DPS Bhagalpur

Methods and Approaches.  A paper by John Trowell, our Director, Academics.

All English teaching is what happens in the classroom or in any other learning place. In every classroom lesson there is a teacher who directs and instructs the students in some points of learning. This is more than presenting factual information but enabling the students to have a skill in communicating their knowledge. This may be in speaking or by writing.

The principle aims of teaching English are:

A. To promote speaking listening skills for every day use.
B. To enable students to understand what they read and to question the text for meanings or information.
C. To be able to write accurately and with the appropriate style what they wish to express.

These are very general aims and each really is a different skill but cannot be separated of becoming both literate and fluent in English

The methods of teaching students English are not equal in obtaining literacy and spoken fluency. Some are positive in all areas while other just promotes one skill. One method is actually destructive to most learning.

A teaching method has three components:

• An approach
• A Design
• Procedure

Of the three the approach is probably the most important because it always directly determines the nature and practices of the other two. 

There are two main approaches. They are the behaviourist and the cognitive ideas about how children learn.

These are the main points about the behaviourist approach works.

1. The behaviourist approach

First it has no psychological foundation value to support it other than we can learn by memorising what we read or experience. It suggests that we might know something if we have read or heard some point of information. Second and more probable is we remember things that make us happy and the things that give us pain. It is sometimes called the carrot and stick approach or even the stimulus reward system. A stimulus in the old Greek was a stick to make your horse or donkey move and the carrot was a bribe of encouragement if it completed the task well enough.
             
J B Skinner did prove that various animals could be trained that way, but for every reward there was a right way to do something and a very painful consequence for getting it wrong.
             
Today some schools still us this approach with either a stress of giving rewards to children to motivate them to do well. This is the sweetie jar bribe approach and of course there is a punishment for them if they don’t do well.  Many schools now use humiliation practices rather than physical punishments.  We may well argue strongly against this way of teaching on the grounds of child cruelty but it is to be remembered that wider society still builds its laws on the notion the bad people are punished and good are rewarded.

2. The cognitive approach
           
This approach completely differs from the behaviourist view of learning and asserts that learning is not just a matter of instruction, imitation, memorisation and successful task completion.  Humans are different from animals in that we have innate ability to learn language and express it in ways no animal can. However learning skill depends on the age or stage of the child’s development.  Jean Piaget 1896-1980 proved beyond doubt that most learning is cognitive.      

He was a Psychologist in Individual Learning Theory. Now his theories are accepted as the proven method and process of how children learn and develop life skills. The learning theory is bases on the concept that learning is a process of assimilation and accommodation.

In childhood there are four distinct learning phases that have to be taken into account when we plan a school syllabus and the methods of application. These are as follows:

• Children 0 - 2 years   A sensory motor stage.
• Children 3 -7 years    A pre-operational stage
• Children 8 - 11 years  A concrete operation stage
• Children 12 -15 years A formal concrete operational stage

It is import to understand the two contrasting approaches of behaviourism and cognitive learning theories because the syllabus content and the class room practices change when you change the approach taken.
The principle difference is that in the former the teacher’s task is to give stimulus and reward to prompt the syllabus tasks, where as in the latter focuses on the child’s natural ability to learn depending on the age or development stage.
           
One approach is instructional and command based and the other is a child centred learning scheme more by giving children assimilation with experiential opportunities, then to accommodate them in a permanent way for future use in skills and reasoning.
         
The best learning is therefore the skill of reasoning and thought about any information source, where by the child can have a clear conception of what that information is revealing. Then to be able to solve new problems as they arise. This largely bypasses the consequential learning from the reward and punishment experiences and gives children the ability to make rational decisions based on the current situation.
             
My logic for this argument is that even the thought of pain or pleasure can be rationalised through cognitive learning methods. A further benefit is that self realisation and self discipline together can prevent most harming situations and control the over indulgence of pleasure. Therefore a teaching approach that is cognitive allows this child to learn beyond the curriculum or syllabus subject and have life skills that last.

English Syllabus Design

This concerns its self with:

• The general and specific objective of the course
• The syllabus model
• The types of learning and tasks of the students
• The roles of learners and teachers
• The use of teaching materials

The Syllabus design is a large subject it own right but the key concepts for each heading can be briefly summarised.

A.  An English course may stress speaking listening skills based on the ability to respond to and express ideas.
B. It may be to be able to read and interpret information
C. To write skilfully on any particular mode, field or genre
D. To learn Grammar and spelling rules.

E. Each of these objectives will produce a different syllabus model

F. Tasks vary from wrote learning word drills grammar exercises to interactive games with no text or writing.

G. The role of teachers may be formal or informal, include explanations and image drawing but essentially to be the guide to meet the learning aims.
In the same lesson pupils must have tasks that practice skills or help learning by improved thinking-reasoning skills.

H. Teaching materials are every thing from a piece of chalk to white board presentation or even a tray of objects to identify. These are all aid materials.

Teaching Procedures

This is what happens in the classroom at the actual lesson. It is however important to note that the approach, method and technique in teaching are hierarchical so the approach whether behaviourist or cognitive directly effects the method and techniques used in the lesson.

TEACHING MODELS and METODOLOGIES

Grammar translation

• The most obvious behaviourist approach to teaching is the Grammar Translation Method. It origin is unknown but goes back at least a thousand years. It about knowing writing grammar rules with out learning the meaning of any particular text.  It was and it is still thought by some that if you learn the rules of writing correctly you will understand all that is written. 

• The method discourages any oral discourse and starts children by copy writing from very easy word to compound sentences that may be very expressive if only the student understood it.

• Primary children are often taught to write before they can read or speak.

• Memorisation of text is considered more important than understanding it.

• Grammar rules are the aim of lessons not understanding the text.

• Native language is used to translate into English many words.

• Accurate copying of sentences is considered an important skill.

• Lesson activities will include question comprehension from a story or information text. The questions are always objective seeking facts and never ask for subjective interpretive questions.

• The learning of sentence structures is always dominant feature GT and the parts of sentences are broken up into nouns, verbs adjectives etc.

• The text sentences usually don’t have any connective meaning.

• Word filling in text is the usual method of practice.

• Some Summarising tasks and précis are sometime given.

• Learning spelling patterns without any sentence or help in actual word usage.

Lesson Procedures for Grammar Translation

 The following are typical lessons.

Example one
Step one: The teacher or chosen pupils reads parts of the text.
Step two: The teacher explains the difficult words.
Step three: The children complete the questions at the end of the text.
Step four: The teacher may write ideal questions and answers to be copied. Step five: These are to be memorised for a test in a short time.
Step six: the children are praise or criticised for the test mark obtained.

Example two
Step one: The selects a part of speech, say nouns
Step two: the children are told they are common proper or abstract.
Step three: The children write down typical examples from the board.
Step four: the teacher may explain how they are different.
Step five: There are set exercises where the children write or underline the types of nouns in the text, or my correct simple sentences as practice.
Step six: Books are marked to grade the performance of the children.
     
A strong feature of GT as a teaching method is that it allows the teachers and often the pupils to use their first language to translate or understand English words and meanings. GT also leads to another and sometime irritating habit of code switching as a way of maintaining conversation. Code switching happens when someone speaks in English for a short period then without warning continues in the first language, thus cutting the conversation if you don’t understand what is being said.

GT is still around and is strongly present in any country that has a dominant language and English is not regularly used. The dominant language makes English a foreign language to be taught to students rather than used on a daily basis. The problem with this method of teaching is that is has no psychological foundation other than memorising word meanings and text written answers to known questions. It is never true learning in the ability to speak or exchange ideas in normal oral communication. GT therefore denies the learner any ability in speech fluency.
       
GT is also is an invasive influence on all the curriculum being taught in a school because it maintains the false idea that learning is just a matter of reading and memorising. As a method of teaching it promotes excessive frequent testing of students to prove the know something. In fact they know or understand little, rather they have just memorised a particular passage of text in a book.  This memory quick fails them when as it has not been explored as a thought process or experienced that usually are remembered for long term use.

The real curse of The Grammar Translation Method of teaching is that is actually stops real learning in any subject. To learn something we have to understand the context of the information and question it as a longer term thought process. Students can then accommodate this knowledge in to any skill or problem solving situation.
    
In countries where English is the first language Grammar Translation methods are used in a much more benign way. The spoken English is dominant and any use of Grammar exercises can relate to text in its context and understood and need not be memorised. In this situation GT helps correct small errors in speech or written work but is never a substitute to learning by for interactive teaching where learning is mainly experiential. So when children say “The boy climbed up the tree” they know what that means without any memory/question searches.

The problem then with GT is when it becomes the only method of teaching English is fails badly as a way of learning a new language and stops deep learning of any subject material. Like any medicine it works in very small doses in for particular purposes but it is a deadly poison if you take it as a daily food.