Language teaching methods

1. Dr. VMS

2. 
 An approach is a set of correlative assumptions dealing with the
nature of language (i.e. linguistic) and the nature of language
teaching and learning; it describes the nature of the subject
matter to be taught; it is more theoretical and forms the basis of
any method to be formulated; an approach is axiomatic.-
Edward Anthony
 A method is an overall plan for the orderly presentation of
language material; no part of the method evolved contradicts the
principles of the approach on which it is based; a method is
more procedural; within any approach, there can be several
methods.
 A technique represents implementation; it is the actual
implementation of a method in the classroom. It is the particular
way of doing things to accomplish an immediate objective.
Techniques must be consistent with a method, which in turn
must be in harmony with an approach Edward. M (1963:66).
Approach, Method and Technique in
Language Teaching

3. 
 Teaching a language involves a proper approach, method and
execution of the desired content. There are various language teaching
methods available today especially for teaching second/foreign
languages.
 Evolution of the language teaching paved the way for inclusion of
special features in the activities especially in accordance with the needs
of the learners. Advanced developments in Computer, engineering and
technology supports the language teaching activity as more innovative,
appropriate, cost effective, easy access and novel.
 Language teachers use various teaching methods based on the need
and appropriateness of the curriculum learners. Teachers prefer not just
one single language teaching method in their classroom activities rather
they use several so as to make the activity as effective and complete.
 Amalgamation of teaching methods based on the suitability of the
learners help creating learner cantered curriculum. The following
section provides the various language teaching methods being
practiced by the teachers from the past to present.
Language Teaching Methods

4. 
 Grammar Translation Method
 Direct Method
 Audio-Lingual Method
 Silent Way
 Suggestopedia
 Community Language Learning
 The Natural Approach
 Total Physical Response (TPR)
 Communicative Language Teaching
 Content-based Instruction
 Task-based Language Teaching
 Cooperative Learning
Various Language Teaching Methods

5. 
 In language teaching the Grammar-Translation Method is not
new and it is used in various names for a prolonged time, once it
was called as the ‘Classical Method’ since it was first used to
teach the classical languages, Latin and Greek. During the early
20th century the grammar translation method was primarily
used to teach the foreign languages to the students through
reading practices.
 This method has the strong motive that by teaching the grammar
of the target language the second language learners can learn the
error free second language. Moreover this method prefers to
teach the target language through the grammatical patterns of
the first language.
 The grammar translation method of teaching concerns that the
familiarity and achievement made by the learners in the first
language also be received in the foreign language.
Grammar Translation Method

6. 
 i. creating the students so as to read the literature of the
target language
 ii. Providing exercises in the target languages will be good
idea to develop the linguistic, cognitive and intellectual
calibres of the learners
 iii. Helping the leaners familiarise and memorise the
grammatical structure of the first language and there by
apply the similar structures in other contexts
 iv. Enhancing the students teacher interaction in a more
traditional way
 v. literary language is given more importance and same is
considered as superior to other language skills
Grammar translation method

7. 
 Similar to the Grammar-Translation Method, the Direct Method is also
not a new one in language teaching history. Since the Grammar
Translation Method was not very effective in teaching the students to
use the target language with communicative competencies, the Direct
Method became popular as an alternative. The method itself belongs
to the natural approach of language teaching aiming at the learners
more communicative in the target language.
 The recent developments in the method of instruction became easier
and help students to communicate freely in the target language. The
Direct Method does not encourage the translation activates rather it
focuses on conveying the intended meaning directly to the receiver.
 This method encourages the learners to receive the content as it is in
the target language and the learners by means of repetitive listening
acquire the pronunciation, grammatical and syntactical patterns.
Direct Method ascertains that the natural way of receiving language
through listening activities help the learners achieve the fluency.
Direct Method

8. 
 i. learners directly associate with the target language
vocabulary items, grammar and syntactical structures and
make meaning of their own
 ii. Leaners probably have more chances to think and decide on
the meaning and logic of the second language directly
 iii. Learners have more opportunities to listen to the foreign
language and there by improve their pronunciation
 iv. Activities designed in the target language may be helpful for
the learners to use them in real contexts
 v. Target language activities and practices can be arranged at
larger extents and leaners will have more possibilities to speak
and act
Direct Method

9. 
 The Audio-Lingual Method was developed in the United States
during WW II.
 It is based on the oral language practices similar to the Direct
Method of teaching. At the same time it is very different, in
approach, process and function rather than emphasizing the
vocabulary acquisition through exposure to its use in situations,
the Audio-Lingual Method trains students in the use of
grammatical and syntactical patterns.
 Charles Fries (1945) of the University of Michigan streamlined
the way in applying principles from structural linguistics in
developing the method, and for this reason, it is also referred as
‘Michigan Method’. Later in its development, principles,
approaches and methods from behavioural psychology (Skinner
1957) also were incorporated.
Audio-Lingual Method

10. 
 Teaching spoken language in dialogue forms.
 ii. Direct choral response by all or parts of the class for a
holistic improvement.
 iii. Teaching the use of structure through pattern
practices.
 iv. Guiding the students in choosing and learning
vocabulary items of various lexical categories.
 v. Show how words relate to meaning in the target
language and practice them.
Audio-Lingual Method

11. 
 Repetition- The student repeats an utterance aloud as soon as
he has heard it. He does this without looking at a printed text.
The utterance must be brief enough to be retained by the ear.
Sound is as important as form and order.
 2. Inflection- One word in an utterance appears in another
form when repeated.
 3. Replacement-One word in an utterance is replaced by
another.
 4. Restatement-The student rephrases an utterance and
addresses it to someone else, according to instructions.
 5. Completion- The student hears an utterance that is complete
except for one word, and then repeats the utterance in
completed form.
Audio-Lingual Method

12. 
 The Silent Way is one of the methods of language teaching devised
and executed by Caleb Gattegno. In this method the colored wooden
sticks called Cuisenaire rods are used for the series Words in Color,
an approach to the teaching of initial reading in which sounds are
coded by specific colors.
 The Silent Way belongs to the tradition followed by Direct and
Audio Lingual Methods of teaching, which views learning as a
problem-solving, creative, discovering activity, in which the learner
is a principal actor rather than a passive listener.
 A massive number of people around the world learned languages
through the Audio-Lingual Method, and indeed the same method is
still practiced today several curriculum across the world.
 Even though it is practiced for a prolonged period it has its own
shortcoming like the students’ inability to readily transfer the habits
they had mastered in the classroom to communicative use outside it.
Moreover the idea that learning a language meant forming a set of
habits was seriously challenged in the early 1960s.
Silent Way

13. 
 the teacher just oversee and conduct the activities whereas the
learners only perform in all the possible ways and means to
utilise the language skills in practice
 ii. in the teacher-students interaction the teacher is seemingly
silent but very active to make the students perform and to
monitor their activities
 iii. This method provides only language clues for the learners
to perform and not the complete language content
 iv. the language activities focus on the learners use of
pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and syntactical patterns
 v. learners are not discouraged for the language content they
produce since this activity mainly focus on their language use
Silent Way

14. 
 Suggestopedia is one of the language teaching methods developed by
the Bulgarian psychiatrist-educator Georgi Lozanov, which is a specific
set of learning recommendations are derived from Suggestology, which
Lozanov describes as a "science ... concerned with the systematic study
of the non rational and/or non conscious influences" that human
beings are constantly responding to (Stevick 1976: 42).
 Lozanov asserts that the psychological barriers and fear of the learners
on learning are the reasons for their inefficiency. The major aim of the
method is to accelerate the process by which students learn to use a
foreign language for everyday communication.
 This is to be done by breaking down the psychological barriers learners
bring with them to the learning situation. Results show that learners do
not use their full mental powers due to their lack of confidence in
language performance.
 According to Lozanov and others, people use only five to ten percent
of their mental capacity and they need to break the limitation of their
thoughts in order to make full use. The learning atmosphere and
classroom ambience along with the teachers’ instruction play crucial
role in language teaching activities.
Suggestopedia

15. 
 1. Show absolute confidence in the method.
 2. Display fastidious conduct in manners and dress.
 3. Organize properly and strictly observe the initial stages
of the teaching process -this includes choice and play of
music, as well as punctuality.
 4. Maintain a solemn attitude towards the session.
 5. Give tests and respond tactfully to poor papers (if any).
Suggestopedia

16. 
 The Community Language Learning method takes its
principles and approaches from the general Counselling-
Learning approach developed by Charles A. Curran. He found
that the adult learners often feel threatened by a new learning
situation that highly affects their learning potentials.
 This method considers the learners as whole persons rather
mere students so as to provide them certain level of
motivational strength. This method has a strong hold that by
understanding students’ fears and being sensitive to them can
help students overcome their negative feelings and turn them
into positive energy to further their learning.
Community Language Learning

17. 
 Translation- Learners form a small circle. A learner whispers a
message or meaning he or she wants to express, the teacher translates
it into (and may interpret it in) the target language, and the learner
repeats the teacher's translation.
 2. Group Work -Learners may engage in various group tasks, such
as small-group discussion of a topic, preparing a conversation,
preparing a summary of a topic for presentation to another group,
preparing a story that will be presented to the teacher and the rest of
the class.
 3. Recording-Students record conversations in the target language.
 Transcription-Students transcribe utterances and conversations they
have recorded for practice and analysis of linguistic forms.
 5. Analysis-Students analyze and study transcriptions of target
language sentences in order to focus on particular lexical usage or on
the application of particular grammar rules.
Community Language Learning

18. 
 The natural approach is a method of language teaching developed by
Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell. This method has base of
teaching language naturally and make it more communicative rather
than concentrating too much on vocabulary and grammar practices.
It was found that the naturalistic principles are similar to that of
second language acquisition in several aspects.
 Krashen and Terrell note that such "approaches have been called
natural, psychological, phonetic, new, reform, direct, analytic, and
imitative and so forth" (Krashen and Terrell 1983: 9). This was an
attempt to develop a language teaching proposal that incorporated
the "naturalistic" principles researchers had identified in studies of
second language acquisition.
 This approach aims to foster naturalistic language acquisition in a
classroom setting, and to this end it emphasises communication, and
places decreased importance on conscious grammar study and
explicit correction of student errors.
The Natural Approach

19. 
 i. Teaching according to the Natural Approach focuses on
communicative abilities of the students.
 ii. This approach is to help beginners to become
intermediate.
 iii. Vocabulary is considered prior to syntactic structures.
 iv. Natural Approach employs lot of comprehensible input
must be provided.
 v. Use of visual aids and tools help improve the
comprehension of the students.
The Natural Approach

20. 
 Total Physical Response (TPR) method of teaching in general
was considered as the Comprehension Approach in foreign
language teaching learning practices. It is called so due to the
importance it gives to listening comprehension practice.
 In most of the other methods it is witnessed that students have
speaking activities in the target language from the first day. In
the 1960s, James Asher’s research gave rise to the hypothesis
that language learning starts first with understanding and ends
with production.
 It was strongly believed that only after the learner internalizes
an extensive map of how the target language works, speaking
will appear spontaneously. Asher reasoned that the fastest,
least stressful way to achieve understanding of any target
language is to follow directions uttered by the instructor
(without native language translation).
Total Physical Response (TPR)

21. 
 The students naturally develop fluencies in the productive skills in
due course of practices the same as seen exactly how an infant
acquires its native language. A baby spends many months listening to
the people around it and imitates the same for some time and
eventually able to utter words.
 The child takes his time to practice and make sense out of the sounds
it hears. It is the natural phenomenon of the child to imitate and
speak and makes it fluent upon attaining the necessary skills even
without any instruction from others.
 The major aim of TPR is to have the students enjoy their experience
in learning to communicate in a foreign language. Learners in Total
Physical Response have the dual roles as listener and performer.
Students listen actively and respond physically to the commands
delivered by the teacher.
 Learners of TPR are required to respond both individually and
collectively in accordance with the instruction put forth by the
teacher.
Total Physical Response (TPR)

22. 
 The communicative approach in language teaching starts from the
theory of language as communication. The goal of language
communicative language teaching (CLT) is to develop the
communicative competencies of the learners.
 During 1970s the educator began to observe all the existing methods of
language teaching and found that the students could produce sentences
accurately in a lesson, but could not use them appropriately when
genuinely communicating outside of the classroom. Still some others
noted that being able to communicate required more than mastering
linguistic structure, due to the fact that language was fundamentally
social (Halliday 1973).
 Learners need to understand the culture, behaviour, custom and
societal manners of the target language culture to certain extent to make
the communication better. Within a social context, language users
needed to perform certain functions, such as promising, inviting, and
declining invitations (Wilkins 1976).
Communicative Language
Teaching

23. 
 Within a social context, language users needed to perform
certain functions, such as promising, inviting, and declining
invitations (Wilkins 1976).
 Students may know the rules of linguistic usage, but be unable
to use the language (Widdowson 1978). Knowing the linguistic
knowledge of the language and social behaviour of the group
needs to be taught to the students at least in the primary level.
 In short, being able to communicate required more than
linguistic competence; it required communicative competence
(Hymes 1971) knowing when and how to say what to whom.
 Such observations contributed to a shift in the field in the late
1970s and early 1980s from a linguistic structure-cantered
approach to a Communicative Approach (Widdowson 1990;
Savignon 1997).
Communicative Language Teaching

24. 
 Content-based Instruction(CBI) is an approach in which students
acquire the target language through content. Richards and Rodgers
(2001) say that “Content-Based Instruction refers to an approach to
second language teaching in which teaching is organized around the
content or information that students will acquire, rather than around a
linguistic or other type of syllabus” (Richards & Rodgers, 2001, p. 204).
 CBI is an effective method of combining language and content in
learning. This approach has more positive impacts in foreign language
learning contexts. Snow (1991) characterizes content-based instruction
as a ‘method with many faces’—both to make the case for content-
based instruction as a method of language teaching and to portray the
great variety of forms and settings in which it takes place.
 In CBI the students will acquire specific contextual knowledge, and
not around the linguistic or other type of syllabus. CBI method is
based on the principles of Communicative Language Teaching. Apart
from teaching language for academic purposes teaching content
language for other specific disciplines also practised.
Content-based Instruction

25. 
i. Base instructional decisions on content rather
than language criteria.
ii. Involve students actively in all phases of the
learning process. One of the main characteristics
of the CBI classroom is that it is learner-centred,
not teacher-centred.
iii. Choose content for its relevance to students’
lives, interests, and/or academic goals.
iv. Select authentic texts and tasks.
Content-based Instruction

26. 
 Task-based Learning (TBL) approach has close connection with
the Communicative Language Teaching method, where the
teaching process is done entirely through communicative tasks.
Task-based Language Teaching is another form of the
communicative approach, where language is acquired through
use. Skehan (1998), drawing on a number of other writers, puts
forward five key characteristics of a task:
 I. Meaning is primary
 II. Learners are not given other people’s meaning to
regurgitate
 III. There is some sort of relationship to comparable real-world
activities
 IV. Task completion has some priority
 V. The assessment of the task is in terms of outcome.
Task-based Language Teaching

27. 
 I. A needs-based approach to content selection.
 II. An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the
target language.
 III. The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.
 IV. The provision of opportunities for learners to focus not only on
language but also on the learning process itself.
 V. An enhancement of the learner’s own personal experiences as
important contributing elements to classroom learning.
Task-based Language Teaching

28. 
 Cooperative Learning is an innovative instructional strategy that
involves a lot of motivational strategies to make instruction relevant
to the students and get them involved. Several definitions of
cooperative learning have been offered by educationists based on its
theory, function and practice.
 Felder and Brent (2010) define cooperative learning (CL) as students
working in teams on an assignment or project under conditions in
which certain criteria are satisfied. Johnson, Johnson & Holubec
(2013) defined cooperative learning as the instructional use of small
groups so that students work together to maximize their own and
each other’s learning.
 It is an instructional programme in which students work in small
groups to help one another master academic content in foreign
language. Cooperative learning essentially involves students
learning from each other in groups regardless their previous
learning achievements.
Cooperative Learning

29. 
 1. Positive Interdependence: Team members are obliged to
rely on one another to achieve their goal.
 2. Individual Accountability: All students in a group are held
accountable for doing their share of the work.
 3. Face-to-Face Promotive Interaction: Group assignments
should be constructed so that the work cannot be simply
parcelled out and done individually. Assignments must
include work that has to be done interactively.
 4. Appropriate Collaborative Skills: Students are encouraged
and helped to develop and practice trust building, leadership,
decision-making, communication and conflict management.
 5. Group Processing: Team members set up group goals,
periodically assess whether they are doing well as a team, and
identify changes they will make to function more effectively in
the future.
Cooperative Learning

30. 
 Computer Assisted Language Teaching (CALT) is one of the
approaches through which teaching is done by making use of
computer technologies.
 CALT methods are mostly used for class room presentation,
testing and evaluation of the students’ performance, recording
the scoring patterns and progress of the learners. CALT
Packages help utilising the Information and Communication
Technologies in best possible way.
 Recent developments made in CALT programs provide a good
interactive platform for the learners of second and foreign
languages. The teachers of ESL/EFL can make the computer
oriented teaching and testing as a best resource eliminating the
effort and time significantly.
CALT Programs

31. 
 Developments in computer software technologies to teach and learn
languages are inevitable in recent times. Online classrooms serve as a
good source to teach the students of different locations and also act
as alternatives to the traditional classrooms.
 One of the significant advantages of using computer technologies is
due to easy access and availability of learning sources. Computer
assisted language teaching (CALT ) method will be the most
important priorities of the future generation.
 Due to the impact of recent researches on classroom teaching and
learning the language teaching activities become more valid and
appropriate to meet the current needs of the learners.
 Language learners are from multifaceted disciplines and professions
which make difficulties to follow one single method to teach all.
Online classrooms are the best alternatives for teaching massive
number of students with various modules to suit the learners of all
disciplines.
Online classrooms

32. 