Collaborative Language Teaching Essay

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Epistemology and Contemporary Methodologies in English teaching

Characterized by frequent change and innovation, the foundation of contemporary language teaching was developed during the early part of the twentieth century, as applied linguists as others pursued to build principles and procedures for the design of teaching methods and materials (RICHARDS; RODGERS, 2014, p. 1). The aim of the present text is to walk through the changes in language teaching through the methodologies, giving emphasis to the ones which are still used and providing a glimpse on what is to come or starting to happen with new approaches and the use of technology on language teaching
The first method cited in literature is the Grammar-Translation method. Its origins dates from the XVIII century when Latin was taught through grammar books. At that time, they believed morphology and syntax rules were frozen and therefore, should be memorized instead of learned. As the focus was on rule, oral work was reduced to the minimum possible. This method dominated Europe foreign language teaching from the 1840s to the 1940s. By the mid of the nineteenth century, the opportunity of communication among Europeans, especially with end of the World war II and the spread of new technologies, as the telephone and cars, created a demand for oral proficiency, which led linguists and researchers to the Reform Movement that changed the view of language and opened space to new methods and approaches to emerge. Before moving to other approaches and methods, I should distinguish 3 levels of conceptualization and organization of the words APPROACHES, METHODS and TECHNIQUE. According to the American applied linguist Edward Anthony (1963), there is and hierarchical arrangement, in which techniques carry a method that is consistent with an approach. In other words, an approach is a set of correlative assumptions dealing with the nature of language teaching and learning, being considered axiomatic. Whereas a method is an overall procedural plan based upon an approach. A technique is implementational, consistent with a method and therefore in harmony with an approach. Throughout the decades, since the Reform Movement, there have been several methods such as: the Direct Method, The silent way, Total Physical Response, The Audiolingual method, among others (LARSEN-FREEMAN; ANDERSON, 2011). However, as these are mostly not used nowadays anymore, contemporary approaches and methods will be focused in an attempt to better understand and visualize how teaching and learning an additional language (SCHLATTER; GARCEZ, 2009) is happening not only in Brazil but in the world. Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), probably one of the most well known approaches for language teaching, was the result of a questioning of the assumptions and practices associated with Situational Language teaching. Considered as an approach (not a method) by American and British proponents, CLT became wide spread, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. The goal of this approach, as the name says, is to develop communicative competence while also teaching the four language skills (RICHARDS, RODGERS, 2014). Favoring CLT, Hyme’s (1972) theory of communicative competence, later analyzed and presented by Canale and Swain (1980), and Halliday’s (1973) functional account of language use, would point out how Chomsky linguistic theory, based on a cognitive view of language, did not comprise the incorporation of communication and culture. In 1984, Howatt distinguished
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CLL has as its aims: raise the achievements of all learners; help teacher build positive relationships among students; give students the experience of healthy social, psychological logical and cognitive development; replace the competitive organizational structure of most classrooms and schools reducing student’s …show more content…
Society has included technologies in education for a while now, as we know that approaches such as the Audiolingual would rely on them. According to Warshauer (1996), the introduction of new information and communication technology (ITC) has originated a field called Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). The same author has divided the CALL in three stages, Behaviorist CALL, Communicative CALL (influenced by CLT and mostly likely where most schools are) and integrative CALL (an ideal for language learning, in which actors involved in the process are agents of their own learning and the multimodality – not only written language, but gestures, colors, images and movement are taken into account – is part of the

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