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

1. The students' understanding of the target language should be developed before speaking.
2. Students can initially learn one part of the language rapidly by moving their bodies.
3. Feelings of success and low anxiety facilitate learning.
4. Language learning is more effective when it is fun.
5. 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!