METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO TEACHING ENGLISH

Clearly (Or is it clear?), one does not teach children the same way one teaches adults. Adults do not start with a tabula rasa and they are serious. Pre-school children may demand different methods from junior-high children. Senior high-school young people prepare for the more abstract and threatening intellectual discipline of the university--rather than for the acquisition of a new communicative medium and culture.

Young children learn essentially and best through play--as in Total Physical Response. Conservative teachers--conscious of the fragility of their tenure--fear that stressing play at the expense of study in the painful traditional fashion, will deprive the child from developing discipline; that the child will not possess the skills and motivations needed to face the rigors of learning in the adult world. The first question that comes to mind is: Why shouldn't learning be a source of enjoyment for the adult as it was--or should have been--for the child? The second question is, rather, an observation: How is it that the young of all mammalians learn through play and yet, somehow learn all the adult skills needed to survive? Isn't a playful lion cub or baby-bear ever going to learn to hunt and find its dinner? In other words: The kind of fun the young enjoys as it learns naturally may gradually give way to other kinds of self-satisfaction it will enjoy as an adult. Thus, the nature of the satisf

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hod, the memorization of long lists of words, and brain-washing drills are de rigueur. Whereas in elementary school the stress is on conversational skills, with gradual acquisition of literary skills, in secondary school the stress is on reading, to a lesser extent on writing, and to a larger extent on memorizing grammatical rules. In other words, whereas the elementary school focuses on Krashenian acquisition and on the enjoyment of a new culture and its communicative expression, the secondary school tells its children to forget about talking and having fun and, rather, to study and learn in the Krashenian sense of the word. Methodologically, curricula for young children (of lower and upper elementary school ages) rely as much as possible on total immersion and on content-based activities. Knowledge is thus acquired by osmosis, so to peak, "in a natural fashion, free from systematic guidance" (Klein, 1986)--"spontaneously" to use Klein's term. Note that " free from systematic guidance" does not imply lack of guidance--a kind of laissez-faire. Rather, guidance is learner-centered, i.e. it is tailored to the individual child's learning style and stage: it is the child who seeks guidance in whatever subtle ways he may do so. Guid
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Approximate Word count = 1412
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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