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Approaches and methods which a language teacher can choose
A language teacher has many approaches and methods from which to choose. Some of them are old and some are new.
Among the old are:
- Grammar- Translation Method: advocating language as an exercise in intellectual development through reading and writing of literature of the target language and translating that literature into the learner’s mother tongue.
- The Direct Method: eschews the learner’s mother tongue and advocates the use of the target language in developing all four skills-listening, speaking, reading and writing.
- Structural-Situational approach: a grammatical approach in teaching language through a careful selection, gradation and presentation of vocabulary items and structures, and through situation-based activities.
- Audio-lingual/ Audio-visual Method: a purely structural approach based on the principles of behavioural psychology that views language learning as habit-formation.
- The Bilingual Method: like Grammar-Translation Method, uses mother-tongue equivalents of the target language utterance to facilitate learning.
- Reading Method: views reading basic to any language teaching.
Among the new are:
- Communicative Language Teaching: focuses on notions and functions as basic to language learning and aims to develop communicative competence in the learners.
- Total Physical Response (TR): teaches language through action-oriented utterances.
- The Silent Way: advocates language learning in which the learner creates rather than remembers and repeats what is to be learnt.
- Community Language Learning (CLL): pleads for a language programme in which learning takes place through cooperation and collaboration in a community of learners.
Each of these methods has a theoretical stance concerning language learning and the learner. Eclecticism believes that a teacher can choose the best of all these methods and achieve success easily.
