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:
READING APPROACH VS AUDIO-LINGUAL APPROACH
THE SCIENTIST SAID TO THE HORSE: "GALLOP USING ONLY TWO LEGS!" AND THE HORSE DIDN'T MOVE ;)
It is utterly fascinating that many of the language pedagogy approaches of the past are so unilateral, after the grammar translation method (focused on reading and writing), and the direct method (mostly focused on speaking and listening) we are back to the writing-focused side of the pendulum arch with the reading approach [Ra] and then back again to the aural/oral side with the audio lingual approach [ALa].
Language is like a beautiful horse, with 4 sturdy, and efficient legs that sustain its weight and move it forward: the 4 essential language skills - reading, listening, speaking (which can be divided In spoken production and spoken interaction) and writing*.
Deciding to purposefully ignore 2 or more of them is like telling a horse to use only 2 legs to gallop! Besides making a wonderful premise for a joke, in reality it’s just a bizarre experiment and we are in the realm of whimsical science.
Each method has its own merits and developed techniques that heavily inform our modern pedagogy, each method finds reasons to exist in the history and the social circumstances in which it was born but their heavy unbalance towards one side or the other is in my opinion what caused most of their demises.
We, on the other hand, are the lucky ones who get to have fun and learn from all the extreme experiments of the past and mix and match the best techniques for our students in each situation.
The different purposes of these two methods, one developed to teach normal children in normal school settings just enough to pass a test and the other created to prepare soldiers to face-to-face meetings with allies and enemies explain and justify all the others differences between them.
The Ra used techniques as vocabulary memorization and deductive grammar teaching applied to level appropriate readings and books, while the ALa used habit formation drills, inductive grammar teaching and functional linguistic chunks memorization applied to useful dialogues.
Personally I use many of the techniques developed by these two methods from guided reading to skimming and scanning from the Ra to minimal pairs for pronunciation practice, playful chain drills and memorization of sentences (the latest only in the very beginning levels) from the ALa.
I always try to work on all 4 skills during each lesson although the time we spend on each skill is different according to the topic, the setting and my students learning styles and needs. For example I have some older students who feel lost if the lesson is “too aural/oral”, on the other hand some younger students would get extremely bored if I concentrated on writing and reading for even a minute too long lol
Either way I always try to get my “horses” to run with all four of their legs! :)
* some languages might not have all these components (for example some tribal languages are thought to only have the oral component)
It is utterly fascinating that many of the language pedagogy approaches of the past are so unilateral, after the grammar translation method (focused on reading and writing), and the direct method (mostly focused on speaking and listening) we are back to the writing-focused side of the pendulum arch with the reading approach [Ra] and then back again to the aural/oral side with the audio lingual approach [ALa].
Language is like a beautiful horse, with 4 sturdy, and efficient legs that sustain its weight and move it forward: the 4 essential language skills - reading, listening, speaking (which can be divided In spoken production and spoken interaction) and writing*.
Deciding to purposefully ignore 2 or more of them is like telling a horse to use only 2 legs to gallop! Besides making a wonderful premise for a joke, in reality it’s just a bizarre experiment and we are in the realm of whimsical science.
Each method has its own merits and developed techniques that heavily inform our modern pedagogy, each method finds reasons to exist in the history and the social circumstances in which it was born but their heavy unbalance towards one side or the other is in my opinion what caused most of their demises.
We, on the other hand, are the lucky ones who get to have fun and learn from all the extreme experiments of the past and mix and match the best techniques for our students in each situation.
The different purposes of these two methods, one developed to teach normal children in normal school settings just enough to pass a test and the other created to prepare soldiers to face-to-face meetings with allies and enemies explain and justify all the others differences between them.
The Ra used techniques as vocabulary memorization and deductive grammar teaching applied to level appropriate readings and books, while the ALa used habit formation drills, inductive grammar teaching and functional linguistic chunks memorization applied to useful dialogues.
Personally I use many of the techniques developed by these two methods from guided reading to skimming and scanning from the Ra to minimal pairs for pronunciation practice, playful chain drills and memorization of sentences (the latest only in the very beginning levels) from the ALa.
I always try to work on all 4 skills during each lesson although the time we spend on each skill is different according to the topic, the setting and my students learning styles and needs. For example I have some older students who feel lost if the lesson is “too aural/oral”, on the other hand some younger students would get extremely bored if I concentrated on writing and reading for even a minute too long lol
Either way I always try to get my “horses” to run with all four of their legs! :)
* some languages might not have all these components (for example some tribal languages are thought to only have the oral component)
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