es and techniques characteristic of a particular discipline or field of knowledge" (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1992, p. 1135). Thus, we have the "Silent Way", "Suggestopedia", "Community Language Learning", etc.
A technique, on the other hand, is a procedure or set of procedures adopted in a method. It is "the systematic procedure by which a complex or scientific task is accomplished" (Ibid, p. 1843). For example, in Curran's Community Language Learning (a method), the teacher may correct errors unobtrusively by repeating correctly what the student said incorrectly (one technique), or she may nonthreateningly explain the error and have the student repeat correctly what he had said incorrectly (another technique).
An instructional aid, of course, is a piece of equipment or material which aims at helping the learner learn. The definitional problem occurs when one confuses "aid" with "method". Is distance-learning (through television, for example) a method or an aid? Or is it that th
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