Page 33 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

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Approaches to Language Teaching

Chapter Objectives
• Critically examining different approaches to teaching an FL from
a present-day perspective
• Evaluating the implications of different approaches to teaching young
learners
• Understanding the suitability of different approaches for different types
of learners

What is the best way to teach a language? Different approaches and meth-
ods, which have been developed and used over the last century, have tried
to give an answer to this seemingly simple question. Each of them has pro-
posed ways in which a language should be learnt and the most suitable
teaching techniques that should be used. Some approaches, for example the
grammar translation approach or the audiolingual approach, received wider
acceptance for a certain period of time only to be replaced by new, more
modern approaches. However, this does not mean that past approaches are
today dead and buried. On the contrary, we often see evidence of their ele-
ments in today’s language classrooms and it is one of the aims of this chapter
to critically examine the selected approaches from the present-day perspec-
tive. Of all the approaches which will be discussed, the most prominent is un-
doubtedly the communicativeapproach or communicativelanguageteaching
which has dominated foreign language teaching for decades. In the mean-
time, several alternative methods and approaches have been developed,
such as the Total Physical Response, multiple intelligences, the task-based ap-
proach, the story-based approach, Content and Language Integrated Learning
(CLIL) and several others. In this chapter, we will look closely at the meth-
ods and approaches which we believe to be especially relevant for teaching
young language learners.

Basic Terms
In the area of ELT, terms like approach, method, procedure and technique (see
Table 2.1 on p. 34) are commonly used to refer to different aspects of teach-
ing a foreign language (Harmer, 2007). Although the majority of these terms
are not always used consistently (e.g. approach and method are often used
interchangeably) and are sometimes vague to define, it is still important to

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