Communicative language teaching

As it says, it is all about communication, so verbal action. Students practice real live situations like, making telephone calls or conversations, make a complaint or solve this complaint or notions such as the expression of quantity, time and location. It is very effective method as it is directly applicable for the students. (Westhoff)

AIM = Accelerative Integrated Method
A language supported by making signs with your hands and body, doing drama, dance and music. It has very good results and the second language is spoken for 99%. (Maxwell, 2010)

Grammar-translation

In contrast to the communicative method, speaking is less important. In this method, students will have to learn grammar rules and wordlists by heart and translate to and from the English language. Teaching will be done in their own language (mother tongue) (Westhoff)

The direct method of teaching

In this method the lesson will be entirely in English. Students should only use English and not use their own language. Pronunciation is very important as were as grammar rules are not important and even avoided. Vocabulary is explained through visual aids and miming. Listening and speaking skills are given priority, though reading and writing play their part. (Essberger, 2016)

Lexical Approach
With this method the students’ attention should be directed to most common vocabulary and grammar. You only learn what is really necessary by learning the so called chunks (=woordgroepen/uitdrukkingen). (Leo Selivan, 2013)

4.2 Personal Experience

As I recall, my English lessons in secondary school were very well organized and that I had a very nice teacher.

Although the lessons were structured in theme blocks but taught (mostly) in our mother tongue, I would say that the method used was grammar-translation. The teacher gave some explanation about, for instance, the irregular verbs. How to use them in the sentences and you were expected to learn them by heart, followed by a school test with gap filling tests, translations or by filling in all the forms of the given irregular verbs. It was mainly skill and drill as I recall.  This was the same for learning vocabulary.

Some attention was paid  on reading skills. We were offered small “books” (only 25 pages) and were tested on context with Dutch questions, which were to be answered also in Dutch.

Writing was mainly tested by dictation exercises. I didn’t like them very much, but then again we didn’t have to use your own imagination to come with a story to write. That came subsequently. I disliked these writing assignments even more, because I always seem to have no inspiration to come up with a nice story.

I also recall some listening and spoken interaction, I liked that very much. Unfortunately we didn’t do these tasks very often.  It was mainly practising some simple conversations and  listening to some conversations from an audio device. With these listening assignments we had to answer multiple choice questions.

Our homework was checked by ourselves. Students had to give their answers in turns and the teacher would agree or disagree with your findings. Then the lesson would start with some information about the previous lesson, followed by some additional information and doing your homework. Very dull. But then again, at that time (25 years ago) they thought that this was the best idea to teach I think.