TESOL Teaching

Whether a behavioristic or humanistic approach is taken towards teaching and learning a foreign language, the fact remains that there are more questions than answers regarding how to teach and how one learns. Teaching--as all endeavors affecting human destiny--is as much an art as a science. There is no shortage of proposed ways to help modify human behaviors: methods come and go and come back ill-disguised as one or another scholar or pseudo-scholar rediscovers the light bulb. As to learning, we are only beginning to discern some of its mechanisms in some people who, in some situations and in some contexts, try and acquire some knowledge or some skills. Linguists fail to understand that linguistics is neither psychology nor pedagogy. Psychologists fail to admit that to know something is not to know how to impart it. Teachers, usually ill-trained and confused, think that by concocting a mixture of recent faddist theories with their own insight, they hold the key to teaching. "Research in second language acquisition has too short a history to supply conclusive evidence on any important question" (Klein, 1986:167).

Thus it is that much of TESOL remains a mystery, in spite of the miracles which proponents of one fad or another try to foist upon a teaching profession and a learning public hungry for valid formulaic responses. One quandary that baffles teachers is the amount and nature of authority they ought to exercise for optimum st

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she is losing authority. In the Silent Way method, the teacher has even less authority. It is the students who do the talking and the recombining of material. In Cooperative Learning--as Johnson and Johnson (1975), Gunderson (1978), and Gunderson and Johnson (1980) point out--learning occurs primarily from peer interaction rather than from teacher-student relationship. In this method, the teacher provides but limited guidance and constitutes but a limited information resource, intervening only when it becomes clear that the group needs solve a problem. Again, teacher's authority is diluted. We see thus, as do Richards and Rodgers (1987:150) that "Some instructional systems are totally dependent on the teacher as the source of knowledge and direction; others see the teacher's role as catalyst, consultant, diagnostician, guide, and model for learning; still others try to teacher-proof the instructional system by limiting teacher initiative and building instructional content and direction into tests and lesson-plans." The audiolingual method is an example of the teacher-centered concept--a concept which provides security to the teacher. He follows the curriculum, the lesson-plans, the accepted methodology: he is, in other words,
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Approximate Word count = 3309
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)

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