Mohammed Kheidher University of Biskra
Faculty of Arabic Language Arts & Foreign Languages
Division of Foreign Languages
Department of English Studies & Education
(Major) Sciences of Language
(Option) TEFL
Approaches, Methods, Techniques
Objectives : As you complete this tutorial you will be able to :
1. Define different teaching-related concepts ;
3. Implement different language methodologies to EFL classes :
4. Develop language teaching literacy.
Food –for-Thought Questions :
1. In what way is GTM and ALM similar or different ?
2. What are the concepts of GTM and Direct Method ?
3. Why is ALM called the Army Method ?
4. Why does ALM avoid ‘‘errors at any cost’’ ?
5. Why are CLT and CBLT the state of the art in the 21st c. ?
Terminology Used in this tutorial :
The science of language teaching
has not reached the point of being
able to consistently demonstrate
the superiority of one methodology
over another for all teachers and all
students and all settings ... and
perhaps it never will.
Diane Larsen-Freeman (1987)
Approach- method- design- technique- procedure- methodologyfunction-notion-communicativecompetency-assumptionaxiomatic- fluency- accuracy-fossilized errors
Edward Anthony’s Definitions
according to Anthony (1963:63-7)
1. An Approach is a set of correlative assumptions dealing with the nature of language teaching
and learning. An approach is axiomatic. It describes the nature of the subject matter to be
taught.
2. Method is an overall plan for the orderly presentation of language material, no part of which
contradicts, and all of which is based upon, the selected approach. an approach is axiomatic, a
method is procedural. Within one approach, there can be many methods.
3. A technique is implementational, that which actually takes palace in a classroom. It is a
particular trick, strategem, or contrivance used to accomplish an immediate objective.
Approaches, Methods & Techniques/ 3 Year/ TEFL/ Mr. Bashar, A.
2. Outline the similarities & differences of different language methodologies ;
Technique must be consistent with a method and therefore in harmony with an approach as
well.
Richards & Rodgers’ Definitions
1. Approach : Their concept of approach is similar to Anthony's.
2. Design : Their design refers to all major practical implications in the classroom, such as
syllabus design, types of activities to be used in the classroom, and student and teacher roles
3. Procedure : It refers to different behaviors, practices and techniques observed in the
classroom
Approach
Theory
Language
Theory
Language
Learning
of
of
Design
Procedure
Objectives
Syllabus
type
Activity
types
Learner
roles
Teacher
roles
Role
of
materials
Techniques
Practices
Behaviours
Typology of Approaches
1. Structural Approaches :
a. Grammar-Translation Method/ The Prussian Method :
The Grammar Translation Method has its historical origins in the teaching of Latin,
which was the dominant language in universities, the public services and intellectual
life in general from medieval times up to the 19th century. Knowledge of Latin was
needed for the study of the bible and for academic purposes like the study of medical
books and legal documents. In Latin studies the focus was, therefore, on the study of
written texts.
It is typical of this approach, therefore, to place emphasis on the rote memory
learning of long lists of bilingual ‘vocabulary equations’, and on the learning of
explicit rules of grammar, frequently in form of tables for the declension and
conjugation of nouns and verbs. In the eyes of proponents of the Grammar
Translation Method vocabulary learning required diligence and the analysis of the
grammatical construction of sentences required intelligence. Learners who failed to do
translations correctly where therefore blamed for being either not intelligent or lazy or
both. In any case, errors were to not be tolerated. And because many people feel, up to
Approaches, Methods & Techniques/ 3 Year/ TEFL/ Mr. Bashar, A.
METHOD
this day, that learning a foreign language means learning to translate sentences from
the mother tongue into the target language and vice versa, this approach to FLT still
has its adherents.
b. Audio-Lingual Method/ The Army Method :
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Speaking and listening competence preceded reading and writing competence.
The development of language skills is a matter of habit.
Students practice particular patterns of language through structured dialogue and drill until
response is automatic.
The printed word must be kept away from the second language learner as long as possible.
There is dependence on imitation, memorization of set phrases, and overlearning.
Structures are sequenced by means of contrastive analysis taught one at a time.
Structural patterns are taught using repetitive drills.
There is little or no grammatical explanation. Grammar is inductive
Great importance is attached to pronunciation..
Success responses are immediately reinforced.
Very little use of the mother tongue by teacher is permitted
Dialogues are the basic form of materials in the Audiolingual method. The dialogue
serves three functions: a) illustrates the target structure; b) illustrates the situation the
structure may be used; c) provides cultural information for language use wherever
possible.
In this method, oral interaction was emphasized in pattern drills, and conversation
practices
2. Functional Method :
a. Oral Approach/ Situational Language Teaching:
The Oral Approach or Situational Language Teaching is an approach developed by
British applied linguists in the 1930s to the 1960s. It is little known by many language
teachers although it had an impact on language courses and was still used in the design of
many widely used EF/ESL textbooks in the 1980s such as Streamline English (Hartley
and Viney 1979).
The Oral Approach and Situational Language Teaching relied on the structural view of
language. Both speech and structure were seen to be the basis of language and, especially,
speaking ability. This was a view similar to American structuralists, such as Fries.
However, the notion of the British applied linguists, such as Firth and Halliday, that
structures must be presented in situations in which they could be used, gave Situational
Language Teaching its distinctiveness.
Approaches, Methods & Techniques/ 3 Year/ TEFL/ Mr. Bashar, A.
It is also called the Aural-Oral Method and/ the Army Method. This method is said to
result in rapid acquisition of speaking and listening skills. The audiolingual method
drills students in the use of grammatical sentence patterns. When this method was
developed it was thought that the way to acquire the sentence patterns of the second
language was through conditioning or helping learners to respond correctly to stimuli
through shaping and reinforcement. The Audiolingual Method is based on:
1.
2.
3.
4.
A typical situational Language Teaching lesson would start with stress and intonation
practice. Then the main body of the lesson might consist of four parts:
revision (to prepare for new work if necessary)
presentation of new structure or vocabulary
oral practice (drilling)
reading of material on the new structure, or written exercises.
3. Interactive :
a. Direct Method :
Instead grammar should be acquired inductively by inducing the rules of how the
language behaves from the actual language itself. Never tell the children anything they can
find out for themselves
Direct Method based on belief that knowing a language was being able to speak it.
Second language learning must be an imitation of first language learning, as this is the
natural way humans learn any language, and so L2 has no place in L1 lesson.
b. Suggestopedia :
It is the study of these suggestive factors in a learning situation.
There are two basic kinds of suggestion: direct and indirect. Direct suggestions are
directed to conscious processes. * an anti-suggestive emotional barrier which rejects
anything likely to produce a feeling of lack of confidence or insecurity: “This antisuggestive barrier proceeds from the set-up in every man.”
Students can sense when we embody the values and attitudes we “talk about”.
Intonation is strongly connected with the rest of the suggestive elements. “Learning is
state of mind dependent”. When varying your voice you “reach” different “states of
mind”.
The artistic organisation of the suggestopedic educational process creates conditions for
concert pseudopassivity in the student. The concert pseudopassivity (concentrative
psychorelaxation) overcomes the antisuggestive barriers, creating a condition of trust and
infantilization in the student, who in a naturally calm state accompanied by a state of
meditation without special autogenic training can absorb and work over a huge quantity of
information.
Approaches, Methods & Techniques/ 3 Year/ TEFL/ Mr. Bashar, A.
It focuses on oral language, requires that all instruction be conducted in the target
language with no recourse to translation. Reading and writing are taught from the
beginning, although speaking and listening skills are emphasized--grammar is learned
inductively. It has a balanced, four-skill emphasis.
Music can be played as the students enter the room, and during the breaksMusic as a
suggestive, relaxing medium. Lozanov researched a wide variety of means for presenting
material to be learned which would facilitate the mentally relaxed, receptive state of mind
he had found to be optimal for learning.
Music can become a powerful facilitator of holistic full-brain learning. For the second
concert presentation of material Lozanov found that Baroque music was especially suited.
TPR is based on the premise that the human brain has a biological program for acquiring
any natural language on earth - including the sign language of the deaf. The process is
visible when we observe how infants internalize their first language.
The secret is a unique "conversation" between the parent and infant. For example, the first
conversation is a parent saying, "Look at daddy. Look at daddy." The infant's face turns in
the direction of the voice and daddy exclaims, "She's looking at me! She's looking at me!"
Dr. Asher calls this "a language-body conversation" because the parent speaks and the
infant answers with a physical response such as looking, smiling, laughing, turning,
walking, reaching, grasping, holding, sitting, running, and so forth.
Notice that these "conversations" continue for many many months before the child utters
anything more intelligible than "mommy" or "daddy." Although the infant is not yet
speaking, the child is imprinting a linguistic map of how the language works. Silently, the
child is internalizing the patterns and sounds of the target language.
When the child has decoded enough of the target language, speaking appears
spontaneously. The infant's speech will not be perfect, but gradually, the child's utterances
will approximate more and more that of a native speaker.
d. The Silent Way :
Caleb Gattegno founded "The Silent Way" as a method for language learning in the early
70s, sharing many of the same essential principles as the cognitive code and making good
use of the theories underlying Discovery Learning.
Some of his basic theories were that "teaching should be subordinated to learning" and
"the teacher works with the student; the student works on the language". The most
prominent characteristic of the method was that the teacher typically stayed "silent" most
of the time, as part of his/her role as helper, and thus the method's popular name.
Language learning is usually seen as a problem solving activity to be engaged in by the
students both independently and as a group, and the teacher needs to stay "out of the way"
in the process as much as possible.
The Silent Way is also well-known for its common use of small colored rods of varying
length and color-coded word charts expressing pronunciation values, vocabulary and
grammatical model
Approaches, Methods & Techniques/ 3 Year/ TEFL/ Mr. Bashar, A.
c. Total Physical Response :
Teachers using the Silent Way want their students to become highly independent and
experimental learners. Making errors is a natural part of the process and a key learning
device, as it is a sign that students are testing out their hypostheses and arriving at various
conclusions about the language.
Another key objective is to encourage students to work as a group - to try and "solve"
problems in the target language together.
This method is used expecting that students would eventually be able to actively use the
language for self-expression, relating their thoughts, feelings and perceptions.
In 1972, the British linguist D.A. Wilkins published a document that proposed a radical
shift away from using the traditional concepts of grammar and vocabulary to describe
language to an analysis of the communicative meanings that learners would need in order
to express themselves and to understand effectively. This initial document was followed
by his 1976 work Notional Syllabuses, which showed how language could be categorized
on the basis of notions such as quantity, location and time, and functions such as making
requests, making offers and apologizing.
At the end of the 1970s, the first course-books to be based on functional syllabuses began
to appear. Typically, they would be organized on the basis of individual functions and the
exponents needed to express these functions. For example, many course-books would
begin with the function of ‘introducing oneself’, perhaps followed by the function of
‘making requests’, with typical exponents being ‘Can I ….?’, "Could you ….?’, "Is it
alright if I ….?’ and so on. These would often be practised in the form of communicative
exercises involving pair work, group work and role plays. It is interesting to compare this
approach with a grammatical syllabus. In a typical grammatical syllabus, structures using
the word ‘would’ tend to appear in later stages of the syllabus, as they are held to be
relatively complex (e.g."If I knew the answer, I would tell you"), whereas in a functional
syllabus ‘would’ often appears at a very early stage due to its communicative significance
in exponents such as ‘Would you like ….?’, which is extremely common and of great
communicative value even to beginners. The need to apply a grammatical name or
category to the structure is not considered important within the framework of a purely
functional syllabus.
f.
Communicative Language Teaching/ Learning :
CLT is interested in giving students the skills to be able to communicate under various
circumstances. As such, it places less emphasis on the learning of specific grammatical
rules and more on obtaining native-speaker-like fluency and pronunciation. Students are
assessed on their level of communicative competence rather than on their explicit
knowledge.
It is more of an approach or philosophy than a highly structured methodology. David
Nunan famously listed five key elements to the communicative approach:[2]
1. An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language.
2. The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.
Approaches, Methods & Techniques/ 3 Year/ TEFL/ Mr. Bashar, A.
e. Notional-Functional Approach:
The role of the instructor in CLT is quite different from traditional teaching methods. In the
traditional classroom, the teacher is in charge and "controls" the learning. In CLT the teacher
serves as more of a facilitator, allowing students to be in charge of their own learning.
The teacher still sets up exercises and gives direction to the class, but the students do much
more speaking than in a traditional classroom. This responsibility to participate can often lead to
an increased sense of confidence in using the language. Putting the teacher in charge of
everything in the traditional classroom has been compared to the Atlas Complex. CLT relieves
Atlas of his "burden."
Communication:
Language is used for communication. For this reason, CLT makes use of communication to
teach languages. Whereas traditional language teaching places a lot of emphasis on grammar
rules and verb conjugations, CLT emphasizes real-life situations and communication in context.
While grammar is still important in the CLT classroom, the emphasis is on communicating a
message.
In CLT, students practice real-life situations, for example, buying food at the market or asking
someone for directions.
In these exercises, the goal is for the student to communicate his or her needs and thoughts,
without worrying about having perfect grammar.
g. Competency-Based Teaching/ Learning :
Competency is the dimunitive of competence ; it refers to abilities and skills that learners need
to acquire in order to be competent in the foreign or second language. Whenever the term
competency is mentioned, a “know-how – to act” process is implied. A competency is a system
of conceptual and procedural parts of knowledge organised into operating schemes that, help
identify a problem-task and its solution through an efficient action within a set of situations.
Learning requires from the learner to go through a process of personal appropriation. Because of
this conception of learning, the learner continually questions his own convictions. This
permanent questioning leads the learner to revise his prior-knowledge and its scope to compare
his own representations with those of his classmates, to search for information and validate it
through consulting various sources of documentation or people in possession of information.
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The interactions with his classmates and his teacher help the learner to:
Make a representation of situations.
Find various ways of performing tasks.
Construct and call upon various resources.
Proceed to an assessment of his progress during the activities and at the end of activities.
Approaches, Methods & Techniques/ 3 Year/ TEFL/ Mr. Bashar, A.
3. The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on the language but also on the
learning process itself.
4. An enhancement of the learner's own personal experiences as important contributing elements
to classroom learning.
5. An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activation outside the
classroom.
CBLT is an application of the principles of Competency-based Education (CBE) to language
teaching. CBE is an educational movement that focuses on outcomes or outputs of learning in
the development of language programs. It emerged in The United States in the 1970s and refers
to an educational movement that educates defining educational goals in terms of precise
measurable descriptions of the knowledge, skills, and behaviors students should possess at the
end of a course of study. CBE addresses what the learners are expected to do with the language,
however they learned to do it.
Auerbach in Richards and Rodgers (2001:145) provides a useful review of factors
involved in the implementation of CBE programs in ESL, and indentifies eight key
features:
2. A focus on life skills
3. Task -or performance- centered orientation
4. Modularized instructions
5. Outcomes that are made explicit a priory
6. Continuous and ongoing assessment
7. Demonstrated mastery of performance objectives
8. Individualized, student-centered instruction
The goal of CBLT is to enable students to become autonomous individuals capable of coping
with the demands of the world. Not only the quality of assessment will improve, but the quality
of teaching and student learning will be enhanced by the clear specification. Rather than
teaching language in isolation, CBLT teaches language as a function of communication about
concrete tasks. Students are taught just those language forms/skills required by the situation in
which they will function. What counts is what students can do as a result of instruction. The
emphasis is on overt behaviors rather than on knowledge or the ability to talk about language
and skills.
Approaches, Methods & Techniques/ 3 Year/ TEFL/ Mr. Bashar, A.
1. A focus on successful functioning in society