History of Englsih Language

Teaching English as a Foreign Language. This term is predominantly used when English is being taught in a country where it isn’t the native language (for example teaching English to Spanish people in Spain).

For various historical and economic reasons, English has become the dominant language of the world in the twenty-first century. English is the language of science, air traffic control, and tourism, the Internet and to a very large extent of trade and export. According to the British Council at least one billion people speak or are trying to speak English at the present time and of those about 300 million people are actively studying the English language.

TEACHING METHODS AND TEACHER & LEARNER ROLES

Method Teacher Roles Learner Roles Situational Language Teaching Context SetterError Corrector ImitatorMemorizer Audio-lingualism Language ModelerDrill Leader Pattern PracticerAccuracy Enthusiast Communicative Language Teaching Needs AnalystTask Designer ImprovisorNegotiator Total Physical Response CommanderAction Monitor Order TakerPerformer Community Language Learning CounselorParaphraser CollaboratorWhole Person The Natural Approach ActorProps User GuesserImmerser Suggestopedia Auto-hypnotistAuthority Figure RelaxerTrue-Believer

History of English language teaching

In the Western world back in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, foreign language learning was associated with the learning of Latin and Greek, both supposed to promote their speakers' intellectuality. At the time, it was of vital importance to focus on grammatical rules, syntactic structures, along with rote memorization of vocabulary and translation of literary texts. There was no provision for the oral use of the languages under study; after all, both Latin and Greek were not being taught for oral communication but for the sake of their speakers' becoming "scholarly?" or creating an illusion of "erudition." Late in the nineteenth century, the Classical Method came to be known as the Grammar Translation Method, which offered very little beyond an insight into the grammatical rules attending the process of translating from the second to the native language.

The Grammar Translation Method The Grammar Translation Method dominated FLT in the 19th century and in some respects continues to be influential in FLT up to this day. Proponents of this method believe that learning a foreign language is achieved through the constant and fast translation of sentences from the target language into the learner’s first language and vice versa. Correct translations of written texts require (a) knowledge of a vast amount of vocabulary, and (b) knowledge of rules of grammar, which allow learners to analyse and understand the construction of target language sentences, thus preventing their misinterpretation. Word by word translations were popular because by them students could demonstrate that they understood the grammatical construction underlying a specific sentence.

It is typical of this approach, therefore, to place emphasis on the rote memory learning of long lists of bilingual �vocabulary equations’, and on the learning of explicit rules of grammar, frequently in form of tables for the declension and conjugation of nouns and verbs. In the eyes of proponents of the Grammar Translation Method vocabulary learning required diligence and the analysis of the grammatical construction of sentences required intelligence. Learners who failed to do translations correctly where therefore blamed for being either not intelligent or lazy or both. In any case, errors were to not be tolerated. And because many people feel, up to this day, that learning a foreign language means learning to translate sentences from the mother tongue into