Teacher Classroom Practices: Redefining Method as Task Hierarchy

Abstract

a foreign language teacher questionnaire on classroom practices. 1 This questionnaire was administered in conjunction with a performance study designed to contrast the classroom implementation of rationalist and empiricist approaches to foreign language instruction. The questionnaire under discussion produced an admixture of distinctive and non-distinctive responses. When we attempted to identify the features which led to the relative success or failure of our items, we uncovered as well the criteria which distinguished the two approaches. In seeking to quantify attitudes about these two approaches to language teaching, we identified fundamental task hierarchies which distinguished them. Therefore, in the analysis of our data, we identify the problems presented by inconclusive items in order to illustrate the essential differences in the two teaching philosophies which contrasting items revealed. We underscore the importance of the assessment of actual curricular practices in any methodological comparison and go on to suggest the implications of our analysis for future foreign language research. HISTORYSince the decision during World War I1 to orient foreign language instruction toward production rather than grammar-translation skills, numerous methods have emerged, all of which have promised to produce superior results. Extensive testing under a variety of constraints has led to inconclusive results which obscure rather than clarify inherent strengths and weaknesses of different methodologies.One consistent problem is whether or not teachers involved in presenting materials created for a particular method are actually reflecting the underlying philosophies of these Modrm h g u a g e Journal, 66 (Spring 1982): 24-33 methods in their classroom practice. The perception of this problem is of recent date. Only within the last decade has the profession realized that two fundamental philosophies govern foreign language education. Various methods -cognitive code, audio-lingual, structural, total physical response, communicative competence -can be grouped under one or the other of these approaches.The view which arose with World War 11, the empiricisthkills approach which assumes that language learning is the result of behavior and largely conditioned responses, contrasts sharply with the rationalist/process approach, which asserts that language learning is primarily the result of critical thinking and that it springs from the desire to communicate. Diller points out that neither approach has total jurisdiction over a particular method, but within general parameters, we assume that materials and methods which are predicated on the notion of four discrete language skillslistening, speaking, reading, and writingare largely empiricist in nature. Those approaches which see language learning as a function of comprehension preceding production and view all aspects of language learning -speech production, reading comprehension, and the likeas part of an interrelated whole can be designated as rationalist, a processoriented appr...

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“…Thus, at the beginning of the 1960s we find extensive elaboration of the basic premises, practices, and specific ways of talking about our work in three areas: (a) materials development whose products, however, are not published in the pages of the MLJ; (b) an expansive and increasingly more solid methodological edifice, which in some fashion is validated by the repeated methods comparison studies, no matter what their results (Aleamoni & Spencer, 1969;Chastain, 1970;Chastain & Woerdehoff, 1968;Clark, 1969;Swaffar, Arens, & Morgan, 1982); and (c) assessment practices that critically depend on the centrality of linguistic rules and their accurate application in forms as indicators of language acquisition. The role of assessment is all the more noteworthy because it breaks the boundaries of classroom practice, reaching into national standardized testing of individuals based on psychometric principles, and targets the assessment of program outcomes as well as teacher competence, all with enormous washback effects in their respective areas based on their specific construal of what constitutes the criteria for measuring quality of performance.…”