3. Problems with methods. Approaches, Methods and Techniques Approach

The structural – situational method.


This method is widely used at the time of writing and a very large number of textbooks are based on it. Best it, also has important links with the audio lingual method especially as far as the way the language to be taught is organized (the “structural” ingredient). New language is presented in the form of modal patterns or dialogues. Much use, too, is made of repetition and analogous pattern drilling.

However, great care is always taking to present and practice language

within a situation. Billows explains the word “situation” in the passage you are about to read. The purpose of the situational ingredient is to ensure a meaningful context for language practice. (Another word for this is “contextualization”). In other words it aims to avoid meaningless and mechanical practice.

There are quite a number of prominent methodologists who have contributed to foreign language teaching and English in particular. In conclusion, it should be said that between the grammar-translation method however modified and direct method in various modification there have been mixed or in between methods. The advocates of the latter method try to avoid the extremes of the former. “Language learning” by Peter Humboldt is an example of such a method.

The chief tendency in the development of Methods abroad may be characterized by a scientific approach to the teaching of foreign languages, extensive use of linguistic science, psychology, psycholinguistics, and experimenting. The progress made in the sphere or phonetics, vocabulary and grammar study has shed fresh light on the content, i.e., on what to teach, what linguistic material should be used for developing audio – lingual skills and written language.

The practical application of some theoretical views of American descriptive structural linguists and psychologists, such as the primary of the spoken over the written language, has – led to the oral approach to foreign language teaching; the treatment of language as a complex of habits and skills, as a form of social behavior, has been realized in teaching a foreign language, i.e., a reaction of the organism as a who to a social environment. The learner should know what a native speaker’s response would be in a certain situation.

In this article “Learning English as behavior” M. West gives the following examples of wrong and right responses:

wrong right

What’s this? What’s this? This is a book.

This is a book. Where is the book?

Where is the book? It’s on the table.

The book is on the table. (or on the table.)

Know what they speak but how they speak, or rather how they converse. In a behavioral method of teaching it is necessary to combine a correct and systematic build-up of linguistic elements (structures and carefully selected vocabulary) and a vital and behavioral use of the language. M. West says: “Ideally one needs television or a film so that the pupil may not merely hear how the English language is behaved but see it behaved as well. The behavioristic stimulus-response and reinforcement theory in psychology adopted by foreign language teaching has resulted in repetitive drill of certain patterns of language or in pattern practice; for the purpose language laboratories, programmed instruction, and other innovations have been offered. However this has not brought the result which were promised and expected. The behavioral method has begun to be strongly criticized by psychologists and by the teachers and students themselves. As a consequence of this criticism the cognitive code-learning theory has been proposed. It is considered a more modern and sophisticated version of the grammar-translation method.

The Cognitive Approach is a reaction to the behaviorist features of the Audio-lingual Approach as well.