There is a lot of talk these days about effective communication and the development of relevant skills. In teaching foreign languages, communicative teaching methods also appeared and quickly became popular. But they are not suitable for everyone, says Olga Saranina, a teacher of Romance languages. Why?
1. When we learn, we look for what is clear, we try to catch patterns, find what is clear to us.
At the same time, at school, almost all of us were taught using classical textbooks, in which the lesson is structured as follows: rules, exercises on the rules, new words and text with them and with new rules.
We understand everything in them, because there is a text that is specially written at our level. And in it we must translate every word, because we have already gone through all this.
The downside of classical textbooks is that those who have studied from them, as a rule, read quite well, but do not speak a foreign language, and it is difficult for them to assimilate new information on the fly, because they are accustomed—he was taught—to analyze it first. And in textbooks of another type, communicative, other goals are set.
All tasks are structured in such a way as to train the ability to capture important information. And it starts right away, from the first lesson. It gives the most necessary minimum of knowledge, and then they immediately offer a text, and not a training one, but a “real” one: an excerpt from an article or from a book.
2. In the classical system of education, it would be impossible to start learning French with The Three Musketeers or other classics
Reading Russian translations, we are accustomed to treating this novel as teenage reading, but in fact it is serious literature, it has a complex and even refined language.
But in a communicative lesson, you can easily be asked to read an excerpt from the first chapter. A lot of words are incomprehensible, but the main questions, nevertheless, can be answered, even if you see this text for the first time in your life and do not understand most of it.
Who is the main character, what is his name? D’Artagnan, right. And what does he ride, a train or a horse? Etc. And it turns out that you managed to grab the most important thing!
Your habitual way of thinking says that first you need to study the theory well. But we will first have experience, practice
But for many of those who have been brought up on classical textbooks in foreign languages, this approach itself is incomprehensible, and the task seems impossible. And then the student says to the teacher and to himself: I have to translate every word, but I don’t know these words. And if you answer him “it doesn’t matter,” he doesn’t understand how it’s so “unimportant”?
Each of us wants to understand — this is our support. And when an adult came to the «magic» courses, having heard about new methods, he still wants it to be clear, that is, familiar.
And when everything is unusual there, it is a double stress for him: not only is the language new and the words are unfamiliar, but also the training system is very different from everything that he knew before. Natural resistance arises (it can take the form of irritation, boredom, distrust, or a sense of one’s own inability), which is difficult to overcome — both for the student and the teacher.
3. It’s not uncommon for adult students to believe that since they paid for courses, the teacher should meet them halfway.
And this means, from their point of view, that he must answer all the questions that arise. What is this grammatical form, in what cases is it used, what is the etymology of this word, and so on.
But when we speak our own language, we don’t think about it! We don’t think at all — yeah, this is the first person, the second conjugation, so the ending should be such and such … We would speak very, very slowly if we thought it all over.
But in fact, “words themselves come to the language”, because we have managed to get used to different words and expressions, are used to pronouncing them in certain situations, because we have heard others pronounce them a hundred times, and we ourselves have spoken a hundred times. And in different high-speed training courses, we repeat the same path — that is, we get used to the words and phrases that are used in certain everyday situations.
«Hello. Here I am. Where do you hang your coat? Right here. How are you? What are you! Can not be. What’s your girlfriend’s name? Oh, it seems she met my brother… Our everyday speech is spontaneous and situational. In your native language, you can regret that «I said without thinking.» And in a foreign language, this is the ideal that we strive to achieve.
4. This does not mean that no theory is needed at all — it is needed, but later, when we get a little familiar with the language
In my group, it happened more than once that students, right from the first lesson, begin to ask an awful lot of theoretical questions: what is this, and what is this? And I say: please write down your question and ask me in a month, because as yet you do not have the tools to understand my explanations. Because it is impossible to explain what a square root is to someone who has not yet heard about addition.
Once one of the students asked me very persistently, and I asked him: “Are you, perhaps, a theoretical physicist?” And whatever you think, it turns out it is! And the same thing happened a second time: again an attentive student with many questions — and also a theoretical physicist. Looks like I’m already guessing them by the type of questions!
Yes, I understand that the way of thinking you are accustomed to says that you first need to study the theory well. But first we will have experience, practice, so we will develop a base on which we can then build a theory.
If you are going to take new progressive courses, be prepared for the fact that they will not be like the old ones.
It’s like a fire: it’s one thing to read in a book how to make it, another thing to see how it’s done before our eyes, but the most interesting thing is to collect brushwood yourself and see how the fire gradually starts and flares up brighter and brighter.
In individual training, of course, everything is different. It all depends on the student himself — how it is more convenient for him, how more interesting, more familiar. But in the group, it is not possible for each individual to explain in the way he is used to. The strength of the group is that it has a lot of communication. The difficulty is that each member adapts to the group.
There is only one way out — if you are going to go to new progressive courses, be prepared for the fact that they will not look like the old ones. This seems obvious. But practice shows that it is far from easy for everyone to agree that one can learn not in one single way, but in many different ways.
No matter how modern and successful this or that way of learning may be, it is not a fact that it will suit everyone and everyone. Each of us has our own experience, our own way of thinking, our own preferences, finally.