Appropriate Methods For Language Teaching
A language is the language of a people or nation and refers to a system of signs that allows a human community to communicate verbally or gesturally. We must differentiate between a mother tongue, which is that of the country in which one was born, from those other foreign languages that can be learned throughout life.
Learning another language or language implies being able, then, to know and appropriate, to a certain extent, its system of signs, its rules and its functioning.
If we take into account that a method involves a specific and concrete procedure to achieve something, from the teaching point of view, we will point out the most relevant aspects of each method and distinguish the most appropriate methods for teaching languages and, therefore , learning a foreign language.
Appropriate methods for teaching languages
GT method
The oldest method of teaching a language, and perhaps the most orthodox, is sometimes called the GT Method. This is so because it is a method mainly focused on grammar and the translation of texts and phrases from one language to another.
This method pays special attention to the grammatical rules and structures that exist between a phrase in one language and another, placing the emphasis on equivalences over the consideration of universal grammatical patterns. This involves rote learning thousands of words and rules, and sentences taken out of context.
Direct method
At the end of the 19th century, another method called the Direct Method emerged. This focuses its focus on verbal communication, regardless of the grammatical specificity of the phrases used, trying that the learner can make themselves understood even when the grammatical structures are not the most appropriate.
In this method, the grammar is intuitive, and it insists on eliminating errors until one can explain oneself by establishing adequate relationships between the foreign word and the situations it names or refers to; hence its “direct” name.
Audio-Lingual Method
For its part, the method called Audio-Lingual has many coincidences with the previous one, since priority is given to the spoken language insisting on oral expression and listening, only in this case the repetition of words, phrases and dialogues as a teaching strategy.
Most suitable methods for teaching languages
Different methods of teaching a foreign language have been developed and used over time, and while we cannot speak of a single method as the best, some are probably more suitable than others.
This is the case of the Communicative Method that, more than a method, is considered an approach from which the learning of other languages is considered a process whose objective is functional rather than structural. That is, the most important thing is the communication purpose, not just the mere fact of learning the grammar of a foreign language.
The communicative method, considering the main aspects of each of the previous ones, puts its interest in the practical need of learning another language, and in the permanent communicative and contextualized interaction as a condition to achieve the use of a foreign language.
At the level of the organization of teaching, using the communicative method implies planning activities focused on problematic situations in which the learning and acquisition of grammatical rules are relegated to the background, without underestimating their internalization, but always depending on the communicative objective.
These problematic situations refer to different scenarios that a person faces in their daily life, such as work, at airports and on trips, to be able to make purchases of all kinds, to be able to ask for help in risky situations, and in that one must be able to progressively develop through the use of another language.
The important thing is communication in language teaching methods
We must emphasize that any method selected to teach a foreign language will be adequate if we take into account the particularities of the learner and their specific learning needs, from which, educators must be able to be flexible in the choice of methods and even combine relevant aspects of each of them.
Both repetition, memorization, and knowledge of grammatical rules can be valid strategies for learning another language, but they must be at the service of solving and making decisions in problematic situations posed as activities of the communicative method, whose objective is that people learn to make themselves understood and can communicate in other languages.
