VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: [1], 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 11:08:54 06/12/07 Tue
Author: Sônia Nagy
Subject: task 4/final paper -Sônia Nagy

A revolutionary approch

According to Audiolingualism, learners are viewed as organisms that can be directed ,be skilled in techniques to produce correct responses. Usually they play a reactive role responding to stimuli and they have little control over the content, pace or style of learning. Through repeating and memorizing the correct structures, they are able to avoid making mistakes which are seen as something bad, unacceptable. They are also not encouraged to interact because it can lead to mistakes as well. It is known as a teacher -centered method, once the teacher models the target language, controls the direction and pace of learning and monitors and corrects the learners’ performance. He keeps their attention using a range of tasks, drills and situations to practice the grammatical structures. Although this method seemed very efficient, in reality, the results showed that “ learners were often found to be unable to transfer the skills acquired through Audiolingualism to real communication outside the classroom, and many found the experience of studying through audiolingual procedures to be boring and unsatisfactory”. The communicative approach, on the other hand, came as a revolution in language teaching for some reasons.
Firstly, it occurred in relation to learners. Instead of receiving the content passively, they are fostered “ to be active in the process of learning responding in novel and authentic communicative situations”; to interact with people; to struggle to communicate, often by trial and error because it makes part of the process of learning; to achieve their autonomy; to apply the strategies learnt in classroom outside it, that is, they are boosted to go beyond the class, for instance, navigating on the internet to do a research, take part in a chat, and so on. The learners are expected to understand the language and acquire competence for communication which includes grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic and strategic skills.
Secondly, it refers to the teacher’s role in classroom. It can vary from one activity to another. He can work as guide; as a facilitator of the process of learning; as a controller; as an assessor; as an organizer; as an assessor (correcting and giving feed-back); as a participant , and so on. The teacher is responsible for providing learners with input which is authentic, intelligible, and contextualized. He is also responsible to create a classroom atmosphere conductive to interaction in which he has to take into account the learners’ differences. He has to give opportunities to “express themselves in meaningful ways; to listen to each other; to express their ideas in speech and writing and read each other’s writing.” In this kind of interaction, “ negotiation of meaning need to become the norm .While negotiating, students need to have a chance to ask and to receive clarification, to confirm their understanding, generally asking questions and reacting to responses. If true negotiation of meaning is going on, students will be fully engaged in using English to understand the meaning intended by the others, as well as to express their own meaning as clearly as possible. Negotiation of meaning also implies that students have choices as to what to say and how they want to say it.”
Thirdly, different from the Audiolingualism which views the structure as something that should be memorized and that treats it without worrying with meaning(function) and context, the communicative approach considers language as something that “ can not only be seen in terms of grammatical form; it can also be seen in terms of ‘what it does’ or its ‘function’ in communication.” The structure teaching is based on the tripod called the form, the meaning(function) and the use(Pragmatics).So as to illustrate it, we can present the language item( verb to be in the simple past tense ) , to talk about the past ( yesterday, I was at my friend’s house) ; “to ask a question politely (What was it you wanted?); to report what someone said( Mary said it was her birthday tomorrow)”. In relation to its use, it is necessary to think about the context, if its formal or informal, the participants , how and when its should be employed, on which occasions and etc.
In summary, all the reasons pointed out above contributed to make this approach special and effective in relation to the Audiolingualism method. Both, the teacher and the learner gained more freedom to act.

Works cited:
.Gebhard, Jerry G .Teaching English as a Foreign or Second language.The University of Michigan Press.
.Gower, Philips, Walter. Teaching practice. MacMillan, 2005.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.