2.7 Humanistic
The involvement of the whole person in the learning experience is central to the humanistic approach. A supportive atmosphere is encouraged in the classroom where
students are listened to, their comments accepted without judgement and they are encouraged to share their feelings and experiences. Activities are used that involve
students talking about their feelings and experiences. Students may be involved in fixing the aims for the course or for one lesson. A teacher may enter the classroom
with no plan and just ask students what they want to do that day and the teacher goes with the flow maybe not an approach to be adopted by a very new teacher.
Speaking as a Psychology graduate, I think care is needed in this type of approach; some people or some cultures might be uncomfortable unveiling their feelings in front
of people they might not know well. However, I fully agree with the advantages of creating a supportive, non-judgemental learning environment.
2.8 Lexical approach
The underlying principle of this method is that grammar and vocabulary cannot be strictly divided as is often the case in traditional teaching methods. A further notion is
that language is made up of lexical items using grammar to support them rather than being made up of grammatical structures incorporating lexis. Lexical items are words
or chunks of words, which have their own meaning. For example, the following combinations of words have different meanings to the individual elements that make
them up: by the way, look into, video recorder. Longer structures are also considered to be lexical items, e.g. I just wanted to say that….
The theory is that we learn a language by learning lexical items and not by learning grammar. Accordingly, the main focus of the work is lexical items rather than syntax or
grammatical rules. Critics have said that it difficult to know in which order lexical items should be taught. Proponents of this method counter this by saying that the syllabus is
organised according to collocation. Collocation refers to words that are frequently used together, e.g. make a phone call, make an appointment, heavy rain, by accident.
A further principle of this method is to teach through: observation, hypothesis and experimentation. The observe phase involves being exposed to language, for example
a text to be read. Students are encouraged to deduce the meaning of unknown language this will be covered in Chapter 3, this phase is known as hypothesis. The
experiment phase involves using the language.
2.9 A final word on teaching methods
Of course there are other approaches to teaching, however, the above are the main ones you should be aware of. I suggest you look at any course book you’re about to
use and see whether it favours one of the approaches above. You will find that after some time teaching, you will have a preference for one or more approach over the
others. You might also find that different approaches work well with different students and with different levels. Don’t worry too much about methodology at the beginning;
just do what feels right to you and what you see produces results in your classes.
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Copyright © Lucy Pollard 2008 All Rights Reserved This e-book may not be reproduced in part or in full without the express written permission of the author.
CHAPTER 3: PRESENTING AND PRACTISING LANGUAGE
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