Communicative Method of FLT   A comparative study of methods and approaches in TEFL/TESL has shown that the past methodologies seem to have pursued too narrow objectives. A flexible uniform language-teaching strategy should be based on a careful selection of facets of various methods and their integration into a cohesive, coherent working procedure that will […]

The Technology of Teaching Speaking Speaking is the most complex of linguistic skills, since it involves thinking of what is to be said while saying what has been thought. In order to be able to do this words must be put at a rapid rate with a spacing about 5 – 10 words ahead of […]

Teaching Speaking Speaking is a varied and complex phenomenon which covers such categories as function ( a means of communication), type (one of the kinds of man’s activity) and result or product of such activity which leads to an utterance. Thus, speaking is not only a means of activity, it is also a means of […]

Eclectic Method Having come to the realisation that each learner possesses distinct cognitive and personality traits, it follows that one teaching methodology will not be the most appropriate for all students. The recent tendency has therefore been towards eclecticism, selecting materials and techniques from various sources. This obviously puts a much larger responsibility on the […]

Cognitive Code-Learning Theory (CC-LT) or the Trend toward Cognitive Activity The trend toward a more active use of the students’ mental powers probably represents the most important effort of the cognitive theory of language acquisition. Advocates of the A-LM often advised the teacher to keep students “active” – since, they said, when a student is […]

Current Trends in English Methodology What is current methodology? Do we have to abandon all we have learned of the audio-lingual method (A-LM), the Direct Method (DM), and start anew? Thus far, the suggestions for change have been gentle, but we have not been left with a vacuum to be filled. Judging from techniques and […]

Georgi Losanov’s Method or Suggestive Method Few methods have been met with claims ranging from sensational to sceptical: mysterious and costly, a highly questionable new gimmick (one critic has unkindly called it “a package of pseudo-scientific gobbledegook“) and far remote from language teaching styles as language sleep learning, meditative relaxation, electrical and sound impulses (E.Davydova), […]

Audio-Lingual Method The Audio-Lingual Method (A-LM), like the Direct Method we have just examined, has a goal very different from that of the Grammar-Translation Method. The Audio-Lingual Method was developed in the United States during the Second World War. At that time there was a need for people to learn foreign languages rapidly for military […]

Direct Method   The Direct Method (DM) appeared as a reaction to GTM and the failure to produce learners who could use the foreign language they had been studying. The Direct Method was based on the belief that students could learn a language through listening to it and that they learn to speak by speaking […]

Harold Palmer’s Method.   Harold Palmer, the great English authority and teacher, experimented extensively with the question-answer method. He considered question-answer work to be “the most effective of all language learning exercises ever devised”. Palmer insisted, however, that if this technique was to be carried out successfully, all questions asked by the teacher must be […]