Lecture 1. Тақырыбы: Psychological content of foreign languages teaching and its relationship with psycholinguistics, psychology and pedagogy

1 9th–20th century

Innovation in foreign language teaching began in the 19th century and became very rapid in the 20th century. It led to a number of different and sometimes conflicting methods, each trying to be a major improvement over the previous or contemporary methods. The earliest applied linguists included Jean Manesca, Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff (1803–1865), Henry Sweet (1845–1912), Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), and Harold Palmer (1877–1949). They worked on setting language teaching principles and approaches based on linguistic and psychological theories, but they left many of the specific practical details for others to devise.

Those looking at the history of foreign-language education in the 20th century and the methods of teaching (such as those related below) might be tempted to think that it is a history of failure. Very few students in U.S. universities who have a foreign language as a major manage to reach something called "minimum professional proficiency". Even the "reading knowledge" required for a PhD degree is comparable only to what second-year language students read and only very few researchers who are native English speakers can read and assess information written in languages other than English. Even a number of famous linguists are monolingual.

However, anecdotal evidence for successful second or foreign language learning is easy to find, leading to a discrepancy between these cases and the failure of most language programs, which helps make the research of second language acquisition emotionally charged. Older methods and approaches such as the grammar translation method or the direct method are dismissed and even ridiculed as newer methods and approaches are invented and promoted as the only and complete solution to the problem of the high failure rates of foreign language students.

Most books on language teaching list the various methods that have been used in the past, often ending with the author's new method. These new methods are usually presented as coming only from the author's mind, as the authors generally give no credence to what was done before and do not explain how it relates to the new method. For example, descriptive linguists seem to claim unhesitatingly that there were no scientifically-based language teaching methods before their work (which led to the audio-lingual method developed for the U.S. Army in World War II). However, there is significant evidence to the contrary. It is also often inferred or even stated that older methods were completely ineffective or have died out completely when even the oldest methods are still used (e.g. the Berlitz version of the direct method). One reason for this situation is that proponents of new methods have been so sure that their ideas are so new and so correct that they could not conceive that the older ones have enough validity to cause controversy. This was in turn caused by emphasis on new scientific advances, which has tended to blind researchers to precedents in older work.

There have been two major branches in the field of language learning; the empirical and theoretical, and these have almost completely separate histories, with each gaining ground over the other at one point in time or another. Examples of researchers on the empiricist side are Jesperson, Palmer, and Leonard Bloomfield, who promote mimicry and memorization with pattern drills. These methods follow from the basic empiricist position that language acquisition basically results from habits formed by conditioning and drilling. In its most extreme form, language learning is seen as basically the same as any other learning in any other species, human language being essentially the same as communication behaviors seen in other species.

On the theoretical side are, for example, Francois Gouin, M.D. Berlitz, and Elime de Sauzé, whose rationalist theories of language acquisition dovetail with linguistic work done by Noam Chomsky and others. These have led to a wider variety of teaching methods ranging from the grammar-translation method to Gouin's "series method" to the direct methods of Berlitz and de Sauzé. With these methods, students generate original and meaningful sentences to gain a functional knowledge of the rules of grammar. This follows from the rationalist position that man is born to think and that language use is a uniquely human trait impossible in other species. Given that human languages share many common traits, the idea is that humans share a universal grammar which is built into our brain structure. This allows us to create sentences that we have never heard before but that can still be immediately understood by anyone who understands the specific language being spoken. The rivalry of the two camps is intense, with little communication or cooperation between them.

Rahmanov I.V., one of the leading researchers in history of methods of teaching foreign languages points out that “ the most ancient and at the same time the most primitive method of teaching foreign languages was natural method, which was called “the method of governess”. Through the history of teaching foreign languages a lot of different methods changed each other, excluding and supplementing each other, but the principle about ambiguity, difficulty and spottiness of this process formulated by great didactics John Amos Comeniusand I.G. Pestalocij is actual till nowadays. Disterverg considered the learner as the subject of education process and he put the educational subject on the second place, said that its particularity must be taken into account completely.

All scientists who deal with teaching foreign languages emphasize that in teaching foreign languages importance of the teacher’s professional language competence, factors of accounting of educational subject’s particularities and individual peculiarities of learners, especially motivation in learning foreign languages are equal. The process of teaching foreign languages consists of three equal components:

- the teacher and his professional skills;

- the learner and his aspiration;

- the subject which learner must acquire.

It is natural that in psychological-pedagogical analyses of education we must consider factors-components mentioned above. Thereupon in our opinion important factors and components of educational system are – psychological particularities of foreign language teachers; psychological peculiarities of learners of various age stages; psychological features of foreign language as educational subject; psychological analysis of speech activity as an object of mastering; pupil’s educational activity in the process of learning foreign languages and the form of education.

Speaking about the factors which influence on successful learning foreign language it is necessary to note a close connection of psychology of teaching foreign language with psychological and pedagogical disciplines, particularly, with pedagogical psychology. All mentioned factors and components of education are the research subject of pedagogical psychology.