As part of a professional development class on language teaching every week I have to reflect on two language teaching methods. Here are some of the discussion prompts and my personal take on them:
COMPREHENSION APPROACH VS COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH
A new hybrid mythological creature: THE MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHER!
- 10:30am - the bell rings - students exit the classroom defeated after a particularly challenging calculus (or philosophy, or chemistry lol) lesson and flood the hallway while one sentence echoes among them: “I thought the prof. was speaking a different language! I didn’t understand anything!”
How many times have we heard or uttered this statement ourselves? We literally use the experience of being exposed to a foreign language as the paradigm, the epitome of the disheartening frustration we feel when we don’t understand something!
But that epitome disintegrates with the COMPREHENSION approach, where students are exposed to the target language exclusively, but every word and every sentence of it are made perfectly understandable through the careful use of visual aids and physical actions.
Such approach allows students to ACTIVELY UNDERSTAND meaning: when for example we take part in a TPR lesson all our senses are engaged in the search for meaning: we look for visual, auditory and even tactile clues in an incredibly active process of discovery.
Contrarily, if the teacher were to reveal the meaning of the foreign utterance directly (for example by saying the translation immediately after the foreign sentence), the students would get to KNOW the meaning PASSIVELY without engaging all the cognitive skills and processes that characterize the understanding process and which are so favorable to memorization and real acquisition of the subject.
As Albert Einstein intelligently put it : ‘Any fool can know. The point is to understand!’
Although my teaching philosophy doesn’t completely align with the Comprehension approach I fully believe in the effectiveness of an active process of discovery and understanding, and having taught children for many years it has become second nature for me to mime and use physical actions, body language and visual aids of all kinds (realia, flashcards etc.) to help my students understand the meaning of my words both in full-immersion and bilingual classes and I rarely have to resort to the students’ mother tongue to explain meaning; however I have come across students who are so used to a more passive lesson environment that they seem unable to connect the many visual, auditory and tactile clues to the spoken language (usually if that happens in group classes I’ll have the whole class translate out loud for the benefit of the students who are struggling to understand, because “Il piacere più nobile è la gioia della comprensione!” - The most noble of pleasures is the joy of understanding!" -Leonardo Da Vinci).
The comprehension approach focus on imitating the “natural language learning experience” and the idea of the Silent Period reveal some influences from both the DIRECT approach and the AFFECTIVE-HUMANISTIC approach respectively; however, differently from these two predecessors, the COMPREHENSION approach de-emphasizes the productive skills (writing and speaking) and emphasizes the receptive ones (reading and especially listening) at least at the beginning of the learning process.
Conversely the COMMUNICATIVE approach aims at a balanced development of all language skills in a context of MEANINGFUL COMMUNICATION.
Creating meaningful communication in the classroom requires that the students use and create language for a meaningful purpose (for example to obtain information from their classmates), and in order to achieve this goal this approach learns and borrows from many previous language pedagogy approaches, for example the information gap technique and the use of authentic materials were introduced by the direct approach while the role-play/role-making activities are typical of the affective-humanistic methods.
With the wide-ranging goal of “meaningful communication to connect people and cultures”, which basically coincides with the purpose of language itself (! :) , there is very little that cannot be encompassed in the big umbrella of the COMMUNICATIVE approach and very few teachers who don’t at least partially adopt it as a starting point for their teaching philosophy.
I, like many modern teachers, love to mix and match my techniques according to the setting, topic and students, and I see myself as a communicative teacher with an affective-humanistic heart, a cognitive brain and a comprehension body!
Manticore and Minotaur step aside! There is a new hybrid mythological creature in town: the MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHER!
- 10:30am - the bell rings - students exit the classroom defeated after a particularly challenging calculus (or philosophy, or chemistry lol) lesson and flood the hallway while one sentence echoes among them: “I thought the prof. was speaking a different language! I didn’t understand anything!”
How many times have we heard or uttered this statement ourselves? We literally use the experience of being exposed to a foreign language as the paradigm, the epitome of the disheartening frustration we feel when we don’t understand something!
But that epitome disintegrates with the COMPREHENSION approach, where students are exposed to the target language exclusively, but every word and every sentence of it are made perfectly understandable through the careful use of visual aids and physical actions.
Such approach allows students to ACTIVELY UNDERSTAND meaning: when for example we take part in a TPR lesson all our senses are engaged in the search for meaning: we look for visual, auditory and even tactile clues in an incredibly active process of discovery.
Contrarily, if the teacher were to reveal the meaning of the foreign utterance directly (for example by saying the translation immediately after the foreign sentence), the students would get to KNOW the meaning PASSIVELY without engaging all the cognitive skills and processes that characterize the understanding process and which are so favorable to memorization and real acquisition of the subject.
As Albert Einstein intelligently put it : ‘Any fool can know. The point is to understand!’
Although my teaching philosophy doesn’t completely align with the Comprehension approach I fully believe in the effectiveness of an active process of discovery and understanding, and having taught children for many years it has become second nature for me to mime and use physical actions, body language and visual aids of all kinds (realia, flashcards etc.) to help my students understand the meaning of my words both in full-immersion and bilingual classes and I rarely have to resort to the students’ mother tongue to explain meaning; however I have come across students who are so used to a more passive lesson environment that they seem unable to connect the many visual, auditory and tactile clues to the spoken language (usually if that happens in group classes I’ll have the whole class translate out loud for the benefit of the students who are struggling to understand, because “Il piacere più nobile è la gioia della comprensione!” - The most noble of pleasures is the joy of understanding!" -Leonardo Da Vinci).
The comprehension approach focus on imitating the “natural language learning experience” and the idea of the Silent Period reveal some influences from both the DIRECT approach and the AFFECTIVE-HUMANISTIC approach respectively; however, differently from these two predecessors, the COMPREHENSION approach de-emphasizes the productive skills (writing and speaking) and emphasizes the receptive ones (reading and especially listening) at least at the beginning of the learning process.
Conversely the COMMUNICATIVE approach aims at a balanced development of all language skills in a context of MEANINGFUL COMMUNICATION.
Creating meaningful communication in the classroom requires that the students use and create language for a meaningful purpose (for example to obtain information from their classmates), and in order to achieve this goal this approach learns and borrows from many previous language pedagogy approaches, for example the information gap technique and the use of authentic materials were introduced by the direct approach while the role-play/role-making activities are typical of the affective-humanistic methods.
With the wide-ranging goal of “meaningful communication to connect people and cultures”, which basically coincides with the purpose of language itself (! :) , there is very little that cannot be encompassed in the big umbrella of the COMMUNICATIVE approach and very few teachers who don’t at least partially adopt it as a starting point for their teaching philosophy.
I, like many modern teachers, love to mix and match my techniques according to the setting, topic and students, and I see myself as a communicative teacher with an affective-humanistic heart, a cognitive brain and a comprehension body!
Manticore and Minotaur step aside! There is a new hybrid mythological creature in town: the MODERN LANGUAGE TEACHER!
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