Most teachers base their teaching on some form of method or approach.
Which of these has the strongest influence on your teaching?
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Comments
Nik Peachey
elinethsuarez
I find Task-based approach compatible with Communicative Language Teaching so I often use a combination of both.
Heath
I would've said the Communicatve Approach has effected me the most... but the Lexical Approach covers everything in the Communicative Approach and then highlights so much more.
Some of the cutting edge course books, like Cutting Edge, and teacher training programmes, like the CELTA, have been incorporate a lot of the main ideas for years. But teachers need to start becoming more familiar with the concepts, and employing them in addition to what they do already.
Have a proper look at it, and you'll find that it's not only based on classroom research, corpus research, and the most modern learning philosophies - it's also extremely intuitive.
I'm starting to sound like a die-hard nothing but the Lexical Approach fan. I'm not. I teach pretty much the same way I always did - but there are subtle little changes in my approach that I feel make my lessons much more valuable than they used to be.
DIM
How should I know? Not all teachers have done lots of training, especially if - like me - they were thrown into the deep end on moving to a "foreign" country (in my case it is Germany), where their native tongue suddenly became a marketable and desirable commodity and they almost drifted into teaching.
I've been a teacher for over 30 years now and I have been and still am learning all the time how to teach.
I have been on several courses and workshops and occasionally hear about the latest trends, In any case, if you use the latest textbooks, you automatically find yourself embracing the newest methods. I know roughly what the direct method was, I went in for communicative competence when it was in fashion, I even heard of EQ and multiple intelligences, but I still have never heard of dogme (sounds a bit Papal?) or community language learning. And as for the "total physical response" - well, it is mind-boggling! I hope we can keep our clothes on for this..
I just wanted to say that not all readers of this thread are at home with the latest jargon.