Teach English in Yangdian Zhen - Jining Shi

I would like to start my essay by expressing how much I have learned and enjoyed going through all those unites. From personal experience, I was once a student, studying French as a second language, so that’s why I could relate to a lot of the topics and unites (non grammar ones) covered in this course, especially the ones talking about the different challenges a teacher could face in a classroom. I have also experienced some of those diversities, varieties and challenges myself when it comes to class size, monolingual and multi-lingual groups and different levels of students within the same class. The topic I am choosing for my essay would be “comparative teaching methodologies” as I’m still a new and inexperienced teacher myself, so I found this topic very interesting and helpful in my future teaching career. Since I’m not an expert on the matter, and all my information was gathered from this course, I don’t think I have the expertise to give an introduction on the topic but rather talk about the different methods of teaching presented in this course. • Grammar-translation: it’s an old school that basically rely on translation and finding the equivalent of what the student is learning in their own native language, it doesn’t help students to learn the language itself but rather learn about the language without getting the natural flow of the new language, also requires that the teacher would have very good knowledge of the students’ native language. • Audio-lingualism: It’s a method that suggests that learning is a result of habit formation through conditioning, it relies mainly on long repetition drills. It’s an outdated method as it was proven that learning a language has more in it than just forming habits and that the students will be able to process language more effectively from the knowledge they have acquired. • Presentation, practice and production: It’s a very effective method in teaching simple language at lower levels where the teacher basically presents the context and situation for the language, and also explains the meaning and the form of the language, students then practise making sentences with the language they learned, then they move on to the production phase where they become more creative with the language. • Task-based learning: it’s a method that focuses on the task rather than the language, where students perform a task (while using the language), then if necessary, the teacher can provide some language study to help clarify the issues they had in the task. • Communicative language teaching: this method focuses on communicative functions of the language rather than grammar and vocabulary. It suggests that the learning will take care of itself provided that the students have enough exposure to the language and the opportunity to use it. • Communicative language learning: It’s a method that’s based on the students themselves would chose a topic to talk about under the supervision and necessary help with the language issues arising during the conversation. • The silent way: where the teacher says as little as possible which forces the student to discover and learn the language themselves which end up in a better outcome compared to remembering what’s been taught to them. A lot of teachers don’t find it easy to apply this method. • Suggestopaedia: This method requires the students to be comfortable and relaxed. There is some sort of parenthood relationship between the teacher and the student and new names are given out. A lesson based on this method consist of 3 parts, first, an oral review of the previous lesson, second, presenting and discussing the new language, then finally the teacher reads a new dialogue while students are listening to relaxing music. • The lexical approach: which suggests that it’s more effective to use words and phrases for language acquisition than grammatical structure. I totally agree with the course that it’s hard to say which method is the best or if there’s one better than the other, but personally speaking, I don’t think there’s anything wrong in trying different methods and decide based on results which one was more effective. Also the fact that there is a big individual variation between different students and different cultures that could result in one method being for effective than the other, which is hard to know beforehand.