Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

particular aspect available online; the more general pages are not signalled every
time they might be useful.
1.2 Common assumptions of language teaching
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Answer the questionnaire in Box 1.1 to find out your assumptions about 
language teaching.
Focusing question
first language
: chronologically the first language that a child learns
second language
: ‘A language acquired by a person in addition to his mother
tongue’ (UNESCO)
native speaker
: a person who still speaks the language they learnt in childhood,
often seen as monolingual
Glosses on names of teaching methods are provided at the end of the chapter.
Explanations of keywords throughout the book are available in the keyword
glossary on the website.
Keywords

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During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a revolution took place that
affected much of the language teaching used in the twentieth century. The revolt
was primarily against the stultifying methods of grammatical explanation and
translation of texts which were then popular. (In this chapter we will use ‘method’
in the traditional way to describe a particular way of teaching, with its own tech-
niques and tasks; Chapter 13 replaces this with the word ‘style’.) In its place, the
pioneers of the new language teaching, such as Henry Sweet and Otto Jespersen,
emphasized the spoken language and the naturalness of language learning, and
insisted on the importance of using the second language in the classroom rather
than the first (Howatt, 2004). These beliefs are largely still with us today, either
explicitly instilled into teachers or just taken for granted. The questionnaire in
Box 1.1 tests the extent to which the reader actually believes in four of these com-
mon assumptions.
If you agreed with most of the statements in Box 1.1, then you share the com-
mon assumptions of teachers over the past 120 years. Let us consider them in
more detail.
Common assumptions of language teaching