Teaching A Foreign Language : The Direct Method

Nowadays, English is an International Language and become a global language of the world. We can find English in all over the world. In fact, more than 100 countries in the world use English. Neither people use English as a national language, official language, second language nor as a foreign language. In Indonesia, English position as a foreign language. We can find English as one of major subject in the school. Meanwhile, beside of many methods, approaches, strategies or our acquisition to learn English, there is a method named Communication Language Teaching or CLT. Communication Language Teaching refers to a learning-teaching process of English that primarily focus on how we

“In boxing, they say everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Well, in language learning, we could just as easily say that everyone has the perfect conversation in mind until they speak to a real native.” says Why Language Classes Don’t Work author Tim Ferriss. Communication is not the focus of a foreign language class these days. Memorizing words and short sentences is not a natural function. Taking a foreign class is not effective and it’s outdated because it’s like placing a group of people, who don’t know how to calculate the area of a circle, into a room and seeing how much they know. According to Jay Mathews,“How students still look good on their report cards is easy to explain. Because much of the world is striving to learn English, Americans wonder why they should bother to learn other languages. We talk about the importance of foreign language learning to our national security, but we don’t mean it. If we need speakers of exotic tongues, we import them”.

This globalization has triggered the need for learning foreign languages to communicate with people from other countries. Some people believe that learning foreign language at the initial stages has a greater advantage while others opine differently. In the following essay we will discuss on the advantages of learning foreign language at primary school followed by the disadvantages.

The main goal of using language learning strategies are to help learners improve their knowledge and understanding of the target language. They are the conscious thoughts and behaviours used by students to facilitate language learning tasks and to personalize the language learning

He believed that whether a strategy is helpful or not depends on the specific context in which it is appropriately used. In order to use a strategy effectively, learners have to consider three important conditions: whether the strategy relates well to the second language task at hand, whether the strategy fits the particular students’ learning style preferences to one degree or another, or whether the students employ the strategy and link it with other strategies well.

Even as a native speaker, teaching something as complex as another language will always present certain challenges. During the course, and particularly during the observed teaching sessions, I learned several techniques and theories that I feel have greatly improved my ability to teach and control a classroom. More specifically I learned about the different aspects of teaching from lesson planning to classroom management. Furthermore, I gained knowledge of different teaching approaches and philosophies and was able to find out which ones worked best for me.

The Lexical Approach is based on the idea that language is made up of other structural elements besides what we traditionally think of as grammar. Instruction focuses on relatively fixed expressions that occur frequently in spoken language rather than on originally created sentences (Lewis, 1997a). This digest provides an overview of the methodological foundations underlying the lexical approach and the pedagogical implications. The lexical approach to foreign language teaching has received interest in recent years as an alternative to grammar-based approaches. The lexical approach concentrates on developing learners' proficiency with lexis, or words and word combinations. It is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and

Language is the system by which people express their perceptions of the world using symbols, gestures and sounds that are shared and understood in their specific groups or locations. The way people communicate those ideas is totally influenced by the culture. The concept of culture encompasses all the characteristics that define a specific group in terms of values, traditions, beliefs, history, etc. expressed through language. Culture and language are, therefore, two concepts whose interconnection cannot be denied or neglected, even more when one is learning a new language. Over the years, researchers have concluded that foreign languages are learned considering the grammar structures and/or the linguistic skills that students have to develop to be effective when communicating. However, Widdowson (1978) argued that “Someone knowing a language knows more than how to understand, speak, read and write sentences. He also knows how sentences are used to communicative effect” (p.1). In this sense, the development of cultural understanding in language learning also remains to be essential for the acquisition of it.

According to Cook (2003), the focus of Communicative Language Teaching Method is primarily social. Therefore, its main goal is to enable the learners to communicate successfully in the target language. In order to achieve that goal, the learners have to be communicatively competent. Communicative competence can be defined according to Saville and Troike (2003) as “What a speaker needs to know to communicate appropriately within a particular language community”. Which means that the learners in Communicative Language Teaching method will not only know the vocabulary, phonology and grammar, but also they’ll know how to use the language for several purposes, how to differentiate between the uses of the language depending on the situations and the participants and they’ll able to classify and produce different kinds of texts. In addition, able to do all of these effectively with appropriate, accurate and fluent language (Saville-Troike, 2006, p. 100).

In the framework of the teaching of English as a foreign language, the advantages of

In the long history of language learning, especially in the case of learning English as L2, educationalists have been tirelessly trying to explore more and more practical approaches that ranged from conventional methods like Grammar translation method, Direct method, Situational Language Teaching etc., to the latest mode of communicative approach. The conventional teaching methods - the unsuccessful result of the earlier language theories, were proved to be ineffective, because it was felt in all the methods, that the learners were passive and the teaching-learning process was mechanical. Hence during the 1960s, a new trend of language teaching called Communicative Language Teaching paved its way into classrooms in the early 1960’s and has been widely acclaimed by educationists so far. The present paper glimpses briefly the emergence of the learner-friendly,

In the nineteenth century, the United States set the precedence for racism. While the problems may appear consummated, the people of today know that is not totally the case. With the amount of cultural presence continuously growing, the ubiquity of foreign language should be taken more seriously. “One reason to learn them [foreign languages] is because they are tickets to being able to participate in the culture of the people who speak them, just by virtue of the fact that it is their code,” begins McWhorter of TED (McWhorter, 2016). Consequently, schools should offer foreign language classes sooner in a child’s life than freshman year of high school because this type of learning introduces them to cultural differences, increases their learning abilities and helps them understand learning styles of varying levels.

HOW TEACHERS CAN HELP CHILDREN LEARN A SECOND LANGUAGE EFFECTIVELY BY THE TEACHING SATRATEGIES THEY USE IN CLASS

This paper believes that every approach has strengths and weaknesses. Hence, choosing an appropriate method depends on the level of the students or the purpose of the course. As an English teacher, I am convinced that we should comprehend both advantages and disadvantages of each method. Thence, we try to maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses. Finally, the chosen method must achieve the objective of the course and meet the demand of the learners. That is my own philosophy of

The goal of this study is to first, investigate the barriers with implementing learning languages in intermediate schools and the difficulties with the provision of foreign languages to Year 7 and 8. Second, find the solutions and innovations to implementing language learning curriculum in Year 7 and 8. This chapter describes how the study was conducted and how the data is collected in order to answer the research questions and achieve the aim of the research.