Effective Teaching

The question “what makes effective language teaching” is so difficult to answer because language learners and teachers alike all have different personalities, preferences and learning styles. Some language learners may find that the Total Physical Response method to be most effective for them, while others may feel that the Total Physical Response method did not help them at all, but they really learned a lot with the Grammar-Translation method. As we saw in the reading, there are many different methods of foreign language teaching, all with their own advantages and drawbacks. I think effective foreign language teachers should take all of these methods into account in order to create the sort of hybrid teaching method that they feel works best for their students and for themselves.

While reading chapter three, I came across several aspects of the different teaching methods that I personally found to be very important and effective; these would be the different aspects that I would combine into my hybrid teaching method. First, from the Audiolingual Method, I think it is very effective (if age appropriate) for the native language to be almost completely banned from the classroom. Obviously if you have a class of kindergarteners you will probably speak a little English and allow your students to do so as well, but for the most part, I think the target language should be spoken about 95% of the time in any class above a low-novice level. I think the ideas that students should not be given time to think about their answers and that grammar discussions should be very brief are also very effective because, although this may sound backwards, I think implementing those practices can actually give students more confidence. I feel that by not discussing many grammar rules and by not making speaking seem like such a big deal, students will come to lose their anxiety about speaking in the target language during class. Of course I would never force any student to speak if they really did not feel comfortable doing so, but I think sometimes producing the language yourself through speaking is built up to be such a big, scary thing while really the only way to get better at it is to practice, and once you start practicing more and more, you start to become more used to the feeling.

I also think this idea works very nicely with the ideas of the Total Physical Response teaching method which emphasizes listening and understanding the target language and producing a complete physical response with your body. The elementary school Spanish teacher that I observed for my Education 500 class used the Total Physical Response method with her students, and I only saw good results from it. Although the first through fifth graders that she taught were not speaking much in Spanish, they were all producing complete physical responses which indicated to us that they were understanding the Spanish we were saying to them. If we told the students (in Spanish) to “color the picture of the duck yellow and then put it on your heads,” all of the students, without talking to each other, would follow the directions perfectly. I think that the Total Physical Response method is very effective for lower level language classes, and for students of any level that do not feel very comfortable with speaking because while it emphasizes listening and comprehension, it does not require the students to produce much of the target language on their own.

I think recording your own voice speaking in the target language is very effective for pronunciation (from the Community Language Learning method) and I think the idea of periodically using breathing/relaxation techniques could also be very effective in helping the students think about and internalize new information (from the Suggestopedia method). Like I said before, I think that all of the different teaching methods have their own advantages and disadvantages, and all language learners and teachers will find different aspects of these methods to be effective or not, depending on their own personalities, preferences, and learning styles. I think it’s very important that language teachers don’t feel that they have to choose one teaching method and stick to it; the teacher can take the aspects of each method that they feel are most effective and use them in their classroom when and how they see fit.