English Language Teaching in the Grammar-Translation Method and Communicative Language Teaching Comparative Study 英语毕业论文.docVIP

English Language Teaching in the Grammar-Translation Method and Communicative Language Teaching Comparative Study 1. Introduction  1.1 A Brief History of Foreign Language Teaching in the West.  The history of Foreign Language Teaching has been summed up as follows:  600 years ago, the most important foreign language taught and learned in Western Europe was Latin.  Between the 17th and the early 19th centuries, modern language such as English, French and German began to be taught in many schools and universities, the main teaching method adopted was Grammar Translation Method which was the method of teaching Latin. The aim was to teach students to understand (read and translate) the written language.  In the second half of the 19th century Linguists and language teachers began to cooperate to research a methodology for foreign language teaching that would be based on a scientific study of language and a study of how people learned. In Britain in the Reform Movement, linguists emphasized the study of phonetics and in the 1880s designed the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). That meant that, for the first time, the sounds of all languages could be systematically compared.  In France and Germany during the same period, The Direct Method, was developed. By the early 20th century the Direct Method had been officially adopted in French and German schools.  When the USA entered the Second World War it suddenly became clear that oral skills in foreign languages were necessary. The authorities turned to the Structural Linguists to seek for a scientific description of language and to the Behaviorist Psychologists for a scientific description of learning. The result of their cooperation became known as the Audio-lingual Method.  In the 1950s and 1960s, the Oral and Situational Methods paralleling the Audio-lingual Method, developed in Britain as a result of decades of work by British linguists.  In the 1970s and 1980s, developed from these methods, cam