I still remember the fear when I decided I have to change the way I’m teaching English! What if I make a fool of myself? What if I become a laughing stock in the school and in front of the parents?

That was in the autumn of 1986. All that fear was gone in a week when I saw what was happening in my classes.

Over the last 50 years language teaching has gone through some major changes aiming at better and better teaching and learning. Even if the methodology has been drastically changed many teachers are are still unsure how to make the changes needed. How to apply the principles of communicative language learning (CLT).

We all want our students to enjoy our lessons, to speak and write English well, or whatever language we are teaching. We want to help and encourage our students to reach their full potential as language learners and human beings.

I remember the fear I had when I changed my style of teaching. What if I make a fool of myself? What if I become a laughing stock in the school and in front of the parents? But I wanted to do my job well and I had no other choice than take the risk. I told my students about my plans and the reasons for the changes I was about to make and they agreed to give it a try. And we never went back to what the lessons used to be like.

The basic questions are still the same: What is the best and most effective way to teach and learn a foreign language? What kind of language lesson would I myself enjoy?

I myself am a child of this period, graduated from high school in 1973 and could not speak English at all when I started to study English at Oulu University in Finland. I never heard the teacher speak English freely, we students never spoke or heard recorded English in class, no recordings were available, hands were raised for the answer and we stood up, answered and sat down one at a time. We were nice students who could stand the process since we knew of nothing better.

Until – we realized the new German teacher’s methods were effective: a lot of reading aloud in class, dealing with the chapters properly in groups and spending two hours a week in the language lab speaking German, recording and listening to ourselves speaking. Hely Laitinen, the teacher, was 20 years ahead of her time. Six German lessons a week for two years – and I can still speak German even if I learnt it 50 years ago and have not used it very much. One of the miracles of my limited brain capacity.

It was actually amusing that when I got in the university to study English and Swedish I could not speak the languages more than at an elementary level since we had not practiced speaking at school and there was no other source available in those days. Of course I Iearnt to speak both langauges quite well in a year but still, I was 19 years of age at that time. What a waste! Still, it is a comforting story for my students: It is never too late to learn to speak a language!

In the early 1980’s the audio-lingual method was introduced in Finland, which meant a step forward towards real usage of language and developing speaking, listening and writing in particular. New methological approaches were introduced and teachers started to use English recordings, students timidly spoke for a few minutes in each lesson and writing tasks were given to the students. Nevertheless, the full potential of CLT was not understood.

I did my compulsory one-year teacher training in 1979 – 1980 in a training school in Oulu in northern Finland. The teaching methods were very teacher-oriented even if there were glimpses of students working in pairs and groups. After the teacher training I taught English, Swedish and Finnish in a local prison and was a part-time teacher in a couple of other schools until I got a permanent position as a teacher trainer in English in Oulu University teacher training school.

In the 1970s suggestopedia developed by Georgi Lozanov brought many new ideas into language teaching even if it was considered to be too different a style to be used continuously. Thanks to suggestopedia we started to eliminate the barriers of learning aiming at more relaxed lessons where all human senses were made use of while the students were working in pairs or groups. Music and language games were made use of. The students felt relaxed and were not afraid of making mistakes when speaking and working together. I personally felt better thanks to the changes but I was still not pleased.

It was an in-service course in southern Finland that changed my style of teaching permanently. On the way back to Oulu I had an incredibly illuminating discussion with professor Irma Huttunen who had been one of the lecturers in the course. She had recently finished her doctoral thesis on autonomous learning and I was absolutely fascinated by her ideas and what she had learnt while applying the ideas in her own classes.

I spent the weekend developing the new approach to the texts in the English books and how the time in the class was to be spent. On the following Monday morning I had a double lesson with senior high students and I said to them that I hated much of what we did in my own lessons and that I wanted to try out something new with them. I explained what I thought was wrong in our system and what and why I was going to do with them in the future.

We agreed on a two-week trial period and would come back to the old style if the new style turned out to be disasterous. We never went back. It was 1986 and most of the principles I came up with at that time served me until I retired a couple of years ago. Of course there have been many methological advances since then but the student-centred approach is still valid today.

In the 1990’s it was finally realized that English and languages in general are to be learnt with true real-life skills in mind: the principles of communicative language teaching became more and more popular. Teachers realized that they have to teach not only all the language skills but also about the culture of the target language as well as study skills. The emphasis on speaking skills was a natural consequence of student-oriented methods. Luckily, the ministeries of education in most countries have understood the same things and the skills are also tested in the final exams, which forces teachers to these these skills in class as well.

Still the biggest changes were seen in classes themselves:

• The teachers’ role began to change and they were more organizers of the lessons than the ones actually speaking and teaching all the time. Their job was to make learning possible as faciliators of learning.
• Students were not evaluated only on the basis of exams but their activity level and participation in class was also taken into account. Learning for life, not for grades and exams, was acknowledged.
• The third change was the introduction of the use of computer programmes and modern technology in lessons.

The 21st century has seen this tendency taken further in many ways:

• classes and methods have become more student-oriented
• the objectives for language learning lessons now cover all skill areas
• time is devoted to enhance the students’ study and social skills
• the teacher has become more an organizer of learning than the one who talks about the language
• assessment is not based only on tests and exams
• learning strategies and styles, how to learn effectively are actively taught
• instead of memorization we now emphasize understanding and application of the language
• modern technology and the internet are made use of and they provide us with plenty of opportunities in distance learning
• even final examinations are taken via the internet in many countries

The internet became a valid source for new information and publishers introduced computer materials that were directly linked to the textbooks used. Even exams can now be taken in special exam locations at a time chosen by the students themselves. The goals set for the 21st century are becoming reality.