Introducing new language

A traditional approach versus a more communicative approach

At the workshops, teachers watched two demonstration grammar lessons. One was presented in a traditional way and the other in a more communicative way. They were then analysed, discussed and compared. The following is an outline of the stages used in the two approaches.

 

Traditional approach	More communicative approach
1. The teacher writes down the grammar point on the board.	1. The teacher uses contexts, situations, even visual aids to present the target language they are going to teach.
2. The teacher gives explanations of the rules or structures.	2. Students do the task and work out the meaning, the form and the use of grammatical items.
3. The teacher gives examples to illustrate the rules or structures introduced.	3. The teacher uses yes/no and simple questions to check students understanding of form, meaning and use.
4. Practice: the teacher asks students to use the target language to make up sentences.	4. Controlled Practice: the teacher gets students to practise the target language in a controlled way using, for example, repetition and substitution drills, word prompts, or picture prompts. The language used is realistic and contextualised.
5. Practice: the teacher gets students to do some quite controlled exercises at sentence level such as gap-fill exercises, sentence completion, matching, or translation.	5. Less controlled/freer practice: The teacher provides students with opportunities to use the new language in a freer, more creative way. The activities are personalized i.e. the students get to use the new language (and previously learnt language) to talk about themselves, their lives, their opinions and things they are interested in or care about.

Guidelines for introducing new language communicatively and effectively

e New grammar items are presented in a context or situation and students are actively involved in exploring the grammar items’ meaning, form (and pronunciation – if relevant) and don’t just sit and listen passively to the teacher’s long explanations.

e The teacher checks the students’ understanding of the new language using simple questions but never asks, ‘Do you understand?’, as students always just say, ‘Yes’, even when they don’t understand!

e After the presentation the students do controlled practice activities to work on their accuracy and then free(r) practice activities to work on their fluency. These are usually done in pairs or groups.

e The activities should allow for personalized and/or communicative use of the new language. Making the language more meaningful and memorable in this way, results in more effective learning for the students!






 

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