Teaching English in EFL classrooms requires us to use a variety of teaching methods in our lessons. The methods most suitable for your class, are all dependent on your students and you!
In order for you to be able to use these methods most efficiently, you need to be comfortable with knowing how to incorporate them into your lesson plans. But that’s a blog for another day!
This article aims at underlining the main concepts of different teaching methods. We’ll be looking into the following teaching methods:
Direct teaching method
The direct teaching method in summary, means using only the language being taught in the classroom. Its purpose is to reduce or eliminate the use of students’ native language in the classroom – students should only communicate in the language they are learning.
As you can imagine – this is definitely not the easiest approach, especially when students are looking at you with huge eyes and blank expressions because they have no idea what you’re talking about.
Using the direct teaching method requires us to make provision for the lack of ‘translation’ – a link. This could be using visual aids (most effective), practical examples, TPR – which we’ll get to in a moment, or relia.
The direct teaching method can be really beneficial for students if it is used efficiently by the teacher. Yes, it requires a bit of thought and maybe some additional planning but it really does pay off as students gain some confidence and independence without the use of translation.
Grammar-Translation
With Grammar-Translation, the main focus is studying the grammar/vocabulary to the point where it is memorised. Students are significantly dependent on translating back and forth between native and foreign language.
Communication and speaking is not prioritised and is barely focused on in the lesson.
This method may seem beneficial, especially for students when they have that ‘Oh-ah’ moment when translating. But it’s not as simple as it may seem.
Using translation when learning English requires great measures of accuracy – which is not found on all translation platforms. So if you do use a translator and you’re not a bilingual teacher, take heed, you definitely don’t want the translator to be teaching your students something entirely different from the target language.
The grammar-translation method may work well for some teachers/students, but personally I do not have as much experience with this as I prefer using the direct teaching method. It may be worth exploring if you think it’s something your class could benefit from.
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
Communicative Language Teaching, also known as CLT, focuses on using practical, real-life situations that can be used interactively in the classroom. The aim is to improve students’ ability to communicate using the target language.
Even though there is great focus on implementing lots of speaking activities, it’s still important to make sure these activities are centred around the target language – a grammar point or specific vocabulary.
The approach is that students have ample opportunities to practice their communicative skills but there still needs to be something concrete that they are learning through these activities.
In addition, functional language is often prioritised when using CLT.
Communicative Language Teaching is one of the most effective teaching methods for many reasons – exposure to real life situations, improving students’ productive skills and above all … the classroom buzz!
It’s also not that difficult to turn almost any activity into one where students can practise speaking. You just need to find the best way to set it up for your class.
Total Physical Response (TPR)
Total Physical Response also known as TPR is an approach that involves using physical movement and bodily gestures to help students learn a new language.
TPR can be used by the teacher to demonstrate the meaning of something, like an action. So you could write some verbs on the board and then physically show students what the word means.
Or even better elicit these verbs – do an action like running or swimming and give students a chance to guess the action. Additionally, it could also be given to students as an activity where they can act out the verbs – this is a really fun classroom activity!
TPR is extremely useful and can solve a lot of problems caused by the language barrier.
If you have a strong class, you could give them story lines. Like what “Sam” did throughout the day. They perform the routine as if they were Sam and their classmates have to guess what he did.
You could ask students to use some linkers and switch up the tenses to make them more suitable for your lesson.
TPR is a great way to get your class moving around and build momentum, it can be used in many different ways and serve many different purposes. I’m teaching an A2.2 class at the moment, it’s a strong class but I still use TPR because the visual link really reinforces their understanding.
There are many more effective teaching methods out there that we’re definitely going to continue exploring.
These methods really make a significant difference in our lessons and they can benefit our students greatly.
Some teachers use a variety of teaching methods together if they link well with one another. It’s just a matter of how your students respond to these methods.
We’d love to know what you think or If you’d like to share an experience we’d love to hear it!
