Teaching A Foreign Language The Direct Method - 2375 Words

Teachers play a key role in the students’ proficiency in acquisition of a foreign language and consequently, prominent debates about using one method or another in order to make the learning process more effective are crowding the bookshelves in libraries. Despite this outstanding proliferation a clear response is still not given. This essay will discuss many aspects of one of the major methods used when teaching a foreign language: the Direct Method, an approach that sets forth something different in teaching and learning procedures. Waldermar Marton (1988:2) defines a language teaching strategy as ‘a globally conceived set of pedagogical procedures imposing a definite learning strategy on the learner directly leading to the development†¦show more content†¦Richards and S.Rodgers (1986:9) collected Sauveur and his supporters’ thoughts: ‘a foreign language could be taught without translation or the use of the learner’s native tongue if meaning was conveyed directly through demonstration and action’. Being so broad the studies about methods it is not difficult to come across others which share many features with the Direct Method as does the Communicative Language Teaching for which Waldemar Marton (1988:37) ‘covers a whole spectrum of somewhat differing orientations and procedures’. In this approach, communication is the main goal and the teacher is the responsible of encouraging the students to speak in the new target language. Seyedhamed and Sarimah (n.d.) claimed that this method provides a meticulous learning process since ‘the activities in a classroom that is run through CLT are based on the needs of learners in real life communicative situation whether in written or spoken communication’. However, these authors (n.d.) also criticized this method for being inaccurate due to the little effort devoted to the correction of mistakes ‘it was found that 58 percent of them agreed that CLT produces fluent but inaccurate learners’. Therefore, this essay is going to focus on the Direct Method since shares the same aim which is to achieve expertise in oral skills but adding up a slight nuance: it attempts to conceive a complete learner with the ability of beingShow MoreRelatedDirect Method in Foreign Language Teaching5667 Words   |  23 PagesDirect method Innovation in foreign language teaching began in the 19th century and, very rapidly, in the 20th century, leading to a number of different methodologies, sometimes conflicting, each trying to be a major improvement over the last or other contemporary methods. 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