Wholesome Dwellings is an exceptional account of housing provision in a specific urban setting – Oxford. There are many features to commend it. Stunning contemporary maps, colourful estate plans and architectural illustrations in addition to atmospheric contemporary photographs and modern images each provide an attractive visual basis for this deeply researched account of the form and character of modern housing in Oxford. The overarching story of inter-war private and public housebuilding is fairly well understood these days, and Malcolm Graham shows how local tensions, vested interests and political intrigue shaped the distinctive character of housing in Oxford. He builds into his account the transformative impact of a major industrial enterprise – the Morris car plant – and the divisive impact of residential segregation between public and private housing, most notably the infamous case of the ‘Cutteslowe Walls’, where two roads between estates were blocked with high brick walls.

With forty figures and tables, Wholesome Dwellings provides a wealth of new research material for local historians. There is much to digest as a result. In fact, with many local places mentioned – Cowley, Barton, London, Ferry Hinksey, Croft and Campbell Roads, as well as Rose Hill, St Ebbe’s, Stockmore Street, and dozens more – this book will have a strong appeal for local residents. This is particularly because Malcolm Graham explains when Oxford’s neighbourhoods developed and how they relate to each other chronologically and visually.

If the centre of gravity of Wholesome Dwellings is inter-war housing, there is a clear recognition from the outset that housing policy and the inter-war subsidy arrangements were themselves the products of nineteenth-century socio-economic conditions. Graham maintains (p. 9) that, compared with other places, Oxford was slow to recognise housing needs, and his explanations for this include the composition of the city council in the late nineteenth century and the abstention of university members of the council on issues relating to housing need. Undoubtedly, Graham makes the case that intervention in the private housing market was warranted, and that central-government housing subsidies in 1919, 1923 and 1924 particularly aided that process.

Malcolm Graham is deeply immersed in Oxford's history. His footnotes are astonishingly detailed, and the general approach and argument are convincing. Another indication of the high quality of this work is that it provides both ideas and revelations for readers to ponder and follow up.

Martin Daunton's contributions to urban history are immense. His earliest works, Coal metropolis: Cardiff 1870–1914 (1977) and House and home in the Victorian city: working class housing 1850–1914 (1983), were deeply researched, thoughtful, and influenced me greatly. In this chapter I return to these works, and forty years on still find his insights into the functioning of cities illuminating. This chapter contextualises Henry George's polarity of progress and poverty, also adopted by Martin in another work, and links land values and taxation, two further areas where Martin has made major contributions to urban and economic history. The chapter proceeds from an exploration of the nature and extent of landownership in terms of land prices, and shows that institutional users and major utility companies had important, and previously under-acknowledged, distorting effects on local property markets. Though reference is made to a number of English cities, distinctive Scottish data sources on urban landownership are used to explain the impact on rents and living conditions there. Thus, the pressure of urban development (progress) is at the cost of squalor accommodation (poverty) in Scotland.

It seems that the taxation of land, like the poor, is always with us. From time to time the topic gains political traction, then falters. Rather than focusing on the ownership of land itself, property taxation in Britain has concentrated largely on taxing the combined value of land and buildings. Driven by a sense of social justice, more radical proposals intended to cream off the increment in rising house property prices have come to nought. Such an approach, a ‘single tax’ to deal with these ‘betterment’ issues, as promoted by the American political economist and social philosopher Henry George in Progress and poverty (1879), were embraced by the Liberal Party as part of land reform in the late nineteenth century. They have since found little resonance in Britain.

Introduction

Language teaching is sometimes discussed as if it existed independently of the teach-ing of other subjects and of trends in teaching generally. However, like teachers in other areas of a school curriculum, language teachers too have to to create a posi-tive environment for learning in the classroom. They have to find ways of engaging students in their lessons, to use learning arrangements that encourage active student participation in lessons, to acknowledge the diversity of motivations and interests learners bring to the classroom, and to use strategies that enable the class to function as a cohesive group that collaborates to help make the lesson a positive learning expe-rience. In dealing with issues such as these, language teachers can learn much from considering approaches that have been used in mainstream education. Cooperative Language Learning (CLL) is one such example. CLL is part of a more general instruc-tional approach, known as Collaborative or Cooperative Learning (CL), which origi-nated in mainstream education and emphasizes peer support and coaching. CL is an approach to teaching that makes maximum use of cooperative activities involving pairs and small groups of learners in the classroom. It has been defined as follows:

Cooperative Learning has antecedents in proposals for peer-tutoring and peer-monitoring that go back hundreds of years and longer. The early-twentieth-century US educator John Dewey is usually credited with promoting the idea of building cooperation in learning into regu-lar classrooms on a regular and systematic basis (Rodgers 1988). It was more generally promoted and developed in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to the forced integration of public schools and has been substantially refined and developed since then. Educators were concerned that traditional models of classroom learning were teacher-fronted, fostered com-petition rather than cooperation, and favored majority students.

Introduction

Text-Based Instruction (TBI) is an approach that is based on the following principles:

• • Teaching explicitly about the structures and grammatical features of spoken and written texts

• • Linking spoken and written texts to the social and cultural contexts of their use

• • Designing units of work which focus on developing skills in relation to whole texts

• • Providing students with guided practice as they develop language skills for mean-ingful communication through whole texts.

(Feez 1998: v)

While developed originally in Australia through the work of educationalists and applied linguists working in the area of literacy and drawing on the work of Halliday (1989), Derewianka (1990), Christie (2002), and others, it has also been influential in developing approaches to language teaching at all levels in countries such as New Zealand, Singapore, and Canada, as well as in a number of European countries, such as Sweden. The Common European Framework of Reference (Chapter 8) also specifies outcomes for what students can do with texts. TBI shares many assumptions with a genre-based approach to course design, often used in the development of courses in English for Academic Purposes (Paltridge 2006). Unlike Task-Based Language Teaching (Chapter 9), which is motivated by a creative-construction theory of second language learning, TBI, while compatible with theories of learning, derives from a genre theory of the nature of language (see below) and the role that texts play in social contexts. Communicative competence is seen to involve the mastery of different types of texts, or genres. Text here is used in a special sense to refer to structured sequences of language that are used in specific contexts in specific ways. For example, in the course of a day a speaker of English may use spoken English in many different ways including the following:

• • Casual conversational exchange with a friend

• • Conversational exchange with a stranger in an elevator

• • Telephone call to arrange an appointment at a hair salonllAn account to friends of an unusual experience

• • Discussion of a personal problem with a friend to seek advice.

Each of these uses of language can be regarded as a text in that it exists as a unified whole with a beginning, middle, and end, it conforms to norms of organization and content, and it draws on appropriate grammar and vocabulary.

The chapters in Part II bring the description of approaches and methods up to the present time and describe some of the directions mainstream language teaching has followed since the emergence of communicative methodologies in the 1980s.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), which we examine in Chapter 5, marks the beginning of a major paradigm shift within language teaching in the twentieth century, one whose ramifications continue to be felt today. The general principles of CLT are still widely accepted in language teaching today, although as we demonstrate in this chapter, these principles have been open to various interpretations, and those favoring the approach may weigh the value of fluency and accuracy in different ways. Aspects of CLT may also be used to support other approaches and methods. In Chapter 6, we consider Content-Based Instruction (CBI) and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). The first (CBI) can be regarded as a logical development of some of the core principles of CLT, particu-larly those that relate to the role of meaning in language learning. Because CBI provides an approach that is particularly suited to prepare ESL students to enter elementary, secondary, or tertiary education, it is widely used in English-speaking countries around the world, particularly in the United States. CLIL, a related approach, has become popular in Europe; both approaches involve a merging of content and language. In Chapter 7, we look at the Whole Language movement that developed in the 1980s as a response to teaching the lan-guage arts. As an approach aimed at younger learners, it may be contrasted with the more modern-day CBI and CLIL.

Chapters 8 through 11 examine, like CBI, CLIL, and Whole Language, a number of other special-purpose approaches, in the sense that they have specific goals in mind or reflect principles of language learning that have a more limited application. In Chapter 8, we describe Competency-Based Language Teaching (CBLT), standards, and the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), all reflecting the outcomes movement that has become increasingly important in recent years as programs strive for accountability and a focus on standards in teaching and learning. In Chapter 9, we look at Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), an approach that aims to replace a conventional language-focused syl-labus with one organized around communicative tasks as units of teaching and learning.

The period from the 1970s to the 1980s witnessed a major paradigm shift in language teaching. The quest for alternatives to grammar-based approaches and methods led in several different directions. Mainstream language teaching embraced the growing interest in communicative approaches to language teaching, as we saw in Part II. The communica-tive movement sought to move the focus away from grammar as the core component of language, to a different view of language, of language learning, of teachers, and of learners, one that focused on language as communication. Other directions in language teaching, also quests for alternatives, appeared during this period and are the focus of this part of the book.

Whereas Audiolingualism and Situational Language Teaching were mainstream teaching methods developed by linguists and applied linguists, the approaches and meth-ods described in this section were either developed outside of mainstream language teach-ing or represent an application in language teaching of educational principles developed elsewhere. They are represented by such innovative methods of the 1970s as the Natural Approach (Chapter 14), Total Physical Response (Chapter 15), the Silent Way (Chapter 16), Community Language Learning (Chapter 17), and Suggestopedia (Chapter 18). Rather than starting from a theory of language and drawing on research and theory in applied lin-guistics, the majority of these methods are developed around particular theories of learn-ers and learning, sometimes the theories of a single theorizer or educator. Many of these methods are consequently relatively underdeveloped in the domain of language theory, and the learning principles they reflect are generally different from theories found in sec-ond language acquisition (SLA) textbooks. The one exception in this group is the Natural Approach, as explained below.

Alternative approaches and methods of the 1970s and 1980s have had a somewhat varied history. Although Total Physical Response, the Silent Way, Community Language Learning, and Suggestopedia did not succeed in attracting the support of mainstream language teaching, each can be seen as expressing important dimensions of the teaching/learning process. They can be seen as offering particular insights that have attracted the attention and/or allegiance of some teachers and educators, but they have each seen their popularity rise and fall since the 1970s.

Introduction

Community Language Learning (CLL) is the name of a method developed by Charles A. Curran and his associates. Curran was a specialist in counseling and a professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago. His application of psychological counsel-ing techniques to learning is known as Counseling-Learning. CLL represents the use of Counseling-Learning theory to teach languages. As the name indicates, CLL derives its primary insights, and indeed its organizing rationale, from Rogerian counseling. Counseling, as Rogerians see it, consists of one individual (the counselor) assuming, inso-far as he or she is able, the internal frame of reference of the client, perceiving the world as that person sees it and communicating something of this empathetic understanding (Rogers 1951). In lay terms, counseling is one person giving advice, assistance, and support to another who has a problem or is in some way in need. CLL draws on the counseling metaphor to redefine the roles of the teacher (the counselor) and learners (the clients) in the language classroom.

Within the language teaching tradition, CLL is sometimes cited as an example of a “humanistic approach.” The content of the language class stems from topics learners want to talk about, and the teacher translates their requests into an appropriate syllabus. Links can also be made between CLL procedures and those of bilingual education, particularly the set of bilingual procedures referred to as language alternation or code switching. Let us discuss briefly the debt of CLL to these two traditions.

Because of the humanistic approach of CLL, the basic procedures can thus be seen as derived from the counselor–client relationship. Consider the following CLL proce-dures: A group of learners sit in a circle with the teacher standing outside the circle: a student whispers a message in the native language (L1); the teacher translates it into the foreign language (L2); the student repeats the message in the foreign language into an audio recorder; students compose further messages in the foreign language with the teacher's help; students reflect about their feelings. We can compare the client–counselor relationship in psychological counseling with the learner–knower relationship in CLL (Table 17.1).

Introduction

Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) refers to the use of tasks as the core unit of planning and instruction in language teaching. It has been defined as “an approach to language edu-cation in which students are given functional tasks that invite them to focus primarily on meaning exchange and to use language for real-world, non-linguistic purposes” (Van den Branden 2006). Some of its proponents (e.g., Willis 1996; Willis and Willis 2007) present it as a logical development of Communicative Language Teaching (Chapter 5) since it draws on several principles that formed part of the CLT movement from the 1980s. For example:

• • Activities that involve real communication are essential for language learning.

• • Activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning.

• • Language that is meaningful to the learner supports the learning process.

TBLT is usually characterized as an approach, rather than a method. According to Leaver and Willis (2004: 3), “TBI [task-based instruction] is not monolithic; it does not consti-tute one single methodology. It is a multifaced approach, which can be used creatively with different syllabus types and for different purposes.” Thus, it can be linked with other approaches and methods, such as content-based and text-based teaching (Leaver and Willis 2004). Proponents of TBLT contrast it with earlier grammar-focused approaches to teach-ing, such as Audiolingualism, that they characterize as “teacher-dominated, form-oriented classroom practice” (Van den Branden 2006).

Introduction

We have seen several instances in this book of language teaching methods that have been developed by educators from outside mainstream language teaching, such as the Silent Way (Chapter 16), and Community Language Learning (Chapter 17). Methods such as these sometimes interest teachers who may be attracted by their novelty and the results they are said to deliver. Many of the “innovative” methods of the 1980s and 1990s are mainly of historical interest today, although they may still have some practitioners in different parts of the world. Suggestopedia is another method of this type and was developed by the Bulgarian psychiatrist-educator Georgi Lozanov. Suggestopedia is a specific set of learning recommendations derived from Suggestology, which Lozanov describes as a “science … concerned with the systematic study of the nonrational and/or nonconscious influences” that human beings are constantly responding to (Stevick 1976: 42). Suggestopedia tries to harness these influences and redirect them so as to optimize learning. The most con-spicuous characteristics of Suggestopedia are the decoration, furniture, and arrangement of the classroom, the use of music, and the authoritative behavior of the teacher. Music is an especially important element of Suggestopedia, and both intonation and rhythm are coordinated with a musical background, which helps to induce a relaxed attitude. The method has a somewhat mystical air about it, partially because it has few direct links with established learning or educational theory in the West, and partially because of its arcane terminology and neologisms, which one critic has unkindly called a “package of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook” (Scovel 1979: 258).

Hansen (2011: 403), a current advocate of Suggestopedia, provides this commentary: