Glossary audiolingual teaching

The proficiency of a teacher is based on the following factors:
1. Teacher should be able to explain his/her ideas clearly in a short and simple way.
2. Teaching process must be organized with taking into consideration the students’ level of language performance and degree of their interest and needs.
3. Teacher's authority, qualification and feeling of responsibility for efficiency of teaching.
4. Students usually obtain complete satisfaction during the lesson of a well- trained and qualified teacher.
5. Methodological preparedness of a teacher and his/her ability of planning the lesson.
6. Teacher should always be ready to answer the learners’ questions, and capable to manage the lesson.
7. Teacher’s ability to form patriotic feelings, to educate students through work, to create favorable atmosphere and direct their activity to the research work and feedback.
8. Teacher's ability to motivate students using different strategies and methods.
9. Teacher should develop students' reflexive skills (analysis, synthesis and evaluation).
10. Teacher should use the effective teaching tools to activate students’ learning, develop their creative thinking and achieve good results.
These factors give us a picture of teacher’s abilities and draw a line of his/her activity. Besides the presentation of the new material, a teacher activates learners’ attention, effort, intelligence and conscious (meta-cognitive) learning strategies in order to enhance learning. It is important here to describe the role of teachers and learners within an innovative approach, referring to Diane Larsen- Freeman’s work (2003: 128). The teacher facilitates communication in the classroom. In this role, one of his/her major responsibilities is to establish various situations to promote communication. The teacher acts as an adviser, answering students’ questions and monitoring their performance. S/he might make notes of their errors to be worked on at a later time during more accuracy-based activity. At other times s/he might be a “co-communicator’ engaging in the communicative activity along with students. Students are above all, communicators. They are actively engaged in negotiating meaning - in trying to make them understand and in understanding others - even when their knowledge of the target language is incomplete. Also, since a teacher’s role is less dominant than in a teacher-centered method, students are seen as more responsible managers of their own learning. Taking into consideration the above information, we point out the following main features of innovative methods:
1. Learners gain the knowledge with interest and they have high motivation, which makes them be active during the lesson.
2. Being active the learners are able to solve problems existed during the lesson. It helps to form creative skills in them.
3. There is an individual approach to importing knowledge.
4. Pair work and group work are emphasized in organizing teaching. This helps to form language skills, to interact with the members of the group.
5. The innovative methods positively influence the formation and development of self-study and reflexive skills.
6. Interactive methods provide using FL in real life situations.
7. The learners are able to overcome the fear of making mistakes. It inspires them and they are involved into the active work.