Naturally artificial

The success of informal learning, and especially of the child acquiring its mother-tongue, has always impressed language teachers, and attempts to reproduce the same effect by creating the same conditions have been a regular feature of language teaching history. Locke’s advice to ‘talk the language into the children’ doubtless worked on many occasions, and his live-in, native speaker tutor was an obvious solution for families who could afford it. It is much more difficult to implement this in the classroom. As a consequence, nature was often tamed by reason derived from the study of language and language learning. One such intervention was to form automatic speech habits through constant practice. However, the idealized sentence patterns were far remote from natural speech-habits. One reaction to this was to revive situational techniques, models of social interaction in an idealized dialogue form. However, these dialogues, rehearsed, theatrical, were far remote from the real world of improvisation. Natural language teaching, it seems, cannot be retracted. Reason intervenes in the shape of syllabuses, curricula, methods, and both social and psychological factors make it difficult to imitate the process of first-language acquisition. It seems that even a natural method, though natural in its basis (in the sense of primarily being concerned with meaning), is artificial in its development.  (Howatt, A.P.R.: A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984: 294-7)