Reading reflection Week 2: LANGUAGE TEACHERS AND TEACHING METHODS

It goes without saying that to every language teacher, the study of teaching methods is important and helpful in many respects. However, to be honest, before doing the assigned readings for week 2, the one and only teaching method that I can call by name is the Communicative Approach. The reading of MCM and HDB chapters on Methods and Approaches in language teaching has, therefore, greatly opened up my horizons both theoretically and personally.

From the first three chapters of Brown's Teaching by Principles, I come to understand in greater depth how long the history of language teaching is and am acquainted with different stages in the development of language teaching methods. It becomes clear to me that like all other professions, language teaching has undergone a great deal of ups and downs, high and lows, rejection and acceptance, as a result of which new methods were continously invented and applied by language teachers. Also, the process of reading and learning about various teaching methods and their corresponding terms such as the Grammar-Translation Method, the Direct Method, the Silent way, ect. was, to me, an exciting journey into self-analyzing my own experiences in learning foreign languages. At many points in reading the chapters, I kept flashing back on my previous language classes and tried to identify which of the methods being described in the book had been used by my teachers. For instance, I found out during my 7 years learning French at school, I was taught mostly in the Grammar-Translation method, which probably is the main reason why even though i did quite well on French grammar tests, it seemed to take me forever to put all of those grammatical points and the vocabulary I had learned together to produce a good utterance in French. Also, after reading through the chapters, I realize to my amazement that as a language learner, I have, to a certain extent, been exposed to almost all of the teaching methods under description. To me, these methods are like friends whom I previously knew by face, and I am now thankful to the readings for giving me their names.

What is more, the reading of methods and approaches in language teaching gave insight into my perception of language teaching. I came to realize that as a language teacher I can’t just copy my teachers’ methods and teach my students the way I was taught, or just follow the methodology book with no in-depth knowledge of why certain techniques are taken. In fact, as far as I am concerned, every method carries in itself principles that are suitable for certain teaching contexts and styles, and it is a language teacher’s obligation to carefully consider those principles before adapting any particular method, as Larsen-Freeman (2000) stated, teachers should be “clear about why they do what they do”, which then will enable them to “teach differently from the way they were taught”.

Last but not least, as clearly indicated in the reading chapters, no single method is perfect, that is to say, each of them has its own drawbacks and most of the time one specific method only works best to students at a certain proficiency level or in a certain social and psychological teaching context. Again it falls on language teachers to make a wise decision on what methods to be used in each stage of their teaching. As a future English teacher, I would prefer to make a good blend of different methods so that my teaching will be most effective to my students in their language acquisition process. This ambition undoudtedly requires a lot of efforts and experiences on the part of the individual teacher.