Approaches To Teaching

what they are and how to use them. Expert opinion - Olga Shurpik.

Aug 15

There are a great number of different approaches to teaching languages from the hackneyed grammar-translation method to the revolutionary DOGME approach. Which one you choose and use in your practice is completely up to you and is based on your student’s needs, requirements and learning style. Today we are going to take a look at the ones most frequently used.

Communicative Approach

The term is known by almost every teacher at this point and almost all claim to be using it, especially in contrast to the old “soviet” grammar-translation method, associated with tedious tasks and thick dictionary tomes. However, as surprising as it may sound, not many actually know or understand what the method entails, and what its characteristics are. Let’s set things clear once and for all:

- focus on speaking;
The main purpose of studying any foreign language is to be able to speak it, and this approach takes the idea very seriously. Most exercises you have in class will involve speaking and interacting verbally with the teacher, other students and so on.

- feedback and mistakes correction at the end of the task;
In order to ensure, that your students aren’t interrupted during their speaking practice, all correction and feedback is provided at the end of the task, or even at the end of the lesson.

- situational grammar;
You teach the grammar that arises naturally in speech and explain the rules that your students want to use, the ones that come up during the lesson on their own.

- real context and situations; authentic materials;
Coursebooks are great for the PPP approach, but they can be limiting in what you discuss and how you do it. Language should be used in real scenarios, with materials that your students may encounter in their everyday life.

- no L1
If your goal is to make your students speak their target language as much as possible, then using their first language in class should be brought down to the minimum. Provide as much exposure as possible and refrain from using the easy way out - give definitions and not translations to words, contextual grammar explanations with examples and so on.

Lexical Approach

The term was first coined by Michael Lewis in the early 1990s, but was widely popularised by Hugh Dellar and Leo Sullivan in 2010s who to this day remain its most adamant advocates. The idea at its core is that words do not exist in vacuum, and are used together in various patterns and functions. When students say such phrases as “How are you?”, they do so automatically, without giving a second thought to how it is formed and why the words go together. The word “obvious” is often preceded by the adverb “perfectly” and “to handle” works great with “stress” and “pressure”.

When we speak, we usually incline towards those conventional pairings of verbs and nouns, nouns and adjectives and so on. True fluency arrives when you resort to these conventionalisms, remembering not just one word at a time, but the phrase or a whole expression. These common pairings (or groupings) were named “chunks”.

Adepts of this approach see the text as a brick wall, where every brick represents a language chunk, consisting of two or more words. Even grammar can be studied through the same lens: “Have you ever” is a common collocation, that can be taught as it is, without delving deep into how’s and why’s.

- contextualised vocabulary and grammar;
Everything you teach should be introduced through context, meanings of structures and phrases should be clear and need no translation.

- language chunks; collocations;
As explained before, vocabulary is taught in most common phrases that the words show up in. These should be taught to be recognised in texts and noted for further use.

- main focus on meaning and functions;
What something means is more important than why it means that. Grammar should be functional and instantly usable,

DOGME Approach

Dogme is a communicative approach to language teaching that encourages teaching without published textbooks and focuses instead on conversational communication among learners and teacher. The term came from the movement of film directors who vowed to refrain from using too many special effects in their works instead relying on their skill and authenticity.

The main idea of this approach is that students know what they want to learn and come to class with their own ideas about how it should go. It is the most student-centered approach of them all, it has an unprecedented amount of student autonomy, but at the same time is considered to be one of the most challenging for teachers.

The language that is studied in DOGME classrooms is all emerging and comes from the students and what they want to talk about. Thus, the teacher takes the role of a mediator, who facilitates discussion and learning.

There is a very similar approach to this one called Teaching Unplugged. It compels teachers to cast aside coursebooks and teaching materials and instead provide the more natural learning experience to the students. It doesn’t mean coming to class unprepared, even though that’s what some people interpret it as, but rather, allowing a lot of room for flexibility and change in the plan, not being rigid and too stuck in the routine.

Flipped Classroom

Sometimes confused with DOGME, this method to teaching also relies heavily on student autonomy, especially a lot of individual work and research done outside of classroom. It is quite similar to how we study at universities - digging for answers in the books and online, analysing what we find and putting it together into a coherent presentation.

Here are some main attributes of this approach:

- students are in charge of the lesson;

- they present the topic and the teacher asks questions;

- the teacher is a facilitator;

- students are more engaged;

- students prepare at home;

- you come to verify the information your learned independently.

This is in no way a conclusive list of teaching methods used, but we tried to take a look at the most interesting ones. The honorary mention goes to the PPP Approach (Present-Practice-Produce) studied in-depth during a CELTA course, or a task-based approach, or the Micro-Learning one, that has been all the rage recently. Which one should you use? Our verdict is - a combination of them, depending on that makes most sense for the level, aims and learning styles of your students. Try something new every once in a while to break the routine and surprise your students (if you feel confident and have enough rapport with them).

Which approaches do use? What was the most unusual approach you have used?

EXPERT OPINION

Hello, my name is Olga. I’m a qualified English teacher with more than 20 years of experience. I’ve got experience of teaching adults and children in groups and individually both online and offline. I’m passionate about teaching English. I really enjoy it and I feel that I want to share it with my students.Being creative is my nature and I do it in choosing the activities and tasks for my lessons to make each lesson interesting and exciting for my students. I love using communicative techniques and interactive methods in my work.

One of my favourite methods in teaching is a communicative language teaching (CLT) or communicative approach. Why? It helps to reduce a language barrier. Students practise the language for real purposes through the interaction with a tutor and each other.

Students are engaged in the interaction based on everyday life topics, such as calling a friend, checking in a hotel, booking a table in a restaurant, shopping, inviting to a party, writing an application letter, visiting a doctor, etc.

In CLT all the phrases are taken from the real life commutation. Another feature of CLT is improvisation which I really enjoy!. Students don’t know how the lesson ends and they can’t assume what other students would respond in a dialogue. I offer new exercises and new topics for discussion at each lesson.

I love CLT as it presents grammar and vocabulary in practice. If we need to learn a verb for communication, we learn its conjugation at the first lesson. Also, personal pronouns are learnt in the questions like “Who is he/ she/ you?” and “What does he do?” For instance, to introduce the pronoun -who?- as part of the question “who is this?” I create situations in which this question would sound natural: A patient in a hospital has lost his memory in the car accident and therefore is asking everyone – “Who is it? What is it?”.

So by acting in such real life situations we remove a fear of live communication and start speaking!

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