A History of English Language Teaching (Howatt & Widdowson)
A History of English Language Teaching (Howatt & Widdowson) is a recommended TEFL/TESOL title from the Global English reading list, available to buy on Amazon.
What it is. A history of how English came to be taught the way it is, written by A. P. R. Howatt for Oxford University Press, with a concluding chapter in the second edition by H. G. Widdowson.
How it is built. It runs chronologically, from the refugee schoolmasters teaching English in sixteenth-century London, through the long argument between the practical and the grammar-translation traditions, the Reform Movement and the arrival of phonetics as a teaching tool, the direct method, the vocabulary-control and situational work of Harold Palmer and A. S. Hornby in the middle of the twentieth century, structural and audiolingual teaching, and finally the communicative turn. It quotes the original texts at length, so you can read what a Victorian methodologist actually wrote rather than a summary of it. Widdowson's closing chapter takes stock of where the field stood at the second edition.
Who it suits. Trainees at Level 5, and anyone writing about method - because ideas that look new in ELT very often turn out to have a nineteenth or twentieth-century ancestor, and knowing that changes how you argue for one. It is also a useful corrective to the impression that communicative teaching settled the question.
What it does not do. It is a scholarly history, not a manual: there is nothing here to take into a classroom on Monday morning. It is also a history of English language teaching specifically, and largely a British one. The wider story of language teaching worldwide is not its subject.
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