UNIT 15: APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE TEACHING

In this unit I learned the different approaches that teachers can use in the classroom depending on what they want to focus on and the lesson´s aims. First of all, it essential to know what an approach is. It refers to the people´s views on what language is made up, how it is learned and what classroom practices are the most effective.   Each teacher has their own belief about it and they can opt to choose one rather than another in their teaching process. For example, there are teachers who think language is a set of grammar rules and that the best way to learn them is by analyising grammatical rules. Therefore, they prepare exercises where students have to work out what language means, or learn a list of words by heart. This approach is mostly known as the Grammar Translation Approach. On the other hand, there are teachers who believe that language is a tool for communicating meaning and the best to learn it is by using communicative activities. In order to achieve this, they try to use authentic materials where students can realize of how language is used in real communication, use pair and group activities to enable lots of interaction in the class. In addition, we have the teachers who prefer to use more than one approach because they think language is learned focusing on the different areas. Here we can say that they are using an eclectic approach which means they mix techniques from different approaches in order to achieve learners` expectations. There are many and many other approaches for teaching language such as, the Lexical Approach, PPP,Structural approach, etc. According to my own perspective, I think that we have to choose not only one approach, but various depending on the aims we want to achieve at the end of the lesson. For example, if I want my students to be able to use vocabulary of the unit I can use is the Lexical Approach. I could present them authentic interview in which they have to write down all the chunks they hear, and then I can ask them to create an interview in pairs by using the studied chunks. Another example, if I want my students to work out a grammatical structure by themselves I can use the Guided Discovery Approach in which I can start by giving a fairytale that contain past tense verbs. Then, I can ask them to work out what the rules seem to be for past tense. Once they have deduce the rules I will provide them all the rules for using past tense to check their discovery. To sum up, there is no approach that is best to use in language learning because all them has their benefits depending on the aims we want to achieve and the learners´ needs.

I recommend you to read these books:

·         Richards, J. & Rodgers, T. (2001). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Second Edition. Cambridge. United Kingdom.

·         Brown, H. (2001). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Longman/ Pearson Education, White Plains, New York.

I share you two links that I consider useful and have more information related to this topic:

ü  A guide to learning English. (2011). Language Teaching Methodologies. UK. Retrieved from http://esl.fis.edu/teachers/support/method.htm

ü   Okumus, D. (2013). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL3KGtBfMak