Teaching: A New Approach

This week was a bit of a humbling experience for me in regards to TESOL and which teaching methods are "better" than others. For awhile now, I was beginning to think that the Communicative Language Teaching method was, for lack of a better word, superior to the other types of teaching approaches (such as direct method, grammar translation method, etc.). Although I am not able to pinpoint where these thoughts originated, I can only guess that I started developing this view point after learning about the many benefits the CLT method seemed to have in comparison to the other approaches. I started to believe that CLT was the "newer" and "trendier" version of teaching a second language in comparison to the previously practiced techniques. However, after reading Stephen Bax's article, The End of CLT: a context approach to language teaching, I began to realize how wrong I was.

In his article, Bax makes an excellent point when he mentions how the CLT approach has been overused and overemphasized for so long. In fact, others began to have a similar view point as myself in the sense that if the CLT method was not used, the teaching program was somehow backwards. Bax gives the example about a man who went to Japan and questioned the experienced teachers' use of the Grammar Translation method. He later states," this displays an unfortunate attitude: a young and relatively experienced teacher comes to a new country of which he has almost no knowledge. Without any reference to the culture, the learning context, student needs and wishes, and other contextual factors, he immediately judges far more experienced teachers as failing. And what gives him a license to do so, as he sees it, is the fact that he is a native speaker, and that he is armed with CLT" (pg. 2). When I read this comment, I could not help but imagine myself doing something similar. Maybe I wouldn't actually say it to the instructor directly, but I would probably be thinking it in my head. "Why," you might ask? Because I would probably think my teaching methods were more effective since they are "newer." As I continued to read, Bax put me in my place once again when he talked about how clearly other methods can be just as effective--it all depends on the context. For instance, in schools over in Holland or the Czech Republic, who did not use the CLT method, the students were able to speak English really well. This shows that the CLT approach does not always have to be used, but rather, depending on various factors such as the students, resources, culture, etc. can help determine which teaching method would be the most effective. Or more simply put, it all depends on the context of the teaching situation.  

To close, I would like to say, "Thank you Stephen Bax. Thank you for keeping me in check and helping me realize that CONTEXT is a very important factor when selecting a teaching method."