Language Teaching in the Past

How has language teaching changed since you were a student? To help you answer this question, ask yourself what exactly you studied when you learned a foreign language in the past.

We did just that and, when asked the same question, a number of native and non-native English teachers responded in a surprisingly similar manner, revealing a particular pattern in the way foreign language teaching and learning has developed over the years. 

‘I learned foreign languages in the last century and at that time, we hardly spoke at all. And the first time we did listening tests was in the exam!’ 

‘Language teaching in my school was very poor. Repetitive tasks were intermittently presented by an unenthusiastic often absent teacher. There was no emphasis on spoken activities or pronunciation and a distinct lack of fun!’

‘When I studied my first foreign language at school, we mostly practised reproducing whatever we read or heard by memorizing; fluent speaking was never a teaching  objective.’

‘When I studied English, we mostly paid attention to grammar. We didn’t do much listening and didn’t focus on pronunciation either, and speaking activities we did in school involved more memorizing than actual fluent speech.’

The focus on accuracy and grammar seems to be an emerging pattern in the way we were educated in foreign languages in the past.

Language Teaching Today

Today’s language teaching is in stark contrast to teaching habits of the past, not only in terms of what we teach but also how we do it. 

With the advent of communicative methodologies, there has been a major change in the practice of language teaching, with a shift in the classroom instruction focus from an emphasis on language forms to developing students’ communicative ability in a foreign language. This means that grammar and vocabulary are only part of what we teach when we teach English as a foreign language, and there is an emphasis on integrating skills and developing students’ listening and speaking skills in particular. 

In terms of how we teach a foreign language, one of the main principles of the Communicative Methodology is based on the assumption that if students work out the rules of how language works for themselves, they will learn and remember it better. This has informed changes in how information is presented in the classroom, from direct and explicit explanations to elicitation and guided discovery. The rule of language instruction these days could be formulated as follows:

Do not tell your students what they can tell you! 

A good online TEFL course

A good online TEFL course should help you experience the above mentioned practice of elicitation and guided discovery within the course, as you work through the content. 

Just like students are encouraged to speak English from the moment they enter the classroom, a good online TEFL programme should expose you to the methodology being taught on the course from the very first lesson. It should also provide the same level of interaction that would be expected in an in-class course. 

This can only be achieved through an activity based TEFL content presentation that will make you engage with the subject matter of the course in the way students engage with language in the communicative classroom.
No amount of reading will ever enable students to communicate effectively; by analogy, no amount of  teaching theory imparted on you will ever help you understand how it feels to be a student in a communicative classroom if you don’t experience it first hand.

When choosing the right online TEFL course, make sure it will help you learn by doing, not by reading. 

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