ABSTRACT
In the 1990s I was invited to be a member of a small team sent to visit a university in a country which shall remain nameless. Because English was an important language for study there, the university ran English language courses for all its undergraduates. The powerful views about acquisition which we discussed in the last chapter had made their mark on the university, and several years before our visit the courses had become ‘acquisition-based’. Formal methods of conscious teaching had been dropped, and replaced by an emphasis on providing comprehensible input. Instead of following classes studying grammar, pronunciation and essay writing, the students (who couldn’t believe their luck!) spent their time watching videos in English, reading books and listening to English-speaking radio. Though the students were indeed overjoyed, the experiment had turned out to be something of a failure. Standards of English dropped, and this had its effect on the overall performance of students in their degree courses. Our team was asked to propose ways of replacing the ‘acquisitional approach’, to come up with a theoretically sound ‘learning-based’ alternative to acquisition.
