Advantages And Disadvantages Of Monolingual Assumption

1.3 Historical and theoretical foundations of the monolingual assumption

1.3.1 Berlitz method, the direct method, and the natural approach

Monolingual teaching, as the name suggests, refers to a way of teaching in which only one language is used. In this case, as it was stated before, the concept of monolingual teaching will be used to talk about teaching a foreign language in the same language. The first steps into monolingual teaching started with a system of instruction called the Berlitz method proposed by Maximilian Berlitz in 1978. To understand the Berlitz method, it is necessary to go into the history of this method. The story started when Maximilian Berlitz, a languages’ teacher, who migrated from Germany to the United States, hired

Supporting this argument, bilinguals not always want to learn English in order to connect only with native speakers in English speaking countries, but to connect with many different cultures (Hall and Cook, 2012). The lack of attention put in this issue turns out to many students rejecting the English language because they only think they can use it when being immersed in the language, whereas, they do not think in using it as a tool to communicate along cultures, in other words, to use it as a lingua franca2. Finally, the unquestionable permanence of this monolingual method has lead people to not realize that the context and the identity of the learners is a fundamental part of how educators need to think their methods of teaching, and made them be in line with their backgrounds. Using mass-produced course design and textbooks makes many students reject the learning of English, feeling that their identities are being left aside, not achieving the connection between the contents and the context. All these factors lead people to accept most of the aspects of monolingual teaching as the ideal method, that there should be achieved and used in every English as a foreign language