Lesson20 min to readSign in to readen
Teaching a language — approaches and methods, classroom practice, vocabulary and structure
Approach, method and technique kept apart; the named methods of language teaching from grammar-translation to the communicative and task-based, each with what it actually does well and badly; how the four skills are taught in practice; and how vocabulary, sentence structure and usage are built through use rather than rules.
Sign in to read this lesson
Every study-material lesson on this site is free to read — an account is what unlocks them, not a payment. Signing in also saves where you stopped reading and lets you practise the questions on this heading.
Also on this subtopic
Other material filed under Approaches, methods and techniques of teaching English.
- Language acquisition, learning and the principles of language teachingThe distinction between acquiring a language and learning one, the terms the paper assumes you know — phoneme, morpheme, interlanguage, fossilisation — and why a learner's error is read as evidence of a system rather than as a failure.Read this →
- The four language skills and the place of grammarListening, speaking, reading and writing — what each actually involves, the reading and listening sub-skills the paper names, and the critical position on grammar that decides most of the questions in this area.Read this →
- The multilingual classroom — diversity, errors, difficulties and disordersWhy the syllabus treats many languages in one room as a resource rather than a problem, how a child moves from the home language to the school's, the difference between an error, a difficulty and a disorder — and what a class teacher may and may not do about each.Read this →
- Evaluating language proficiency, and remedial teachingHow to assess a skill rather than a memory — the kinds of language test the paper names, why speaking and listening are the skills schools forget to assess, and what remedial teaching means when it is done properly.Read this →
- Teaching-learning materials, ICT, lesson planning and microteachingHow to choose and improvise teaching aids, what ICT can and cannot do, the structure of a lesson plan with objectives that can actually be observed, and how microteaching works — including the retention figures attached to Dale's cone that were never his.Read this →