The Practice-theory-gap

In language teaching, as in other fields of education, it is common to discuss a gap between theory and practice. On one hand we may ask how research findings can be made accessible to language teachers and integrated into curricula. On the other, we might wonder how what occurs in language classrooms and in the heads of language learners can best be accounted for by theories of language learning and teaching. The bridging of this gap is often viewed as a need to bring teaching into line with theory, which may be referred to as science, methodology, or research in different contexts at various times. However, as the grounded histories in the present volume show, the opposite approach, aligning theory with teaching practice, may in fact pay greater dividends. Cuban explains the theory-practice disconnect in terms of the sometimes wilful ignorance on the part of reformers of what he refers to as a ‘coral reef’ of prior developments:

Hence, for Cuban, the futility of tinkering with the “intended (or official) curriculum” which “rests atop” three other layers: the taught curriculum, which teachers deliver “once they close their classroom doors”, the learned curriculum or “what students take away from class”, and the tested curriculum, representing “an even narrower band of knowledge”.

Public Language Education for the Working and Middle Classes

In 1888, Luigi Pavia published a pamphlet entitled Sull’insegnamento delle lingue Straniere negli Istituti Tecnici e relativi Programmi ed Istruzioni Ministeriali. In 1906, the text was reissued with the more controversial title Le Lingue straniere negli istituti tecnici e l’eccessivo lavoro scolastico. The first addressed the current legislation and the state of language teaching in technical schools, while the second addressed the teacher's role more specifically. The two pamphlets shed light on a period of change and describe a new scenario for the teaching of foreign languages.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Italian school system included scientific-technical curricula in which language teaching was a distinguishing feature: while French was studied as part of the literacy requirements at all school levels, English and German were seen as a necessary skill for those involved in business and technology. Rather than addressing methodological issues relating to adults learning diverse languages, or innovative grammars, the documents bring us into a teenage classroom with problems related to age and, in part, their social backgrounds. The students described here are not middle or upper-class learners willing to broaden their view of politics and culture by reading news and books in a foreign language. They are youngsters trained to become artisans and skilled workers.

Historical Overview of Foreign Language Teaching in Georgia

Because Georgia is a multicultural and multinational country, the study of languages has traditionally been considered significant in the nation. According to the eleventh century Georgian historian, chronicler, and ecclesiastic Leonti Mroveli, five languages in addition to Georgian were spoken in Kartli (a historical region of Georgia) from as early as the sixth century BC: Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, Hebrew, and Khazar. These languages were spoken by all the kings of Kartli, as well as by ordinary men and women; this multilingualism is emblematic of the way Georgians peacefully cohabited with different minority groups in a society that respected cultural diversity.

From the fourth century of the common era, the Greek language was a mandatory subject, along with philosophy and rhetoric, at Georgian-Greek rhetoric schools in the west part of Georgia, and numerous translations from Georgian to Greek were produced during the period. Persian and Arabic were also taught in Georgia for both political and cultural reasons, and translations of literary, philosophical, and religious texts into and out of these languages were also undertaken. As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Greek, Persian, Arabic, and Syrian were compulsory school subjects at the ecclesiastical academies of Gelati and Ikalto. Western European languages were introduced at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which can be considered a consequence of the Italian and French Catholic missionaries’ work undertaken in Georgia.

School, (Re-)education and Teaching German in post-World War II Germany

The situation in German schools after the Second World War was difficult, especially in the immediate post-war period between 1945 and 1949. The population suffered from housing shortages and often from malnutrition. Not only were many school buildings destroyed, there was a lack of (politically unencumbered) teachers, there were no new curricula at first, and no new teaching materials for a long time. Mentally, the people in Germany suffered greatly as well: liberated and yet burdened after the long war, they were confronted with the crimes of National Socialism and had to deal with possible personal guilt. The efforts of the Allies, which—in different ways—aimed at a democratization of schools and teaching in Germany, were therefore faced with the great challenge of a necessary ‘rethinking’, a necessary change of mind.

Because of its “mood-forming power”, teaching German in schools was attributed a special role in counteracting the “brutalization and flattening through education and life in the last decade and strengthening inwardness and reverence”.

Valorizing the Past Practice of Error Classification

It is hard to dispute that the following cliché is painfully apt:

In this chapter, I take a closer look at four different error categorization systems developed between 1980 and 2003, a time period often considered to be the heyday of the communicative language teaching (CLT) movement. It is my intention to examine the degree to which these error taxonomies— developed for use in various foreign language education settings by practitioners—accounted for and reflected the basic rationale of the CLT agenda, that is, the fostering of communicative skills that allow learners to express their intentions in a correct and appropriate way.

Social Context and Language Learning

All formal education, like other human activities, takes place within a complex social context. In this essay, I define social context as the social forces that shape individuals’ daily experiences. These forces include a web of structures and processes, organizations and institutions, and interpersonal relationships. Together social context defines the parameters of individual daily life. For language learning and teaching, social context is important because it influences the choices that institutions and individuals make. For example, education authorities in most countries require pupils in school to learn one or more languages while offering others as options. The broader social context influences these decisions which, in turn, have a direct influence on the daily school activities of pupils. The history of language learning and teaching thus reflects changes in the social context over time. As H. H. Stern aptly put it, “[w]e cannot teach a language for long without coming face to face with social context factors which have bearing on language and language learning”.

A key component of social context is social attitudes, which can be defined as ways a society looks at phenomena in the world. This chapter is an investigation of social attitudes toward ‘school English’ in South Korea from 1970 to 1999 that addresses the following research question: “How did social attitudes affect the evolution of English education policies in South Korea during this period?”.

Ovid and Latin Instruction in Germany and Europe

Ovid and Latin instruction in Germany and Europe have been closely intertwined since the Middle Ages. Since the Middle Ages, most of Ovid's works have been the subject of many scientific, artistic, and educational efforts in schools. Metamorphoses played a very special role here. This epic poem can justifiably be called the “Grundbuch der Mythen” (basic book of myths), an epic in which the Roman poet Ovid made transformation myths the central theme in approximately 12,000 verses and approximately 250 individual stories. Ovid created a literary treasure with figures such as Daedalus and Icarus, Orpheus and Eurydice, or Pygmalion, from which creative work is still generated today. This applies not only to literature, music, or the visual arts, but also to schools: Ovid's Metamorphoses represent an indispensable and exemplarily significant part of Latin teaching in Germany in the twenty-first century, so that Metamorphoses can be described as a classic of school practice that is unquestioned in Germany. This is in stark contrast to the controversial me too debates at American universities, in which Metamorphoses were classified as inappropriate reading, especially for female students, because of its depictions of violence against women. How and under what historical conditions could this text achieve such a central position in the teaching of Latin in German schools? Is it a teleological selection process that almost inevitably made Metamorphoses a school classic because of its special humanistic, that is, linguistic and pedagogical qualities?

Teaching and Learning English between Educational and Practical Values

Teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) has increasingly come to be seen in almost entirely instrumental terms. Facing the pressure from career-oriented fields, English teaching has focused on the functional use of language and has been reduced to meeting the perceived needs of workplaces across the globe. Japan is also not exempt from this. EFL policymakers are more concerned and obsessed than their predecessors with ‘fostering practical communicative abilities to comprehend information, to understand others’ intentions and to express one's own ideas’, as is the case with the 1998–1999 revisions to the Course of Study for junior and senior high schools. Moreover, ‘Action Plan to Cultivate “Japanese with English Abilities”’, promoted by the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT) in 2003, mentions the word ‘communication’ no less than thirty-nine times and ‘speaking’ and ‘conversation’ thirty times each. Further buttressed by the revisions to the Course of Study in 2008–2009 and 2017–2018, those EFL policy directions have been deeply ingrained in Japanese English language education.

Underlying this were the strong demands from the business community for English as the international language of commerce. A notable example is a business executive who called for a shift in the focus of teaching in the English departments at Japanese universities from ‘Shakespeare’ towards ‘Tourism’, catering lucratively to mass tastes and interests (this sounds odd given that few learn Shakespeare in English departments).

Teacher Education as a Fifth Curricular Layer

In his 2012 blog entry, Larry Cuban juxtaposes a conventional view of ‘the curriculum’ with what he considers to be a more accurate representation how things work in their translation from government level policy intent to the classroom. Cuban presents an argument for understanding the curriculum as multi-layered as opposed to the more traditional notion of one homogenous entity which is uniformly and seamlessly enacted from the national policy level, through to its reception by students and its instantiation in testing. His four layered curriculum consists of the intended, official layer, that is the policy layer; the layer that is taught by teachers (the practice layer); the layer that is learned by students; and the fourth ‘tested’ layer. Cuban adds that a crucial factor to consider when examining curricula is the historical context within which all layers of the curriculum are nested. He uses the metaphor of a coral reef to portray the multivalent nature of any historical context.

This chapter examines the Learning Languages strand of the 2007 New Zealand curriculum through the lens of Cuban's four-layered curriculum. Focussing particularly on the attempted integration of intercultural competence into New Zealand language education, it contrasts the intended and official layer of the curriculum strand introduced in 2007, with the taught layer, examined through key evaluation research carried out by the author and colleagues over the ten years following the introduction of the ‘new’ curriculum.

Teaching Modern Languages in the Nineteenth Century: A Discourse Analytical Approach

In the context of a volume focusing on the history of foreign language teaching, it is interesting to recall that German—at least as a literary language— has only been firmly anchored in the curricula of secondary schools and institutions of higher education in the German states since the second half of the nineteenth century. Up to the end of the German Kaiserreich, the teaching of German remained a minor subject along with the modern foreign languages that were gradually introduced over the same period. Until well into the Weimar Republic, literature lessons, calculated in weekly hours, consisted mainly of reading the Greek and Latin classics. The subordinate role of modern languages and literatures was the reason why teachers of German, French, and English long acted as a joint interest group, which shared similar questions, conceptual approaches, and methodical solutions for imparting literary knowledge in class. Although—or rather precisely because—these teachers were usually classical philologists from their university education, an extensive practice-oriented discourse developed from the middle of the century. This discourse found its most prominent institutionalization in the journal Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen that was founded in 1846 as an interdisciplinary journal for the didactics of language teaching and still exists today as one of the leading journals of comparative literature.

Analysing Handbooks for the Teaching of English Writing

If children can learn to speak simply by listening and imitating, they cannot learn to write unless someone shows them how. Unlike speech, writing needs to be taught. This is the European-American principle that seems to be substantiated by “the tremendous investment of time and resources in writing instruction over many centuries”. It was in the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds that writing instruction became a fundamental cornerstone of education and learning. Indeed, Isocrates is considered the first literate rhetorician and the first educator to introduce writing instruction in the classical curriculum of Ancient Greece. Moreover, it is from Isocrates that Quintilian, teacher in Ancient Rome, seems to have inherited the educational program that he turned into a system, focused on fostering writing instruction at elementary, secondary, and adult levels. If the Roman Empire lasted for such a long time and extended over so many lands, it was not just owing to the strength of its army, but also to the development of formal, written Latin, which secured extensive communication and efficient coordination. Indeed, “the soldier and the grammarian proceeded in lockstep to spread the Roman way, one by conquering the world, the other by providing it with correct Latin as a medium of organization”.

Since its advent as the new Lingua Franca, being able to write clearly and correctly in English has for a long time been of paramount importance and has led to the production and consumption of a great number of teaching materials, including handbooks, especially in the twentieth century when students could be asked to buy them.

Communicative Competence as Key Objective for and Appropriate Outcome of Language Learning

This chapter on valorizing practice explores the period of language learning in English schools from 1968–2010 and the different methodologies introduced over this time with which the author, as teacher and researcher, has been personally involved. The central theme is communicative competence, the ability to communicate in a foreign language, emphasizing the role of spoken language and the importance attached to productive language skills.

For much of this period, communicative competence is identified as an objective for language learning, an appropriate outcome: the ability to use the language practically. The chapter will trace this theme through the different periods of language learning, describing in turn the three key periods which marked language learning in England over the period starting with the ‘revolution’ of the pioneering audio-visual period of the 1960s, introducing language learning for younger pupils. This is followed by what is described as a consolidation period in the 1980s and finally the monitoring phase associated with the introduction of the National Curriculum in England in the 1990s. This is a way of establishing the importance given to spoken language from its central role in audio-visual language learning, to a less prominent position during the monitoring phase of the National Curriculum.

Building on exchanges among scholars in different countries which have been developing in recent years in the field of History of Language Learning and Teaching (HoLLT), this book brings together studies from Georgia, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, South Korea, and the UK which explore links between policy and practice in language teaching in the twentieth century. The book sets out to expand the remit of ‘grounded history’ within the field of HoLLT by focusing on twentieth-century language teaching policies and linking these to practices and to contexts, situating policy formulation in particular contexts on the one hand, and exploring the relationship between policy and practice on the other. In this sense, it shows how the theories, policy pronouncements, curricula, textbooks, and overall teaching approaches which tend to feature in most histories of language teaching always emerge from particular, researchable contexts, and, in the other direction, are interpreted and responded to in practice, again, in particular contexts. In this way, we hope to contribute a context-based perspective that highlights diversity of practices, in opposition to received views that language teaching methodology is ‘universal’ and context-free.

Reconsidering the Value Given to Theory and Policy in the History of Language Education

In editing this volume, we have therefore had four main goals in mind:

Firstly, we would like to continue to help build international, interlingual, intercultural and interdisciplinary perspectives in developing the field of HoLLT by bringing together specialists from a range of different countries, languages, and disciplines. A second aim is to develop an enhanced appreciation of the role that context has played in the formulation of policy in the twentieth century history of language learning and teaching, and in the success or otherwise of policy implementation. By doing so, we hope, thirdly, to help bring about a shift towards greater valorization of the great diversity of practices in the history of language learning and teaching, as a complement to prevailing universalist accounts of the history of ideas on language learning and teaching. Last, but not least, we hope to pave the way for systematic comparative research that takes account of various dimensions of practice in the history of language education.

A History of Language Teaching beyond Normative Sources

Studies of the history of foreign language teaching are frequently based (predominantly) on normative sources. Scholars rely on ideas that have been laid down in theoretical writings as well as guidelines in curricula, textbooks, or school programmes. They thus gain only incomplete insights—if any—into actual teaching practice because of a lack of valid sources that allow historiographic access into what has actually happened in classrooms. This might be seen as highly problematic, because these normative sources all have a common weakness, namely that they merely represent a desired state, that is, a norm of how something should (have) be(en). Conclusions drawn from these sources on actual practice should be reflected on very critically, because we know from other contexts how indirect and vague the connection tends to be between what should be and what actually is—especially in a complex system like school. Schools have therefore been described as “loosely coupled systems”, which prove to be very robust against top-down influences from normative sources—that is, reforms that are imposed (for example, politically) from outside the system. Tyack and Tobin call this stability of the central organizational structures the “grammar” of schooling. Cuban has come to a similar conclusion concerning the essential features of teaching practice.