English teaching methods and approaches

Throughout the history of teaching languages a number of different teaching approaches and methodologies have been tried and tested with some being more popular and effective than others. It’s beneficial to be familiar with a few of these.

1 – The Direct Method

The direct method of teaching English is also known as the Natural Method. It’s used to teach a number of different languages not just English, and the main idea of the Direct Method is that it only uses the target language that the students are trying to learn. Its main focus is oral skill and it is taught via repetitive drilling. Grammar is taught using an inductive way and students need to try and guess the rules through the teacher’s oral presentation.

2 – The Grammar Translation Method

This is the traditional or ‘classical’ way of learning a language and it’s still commonly used. Some countries prefer this style of teaching and the main idea behind this method is that the students learn all grammar rules, so they’re able to translate a number of sentences.

3 – The Audio Lingual Method

The Audio Lingual Method otherwise known as the New Key Method or Army Method is based on a behaviourist theory that things are able to be learned by constant reinforcement. This is related to the Direct Method and just like its predecessor it only uses the target language. The biggest difference between the Audio Lingual Method and the Direct Method is its focus of teaching. The Direct Methods focuses on the teaching of vocabulary whereas the Audio Lingual Method focuses on specific grammar teachings.

4 – The Structural Approach As the name suggests, the method is all about structure. The idea is that any language is made up of complex grammar rules. These rules, according to this approach need to be learnt in a specific order, for example the logical thing would be to teach the verb “to be” prior to teaching the present continuous which requires using the auxiliary form of the verb “to be”.

5 – Suggestopedia

This is a behaviourist theory and related to pseudoscience. This theory is intended to offer learners various choices. It relies a lot on the atmosphere and the physical surroundings of the class. It’s essential that all learners feel equally comfortable and confident. When teachers are training to use the Suggestopedia method, there’s a lot of art and music involved. Each Suggestopedia lesson is divided into three different phases – 1. Deciphering 2. Concert Session 3. Elaboration.

6 – Total Physical Response

Total Physical Response, otherwise known as TPR is an approach that follows the idea of ‘learning by doing’. Beginners will learn English through a series of repetitive actions such as “Stand up”, “Open your book”, “Close the door”, and “Walk to the window and open it.” With TPR, the most important skill is aural comprehension and everything else will follow naturally later.

7 – Communicative Language Teaching CLT

The idea behind this approach is to help learners communicate more effectively and correctly in realistic situations that they may find themselves in. This type of teaching involves focusing on important functions like suggesting, thanking, inviting, complaining, and asking for directions to name but a few.

8 – The Silent Way

The main of this way of teaching is for the teacher to say very little, so students can take control of their learning. There’s a big emphasis on pronunciation and a large chunk of the lesson focuses on it. This method of learning English follows a structural syllabus and grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation are constantly drilled and recycled for reinforcement. The teacher evaluates their students through careful observation, and it’s even possible that they may never set a formal test as learners are encouraged to correct their own language errors.

9 – Community Language Learning

This is probably one of the English teaching methods where the student feels the safest as there’s a great emphasis on the relationship and bond between the student and teacher. Unlike a lot of the other methods and approaches of teaching English as a Second Language, a lot of the L1 (mother tongue) is used for translation purposes.

10 – Task Based Language Learning

The main aim of this approach to learning is task completion. Usually, relevant and interesting tasks are set by the teacher and students are expected to draw on their pre-existing knowledge of English to complete the task with as few errors as possible.

11 – The Lexical Approach

The Lexical syllabus or approach is based on computer studies that have previously identified the most commonly used words. This approach in teaching focuses on vocabulary acquisition and teaching lexical chunks in order of their frequency and use. Teachers of the Lexical Approach place a great emphasis on authentic materials.

(Available: http://www.huntesl.com. Adapted.)

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Language Assessment and the new Literacy Studies

Some Final Remarks

    Planning language assessment from a structuralist view of language has been a fairly easy task, since it aims at testing the correct use of grammar and lexical structures. This has been a very comfortable way to evaluate students’ performance in many regular schools or language institutes due to the stability of standardized answers. From the perspective of the new literacy studies, the comfort of teaching and assessing objective and homogeneous linguistic contents is replaced by a wider spectrum of language teaching and assessing possibilities, whose key elements turn to be difference and critique. Typical activities based on this new approach would enable students to make and negotiate meanings in a much more flexible way, corroborating the novel notion of unstable, dynamic, collaborative and distributed knowledge.

    The inclusion of contents of such nature in language assessments may be, at a first glance, a very laborious process due to the fact we are simply not accustomed to that. Actually, we sometimes find ourselves deprived from the teaching skills necessary to apply a more critical teaching approach, a fact that is much the results of our positivist educational background.

    Nonetheless, since the emergent digital epistemology will require subject more capable of designing and redesigning meaning critically towards a great deal of representational modes, we need to reconsider our teaching approaches, go further and seek theories that take such issues into account. By redefining the notions of language and knowledge, we, thus, assume that the new literacy studies from the last decades may offer very good insights to the field of foreign language teaching.

    The re-conceptualization of language assessment according to the new literacies project presented in this paper does not intend to suggest prompt fixed answers, but it takes the risk of outlining possible activities, signaling certain changes regarding its characteristics and contents, as previously shared.

    The increasing importance of the new literacy and multiliteracies studies and their fruitful theoretical insight for the rethinking of pedagogical issues invite us to review our foreign language teaching practices in a different perspective. By sharing some of our local findings, we attempt to corroborate the collaborative and distributed knowledge discussed by the literacies theory itself and hope to be contributing to the new educational demands of the emerging epistemological basis.

From: DUBOC, A.P.M. Language Assessment and the new Literacy Studies. Lenguaje 37 (1), 2009. pp. 159-178, p. 175-176.

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