Page 23 - HOW TO TEACH GRAMMAR

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages:
Learners are able to speak the target language communicatively.

Learners have no difficulties to understand the lesson as it is carried out in the mother tongue.

Learners are able to give response directly.
Learners are more concerned about the combination between behavioral psychology and linguistic.

Disadvantages:
Speaking or any other spontaneous creative output was missing from the curriculum.

Students lacked an active role in the classroom.

Very little attention is paid to communication.
Very little attention is paid to content.

Processes of learning only focus in speaking.

Because of all these disadvantages, instructors tried to find better ways to remedy the pitfalls of the
Audio-lingual Method.

Silent Way

The Chomskyan criticism of the theories upon which the audio-lingual method was founded
led to an interest in not only the affective factors but also in the cognitive factors. While Community
Language Learning, drawing from Carl Roger’s philosophy, focused on the importance of the affect,
new methods were developed in the 70s to highlight the cognitive domain in language learning. The
Silent Way is one of these innovative methods. In Fact, Caleb Gattegno, the founder of the Silent
Way, devoted his thinking to the importance of problem solving approach in education. He contends
that the method is constructivist and leads the learners to develop their own conceptual models of all
the aspects of the language. The best way of achieving this is to help students to be experimental
learners.

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