beginning of each lesson through
a dialog or a serialised story … Structures are presented in frames
followed by: A) Exercise, which serves as an explanatory device, B)
Drill, designed to establish the new structure as an automatic response,
C) Practice, where the student is required to use the structure in a
less restricted framework and thereby assure his comprehension and
control.

Does it work?

At the theoretical level, the audiolingual method suffered many

reverses. For a start, contrastive analysis (e.g. between Spanish and
English) failed to predict many of the errors that learners typically
make, suggesting that errors were not necessarily ‘bad habits’. And then
there was Noam Chomsky’s celebrated attack on the fundamentals
of behaviourism, which seemed to confirm what a number of
methodologists had suspected all along: that imitation alone cannot
account for linguistic creativity.

­24 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

There was a certain injustice, though, in branding the Audiolingual
Method as simply mindless parroting. In the introduction to the textbook
quoted above, the author writes, ‘At no time are students to parrot
meaningless phrases. Learning, as far as we’re concerned, is a thinking
process. Variety makes for an interesting class. Intense drill should be
interspersed with other activities such as: Chart Practice …, controlled
conversation, language games, quizzes, etc.’ (Ramsey 1967). And, in an
updated edition of the University of Michigan’s English Sentence Patterns,
the author insists, ‘probably the best way to practice a foreign language
is to use it in communicating with others. Thus, teachers should provide
time for meaning-oriented practice’ (Krohn 1971).

Nevertheless, the emphasis on accurate learning in incremental steps

before ‘meaningful-oriented practice’ was allowed, as well as the strict
rationing of vocabulary input, put a strong brake on the development of
fluency.

What’s in it for us?

Old school audiolingualists may be taking heart in developments in SLA

theory that suggest that, yes, environmental factors (such as exposure to
frequently occurring patterns) do impact on learning. So-called usage-
based theories, drawing on the way that neural networks are strengthened
by patterns in the input, sound remarkably like old-style behaviourism.
What’s more, they seem to vindicate repetitive practice in order to
counteract entrenched L1 ‘habits’. Also, related developments in corpus
linguistics have reinforced the view that language is both intricately
patterned and remarkably formulaic. This suggests that the memorization
of prototypical examples of patterns and also of commonly-occurring
formulaic ‘chunks’ may benefit both fluency and the acquisition of
grammar. Is it time to bring back the language laboratory?

Fries, C. (1952) The structure of English: An introduction to the construction of English

sentences. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Krohn, R. (1971) English sentence structure. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Lado, R. (1943/1970) ‘Introduction’ to Lado, R. and Fries, C. English pattern practice:

establishing the patterns as habits. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Ramsey, R. (1967) English through patterns. Barcelona: Teide.

The Audiolingual Method 25

 7 Total Physical Response

The ease with which children acquire their first –

and, often, a second – language has long fascinated
methodologists. Could the fact that they physically
embody the language have something to do with it?

The background

In the late nineteenth century, a Frenchman called François Gouin,

having failed to learn German by traditional methods (including
memorizing a dictionary), had a flash of insight on observing his young
nephew recounting a visit to the local mill. The boy’s story took the
form of the description of a sequence of activities, inspiring Gouin
to develop his ‘series method’: lessons consisted of series of actions
that were simultaneously enacted and described. In addition, Gouin’s
observations of children’s language learning suggested to him the need
for an ‘incubation period’ between listening and speaking. Not only was
Gouin’s approach a precursor of the Direct Method (see chapter 3) but
his recognition of the need for a ‘silent period’ also presaged the Natural
Approach of Terrell and Krashen (see chapter 2).

Gouin’s influence was considerable, especially in the teaching of foreign

languages in schools, and it persisted into the twentieth century.
For Gouin, the key to language was the verb, and the structure that
highlights verbs like nothing else is the imperative. Harold Palmer
(of the Oral Method, see chapter 4) developed this idea into what he
called ‘imperative drill’: ‘The teacher says “get up”, and makes the
appropriate sign. The student has not understood the words but he does
understand the sign and he gets up. The teacher says “sit down” and the
student obeys the gesture’ (Palmer 1921). Once students are trained to
associate the command with the action, the gestures are withheld. And
the commands increase in complexity – from ‘get up’ to ‘take the fourth
book from the side nearest the window, from the second shelf; open it at
page 65 and point to the first word’ (ibid.). For Palmer it was important
that students remain silent during the performance of the actions.

­26 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

It took another four decades before this technique was developed into
a method in its own right, to be called Total Physical Response (TPR).
It’s perhaps significant that one of the early papers published on it by
the method’s architect, James Asher, was called ‘Children’s first language
as a model for second language learning’ (Asher 1972). In that article,
Asher argues that ‘not only is listening critical for the development of
speaking, but children acquire listening skill in a particular way. For
instance, there is an intimate relationship between language and the
child’s body’. It is this intimate relationship that TPR seeks to exploit
for second language learning.

How does it work?

Just as in Palmer’s ‘imperative drills’, Asher’s approach revolves around

sets of instructions, using pre-taught vocabulary referring to real objects
that can be brought into the classroom. The teacher demonstrates
the actions and individual students join her to perform them. Once
the students are sufficiently ‘well trained’, the teacher repeats the
instructions without enacting them and the students, either individually
or as a group, perform them. The commands are varied using new
combinations of the basic ingredients. At no point are students
encouraged to repeat them.

A typical sequence might go like this:

Igor, pick up the black box. Give it to Juana.
Juana, put the red car in the box. Walk to the door with the box. Leave
the box by the door.
Keiko, point at the black box. Go to the box. Take out the red car.
Hand it to Johan. Ana, walk to the board. Draw a fish. Write ‘fish’.
Etc.

After a number of lessons like this, students are given lists of the basic
instructions they have been exposed to, and asked to study these as
homework. They are then given the chance to speak, by first preparing
their own commands using new combinations of the linguistic elements
(pick up, give, point to, draw; box, car, fish, etc.), and then instructing
their classmates to perform them.

Total Physical Response 27

Obviously, there are severe limitations in terms of the structural
complexity of the input if it is limited solely to commands. Asher
himself had ingenious suggestions for incorporating a greater range
of structures into the method. Subsequently, Blaine Ray, a high school
teacher of Spanish in California, experimented with ways of including
narrative-building activities with a view to extending the linguistic
range of the input. He trademarked the approach that resulted as TPRS
(standing for Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling).
The basic technique involves the teacher eliciting from the learners
a story (typically fantastic) that involves a good deal of recycling of
structures and vocabulary. The story is both acted out and re-told by
the learners, and serves as the basis for further listening and reading
activities. Comprehension at all stages is closely monitored, using
techniques such as eliciting occasional L1 translations, or ‘teaching
to the eyes’, i.e. closely observing learners’ degree of understanding
through eye contact and body language.

Does it work?

Initial research into TPR (admittedly, by Asher himself) indicated

positive gains, compared to classes taught by audiolingual methods,
not only in listening skills (as you would expect) but in other skills,
including speaking, suggesting that there had been some kind of
internalization of the grammar – although grammar had never been
explicitly taught or drilled. Similar claims have been made for the
efficacy of TPRS. However, as in all comparison studies of methods,
considerable caution has to be exercised, given the difficulty of
controlling for all the variables. Moreover, few, if any, of these studies
were conducted over the long term, so it’s difficult to know how these
gains might be sustained. Finally, comparing TPR (or TPRS) with
audiolingualism seems hardly relevant nowadays, given the almost total
demise of the latter.

What’s in it for us?

TPR is now generally considered as a set of techniques that can be

integrated into other methods, principally the Natural Approach.
However, the notion of a ‘silent period’, during which learners are
exposed to comprehensible input before they are required to speak, is

­28 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

an attractive one, if for no other reason that it takes some of the anxiety
out of initial learning. More compelling, perhaps, is the holistic and
‘embodied’ nature of learning in TPR. The idea that learning involves
more than purely mental operations or – put another way – that
cognition extends beyond the physical brain, is gaining hold nowadays.
Research into first language learning has shown that acting out word
meanings facilitates their learning; research in SLA – in, for example,
the learning of phrasal verbs – is showing similar benefits. Asher argued
that bodily movement, including gesture, is ‘a powerful mediator’ for
the storage of linguistic input (1983). It seems that it might also be a
powerful mediator for the retrieval and control of output. Encouraging
the use of gesture and movement in the language classroom, by both
teachers and learners, upholds a tradition begun by Gouin and further
refined in the work of Palmer and Asher.

Asher, J. (1972) Children’s first language as a model for second language learning. Modern
Language Journal, 56: 133–139.

Palmer, H. (1921) The Oral Method of Teaching Languages. Cambridge: Heffer.

Total Physical Response 29

 B: Linguistic methods

The next six methods are loosely labelled

‘linguistic methods’, since they are driven
less by theories of learning than by
theories of language. Language is seen
as a property of the mind, and as such is
best learned by engaging mental faculties,
such as reason, attention, memory, and
by the application of rules. Such methods
make no pretence that the learning of
a second language is ‘natural’; on the
contrary, it is an intellectual exercise
with a strong focus on the formal
features of the language – especially its
grammar. Such a focus, though, does
not necessarily ignore a concern for its
communicative functions.

8 Explication de Texte
9 Text Memorization
10 Grammar-Translation
11 The Lexical Approach
12 Text-based Instruction
13 The Comparative Method

­30 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 Explication de Texte 8

‘With a fresh blotting-case under his arm, he set forth to

attend the opening lecture of the course. Three hundred
young men, bare-headed, filled an amphitheatre, where
an old man in a red gown was delivering a discourse in
a monotonous voice. Quill pens went scratching over the
paper…’ (Sentimental Education). In this fashion, Gustave
Flaubert captures the essence of French education in the
19th century, of which explication de texte was a core
technique.

The background

Explication de texte is French for ‘text explication’, but might better be

translated as ‘text analysis’. In fact analyse de texte is another French
term for it, as is lecture expliquée (explicated, or explained, reading).
All these terms attest to the strong associations that explication de texte
has with the teaching of French: like dictation, explication de texte is
embedded in French pedagogical practice, in teaching French both as a
mother tongue, especially its literature, and as a foreign language – and
it has a long history.

In fact, explication de texte goes back at least 2,000 years – to the

classical tradition of praelectio (literally ‘reading aloud’) – where pupils
in Ancient Rome were required to parse the grammar, scan the meter,
and comment on the style of each line of the classical poem or play
that they happened to be studying. The tradition persisted into the
Renaissance and beyond, and was known as ‘construing’. It merged
with a tradition of Biblical scholarship (or exegesis).

It was not until the end of the eighteenth century, though, that
explication de texte began to be applied to living languages.
Combined with translation, it morphed into what became known as
Grammar-Translation (see chapter 10). As a vehicle for the study and

Explication de Texte 31
appreciation of literature, as well as for the teaching of first language
literacy, it found a natural fit with the philological tradition of the
French enlightenment, with its taste for formal stylistic analysis. For
the teaching of foreign languages, and as a reaction to such Western
practices as the direct method, in Soviet Russia it was re-branded as
the ‘conscious-comparative method’, and, as such, was then exported
to China.

How does it work?

An example from a textbook of the time shows how explication de

texte was adapted to the teaching of English in the nineteenth century.
The first book of T. Robertson’s New Course (1851/1872) is ingeniously
based on one single text, a folk tale translated into ungraded English.
Each sentence of the story supplies the content of each of the course’s
20 units. For example, the first sentence, and hence the first text that the
learner meets, goes like this:
We are told that the Sultan Mahmoud, by his perpetual wars abroad,
and his tyranny at home, had filled the dominions of his forefathers
with ruin and desolation, and had unpeopled the Persian empire.

Then follow twenty closely written pages in Spanish (because this is the
version of the course designed for Spanish speakers), providing a key
to the pronunciation, a translation, exercises for translation, and then a
section titled ‘Analysis, Theory and Synthesis’ (women and children are
advised to skip this section) in which every word is subject to detailed
‘explication’ for what it reveals about English phonology, morphology
or syntax. Unpeopled, for example, exemplifies the way that the prefix
un- negates the meaning of some verbs, while the suffix –ed forms
the past participle. The same procedure is adopted for each of the
subsequent 19 segments of the text.

The teacher’s notes for the course recommend that the text be
written on the board and that the book be kept closed during the
lesson. The teacher orchestrates a succession of tasks, including
reading aloud, translation, question and answer, dictation, and the ­
re-combining of elements of the text to create new phrases or
sentences. By the end of the lesson, students are expected to have
learned the text by heart.

­32 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

A variation of this method was (accidentally) invented by a teacher
of French in the late 18th century. Jean Joseph Jacotot (1770–1840)
was unexpectedly required to teach French to speakers of Flemish, a
language he knew nothing of. Unable to use translation, he nevertheless
had his students get copies of a French novel. Using the book as a kind
of corpus, the students were set the task of reading the text, a word at a
time, and searching the text for further examples of the same words or
structures. Gradually, they were able not only to make sense of the book
but also to acquire the basics of the grammar. From this experience,
Jacotot concluded that learners were able to teach themselves with little
overt guidance, and that a single book could embody a microcosm of
the language as a whole.

Does it work?

The reliance on explanation, with its associated terminology, and

on translation, places explication de texte firmly in the non-natural
method camp. Like Grammar-Translation (to which it is akin), such an
approach may suit certain kinds of learners more than others, e.g. those
with a scholarly learning style and with less need to put the language to
communicative use. Those in a hurry, however, may find the approach
frustrating.

Of course, it’s not impossible to imagine a ‘lighter’ version of explication

de texte, where, for a start, the texts are graded, and where the individual
sentences demonstrate features of grammar and vocabulary which have
been selected as appropriate to the learners’ developmental stage.
Nevertheless, research suggests that there is little or no correlation
between metalinguistic knowledge (knowledge about the language) and
communicative ability. That is to say, knowing that un- is a negative
prefix does not automatically transfer into the capacity to make
negative statements. Moreover, the risk of the teacher taking over, and
lecturing at length about grammar and style, at the expense of any
learner involvement or engagement, makes the wholesale adoption of
the approach risky, to say the least. This is where an adapted version of
explication de texte – in the style of Jacotot – which is less teacher- or
book-centred, and which involves the learners collaborating to solve
language puzzles in a text – might be a viable option.

Explication de Texte 33
What’s in it for us?

Communicative Language Teaching – for many, the current orthodoxy

– has often been criticised for the somewhat superficial approach it
takes to dealing with texts. Skimming and scanning a written text,
or extracting the gist from a spoken text, are encouraged. But ‘close’
reading or listening are less often dealt with in many current materials.
Arguably, this is a loss: texts are under-exploited for what they might
reveal about a whole range of linguistic features – lexical, grammatical
and textual. Explication de texte – preferably learner-led and
collaborative – offers a methodology for this kind of more penetrating
analysis. And, without needing to venture too far into exegesis or
literary criticism, ‘critical reading’ encourages learners (typically at more
advanced levels) to critically engage with, and ‘interrogate’ texts, in
order to uncover their ideological subtexts.

Robertson, T. (1851/1872) Nuevo curso de idioma inglés escrito por los franceses
(8th edition). New York: Appleton & Co.

­34 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 Text Memorization 9

‘The study of a language is in its essence a series of acts

of memorizing,’ wrote Harold Palmer in 1921. ‘Whether
we are concerned with isolated words, with word-groups,
with meanings or with the phenomena of grammar, the
fact remains that successful memorizing is the basis of all
progress.’ It stands to reason, then, that a method that
foregrounds memorization has a lot going for it.

The background

Memorization – also known as rote-learning and learning by heart –

is institutionalized in a number of educational traditions. Combined
with recitation, it is – or has been – standard practice in religious
schools in many parts of the world. Knowing a sacred text by heart
is believed to be a prerequisite for understanding and interpreting it.
Once the text has been internalized in this way, it is available for study
and commentary and, especially in the days before print, for further
dissemination.

The tradition has permeated secular education in many cultures.

Confucian-heritage educational systems, for example, are often (perhaps
undeservedly) equated with a culture of imitation and rote-learning.
The education system in South Korea is frequently cited as an extreme
example of this heritage, with children cramming for high-stakes exams
from an early age. The sight of students memorizing long lists of English
words on their way to and from school is a common one.

Memorization is not confined to Asia, of course. Until relatively

recently, it was well-established in education systems in the west, either
directly (e.g. through choral chanting and drilling) or indirectly (as
a consequence of the exam system). Only a few years ago, the then
Minister of Education in the UK was reported as saying, ‘memorisation
is a necessary precondition of understanding’. In this fashion, the case

Text Memorization 35
for rote-learning – as opposed to other, more experiential forms of
learning – is regularly championed, and continues to divide opinion: it
clearly has a strongly ideological basis.

In English language teaching, support for memorization as a technique

– if not a method in its own right – has fluctuated. It is now most often
associated with the Audiolingual Method (which at one time was
called the Mim-mem Method, standing for mimicry and memorization,
see chapter 6). Repetitive drilling is the technique by means of which
sentence patterns were supposedly entrenched in memory as habits.
Dialogues which embedded these sentence patterns were learned
by heart. When the behaviourist learning theory underpinning
audiolingualism was discredited, memorization fell out of favour too.
‘Mindless parroting’ is what its detractors called it.

Much earlier, memorisation of sentences and whole texts was a

feature of a number of 19th century approaches. Thomas Prendergast
(see chapter 26 Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’) developed an
original version of Grammar-Translation which involved translating
grammatically complex sentences with a view to memorizing them,
manipulating them, and internalizing their grammatical elements. He
maintained that ‘the power of speaking other tongues idiomatically is
attained principally by efforts of the memory, not by logical reasonings’
(1864).

Earlier still, Jean Joseph Jacotot (1770–1840) had made his learners
memorize complete novels (see chapter 8 Explication de Texte) which
would then become a linguistic resource into which they could search
and retrieve – in much the same way as we might now search an online
corpus. As Howatt and Smith (2000) observe, ‘the texts themselves are
largely irrelevant: they are not like prayers to be repeated verbatim but
are important for what they can yield if they are taken to pieces and
used in appropriate circumstances’.

The idea of using memorized texts as a resource persists to this day

in, among other places, China. As in the memorizing of sacred texts,
it is felt that only when a text has been appropriated in this way is it
optimally available as an object for study and a tool for learning.

­36 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

How does it work?

In a study of three exceptional learners of English in China (Ding 2007),

all attested to the usefulness of text memorization. The way that this
was implemented in one class involved the following stages:

having worked on a written text in their coursebook in class,

students then listen to a recording of it;
they attempt to imitate the spoken text, intonation included,
sometimes listening to the text up to 50 times;
they continue to practise at home, and, in subsequent lessons, are
individually tested on their ability to recall the text;
they are set regular tests involving recall of phrases and sentence
patterns based on the memorized texts;
eventually the students will have memorized all the texts in the
coursebook.

According to Ding, at more advanced levels, learners would commit to

memory the entire screenplays of feature films, imitating the accent and
prosody of each speaker.

Does it work?

All three students in the aforementioned study attribute their success

in national English-speaking competitions to the practice of text
memorization during their middle school years. They claim that it has
given them a ‘feel’ for the language. More specifically, they seem to
have each imported an enormous ‘database’ of English from which they
can draw. As one of them reported, ‘through reciting those lessons, he
gained mastery of many collocations, phrases, sentence patterns and
other language points’ (Ding 2007).

On the other hand, in another study of Chinese learners (Gan et al.

2004), in which the learning strategies of successful and unsuccessful
learners were compared, the researchers found that reliance on rote-
learning alone was insufficient. While the unsuccessful students relied
on memorizing word lists, successful students reinforced the learning
of words by regular reading and attempting to put the memorized
words to use. Also, the successful learners set learning goals and
identified ways of achieving these, whereas the unsuccessful ones did
not. While this study focused on the memorization of word lists rather

Text Memorization 37
than of whole texts, it does suggest that supplementing rote-learning
with deliberate attempts to retrieve and use the memorized material
is crucial.

What’s in it for us?

It’s unlikely that learners in cultures where the tradition does not
already exist will take kindly to the suggestion that they should embark
on text memorization on a scale as demanding as practised in China.
Even in China, there is some resistance to the idea, and one of the
learners in the Ding study admitted to disliking it at first. Nevertheless,
many learners in a wide range of contexts pick up the words of English
language songs, or the language uttered in video games, or catchphrases
from TV shows, whether intentionally or not. Often, these memorized
segments will emerge unexpectedly, but appropriately and accurately.
Handled more systematically, the memorization of short texts, including
dialogues, may offer a foothold into the language, and provide the ‘feel’
that other, more grammar-focused approaches, do not.

Ding, Y. (2007) Text memorization and imitation: The practices of successful Chinese
learners of English. System. 35: 271–280.

Gan, Z., Humphreys, G., & Hamps-Lyon, L. (2004) Understanding successful and
unsuccessful EFL students in Chinese universities. Modern Language Journal, 88: 229–244.

Howatt, A.P.R., & Smith, R.C. (2000) ‘General introduction’ to Howatt and Smith (eds.)
Foundations of foreign language teaching: 19th century innovators. London: Routledge.

Palmer, H. (1921) The oral method of teaching languages. Vonkers on Hudson, New
York: World Book Company.

­38 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 Grammar-Translation 10

In most teacher preparation courses in which the ‘history

of methods’ is reviewed, it all began with Grammar-
Translation. And it was bad! In fact, neither claim – that
Grammar-Translation was the first method, and that it was
inherently wrong – is entirely true.

The background

When I was a student of French at secondary school in New Zealand

in the 1960s, the curriculum was based on a textbook called A New
French Course (Horan & Wheeler 1963). The story-line followed
the (fairly uneventful) life of the Ravel family, dramatized as short
dialogues, but the syllabus was organized around a graded list of
grammatical structures, one or two per unit. The English equivalents of
these structures were provided, along with a list of thematically-related
words. Exercises involving translating sentences from French into
English, and then the reverse, provided the bulk of the practice.

All this will be familiar to many language learners, especially those

who have studied modern languages at school. This is hardly
surprising, perhaps, since the approach was originally devised to meet
the needs of school children in the early nineteenth century, an age-
group for whom the self-study, text-based methods of classics scholars
were simply not appropriate. At one time called ‘the Prussian Method’,
because it was developed and refined in what is now Germany, the twin
focus on grammar and translation was a legacy of the study of classical
(i.e. dead) languages. It was part of a long tradition that included the
detailed analysis – or ‘construing’ – of literary texts (see chapter 8). But
the preference for individual sentences, rather than whole texts, was
an innovation. It was felt that the grammar focus could be more easily
controlled and delimited this way. That the sentences were invented,
and often bizarre, was unfortunate – and would eventually serve to
discredit the method (dubbed Grammar-Translation by its detractors).

Grammar-Translation 39
Here, for examples, are sentences for translation from Ollendorf’s
Nuevo Método (1876):
What mattress have you? – I have the sailor’s. – Have you his good
beer or his fine meat? – I have neither this nor that. – Have you the
corn of the Frenchman or that of the Englishman? – I have neither the
Frenchman’s nor the Englishman’s, but that of my granary. Etc.

Since Grammar-Translation had originally been designed for

schoolchildren, it adapted relatively well to the needs of a growing
cosmopolitan middle class who needed foreign languages for trading
goods and ideas, but were not versed in the classics. The grammar
component of Grammar-Translation was kept relatively simple, with
minimal use of terminology. However, over time, the temptation to
include more and more grammatical padding, in the form of detailed
explanations and long lists of exceptions to rules, became irresistible.
This was in large part motivated by the reverence in which grammar
was held: one course, published in Spain in 1825, posted the following
quotation (by a certain John Horne Tooke) on its title page:
I consider Grammar as absolutely necessary in the search for
philosophical truth, and I think it no less necessary in the most
important questions concerning religion and civil society.

The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented growth in the

production of grammars of English, with grammarians vying with one
another to slice the grammar cake into ever smaller portions, and this
pedantry was reflected in its teaching texts. It was further compounded
by the fact that the default model for grammatical description was still
Greek and Latin, and the very different grammar of English was forced
to comply with these classical models. Nevertheless, for the teaching
of highly inflected languages like French or German, the rule-based
approach seemed to make more sense – even if, as Kelly (1969) notes,
‘language skill was equated with the ability to conjugate and decline’.

How does it work?

My French course was more or less typical: the obligatory elements of

the Grammar-Translation lesson include a statement of the rule in the

­40 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

learner’s L1; a translated list of vocabulary items, chosen so as to make
a good fit with the grammar point; followed by translation exercises in
and out of the target language. Eventually, the student might translate
whole texts – especially for assessment purposes. Optional elements
might include dialogues or texts that contextualize the syllabus items,
as well as prompts for a ‘conversation’ using the same items. But the
focus is very much on the written language, on accuracy and on the
memorization of rules.

How teachers actually negotiate this material is very much up to them,

since there is seldom any guidance provided as to how a Grammar-
Translation lesson is realized in practice. In that sense, Grammar-
Translation is a method without a methodology. The default approach
is to work with the class in ‘lockstep’ (i.e. as one group), with individual
learners taking turns to read lines of text aloud, and to translate
sentences when called upon.

Does it work?

Given that Grammar-Translation was originally conceived as a means

of cultivating literacy skills in the target language, including the ability
to appreciate its literature, it would be unfair, perhaps, to judge it on its
capacity to develop spoken fluency. Certainly, in the case of my French,
it didn’t. The almost exclusive focus on written forms, on sentence-level
grammar, and on accuracy, means that – unless teachers incorporate free
speaking activities into the lessons – there is zero preparation for spoken
fluency. However, it’s not hard to envisage a rehabilitated version of
grammar-translation, where these weaknesses are counterbalanced, or
even eliminated altogether – where the syllabus is more comprehensive,
mediated by a balance of written and spoken texts, and with tasks that
develop communicative competence.

One of Grammar-Translation’s merits, however, is that, as Guy Cook

(2010) points out, ‘it may be particularly well suited to those teachers
who are themselves not wholly proficient in the language they are
teaching and/or too overworked to undertake extensive preparation’. In
a sense, Grammar-Translation teaches itself, and this may be one of the
main reasons for its enduring appeal.

Grammar-Translation 41
What’s in it for us?

It’s ironic that, of the two defining features of Grammar-Translation,

the grammar syllabus has survived, indeed flourished, while translation
has been consistently – often vehemently – discouraged (even if it has
been practised covertly). Yet translation has perhaps been unjustly
denigrated: the direct method mantra that, in order to speak an L2 you
have to think in it (with the corollary that, in order to think in it, you
have to be submerged in it) has become an unshakeable dogma. But
perhaps the real strength of Grammar-Translation was its (admittedly,
somewhat pedestrian) use of translation, as a means of conveying
meaning and of testing understanding, and as a way of entrenching
the L2 grammar and vocabulary. Recent evidence from the field of
neurobiology, including the use of neuroimaging techniques, seems to
show that the languages of bilinguals are not differently located in the
brain; rather, they share a common space. This fact alone might support
a re-evaluation of the role of translation in the process of becoming
bilingual.

Cook, G. (2010) Translation in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Horan, R.S., & Wheeler, J.R. (1963) A new French course. Sydney: Science Press.

Kelly, L.G. (1969) 25 centuries of language teaching. Rowley, Mass: Newbury House.

Ollendorf, H.G. (1876) Nuevo método para aprender a leer, escribir y hablar una lengua
en seis meses. Aplicado al inglés (nueva edición). Paris: Ollendorf.

­42 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 The Lexical Approach 11

In a radio broadcast in 1929, the English writer, Virginia

Woolf, had this to say: ‘Words do not live in dictionaries:
they live in the mind. … And how do they live in the
mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings
live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, meeting
together’. The way that words ‘live in the mind’, and what
this might mean for language teaching, is a major concern
of those who advocate a lexical approach.

The background

When asked How does one achieve proficiency in a second language?

Harold Palmer (see chapter 4 The Oral Method) was unequivocal:
‘Memorize perfectly the largest number of common and useful word-
group’ (1925, quoted in Smith 1999). But it took the advent of
corpus linguistics to persuade researchers, such as John Sinclair, that
‘learners would do well to learn the common words of the language
very thoroughly, because they carry the main patterns of the language’
(1991). And it wasn’t until 1996 that COBUILD, under Sinclair’s
supervision, produced a corpus-based pattern grammar of its own
(Francis et al. 1996), based on Sinclair’s conviction that there is a close
relationship between word meanings and the patterns that they occur
with. Or, as Sinclair’s eminent predecessor, J.R. Firth (1957), put it, ‘you
shall know a word by the company it keeps’.

But it was a teacher, writer and publisher who was the first to attempt
to take this mixed bag of constructs – word groups, collocations,
patterns, formulaic language, syntactical constructions and so on – and
to base a teaching approach upon it. In 1993, Michael Lewis published
The Lexical Approach. It built on the success of his earlier book, The
English Verb (1986), and reflected an ongoing interest in pedagogical
grammar – with the significant difference being Lewis’s reappraisal of

The Lexical Approach 43

the relative importance of sentence grammar, on the one hand, and lexis
(including multi-word ‘chunks’), on the other. Whereas structuralist
approaches had foregrounded grammatical patterns into which a
restricted vocabulary was ‘slotted’, Lewis argued that language was
primarily lexical, and that the ‘kit of rules’ that constitutes a grammar
serves merely to link and fine-tune the meanings encoded in words. In
short, as he famously claims in his list of ‘key principles’ at the start of
his book: ‘Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised
grammar’ (1993).

How does it work?

Although labelled an ‘approach’, Lewis’s brainchild was somewhat

short on the kind of detail that normally defines a method, such as
how an entire course using the lexical approach might be sequenced
or implemented. One pioneering attempt to incorporate the findings
of corpus research into course design and base a syllabus entirely on
frequency data was The Collins COBUILD English Course (Willis &
Willis 1988), which was predicated on the view that ‘the commonest
and most important, most basic meanings in English are those meanings
expressed by the most frequent words in English’ (Willis 1990).
Accordingly, the first book in the series was based on the 700 most
frequent words in English, and the kinds of constructions that they
typically occur in.

Lewis, however, is highly sceptical as to the value of additive, discrete-

item syllabuses, whether of grammar items or of words (‘I am
concerned to establish a lexical approach, not a lexical syllabus’). He
tends to align himself with Stephen Krashen’s view that acquisition is
best facilitated by exposure to comprehensible input, in the form of
texts: ‘A central requirement of the Lexical Approach is that language
material should be text and discourse rather than sentence based’
(op. cit.). He proposes a pedagogical cycle of observing, hypothesizing
and experimenting, where selected and preferably authentic, texts are
subjected to tasks that promote the noticing and manipulation of such
lexical features as collocations and fixed and semi-fixed expressions,
and where comparison between the target language and the students’
L1 is encouraged.

­44 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

Lindstromberg and Boers (2008) elaborate on this basic model, with a
‘three-stage programme for chunk learning’, which aims:

1 to help students notice chunks and appreciate their importance;

2 to deliberately target selected sets of chunks and apply techniques
known to help students commit chunks to memory;
3 to consolidate knowledge through review.

Typical activities involve learners scanning texts for possible chunks

and checking these against information in a dictionary or in an online
corpus.

Does it work?

Because the lexical approach has seldom if ever been realized as a stand-
alone method but, instead, has been integrated into existing methods,
such as Communicative Language Teaching, or Text-based Instruction,
it is difficult to assess its true effectiveness. Certainly, there has been
a renewed interest in vocabulary teaching, including the teaching of
collocation and other multi-word items, in recent years, and this is
reflected in most current teaching materials. Moreover, research suggests
that a critical mass of vocabulary is a prerequisite for both receptive
and productive fluency, and that – as Palmer long ago argued – the
more chunks, the greater the fluency. Retrieving chunks as opposed to
individual words both saves processing time and confers a degree of
idiomaticity (i.e. the capacity to sound natural) on the user. Hence, any
approach that promotes the acquisition of formulaic language can only
benefit the learner.

Unhappily, though, there are few if any innovative procedures that the
lexical approach has offered us. Scanning texts for lexical chunks is like
scanning the night sky for constellations: unless you already know what
you are looking for, it is a fairly hit-and-miss business.

What’s in it for us?

When Lewis first formulated his lexical approach it was grounded in

a theory of language (i.e. that ‘much language consists of multi-word
“chunks”’) but it lacked a coherent theory of learning. Since then, such
a theory has emerged. A usage-based theory of language acquisition

The Lexical Approach 45

lends support to Lewis’s basic premise. It argues that, through exposure
to rich sources of real language use, certain frequently encountered
sequences – called constructions – and their associated meanings are
stored in memory and can be retrieved and re-combined for future
use. Over time, using the innate human capacity to identify patterns,
the internal structure (i.e. the grammar) of these constructions is
unpacked, providing a model for the creation of novel utterances.
The theory suggests that there is a strong case for viewing language
less as independent systems of grammar and vocabulary, and more as
a spectrum of meaningful units ranging from individual morphemes
(-ing, -ed) to abstract syntactic structures (verbs with two objects)
by way of collocations (highly likely, safe and sound) – with lexis
occupying a central role. While not fully validating a lexical approach, a
usage-based theory does seem to confirm the view that teaching that is
based on the rigid separation of grammar and vocabulary misrepresents
both the means and the ends of language learning.

Firth, J.R. (1957) Papers in linguistics. London: Oxford University Press.

Francis, G., Hunston, S., & Manning, E. (1996) Collins COBUILD grammar patterns 1:
Verbs. London: HarperCollins.

Lewis, M. (1993) The lexical approach: The state of ELT and a way forward. Hove:
Language Teaching Publications.

Lindstromberg, S., & Boers, F. (2008) Teaching chunks of language: from noticing to
remembering. Helbling.

Sinclair, J. (1991) Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, R. (1999) The Writings of Harold E. Palmer: An Overview. Tokyo: Hon-no-

Tomosha.

Willis, D. (1990) The lexical syllabus: A new approach to language teaching. London:
Collins.

Willis, J., & Willis, D. (1988) The Collins COBUILD English Course. London: Collins.

­46 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 Text-based Instruction 12

‘Language always happens as text, and not as isolated

words and sentences. From an aesthetic, social or
educational perspective, it is the text which is the
significant unit of language’ (Kress 1985).

The background

This belief is held as fundamental by proponents of Text-based

Instruction. It’s a theory of language that strongly contrasts with the
long-held view that the basic unit of language – at least from the point
of view of syllabus design – is the sentence. Structural approaches to
teaching – as in the Audiolingual Method (see chapter 6) – take the
sentence, and the elements that compose it, as their starting point. The
primacy of the sentence was given an added boost by Noam Chomsky
(1957) who argued: ‘From now on I will consider a language to be a set
(finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out
of a finite set of elements’. Teaching a language, it followed, is teaching
how its sentences are formed from these elements.

Functional approaches, however, have long recognized the fact that,

when we look at language from the point of view of the meanings it
expresses, the sentence is no longer pre-eminent. A communicative
event, such as a shopping encounter, or a job interview, or an exchange
of SMS messages, is constructed of much more than a succession
of independent sentences. And some communications, such as a
compliment (‘Nice shirt!’) or a road sign (NO PARKING) consist of
single phrases. From a functional point of view, language is realized –
not as sentences – but as text, whether spoken or written, and whether a
single word or a 600-page novel.

An early study of how language in its contexts of use occurs as

connected text was conducted in the markets of Tunisia: the researcher
(Mitchell 1957) observed that buying and selling exchanges followed

Text-based Instruction 47
clearly defined stages, even if different configurations of context factors
meant that there was considerable variation within these stages. The
dynamic nature of the emerging conversation (the text), and the way it
is shaped by its context, led Mitchell to conclude (1975):
A text is a kind of snowball, and every word or collocation in it is
part of its own context, in the wider sense of this term; moreover, the
snowball rolls now this way, now that.

The same reciprocal relationship between text and context underpins

Michael Halliday’s theoretical model called systemic functional
linguistics (SFL), the theory that, in turn, informs text-based instruction.
Halliday takes the view that ‘language is as it is because of what it has
to do’ (Halliday 1978). What it has to do is make meanings, and these
meanings are realised as text. Put simply, ‘text is the process of meaning;
and a text is the product of that process’ (Halliday 1981/2002). In other
words, ‘text’ is both verb and noun – the process of making meanings in
context, and the product of that process in the form of texts. Nowadays,
we witness on a daily basis the way that this process-product dynamic is
played out in the form of SMS messages, where the messages themselves
are the traces of a communicative exchange. Learning to mean in a
language is learning to ‘text’.

How does it work?

The methodology of Text-based Instruction is essentially an Australian

invention. It grew out of the teaching of literacy there, both first
language literacy (to children) and second language literacy (to
migrants). As well as aligning the curriculum to a syllabus of text-
types (or genres), proponents of Text-based (also called Genre-based)
Instruction advocate the explicit teaching of the formal features of
each genre in close association with its social and cultural functions. In
this sense, it is very much a non-natural method, and its practitioners
are in fact hostile to the kind of experiential approach to literacy
development known as ‘process writing’. Knowing how to construct
and interpret the kinds of texts that are privileged in a society is part
of a child’s (or migrant’s) ‘cultural capital’ and should not be left to
chance, they argue.

­48 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

Accordingly, a typical teaching sequence (following Derewianka
1990) involves the modelling of a chosen genre, including situating it
in its social-cultural context. The next stage is identifying its overall
organization (or macrostructure) and the purposes and linguistic
features (grammatical, lexical and textual) of each of its stages. This is
followed by joint construction, where learners work together to recycle
these generic features in the construction of a new text. The final stage
is individual construction, involving cycles of drafting and revision,
and eventual publication – or performance, since a similar sequence is
adopted for teaching spoken genres, such as giving presentations, being
interviewed for a job, and so on.

Does it work?

Because text-based teaching moves from the whole to the parts,

rather than vice versa, it is notionally aligned to what is known as
Whole Language Learning (see chapter 18), a major tenet of which
is that language is best learned in authentic, meaningful situations,
and by engaging with whole texts – whether spoken or written. Any
assessment of its effectiveness needs to show, as a minimum, that
working in this direction is as viable as working from the parts to
the whole, i.e. learning grammar and vocabulary and then combining
these to construct texts. Even so, a syllabus that is firmly grounded
in the learners’ social and cultural needs, and which facilitates their
integration into the target ‘discourse community’, is arguably better
than one that is simply an arbitrary list of grammatical structures.

On the downside, the bias towards written rather than spoken language
can make this approach somewhat dry and academic, and needs to
be balanced with work on spoken genres. And, like any linguistic
approach, there is the ever-present danger that lessons will become
simply a ‘chalk-and-talk’ demonstration by the teacher – not helped by
the load of linguistic terminology that this approach has inherited from
systemic functional linguistics.

What’s in it for us?

For learners whose discourse needs are predictable – e.g. those doing
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses – a text-based approach

Text-based Instruction 49
makes a lot of sense, even if it forms just one thread in a more grammar-
based syllabus. Moreover, the fact that a text-based approach has been
used with success with young learners in their first language suggests that
it may have a wider application than a purely academic one. At any age,
learning to write texts that conform to certain generic features – such as
reporting an excursion or a sports event – may be better preparation for
second language literacy than simply ‘free-expression’.

Chomsky, N. (1957) Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Derewianka, B. (1990) Exploring how texts work. Newtown NSW: Primary English
Teaching Association.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1978) Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of

language and meaning. London: Arnold.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1981/2002) Text semantics and clause grammar: how is a text like
a clause? Reprinted in Webster, J.J. (ed.) On Grammar: Volume 1 collected works of
M.A.K. Halliday. London: Continuum.

Kress, G. (1985) Linguistic processes in sociolinguistic practice. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin

University Press.

Mitchell, T.F. (1957) The language of buying and selling in Cyrenaica: A situational
statement. Reproduced in Mitchell (1975) Principles of Firthian Linguistics. London:
Longman.

­50 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 The Comparative Method 13

Natural approaches attempt to recreate the conditions of

first language acquisition, as if the mind were a blank slate
on to which the new language can be inscribed. But the
mind of the second language learner is not a blank slate.
As one linguist puts it, ‘Second language is looking into the
windows cut out by the first language’ (Ushakova 1994).
The Comparative Method embraces this understanding.

The background

Why do many Spanish-speaking learners of English say ‘I no eat fish’?

Presumably, because in Spanish they would say ‘No como pescado’.
That, at least, was the assumption underlying the proliferation
of contrastive analysis studies in the mid-20th century. It was an
assumption, though, that fell into disrepute, after it was discovered that
all learners, regardless of their L1, go through a phase of saying ‘I no
eat fish’. More recently, however, there has been a revival of interest in
contrastive analysis, not least because the L1 has been shown to be as
much a positive influence as a negative one. Indeed, researchers now
talk less about ‘interference’ than they do about ‘transfer’.

In the early days of contrastive analysis, those linguists working within

the behaviourist tradition were interested in the structural differences
between one language and another, predicting that these differences
would cause problems for learners. As Robert Lado (1971) memorably
expressed it:
We assume that the student who comes in contact with a foreign
language will find some features of it quite easy and others extremely
difficult. Those elements that are similar to his native language will be
simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult.

The Comparative Method 51

Contrastive analysis aimed to identify which elements were similar
and which different, in order to plan teaching syllabuses that
would accommodate the similarities, while focusing mainly on the
differences. But the methodology associated with these syllabuses (i.e.
the Audiolingual Method: see chapter 6) did not invite the learners
themselves to participate in this analysis. It was felt that to do so would
simply increase the risk of their being negatively influenced by their L1:
better, therefore, to keep the L1 well away.

Elsewhere, however, the pedagogical applications of contrastive analysis

had been quietly morphing into what would be called ‘the Comparative
Method’ (or ‘the dual-language method’). The impetus for this approach
originated in what was known as ‘the Prague School’ – a group of
linguists (not all of them Czech) working in the 1920s and 1930s, who
shifted the prevailing focus on linguistic structures to a focus on the
communicative functions of language, thereby paving the way for the
kind of functional linguistics associated with Michael Halliday, and, by
extension, Communicative Language Teaching (see chapter 15).

Being linguists, they were interested in the similarities and differences

between languages. But, unlike the American ‘descriptivist’ tradition,
the more functionally-inclined Prague scholars were less concerned
with the formal characteristics of the languages being compared than
in the ways in which the forms actually function. That is to say, ‘the
elements of one language are compared in the light of the corresponding
situation or function in the other language’ (Fried 1968). Initially a tool
for linguistic analysis, it was a short step to turn this technique into a
method for teaching second languages.

How does it work?

Unlike Grammar-Translation (see chapter 10), the Comparative

Method does not place translation at the centre of its methodology.
Rather, it uses texts that are already translated as a stimulus for raising
awareness as to the similarities and differences between the learner’s
L1 and the target language. As Vilém Fried (1968), a leading Prague
School associate, describes it: ‘The student is systematically guided and
made to realize the functional differences that exist between the foreign
language … and his native tongue’, and he adds: ‘Two-way translation

­52 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

[i.e. translation from both the L1 into the L2, and vice versa] may not
be excluded here’.

In more recent years, the use of the learners’ home language as a

cognitive scaffold for the development of the target language is known
as a ‘translanguaging pedagogy’ (Garcia & Kleifgen 2010), and has been
encouraged in multilingual classrooms. Activities include identifying
cognates in the two languages (i.e. words like taxi that are the same or
similar), writing bilingual ‘identity texts’ (i.e. autobiographical texts that
mix the writer’s different languages), and pairing learners from the same
language background so that those who are more fluent can help those
who are less so. While such practices are not necessarily typical of the
Comparative Method as first conceived, they are certainly compatible
with an approach that not only tolerates, but actively encourages,
classroom bilingualism.

Does it work?

Despite a growing literature on the use of code-switching (i.e.

switching from one language to another) in classrooms, the use of
actual translation as a pedagogic tool in the teaching of English is
under-researched. The few studies that have been done suggest that
there are real learning benefits from what has been called ‘contrastive
metalinguistic input’ (Scheffler 2012). Certainly, the evidence suggests
that most students prefer learning situations where some kind of
cross-linguistic comparison is an option. New knowledge, after all, is
constructed on, and regulated by, prior knowledge: whether teachers
approve of it or not, learners will always be translating ‘in their heads’.
It makes sense, then, to bring this internal process out into the open, so
that it can be more effectively managed and shared. Moreover, the co-
existence of more than one language in the classroom better reflects the
reality of real language use in an increasingly multilingual world.

What’s in it for us?

One obvious implication of adopting a comparative approach is that the

teacher needs to be proficient in the learners’ L1 (which, of course, will
not always be feasible in situations where learners come from different
first language backgrounds). It also assumes that there are materials
available that support cross-linguistic comparison. As Fried pointed

The Comparative Method 53

out all of 50 years ago, there is a real need ‘to prepare foreign language
teaching materials in consideration of the fact that the learner’s mother
tongue will always be present as a factor of interference or support in
the teaching process’ (1968). Of course, ‘doing’ comparative translation
does not require published materials: there is no shortage of texts online
in both their original and their translated versions that could usefully
serve as material for cross-linguistic comparison. Equally exploitable are
the kind of ‘bad translations’ that are delivered up by online translation
software. Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, is to convince several
generations of teachers and teacher educators raised according to Direct
Method principles that the L1 is not an obstacle to learning the L2, but
an asset.

Fried, V. (1968) Comparative linguistic analysis in language teaching. In Jalling, H. (ed.)

Modern Language Teaching, London: Oxford University Press.

García, O., & Kleifgen, J. (2010) Educating Emergent Bilinguals. New York: Teachers’
College Press.

Lado, R. (1971) Linguistics across cultures: Applied linguistics for language teachers.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Laufer, B., & Girsai, N. (2008). Form-focused instruction in second language vocabulary
learning: a case for contrastive analysis and translation. Applied Linguistics 29: 694–716.

Scheffler, P. (2012) Theories pass. Learners and teachers remain. Applied Linguistics, 33,
5: 603–607.

Ushakova, T. N. (1994) Inner speech and second language acquisition: an experimental-

theoretical approach. In Lantolf, J.P., & Appel, G. (eds), Vygotskian Approaches to Second
Language Research, Hillsdale, NJ: Ablex.

­54 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

C: Communicative methods

The next group of methods share a

concern for the situated and social
nature of language use. This is not to
say that other methods do not recognize
language’s social function. But there
was a growing tendency in the 20th
century to move away from language
descriptions that took a primarily formal
(or structuralist) view of language to a
view of language that foregrounded its
communicative purposes. This shift in
perspective required an associated shift
in methodology, which culminated in
what is known as the Communicative
Approach.

14 The Situational Approach

15 Communicative Language Teaching
16 Task-based Language Teaching
17 Competency-based Teaching
18 Whole Language Learning
19 Content-based Instruction
20 Dogme ELT/ Teaching Unplugged

Communicative methods 55
 14 The Situational Approach

‘The material of the language lesson,’ wrote Lionel Billows

in 1961, ‘is not language, but life itself; the language is
the instrument we use to deal with the material, slices
of experience’. One form that these ‘slices of experience’
take is the situation, and the Situational Approach was
originally conceived as a way of making the situation ‘the
material of the language lesson’.

The background

In 1914, the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1881–1942)

travelled to Papua and thence to the adjacent Trobriand Islands, where
he conducted a lengthy ethnographic study of the islanders. Out of
the experience of transcribing their day-to-day talk, he concluded that
language use is entirely context-dependent: ‘Utterance and situation are
bound up inextricably with each other and the context of situation is
indispensable for the understanding of words’ (1923).

Malinowski’s insight was picked up by a number of (primarily British)

linguists. As one of them worded it, ‘to be a member of a speech
community is to know what language behaviour fits what situation’
(Mackey 1978). It was left to others, such as Michael Halliday, to
attempt to identify the ways that situational (or contextual) features are
encoded (i.e. expressed) in language – a project that culminated in his
Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985).

Meanwhile, the pedagogical implications of this ‘situated’ view of

language were not lost on applied linguists. Pit Corder (1966) wrote
that ‘one can perfectly well envisage theoretically a course which had as
its starting point an inventory of situations in which the learner would
have to learn to behave verbally’.

While linguists were wrestling with these questions, teachers were

already implementing what came to be known as Situational Language

­56 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

Teaching. Lionel Billows’ Techniques of Language Teaching (1961)
outlines the principles that underpin this approach. In order to ‘situate’
language learning, Billows proposes a system of concentric circles,
radiating out from the learner’s immediate context (e.g. the classroom)
to the world as directly experienced, the world as imagined, and the
world as indirectly experienced through texts. Billows argues that we
should always seek to engage the outer circles by way of the inner ones.

Teaching based around a syllabus of situations is best remembered

in the form of the Audio-visual Method, popular in the teaching of
French. However, it soon became apparent that ‘situation’ was too
loose a way of categorising language in use, and, at best, was only good
for generating a kind of ‘phrase book’ approach to syllabus design.
So, apart from in some ‘survival’ courses for beginners, and in ESP
courses (such as English for business people), the situation was largely
abandoned as an organizing principle. Instead, it was co-opted into
grammar-based courses in the Oral Method tradition (see chapter 4),
in the form of what Louis Alexander called ‘structurally controlled
situational teaching’, i.e. ‘teaching a language by means of a series of
everyday situations while at the same time grading the structures which
are presented’ (1967). His New Concept English series (Alexander
1967) was a widely marketed example of this approach. English in
Situations by Robert O’Neill (1970) further consolidated the basic
model, in which the situation is simply a context for presenting the
grammar.

How does it work?

The basic learning principle at work is that of induction, i.e. from the
examples of a grammatical structure in a text or dialogue (typically
presented orally), the learners work out the rules of its form and use.
Here, for example, is a typical situation (from English in Situations,
O’Neill 1970):
Charles Gripp was a bank robber once. The police caught him in
1968 and he is in prison now. Before 1968 Charles drove a large car,
robbed banks, had a lot of money and had arguments with his wife
all the time. He did a lot of things then but he does not do any of those
things now and he never sees his wife. HE USED TO BE A BANK

The Situational Approach 57

 ROBBER. HE USED TO ROB BANKS, DRIVE A BIG CAR, AND
HAVE ARGUMENTS WITH HIS WIFE ALL THE TIME, BUT HE
DOESN’T DO ANY OF THOSE THINGS NOW.

The pattern may then be displayed in the form of a substitution table,

and is consolidated through successive stages of controlled practice,
beginning with imitation drills.

In somewhat elliptical style, O’Neill (1970) outlines the rationale:

Class must have chance to gain insight into when to use pattern.
Situations represent typical instances. From these, they can generalise
about use of pattern. Teacher may also decide to give formal rule.
However, this is not enough in itself. […] Formal rules can be helpful
but cannot be substituted for student’s own insight.

Does it work?

The ‘generative situation’ – i.e. a situation which generates several

instances of the target structure – has provided legions of language
teachers with an alternative to translation or explanation as a means
of presenting grammar. As the first ‘move’ in the PPP (presentation-
practice-production) lesson structure, it satisfies the need for a lesson
planning template that enshrines a tight logic – and one that finds
some validation in skill learning theory, i.e. the theory that declarative
knowledge (knowledge-that) becomes proceduralized (i.e. converted
to knowledge-how) through practice. Moreover, the use of guided
discovery procedures in order to encourage learners to work out the
rules themselves confers a degree of agency on learners that earlier
methods, such as the Oral Method, lacked.

On the other hand, the somewhat rigid lesson format of the situational
approach, with its emphasis on the accurate reproduction of pre-selected
patterns, along with the artificially contrived contexts for presentation,
is not a huge advance on the Audiolingual Method (see chapter 6), with
which it shares many beliefs about learning and language.

What’s in it for us?

In the light of recent developments in educational theory, which

argue that all learning is ‘situated’ (Lave & Wenger 1991), it may be

­58 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

time to revisit the Situational Approach as originally conceived, i.e.
where the situation is not simply a context (or pretext) for presenting
grammar, but is the central organizing principle in course design. This
is particularly relevant now that digital technologies have effectively
dissolved the borders between the classroom and ‘real life’ situations.
For example, mobile devices allow learners to record interactions in
the outside world for later analysis in the classroom, such as exploring
the ways that language choices and the ‘context of situation’ impact
on one another. And corpus linguistics now provides increasingly more
detailed descriptions of the kind of language that is used in specific
situations – not just the vocabulary and grammar, but the particular
features of register and style. The way that language varies according
to situation suggests that, in the end, all language use is ‘specific’, and
that language teaching, therefore, is preparing learners to use language
for ‘specific purposes’.

Alexander, L.G. (1967) New concept English: First things first (Teacher’s Book).
Harlow: Longman.

Billows, L.F. (1961) The techniques of language teaching. London: Longmans.

Corder, S.P. (1966) The visual element in language teaching. London: Longmans.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1985) Introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New
York: Cambridge University Press.

Mackey, W.F. (1978) Divorcing language from life: non-contextual linguistics in language
teaching. In Strevens, P. (ed.) In honour of A.S. Hornby. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Malinowski, B. (1923) The problem of meaning in primitive languages. Appendix to

Ogden, C.K., & Richards, I.A. The meaning of meaning. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

O’Neill, R. (1970) English in Situations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Situational Approach 59

 15 Communicative Language Teaching

In 1994, H.D. Brown posed the question ‘Is there a

currently recognised approach that is a generally accepted
norm in the field?’ and he answered it by saying, ‘the
answer is a qualified yes. That qualified yes can be
captured in the term communicative language teaching
(CLT)’. A quarter of a century later, the answer is still ‘yes’,
and still qualified.

The background

In the early 1960s, the terms ‘communication’ and ‘communicative’

were all the rage. Communication had been invoked as a tool for post-
war reconstruction; mass media were now being credited with turning
the word into a ‘global village’. Driven by innovations in technology,
university courses on ‘communication studies’ and ‘communication
sciences’ proliferated. To sell anything or to get votes, ‘communication
skills’ were considered essential. At the same time, a new branch of
linguistics was emerging: sociolinguists were training their sights on the
relationship between language and society, interested less in language
as an abstract system and more in how it is put to use in actual
communication.

It was in this intellectual climate, in 1966, that Dell Hymes put forward
the idea of ‘communicative competence’, i.e. ‘competence as to when
to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when,
where, in what manner’ (Hymes 1972). Communicative competence,
it followed, involves more than having a command of the sum of the
grammatical structures that were enshrined in the typical syllabuses of
the time. It involves being sensitive to the effect on language choices
of such contextual factors as the purpose of the exchange and relation
between the participants. Communicative competence was to become
the ‘big idea’ that would underpin Communicative Language Teaching
(CLT) and give it its name.

­60 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

How this big idea might revitalize language teaching was the driving
force behind the Council of Europe Modern Languages Project that was
launched at Rüschlikon, Switzerland, in 1971, and which effectively
marked the inception of CLT. It came to fruition a few years later with
the publication of a number of courses based not on a syllabus of
grammatical structures but on a syllabus of communicative functions
– such as making requests, complaining, narrating and so on. As an
epigraph to one of the first of these courses, Strategies (Abbs, et al.
1975) the writers quoted David Wilkins (1976), a consultant on the
Council of Europe project, to the effect that:
what people want to do through language is more important than the
mastery of language as an unapplied system.

How does it work?

In the teachers’ guide to the same series, the authors spell out their
approach (Abbs & Freebairn 1979):
If emphasis is placed on learning a language for communicative
purposes, the methods used to promote learning should reflect this.
[…] A communicative methodology will therefore encourage students
to practise language in pairs and groups, where they have equal
opportunity to ask, answer, initiate and respond. The teacher assumes
a counselling role, initiating activity, listening, helping and advising.
Students are encouraged to communicate effectively rather than
merely to produce grammatically correct forms of English.

By realigning the goals of instruction away from grammatical accuracy

and towards fluency (however defined), and by making a strong
commitment to experiential learning, i.e. that communication is best
acquired by communicating, the quality and quantity of classroom
interaction was set to change radically.

There was still the problem of the syllabus, however. The Council of
Europe had urged the adoption of functional-notional syllabuses, i.e.
syllabuses made up of items such as requesting, making comparisons,
narrating, duration. Others argued for a task-based syllabus. Either
way, allegiance to the grammar syllabus – on the grounds that grammar

Communicative Language Teaching 61

items are more generalizable, easier to sequence, and, of course, easier
to test – was unshakeable.

And, since grammar items are not easily learned by experience, the
‘fluency first’ teaching cycle that had originally been proposed, in which
learners communicate to the best of their ability, and then get feedback,
was sidelined and re-packaged as Task-based Language Teaching (see
chapter 16). It was replaced by a less deep-end version of CLT, in
which pre-communicative activities (typically with a structural focus)
precede communicative activities. Effectively, the PPP model inherited
from Situational Language Teaching (see chapter 14) was dusted off
and stretched a little, so as to include more production activities (such
as information-gap tasks, role plays and discussions) but not a lot else
changed.

For example, the unit structure of a coursebook series that claims to

incorporate ‘the best features of proven and familiar communicative
methodologies’ (McCarthy et al. 2005) follows this order:

Lesson A presents the main grammar point of the unit with some
relevant new vocabulary …
Lesson B teaches the main vocabulary of the unit and builds on the
grammar taught in lesson A …
Lesson C teaches a Conversation strategy and some common
expressions useful in conversation, followed by a listening activity
reinforcing this conversational language …
Lesson D, after the first three units, focuses on reading and writing
skills while providing additional listening and speaking activities.

By the time English language teaching became a global industry in the

1980s and 1990s, it was this ‘weak’ version of CLT that was taken to
be the default form. In many EFL contexts there was no ‘communicative
revolution’ at all.

Does it work?

If widespread adoption is any indication of effectiveness, then CLT

– especially in its weak form – would seem to have worked. Most
teachers, teacher educators, publishers and institutions subscribe, in
principle, at least, to ‘being communicative’. What this means is not

­62 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

always clear, but there seems to be a general commitment to the idea
that fluency is at least as important as accuracy, that language is a skill
as much as a system, and that the goal of second language learning is
communicative competence, rather than native-like mastery.

However, CLT has not been without its critics. Resistance to CLT in
many (especially non-Western) contexts is argued on the grounds that
it might not be appropriate in cultures where theoretical knowledge
is valued more highly than practical skills, and where accuracy, not
fluency, is the goal of language education. Moreover, a method that
prioritizes communicative competence would seem to favour teachers
who are themselves communicatively competent, which in many –
perhaps most – EFL contexts is not necessarily the case.

What’s in it for us?

The lasting legacy of CLT is the idea of the ‘communicative activity’.

That is to say, an activity in which there is a genuine exchange of
meanings, and where participants can use any communicative means at
their disposal. In other words, they are not restricted to the use of a pre-
specified grammar item. Whether or not a programme consisting solely
of such activities enables language acquisition has been thrown into
doubt by research suggesting that a ‘focus on form’ – such as attending
to features of the grammar – is necessary. But such activities have made
classrooms more interesting, and even fun.

Abbs, B., Ayton, A., & Freebairn, I. (1975) Strategies: Students’ Book. London: Longman.

Abbs, B., & Freebairn, I. (1979) Building Strategies: Teacher’s Book. London: Longman.

Brown, H.D. (1994) Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language

Pedagogy. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.

Hymes, D. (1972) On communicative competence. In Pride, J.B. and Holmes, J. (eds)

Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

McCarthy, M., McCarten, J., & Sandiford, H. (2005) Touchstone 1 (Teacher’s edition).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilkins, D. (1976) Notional Syllabuses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Communicative Language Teaching 63

 16 Task-based Language Teaching

‘A presentation methodology is based on the belief that

out of accuracy comes fluency. A task-based methodology
is based on the belief that out of fluency comes accuracy,
and that learning is prompted and refined by the need to
communicate’ (D. Willis 1990).

The background

In 1979, the Regional Institute of English in Bangalore, India, under

the guidance of N.S. Prabhu, embarked on a five-year project that was
to achieve legendary status in the history of English language teaching.
Referred to ever since as ‘the Bangalore Project’, the aim was to teach
English to a small number of classes in local primary and secondary
schools using a syllabus that was based – not on a list of grammatical
patterns, as was customary in India at the time – but on a series of
tasks, where tasks are defined by Willis (1996) as ‘activities where the
target language is used by the learner for a communicative purpose
(goal) in order to achieve an outcome’. Dissatisfied with the prevailing
‘structural-oral-situational’ methodology, but sceptical about replacing
a syllabus of grammar items with a syllabus of functions or notions
(as some proponents of Communicative Language Teaching were
advocating – see chapter 15), Prabhu opted instead for a task-based
approach, and for ‘the creation of conditions in which learners engage
in an effort to cope with communication’ (1987).

In this sense, he was following the lead of advocates of a ‘strong’ form

of CLT, such as Dick Allwright (1979) who insisted: ‘If the “language
teacher’s” management activities are directed exclusively at involving
the learners in solving communication problems in the target language,
then language learning will take care of itself’. In other words, you
learn to communicate simply by communicating. And tasks – doing
things that involve real language use – provide the ideal context and
motivation for communicating. Prabhu, like many after him, rejected

­64 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

the view that a pre-selected syllabus, whether of grammar items or of
functions, and the PPP methodology associated with it, are the optimal
route to proficiency.

Although supported by a long tradition in progressive education of

‘learning by doing’, initially TBLT lacked a sound empirical basis.
Certainly, research into SLA was starting to cast doubt on the wisdom
of teaching according to a syllabus of ‘forms’ (i.e. grammatical
structures). The learner’s ‘inbuilt’ syllabus seemed to be immune to
this kind of manipulation. Moreover, research into the interactions
between learners when performing tasks, including the way that they
negotiate and repair communication breakdowns, suggested that these
interactions might be a fertile site for acquisition. On the other hand,
evidence from other ‘deep-end’ learning contexts, such as immersion
(see chapter 1), indicated that an exclusive focus on communication –
without some explicit attention to the formal features of the language
(called ‘focus on form’) – might result in ‘arrested development’, i.e. the
temporary or permanent stabilization of the language system.

Accordingly, the Bangalore model of TBLT – which discouraged ‘any

sustained attention to language itself’ (Prabhu 1987) – was reconfigured
by scholars such as Mike Long so as to include a focus on form. But it
is a focus on form ‘which is by definition reactive, i.e. responsive to the
learner’s current stage of development’ (Long 2015). In other words,
‘students lead, the teacher follows’.

How does it work?

Much ink has been shed as to what constitutes a task, but there is
general agreement that a task should be directed at achieving some
outcome, where language is the means but not the end. Filling in the
verbs in a gap-fill exercise is not a task. Finding the differences in two
pictures, by exchanging spoken descriptions with your partner, is. As
is the collaborative planning and taking of a class photo. Tasks can
involve any one of the four skills, together or in isolation. They are
more often done collaboratively, but they can be done individually, and
in class or on line.

The selection and sequencing of tasks is more problematic, since it is

not always clear in what ways one task is more difficult than another,

Task-based Language Teaching 65

or in what way tasks may build on one another to form a coherent
learning sequence. A series of projects – or one continuous project, such
as the design and maintenance of a class website – offer possible ways
of structuring a course. Attempts to sequence tasks according to the
grammatical forms that they are likely to require have been dismissed as
task-supported learning, and not the real thing.

There are various suggested models of how a task-based lesson can

be designed. Prabhu himself favoured beginning with the teacher
performing the task, and then the learners following suit. Jane Willis
(1996) reverses this sequence, so that viewing the skilled performance
of the task occurs after learners have attempted it themselves (and
reported on the outcomes). At some post-task stage, attention might be
devoted to how the task performance could be improved, including an
explicit focus on form.

Does it work?

While the (somewhat delayed) evaluation of the Bangalore project

was itself inconclusive, there is probably no method that has been
more persuasively championed than TBLT: it comes supported by an
ever-growing research base into SLA, especially the school of SLA that
subscribes to a cognitive view of learning, i.e. one that construes the
learner as a ‘limited capacity information processor’. Performing tasks,
and getting feedback on them, would seem to optimize this kind of
processing. Laboratory-type studies of specific features of the method,
such as different ways of focusing on form, have been encouraging.
Evidence that alternative models of instruction – such as PPP – work
any better is scarce.

Why isn’t TBLT more widely applied, then? One reason might be the
syllabusing issue, mentioned above. There is also the plausible concern
that, without a language syllabus, learners will simply recycle their
existing (limited) competences. More acute still is the uncertainty, on
the part of many teachers and their supervisors, as to how to deal
with the unpredictability of task outcomes. Not to mention the actual
management challenges of setting up, monitoring and providing
feedback on pair and group work. Where TBLT seems to work best
is when experienced teachers are working with smallish groups of

­66 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

learners, e.g. immigrants, whose practical language needs can be
accurately predicted, such that the programme can be designed to
address them.

What’s in it for us?

The idea that the ‘students lead [and] the teacher follows’ is a powerful
one – implying a fundamental redistribution of power in the curriculum.
Taken to an extreme, it suggests the adoption of what is called a
‘process syllabus’, that is, a syllabus that is in a constant state of
negotiation, as learners’ needs emerge, their interests fluctuate and their
capacities evolve. In this sense, ‘tasks are not isolated events but parts
of a process whose goals are determined by the interaction between
learners and their expressed interests and needs’ (Legutke & Thomas
1991). Recent developments in some mainstream education systems,
e.g. Finland, where school subjects are no longer taught as independent
disciplines, but are merged into the collaborative implementation of
long-term projects involving a whole constellation of tasks, might seem
to offer a way forward.

Allwright, R. (1979) Language learning through communication practice. In Brumfit, C.

& Johnson, K. (eds) The communicative approach to language teaching. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Legutke, M., & Thomas, H. (1991) Process and experience in the language classroom.
Harlow: Longman.

Long, M. (2015) Second language acquisition and task-based language teaching.

Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

Prabhu, N.S. (1987) Second language pedagogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Willis, D. (1990) The lexical syllabus: A new approach to language teaching. London:
Collins.

Willis, J. (1996) A framework for task-based learning. Harlow: Longman.

Task-based Language Teaching 67

 17 Competency-based Teaching

In formulating the syllabus prescriptions for CLT, van Ek

(1975/1980) argued that ‘language-learning objectives,
like other learning objectives, are defined in terms of
behaviour. The aim of learning is always to enable the
learner to do something which he [or she] could not do at
the beginning of the learning process’. Competency-based
Teaching takes this principle to its logical extreme.

The background

In principle, a communicative approach focuses less on what learners

know about the language than what they can do with it. It follows,
therefore, that a curriculum whose goals are defined in terms of
competencies – that is, the specific skills that learners will be able to
do – is more functional than one that is based around a list of discrete
items of grammar.

Competency-based Teaching, then, starts with an analysis of the

specific behaviours – or skills – that are needed to do a job, to pursue
a field of study, or to survive as a tourist, for example. These skills
(sometimes called key competencies or even life skills) form the basis
of the course design, and are the goals – or outcomes – of classroom
instruction and testing. Competencies are often expressed in the
form of can do statements, probably the best known of which (for
language teaching) are those that were devised for the Common
European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching,
Assessment (CEFR). For example, here are the self-assessment
descriptors for the skill of writing at A1, A2 and B1 levels (Council of
Europe 2001):

­68 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 A1 A2 B1
I can write a short, I can write short, I can write simple
simple postcard, for simple notes and connected text
example sending messages relating on topics which
holiday greetings. to matters in areas are familiar or of
WRITING

I can fill in forms of immediate need. personal interest.

with personal I can write a very I can write personal
details, for example simple personal letters describing
entering my name, letter, for example experiences and
nationality and thanking someone impressions.
address on a hotel for something.
registration form.

These very broad outcomes can be specified in yet finer detail: the finer
the better, arguably, since discrete outcomes are more efficiently taught
and tested than very general ones. A case in point is the Pearson Global
Scale of English (GSE) which boasts over 1,800 can do statements.

How does it work?

If a method is defined – not just by its syllabus, materials and

procedures – but also by its goals, then Competency-based Teaching
certainly merits consideration as a method in its own right. It is not
so clear, though, as to how the syllabus goals are to be met. As the
CEFR (Council of Europe 2001) insists, ‘such statements of learning
objectives say nothing about the processes by which learners come to
be able to act in the required ways … They say nothing about the ways
in which teachers facilitate the processes of language acquisition and
learning’. Nevertheless, the fact that the goals of learning are typically
expressed in terms of abilities (as in the can do statements), rather than
as grammar or vocabulary items, suggests that a skills-based approach
would be appropriate. Such an approach would be one in which
the specific behavioural goal – e.g. ‘writing a short personal letter’
– is modelled for the learners, and then practised by them until it is
sufficiently ‘automated’.

However, as in the case of the CEFR, attempts to flesh out the

descriptors by specifying the precise linguistic elements (e.g. the

Competency-based Teaching 69
grammar and vocabulary) that are implicated in each competence
may undermine a skills-based approach, inviting a more traditional,
atomistic teaching approach, along the lines of the PPP (present-
practice-produce) model (see chapter 14). More problematic still is the
fact that, whatever methodology is employed, a key component of the
teaching-learning cycle is testing to see if the target competencies have
been acquired. And the more precisely and narrowly the competencies
are defined, the more items there will be to test.

Does it work?

Critics of a competency-based approach argue that its narrowly-

specified, utilitarian goals artificially constrain learning, producing
learners with a narrow range of competencies and few transferrable
skills. They also argue that the reduction of learning into discrete,
modularized chunks distorts the nature of language and language use in
the real world. As Auerbach (1986) comments, ‘the focus on a bottom-
up, building block pedagogy may produce such a narrow dissection into
sub-units that students cannot see the forest for the trees’.

The trend to ‘commodify’ learning in this way is consistent with the

way that education is increasingly being construed as a business, where
production targets and marketing plans directly determine the way
that the work-force is trained, and where managers (and teachers)
are accountable both to their stakeholders and to their customers.
As Gray and Block (2012) put it, ‘terms such as ‘‘outcomes’’, ‘‘value
added’’, ‘‘knowledge transfer’’, ‘‘the knowledge economy’’ and above
all ‘‘accountability’’ have become part of the day-to-day vocabulary
of education’.

Worse still, accountability encourages a culture of continuous testing.

As Diane Ravitch (2010) complains – with reference to the introduction
of ‘common core standards’ into the US education system – ‘How did
testing and accountability become the main levers of school reform?
… What was once an effort to improve the quality of education turned
into an accounting strategy’. And she adds, ‘Tests should follow the
curriculum. They should not replace it or precede it’ (ibid.).

­70 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

What’s in it for us?

Despite its business-like associations, the idea that the curriculum

should be ‘reverse engineered’ according to an analysis of learners’
needs is not necessarily an unworthy one. In fact, it is a fundamental
principle underpinning the teaching of ESP: the starting point of course
design is a needs analysis, from which the course objectives, materials
and even teaching procedures are derived. Success of the programme is
measured in terms of how well the needs have been met.

Moreover, it is a fact that, as Heyworth (2004) argues (in favour of the

CEFR) ‘all knowledge of language is partial’. He adds that ‘the concept
of partial competencies reinforces the need for negotiation of objectives
with learners, and recognition of the fact that not everyone has to
set off on the journey to learn the whole of the language. Learning a
language is not an “all or nothing” undertaking’. This is a view that
acknowledges the widespread plurilingualism and mobility associated
with globalization, where conformity to native-speaker models of
proficiency is of less utility than communicative resourcefulness. This
suggests that a competency-based model – but one that is negotiated in
much the same way that a process syllabus is negotiated (see chapter 16
Task-based Language Teaching) and one that, above all, is not
over-burdened with continuous testing – might well serve the needs of
learners in an increasingly globalized world.

Auerbach, E. (1986) Competency-based ESL: one step forward or two steps back?
TESOL Quarterly, 20: 411–430.

Council of Europe (2001) Common European framework of reference for languages:

learning, teaching, assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gray, J., & Block, D. (2012) The marketisation of language teacher education and
neoliberalism: characteristics, consequences and future prospects. In Block, D., Gray, J., &
Holborow, M. (eds) Neoliberalism and applied linguistics. London: Routledge.

Heyworth, F. (2004) Why the CEF is important. In Morrow, K. (ed.) Insights from the
common European framework. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ravitch, D. (2010) The death and life of the great American school system: how
testing and choice are undermining education. New York: Basic Books.

van Ek, J. (1975/1980) Threshold Level English. Oxford: Pergamon.

Competency-based Teaching 71
 18 Whole Language Learning

The history of methods is a history of polar opposites:

learning vs acquisition, product vs process, accuracy vs
fluency – and teaching ‘bits’ of language vs engaging with
whole texts. Whole Language Learning aims to gather
together the second of each of these polarities.

The background

In the 1920s, the French schoolteacher Célestin Freinet promoted what

he called a ‘work-based pedagogy’ that rejected the kind of centralized
school-planning associated with textbooks and examinations. His best
known innovation was the introduction of a printing press into his
school, so pupils could generate their own materials, including a school
magazine, which they exchanged with pupils at a sister school. Freinet
was impelled by the belief that ‘the key features of empty academic
activity are rules, books and teachers … all forcing pupils to produce
work with absolutely no basis in real life’ (quoted in Clandfield and
Sivell 1990). Instead, ‘by re-establishing the cycle of life, by assuring
constant motivation through creative work, we get beyond dry
academic exercises and reach a far superior form of classroom activity’.

Freinet occupies one end of a continuum along which all teachers –

whether teachers of first language literacy or of an additional language
– situate themselves. At one extreme, there are those who believe that
you learn a language by studying each of its components first, that is,
by progressing from the parts to the whole (often by means of ‘dry
academic exercises’). And there are those (like Freinet) who believe that
you learn the components of the language by engaging with it as an
integrated whole, in the form, for example, of ‘creative work’. That is,
learning goes from whole to part.

In first language literacy teaching, this division is most famously

represented in the arguments (often acrimonious) between those who

­72 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

advocate the teaching of phonics and those who don’t. Phonics is the
study of sound-letter relationships, and its proponents argue that using
this knowledge to ‘sound out’ words is the best way of learning to read.
A whole-language approach, on the other hand, takes a ‘top-down’
perspective, in which reading involves working out word meanings from
context, and recognizing word shapes by means of activities such as
being read to while following the words on the page, or reading aloud
with the assistance of an adult or a slightly more proficient classmate.

The whole language movement was popularized in North America in

the 1990s, as a reaction to the prevailing atomistic (or ‘building block’)
approach to curriculum design, in which language arts were taught and
tested in discrete, de-contextualized units. Among its core principles are
the following (after Freeman & Freeman 1998):

Learning goes from whole to part.

Reading, writing, speaking and listening all develop together.
Lessons should be learner-centred because learning is the active
construction of knowledge.
Learning takes place in social interaction.

The whole language approach emphasizes the social and cultural

dimension of education. It also aims to promote the learner’s self-
realization through learning, a feature that aligns it with the humanistic
tradition of education. In this sense ‘whole’ stands not only for ‘whole
language’, but also ‘whole person’: learning works best when the learner
is engaged not only intellectually but emotionally and even physically.

How does it work?

Whole Language Learning, as implemented in second language

classrooms, shares many characteristics of both Task-based and Text-
based Instruction. The starting point of any teaching cycle is not a
discrete item of grammar, but the performance of a task, or engagement
with a text. Only at a later stage in the cycle are specific linguistic
features the target of instruction – and only as deemed necessary for
the improved performance of the task. This is why Whole Language
Learning is most often associated with the teaching of the skills of
reading and writing. Marie Wilson Nelson (1991), for example,

Whole Language Learning 73

describes a five-year experiment at a college in the US, where writing
workshops were offered to small groups, including English language
learners, and where there was no formal writing – or grammar, or
vocabulary – instruction. Instead, the students were – in the words of
the program publicity – invited to:

Choose topics that interest you and your group

Freewrite (i.e. write freely) without worrying about correctness on
the first draft
Revise your freewrites. Your group will help you …
Learn to copy-edit your writing for publication

Instead of pre-teaching or modelling the skills of writing, a process

approach was adopted – i.e. one which involved collaboration and
multiple drafts – and in which ‘the tutors found that the most acceptable
and effective teaching was to give the help the students asked for when
they asked for it’– instruction, that is to say, ‘at the point of need’.

Does it work?

Nelson (op. cit.) and five independent teams of researchers found

so: ‘Despite the loss of drive some suffered at first without grades,
motivation surged when they experienced writing’s rewards: pride
of publication …, feelings of accomplishment, influence on others,
better grades in other courses, competence, empathy and praise from
friends, and … emotional release’. Likewise, ‘free voluntary reading’,
an approach to first language literacy training that is energetically
promoted by Stephen Krashen (2004), and which is entirely consistent
with the principles of Whole Language Learning, is equally positively
evaluated: ‘In-school free reading studies and “out of school” self-
reported free voluntary reading studies show that more reading results
in better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and
grammatical development’. And he adds, ‘in face-to-face comparisons,
reading is consistently shown to be more efficient than direct
instruction’. Krashen argues that the approach applies equally well to
second language development.

­74 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

What’s in it for us?

Despite these enthusiastic claims, as teachers we might be advised to

hedge our bets – especially given the research evidence that endorses
the value of a ‘focus on form’ (see chapter 16 Task-based Language
Teaching). As an instance of how a compromise might be reached,
Courtney Cazden (1992) argues for what she calls whole language plus:
‘As people of any age learn to read and write, they need help in focusing
attention on specific features of written language’. So, even when the
primary focus is on task performance, e.g. fluent reading or writing, she
argues for the need for ‘instructional detours’ in order to shift attention,
when necessary, away from the whole and on to the parts: ‘The idea of
a detour preserves what I believe to be essential: the prior establishment
of a main road of meaningful language use, to which the detour is a
momentary diversion when needed’. This is entirely consistent with
Nelson’s notion of instruction ‘at the point of need’ or with what others
have called ‘just in time teaching’. It is an approach that Freinet, with
his printing press, would have approved of.

Cazden, C. (1992) Whole language plus: Essays on literacy in the US and NZ. New
York: Teachers College Press.

Clandfield, D., & Sivell, J. (eds.) (1990) Co-operative learning and social change: Selected
writings of Célestin Freinet. Montréal: Our Schools, Our selves.

Freeman, Y.S., & Freeman, D.E. (1998) ESL/EFL Teaching: Principles for success.
Heinemann.

Krashen, S.D. (2004) The power of reading: Insights from the research (2nd edition).
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Nelson, M.W. (1991) At the point of need: Teaching basic and ESL writers. Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann.

Whole Language Learning 75

 19 Content-based Instruction

Content-based Instruction takes the principle of immersion

and applies it – not to life in its totality – but to the school
context in particular.

The background

On October 30, 1963, in a living room near Montreal, Canada, a dozen

concerned parents of English-speaking children met to discuss what
could be done about the lamentable state of their children’s French. As
a solution, they proposed a form of language immersion, in which the
children would be taught their school subjects (or some of them), not
in their first language, English, but in French. This was a radical idea
at the time, when bilingualism was still regarded with deep suspicion:
the popular view was that the influence of the second language would
retard development of the first language, not to mention the negative
effects it would have on education in general. But, with the support of
experts at McGill University in Montreal, the first class of Anglophone
children to be taught in French was set up at kindergarten level in
September 1965. By 1983, the Canadian Immersion Program was
providing over 100,000 Anglophone children with at least some part
of their regular curriculum in French; five years later this figure had
more than doubled, and the idea had spread to the United States, where
immersion programs in Spanish led the way.

That living room meeting in Montreal in 1963 planted a seed that

would give rise to a wide variety of educational options – and a steady
trickle of acronyms – that, in various ways, combined content teaching
and language learning. These include CBI (content-based instruction –
a term more commonly used in the US), CLIL (content and language
integrated learning – originally a European term) and EMI (English-
medium instruction – more commonly used with reference to tertiary
education). The basic principle underlying all these different versions
of classroom immersion is that an additional language can be acquired

­76 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

when that language is being used as the vehicle of instruction, even
if the learner’s attention is primarily, although not exclusively, on the
message and not on the medium.

Of course, learning school subjects in a language that is not the home

language is not a novelty: for centuries it was standard practice in
Western Europe to be schooled in Latin, for example, and classical
Arabic is still the medium of instruction in many Muslim countries
nowadays. During the period of European colonization of countries
such as India, Brazil or Mexico education was typically mediated in the
language of the colonizers. And few children of immigrants today have
any choice but to be educated in the language of their ‘host’ country,
despite UN recommendations that early learning should be conducted
in the home language wherever possible.

How does it work?

The defining characteristic of the content-based classroom is that the

syllabus is organized around content, not grammar. Typically, the content
will be the subjects of the school curriculum – geography, PT, art, history
etc. These subjects will be taught in the target language – English, in
the case of English-medium instruction. The relative importance that is
then given to the code, i.e. the features of the language – its grammar,
vocabulary and pronunciation – seems to depend as much on the whim of
individual teachers as on the specific method that is being followed. But,
as in Task-based Learning, there has been a shift in emphasis from content
only to content-plus-code in recent years. In immersion teaching as first
practised in Canada, little or no formal attention was paid to the code:
teachers simply taught their subjects in French, but allowed learners to
ask questions and respond in their L1. Proponents of CLIL, on the other
hand, are insistent that due attention should be given to the code, such as
pre-teaching the vocabulary and grammar that the learners will need, and
providing explicit error correction. Either way, it seems that successful
teachers of Content-based Instruction are able to do the following:

grade their classroom language to ensure comprehensibility, and/or

use the learners’ first language when necessary;
use multiple modes (e.g. graphics as well as language) to help
construct the meaning of the texts the students will read or listen to;

Content-based Instruction 77
 scaffold the learners’ interactions by asking strategically-placed
questions that guide learners to a deeper understanding of texts, and
a more articulate expression of their own meanings;
provide unambiguous feedback on learners’ output, and
continuously assess learners’ evolving understanding of the subject
matter, as well as their control of the vehicular language.

Does it work?

The Canadian experience shows that French immersion students

develop higher levels of fluency and comprehension than those
studying French as a curriculum subject (e.g. for an hour a day) and
– importantly – their academic success is not prejudiced by studying
school subjects in French. On the contrary, the bi- or multilingualism
that results is both a personal and a social asset. However, this situation
is somewhat exceptional. For a start, these learners’ first language
(English) is sufficiently supported at home and in their community,
which is seldom, if ever, the case for children of immigrants or other
minority groups. Moreover, the Canadian immersion teachers are fluent
speakers of the vehicular language, whereas in many CLIL contexts
teachers may be less than fully proficient in the language of instruction.

But even the Canadian learners do not always achieve native-like levels
of proficiency in French, a fact that has been attributed to, among
other things, lack of explicit instruction and corrective feedback. These
are exactly the areas that a CLIL methodology claims to remedy, by
providing balanced attention to both code and content – what Roy
Lyster (2007) calls ‘a counter-balanced approach’. Whether, in fact,
it does this depends on a variety of factors, not least the skills of the
teacher, their training, and their beliefs. On the whole, however, research
into CLIL suggests that, in the right conditions and given sufficient
attention to the formal features of the vehicular language, the L2
learning outcomes are positive, even if not perfect. Less thoroughly
researched are the effects on overall academic achievement, and
advocates of CLIL will need to work hard to convince doubting parents
in some CLIL contexts – e.g. where the standard of subject matter
teaching is not already strong – that their children are getting the
integrated education that CLIL promises.

­78 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

What’s in it for us?

The foregrounding of subject matter knowledge – e.g. geography,

science or art – solves the problem that has plagued second language
teaching for centuries – i.e. that it is a discipline with no real content.
In the absence of a subject, the language itself, or its literature, tends
to become the subject, and a great deal of classroom time is devoted
to studying grammar or reading the ‘classics’. But Content-based
Instruction fulfils the promise of communicative language teaching:
that – in Brumfit’s (2001) words – ‘we may learn the tokens of language
formally, but we learn the system by using it through reading or writing,
or conversing’. Content-based Instruction gives us something to read,
write and converse about.

Brumfit, C. (2001) Individual freedom in language teaching: Helping learners to

develop a dialect of their own. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lyster, R. (2007) Learning and teaching languages through content: A counterbalanced

approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Content-based Instruction 79
 20 Dogme ELT/ Teaching Unplugged

‘The language I learn in the classroom is a communal

product derived through a jointly constructed process’,
wrote Michael Breen in 1985. ‘Dogme’ teachers have
adopted this idea as their … dogma!

The background

In 1995, over a bottle of red wine, the Danish film-maker Lars von Trier
and three colleagues drafted the manifesto of the Dogme 95 film-makers
collective. They were driven by a commitment to rescue cinema from
big-budget, hi-tech, Hollywood-style production values and to recover
what von Trier referred to as ‘our joyful film-making’. In order to make
films that would be true to the ‘inner story’ of the characters, the group
pledged allegiance to a set of ‘vows’, the first of which was:
Shooting should be done on location. Props and sets must not be
brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location
must be chosen where the prop is to be found).
By analogy, in 2000, I wrote a short, intentionally provocative, article
(Thornbury 2000) suggesting the need for a similar rescue action in
ELT, which – at least in the contexts I was familiar with – seemed to
be drowning in an embarrassment of riches. An over-dependence on
manufactured materials (I argued) ran counter to the often expressed
desire of both teachers and learners to create more opportunities
for real language use in their classrooms. This was partly due to the
single-minded fixation of published materials (such as coursebooks) on
teaching the system (mainly grammar) rather than on engaging learners
in applying the system to create meanings for themselves – which had
been a core tenet of the communicative approach (see chapter 15).
There was also a growing reliance on – and uncritical enthusiasm for
– the use of technological aids, such as interactive whiteboards and
mobile phones, but without any apparent improvement in the quality of
classroom interaction.

­80 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

In the same style and spirit as the Dogme filmmakers’ vows, I drafted
some vows of my own, the first being:
Teaching should be done using only the resources that teachers and
students bring to the classroom – i.e. themselves – and whatever
happens to be in the classroom. If a particular piece of material
is necessary for the lesson, a location must be chosen where that
material is to be found (e.g. library, resource centre, bar, students’
club …).
The article stimulated the formation of an online discussion group,
Dogme ELT (but later re-labelled as Teaching unplugged). Out of
this ongoing discussion, a number of principles emerged that teachers
sympathetic to this approach seemed to hold in common, irrespective
of the contexts they were teaching in. These might be summarised
as being:

Learning is a social and dialogic process, where knowledge is

co-constructed rather than transmitted or imported from teacher/
coursebook to learner.
Learning can be mediated through talk, especially talk that is shaped
and supported (i.e. scaffolded) by the teacher.
Materials-mediated teaching is the ‘scenic’ route to learning, but
the direct route is located in the interactivity between teachers and
learners, and between the learners themselves.
The content most likely to engage learners and to trigger learning
processes is that which is already there, supplied by the ‘people in
the room’.
Rather than being acquired, language (including grammar) emerges:
it is an organic process that occurs given the right conditions.
The teacher’s primary function, apart from establishing the kind
of classroom dynamic which encourages learner interaction, is to
optimise language learning affordances, by, for example, directing
attention to features of the emergent language.
Providing space for the learner’s voice means accepting that the
learner’s beliefs, knowledge, experiences, concerns and desires are
valid content in the language classroom.

Dogme ELT/ Teaching Unplugged 81

In a book published nearly a decade later (Meddings & Thornbury
2009), these principles were pared down to just three core precepts:

Dogme is about teaching that is conversation-driven.

Dogme is about teaching that is materials-light.
Dogme is about teaching that focuses on emergent language.

How does it work?

In principle, Dogme ELT shares many characteristics of Task-based

Language Teaching (see chapter 16), and is arguably a ‘minimalist’ form
of it. It rejects a curriculum based on a syllabus of ‘forms’, but prefers a
process syllabus, i.e. one that is continuously negotiated by the learners; it
adopts a ‘fluency-first’ pedagogy (on the assumption that accuracy is late-
acquired); it advocates a reactive (as opposed to a pro-active) focus on
form ‘at the point of need’, that is to say, corrective feedback or grammar
explanations or vocabulary input are provided at the moment when the
need for such a focus arises during task performance. A typical teaching
sequence might begin with a classroom discussion around a topic that a
learner has volunteered – or may have been tasked to prepare for – out of
which the teacher will extract some relevant language items that might, in
turn, be recycled in a follow-up writing task.

In practice, a Dogme approach will vary according to its context. For

some teachers and in some situations, it may be enough to intersperse
their teaching with ‘Dogme moments’, such as when a learner’s
utterance offers a learning opportunity and the lesson takes a brief
detour in pursuit of it. Assuming they are in a context where they are
allowed to, other teachers may be motivated to design their whole
course according to Dogme principles.

Does it work?
Dogme is under-researched, but its critics have identified some possible
weaknesses. For a start, it seems to favour small groups of motivated
learners who are prepared to ‘suspend disbelief’ in a programme that
has no clear syllabus nor coursebook. Moreover, because its approach
is essentially reactive, it assumes its teachers have the skills – and
the language – to deal spontaneously with learners’ output. And the
fact that the emphasis is on conversation as the context out of which

­82 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

language ‘emerges’ means that learners may be less well prepared for
more formal or written registers, such as academic writing. Finally,
Dogme is open to the same charge as Task-based Instruction – that the
lack of a syllabus of preselected language items means that learners
are simply relying on their existing competence without being pushed
to extend it. In response, proponents of a Dogme approach appeal to
sociocultural theories of learning, which suggest that development can
occur through collaborative activity, especially when ‘scaffolded’ by a
supportive teacher.

What’s in it for us?

Despite the above criticisms, many teachers have felt liberated when
their lessons are no longer shackled to coursebook texts or a preselected
‘grammar point’. In fact, research into teachers’ developmental
trajectories suggests that many expert teachers learn to rely less on
‘imported’ materials and more on what arises from the learners
themselves. At the same time, learners who have experienced greater
control of the classroom topic agenda typically rate ‘Dogme moments’
highly. Apart from anything else, ‘doing a Dogme lesson’ from time to
time might be a very productive professional development exercise – a
fact attested by many teachers who choose this option as part of their
‘experimental practice’ on in-service teacher education courses.

Breen, M. (1985) The social context for language learning – a neglected situation? Studies
in Second Language Acquisition, 7: 135–158.

Meddings, L., & Thornbury, S. (2009) Teaching unplugged: Dogme in English language
teaching. Peaslake, Surrey: Delta Publishing.

Thornbury, S. (2000) A dogma for EFL. IATEFL Issues, 153: 2.

Dogme ELT/ Teaching Unplugged 83

 D: Visionaries

Each of these methods is closely

associated with its architect, who, in
each case, had a unique, even mystical
vision of teaching, often combined with a
charismatic teaching style. Nevertheless,
some of the practices associated with
these methods have been co-opted into
more mainstream methodology, even if
the beliefs that underpin them have not.

21 Community Language Learning

22 Suggestopedia
23 The Silent Way
24 Crazy English & the Rassias Method

­84 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 Community Language Learning 21

The anxiety and identity dislocation that so often comes

with adopting a second language might better be treated –
not by a teacher – but by a psychotherapist. Or a teacher-
therapist. That, at least, is the thinking that underpins
Community language learning.

The background
When I hear my voice, I just hate it … It is not simply that my ears hate
my mouth, or my mouth hates my eyes. The inner conflict inhabits
my entire being. This makes me feel that my own ‘self’ is falling apart.
Now I have two ‘mes’ inside myself. A ‘me’ with whom I am familiar
and with whom I feel connected … The other ‘me’ is a stranger.

Thus, Zhou Wu (1993, quoted in Granger 2004) recalls the anxiety and
loss of identity associated with migrating to Canada and discovering
that his English, which seemed perfectly adequate at home in China,
failed him in the Canadian context.

Zhou Wu might have benefitted from Community language learning

(CLL, also known as Counselling-learning). Developed in the 1960s
and 1970s by Charles Curran, a Jesuit priest and practising counsellor,
CLL imports into language instruction the kind of three-step exchange
that is fundamental to non-directive, client-centred and ‘whole person’
counselling practices. In this exchange, the ‘client’ articulates his or her
fears, anxieties, or desires in language that is often highly-charged and
emotional. The counsellor paraphrases (or reflects back) the content
of the client’s utterance in language which is more detached, more
matter-of-fact, which the client, in turn, is invited to repeat. In this way,
the client comes to view their situation more objectively, to gain some
control over it, and, eventually, to become less reliant on the counsellor.
Curran’s insight was that this sort of twin-code communication of
emotional talk and rational talk, in which the words of one register

Community Language Learning 85

are ‘translated’ into another, could be successfully adapted to language
teaching, especially if conducted in the kind of mutually supportive
community context associated with group therapy.

Hence community language learning – because Curran’s other insight

was that language is not simply a means of communication, but that
it plays a vital role in building and maintaining communities – even
communities as small and as artificially constituted as a group of
language learners. This means that the language should not be imposed
on the learners, in the form, for example, of a syllabus and coursebook,
but that it should emerge jointly from them, and simply be translated
for them by the teacher-counsellor.

How does it work?

The classic CLL procedure is one in which small groups of learners (also
known as ‘clients’), seated in a circle, jointly construct a conversation
on a topic of their own devising, with the unobtrusive assistance of the
teacher (or ‘knower’).

Any student can start, and there is no set order or even requirement
to participate. A student quietly tells the teacher, in her L1, what she
wants to say in the L2. The teacher translates. The student repeats and
the teacher may correct if necessary. When the student is satisfied, the
utterance is recorded. Other students respond, each utterance being
assembled, fine-tuned and recorded in turn. Here, for example, is the
conversation that three adult Spanish learners of English constructed:
S1: Emma, where are you going tonight?
S2: Tonight I am going to have supper out.
S3: Where are you going to have supper?
S2: I don’t know. I am being taken out.
S1: Who are you going with?
S2: I’m going with, with a guy, but he isn’t my boyfriend.
S1: And where is your boyfriend?
S2: Do you mean now?
S1: No, not now. Where will he be this evening?
S2: He’s going to play water polo.
S3: Hmm, water polo. Very interesting. Is your boyfriend hunky?
S2: Yes, he’s very hunky.

­86 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

The teacher replays the whole recording, and chooses elements of it
to transcribe on to the board in order to draw attention to particular
linguistic features that are considered to be within the learners’ current
learning capability. Other activities might complement this basic
framework, such as reading the text aloud, as well as reflecting on the
experience itself.

Does it work?

Even in its heyday, CLL was seldom subject to exhaustive methods

comparison studies, and most of the success its proponents claim for it is
largely anecdotal. It is perfectly plausible, however, that a strong group
dynamic could develop using CLL procedures, and that this in turn could
be a powerful motivator. Moreover, the freedom to control the classroom
discourse is likely to be welcomed by more assertive and independent
learners. Research (e.g. Slimani 1989) into more conventional methods
suggests that, when learners have some say in the choice of topics, then
‘uptake’ (i.e. what the learners remember from the lesson) is enhanced.
However, the impracticality of adopting CLL in most learning contexts
militates against it: classes need to be small, the teacher needs to be
proficient in the learners’ L1, and capable of dealing with linguistic
issues spontaneously and at the point of need. (In this sense, CLL shares
many of the challenges of Dogme ELT, see chapter 20.) It is perhaps best
employed as a source of specific techniques, rather than as a method in its
own right.

What’s in it for us?

Stripped of its quasi-mystical rhetoric – e.g. ‘an incarnate-redemptive

learning experience’ (Curran 1983) – CLL still has a lot to offer, not
least in its foregrounding of socially-oriented collaborative learning.
This is in line with learning theories (such as Vygotsky’s sociocultural
learning) of which Curran, in his time, would have been unaware. It
is also consistent with the view that the classroom has its own unique
‘culture’ with its own dynamic and momentum. As Michael Breen
(1985) notes: ‘Whether or not the teacher plans a lesson in advance, the
actual working out of that lesson in the class demands joint endeavour.
The lesson-in-process is most often different from that which either the
teacher or the learners anticipated before the lesson began’. Community

Community Language Learning 87

language learning takes this inherent unpredictability and turns it into
an opportunity.

It might also be interesting to know what Curran would have made of

online social networking and its potential to provide both a context and
a motivation for jointly constructed learning opportunities. Sites (such
as www.italki.com) that provide a venue for users of different languages
to interact and ‘teach’ one another by, for example, translating and
editing each other’s texts, offer a possible solution to some of the scale
limitations of CLL as first conceived.

Breen, M.P. (1985) The social context for language learning: a neglected situation?
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 7: 135–158.

Curran, C. (1983) Counselling-Learning. In Oller, J.W., Richard-Amato, P.A. (eds)

Methods that work: A smorgasbord of ideas for language teachers. Rowley, Mass.:
Newbury House.

Granger, C.A. (2004) Silence in second language learning: A psychoanalytic reading.

Cleveland: Multilingual Matters.

Slimani, A. (1989) The role of topicalization in classroom language learning. System, 17:
223–234.

­88 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 Suggestopedia 22

Terrence Rattigan’s popular comedy French Without

Tears (1936) was named after a well-known textbook of
the time. The title plays on the widespread longing for a
language teaching method that is painless, pleasurable, and
fast. Suggestopedia claims to be all those things: language
learning without tears.

The background

Second language learning is famously slow and time-consuming.

Literally hundreds of hours may be needed just to reach intermediate
level, especially if the learner has little or no direct contact with
speakers of the language. And, since time is money, this constitutes an
enormous financial investment for most learners or their sponsors. Any
method that offers a significant shortcut to this arduous, expensive and
often thankless task will surely triumph. Suggestopedia claims to do
exactly that: it increases the speed of learning by as much as 25 times,
its practitioners attest. The memorization of 1,000 foreign language
words in just an hour is another frequently cited figure.

Its architect and active publicist, Georgi Lozanov (1926–2012) was a

Bulgarian scientist and educator who believed that the human mind’s
capacity for exceptional feats of memory is inhibited only by our need
to filter out unconscious and irrational ‘noise’. While, for day-to-day
purposes, these filters are necessary, they seriously constrain our ability
to learn. Lozanov’s solution, called Suggestopedia, involved unblocking
(or ‘de-suggesting’) the inhibitors that have accumulated over the course
of our learning history, while at the same time substituting these with
positive suggestions that will massively enhance our future learning
potential.

First popularized in the West in the 1970s (in a book that also had
chapters on clairvoyance, auras, prophecy, past lives, faith healing,

Suggestopedia 89
psychokinesis, and talking to plants), Suggestopedia is easy to dismiss as
quackery. This negative perception is not helped by the unsubstantiated
claims of some of its more fervent advocates: ‘Stress and anxiety tend
to over-activate the left hemisphere and the sympathetic division
of the autonomic nervous system, which reduces receptivity at the
paraconscious level. With Lozanov’s method, the mind must be soaring
high and free’ (Hansen 1998).

Nevertheless, the notion that, simply by unlocking our unconscious

minds, effortless learning capacities will result, has always had popular
appeal. Lozanov’s accomplishment was to provide a quasi-scientific
veneer to this ‘magical thinking’, combining techniques from yoga,
meditation, hypnotherapy, and music therapy, so as to lull learners into
an infantilized but highly receptive state in which any input they were
exposed to would be unconsciously ‘absorbed’.

Despite being dismissed by mainstream learning theorists, the

basic philosophy of Suggestopedia has persisted under different
guises, such as super learning, accelerated learning and multi-level
learning. It also prefigured a number of ‘new age’ learning theories
that are based on questionable claims about neurobiology, such as
neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and the belief that learners can
be classified according to whether they have a visual, auditory or
kinaesthetic learning style. And the quest for new ways of accelerating
learning has embraced such digital technologies as augmented reality,
which, allegedly, provides ‘a multi-channel, high-immersion learning
experience that teaches new concepts to children or adults at many
times the speed and efficiency of today’s standard teaching approaches’
(Adams 2004).

How does it work?

The classic methodology, as pioneered by Lozanov, involves intensive

classes of around four hours a day, six days a week, consisting of
a dozen students who are given new, target language names and
biographies. They are seated in comfortable chairs in a softly-lit,
tastefully decorated room. Lessons begin with a review of the previous
lesson, using standard oral practice techniques, including some kind
of role play involving the spontaneous use of language. The next stage

­90 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

comprises the presentation and explanation of new material which
takes the form of an extended written scenario with its accompanying
L1 translation. The third stage is the one which most distinguishes
Suggestopedia from other methods. It is called the séance, and aims
to facilitate unconscious memorization of the new material. There are
elaborate prescriptions as to how this must be done. Essentially, though,
having relaxed themselves doing breathing and other exercises, the
learners listen to the text – and its translation – recited aloud to them
by the teacher, to the accompaniment of baroque music, whose soothing
hypnotic rhythms, along with that of the teacher’s carefully modulated
voice, supposedly ensure maximum retention.

Does it work?

Suggestopedia aims to tap into unconscious learning faculties.

Lozanov claims that material that is at the very edge of our attention
and that is picked up and stored in long-term memory is actually
more durable than that which is consciously learned. There is still a
great deal of debate as to whether, or the extent to which, unconscious
processes are implicated in SLA. On the one hand, there are those who
argue that all learning requires a degree of conscious attention to what
is being learned: you cannot learn in your sleep, nor when your mind
is elsewhere. Others are less convinced, arguing that first language
acquisition, for example, is largely an unconscious process. Thus, for
Stephen Krashen (1987), an advocate of implicit – i.e. unconscious
– learning, ‘Suggestopedia comes very close to completely matching
the requirements of optimal input’ – input being the single necessary
condition (especially in a stress-free environment) without which
acquisition cannot occur.

To support this view, recent developments in neuroimaging suggest

that explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge are differently located
in the brain, and that, in an input-rich, naturalistic context, implicit
– i.e. unconscious – cognitive processes are activated first – processes
that appear to be the same as those operating for first language
acquisition. It is plausible, then, that the kind of language exposure
that Suggestopedic techniques provide, involving optimal input and
low anxiety, may well activate and nourish unconscious language
acquisition processes, even in adults. Whether all the ‘theatre’ involved

Suggestopedia 91
in providing these conditions is necessary is, however, debatable. It
may, of course, be the case that – because the students think that the
theatre matters – it does matter, and that their learning is enhanced
because of it. The method is, for all intents and purposes, a placebo –
with all the appearances of being an effective, scientifically-grounded
system, but with very little real substance. This, at least, is Earl Stevick’s
(1980) assessment: ‘Virtually every element in a Suggestopedic course
has, in addition to its overt effect, also a “placebo” effect’.

What’s in it for us?

Suggestopedia – for all its pseudo-scientific and theatrical trappings –

does at least attempt to address one of the single biggest challenges in
language learning: the memory load. For example, current estimates of
the number of word families (where a word family is a word and its
common derivatives) that learners need to know in order to provide
sufficient coverage for fluent reading (estimated as being 98% of the
running words in a text) is anywhere from 7,000 to 9,000 words
(Nation & Gu 2007). Obviously, this enormous task cannot be
accomplished in the classroom alone: learners will need to read and
listen to large amounts of comprehensible text in their own time, relying
to some extent on incidental learning processes in order to increase their
sight vocabulary. Suggestopedia’s use of repeated exposure to dual-
language texts offers one way that this might be accomplished.

Adams, M. (2004) The Top Ten Technologies: #10 Superlearning Systems.

http://www.naturalnews.com/001340_learning_child_brain.html

Hansen, G.H. (1998) Lozanov and the teaching text. In Tomlinson, B. (ed.) Materials
development in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Krashen, S.D. (1987) Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Hemel
Hempstead: Prentice Hall.

Nation, P., & Gu, P.Y. (2007) Focus on vocabulary. Sydney, NSW: Macquarie University.

Stevick, E.W. (1980) Teaching languages: A way and ways. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury
House.

­92 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 The Silent Way 23

When observing classes, Caleb Gattegno, founder of

the Silent Way, is alleged, on occasions, to have held up
a sign which simply read ‘Stop teaching!’. This story
captures Gattegno’s fierce commitment to minimizing
teachers’ interventions in order to maximise the learner’s
own cognitive and emotional investment in the learning
process. The ‘silence’ of the Silent Way, is the teacher’s
silence, not the learner’s.

The background

Gattegno (1911–1988) was not, primarily, a language educator: his

initial interest was in re-thinking the teaching of mathematics, especially
through the use of Cuisenaire rods (small coloured blocks of wood of ten
different lengths). But the guiding principle of his approach, that learners
should take responsibility for, and control of, their own learning, could
(he intuited) apply equally to the learning of a second language.

Basic to Gattegno’s philosophy was the conviction that learning is –

initially, at least – a deliberate, conscious and cognitive process, based
– not on memorization or habit-formation – but on ‘acts of awareness’.
It follows that – for adult learners at least – the learning of a second
language should in no way try to replicate the unconscious, naturalistic
experience of learning the mother tongue. Gattegno aimed, instead, ‘to
replace a “natural” approach by one that is very “artificial” and, for
some purposes, strictly controlled’ (1983). Indeed, superficially at least,
there is hardly a language teaching method that seems quite so artificial
and controlled: unlike, say Suggestopedia (see chapter 22), which at
least conforms to certain folk theories of language learning, the Silent
Way seems totally counter-intuitive.

Nevertheless, there are several features of the Silent Way that seem to
have been imported from the Direct Method (see chapter 3) and other

The Silent Way 93

‘natural’ approaches, including the exclusive use of the target language,
the symbolic use of aids to illustrate and elicit language items (i.e.
the rods, as well as the colour-coded wallcharts – see below), and the
strict rationing of the content to be learned, particularly vocabulary.
The defining difference is, of course, the almost complete absence of
teacher talk, including the question-answer sequences and corrective
feedback so typical of most teaching. This ‘abdication’ of the teacher’s
traditional role is entirely in the interests of encouraging – even forcing
– the learners to ‘do the learning’ for themselves; ‘there are means of
letting the learners learn while the teacher stops interfering or side-
tracking’ (op. cit.). Gattegno argued that the mental alertness and
concentration that is required when learners are thrown back on their
own resources ensures retention of the lesson content without the need
for memorization: ‘memory is a function of concentration’ (op. cit.).

Like the other luminaries of the so-called humanistic methods

movement with whom he is typically associated – Curran of
Community language learning (see chapter 21), and Lozanov of
Suggestopedia (see chapter 22) – Gattegno’s rhetoric verges on the
quasi-mystical at times. He invokes, for example, the ‘spirit’ of the
language, which is encoded in its melody and rhythm and also in the
difficult-to-translate small words, such as prepositions, articles and
auxiliary verbs. To capture the spirit, he recommends having learners
listen to recordings of authentic speech, even if they don’t understand
them. But underlying his thinking is a strong seam of common sense: in
fact, he wrote a book called The Common Sense of Teaching Foreign
Languages. Gattegno himself provides detailed descriptions of typical
lesson sequences, while at the same time acknowledging that every
learning situation and every language is different. Moreover, no two
learners will follow the same learning trajectory. The teacher, therefore,
should be prepared to adapt the approach to suit the local conditions
and in accordance to what actually happens in the class. Nevertheless,
the fundamental principle – that teaching is subordinated to learning –
should dictate every decision.

How does it work?

Groups are necessarily small: all students need to be able to see and
handle the set of Cuisenaire rods that the teacher manipulates. Also,

­94 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

the relative intimacy of the group ensures a degree of focused attention
that is absolutely necessary for the kind of mental discipline that the
lessons require.

Using minimal vocabulary (rod; black, red, yellow, etc.; give, put,
me, him, her, etc.) and guided by colour-coded charts that display
the phonemes of the language, learners construct increasingly more
complex utterances in response to cues provided by the teacher. New
vocabulary items or constructions may be modelled initially, but
thereafter there is little or no repetition on the part of the teacher nor
anything but the most minimal feedback. Instead, learners are expected
to develop their own ‘inner criteria’ for evaluating the accuracy of their
utterances. Long silences are tolerated as learners engage cognitively
with the materials, trying to work out their hidden laws. As the need for
more complex grammatical patterns arises, the rods are used to create
contexts for these. Theoretically, at least, the entirety of a language’s
grammar can be built up using these minimal means.

Does it work?

For obvious reasons, the Silent Way is not widely practised, and
therefore any claims as to its effectiveness are largely anecdotal. It is a
procedure that is probably more often demonstrated at beginner level,
as part of teaching preparation courses, than actually implemented in
real classrooms with real students. Nevertheless, assuming a degree
of student compliance, it’s not hard to imagine it having a certain
impact, in line, perhaps, with the so-called Hawthorne effect, i.e.
when learners know that they are being experimented on, they tend
to outperform their present competence. John Holt makes a similar
point (1982):
Perhaps this is a reason why people like Gattegno, who go around
teaching demonstration maths classes, get such spectacular results.
The kids know that this is not real school, that the strange man is not
a teacher, that if they make mistakes nothing serious will happen, and
that, in any case, it will be over soon. Thus freed from worrying, they
are ready to use their brains. But how can we run a class from day to
day and keep that spirit? Can it be done at all?

The Silent Way 95

What’s in it for us?

A method that is provocatively named the Silent Way compels us

to re-evaluate the role of silence in the classroom – not as a sign of
communicative failure or learner ignorance, but as a possible indicator
of the cognitive effort involved in learning. As Claire Kramsch (2009)
argues:
We may want to leave time in class for students to write in silence, to
have a silent, private contact with the shape of a poem and its silent
sounds, to listen in silence to the cadences of a student or to our own
voice reading aloud, to follow silently the rhythm of a conversation
played on tape, the episodic structure of a story well told. We may
want to even foster silence as a way of letting the students reflect on
what they are right now experiencing.

Moreover, Gattegno’s guiding principle – that teachers should intervene

less so that learners develop their own autonomous learning skills – is
a basic tenet of any approach that subscribes to the notion of learner-
centeredness. Although Gattegno pushed this principle to the limits of
credibility, many – maybe most – teachers might be well advised, from
time to time, to follow Gattegno’s injunction to simply ‘stop teaching’.

Gattegno, C. (1983) The silent way. In Oller, J.W., Richard-Amato, P.A. (eds) Methods that
work: A smorgasbord of ideas for language teachers. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

Holt, J. (1982) How children fail (revised edition). Cambridge, Mass: Da Capo Press.

Kramsch, C. (2009) The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

­96 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 Crazy English & the Rassias method 24

‘In order to be a wit in a foreign language you have to go

through the stage of being a half-wit,’ wrote Peter Harder
in 1985. These two methods take this premise to its logical
conclusion.

The background

Li Yang (born 1969) was a student of mechanical engineering in

Lanzhou University, China. Pathologically shy, his grades were poor,
especially in English, which he needed in order to graduate. Driven
to desperate measures, he discovered that the recitation of his English
texts as preparation for his exams was much more effective if he went
outside and – rather than mumbling the sentences to himself – simply
shouted them at the top of his voice. He passed his English exam with
flying colours. Encouraged by this unexpected breakthrough, he started
teaching English on the side. A brief stint as an English presenter on
television led to his setting up, in 1994, a teaching and publishing
venture called Crazy English, which he energetically publicised by
giving lessons to large groups in public venues. By 1997 Li Yang was a
celebrity, filling whole sports stadiums with English language learners
chanting in unison. Astute merchandising of CDs, DVDs and books
(including his autobiography I am Crazy, I Succeed) helped spread
his method further: his followers numbering in the tens of millions,
allegedly.

Li Yang is not the only, or even the first, ‘crazy’ teacher. When John
Rassias (1925–2015), the son of Greek immigrants to the USA, started
teaching French – the subject he had majored in – there was little in
the method or the materials that enthused him. It was only when he
realized that his other great love – the theatre – could be enlisted into
the teaching of languages that he began to formulate what became
known as the Rassias Method. He pioneered the method teaching Peace
Corps volunteers as preparation for postings to French-speaking Africa

Crazy English & the Rassias method 97

in the 1960s, and further refined it in Dartmouth, Vermont, where he
trained hundreds of teachers in its techniques. Essentially, these include
rapid-fire drilling coupled with comically exaggerated feedback, as well
as role playing and the acting out of ‘skits’. What both Li Yang and
Rassias have in common is a repertoire of performance skills by means
of which they make fairly conventional techniques – such as drilling –
non-threatening, highly entertaining, and hence (they would both claim)
extremely memorable.

How does it work?

Both Crazy English and the Rassias method borrow from

audiolingualism (see chapter 6), and incorporate intensive drilling of
structural patterns – so intensive, in the case of Rassias, that the drilling
is usually conducted by adjuncts, while the teacher’s role is reserved for
the less regimented, more performance-based stages of each lesson. The
purpose of the drilling, for Rassias, seems to be less about habituation
than about maximising student talking time: each student is expected
to speak at least 65 times in the course of a 50-minute lesson. This
also accounts for the rapid delivery of question-and-answer routines,
in which teachers are encouraged to snap their fingers to keep things
moving. Feedback on accuracy is provided by exaggerated gestures,
such as blowing kisses (in the case of a correct answer) or miming a
knife thrust (in the case of error). On the other hand, accuracy is not
necessarily the main goal. As Rassias is quoted as saying (Wolkomir
1983), ‘Have the courage to be bad, to make mistakes – but speak!’.

In Crazy English, drilling is done mainly for the purposes of confidence

building and for memorization, and in that sense it fits into a well-
established Chinese tradition of recitation and repetition. Videos of Li
Yang show him drilling huge crowds in utterances like ‘Would you like
to speak English?’, a word at a time until the whole utterance is shouted
in its entirety. This is part of what he calls ‘tongue muscle training’.
Students are also taught to mimic 20 different gestures representing
different English phonemes. Compared to the Rassias method, Crazy
English is much less intensive, especially when conducted as a self-study
program: in the interests of avoiding overload and the associated loss of
confidence, the sentences to be learned are delivered in manageable sets
– e.g. ten a month – and a prize is awarded once each set is ‘learned’.

­98 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

Does it work?

Both Rassias and Li Yang seem less preoccupied with the mechanics
of teaching and much more focused on removing the inhibitions that
block language learning, whatever method is employed. The website for
Dartmouth College (where Rassias developed his program) states:
The goal of the Rassias Method is to make the participant feel
comfortable and natural with the language in a short period of time.
This is accomplished through a specific series of teaching procedures
and dramatic techniques which seek to eliminate inhibitions and
create an atmosphere of free expression from the very first day
of class.

Similarly, Li Yang’s personal struggle to overcome his fear of ‘losing

face’ is a theme he returns to frequently, as justification for the
‘craziness’ of his approach. For example, he has his students chant ‘I’m
not afraid of losing face!’. In fact, his approach seems to target not
just language learning but personal self-esteem and, ultimately, self-
realization: he is quoted as saying ‘You have to make a lot of mistakes.
You have to be laughed at by a lot of people. But that doesn’t matter,
because your future is totally different from other people’s futures’
(Osnos 2008).

Judged in these terms, then, the enthusiasm with which both methods
have been received would seem to confirm that, in terms of breaking
down inhibitions, they do succeed. Rassias’s long association with
the Peace Corps, for example, suggests his initial courses provide an
effective platform for subsequent immersive learning while in the field.
And the rapturous, almost cult-like, response that Li Yang evokes must
have impelled at least some of his many fans into dedicating more time
and effort into learning English.

On the negative side, it may be that, for certain learners at least, the
mindless chanting, the play-acting and, above all, the assertive presence
of their larger-than-life teachers are a disincentive. For every student
who reports that ‘having an egg broken over your head by Rassias is an
intense loving experience’ (Wolkomir 1983), there will be at least one
who will likely be less well disposed.

Crazy English & the Rassias method 99

What’s in it for us?

To paraphrase the old workplace slogan: You don’t have to be crazy

to teach here, but it helps. In other words, any method, however
discredited, can be made to work if the teacher injects a degree of
novelty, theatricality and surprise. More importantly, any techniques
that serve to reduce the learners’ fears and insecurities – whether or not
these techniques are as extreme as either Li Yang’s or Rassias’s – will go
at least some way to ensuring a method’s chances of success.

Harder, P. (1980). Discourse and self-expression – on the reduced personality of the

second language learner. Applied Linguistics, 1: 262–270.

Osnos, E. (2008) Crazy English: The national scramble to learn a new language before the
Olympics. The New Yorker, April 28. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/28/
crazy-english (accessed 17th January 2017)

Rassias Centre, Dartmouth College: http://rassias.dartmouth.edu/method/

Wolkomir, R. (1983) A manic professor tries to close up the language gap. In Oller, J.W.,
Richard-Amato, P.A. (eds) Methods that work: A smorgasbord of ideas for language
teachers. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House.

­100 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

E: Self-study methods

Over time, self-study methods have

adapted to changes in technology (from
the printed book to long-playing records
to mobile phones) while tending to
reflect – rather than lead – contemporary
developments in classroom methodology.
But there have been some notable
innovations, some of which are reviewed
in this section.

25 Orientalists
26 Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’
27 Brand name Methods: Assimil, Michel
Thomas, Pimsleur
28 Programmed Instruction: Duolingo
29 Online Polyglots

Self-study methods 101

 25 Orientalists

Before there were linguists there were ‘philologists’ –

literally, ‘lovers of learning’. One of the most famous,
William ‘Oriental’ Jones (1746–1794), reputedly knew
28 languages.

Background

Interest in so-called ‘oriental’ languages by Western scholars in the

18th and 19th centuries was fuelled by – among other things – a
burgeoning interest in archaeology and in ‘philology’, or what now
would be known as comparative linguistics. This produced a cadre of
Western ‘orientalists’, many of whom, because formal instruction in the
languages they wanted to learn was often not available, were self-taught
polyglots. The methods they used are still of interest, not least for what
they tell us about learner autonomy and agency. In this section we will
look at just two of these 19th century orientalists: Sir Richard Burton
(1821–1890), the British explorer, spy, diplomat, and translator of the
Arabian Nights, who was allegedly fluent in 29 languages, and Ármin
Vámbéry (1832–1913), the Hungarian ‘turkologist’ (and also a spy),
who used his knowledge of Turkish to argue the case for a common
origin between that language and Hungarian.

How did it work?

Both Burton and Vámbéry have left accounts of their methods, the
former being more detailed than the latter, but both coinciding in their
reliance on memorization, reading aloud, and the use of authentic texts.

Here is Burton (1893, quoted in Brodie 1967/1986):

I got a simple grammar and vocabulary, marked out the forms and
words which I knew were absolutely necessary, and learnt them by
heart by carrying them in my pocket and looking over them at spare
moments during the day. I never worked for more than a quarter of an
hour at a time, for after that the brain lost its freshness. After learning

­102 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 some three hundred words, easily done in a week, I stumbled through
some easy book-work (one of the Gospels is the most come-atable),
and underlined every word that I wished to recollect, in order to read
over my pencillings at least once a day … If I came across a new sound
like the Arabic Ghayn, I trained my tongue to it by repeating it so
many thousand times a day. When I read, I invariably read out loud, so
that the ear might aid memory … Whenever I conversed with anybody
in a language I was learning, I took the trouble to repeat their words
inaudibly after them, and so to learn the trick of pronunciation and
emphasis.

Burton’s text-based approach closely matches that of his German

contemporary, the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (quoted in Lomb
1988/2013):
In order to acquire quickly the Greek vocabulary, I procured a modern
Greek translation of Paul et Virginie, and read it through, comparing
every word with its equivalent in the French original. When I had
finished this task I knew at least one half the Greek words the book
contained; and after repeating the operation I knew them all, or
nearly so, without having lost a single minute by being obliged to use
a dictionary […] Of the Greek grammar I learned only the declensions
and the verbs, and never lost my precious time in studying its rules.

Meanwhile, Vámbéry, who had grown up bilingual in Hungarian and

German, polylingualism was early acquired. He recalls (1889) that
‘I found myself, not quite sixteen years old, conversant with so many
principal languages that acquiring the idioms [i.e. dialects] kindred to
them had become a comparatively easy task for me’. Here he recounts
his approach:
I always took special delight in memorizing. … When I was able to
increase the number of words which I could master in one day from
ten to sixty and even to a hundred, my exultation knew no bounds. …
I never omitted to read out loud and to hold conversations with myself
in the languages I was learning … .

Having gained a basic grasp of the language he was learning, he moved

on to ‘general literature’ which he read aloud, often gesturing as he did

Orientalists 103
so. (‘Owing to this habit of loud reading and the violent gestures with
which I would often accompany it, the plain people who were about me
often thought me wrong in the mind.’) If available, he would consult
a translation of the text he was reading (he admits he was too poor
to afford a dictionary), and he annotated the texts with his feelings
‘whenever any passage happened to strike my imagination’.

Did it work?

While there is no independent evidence as to the degree of proficiency

achieved by either Burton or Vámbéry, we do know that Burton’s
fluency in Arabic, Persian and Hindustani enabled him to ‘pass’ as
a Muslim (of Pathan origins but resident in Rangoon) and visit the
otherwise off-limits holy sites of Medina and Mecca.

As for Vámbéry, it was on his first journey abroad, en route from

Budapest to Istanbul, that he was given an opportunity to put his
theoretical knowledge of Serbian, Italian, and Turkish to practice with
his fellow shipboard passengers. He immediately became the centre
of attention: ‘They formed a ring around me, trying to guess at my
nationality, and received rather sceptically my statement that I had
never been abroad’. And he adds that, after only a day or two, he had
improved his Turkish to such an extent that, on arriving in Turkey, he
was able to act as a Turkish interpreter for a fellow Hungarian.

What’s in it for us?

It is difficult to generalise on the basis of these two cases, but what

is interesting is the way that the two orientalists used the (solitary)
academic study of the systems of the target language as a launching
pad into actual use of the language as meaningful communication.
Contradicting the immersionist view, i.e. that you learn a language by
using it, there was a clear distinction between the learning and using
phases in both Burton’s and Vámbéry’s cases. This is consistent with
the nineteenth century view of learning as being an intellectual, rather
than an experiential, endeavour. As Henry Sweet (1899/1964) argued,
‘It sounds well to talk of “picking up a language by ear in the country
itself”, but most good linguists will confess that they learnt nearly
everything from books, and but little from conversation’. There is a
body of research that would seem to vindicate the view that, at least

­104 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

for some learners and in some learning contexts (typically instructed
ones), the learning of the facts of the language, e.g. its grammar rules,
reinforced by cycles of practice, is as effective, if not more so, than more
‘deep-end’ approaches. Subscribing to a view of learning that is known
as ‘skills acquisition theory’, these studies suggest that declarative
knowledge (i.e. facts) can become proceduralized (i.e. turned into skilled
behaviours) through practice. What is unusual, perhaps, in the case of
both Burton and Vámbéry, is that the practice activities included reading
aloud, an activity that is nowadays generally discouraged by advocates
of more communicative approaches.

Brodie, F.M. (1967/1986) The devil drives: A life of Sir Richard Burton. London: Eland.

Lomb, K. (1988/2013) Harmony of Babel: Profiles of famous polyglots of Europe.

Translated by S. Alkire. Berkeley: TESL-EJ Publications.

Vámbéry, A. (1889) Árminius Vámbéry, his life and adventures. London: Fisher Unwin.

Orientalists 105
 26 Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’

Thomas Prendergast (1806–1886) was another nineteenth

century ‘orientalist’ (see chapter 24). But, unlike his
peers, who were content simply to boast about their
linguistic prowess, Prendergast attempted to turn his own
language learning experience into a method that could be
generalized to other languages and for other learners.

Background

Like his father before him, Prendergast served all his working life in
the East India Company, during which time he learned at least two of
India’s indigenous languages, Hindustani and Telugu. On retirement
in his fifties, he returned to England where (now blind) he spent his
remaining years developing what he called his ‘Mastery’ system,
published in 1864 as The Mastery of Languages or, the Art of Speaking
Foreign Tongues Idiomatically, along with accompanying teaching
materials in a variety of languages. Based largely on his own experience
as a learner, (he never actually taught languages himself), his method
was directed at self-study rather than classroom instruction (although
he did provide guidance for teachers, just in case).

Essentially, his method involved the cumulative memorization of a set

of exemplary sentences and the subset of sentences that can be derived
(or ‘evolved’) from each of them. Unlike other approaches within
the then current Grammar-Translation (see chapter 10) paradigm,
Prendergast’s sentences were not graded from the simple to the more
complex. Rather, they were deliberately contrived to pack in as much
syntax as possible, the test of their usefulness being the number of less
complex sentences that could be generated from them. Supposedly,
this replicated the ‘natural’ process by which children pick up a second
language: somehow they are able to extract an entire grammar out of
the ‘chance’ sentences that they are exposed to, and without these being
graded in any significant way. How do they do this? With remarkable

­106 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

foresight, Prendergast had observed that children seem to achieve
fluency by memorizing entire sequences of words – what we would
now call chunks or constructions. They are also able to combine and
re-combine these elements in creative ways. Accordingly, Prendergast
set about trying to identify the most frequent constructions, albeit only
those that qualified as well-formed sentences. Because children are
able to derive the grammar from these constructions without explicit
instruction, Prendergast was adamant that all grammar explanation was
‘prohibited’, not only because it interfered with natural processes, but
because it was redundant. As he argued, ‘When a man has committed
to memory a few well selected sentences, each containing different
constructions, and has acquired the power of putting them together
in all their variations, one rapid perusal of the grammar will suffice to
convince him that he is already in possession of the whole syntax of the
language’ (1864).

Moreover, the vocabulary load was to be kept light – partly so as to

reduce the demands on memory (since ‘the capacity of the memory for
the retention of foreign words is universally over-estimated’), but also
because he believed that a core vocabulary was sufficient to encapsulate
the essential features of the language being studied. As he wrote (1864),
‘When a child can employ two hundred words of a foreign language
he possesses a practical knowledge of all the syntactical constructions
and of all the foreign sounds’. Accordingly, Prendergast compiled a
list of the 200 or so most frequent words in English and, although
he obviously had no access to digitalized corpora, his intuitions were
impressively accurate.

How did it work?

The learner studying alone first memorizes one of the target sentences,
for which there is a translation. For example, the first sentence in the
French course is:
Pourquois ne voulez-vous pas me faire le plaisir de passer demain avec
moi chez le frère de notre ami dans la rue Neuve? (Why will you not do
me the favour of calling on our friend’s brother in New Street with me
tomorrow?)

Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’ 107

‘Variations’ of this sentence are then supplied, e.g. Voulez-vous me
faire le plaisir? Voulez-vous le faire? Vous ne voulez pas me faire le
plaisir. Voulez-vous le faire? etc. These are to be memorized and their
recall tested by translating from their English versions (supplied on
each facing page) into French. Once one sentence and its variations
have been thoroughly learned – to the extent that they can be recalled
flawlessly and at speed – the learner moves to the next sentence: in the
French course, this translates as Do you not want to go to London
today, before your morning walk, to have your boots stretched at
the French shoemaker’s? (Authenticity was clearly not a priority for
Prendergast!) And so on, for another 13 sentences and over a thousand
variations.

Does it work?

Prendergast’s Mastery System seems to have enjoyed some degree

of success in its time and was adapted to the teaching of four other
languages as well as French, all of which ran to several editions. It was
also adopted by other writers in the design of their own courses. But it
was soon overtaken by less cerebral approaches to language learning,
notably the Direct Method (see chapter 3).
Nevertheless, in many ways, Prendergast’s system prefigured
developments in methodology that were way ahead of their time. One
of these was the use of what later came to be known as substitution
tables: i.e. tables that display the way that words and sentence elements
can be combined. Also, his belief that mastery of a limited ‘core’
of structures and vocabulary could serve as a foundation for later
proficiency contrasted with his contemporaries, for whom principles
of selection or grading were largely ignored. But perhaps most
remarkable was his insight that fluency, at least in part, results from
having a memorized store of fixed and semi-fixed formulaic utterances
– ‘Language is a tree which is propagated not by seeds, but by cuttings’
(1864) – even if he misunderstood the nature of these ‘cuttings’ – i.e.
that they typically consist, not of complete sentences, but of phrases.
Nor was it entirely clear how learners were to transition from
memorizing the pre-selected variations to creating original, meaningful
utterances of their own. Moreover, the reliance on sentences rather than
connected text, and extremely contrived sentences at that, meant that

­108 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

Prendergast’s system was unfairly lumped together with those of his
grammar-translation contemporaries.

What’s in it for us?

As a self-study method, though, the Mastery System had one saving

strength – a recognition of the value of what we now call distributed
practice, i.e. short bursts of practice distributed over increasingly
longer intervals. As Prendergast put it, ‘in learning anything by heart,
repetitions are indispensable, and the more they are distributed
throughout the day, the smaller will be the number required to
impress the foreign phrases on the memory’ (1870). To expedite this,
Prendergast recommended that learners carry around with them both
the L1 and L2 sentences, and, after first reading the latter, they should
attempt to translate the L1 sentences into the L2, unseen. Moreover, this
should be done in ‘irregular succession’, i.e. in a different order each
time.

These same principles underpin the use of vocabulary learning ‘word

cards’, whereby learners review vocabulary by translating into and out
of their L1. The principle has now been successfully digitalized and
refined, and downloadable apps, with which learners can input their
own word (or phrase) lists and regularly review them in randomized
order, are freely available and massively popular. Prendergast would
have approved.

Prendergast, T. (1864) The Mastery of Languages, or the Art of speaking Foreign Tongues
idiomatically. London: R. Bentley.

Prendergast, T. (1870) The mastery series: French (new edition). New York: Appleton
& Co.

Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’ 109

 27 Brand name Methods: Assimil,
­Michel Thomas, Pimsleur

Methods that were branded with the name of their

inventor were common in the nineteenth century, the
Ollendorf Method and the Berlitz Method being but two.
The tradition persists.

Background

‘My tailor is rich’. The first example sentence of Anglais sans peine
(‘English without toil’ 1929), in turn the first publication of the Assimil
group, has iconic status – encapsulating as it does the distinctive
style of self-study manuals, instantly recognizable to generations of
long-suffering autodidacts. Its author, Alphonse Chérel (1882–1956),
was himself an autodidact, having left his native France to work as a
private teacher in Tsarist Russia, where he learned Russian. Thence
he moved to England and then Germany, where he picked up English
and German respectively. At the time, virtually the only way to learn a
foreign language, apart from living in the country where the language
was spoken, was to attend a Berlitz-type school or get a private
teacher. Aged 46, Chérel decided to remedy the situation by producing
a calendar, on every page of which there was a short, light-hearted
English lesson for self-study. From this seed the mighty Assimil empire
was born, and it flourishes to this day.

Michel Thomas (1914–2005) was similarly motivated to exploit

his polyglot achievements, although his life was considerably more
colourful than Chérel’s. Born in Poland, he moved to France to escape
the Nazis, and then (allegedly) joined the French resistance, before
working as a spy for the US. He was frequently arrested and tortured
but attributed his survival, on more than one occasion, to his linguistic
skills. After the war he emigrated to California, where he set up a
language school in 1947. His distinctive teaching style and extravagant
claims (e.g. that conversational proficiency could be achieved after just
three intensive days’ instruction) soon attracted the attention of, among

­110 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

others, the great and good of Hollywood, including Grace Kelly, Woody
Allen and Emma Thompson. He started merchandising his approach as
a self-study course, and it is still widely marketed as the Michel Thomas
Method.

Unlike either Chérel or Thomas, Paul Pimsleur (1927–1976), had

a strong academic background, including a PhD in French, which
he taught in California, before taking up a position at Ohio State
University. There he set up the Listening Center, one of the largest
language laboratories in the U.S., where he experimented with self-
paced language teaching programmes designed according to the
prevailing audiolingual methodology. Invited to Washington D.C. in
1962 to advise on how foreign language teaching in the U.S. could
be improved, Pimsleur ‘proposed creating a self-study audio language
programme based on his own classroom methodology and his
experience with students at the Listening Center’ (Pimsleur 1980/2013).
The first course – for learning Greek – was launched in 1963; now
owned and marketed by Simon & Schuster, the Pimsleur catalogue
offers self-study courses in over 50 different languages.

How do they work?

All three methods borrow from – and perpetuate – features of the
methods that were dominant at their time of creation. But, in different
ways, they each incorporate elements that are designed to meet the
challenge of teacher-less instruction. Pre-dating Communicative
Language Teaching, the syllabuses of all three are predominantly
structural, although explicit grammar instruction is kept to a minimum:
grammar, it is assumed, will be acquired inductively simply through
exposure to, and repetition of, example sentences. In the case of Michel
Thomas, syntax is built up incrementally though the combination of
words (initially often cognates) and phrases. The vocabulary input in
all three courses is deliberately restricted, presumably so as to avoid
overload.

Texts, if they exist at all, are typically scripted dialogues. To ensure

understanding, the input in all three courses is translated into the
learner’s L1, and explanations and instructions are also provided in
the L1. Both Michel Thomas and the Pimsleur courses are purely

Brand name Methods: Assimil, ­Michel Thomas, Pimsleur 111

spoken – there is no written support. The Assimil courses, by contrast,
have an accompanying coursebook, each double-page spread divided
between the L2 and the L1 translation. They also have a curious
division into receptive and productive phases: for the first half of the
100-unit course, learners simply listen and read. Half-way through they
return to the beginning and this time translate the texts and example
sentences of each unit from their L1 into the target language.

In all three courses, interaction occurs mainly in the form of repeating

sentences on the recordings. In Pimsleur, the response time is carefully
calibrated so as to optimise the principle of spaced repetition, i.e.
successive responses are required at increasingly longer intervals. The
original Michel Thomas course is unique in that Thomas himself is
present on the audio recordings: he is heard conducting each lesson
with two students, pausing at points to elicit responses from the user.

Do they work?

Given the decades of uninterrupted sales these courses have enjoyed, it

might seem perverse to even question their effectiveness. They must be
working for somebody. Certainly, in his time Michel Thomas attracted an
almost cult-like following in Hollywood: Emma Thompson is on record
as saying that her crash course in Spanish was ‘the most extraordinary
learning experience of my life – it was unforgettable’. Of course, that was
a one-to-one course, not the self-study version. In fact, given the lack of
real interaction or point-of-need feedback in the self-study courses, it’s
hard to credit the claims made in the publicity for these courses, each
purporting to cut learning time radically, and promising the learner
enviable levels of fluency for just 30 minutes’ study a day. Because the
only feedback the learner gets is on their ability to recall by heart the
artificially limited input and not on their capacity to engage in real
communication, it may be that learners are under the illusion that they
are progressing, even if they are not. At best, these courses might provide
a foundation on which to build in subsequent immersive situations.
Users of this and similar methods attest to the confidence that is instilled
as, through regular re-playing of the recorded material, they become
‘acclimatized’ to what was initially just meaningless noise. Likewise,
the initial memorization, through repeated practice, of key words and
phrases provides a foothold into an otherwise impenetrable system.

­112 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

What’s in it for us?

The need for self-study courses is as acute as ever; the technological

means for satisfying this need have increased exponentially since the
first Assimil course was published. Many of the shortcomings of these
courses – such as the lack of opportunities for real time interaction
– could relatively easily be remedied by signing up for some sort of
language exchange, such as that offered by Conversation Exchange
(www.conversationexchange.com). Moreover, most language learning
apps (see chapter 28 Programmed Instruction: Duolingo) now include
a social networking component that allows ‘real’ interaction. Likewise,
vocabulary learning apps can be used to boost the lexical input, while
the internet, in conjunction with translation software, provides a much
richer diet of authentic texts than any of these courses presently offer.

Pimsleur, P. (1980/2013) How to learn a foreign language. New York: Pimsleur

Language Programs.

Brand name Methods: Assimil, ­Michel Thomas, Pimsleur 113

 28 Programmed Instruction: Duolingo

Digital technologies ‘atomize educational processes and

practices into a series of discrete tasks’ (Selwyn 2014).
Even before the advent of digital technologies, the
‘atomization’ of language teaching was well underway.

The background

The name B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) is inextricably linked to

behaviourist learning theory. This is the theory that learning is an effect
of behaviour change, and that behaviours can be changed by reinforcing
the preferred response to a stimulus through the provision of positive or
negative feedback. Even before the advent of the computer chip, Skinner
was quick to realize that these behaviourist principles could be executed
by mechanical means. Accordingly, he set about designing machine-
readable programmes that segmented the learning material into small
steps, where progress from one step to the next depended on a correct
response to each successive task. Not only that, the teaching machines
were, ideally at least, ‘adaptive’, in the sense that the choice of each
step was contingent on how the learner answered the preceding one,
requiring a ‘branching’ rather than a ‘linear’ program. It is only through
branching, argues Valdman (1966) that the ultimate goals of computer-
based programs can be realised: ‘complete control of the learner’s
behaviour, involving immediate and reliable feedback and adaptation to
individual learning habits at each step of the way’.

By these means, learners could (theoretically, at least) work at their

own pace and in accordance to their own learning needs. Of course, to
anticipate all the possible ‘branches’ that even one individual learner
might generate was a computational task way beyond the scope of
programmers in Skinner’s day (and, arguably, of programmers even
now). Nevertheless, the basic principles of ‘programmed instruction’
had been established, and all that was needed was to apply them to
language teaching.

­114 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

This was already being done, in a variety of languages, by the early
1950s under the name of Audio-Lingual Language Programming.
But, by the 1970s, with the demise of audiolingualism (see chapter 6),
programmed instruction – never hugely popular at the best of times –
had completely fallen out of favour. It wasn’t until the widespread use
of mobile devices, plus an exponential increase in computing power,
that programmed instruction was rehabilitated and delivered by means
of language learning apps.

One of the first of these apps to achieve global success was Duolingo,
launched in 2012 by co-founders Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker,
with the express aim of providing a language learning tool that was
free, fun to use, and effective. As in the original programmed instruction
machines, users are led from one challenge to the next. But – despite the
branching possibilities offered by digital software – the learning path is
essentially linear. In order to short-cut any stages in the lesson sequence,
a user can ‘test out’, but this is one of the very few concessions to
‘personalization’.

And, true to the Skinnerian principle of positive reinforcement,

Duolingo includes an element of ‘gamification’, i.e. design features
borrowed from computer games. Thus, Duolingo users are rewarded
(in the form of ‘lingots’) for achieving their daily targets, and are
encouraged to compete with friends, workmates, or other learners in the
‘Duolingo Clubs’.

To date Duolingo offers around 80 different courses (e.g. English for

Spanish speakers; French for German speakers etc.), and boasts millions
of registered users (although how many are regularly active users is
unknown). And – thanks to the hosting of ads – it is free, although a
fee-paying testing service has also been launched for some languages.

How does it work?

On signing in, users are presented with their learning ‘roadmap’ and
are prompted to set their own learning goals, in terms of the amount
of time they plan to study daily, and the number of points they hope to
gain (but not of what they would like to learn – there are only limited
options in terms of what they can choose to focus on within their
present level).

Programmed Instruction: Duolingo 115

By means of multiple matching tasks (e.g. of words with pictures), reading
aloud tasks (evaluated by voice recognition software), and the translating
of short sentences, they are led through a series of tasks that are
organised into a gamified ‘skill tree’ that targets the learning of a specific
grammatical structure or a lexical set. As the website says, ‘language
is split into bite-size skills that feel like games’ (Duolingo). Meaning is
conveyed by translation, or, in the case of vocabulary, pictures, and there
are no explicit grammar rules, although feedback on incorrect answers
often includes a brief explanation. Learners are rewarded once they have
completed all the exercises associated with the specific ‘skill’. They are
also presented with graphic feedback on their strengths and weaknesses,
and prompted to work on the latter. In this sense, the methodology is
essentially a streamlined version of programmed learning, the difference
being that sophisticated algorithms recycle the learning content at
intervals that are calibrated to maximise memorization, on the principle
of ‘spaced repetition’. But the object, as with programmed learning, is
‘complete control of the learner’s behaviour’.

More recently, Duolingo has incorporated a ‘chatbot’ feature for some

languages: learners interact with the program to role-play a situation,
e.g. ordering a meal in a restaurant, by keying in their responses to
the pre-programmed ‘waiter’. The program accepts a limited range of
responses, but rejects any response that is grammatically incorrect or
contextually inappropriate.

Does it work?

While Duolingo cites a research study that shows that 34 hours of

Duolingo is the equivalent of one whole semester of university-level
language instruction, there is little if any independent investigation
into its effectiveness. Like many digital self-study tools, Duolingo has
been criticised for its ‘old-fashioned’, somewhat mechanical approach,
including its narrow focus on discrete-items of grammar, its reliance on
de-contextualized sentences, and the built-in assumption that accuracy
is a prerequisite for fluency. Moreover, its contrived language examples
undermine any claims to be authentic or even accurate. Nor are there
opportunities for creative language use, nor real (i.e. human-to-human)
interaction. All this suggests that Duolingo (and similar apps) might work
best to complement, rather than substitute for, ‘live’ learning in classrooms.

­116 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

What’s in it for us?

Apart from being free, what, then, explains Duolingo’s phenomenal

success? As well as its attractive and user-friendly interface, users
invariably highlight the built-in motivation provided by the gamification
software, and the sense of immediate gratification that this supplies:
as the website boasts, ‘it’s addictive!’. They also value the element
of surprise, in not quite knowing what type of exercise they will be
served next, while at the same time appreciating the spaced repetition
of tasks that maximises their memorability. And, of course, there is its
portability and the fact that the learner can brush up whenever they
have a spare moment, wherever they are.

But the real takeaway is doubtlessly the sense that learners get that they
are constantly and incrementally improving – improvement that they
can attribute to their own agency, given that they set their own learning
targets. The system is oriented towards success at every step.

Duolingo: https://www.duolingo.com/

Selwyn, N. (2014) Distrusting educational technology. London: Routledge.

Valdmann, A. (1966) Programmed instruction and foreign language teaching. In

Valdmann, A. (ed.) Trends in language teaching. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Programmed Instruction: Duolingo 117

 29 Online Polyglots

Key the word ‘polyglot’ into an internet search engine

and you will be inundated with links to websites or
videos in which individuals who have achieved success in
a number of languages both demonstrate their linguistic
achievements and offer advice to other, potential polyglots.

Background

Benny Lewis, for example, is a typical case: a failed classroom learner,

he opted for immersion and self-instruction, using a variety of online
and print sources, and now speaks ‘over a dozen languages’. Like
Lewis, many of the ‘professional’ (and predominantly male) polyglots
are self-taught. Those that do attend formal classes typically reinforce
classroom instruction with a great deal of extra-curricular and self-
initiated practice. And, for many, formal study, whether curricular or
extra-curricular, is often combined with a period spent living in a place
where the language is spoken.

The experience of learning several languages has given many the

confidence to recommend – if not a method as such – at least certain
strategies that predict success. As a consequence, some have developed
self-help guides, learning materials, and entire language courses.
There are now so many of these self-taught polyglots that hundreds
of them meet annually at conferences in both North America and
Europe. Significantly, perhaps, few have any academic background
in educational theory or in linguistics, and seldom if ever reference
the literature on SLA in their blog posts. This apparent indifference
is mutual: despite their often extraordinary achievements, self-taught
polyglots are virtually ignored in the SLA research literature.

How does it work?

While each online polyglot has a slightly different approach to language

learning, conditioned as it is by their very different life stories and

­118 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

learning trajectories, there are enough commonalities to constitute what
could be considered a generic ‘self-help’ method. Based on these shared
principles, this ‘über-method’ might best be characterized as nativist,
communicatively-oriented and socially-constructed.

It is nativist in the sense that the default model of language acquisition

is the child learning his or her mother tongue, i.e. a naturalistic and
immersive one. As Lewis (2014), puts it, ‘the way to learn a language
is to live it’. Hence, there is often a blanket rejection of procedures
associated with formal language learning, such as studying grammar
rules, rote learning and (to a lesser extent) translation. As Donovan
Nagel argues, ‘you didn’t become a fluent speaker of your own language
by studying its grammar’ (The Mezzofanti guild). Indeed, there is a
built-in assumption that most formal instruction still follows grammar-
translation principles.

By contrast, today’s autodidacts are communicatively oriented, and

promote a ‘fluency-first’ approach. ‘Speak from day 1’ is Lewis’s slogan.
Or, as Anthony Lauder puts it (quoted on The Polyglot Dream website),
‘fluency is not an end goal, but a springboard from which you can
keep getting better and better’. This may mean sacrificing accuracy
and ‘embracing a little imperfection’, in Lewis’s words. It also means
adopting a risk-taking strategy and a ‘willingness to communicate’.
As a foothold into fluency, many recommend memorizing some high-
frequency phrases, although only a few (e.g. Nagel) acknowledge the
central role of prefabricated ‘chunks’ in developing overall proficiency.

Most, if not all, autodidacts foreground the social function of language

and the belief that acquisition is socially constructed. As Lindsay Dow
argues, ‘it’s a common truth by now that we need human interaction to
communicate well in a language’. Lewis (op. cit.) suggests that social
interaction is not only necessary but sufficient:
We keep trying to find language solutions through courses, software,
apps, flights abroad, books, schools, and a host of other methods,
some of which can be useful, but these are nothing but accessories to
the true core of language-learning: the people we speak with and hear.

For many, this is what motivates them, i.e. contact with other people
and cultures: language learning and travel are inextricably connected.

Online Polyglots 119

Less weight is given to the development of literacy skills, and it is
generally accepted that pronunciation, while important, need not be
native-like so long as it is intelligible – although some, like Gabriel
Wyner (2014) would dispute this: ‘An accurate accent is powerful
because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy’.

Perhaps of most significance are the learning strategies that these

polyglots enlist, especially for vocabulary acquisition. These include
the use of word cards (or their digital equivalent), spaced repetition, a
reliance on cognates (at least initially), contextualization, and mnemonic
techniques, such as associating words with memorable images. Other
form-focused strategies that are mentioned are: shadowing (i.e. listening
to a recording and sub-vocalizing at the same time), transcribing
spoken language, and reverse translation (i.e. translating a text from L2
into L1 and then back again, unseen). Unlike the promoters of Brand
name methods, autodidacts acknowledge that language learning takes
a good deal of time and concentrated effort: for example, Alexander
Arguelles, a ‘hyper-polyglot’, attributes his phenomenal success to ‘drive,
discipline, countless hours of systematic hard work, sustained interest
and motivation, access to good materials and intelligent methods and
procedures for using them’.

Nevertheless, the experience of learning several languages has taught

polyglots how to cut corners, and even ‘fake it’. As Richard Simcott puts
it, ‘that doesn’t mean that [we] are fakes. It simply means that [we] can
get by on far less … we learn to be fluent with what we’ve got’.

Does it work?

If we take them at their word, these polyglots have achieved impressive

– in some cases, superhuman – feats of language learning. It has clearly
worked for them, especially when combined with immersion in the target
language community. What none of them mentions, however, is aptitude,
i.e. an innate talent for language learning. Research suggests that
aptitude is not evenly distributed across populations. Notwithstanding,
many of these polyglots are insistent that there is no bar, including age,
to achieving fluency in at least one other language. Nevertheless, their
up-beat optimism and questionable claims need to be tempered with a
little caution: some people are just not good language learners.

­120 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

What’s in it for us?

What stands out from all these accounts is these learners’ agency –
in the sense that they are the instigators and managers of their own
learning. This is reflected in their choice of learning strategies: the
metacognitive, such as the way they set realistic and achievable goals,
and the way they actively seek out the best technological aids for their
purposes; the cognitive, such as their choice of vocabulary learning
techniques, or the deliberate attention given to form; and the social,
such as setting up conversation exchanges, either on-line or face-to-
face, or finding a ‘buddy’ to share their learning experiences with. These
learners have really learned how to learn. Their combined wisdom,
in the form of proven learning strategies, along with their infectious
enthusiasm for language learning, is worth sharing with classroom
learners.

Arguelles, A. http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/

Dow, L. http://www.lindsaydoeslanguages.com/

Lewis, B. (2014) Fluent in 3 months: Tips and techniques to help you learn any language.
London: HarperCollins.

The Mezzofanti Guild http://www.mezzoguild.com/

Simcott, R. http://speakingfluently.com/

The polyglot dream: http://www.thepolyglotdream.com

Wyner, G. (2014) Fluent forever: How to learn any language fast and never forget it.
New York: Harmony.

Online Polyglots 121

 F: Beyond methods

Although methods were declared dead

in the 1990s, the method concept
still persists, even if only as a kind of
smorgasbord from which teachers
can pick and choose, tailoring their
methodology to their particular context.
That is to say that, even in the absence of
methods, mindful teachers still go about
their work ‘methodically’.

30 Principled Eclecticism

­122 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

 Principled Eclecticism 30

Twenty-nine methods and still counting: what are we

to make of this steady drip-feed – sometimes a tsunami
– of methods? Why are there so many, and how is the
practising teacher to choose between them?

Background

One reason for the plethora of methods is that we still do not know
everything there is to know about how people learn languages – whether
their first language or an additional one. The study of second language
acquisition (SLA) is a relatively new field (as scientific fields go). While
we are much better informed than we were half a century ago, there
are still some key questions over which there is a great deal of debate.
These include:

1. To what extent is SLA like first language acquisition?

2. To what extent does SLA involve conscious vs. unconscious learning
processes?
3. Why do learners make mistakes?
4. How do you become fluent?
5. Why do some learners do better than others?

As new research findings come to light, and new theories are

generated to explain them, old methods adapt or new methods are
invented to take account of these developments. The Lexical Approach
(see chapter 11), for example, was largely influenced by insights from
the study of language corpora. And Task-based Language Teaching
(see chapter 16) draws heavily on research into cognition. On the
other hand, research seldom yields findings that are 100 percent
conclusive. This means that any methods that derive from research are
themselves liable to be discredited.

Another reason for the proliferation of methods is the diversity of

learning situations. People learn languages as children, as teens, and as

Principled Eclecticism 123

adults. They learn them in their home country or in places where the
language is spoken. They learn them intensively or part-time. They learn
them in classrooms or in the street or by means of their mobile phones.
They learn them for pleasure, for study, for work, for travel – or none
of the above. Arguably, different methods cater better than others for
different combinations of these variables.

Yet another reason for the emergence of so many methods might simply
be fashion – or, put another way – ideology. Methods, it has been argued,
are never disinterested: they embody particular views about the nature of
mind, of language, of education, and of society – and the interconnections
between all four. As beliefs and attitudes change, the need arises for new
methods that enshrine these new beliefs. A case in point is the Direct
Method (see chapter 3) which represented a shift from the view of
language-as-cultural-object to one of language-as-transaction. Likewise,
the Communicative Approach (see chapter 15) was the method that best
reflected the drive towards the social reconstruction of post-war Europe.

Finally, methods have generally developed hand-in-hand with specific

technologies, so as technologies evolve, so too do methods: ‘gamification’
(i.e. using features of computer game design to enhance educational
software) is just one instance of this. Methods are also designed, it has to
be admitted, for purely commercial reasons: a method, after all, is often
a vehicle for the teaching materials, technologies and specialized training
that can be marketed to support it. Certain branded methods are liable
to this charge. Language teaching is big business, after all, and, like all
businesses, it attracts its fair share of entrepreneurs.

How, then, is the teacher to choose?

Sometimes teachers have no choice: the institution or education

authority that they work for tries to impose a method. Or, because
they are at the outset of their career, some teachers prefer the security
of a single ‘teach-by-numbers’ method. In either case, the challenge is
to find what it is about the method that can be exploited to maximize
learning, while (if possible) rejecting those aspects of it that are simply
implausible.

Some teachers reject the method concept entirely, holding the view that
methods are prescriptive, inflexible and insensitive to local conditions.

­124 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

They may subscribe to what has been called the ‘post-method condition’
which, in turn, is associated with postmodernism and its rejection of
the idea of universalist, objective knowledge and of ‘one-size-fits-all’
solutions to complex problems.

On the other hand, even postmodern teachers need to make decisions

about syllabus, materials and classroom procedures. Chances are they
will borrow from existing methods in ways that are consistent with
their beliefs and their understanding of the local context. In that sense
they are adopting what has been called ‘principled eclecticism’: ‘They
are in effect creating their own method by blending aspects of others
in a principled manner’ (Larsen-Freeman 2000). The idea is not new:
as long ago as 1899, Henry Sweet (1899/1964) argued that ‘a good
method must, before all, be comprehensive and eclectic. It must be
based on a thorough knowledge of the science of language’.

How does it work?

As this book has attempted to show, most methods have worked for
someone, somewhere and at least some of the time. Hence, every
method worth its name has something to offer the resourceful teacher.
A number of allegedly effective classroom and self-study procedures
have been mentioned in passing, including text memorization, reverse
translation, ‘shadowing’, reading aloud, and contrastive analysis.
But there is a difference between, on the one hand, simply stringing
a sequence of borrowed techniques together in a somewhat random
fashion, and, on the other, choosing those techniques which are
consistent with a coherent theory of language learning. That is the
difference, in short, between eclecticism and principled eclecticism. It is
not the case, then, that ‘anything goes’. At the very least, the principled
teacher should be able to respond to the question ‘Why did you do
that?’ with an answer that is grounded in some understanding of
language, of language learning, and of the language learning context.

Does it work?

For some scholars, eclecticism – whether principled or not – has a bad

name. H.H. Stern (1983), for example, writes: ‘In my view, eclecticism
does not recognize the fundamental weaknesses in the method concept
as such, nor does it offer any guidance on what basis and by what

Principled Eclecticism 125

principles aspects of different methods can be selected and combined’.
In similar vein, Jack Richards (1990) argues that the teacher’s focus
should not be ‘on the search for the best method, but rather on the
circumstances and conditions under which more effective teaching and
learning are accomplished’. He puts the case for a ‘process-oriented
methodology’ in which teachers become investigators of their own
classrooms. Such an approach, however, does not seem incompatible
with principled eclecticism, if the principles that underpin the
eclecticism are derived from the teacher’s own exploratory practices.

What’s in it for us?

In the end, all methods are eclectic, in the sense that they borrow from,
build on, and recycle aspects of other methods. Our understanding
of how and why this happens, and of how these same processes of
appropriation and reconfiguration impact on our own teaching, is part
of our ongoing professional development.

Advancing that understanding has been the purpose of this book. I hope
that, in some small measure, this objective has been met.

Larsen-Freeman, D. (2000) Techniques and principles in language teaching (2nd edition).

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Richards, J. (1990) The language teaching matrix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stern, H.H. (1983) Fundamental concepts of language teaching. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Sweet, H. (1899/1964) The practical study of languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

­126 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

Index
Accelerated learning 90 Brown, Roger 12
Accountability, Competency-based Brumfit, C. 79
Teaching 70–71 Burton, Sir Richard 102–103, 104
Accuracy
audiolingual method 25 Canadian Immersion Program 76–79
Communicative Language Teaching 61, Chérel, Alphonse 110
63 China, memorization 36–38
Crazy English 98 Chomsky, Noam 24, 47
Duolingo 116 CLT (Communicative Language Teaching)
grammar-translation method 41 34, 60–63
oral method 17 Code-switching 53
see also error correction Coleman, Algernon 18
Acquisition, meaning of 7, 9 Collins COBUILD English Course 44
Agency 121 Commodification of learning 70
Alexander, Louis 57 Common European Framework of
Allwright, Dick 64 Reference (CEFR) 68–70
Applied linguistics 16 Communicative competence 60, 63
Aptitude, polyglots 120–121 Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
Arguelles, Alexander 120 34, 60–63
Asher, James 27, 29 Communicative methods 55
Assessment, Competency-based Teaching Communicative Language Teaching
70–71 60–63
Assimil courses 110, 112 Competency-based Teaching 68–71
Associationism 11 Content-based Instruction 76–79
Audiolingual method 22–25 Dogme/teaching unplugged 80–83
Crazy English 98 Situational Approach 56–59
memorization 36 Task-based Language Teaching 64–67
programmed instruction 115 Whole Language Learning 72–75
Rassias method 98 Community language learning 85–88
situational language teaching 58 Comparative linguistics 102
total physical response 28 see also contrastive linguistics
Audio-visual method 57 Comparative method 51–54
Auerbach, E. 70 Competency-based Teaching 68–71
Autodidacts 118–121 Comprehensible input 8, 17, 20, 44
Automatism, oral method 16, 17 Content and language integrated learning
(CLIL) 76–77, 78
Bangalore Project 64, 65–66 Content-based Instruction 76–79
Behaviourist learning theory 114 Contrastive analysis 51–54
Berlitz, Maximilian 10–12 Contrastive linguistics 22
Berlitz Method 11–13, 110 see also comparative linguistics
Beyond methods 122–126 Cook, Guy 41
Billows, Lionel 56, 57 Corder, Pit 56
Bloomfield, Leonard 22 Council of Europe Modern Languages
Boers, F. 45 Project 61
Brand name methods 110–113 Crazy English 97–100
Breen, Michael 80, 87 Cuisenaire rods 93, 94–95
Brown, H. D. 60 Curran, Charles 85–86, 87–88

Index 127
Declarative knowledge 105 Grammar
Digital learning Communicative Language Teaching
Duolingo 114–117 61–62
online polyglots 118–121 explication de texte 33
social networking 88, 113 natural methods 3–4, 8
word cards 109 total physical response 28
Direct method 10–13 Grammar-translation method 31, 39–42
Distributed practice 109 Greene, Graham 10
Diversity, learning situations 123–124
Dogme approach 80–83 Halliday, Michael 48
Dow, Lindsay 119 Harder, Peter 97
Dual-language method 51–54 Hawthorne effect 95
Duolingo 114–117 Heyworth, F. 71
Holt, John 95
Eclecticism 125–126 Hymes, Dell 60
English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses
49–50 Imitation
English-medium instruction (EMI) 76–77 audiolingual method 23, 24–25
Error correction natural approach 7–8
Crazy English 98, 99 oral method 15
natural methods 8, 17 situational language teaching 58
Silent Way 95 Immersion
see also accuracy content-based instruction 76–78
Exams, Competency-based Teaching 70–71 total 2–5
Explication de texte 31–34 see also natural methods
Extensive reading 20 Imperative drill 15, 26–27
see also total physical response
Fashions, learning methods 124 Implicit learning
Firth, J. R. 43 oral method 16–17
Form focus Suggestopedia 91
Task-based Language Teaching 65–66 India, Bangalore Project 64, 65–66
whole language learning 74–75 Innate ability, polyglots 120–121
Freinet, Célestin 72, 75 Instructional conversations 8
Fried, Vilém 52–54 Internet see digital learning
Fries, C. 23
Functional approaches Jacotot, Jean Joseph 33, 36
Communicative Language Teaching
60–63 Kramsch, Claire 96
comparative method 52 Krashen, Stephen
systemic functional linguistics 48 acquisition 7
text-based instruction 47 comprehensible input 20, 44
Suggestopedia 91
Gamification 115, 117, 124 whole language learning 74
Gattegno, Caleb 93–96
Generative situations 58 Lado, Robert 22, 24, 51–52
Genre-based instruction 47–50 Lauder, Anthony 119
Global Scale of English (GSE) 69 Learning by heart see memorization
Gouin, François 26 Learning situations 123–124
Gradation, oral method 16 Lewis, Benny 118, 119

­128 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods

Lewis, Michael 43–46 Online polyglots 118–121
Lexical approach 43–46 Oral method 14–17, 57
Lexical chunks 16 Oral skills see speaking skills
Lindstromberg, Seth 45 Orientalists 102–105
Linguistic methods 30
comparative method 51–54 Palmer, Harold
explication de texte 31–34 imperative drill 15, 26–27
grammar-translation 31, 39–42 memorization 35, 43
lexical approach 43–46 oral method 14–16
text memorization 35–38 Palmer method 14–16
text-based instruction 47–50 Pattern practice drill 24–25
Literacy skills Philology 102
online polyglots 120 Phonics 73
reading method 18–20 Pimsleur, Paul 111
text-based instruction 48 Pimsleur courses 111–113
total immersion 4–5 Polyglots 118–121
whole language learning 72–73 Post-method condition 125
Locke, John 6 Postmodernism 125
Long, Michael, H. 65 PPP (presentation-practice-production)
Lozanov, Georgi 89–90 lesson structure 58, 62
Prabhu, N. S. 64–65, 66
Malinowski, Bronislaw 56 Prague School 52
‘Mastery’ system, Prendergast 106–109 Prendergast, Thomas 36, 106–109
Memorization 35–38 Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’ 106–109
Crazy English 98–99 Principled Eclecticism 123–126
lexical approach 43 Proceduralized knowledge 105
Prendergast’s ‘Mastery’ system 106–109 Programmed instruction 114–117
Michel Thomas Method 110–112 Prussian Method see grammar-translation
Mim-mem Method 23, 36 method
see also audiolingual method Psychological laws, Bertlitz Method
Mitchell, T. F. 48 11
Multi-level learning 90
Rassias, John 97–100
Natural methods Rassias method 97–100
approach and rationale 6–9 Rattigan, Terrence 89
audiolingual method 22–25 Ravitch, Diane 70
direct method 10–13 Reading aloud 19–20, 31, 105, 116
oral method 14–17 Reading method 18–21, 22
reading method 18–21 Reform Movement 10, 11, 18
Silent Way 93–94 Reverse translation 120
total immersion 2–5 Richards, Jack 126
total physical response 26–29 Robertson, T. 32
Naturalistic learning 3, 6 Rote-learning see memorization
Nelson, Marie Wilson 73–74, 75
Neuroimaging 91–92 Sauveur, Lambert
Neurolinguistic programming (NLP) 90 comparison to direct method 11, 12
natural method 7–8
Ollendorf Method 110 Scaffolding, oral method 17
Online learning see digital learning Schliemann, Heinrich 103

Index 129
Self-study methods 101 Total immersion plus 3–4
brand name methods 110–113 Total physical response (TPR) 15, 26–29
online polyglots 118–121 Translanguaging pedagogy 53
orientalists 102–105 Translation
Prendergast’s ‘Mastery System’ 106–109 audiolingual method 23
programmed instruction 114–117 comparative method 52–53, 54
social networking 113 contrast to direct method 11–12, 13,
Series method (total physical response) 19, 23
26–29 explication de texte 31–32, 33
Shadowing 120 grammar-translation method 31, 39–42
Silent period, total physical response online polyglots 120
26–27, 28–29 oral method 15, 16
Silent Way 93–96 Prendergast’s ‘Mastery’ system 106–109
Simcott, Richard 120 Suggestopedia 91
Sinclair, John 43
Situational language teaching 56–59 Usage-based theory of language acquisition
see also Task-based Language Teaching 45–46
Skills acquisition theory 105
Skinner, B. F. 114 Valdman, A. 114
Social networking Vámbéry, Ármin 102, 103–104
community language learning 88 Visionaries 84
self-study methods 113 community language learning 85–88
South Korea, memorization 35 Crazy English & the Rassias method
Speaking skills 97–100
natural approach 6–8 Silent Way 93–96
oral method 14–16 Suggestopedia 89–92
reading method 19–20 Vocabulary
total immersion 2–5 Competency-based Teaching 69–70
Stern, H. H. 125–126 content-based instruction 77
Stevick, Earl 92 lexical approach 43–46
Substitution tables 108 online polyglots 120
Suggestopedia 89–92 Prendergast’s ‘Mastery’ system 107, 108,
Super learning 90 109
Sweet, Henry 11, 104, 125 Silent Way 95
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) 48 von Trier, Lars 80

Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) Whole language learning 49, 72–75

64–67, 82 Wilkins, David 61
Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Willis, Dave 64
Storytelling (TPRS) 28 Willis, Jane 66
Teaching unplugged 80–83 Woolf, Virginia 43
Terrell, Tracy 7 Word cards 109
Testing, Competency-based Teaching 70–71 Word frequency, reading method 18–19
Text explication/analysis see explication Word-groups 16
de texte see also lexical chunks
Text memorization see memorization Wu, Zhou 85
Text-based instruction 47–50 Wyner, Gabriel 119
Thomas, Michel 110–112
Tooke, John Horne 40 Yang, Li 97–100
Total immersion 2–5

­130 Scott Thornbury’s 30 Language Teaching Methods