Modern Language Teaching Methods
Meaning is paramount. Dialogues center around communicative functions and aren’t normally memorized. Contextualization is a basic premise. Language learning is learning to communicate. Effective communication is sought. Drilling may occur, but peripherally. Comprehensible pronunciation is sought. Translation may be used where students need or benefit from it. Reading and writing can start from the first day, if desired. Teachers help learners in any way that motivates them to work with the language.
Learner-Centered Instruction
Includes techniques that focus on or account for learners’ needs, styles, and goals. Techniques that give some control to the student (group work or strategy training). Techniques that allow for student creativity and innovation. Curricula that include the consultation and input of students and that do not presuppose objectives in advance. Techniques that enhance a student’s sense of competence and self-worth. The teacher is a facilitator.
Cooperative and Collaborative Learning
Collaborative learning is a method of teaching and learning in which students team together to explore a significant question or create a meaningful project. Cooperative learning is a specific kind of collaborative learning. In cooperative learning, students work together in small groups on a structured activity. They are individually accountable for their work, and the work of the group as a whole is also assessed.
Interactive Learning
Doing a significant amount of pair work and group work, receiving authentic language input in real-world contexts, producing language for genuine, meaningful communication, performing classroom tasks that prepare them for actual language use out there, practicing oral communication through the give and take and spontaneity of actual conversations, writing to and for real audiences, not contrived ones. As learners interact with each other through oral and written discourse, their communicative abilities are enhanced.
Whole Language Education
The wholeness of language as opposed to views that fragmented language into its bits and pieces of phonemes, graphemes, morphemes, and words. The interaction and interconnections between oral language and writing language. The importance, in literate societies, of the written code as natural and developmental, just as the oral code is.
- Cooperative learning
- Participatory learning
- Student-centered learning
- Focus on the community of learners
- Focus on the social nature of language
- Use of authentic, natural language
- Meaning-centered language
- Holistic assessment techniques in testing
- Integration of the four skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking)
Content-Based Instruction
Integration of content learning with language teaching aims. It refers to the current study of language and subject matter, with the form and sequence of language presentation dictated by content material. Students are pointed beyond transient extrinsic factors, like grades and tests, to their own competence and autonomy as intelligent individuals capable of actually doing something with their new language. Challenges range from a demand for a whole new genre of textbooks and other materials to the training of language teachers to teach the concepts and skills of various disciplines, professions, and occupations.
Task-Based Instruction
It focuses on the use of authentic language and on asking students to do meaningful tasks using the target language. Such tasks can include visiting a doctor, conducting an interview, or calling customer service for help. Assessment is primarily based on task outcome (in other words, the appropriate completion of real-world tasks) rather than on the accuracy of prescribed language forms. This makes TBLL especially popular for developing target language fluency and student confidence. As such, TBLL can be considered a branch of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).