Historical Changes
When I started working at the Mexico City Binational Center (Instituto Mexicano Norteamericano de Relaciones Culturales) in 1976, the word communication was never used. We were in the last days of Audio-Lingualism. Language learning was still seen as acquiring habits and that was done through repetition.
We used a textbook that had been written at the school in the 1950s and that was still very popular throughout Mexico. Each unit was the same, beginning with a series of sentences containing the grammar structure being taught in the unit. Supposedly the teacher was supposed to model the sentences and the student repeat them chorally. (Just to make it “fun”, we sometimes had the class repeat in groups of men and women or by sides of the classroom and sometimes we let individuals repeat.
The next pages were dedicated to a grammar explanation with examples and then substitution drills. In these sections the teacher said the model sentence: John has a ball and the cue: You. Students were to make the transformation in chorus: You have a ball. This was done even with structures where there was no morphological or syntactical changes: Peter is more intelligent than Paul. (studious) –> Peter is more studious than Paul. After the repetition exercises, students dedicated themselves to written exercises, often of a similar repetitive nature. (My Mexican husband once turned in his homework by doing one or two of the items in each exercise and writing “ditto” for the rest.)
The theoretical logic behind all this repetition was that students had to repeat a sentence many times to learn it. In fact, memorization was considered to be the “maximum”. It was all based on B. F. Skinner’s studies of stimulus and response. The teacher gave the stimulus (the model or cue) and the students responded.
In this model there was no space for creativity. Vocabulary was limited and all emphasis was on structure and pronunciation….Yes, it was VERY BORING, for the students and especially for the teachers who taught 6 or 7 50-minute classes every day.
I must admit that many teachers liked the boredom. Two of our older male teacher were infamous at school. One of them used to give the students written work and sit back and read the newspaper. Another would sneak out and go call his myriad girlfriends on the phone (he was over 60 ….and married, if I remember well)
This boredom led me to one of the most creative periods of my life. Many of us had no faith in the Audio Lingual method so we started using what was called “the Eclectic Method”. What was the Eclectic Method? Basically it meant doing what you enjoyed doing and what you, as the teacher, felt helped the students learn. We started inventing and sharing in fun activities and games. We made posters, cards and cut pictures out of magazines (the activities I mentioned in my second Blog came from this epoch). None of the activities would be considered “communicative” nowadays. Most work was Teacher-Student, but we did begin having students work in groups, even if the activities were very controlled. “Free conversation” was the only open activity we did and it was relegated to Fridays when we were just too tired to teach or for when we substituted classes and had no idea what to do.
Teaching/Learning has changed a lot in 30 years. Students are now more responsible for what they learn and the teacher’s role has changed from the audio-lingual “orchestra conductor” to the modern facilitator, but I often wonder if that “rush” of creativity we felt from around 1977-1979 (when communicative teaching was born at our school) still exists or if the plethora of material now available (in texts, resource books and online) has perhaps limited the creative process and rendered it dormant.
