of the exercise and the nature, cultural, educational, and linguistic status of the learners. The learning motivational factor will be highly dependent on the willingness, knowledge, and ability of the teacher to motivate his or her students.
"Prior to this century, language teaching methodology vacillated between two types of approaches: One type of approach which focused on using a language (i.e. speaking and understanding), the other type which focused on analyzing language (i.e. learning the grammatical rules)" (Celce-Murcia, 1991). "Becoming proficient in a second language takes time, longer than we once thought, even for young children, who seem to pick up language quickly" (Leki, 1992). "... learning English presents different problems, and the same problems in different dimensions, to speakers of different native languages. The problem of transfer from the act of using the mother tongue to learning another language is central" (Lewis and Massad, 1975).
"The practitioner is thus confronted with a somewhat bewildering set of options at the levels of both theory and practice." However, "Today's innovations in teaching practice represent variations on familiar themes, rather than radical departures or totally new practices" (Richards and Rodgers, 1987).
Two researchers--Celce-Murcia (1991) and Larsen-Freeman (1986)--have attempted taxonomies of the methods favored in the last 50 years or so in the industrialized countries and still in use in some of these countries and in the industrializing world. This paper follows and extrapolates from these authors, while offering an independent critique and constructive suggestions and, at the same time, discussing other researchers' work. These comments are of a general nature, inasmuch as the target-populations are unknown--and the other-language acquisition problems of Chinese are different from those of Arabs or of Russians--to name but three linguistic groups with their spec...