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6-
Vocabulary is strictly limited and learned in context.
7-
There
is much use of tapes, language labs, and visual aids.
8-
Great importance is attached to pronunciation.
9-
Very little use of the mother tongue by teachers is permitted.
10-
Successful responses are immediately reinforced.
11-
There is a great effort to get students to produce error-free utterances.
12-
There is a tendency to manipulate language and disregard content.
The ALM was firmly rooted in respectable theoretical perspectives of the time.
Materials were carefully prepared, tested, and disseminated to educational
institutions. “Success” could be overtly experienced by students as they practiced
their dialogues in off-hours. But the popularity was not to last forever. Challenged by
Wilga Rivers’s (1964) eloquent criticism of the misconceptions
of the ALM and by
its ultimate failure to teach long-term communicative proficiency, ALM’s popularity
waned. We discovered that language was not really acquired through a process of
habit formation and overlearning, that errors were not necessarily to be avoided at all
costs, and that structural linguistics did not tell us everything
about language that we
needed to know.
2.6.4. Silent Way
The Silent Way is the name of a method of language teaching devised by Caleb
Gattegno’s. The Silent Way represents Gattegno’s venture into the field of foreign
language teaching. It is based on the premise that the teacher should be encouraged
to produce as much language as possible. Elements of the Silent Way, particularly
the use of colour charts and
the coloured Cuisenaire rods, grew out of Gattegno’s
previous experience as an educational designer of reading and mathematics
programs.
The Silent Way shares a great deal with other learning theories and educational
philosophies. Very broadly put, the learning hypotheses underlying Gattegno’s work
could be stated as follows:
1-
Learning is facilitated if the learner discovers or creates rather remembers
and repeats what is to be learned.
2-
Learning is facilitated by accompanying physical objects.
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3-
Learning is facilitated by problem solving involving the material to be
learned.
The Silent Way has had its share of criticism. In one sense, it
was too harsh a
method, and the teacher too distant, to encourage a communicative atmosphere.
Students often need more guidance and overt correction than the Silent Way
permitted.
As English language teachers we can find games to play in the classroom by
using this method.
2.6.5. Total Physical Response
Total Physical Response is a language teaching method built around the
coordination of
speech and action; it attempts to teach language through physical
(motor) activity. Developed by James Asher, a professor of psychology at San Jose
State University, California,
it draws on several traditions, including developmental
psychology, learning theory, and humanistic pedagogy, as well as on language
teaching procedures by Harold and Dorothy Palmer in 1925. He actually began
experimenting with TPR in the 1960s, but it was almost
a decade before the method
was widely discussed in professional circles.
Total Physical Response is linked to the “trace theory” of memory in
psychology, which holds that the more often or the more intensively a memory
connection is traced, the stronger the memory association will be and the more likely
it will be recalled. Retracing can be done verbally and/or in association with motor
activity.
Combined tracing activities, such as verbal rehearsal accompanied by motor
activity, hence increase the probability of successful recall.
In a developmental sense, Asher sees successful adult second language
learning as a parallel process to child first language acquisition. He claims that
speech directed to young children consists primarily of commands,
which children
respond to physically before they begin to produce verbal responses. Asher feels
adults should recapitulate the processes by which children acquire their mother
tongue.
Asher's emphasis on developing comprehension skills before the learner is
taught to speak links him to a movement in foreign language teaching sometimes