CHAPTER 4
Language Teaching Methods
The search for the best method to learn a foreign language has been constant in the language teaching profession. Since the Renaissance or maybe a little earlier, applied linguists, methodologists and language teachers have designed, applied and tested what was considered at its time as 'the method'.
We should not be surprised that each methodological trend brings with it the solution to its own language teaching problems and this is so to the extent that they have appeared at a specific time with particular needs and circumstances. From Elizabethan London, the development of English teaching materials in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, passing later through the Grammar-Translation Method, 'Natural' language teaching methods, the work of the Reform Movement, the valuable contribution of the Reading and the Audiolingual Methods, the Silent Way, Suggestopedia, and finally with the Total Physical Response Method and the Communicative Approach, there has existed the need for effective strategies to help people to learn foreign languages.
In the present century in Colombia – to mention a very specific place – we have sometimes adopted and many times adapted methods that have come to us via publishing houses, commercially-sponsored programmes, textbooks, lecturers, and so on. We have let ourselves be influenced by international and national organizations that promote particular approaches or methods, but we have neglected a coherent evaluation of their teaching results. In other words, we have accepted what has been in fashion without questioning whether it has suited our purposes.
In this chapter, we will present and discuss some methods and approaches which we think that, on the one hand, have influenced our language teaching practices and, on the other, share a variety of characteristics with other important teaching principles.
Finally, I hope that this section will (a) enable teachers and teacher-trainees
to become better informed about the nature, strengths and weaknesses of
some methods that have been polemical both in our high school institutions
and in our colleges and universities, and (b) provide teachers with
some information that may raise their awareness of language teaching
practices and, by doing so, help them to make better informed decisions.
