KARLA ANAH DELGADO GONZLEZ

EMELIA LPEZ CASTILLO

Describing learning and teaching

Children and language

All children acquire a language, apperently without effort. In many parts of

the world, children grow up speaking two or more language with incredible
ease.

However, this ease of acquisition becomes gradually less noticeable as

children move towards puberty, and after that, language acquisition is much
more difficult.

Acquisition and learning

Comprehensible input: language that the students understand more or less,

even if it is a bit above their own level of production.

Monitor: what is coming from out acquired store to check that it is ok. As a
result. Learnt language tends to get in the way of acquired- language
production and may inhibit spontaneous communication.

Metodhs
Grammar translation: The grammar translation method is a method of
teaching a foreign language where the rules of grammar in the foreign
language is taught along with the vocabulary of that language. Little time is
spent dealing with the spoken form of the language. One of the major
disadvantages of this method of teaching is that it leaves students frustrated
and bored.

Audiolingual: Originated

in army education in the 1940s. It was then

developed in the 1950s and enhanced by the arrival of the language

laboratory in the 1960s. Emphasis on grammatical. Listening, conversations,
repeat some words to check the pronunciation.

Task- based learning (TBL) : offers the student an opportunity to do

exactly this. The primary focus of classroom activity is the task and

KARLA ANAH DELGADO GONZLEZ

EMELIA LPEZ CASTILLO

language is the instrument which the students use to complete it. The task is
an activity in which students use language to achieve a specific outcome.
The activity reflects real life and learners focus on meaning, they are free to
use any language they want.

* PPP approach: The first stage is the presentation of an aspect of language in a

context that students are familiar with, much the same way that a swimming
instructor would demonstrate a stroke outside the pool to beginners.
The second stage is practice, where students will be given an activity that gives
them plenty of opportunities to practice the new aspect of language and become
familiar with it whilst receiving limited and appropriate assistance from the teacher.
To continue with the analogy, the swimming instructor allowing the children to
rehearse the stroke in the pool whilst being close enough to give any support
required and plenty of encouragement.
The final stage is production where the students will use the language in context,
in an activity set up by the teacher who will be giving minimal assistance, like the
swimming instructor allowing his young charges to take their first few tentative
strokes on their own.

Communicative language teaching

Communicative language teaching rose to prominence in the 1970s and early

1980s as a result of many disparate developments in both Europe and the United
States. First, there was an increased demand for language learning, particularly in
Europe. The advent of the European Common Market led to widespread European
migration, and consequently there was a large population of people who needed to
learn a foreign language for work or for personal reasons. At the same time,
children were increasingly able to learn foreign languages in school. The number of

KARLA ANAH DELGADO GONZLEZ

EMELIA LPEZ CASTILLO

secondary schools offering languages rose worldwide in the 1960s and 1970s as
part of a general trend of curriculum-broadening and modernization, and foreignlanguage study ceased to be confined to the elite academies. In Britain, the
introduction of comprehensive schools meant that almost all children had the
opportunity to study foreign languages.