The Evolution of Second- and Foreign- Language Teaching

“Education in the life of present-day knowledge and need calls for some spirited and creative innovations both in substance and the purpose of current pedagogy”

The use of translation in the classroom as a teaching method is a valid method to teach english as a foreign language. Over the years, translation as a teaching method has being avoided as a technique to use at the classroom. With the development of different approaches and methods such as communicative approach or the audiolingual method, which looks for the students to learn with the least possible use of speakers’ native language. According to Richards (2006) to learn how to communicate language people need competence which includes different real-life situations; grammar does not fulfil these roles and as far of the learning, in other words, learning by only speaking and practicing the target language other abilities would eventually be

I strongly believe that there is an urgent need for new pedagogies that develop 21st century learning for students as they prepare for their future. Schools should be looking at rethinking purpose, pedagogies, curriculum, structures, assumptions and expectations. The old pedagogies persisting into the 21st century are no longer relevant. What’s needed is a 21st century pedagogy which will serve as a paradigm that reflects a strong and creative commitment to relevance and quality learning and teaching (Whitby,

My project was to go and find out about bilingual education’s history, process, and the experts in the field of bilingual education. Bilingualism is the ability to speak two languages fluently. Bilingualists study Bilingualism and bilingual education, which is teaching all subjects in school through two different languages. Bilingual Education was first adopted in Ohio in 1839, due to the increase of German-Americans (Rethinking). By the end of the 19th century, many states had adopted bilingual education laws to meet the demands of new immigrants due to industrialization. When World War I came many Americans changed their views of bilingual education, due to the fear of German-Americans and the government’s new Americanization policies,

Every few years new foreign language teaching methods arrive on the scene. New textbooks appear far more frequently. New methods and textbooks may reflect current developments in linguistic/applied linguistic theory or recent pedagogical trends. Sometimes they are said to be based on recent developments in language learning theory and research. For example, one approach to teaching may emphasize the value of having students to imitate and practice a set of correct sentences

Today’s educational system as a whole can gain the confidence to unlearn it’s archaic way of learning in the classrooms if it realizes the possibilities and endless potential the 21st century student

In most educational reform literature today it includes the term 21st Century as a main statement in its dialogue. Already a decade into the 21st Century educators, policymakers, and business leaders are determined that education in this century will differ or be altered from education from previous centuries. Throughout history, until recently, most people work manually, not mentally. In Wagner’s book, The Global Achievement Gap, working, learning, and citizenship in the twenty-first century requires people to know how to think, reason, analyze, weigh evidence, and problem solve in order to function in a 21st Century (Wagner, 2008) . Wagner also believed that effective communication and critical thinking skills no longer are just desirable outcomes for just the elites of education, but it is essential for all individuals to obtain (Wagner 2008). 21st Century learning has been broken down into four significant forces that redefine the terms work and education (Century, Trilling and Fadel 2009). The first form is the emergence of a knowledge-based economy and this can determine how people work and the skills they may need to

The Grammar translation method, or classical method started when people wanted to read literature written in the target language. Its focus was on grammatical rules, the memorization of vocabulary and of various declensions and conjugations, translations of texts, doing written exercises.

Many establishments in the educational system change as culture unfolds (Van Brummelen, 2002, p. 81). The reason that change is necessary in the educational curriculum, is for the reason that in the past decade, there has been an emergence of expansions that are performing research-based, top practice teaching strategies, which are escorted by discoveries regarding learning and learners. With change, it is predominant throughout our school in the U.S. In our country, these changes are taking place rapidly, against a framework of the move from an industrialized economy that is solely constructed on the universal traffic of information. In America, our nation has progressed to a post-modern civilization. In our schools, they are not designed to prepare our children for the needed knowledge our economy or its demand for the effects over the process.

This approach was very advanced for the time. It revolutionised the strategies of language learning and also changed the role of the language teachers as well as the language learners. In contrast with some of the methodologies previously adopted, its main goal is to teach the scholars the ability to communicate. Thereby, Communicative Language Teaching bases itself upon the concept of language competence, which is considered the actual basis of proficiency in a language. Hence, teaching activities involve students in real-life communicative situations in which the communicative task is of more importance than the grammatical accuracy. Other exercises such as games, songs, problem solving and role-plays also are used in classrooms. It must be said that each of these activities are sowed on the learners needs, therefore, if the class

I also agree that students construct their own knowledge. I can think of numerous occasions when I had to prepare lessons to teach my classmates, or times when my colleagues and I were placed into think-pair-share groups, I can still remember the information that was taught or shared. This is because I constructed my own knowledge. When students construct their own knowledge through Constructivist Learning, students become "expert learners." Learning is an interactive process that should be an enjoyable experience for students. Through direct teaching and an allowance for spontaneity, the learning process is well balanced. Friedrich Froebel also proposed very genius ways that children learn; through play. This is a very brilliant observation, for children acquire lifelong social skills through play. Hence, I follow John Dewey’s method of teaching which states that children learn through doing.

According to constructivist theorists it is important that students do not have misconceptions before they start to learn a new concept. Teachers should identify the students current understanding and ideas in order to construct new meaning. This can be done, for example, by giving a quiz as an introduction to a new subject, by group discussion, by giving activities after presenting new

The Grammar Translation method is an old method of teaching a foreign language, it was used to teach classical languages such as Latin and Greek, that’s why it was called “the classical way” to teach a language, this method’s main purpose was to learn and value a language literature, it was also strongly believed that this using this way in teaching would develop the learners’ native language in speaking and writing as the ability of communication using the language learned wasn’t a target for using this method of teaching. As it was mentioned earlier this way was called “the classical way”, so was the roles of students, teachers and the nature of interaction between them either teacher-student interaction or student-student in this method they were traditional and classical, the teacher is the authority in the classroom and the learners follow whatever this authority says or does, they were mainly asked to translate a passage or a piece of reading from a language to another language, they were taught grammar rules and were asked to memorize them to give examples of these rules and for vocabulary learning they get taught words that are similar from the native language to the language learned, as for the nature of interaction inside the classroom is mostly about teacher- student interaction and student-student interaction is rarely used or initiated. The skills that that this method is aiming to enhance and develop are reading and writing because as it was mentioned earlier that the main purpose of this method is to understand and learn literature of the language learned, moreover the native language is frequently used in a grammar translation method class as it is clearly used by students to translate the foreign language to their language and vice versa. The evaluation or the assessment of what have been taught in this method is mostly done in

A student has the ability to learn without a teacher. However, the Law of the Teaching Process creates the background for a teacher to guide a student on the path to more knowledge. A teacher should establish a safe environment that encourages thinking to help students learn “the unknown by the way of the known” (84). Acquiring their knowledge and increasing their mental power correlates to the aims of a teacher as they guide students. While a teacher is to be passionate in laying out knowledge, the really work of an education, acquiring knowledge, is the work of the student. A student learns by discovery and information stores as the student interprets the new information.

Scott Kissau and Elena King elaborate on the reasoning behind there being such a low amount of second language teachers. One, it is a hard field trying to think of ways to teach students who understand English is hard enough, it is a completely different matter to try and teach students life skills while teaching them English at the same time. Two, so many new teachers go the alternative route when getting their teaching licensure that they are wholly unprepared. Schools are in desperate need of second language teachers though so the best way to train teachers to teach English as a second language or even teach a foreign language is to partner them with an experienced ESL teacher. However, this dream is not a reality. Experienced ESL teachers do not want to train new teachers because doing so does not benefit them in anyway. Also, new teachers find older, experienced teachers to be intimidating and unapproachable. The best way to solve this problem, according to school districts, was to pair new, inexperienced teachers with slightly less new, graduate students who had at least a year of experience. The particular study that Kissau and King researched involved 27 mentors and mentees that were around the same age and experience level. Only two of the 27 mentors had four years of experience teaching and none of the other mentors had more experience than that. Pairing inexperienced teachers with barely experienced teachers sounds like a bad idea; however, the mentors and mentees