REFLECTIVE PAPER

Reflective Paper



Reflective Paper

Introduction

Second and foreign language teaching is a field that is constantly in a state of change. For example new curriculum frameworks currently being implemented in different parts of the world include competency based, genre based, and content based models. In many countries English is now being introduced at primary rather than secondary level necessitating considerable new investment in textbooks and teacher training. And among the innovations that teachers are being asked to consider are Multiple Intelligences, Co-operative Learning, Task-Based Instruction, and Alternative Assessment.

I have recently had the opportunity to reflect on these and other changes that have come about in language teaching in recent years. This process of reflection was prompted by several quite practical tasks. One was the preparation of the third edition of the Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics (Richards and Schmidt 2002), which required reviewing several hundred journal articles and books in the field to identify new terminology that has appeared since the last edition of the dictionary was published in 1994. This resulted in the addition of some 800 items to the third edition. A second task was the preparation of a new edition of Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (Richards and Rodgers 2001), which resulted in the addition of chapters on eight approaches and methods that had not been included in the first edition of 1986. Another activity was the compilation of an anthology of current practices in language teaching methodology - Methodology in TESOL: An Anthology of Current Practice (Richards and Renandya 2002) - which likewise required an extensive review of articles published in the last 10 years.

On a more personal level I have recently made a transition from full time to part time academic life to enable me to accommodate a more flexible life style. It is some 30 years since I completed my own Ph.D. and came to Asia as a teacher and teacher-educator. I have worked continuously in the Asia-Pacific region since then.

Looking back over the last 30 years, at the influences that have shaped my own thinking and professional practice and reflecting on the current "state of the art" in language teaching prompted me to ask three basic questions:

1. What are some of the key questions we have been concerned about in language teaching?

2. What did we believe and understand about these issues thirty years ago?

3. What do we believe and understand about them now? To explore these questions I made use of the information obtained from the activities mentioned above and also examined all the issues of two important professional journals in language teaching - English Language Teaching Journal and English Teaching Forum - for the years 1970-1975 and 1995-2000 *. In reviewing these journals I sought to identify the issues that were most frequently written about during the two time periods. This paper presents the results of these activities and explores the following eight questions: What are the goals of teaching English? What is the best way to teach a ...