This is the first part of our course about theories and methods of singing language acquisition. In this first session we are going to talk about traditional language teaching. What is exactly traditional language teaching? Well it's difficult to say there is a common misconception at least in my students at university is that traditional language teaching is somehow behaviorist in Spanish conductismo. It is not the case this is wrong and it's simply wrong for a question of dates. Behaviorism only started in the 20th century not even in the beginning of the 20th century and in language teaching mostly after the Second World War so after 1945 that's the moment when really behaviorism started and we are going to talk about that in the next session. But actually the teaching of second and foreign languages started much earlier than the beginning or the middle of the 20th century. So the public system of education actually started in the 19th century in different moments depending on the countries and sometimes at the beginning of the 20th century. Borrowing from previous methods of teaching in general but it was not at all following the behaviorist principles. In languages what was actually existing before we started teaching foreign languages such as English, French, German, Spanish at school the only teaching of languages that existed was the teaching of classical languages. Classical languages were basically Latin and Greek but not taught at modern Greek, taught at classical languages as dead languages. So languages that no one was speaking and languages that the most important objective for it was reading the literature and understanding the grammatical system. So this is the reason why traditional language teaching has always put such a heavy weight on grammar. It was not because grammar was necessary to speak the language it was mostly because grammar was seen as a way of understanding the logic of the grammar in a kind of mathematical exercise. So grammar was not seen as necessary it was really seen as a rational, mental exercise of understanding the system of the language. This might have applied to Latin and Greek adequately this is another subject we're not going to talk about this but for foreign languages this was not really targeted at the same objective as what we would consider today to be the objective of language teaching. Today if we teach English or goal is for the students at the end of the process to be able to speak English and to understand English in different situations of life they might encounter. The problem is that this classical traditional teaching of grammar in literature was not targeted at actual fluency in the language. That's the general characteristic of the traditional teaching of languages and that's the reason why it's called the grammar translation method because there was a lot of teaching and explanation of grammar and a lot of translation used as exercises. Now if you look at many modern classes of English, French, German, whatever you want you will actually see many characteristics of this traditional method of language teaching such as the heavy explanations of grammar, vocabulary taught as isolated words, a lot of exercises based around translation or grammatical exercises, a lot of reading of texts, very little use of speaking and very little use of the target language because of course when you were teaching in Latin and Greek the teacher would not be able to speak Latin and Greek he would have been able to explain Latin and Greek. That's also the reason why we have so little use of the foreign language in many current classrooms is that the teacher are used to this explanation of the language rather than using it to demonstrate its use. So all this teaching in the modern tone focusing on vocabulary as isolated items, isolated words, explanations of grammar, reading grammar analysis and no speaking and no speaking in the target language is really what characterizes this grammar translation method which is the traditional language teaching method. Now what you have to understand is that this traditional teaching method has no scientific base, there is no theory, there are no principles behind it that are inspired by what we know about how people learn languages, it's only coming from tradition, from what people were doing before and what they've been doing all the time. There is no theory, there are no things that demonstrate that this should be working, actually it doesn't work. What we see in most language classes that use this method is that at the end of the process the students might understand the grammar very well, might know vocabulary but they have no ability to speak and sometimes even no ability to understand the language in a normal daily life situation and that's the major issue with this method. It's not based on theory, it has no effect that we know of but people still continue to use it because it's what they've been taught in. So why do people continue to use the grammar translation method when they know it doesn't work, when they know it has no theory behind it, there is no reason to use it. Well the main reason it's because it's what they've seen other people do, that's what they've seen their teacher do and they will continue to rely on it because it's also a safe method for teaching, especially if you have a very low proficiency in the language, if you do not yourself speaking the language very well, it's safe because you do not need to show that you'd speak the language, you just need to show that you know the grammar. So as long as you have the knowledge, you can teach in the grammar translation. The problem is it doesn't work, we really need teachers who are able to speak in the foreign language they are teaching because what is teaching the foreign language is essentially showing the language in use and making the students practice the language with you and between them. That's the key of second language acquisition, it's practice in the foreign language. So that's what we will see in the future weeks when we will see the different other theories about second language acquisition and the current dominant methods for language teaching. See you then.