Modern language Teching Methods
статья по английскому языку по теме

Modern Language teaching methods.

The opening up of Europe in the 1970s with the formation of the Common Market, the forerunner to today’s European Union, led to an increase in the demand for foreign language learning. A new way of learning languages was felt necessary in the wake of the need for quicker results and pedagogical changes in the understanding of how learning best takes place.^[1]

        The traditional method of language teaching, sometimes known as situational language teaching, had been based on learning grammar and translating sentences, with the aid of audiolingual material that utilises drills and repetition. It was felt to be a slow way to learn and stilted in that it did not teach a language as it was actually spoken, but only a formal, written style. The new method, which has come to be known as communicative language teaching, was designed to enable students to communicate in the culture of the studied language, taking into account idioms and gestures. It is characterized by learning through doing more than learning through studying. Instead of avoiding mistakes, which was the criticism of the method focused on learning grammar, communicative language teaching highlights effective construction of meaning through experimentation. It takes into account things like purpose, setting, function, roles, and variety across the four communicative areas of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It focuses on authentic language and real and appropriate settings. This takes into account the fact that in different situations speakers of a language need different vocabulary and styles of communicating.

        Jack Richards points out that grammatical competence (the ability to construct a sentence correctly) is not to be considered unimportant, but that the ability to use a language competently, in a number of different situations, taking into account settings and participants, as well as using the appropriate type of communication, is.^[2] According to the ground-breaking work of Hymes, grammatical competence was insufficient since it was a resource to be used through societal interaction in the creation of meaningful exchange.^[3] Thus, communicative competence goes beyond grammatical competence in that it requires also contextual or sociolinguistic competence.^[4]

        The method involves creating real-life situations and asks students to communicate with one another in a meaningful and non-predetermined way. Teachers become facilitators and listeners more than instructors and reference points and students take more responsibility for their own learning through interactivity. This can take the form of working in pairs at dialogues and role plays, completing tasks, gathering information, sharing opinions, and reasoning ideas. Information gap, whereby students seek to gain information from another student through a series of question and answers, is the most common teaching technique for this. Fluency (defined by Richards as meaningful interaction and the ability to maintain comprehensible and ongoing communication despite limitations in his or her communicative competence^[5]). The key difference between situational and communicative language teaching seems to have to do with interactivity. The former relied upon what could be described as a mechanical, one-way learning system and lacked the spontaneity and open-endedness of the communicative language system. Of course, fluency and accuracy need to be developed together, and the needs for grammar, although there is evidence that this is not always the case.^[6]

        It is argued that motivation is increased through communicative language teaching, where students have the opportunity to negotiate meaning and deal with relevant and interesting content. Thus, it has been argued that the communicative language teaching methodology is more appropriate for second-language students (e.g., non-English-speaking students living in an English-speaking country) than foreign-language students (e.g. non-English-speaking students living in their own country learning English).^[7]