Methods and approaches in the teaching English as a foreign language.
Approaches,
methods, procedures, and techniques
Approach:
this refers to “theories about the nature of language and language
learning that serve as the source of practices and principles in language
teaching”. It offers a model of language competence. An approach describes how
people acquire their knowledge of the language and makes statements about
conditions which will promote successful language learning.
Method: a method is the practical
realization of an approach. Methods include various procedures and techniques
as part of their standard fare.
Procedure: a procedure is an ordered sequence
of techniques. A procedure is a sequence which can be described in terms such
as first you do this, then you do that… Smaller than a method and bigger than
technique.
Technique: a common technique when using
video material is called “silent viewing”. This is where the teacher plays the
video with no sound. Silent viewing is a single activity rather than a
sequence, and as such is a technique rather than a whole procedure.
A term that is also used in discussions about
teaching is “model” – used to
describe typical procedures, usually for teachers in training. Such models
offer abstractions of these procedures, designed to guide teaching practice.
The Grammar – Translation Method
- This
is a method that has been used by language teachers for many years.
- At
one time it was called Classical Method, since it was first used in the
teaching of the classical languages, Latin and Greek.
- Earlier
in this century, it was used for the purpose of helping students read and
appreciate foreign language literature.
- Classes
are taught in the students’ mother tongue, with little active use of the target
language;
- Vocabulary
is taught in the form of isolated word lists;
- Elaborate
explanations of grammar are always provided;
- Reading
of difficult text is begun early in the course of study;
- Little
attention is paid to the content of text, which are treated as exercises in
grammatical analysis.
Audio-lingualism
- Audio-lingual
methodology owes its existence to the Behaviorist models of learning using
the Stimulus-Response-Reinforcement model, it attempted, through a continuous
process of such positive reinforcement, to engender good habits in language
learners.
- Audio-lingualism
relied heavily on drills like substitution to form these habits.
- Habit-forming
drills have remained popular among teachers and students, and teachers who feel
confident with the linguistic restriction of such procedures
Presentation, Practice, and Production
A variation on Audio-lingualism in
British-based teaching and elsewhere is the procedure most often referred to as
PPP, which stands for Presentation, Practice, and Production. In this procedure
the teacher introduces a situation which contextualizes the language to be
taught. The students now practice the language using accurate reproduction
techniques such as choral repetition, individual repetition, and cue-response
drills
PPP and alternatives
to PPP
- The
PPP procedure came under a sustained attack in the 1990s.
- Michael
Lewis suggested that PPP was inadequate because it reflected neither the nature
of language nor the nature of learning.
- Jim
Scrivener advanced what is perhaps the most worrying aspect of PPP, the fact
that it only describes one kind of lesson; it is inadequate as a general
proposal concerning approaches to language in the classroom. PPP and
alternatives to PPP
- The
PPP procedure came under a sustained attack in the 1990s.
- Michael
Lewis suggested that PPP was inadequate because it reflected neither the nature
of language nor the nature of learning.
- Jim
Scrivener advanced what is perhaps the most worrying aspect of PPP, the fact
that it only describes one kind of lesson; it is inadequate as a general
proposal concerning approaches to language in the classroom.
- In
response to these criticism many people have offered variations on PPP and
alternative to it: ARC, OHE/III, ESA.
ARC
- Put
forward by Jim Scrivener.
- Stands
for Authentic use, Restricted use and Clarification and focus.
- Communicative
activity will demonstrate authentic use; elicited dialogue or guided writing
will provoke restricted use of language by students; finally clarification
language is that which the teacher and students use to explain grammar, give
examples, analyze errors, elicit or repeat things.
OHE/III
Michael Lewis claims that students should be
allowed to Observe (read or listen to language) which will then provoke them to
Hypothesize about how the language works before going on to the Experiment on
the basis of that hypothesis.
ESA
- In
the ESA model three components will usually be present in any teaching
sequence, whether of five, fifty or a hundred minutes
- E stands for Engage
- students have to be engaged emotionally
- S stands for Study
- A
stands for Activate - any stage at
which students are encouraged to use all and/or any of the language they know
The Communicative Approach
The communicative approach or Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
is the name which was given to a set of beliefs which included not only a
re-examination of what aspects of language to teach but also a shift in
emphasis on how to teach!
Non-communicative activities
|
Communicative activities
|
No communicative desire
|
A desire to communicate
|
No communicative purpose
|
A communicative purpose
|
Form not content
|
Content not form
|
One language item only
|
Variety of language
|
Teacher intervention
|
No teacher intervention
|
Materials control
|
No materials control
|
The
communication continuum
Task-based learning (TBL)
- Popularized
by prof. Prabhu, who speculated that students were likely to learn language if
they were thinking about a non-linguistic problem.
- Three
basic stages of TBL according to Jane Willis:
o
Pre
task (introduction to topic and task)
o
Task
cycle (task, planning and report)
o
Language
focus (analysis, practice).
Four methods
These
methods developed in the 1970s and 1980s as humanistic approaches to remove
psychological barrier is to learning.
1. Community Language Learning
This methodology is not based on the usual
methods by which languages are taught. Rather the approach is patterned upon
counseling techniques and adapted to the peculiar anxiety and threat as well as
the personal and language problems a person encounters in the learning of
foreign languages. Consequently, the learner is not thought of as a student but
as a client. The native instructors of the language are not considered teachers
but, rather are trained in counseling skills adapted to their roles as language
counselors.
The language-counseling relationship begins
with the client's linguistic confusion and conflict. The aim of the language
counselor's skill is first to communicate empathy for the client's threatened
inadequate state and to aid him linguistically. Then slowly the
teacher-counselor strives to enable him to arrive at his own increasingly
independent language adequacy. This process is furthered by the language
counselor's ability to establish a warm, understanding, and accepting
relationship, thus becoming an "other-language self" for the client.
The process involves five stages of adaptation:
- students
sitting in a circle
- a
counselor or a knower
- making
the utterance
2. The Silent Way
This method
begins by using a set of colored rods and verbal commands in order to achieve
the following:
To avoid the use of the vernacular. To create
simple linguistic situations that remain under the complete control of the
teacher To pass on to the learners the responsibility for the utterances of the
descriptions of the objects shown or the actions performed. To let the teacher
concentrate on what the students say and how they are saying it, drawing their
attention to the differences in pronunciation and the flow of words. To
generate a serious game-like situation in which the rules are implicitly agreed
upon by giving meaning to the gestures of the teacher and his mime. To permit
almost from the start a switch from the lone voice of the teacher using the
foreign language to a number of voices using it. This introduces components of
pitch, timbre and intensity that will constantly reduce the impact of one voice
and hence reduce imitation and encourage personal production of one's own brand
of the sounds.
To provide the support of perception and action
to the intellectual guess of what the noises mean, thus bring in the arsenal of
the usual criteria of experience already developed and automatic in one's use
of the mother tongue. To provide a duration of spontaneous speech upon which
the teacher and the students can work to obtain a similarity of melody to the
one heard, thus providing melodic integrative schemata from the start.
The complete set of materials utilized as the
language learning progresses include: A set of colored wooden rods A set of
wall charts containing words of a "functional" vocabulary and some
additional ones; a pointer for use with the charts in Visual Dictation A color
coded phonic chart(s) Tapes or discs, as required; films Drawings and pictures,
and a set of accompanying worksheets Transparencies, three texts, a Book of Stories,
worksheets
- the
teacher says as little as possible
- interacting
with physical objects, especially with Cuisenaire
rods
- pointing
to a phonemic chart
3. Suggestopedia
- Georgi
Lozanov
- physical
surroundings and atmosphere of the classroom are of a vital importance;
- the
reason for our inefficiency is that we set up psychological barriers to
learning: we fear that we will be unable to perform, that we will be limited in
our ability to learn, that we will fail;
- one
result is that we do not use the full mental powers that we have and according
to Lozanov, we may be using only 5 – 10% of our mental capacity
- In
order to make better use of our reserved capacity, the limitations we think we
have need to be ‘desuggested’
- parent-children
(teacher-student) relationship
- three
main parts: oral review, presentation and discussion, concert session
(listening to classic music)
- Desuggestopedia/suggestopedia,
the application of suggestion to pedagogy, has been developed to help students
eliminate the feeling that they cannot be successful or the negative
association they may have toward studying and, thus, help them overcome the
barriers to learning.
- One
of the ways the students’ mental capacities are stimulated is through
integration of the fine arts.
Techniques
CLASSROOM SET-UP – the challenge for the teacher is
to create a classroom environment which is bright and cheerful. (The teacher
should try to provide as positive environment as possible.)
PERIPHERAL LEARNING – this technique is based upon that
we perceive much more in our environment than that to which we consciously
attend. It is claimed that, by putting poster containing grammatical
information about the target language on the classroom walls, students will
absorb the necessary facts effortlessly.
POSITIVE SUGGESTION – it’s the teacher responsibility
to orchestrate the suggestive factors in a learning situation, thereby helping
students break down the barriers to learning that they bring with them.
Teachers can do this through direct and indirect means.
BAROQUE MUSIC – it has a specific rhythm and a
pattern of 60 beats per minute, and Lozanov believed it created a level of
relaxed concentration that facilitated the intake and retention of huge
quantities of material.
4. Total Physical
Response (TPR)
- The
originator of TPR, James Asher, worked from the premise that adult second
language learning could have similar developmental patterns to that of child
acquisition.
- Children
learn language from their speech through the forms of commands, and then adults
will learn best in that way too.
- In
responding to commands students get a lot of comprehensible input, and in
performing physical actions they seem to echo the claims of Neuro-linguistic
programming that certain people benefit greatly from kinesthetic activity.
- This
method is developed to reduce stress people feel while studying foreign
languages. Learners are allowed to speak when they are ready.
o
Using
commands to direct behavior
o
Role
reversal
o
Action
sequence
Principles
- The students' understanding of the
target language should be developed before speaking.
- Students can initially learn one
part of the language rapidly by moving their bodies.
- Feelings of success and low anxiety
facilitate learning.
- Language learning is more effective
when it is fun.
- Students are expected to make errors
when they first begin speaking. Teachers should be tolerant of them. Work on
the fine details of the language should be postponed until students have become
somewhat proficient.
Technique
- Step I The teacher says the commands as he himself
performs the action.
- Step 2 The teacher says the command as both the
teacher and the students then perform the action.
- Step 3 The teacher says the command but only students
perform the action
- Step 4 The teacher tells one student at a time to do
commands
- Step 5 The roles of teacher and student are reversed.
Students give commands to teacher and to other students.
- Step 6 The teacher and student allow for command
expansion or produces new sentences.
Humanistic teaching
- Humanistic
teaching has found a greater acceptance at the level of procedures and
activities, in which students are encouraged to make use of their own lives and
feelings in the classroom.
- Such
exercises have a long history and owe much to a work from 1970s called Caring
and Sharing in the Foreign Language Classroom by Gertrude Moscowitz in which
many activities are designed to make students feel good and remember happy
times while, at the same time, they practice grammar items.
- When I was a child my favorite food
was hamburger, or When I was a child my favorite relative was my uncle. I was
shown how to crawl. I pushed out of my mother’s womb.
The Lexical Approach
- The
lexical approach, discussed by Dave Willis and popularized by the writer
Michael Lewis is based on the assertion that language doesn't consist of
traditional grammar and vocabulary, but also of phrases, collocations, and
idioms.
- A
lexical approach would steer us towards the teaching of phrases which show
words in combination. Thus, instead of teaching will for the future, we might
instead have students focus on its use in a series of archetypical utterances
such as I'll give you a ring.
The Communicative Approach
What is
communicative competence?
- Communicative
competence is the progressive acquisition of the ability to use a language to
achieve one's communicative purpose.
- Communicative
competence involves the negotiation of meaning between meaning and two or more
persons sharing the same symbolic system.
- Communicative
competence applies to both spoken and written language.
- Communicative
competence is context specific based on the situation, the role of the
participants and the appropriate choices of register and style. For example:
The variation of language used by persons in different jobs or
professions can be either formal or informal.
The use of jargon or slang may or may not be appropriate.
- Communicative
competence represents a shift in focus from the grammatical to the communicative
properties of the language; i.e. the functions of language and the process of
discourse.
- Communicative
competence requires the mastery of the production and comprehension of
communicative acts or speech acts that are relevant to the needs of the L2
learner.
Characteristics of the Communicative
Classroom
- The
classroom is devoted primarily to activities that foster acquisition of
L2. Learning activities involving
practice and drill are assigned as homework.
- The
instructor does not correct speech errors directly.
- Students
are allowed to respond in the target language, their native language, or a
mixture of the two.
- The
focus of all learning and speaking activities is on the interchange of a
message that the acquirer understands and wishes to transmit, i.e. meaningful
communication.
- The
students receive comprehensible input in a low-anxiety environment and are personally
involved in class activities. Comprehensible input has the following major
components:
- a. a context
- b. gestures and other body language
cues
- c. a message to be comprehended
- d. a knowledge of the meaning of key
lexical items in the utterance
Stages of language acquisition in the
communicative approach
1.
Comprehension or pre-production
a. Total physical response
b. Answer with names--objects,
students, pictures
2.
Early speech production
a. Yes-no questions
b. Either-or questions
c. Single/two-word answers
d. Open-ended questions
e. Open dialogs
f.
Interviews
3. Speech emerges
a. Games and recreational activities
b. Content activities
c. Humanistic-affective activities
d. Information-problem-solving
activities
The Natural Approach: Theoretical Base
The Natural Approach and the Communicative
Approach share a common theoretical and philosophical base. The Natural
Approach to L2 teaching is based on the following hypotheses:
1. The acquisition-learning distinction
hypothesis: Adults can "get" a second language much as they learn
their first language, through informal, implicit, subconscious learning. The conscious, explicit, formal linguistic
knowledge of a language is a different, and often non-essential process.
2. The natural order of acquisition hypothesis:
L2 learners acquire forms in a
predictable order. This order very
closely parallels the acquisition of grammatical and syntactic structures in
the first language.
3. The
monitor hypothesis: Fluency in L2 comes from the acquisition process. Learning produces a "monitoring" or
editor of performance. The application of the monitor function requires time,
focus on form and knowledge of the rule.
4. The input hypothesis: Language is
acquired through comprehensible input.
If an L2 learner is at a certain stage in language acquisition and
he/she understands something that includes a structure at the next stage, this
helps him/her to acquire that structure.
Thus, the i+1 concept, where i= the stage of acquisition.
5. The affective hypothesis: People with
certain personalities and certain motivations perform better in L2
acquisition. Learners with high
self-esteem and high levels of self-confidence acquire L2 faster. Also, certain
low-anxiety pleasant situations are more conducive to L2 acquisition.
6. The filter hypothesis: There exists an affective filter or
"mental block" that can prevent input from "getting
in." Pedagogically, the more that
is done to lower the filter, the more acquisition can take place. A low filter is achieved through low-anxiety,
relaxation, non-defensiveness.
7. The
aptitude hypothesis: There is such a thing as a language learning
aptitude. This aptitude can be measured
and is highly correlated with general learning aptitude. However, aptitude relates more to learning
while attitude relates more to acquisition.
8. The
first language hypothesis: The L2
learner will naturally substitute competence in L1 for competence in L2. Learners should not be forced to use the L1
to generate L2 performance. A silent
period and insertion of L1 into L2 utterances should be expected and tolerated.
9. The textuality hypothesis: The
event-structures of experience are textual in nature and will be easier to
produce, understand, and recall to the extent that discourse or text is motivated
and structured episodically.
Consequently, L2 teaching materials are more successful when they
incorporate principles of good story writing along with sound linguistic
analysis.
10. The expectancy hypothesis: Discourse
has a type of "cognitive momentum."
The activation of correct expectancies will enhance the processing of
textual structures. Consequently, L2
learners must be guided to develop the sort of native-speaker
"intuitions" that make discourse predictable.
Making choices
- Exposure to language: students need constant exposure to
language since this is a key component of language acquisition
- Input: students need comprehensible input but this
is not enough in itself, they need some opportunity for noticing or
consciousness–raising to help students remember language facts.
- CLT: communicative activities and task-based
teaching offer real learning benefits
- The affective variable: anxiety needs to be lowered for
learning to take place.
- Discovery: where culturally appropriate,
students should be encouraged to discover things for themselves.
- Grammar and lexis: showing how words combine together
and behave both semantically and grammatically is an important part of any
language learning program.
- Methodology and culture: teaching methodology is rooted in
popular culture. Therefore, compromise may be necessary.
- Pragmatic eclecticism does not just mean that “anything
goes“. On the contrary, students have a right to expect that they are being
asked to do things for a reason, and that their teacher has some aim in mind
which he or she can, if asked, articulate clearly. Teaching plans should always
be designed to meet an aim or aims.
Pair work- closure
What seems to work in English classes will
depend upon the age and character-type of learners, their cultural backgrounds,
and the level they are studying at – not to mention the teacher's own beliefs
and preferences!
