Methodology and different approaches

Applied linguistics, Psychology and Language Teaching 


Carter, Ronald & David Nunan eds. 2001. The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Celce-Murcia, Marianne and Elite Olshtain. 2000. Discourse and Context in Language Teaching.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Hedge, Tricia. 2000. Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Lightbown, Patsy and Nina Spader. 2006. How Languages Are Learned. 3^rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Williams, Marion and Robert Burden. 1997. Psychology for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Schmitt, Norbert. 2002. An Introduction to Applied Linguistics. London: Arnold. 

The Communicative Approach 

A communicative methodology should be based on the Communicative Approach or Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

What do we teach? We need to give special importance to language functions rather than grammar and vocabulary.

As Jeremy Harmer says in his book The Practice of English Language Teaching (2008) the activities "typically involve students in real or realistic communication, where the accuracy of the language they use is less important than successful achievement of the communicative task they are performing. [...] What matters in these activities is that students should have a desire to communicate something. [...] They should be focused on the content of what they are saying or writing rather than just one language structure. The teacher will not intervene to stop the activity; and the materials he or she relies on will not dictate what specific language forms the students use either"

"The emphasis of CLT is on functional communication, social interaction, and real-life language use. Addressing fluency and accuracy, this approach considers integrated components of communicative competence, including the grammatical, functional, and sociolinguistic. The major tenet of CLT is that language acquisition is achieved through using language communicatively, rather than from repetitious drills that are common in the grammar-based approach." (Pu, Chang 2008)

Activities you can use at class following this approach include:

• Role Play
• Interviews
• Information Gap
• Games
• Language Exchanges
• Surveys
• Pair Work
• Learning by teaching

• Harmer, Jeremy 2008: The Practice of English Language Teaching (4th Edition). Essex: Pearson Longman
• Pu, Chang 2008: "English as a Second Language (ESL) Approaches". Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education. SAGE Publications.

Grammar-based approach 


This approach is the one that most of us have used during our school days.

"The grammar-based approach addresses the structure or grammatical elements of language in order to improve language skills." 

"The grammar-translation method is a practice of the grammar-based approach. Grammar is taught with extensive explanations in students' native language, and later practice is through translating sentences from the target language to the native language, or verse visa. Little attention is paid to the content of texts; rather, emphasis is on language form itself. Similarly, little attention is paid to pronunciation and active use of English."

"Students may have difficulties “relating” to the language because the classroom experience is disconnected from real life. There is often little contextualization of the grammar; thus, students memorize abstract rules in isolation."

Taken from: 

• Pu, Chang 2008: "English as a Second Language (ESL) Approaches". Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education. SAGE Publications. 

http://www.sage-ereference.com/bilingual/Article_n103.html 

Though it is important to know the grammar points of a language we cannot forget that a language needs to be actively used, spoken, listened, written or read. With only grammar activities we are not going to achieve that our students can communicate in a foreign country using the second language, in this case, English.

Discourse Analysis Approach 




Why is it important to use this approach? When can we use it?

Well, to begin with, we must say that one of the main aspects that is developed in this approach is the use of language as it appears in its own context, without any special adaptation (authentic material)

Discourse Analysis approach is not only important in order to learn real language in context without adapting but also, thanks to this authentic material “Learners gain so a greater appreciation and understanding of […] the sociolinguistic factor that contribute to linguistic variation across setting and contexts” (Douglas 2001).

In some groups with an advanced level of English this approach can be carried out, but what happens with the little ones? Can we use authentic material without adapting it? The answer is yes. We can facilitate lexical items that appear in our lesson and give them a previous context so that students can understand better what's going on. Also, as teachers, we need to use material that has been very carefully chosen . It implies more work, more hours at home surfing the Internet, but at the end we will see the reward at class.

Bibliography:

• Celce-Murcia, Marianne and Elite Olshtain 2000: Discourse and Context in Language Teaching: A Guide for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Douglas, A. 2001: „Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers‟. ERIC Digest.

Teachers' Beliefs

"There is a growing body of evidence to indicate that teachers are highly influenced by their beliefs, which in turn are closely linked to their values, to their views of the world and to their conceptions of their place within it. One comprehensive review of the literature on teachers' beliefs concluded that these had a greater influence than teachers' knowledge on the way they planned their lessons, on the kinds of decisions they made and on their general classroom practice (Pajares 1992). Beliefs were also found to be far more influential than knowledge in determining how individuals organise and define tasks and problems, and were better predictors of how teachers behaved in the classroom.

Beliefs are notoriously difficult to define and evaluate, but there do appear to be a number of helpful statements that we can make about them. They tend to be culturally bound, to be formed early in life and to be resistant to change. Beliefs about teaching, for example, appear to be well established by the time a student gets to college (Weinstein 1989). They are closely related to what we think we know but provide an affective filter which screens, redefines, distorts, or reshapes subsequent thinking and information processing. Our beliefs about one particular area or subject will not only be interconnected, but will also be related to other more central aspects of our personal belief systems, e.g. our attitudes and values about the world and our place within it. Because they are difficult to measure, we usually have to infer people's beliefs from the ways in which they behave rather than from what they say they believe (Agyris and Schon 1974).

We have stressed earlier the importance of teachers reflecting upon their own actions in order to make explicit their often implicit belief systems and to help them clarify what is personally meaningful and significant to them in their professional roles. Teachers' beliefs about what learning is will affect everything that they do in the classroom, whether these beliefs are implicit or explicit. Even if a teacher acts spontaneously, or from habit without thinking about the action, such actions are nevertheless prompted by a deep-rooted belief that may never have been articulated or made explicit. Thus teachers' deep-rooted beliefs about how languages are learned will pervade their classroom actions more than a particular methodology they are told to adopt or coursebook they follow. If the teacher-as-educator is one who is constantly re-evaluating in the light of new knowledge his or her beliefs about language, or about how language is learned, or about education as a whole, then it is crucial that teachers first understand and articulate their own theoretical perspectives."

From Williams, Marion and Robert Burden. 1997. Psychology for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Argyris, C. and D. A. Schon. 1978. Organizational Learning: a Theory of Action Perspective. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.

Pajares, M. F. 1992. Teachers' beliefs and educational research: clearing up a messy construct. Review of Educational Research, 62(3), 307-32.

Weinstein, C. S. 1989. Teacher education students' perceptions of teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 40(2), 53-60.