This presentation describes and demonstrates some potential uses of a historical English Language Teaching (ELT) corpus, using a small pilot corpus of intermediate level ELT textbooks from the 1960s. There have been few systematic and objective historical accounts of language teaching methods and materials (Smith 2015: 84), and the history of ELT has typically been presented as a rather simplified ‘procession of methods’, with an emphasis on their difference than any similarities (Howatt and Smith 2014: 76). Here I will explore some ways in which a corpus-based approach can contribute to our knowledge in this area. The 1960s have been identified as a starting point for the corpus as a range of methodological influences were present in ELT in this decade. The books in the pilot have been selected to reflect this, including courses which situate themselves within structural, audiolingual and situational teaching paradigms. From the corpus, we can identify task-types, examine instructions and target language, and use this data to gain insights into the pedagogical approaches in use. The 1960s corpus is a pilot for a larger project that aims to investigate twentieth century English Language Teaching (ELT) materials diachronically. With the co-operation of the ELT Archive at Warwick University (see https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/al/research/collections/elt_archive/), we aim to digitize a range of representative ELT textbooks from several decades of the last century, and build a corpus through which language teaching methods and language taught can be explored and compared.
Howatt, A.P.R. and R. Smith. 2014. “The History of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, from a British and European Perspective.” Language and History 57 (1): 75-95.
Smith, Richard. 2015. “Building ‘Applied Linguistic Historiography’: Rationale, Scope, and Methods.” Applied Linguistics 37 (1): 71–87. doi:10.1093/applin/amv056.