Learn English
- 5 Ways To Boost Your Grammar Skills
Learning English relies on mastering a complex series of definitions, principles, and rules about how everything fits together. As is the case in other languages; grammar represents the rules used to craft meaningful passages. Teachers use a variety of...
- Top Twitter Accounts To Follow To Help You Learn English
While there will always be traditional avenues available to help you learn English, such as self-help books, classes, and different types of computer programs, there are also some less traditional ways that you can immerse yourself in the English language...
- The Goal Of Teachers Who Use The Communicative Approach Is To Have Students Become Communicatively Competent.
?the goal of teachers who use the Communicative Approach is to have students become communicatively competent. While this has been the stated goal of many of the other methods, in the Communicative Approach the notion of what it takes to be communicatively...
- English For Young Learners
Sometimes, teaching English for young learners is not very easy. It needs some methods in teaching English to ease young learners to understand what the main point of learning English. The most important one is nonconventional method. It means students...
- Classroom Routines
One of the most important things I have learnt about teaching young learners is the need for routines. There are many things that can be used in the classroom for many reasons, but today I'm interested in discipline routines. When I started teaching,...
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Post-method - the easy way out?
Post: (prefix), meaning 'coming after in time, often as a rejection of or in reaction to'.
Ok, so are we focused on 'post-' being a simple, temporal shift; or is this a reaction to the methods used before? Surely they're two quite different things, aren't they? Have we simply 'grown out of' methods, viewing them as unhelpful, or are we strongly reacting to them?
Are we anti-methods? If so, why?
There is no doubt that some learners develop a method and it works for them. Some polyglots study a language intensively, using a method largely based on audio-lingualism and grammar-translation; this works for them, very successfully, who are we to dismiss it?
I found an interesting website called 'Omniglot' written and maintained by a ployglot student of languages. This guy is obviously a successful language learner; are there not lessons we can learn from people like this?
I have always felt that there was something strange about the huge contrast between intensive methods promising something like 'learn any language in six-months' and the sometimes rather flimsy, non-method, 'communicative' world of ELT.
Below is a comment that I found on the Omniglot blog:
I?m skeptical about anything from the ESL establishment since as far as I can tell, it?s mostly built around keeping paying students in the system for as long as possible. That is, the student that meets their goals and becomes independent is out of the system and no longer paying. A set of non-goals with undefined methodology fits in well with that.
I?d look instead at systems that have a fixed deadline for preparing students for specific tasks (that are outside the program). There is or used to be a center in Poland charged with taking young adult learners with no Polish and getting them up to speed to follow university classes within one academic year. I really doubt if they had no methodology. It might not have been much fun, but it worked.
A colleague who attended a seminar on multi-lingual people who deal with three or more languages on a daily basis said they all reported the same tactic when confronted with a new language: Get a surface understanding of the whole of the grammar as quickly as possible and then go back and work on different parts of the language.?
This is heavily critical, obviously, but I can hear ring of truth in the distance!
What do you think?
Is post-methodology a product of the commercialisation of the industry? Do we not promise because we're afraid to disappoint? Or afraid of losing 'customers/ clients'?
In my teaching contexts, I have often felt that (to view language schools cynically) kids classes are glorified child-minding and adult classes are a social-club, run by poorly qualified foreigners who like a conversational approach because they don't understand the grammar they're supposed to be teaching.
Tell me I'm wrong!
- 5 Ways To Boost Your Grammar Skills
Learning English relies on mastering a complex series of definitions, principles, and rules about how everything fits together. As is the case in other languages; grammar represents the rules used to craft meaningful passages. Teachers use a variety of...
- Top Twitter Accounts To Follow To Help You Learn English
While there will always be traditional avenues available to help you learn English, such as self-help books, classes, and different types of computer programs, there are also some less traditional ways that you can immerse yourself in the English language...
- The Goal Of Teachers Who Use The Communicative Approach Is To Have Students Become Communicatively Competent.
?the goal of teachers who use the Communicative Approach is to have students become communicatively competent. While this has been the stated goal of many of the other methods, in the Communicative Approach the notion of what it takes to be communicatively...
- English For Young Learners
Sometimes, teaching English for young learners is not very easy. It needs some methods in teaching English to ease young learners to understand what the main point of learning English. The most important one is nonconventional method. It means students...
- Classroom Routines
One of the most important things I have learnt about teaching young learners is the need for routines. There are many things that can be used in the classroom for many reasons, but today I'm interested in discipline routines. When I started teaching,...