 Hello, this presentation is going to focus on the theories, methods and techniques of teaching and we're going to start with a quote. This is an interesting quotation because it contains within it a philosophical argument and it's a philosophical argument the way in which we learn. Basically, this one is saying that the intelligence of their own children comes about due to a natural process. So this one could be said to be due to nature. This is exactly the opposite of this one which is saying that they're teaching the environment that we create creates that intelligence. So this one can be said to be due to nurture and this argument nature versus nurture has been going on for thousands of years. These two viewpoints are two ends of a scale or a continuum if you like and every teaching methodology that's ever been created has its starting point somewhere on this scale. For example, if a particular methodology has its starting point here then that would be 50% due to nature and 50% is due to nurture. Before looking at the methods or approaches themselves there are some terms that we need to define. These are the approach, the method or the technique. Basically, these are hierarchical. The approach is an overriding set of principles that a method can actually make use of. Whereas the technique are the things that we actually do in the classroom to approach that method. So these three words are going to appear during the presentation. Again, for each of either the approaches or the methodologies we're going to ask for questions and those questions. So be it an approach or a method for each of those things, where did it come from? What's its background? What does it involve when we're talking about actually in the classroom in other words techniques? What is positive about it? What appears to work about that methodology or approach? And what is negative? What doesn't work so well? Basically, we're going to look at it in a historical viewpoint. So we'll start with the oldest particular teaching methodology which is known as the classical method. The classical method was given its name basically because it was trying to teach the classics in language which is ancient Greek and Latin. Those particular languages are now dead. This methodology was probably started somewhere around the 17th century. And the purpose of this particular methodology was for scholars to be able to translate old Greek and Latin texts into their particular language. If we take the language that we usually speak, our native language, that is often given the designation L1. And the language that we are trying to translate that to, let's call it the target language, is given the designation L2. The purpose of grammar translation then is to basically translate between L1 and L2 and vice versa. So we could take a simple example. Let's imagine that our native language was English and our target language was French. And let's assume that we want to translate a document from French into English. Let's take a simple sentence. Here's a sentence in French, uvre la fenêtre, and we'll add c'est voupler at the end. What we want to do is to take this L2 and translate it back into English. Now, if we have a reasonable knowledge of French, then we may well know that this particular verb, uvre, to open, translates directly. And this female form of the, and finally the fenêtre, open the window, and this polite form of please. This is all very well if the two structures that we're translating between the L1 and the L2 have a common grammar, which French and English usually do. However, one problem that we do get with this particular classical method is that if the grammar structures are not the same, then it's very difficult to translate between the two things. Okay, and so if we look at the first question, where did it come from? Basically around the 17th century it was used by scholars to translate ancient Greek and Latin text into their native language. The whole idea of grammar translation was therefore based on being able to read and write in that particular language. This methodology was never intended for the learning of speaking. Now, it's very strange that this particular method is actually the most popular method for the teaching of languages throughout the world. And we've just said that that does not involve speaking skills. So one of the main problems with the classical method or grammar translation is that it does not develop speaking skills. What does it involve? It involves taking the native language and converting it to Greek or Latin or vice versa. What's positive about it? Well, it is the most popular method for teaching language. And if your language structures, the grammars that you're working between are similar, then it allows you to infer from the context of a particular sentence what something might actually mean. If we think back to the example that we translated at the beginning, which was uvra la fenetra, let's say for example that you had never seen the word fenetra in French before and that you didn't know what it was. You could, from a very good knowledge of English, actually infer what that meant. We have uvra, which means to open, la, which is the, so we know we're going to open something. And if you have a very good native language knowledge in terms of vocabulary, you may know the English word defenestration and defenestration is the act of being thrown out of a window. So this has a similar root to fenetra in French. So you may well be able to infer what that particular sentence means. In terms of the things that are negative about it, we've already said that it doesn't develop speaking, but perhaps the biggest negative point about this particular methodology is that it's very unnatural. Okay, so despite the criticisms of this particular method and particularly the fact that it's unnatural, this particular methodology was in use all the way through the 17th, 18th and 19th century and indeed it's still in use today. However, Gwann in the 1880s and Burlitz in the early 1900s decided that this particular methodology was so unnatural that they wanted to come up with something new. And the method that they came up with, they called the direct method. You will also sometimes see it as the natural method. What these two people were saying is that if we wish to learn a language, then we should try to recreate the conditions that we learn our native language in. And this is what the natural methodology tried to do. So what we're going to do is to run through a series of methodologies that were created mainly in the 1900s that adopted the idea that language learning should be much more communicative, much more natural. The first one is called audio-lingualism and it's also called the army method because of where it was developed. Basically, psychology during the 1950s and 60s was building up new theories about behaviourism. Perhaps the most famous experiments that were done in this particular area were by Pavlov where he was showing that most animals undergo a stimulus response mechanism and he had a series of famous experiments where by ringing her bell he could cause a dog to salivate. That would be his response in the expectation of getting some food. This behaviourist idea of stimulus response was put into an actual teaching methodology. Basically, in the audio-lingualism method, these two parts of the name tell us what actually happens. Audio is to listen and lingual is to repeat. So what we do is a series of drills and these intensive verbal drills help us to get a use of the particular language. So let's take an example of what those drills might involve. So here is an example of a repetition drill. I will model the language and then my class will repeat after me. So this is a cup, knife, thank you. The reason that it's called or also called the army method is that it was the method adopted by the United States military who had personnel stationed around the world at the end of Second World War and they realised that they needed those personnel to pick up the language very quickly and that's one of the positive things about this particular methodology is that you do very quickly learn vocabulary. Another positive thing about it is that you quickly learn the correct pronunciation of that vocabulary. However, there are some negative points to it. One of the things that the drills actually lacks is some form of realistic context and the fact that these drills are out of context in any real situation in the world makes it very difficult to translate the knowledge that you pick up into a new situation. The second negative thing about it is that errors were very, very quickly tried to be forced out of the students and it was realised that errors weren't in fact such a bad thing after all. Our next methodology is called the silent way and it's accredited to Caleb Gathegno and was developed in or around the 1970s. This particular methodology moved on from the behaviourist stimulus response to what's called a theory of constructivism and this constructivist approach was very, very different, very radical to anything that had been tried before. The background to this particular methodology was that there was a French mathematics teacher who found that his students were finding it very difficult to understand particular concepts. What he realised was that what they needed was a more visual representation of the information. So he came up with a series of coloured rods to help with those concepts in mathematics. He gave his name to those rods and they're called Cusinair rods and there's an example of Cusinair rods here. What teachers of English realised was that if this constructivist idea of using this visual representation of rods worked for concepts in mathematics, why could it not be applied to the teaching of English and this is what the silent way and Gathegno came up with. The idea is that each of these coloured rods would represent a different sound, a phoneme if you like and by using those rods he could teach vocabulary and indeed grammar by using a series of coloured rods. One particular colour may represent one particular sound and by putting those colours out in a series he could represent the linking of those sounds into a particular word and indeed the length of the rod itself could tell you something about how long that sound should be pronounced. So if you were quite inventive and you were trained in this particular method you could use this series of coloured rods to develop the pronunciation of words move on to the next level into the way in which sentences are actually constructed by using the rods and so on and so forth. So what was good about this particular methodology was that it was said to use cognition in the learning process in other words the brain was actually physically involved in constructing the language in how it works so we're really building up the language within our own brain. This constructivist idea is very much the same way that we learn our native language. The other positive thing about it is that it's very good fun. One of the main problems with this particular methodology is the fact that it uses all of these rods and phonemic charts and so on and so forth so it takes quite a lot of learning before you actually get onto the learning of English itself you have to know what each of these particular colours mean in terms of the phoneme and all of the charts and so on and so forth and that's true both for the teacher and for the students themselves. The second negative part is that you're actually too distant from the teacher and the whole point of the silent way is that the teacher would say as little as possible apart from the modelling of language initially and one of the main criticisms was that it was felt that this particular methodology was so far removed from didactic teaching, the teacher standing at the front and explaining that students found it very difficult to learn. Also in the 1970s Luzanoff came up with a new methodology called Suggestopedia. As psychological theory was developing, one of the ideas that came up was something called the effective filter. Basically the effective filter is a barrier to learning. It's the reasons why we inhibit our learning of a particular language. There are two main elements to the effective filter, two sets of factors if you like. Those are known as internal and external factors. The external factors to learning, the reasons why we have barriers to learning, may be just simple things such as external noise. So people talking to us while we're trying to learn and so on and so forth. Perhaps more important are these internal factors and the internal factors, one of the main things here is our previous experience. If we have tried to learn a language in the past and we have not been successful, that forms an internal barrier to further learning in the future. The idea of Suggestopedia is that we reduce this effective filter to its lowest possible value. Theory tells us that the effective filter has its lowest value when we're in the womb. One of the ideas of Suggestopedia was to try to recreate the conditions of feeling safe in the womb and our effective filter will now be at its lowest possible value. We will be the most receptive to learning at that point. So how do we actually go about teaching in this situation? Well, what we try to do is first of all reduce the effective filter through the internal and external factors down to its lowest value. So our students are made to feel comfortable first of all and then we have the use of music. The use of music in Suggestopedia is in different forms depending on which part of the lesson that we're in. The idea is in the first section, which is sometimes called the first concert, we use lively music and this is known as the active part of the lesson. The idea here is that the lively music will start to get our brainwaves moving around and put us into a receptive mood. Then in the second concert, the teacher will introduce the target language, usually in the form of dictation. Whilst that's taking place, we use baroque music, which puts us into a passive state and allows us almost to become like a sponge and absorb this particular information. Once that's been completed, we can then use that knowledge in some form of production. Now, in terms of positive things for the students, in reducing this effective filter down to its lowest value, it makes the actual lessons a very comfortable experience for our students. The second positive thing about it is whilst it may sound strange itself in terms of a technique, it does come from a very clear psychological theory in the terms of the effective filter and the fact that we are more receptive to learning when that effective filter is lowest value. In terms of the negatives, it's obviously very, very different to anything that we're used to and some people say it's just too different. The fact that it is so different can increase our effective filter in effect because we think it's not going to work. Secondly, it's not easy to create these ideal conditions that are necessary to reduce your effective filter. There aren't too many schools that would have the facilities, first of all, to actually produce all of these conditions. Our next particular methodology is accredited to James Asher around 1965 and is called Total Physical Response. Asher looked at the way in which we learn our native language and he saw that most children, before they even went to school, had picked up a very large percentage of both the grammar and the vocabulary that they would use in their native language before any type of formal schooling. So Asher started to have a look at ideas of how to use the whole of our brain in language learning in the way that we do when we're very young. It's accepted that within our brain there are two hemispheres. One is the left hemisphere, the other is the right hemisphere and one of the functions of the left hemisphere is language learning. One of the major functions of the right hemisphere is controlling our body's movement. What Asher said was that when we are young, what we tend to do in the way in which we learn language is to use the whole of our brain whereas formal schooling tends to only use half of it, only the left-hand side. So his idea was to try to introduce movement into the process of learning a language so that we're using the whole brain and therefore doubling the capacity of our learning within that process. So the use of motion and learning would be a fairly typical way of using total physical response. If we, for example, are learning the vocabulary of the parts of the body, then we wouldn't just listen and repeat those particular words, but we'd actually use movement. So if we were learning the word for our arm, we would move our arm whilst we were saying that word. If we were learning the word hand, we would use our hand whilst we were learning that word. By bringing those two things together, it was shown that it would actually enhance the learning process. One of the main positive points to this particular methodology is that it's very, very good for young students, for young learners. If you can get your young learners to be moving around whilst they're actually learning, then it will enhance the process of learning and they will enjoy it. And it's said to give much longer term retention of those particular vocabulary words than if you were just to say them without any motion at all. Some of the negative points for this particular methodology, whilst it is good for young learners, obviously it wouldn't be so good for one-to-one professional learners or for very high levels of grammar. One of the other requirements of this particular methodology goes back into the way in which we learn our native language. Within our native language we are listening to what's being said around us, but there's a long silent period involved in learning our native language where we don't say anything, we're just absorbing the information and then we start to use it. This long silent period is part of the total physical response approach or methodology and therefore we don't get immediate results from this. So before we move on to the final methodology for today, let's just recap and see where we are at this point in time. We're looking at different learning methodologies. Each of those methodologies takes its premise from being somewhere on this particular spectrum of nature versus nurture and where we are on this spectrum gives us a starting point for the background or theory to that particular methodology. So we've had a look starting in the 17th century and the classical method and moving on as the ideas of psychology developed to various methods such as audio-lingualism, the silent way, suggestopedia and TPR. Each of these showing a development as knowledge about learning increased and each of these takes a different starting point on our initial spectrum. Our final methodology is accredited to Jeremy Harmer and it's known by the letters ESA. Around 1998 Jeremy Harmer produced a book called How to Teach English and basically what Harmer did as a background to this book is to do what we have done today and to work through all of the different methodologies that have come about over the last 300 years. He highlighted for each of those methodologies what was good about it, what was positive and what didn't appear to work and then put all of the positive things into a melting pot and came out with this methodology which he called ESA. It's a three-stage methodology where each of the letters represents a particular phase of the lesson, the first one being called the engage phase, the second the study phase and the final one the activate phase. So let's have a look at this particular methodology and try to bring back some of the ideas that we've already looked at this morning. The engage phase of this ESA lesson has one particular purpose and the purpose of that particular phase is just to get the students talking and thinking in English. We can go back to the idea of the effective filter and we've said that when students are relaxed and ready then that will improve their chances of learning and the idea of getting the students talking and thinking in English is the first part of the lesson just to relax them and to get them involved. Once we've completed that particular task which is usually done by the use of communicative games then we move into the actual teaching part of the lesson which is called the study phase. The study phase has two particular parts to it. The first part is known as the board work and that, if you like, is where the actual teaching takes place. Once we've completed that phase of the lesson we need to check that the students actually understand what they have just been taught. So what we do is then ask them to complete a series of activities that are very targeted towards this teaching component to make sure that they actually understand it. Now one of the things that the other methodologies have said to us is that in order to be able to use the language in a communicative way you need to move beyond the actual knowledge and put it into a realistic context and that's exactly what the activate phase does. The activate phase of the lesson sets up some form of scenario or situation where the students can use the language knowledge that they've just learnt and put it into a realistic context. So what are the positive factors in the use of the ESA methodology? The first is that it requires communication. The activate activity and indeed the study activities require the students to actually talk to each other. The second positive thing about it is that it works for all particular levels. So all the way from our beginners up to our upper intermediate students this particular methodology can be used. Some of the negative things about it might be that it can become predictable. If you follow that same structure of ESA every single lesson with your students then they will get to know what is coming next. But within this particular methodology hammer came up with a way around that and we'll be looking at that later on. The other potential negative for some particular countries is that the activate activity requires the students to talk to each other and if all your students are talking to each other then your classroom can become noisy and potentially in certain countries this could be a problem.