13 Flashcards
(16 cards)
OUTLINE TOPIC
- INTRODUCTION
- EVOLUTION AND HISTORY OF LANGUAGE TEACHING
- 1 THE GRAMMAR-TRANSLATION METHOD
- 2 THE REFORM MOVEMENT
- 3 THE AUDIO-LINGUAL AND AUDIO-VISUAL METHODS
- CURRENT APPROACHES
3.1 THE SITUATIONAL LANGUAGE TEACHING METHOD
3.2 THE NOTIONAL-FUNCTIONAL SYLLABUS
3.3 COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE TEACHING
A. NATURAL APPROACH
B. CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING (CLIL)
C. THE TASK BASED LEARNING METHOD
D. COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH
3.4 ALTERNATIVE METHODS
INTRO TOPIC
For many years teachers have searched for a way to teach second languages. There have been a large number of methods suggested by various researchers, all with different levels of success. Today, foreign language teaching has incorporated into its objectives the communicative concept, which is the basis of the Communicative Approach.
According to Jeremy Harmer, the best teachers are those who think carefully about what they are going to do in their classes. In this sense, teachers must bear in mind students’ characteristics, abilities and needs.
EVOLUTION AND HISTORY OF LANGUAGE TEACHING METHODS: INTRO
Five hundred years ago, Latin was the most studied language in the world. It was based on memorizing grammar rules and translating. Although Latin became displaced as a language, modern languages were taught using the same techniques. Based on this concept, the Grammar-Translation Method was developed.
THE GRAMMAR-TRANSLATION METHOD
This method has a German origin, and was used from 1840 to 1940. The fundamental purpose of this method was to enable students to read literature in the target language. It was thought that the mental discipline associated with this type of learning will benefit students.
The foreign language was studied through detailed analysis of the grammar rules, and memorization was encouraged. In this method, accuracy was more important than fluency. Therefore, reading and writing skills were enhanced. This is understandable as the main goal of learning a language was to read its literature.
Its main disadvantage was that translation was overused and the language of teaching was the students’ mother tongue (L1). Moreover, due to the translation of literary texts, the language was unrealistic and pupils without good memory founded this method difficult to follow. In this method, the teacher is the authority and the students have a passive role.
In the second half of the 19th century there was a strong reaction to this method across Europe known as the Reform Movement.
THE REFORM MOVEMENT
The Reform Movement (1860-1910) marks the beginning of the influence of applied linguistics on language teaching. The Reformers were linguists and phoneticians from across Europe who thought that language teaching should focus on oral skills rather than on the written ones. Some of the scholars who participated in this movement were H. Sweet, P. Passy, and F. Gouin, among others.
H. Sweet and P. Passy were the founders of the International Phonetic Association (IPA), which have the goal of studying the spoken language and giving phonetic training in order to establish good pronunciation habits.
Gouin’s observations of first language acquisition led to the creation in 1860s of the Direct Method by It Sauver and Berlitz. This method was focus on oral skills and sought to immerse the learner in the same way as when a first language is learnt. Thus, all teaching was done in the target language and grammar is taught inductively focusing on oral skills and pronunciation.
The weakness lied in its assumption that a second language could be learnt as the mother tongue, when in fact the conditions are very different.
The innovations of the Reform Movement had no impact in schools, where Grammar-Translation method was still used. However, it was very influential in the long term, as it laid foundations for the development of new methods in the second half of the 20th century
THE AUDIO-LINGUAL AND AUDIO-VISUAL METHODS
The Audio-lingual method was also known as the Army Method. It was born in the second half of the twentieth century in United States under the influence of L.Bloomfield, a structuralist linguist, and B. F. Skinner, a psychologist who applied Paulov’s principle of “stimulus-response -reinforcement” to language learning. Based on behaviorist theory, it postulated that learning a second language meant internalizing a set of habits, following a process of imitation and reinforcement.
Thanks to innovations in technology, it was possible to bring native voices into classroom with the use of language lab and tape-recorder. The most important aspect of this method was the emphasis given to oral skills, although no real communication was developed.
Based on this method emerge the Audio-visual method, which consisted of taped dialogues, accompanied by film-strips designed to act as visual aids.
The main disadvantage of these methods was the repetitive use of drills. Thus, pupils felt bored and unable to use the language in a creative way.
Both methods had their decline at the end of the 70s, when Chomsky published his Generative Transformational Grammar. For him, language is innate and not formed from habits.
CURRENT APPROACHES:INTRO
There has been a change over the last forty years in the way languages have been taught. Linguists and teachers had realised that the most important element of language learning is the ability of the students to communicate. Pursuing this aim, many methods have been developed culminating in the method is actually in use today, the Communicative Approach. We will now briefly explain some of the most outstanding ones beginning with Structural-Situational Method
THE SITUATIONAL LANGUAGE TEACHING METHOD
This method was created in the 1960s by the British linguists M. Halliday and J.R. Firth, and was known as the three P’s method (Presentation-Practice-Production). It was a pragmatic version of the Audio-Lingual method, with the main difference that language was always presented in context and given social meaning, which made learning meaningful. This is one of the main features of the Communicative Approach that will be explained later.
However, the contents were still determined and the oral practice is normally based on guided repetitions.
THE NOTIONAL-FUNCTIONAL SYLLABUS
In the 1970s, after Chomsky’s reaction against mechanical methods, the Council of Europe introduced the Notional-Functional Syllabus, in which the course contents were organized taking into account “notions” and “functions” instead of grammar.
A “notion” is a particular context in which people communicate (e.g. “shopping”), and a “function” is a specific purpose in a given context (e.g. asking about prices).
The notional-functional syllabus was the work of Wilkins, Widdowson and Jan van Ek, among others. This type of syllabus was first introduced in Spain in 1990 with the LOGSE and marks the beginning of the communicative revolution in foreign language teaching.
COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE TEACHING
The communicative revolution revolves around the term COCO, which was introduced by Dell Hymes in the early 1970s, as a reaction to Chomsky’s distinction between “linguistic competence”, the speaker’s knowledge of language, and “linguistic performance”, the actual use of language in real situations).
Hymes brought the sociolinguistic perspective into Chomsky’s view, as for him the native speakers do not only construct grammatically correct utterances, but knows the rules of use, WHERE, WHEN, and HOW to use the language. His model consisted of four main aspects, systematic potential (have a system to create language), appropriacy (knowledge of the correct language in a given situation), frequency of occurrence (to know how often something is said) and finally, feasibility (plausibility of the language).
These categories were adapted in the 80’s for teaching purposes by Canale and Swain, who stipulated four subcompetences, Grammatical, that refers to the ability to use the units and the rules of the language system, Discourse, capacity to use the language with coherence and cohesion, Socio-linguistic, which implies using the appropriate language in different contexts, and Strategic, refer to the mastery of verbal and non-verbal communicative strategies to solve problems during communication.
Later, Jan Van Ek introduced a fifth subcompetence, socio-cultural subcompetence, which is the ability to know the social and cultural context in which the language is used.
Nowadays, developing communicative competence is the aim of any language and is reflected in our current Primary Curriculum in several ways, such as Objective F (article 7 RD 126+ 4 of D 89) that states the need for pupils to “achieve basic communicative competence in a foreign language in order to express and understand simple messages related to their every daily life”.
The COCO is directly developed though the linguistic competence, the 1st. of the 7 key competences established by the LOMCE 8/2013 of 19th. of December.
Besides, it is remarkable the importance that the third key competence, the Digital one, has when COCO is involved. It is connected to the ICT, which is a cross-curricular element and an incredibly effective teaching tool in teaching a foreign language, as it has a great motivational potential and gives pupils exposure to native English.
Pursuing the communicative competence as main aim of language teaching, many methods have been developed.
NATURAL APPROACH
It was developed in the late 70s by Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell. It fosters “natural” language acquisition, as children acquire their mother tongue. Therefore, it is based on comprehensible input and communication, where understanding lead to learning.
This approach has five hypotheses:
- Acquisition versus learning: the mother tongue is learnt in a natural way without effort, in an unconscious way, is therefore “acquired”. On the other hand, the second language is normally “learnt” in an artificial situation, the classroom, so comprises a conscious process.
- Natural order: states that learners acquire the grammatical structures following a predictable order. For example, oral skills before the written ones.
- Monitor: the language that is consciously “learned”, can only monitor the output, not generate new language.
- Input + 1: language is acquired by exposure to comprehensible input at a little higher lever thatn the learner can understand.
- Affective Filter: states that motivation, self-confidence and anxiety affect language acquisition. Learning will take place when this filter is low.
CLIL
The term CLIL was coined by David Marsh in the 90s. This method involves teaching a curricular subject through a foreign language, so teachers are specialists in their own discipline, not traditional language teachers.
The main advantage of this method is the increase in learners’ exposure to the foreign language, giving them the chance of acquiring a proficiency in the target language. Thus, it prepares them better for an internationalised society.
The Community of Madrid has embraced this educational approach setting up a growing number of CLIL schools.
THE TASK-BASED LEARNING METHOD (TBL)
This method was popularised by Prabhu and attempts to make language in the classroom truly communicative by putting the focus on meaningful tasks connected to real life situations.
In a task-based lesson the teacher does not pre-determine what language will be studied, thus, the lesson is based around the completion of a central task and the language studied is determined by what happens as the students complete it.
There are three main categories of task that we use as techniques in class:
- information-gap, which involves a transfer of information between students.
- reasoning-gap, in which pupils derive new information from given information through inference or deduction, and
- opinion-gap, includes expressing a personal preference in response to a given situation. E.g.: taking part in the class discussion of a given issue.
COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH OR COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING (CLT)
The Communicative Approach is an “umbrella term” that describes a methodology which teaches students how to communicate efficiently.
The Natural Approach which emphasizes on “comprehensible input” is complemented by this approach which is based on “meaningful output”. Its basic assumption is that students will be more motivated to study a foreign language if they feel that they are doing something useful with the language.
As teachers’ goal is that their students become communicatively competent, they need to learn how to use the appropriate language to a given context, emphasizing that it is possible to say something in different ways. Therefore, students are engage in role-plays, where fluency has more importance than accuracy. So, teacher’s role is to facilitate communication and not merely to correct errors. In this light, is crucial that they create
a positive atmosphere for the success of the activity.
In this model, authentic materials, such as traditional tales or songs, are frequently used so that students can develop strategies normally used by native speakers.
In this approach students have an active role as they participate and their needs and interests are considered. Learners “learn by doing”, which is a totally learner-centred and constructivist way to learn.
ALTERNATIVE METHODS
A. THE SILENT WAY METHOD
Created by Gattegno in the 1970s, it was based on the premise that the teacher should be a silent spectator promoting pupils’ autonomy, as they will have an active role in their own learning process. The teacher will only give corrective feedback in the form of headshakes or hand movements.
This method associates colours to phonemes in order to teach pronunciation. For example, the schwa may be signified by the colour blue. If the teacher writes the words on the board, whenever the schwa appears, he or she will write it in blue.
B. SUGGESTOPEDIA
Developed by Lozanov in the 1980, this method is based on yoga and soviet psychology. Based on the affective filter, this method emphasizes on the importance of the psychological environment, to make students feel comfortable and confident when learning a foreign language. To achieve this purpose, the use of music in the different lessons plays a crucial role.
C. TOTAL PYSICAL RESPONSE METHOD (TPR)
Developed by James Asher, it derives its name from the emphasis given to the physical actions learners have to make as they are given commands. It has multiple advantages as the activities do not require a great deal of preparation and students enjoy moving around. Therefore, is perfect for mixed ability class, especially for kinaesthetic and hyperactive learners.
However, it is recognized that this method is most useful for beginners, and it is not a very creative method as pupils cannot express their own thoughts.
CONCLUSION
As a conclusion, I would highlight that as teachers of English we need to foster communication, as we are not simply teaching a language, but HOW TO COMMUNICATE in that language. Therefore, it is important we choose an adequate methodological approach that will allow us help pupils improve their communicative competence in English.
Hence our approach to teaching should be communicative, by providing meaningful and fun activities that take into account students’ age, interests and need. To achieve this aim, the combination of different methodologies would be the best choice.
We should also take advantage of the technological means available at our school as they have the power to incentive learners towards the target language.
As Dewey said, ‘education is not preparation for life, its life itself’. Thus, an eclectic methodology will be the stepping stone that will lead our students towards a communicative competence in English, and in this sense, prepare them better for their future.
