In everyday life related activities; individuals tend to look for the best technique and process to execute and successfully achieve a task. This can be seen as an innate nature of human beings who are skilled with the capability and capacity of thinking and distinguishing things in advance in relation to how a task or a sequence of tasks need to be completed using the most effective and viable way with the obtainable resources. When looking at how a teacher teaches another language, the teacher is usually inclined to pursue an effective and result-oriented method with the assumptions that the methods he or she utilises will ultimately lead to the learners mastery of a language. Language teachers on a whole are very much concerned about teaching methods as they need to employ the most effective methods in teaching in order to aid their learner’s achievement of the objectives in learning another language.
The main objective of this essay is to investigate the notion of best method in L2 teaching, which has nowadays become a perplexing problem for many language teachers and experts engaged in the TESOL, ESL or EFL domains and why principled eclecticism seems to be many teachers preferred method.
Firstly, therefore, I shall define the key concepts; methods, approaches and techniques and show the relationship existing between them with reference to literature. Then I will briefly discuss and describe the available methods with emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses in the light of current views of L2 learning and teaching process and finally, I will argue as to why an L2 teacher constantly needs to change the methods and techniques (principled eclecticism) while he/she is engaged in teaching operation in orde...
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... Model and the Centring Principle." TESL-EJ | The Electronic Journal for English as a Second Language. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Dec. 2012.
Nunan, D. 1989. Designing Tasks for Communicative Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Piaget, Jean. Biology and knowledge; an essay on the relations between organic regulations and cognitive processes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Print.
Prabhu, N.S. 1990. There is No Best Method-Why? TESOL Quarterly 24, 2:161-176.
Richards, Jack C., John Talbot Platt, and Heidi K. Platt. Longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics. 2nd ed. Essex, England: Longman, 1992. Print.
Richards, Jack C. and Theodore S. Rodgers. 1986. Approaches and methods in language teaching: A description and analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meanwhile, according to Schon (1987) and Zeichner (1994), through reflective practice, there has been general shift of idea in teacher’s education from the beliefs of the teacher as technician to that of the teacher as reflective practitioner since the late eighties. As a matter of fact, Prahbu (1990) mentioned that teachers in second language teaching begin to realize the pointless of the continual search for the best teaching method and turn their attention to teachers' professional development.
Swarbrick, A. (2013) Aspects of Teaching Secondary Modern Foreign Languages: Perspectives on Practice. London: Routledge Falmer.
"Linguistics 201: First Language Acquisition." Linguistics 201: First Language Acquisition. Western Washington University, n.d. Web. 8 Sep. 2013. .
In the twentieth century, the avoidance of the using L1 in classrooms dominated teachers’ minds; as well it was implemented in many policies and guidelines of language teaching (Cook, 2001). Thornbury (2010) listed a set of arguments against using L1 in L2 classrooms mainly for that the translation of L2 into another language will play negative effects on students’ learning process. He pointed out that the use of L1 will result learners to have a cognitive dependence on their mother tongue at the expense of developing independence TL learning. Although the two language systems are not equivalent in many aspects, students may have an awareness of the notion of equivalence of the two languages if translation serves to convey meanings. Some argue that the use of translation to convey the meaning of the TL is more efficient and more memorable. However, Thornbury (2010) sees the opposite. He stated that the simple and direct way of translation will make L2 knowledge less memorable since the process lacks mental efforts in working out meanings.
Richards, J. C., Platt, J., & Plat, H. (2000). Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied linguistics. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.
Since a language is highly complex and pervasive, all of it (which can hardly be determined) cannot be taught at a time. Moreover all the phenomena related to the language might not be relevant or necessary to be taught to the learner/group of learners. Therefore, successful teaching of the language evidently requires a selection and then an arrangement of the teaching items/materials depending on the prior definition of the objective(s), proficiency level to be developed in the learner, duration of the program, and the like, on the one hand, and on the other, upon the consideration of the learner's needs, lacks, aptitudes, motivation, age, personality memory transfer of training, cognitive style, and so forth. The selection and the sequencing absolutely take place in the syllabus planning stage.
Thus, the book answers numerous practical questions that teachers have often struggled with; for example, how to increase the chances of academic success for language learners, how to use technology to teach language effectively, or how to teach language and content material concurrently. From the preface, the author makes it very clear that the book is designed to support language teachers in their journey as new teachers and throughout their teaching careers. In total, the book contains eleven chapters, which have been divided into four parts. The first part, "What Do Language Teachers Think About?" includes topics of foreign/ second language acquisition theories and language teaching methodologies. This part introduces the background knowledge readers will need in their journey as language teachers. The second part, "How Do You Teach a Language?" introduces approaches to teaching and learning that improve students’ writing, listening, speaking and reading abilities. Each chapter in this part includes suggestions for how students can be motivated and describes teaching and testing approaches to assess students ' language skills and academic literacy. The third part, "How Do I Know What to Teach?" is instrumental in helping teachers adopt teaching practices to particular teaching settings. The fourth part, "Where Do I Go from Here?" helps teachers gain a clearer perspective of what language teaching is all about; this section also considers teacher 's self-assessment and personal
Lynne Flowerdew (2009) “Applying corpus linguistics to pedagogy” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14:3, 393–417
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. An Introduction to Language. 8th ed. Boston: Thomson, 2007.
A major proportion of class time is taken up by teachers talking in front of the classroom(Nunan & Bailey, 2009). No matter what teaching strategies or methods a teacher uses, it is necessary to give directions, explain activities and check students’ understanding (Richards & Schimdt, 1985). This clearly emphasizes the importance of teacher talk in language classrooms. Walsh (2011) claimed that teacher talk is more important in language classroom than any other classroom since in this context the language being used by teacher is not only the means of acquiring new knowledge; it is also the goal of the study.
A teacher’s responsibilities are to ensure that every student gets the education that they deserve from a well-structured curriculum and materials. Within the teacher’s responsibilities a strong foundation of instruction has to be implemented, this is why instructional strategies are significant in a teacher’s career. The strategies for instruction vary from teacher to teacher; as a result there are no specific ways to employ strategies within instruction. The main purpose of this essay is to display knowledge of methods that are involved in teaching second language instruction for various ages and levels of students. This essay will also develop from the following components that methods and techniques are important to encourage tactical instructional strategies. These components are comprehensible input, feedback that is on-going, specific and immediate, grouping structures and techniques, building background and vocabulary development along with student engagement.
After doing reflection exercise in the hand out, I can reflect our own ways to motivate my students and we will try to apply some things I haven’t tried before such as bring the humor and laughter or invite native speakers to my classes. Besides such interesting information above, I can distinguish these terms such as method, technique or approach.While approach is a set of correlative assumptions dealing with the nature of language teaching and learning, method is an overall plan for orderly presentation of language material, based on a selected approach. Technique is particular trick, stratagem or contrivance used to accomplish an immediate objective .Moreover, from Anthony’s proposal , Richards & Rodgers (2001) suggested three terms approach , design, procedure , which I need to take into consider. This lesson also review some popular methods of teaching and introduce some new methods I haven’t learnt such as TPR, CLILL, TBL. This is really an informative
113-117. 151-195. The. English: A Linguistic Tool Kit, (2012), (U214, Worlds of English, DVD ROM), Milton Keynes, The Open University. English in the World, (2012), (U214, Worlds of English, DVD ROM), Milton Keynes, The Open University.
Center for Applied Linguistics. Why, How, When? N.p.: Center for Applied Linguistics, n.d. www.cal.org. US Department of Education. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.
In most institutions of learning today, the classes are made up of students from different ethnic backgrounds. These have different traditions and also speak different languages. In a typical classroom, the majority of the students will speak the same language. The teacher must then employ strategies which will accommodate all the students in the class. This will ensure that every learner gets the best quality of education. This will enable them to be better prepared for career and expressing themselves. In this paper, strategies to assist learners of the English language in their literal development for third grade learners. In the paper, three strategies that can be used by the teacher will be discussed. New strategies and research that will help the English language learners to gain in depth mastery of the language will also be discussed. Due to the widespread learning of the English language in most schools, addressing issues of the language learners is of vital importance. Teachers should have the understanding that cultures are what give someone identity and therefore no student should leave their culture for another. Instead, there should be the blending of different cultures so that students can appreciate and learn from each other.