Pictures about methodology.

She is the Teacher María Teresa Fernandez...

Discussing some method

Discusing the different methods

THE AUDIOLINGUAL METHOD

This method of Language Learning is also called the Aural-Oral Method. This method is said to result in rapid acquisition of speaking and listening skills. The audiolingual method drills students in the use of grammatical sentence patterns. When this method was developed it was thought that the way to acquire the sentence patterns of the second language was through conditioning or helping learners to respond correctly to stimuli through shaping and reinforcement.

The Audiolingual Method is based on the following principles:

• Speaking and listening competence preceded reading and writing competence.
• Use of German is highly discouraged in the classroom.
• The development of language skills is a matter of habit formulation.
• Students practice particular patterns of language through structured dialogue and drill until response is automatic.
• Structured patterns in language are taught using repetitive drills.
• The emphasis is on having students produce error free utterances.
• This method of language learning supports kinesthetic learning styles.
• Only everyday vocabulary and sentences are taught. Concrete vocabulary is taught through demonstration, objects, and pictures. Abstract vocabulary is taught through association of ideas.
• The printed word must be kept away from the second language learner as long as possible.

http://www.saskschools.ca/curr_content/hutt/esl/amtheory.htm

Audio-lingual method

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The audio-lingual method, Army Method, or New Key^[1], is a style of teaching used in teaching foreign languages. It is based on behaviorist theory, which professes that certain traits of living things, and in this case humans, could be trained through a system of reinforcement—correct use of a trait would receive positive feedback while incorrect use of that trait would receive negative feedback.

This approach to language learning was similar to another, earlier method called the direct method. Like the direct method, the audio-lingual method advised that students be taught a language directly, without using the students' native language to explain new words or grammar in the target language. However, unlike the direct method, the audio-lingual method didn’t focus on teaching vocabulary. Rather, the teacher drilled students in the use of grammar.

Applied to language instruction, and often within the context of the language lab, this means that the instructor would present the correct model of a sentence and the students would have to repeat it. The teacher would then continue by presenting new words for the students to sample in the same structure. In audio-lingualism, there is no explicit grammar instruction—everything is simply memorized in form. The idea is for the students to practice the particular construct until they can use it spontaneously. In this manner, the lessons are built on static drills in which the students have little or no control on their own output; the teacher is expecting a particular response and not providing that will result in a student receiving negative feedback. This type of activity, for the foundation of language learning, is in direct opposition with communicative language teaching.

Charles Fries, the director of the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, the first of its kind in the United States, believed that learning structure, or grammar was the starting point for the student. In other words, it was the students’ job to orally recite the basic sentence patterns and grammatical structures. The students were only given “enough vocabulary to make such drills possible.” (Richards, J.C. et-al. 1986). Fries later included principles for behavioural psychology, as developed by B.F. Skinner, into this method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio-lingual_method

Teaching Pronunciation

Teaching Pronunciation

Pronunciation involves far more than individual sounds. Word stress, sentence stress, intonation, and word linking all influence the sound of spoken English, not to mention the way we often slur words and phrases together in casual speech. 'What are you going to do?' becomes 'Whaddaya gonna do?' English pronunciation involves too many complexities for learners to strive for a complete elimination of accent, but improving pronunciation will boost self esteem, facilitate communication, and possibly lead to a better job or a least more respect in the workplace. Effective communication is of greatest importance, so choose first to work on problems that significantly hinder communication and let the rest go. Remember that your students also need to learn strategies for dealing with misunderstandings, since native pronunciation is for most an unrealistic goal.

A student's first language often interferes with English pronunciation. For example, /p/ is aspirated in English but not in Spanish, so when a Spanish speaker pronounces 'pig' without a puff of air on the /p/, an American may hear 'big' instead. Sometimes the students will be able to identify specific problem sounds and sometimes they won't. You can ask them for suggestions, but you will also need to observe them over time and make note of problem sounds. Another challenge resulting from differences in the first language is the inability to hear certain English sounds that the native language does not contain. Often these are vowels, as in 'ship' and 'sheep,' which many learners cannot distinguish. The Japanese are known for confusing /r/ and /l/, as their language contains neither of these but instead has one sound somewhere between the two. For problems such as these, listening is crucial because students can't produce a sound they can't hear. Descriptions of the sound and mouth position can help students increase their awareness of subtle sound differences.

Here are some ideas for focusing on specific pronunciation features.

• Voicing
  Voiced sounds will make the throat vibrate. For example, /g/ is a voiced sound while /k/ is not, even though the mouth is in the same position for both sounds. Have your students touch their throats while pronouncing voiced and voiceless sounds. They should feel vibration with the voiced sounds only.
• Aspiration
  Aspiration refers to a puff of air when a sound is produced. Many languages have far fewer aspirated sounds than English, and students may have trouble hearing the aspiration. The English /p/, /t/, /k/, and /ch/ are some of the more commonly aspirated sounds. Although these are not always aspirated, at the beginning of a word they usually are. To illustrate aspiration, have your students hold up a piece of facial tissue a few inches away from their mouths and push it with a puff of air while pronouncing a word containing the target sound.
• Mouth Position
  Draw simple diagrams of tongue and lip positions. Make sure all students can clearly see your mouth while you model sounds. Have students use a mirror to see their mouth, lips, and tongue while they imitate you.
• Intonation
  Word or sentence intonation can be mimicked with a kazoo, or alternatively by humming. This will take the students' attention off of the meaning of a word or sentence and help them focus on the intonation.
• Linking
  We pronounce phrases and even whole sentences as one smooth sound instead of a series of separate words. 'Will Amy go away,' is rendered 'Willaymeegowaway.' To help learners link words, try starting at the end of a sentence and have them repeat a phrase, adding more of the sentence as they can master it. For example, 'gowaway,' then 'aymeegowaway,' and finally 'Willaymeegowaway' without any pauses between words.
• Vowel Length
  You can demonstrate varying vowel lengths within a word by stretching rubber bands on the longer vowels and letting them contract on shorter ones. Then let the students try it. For example, the word 'fifteen' would have the rubber band stretched for the 'ee' vowel, but the word 'fifty' would not have the band stretched because both of its vowels are spoken quickly.
• Syllables
  • Have students count syllables in a word and hold up the correct number of fingers, or place objects on table to represent each syllable.
  • Illustrate syllable stress by clapping softly and loudly corresponding to the syllables of a word. For example, the word 'beautiful' would be loud-soft-soft. Practice with short lists of words with the same syllabic stress pattern ('beautiful,' 'telephone,' 'Florida') and then see if your learners can list other words with that pattern.
• Specific Sounds
  • Minimal pairs, or words such as 'bit/bat' that differ by only one sound, are useful for helping students distinguish similar sounds. They can be used to illustrate voicing ('curl/girl') or commonly confused sounds ('play/pray'). Remember that it's the sound and not the spelling you are focusing on.
  • Tongue twisters are useful for practicing specific target sounds, plus they're fun. Make sure the vocabulary isn't too difficult.
  • The Sounds of English, American Accent Training, and EnglishClub.com websites below offer guidelines for describing how to produce various English sounds. You can find representative practice words for every English sound on the English is Soup site.

http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/esl/pronunciation.cfm

Teachin Grammar

1. Grammar is acquired naturally; it need not be taught.

It is true that some learners acquire second language grammar naturally without instruction. For example, there are immigrants to the United States who acquire proficiency in English on their own. This is especially true of young immigrants. However, this is not true for all learners. Among the same immigrant groups are learners who may achieve a degree of proficiency, but whose English is far from accurate. A more important question may be whether it is possible with instruction to help learners who cannot achieve accuracy in English on their own.

It is also true that learning particular grammatical distinctions requires a great deal of time even for the most skilled learners. Carol Chomsky (1969) showed that native English speakers were still in the process of acquiring certain grammatical structures in English well into adolescence. Thus, another important question is whether it is possible to accelerate students' natural learning of grammar through instruction. Research findings can be brought to bear on this question from a variety of sources (see Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991). Pienemann (1984) demonstrated that subjects who received grammar instruction progressed to the next stage after a two-week period, a passage normally taking several months in untutored development. While the number of subjects studied was admittedly small, the finding, if corroborated, provides evidence of the efficacy of teaching over leaving acquisition to run its natural course.

With regard to whether instruction can help learners acquire grammar they would not have learned on their own, some research, although not unequivocal, points to the value of form-focused instruction to improve learners' accuracy over what normally transpires when there is no focus on form (see Larsen-Freeman, 1995).

2. Grammar is a collection of meaningless forms.

This myth may have arisen because many people associate the term grammar with verb paradigms and rules about linguistic form. However, grammar is not unidimensional and not meaningless; it embodies the three dimensions of morphosyntax (form), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (use). As can be seen in the pie chart in Figure 1, these dimensions are interdependent; a change in one results in change in another. Despite their interdependence, however, they each offer a unique perspective on grammar. Consider the passive voice in English. It clearly has form. It is composed minimally of a form of the "be" verb and the past participle. Sometimes it has the preposition "by" before the agent in the predicate: (1) "The bank was robbed by the same gang that hijacked the armored car." That the passive can occur only when the main verb is transitive is also part of its formal description.

The passive has a grammatical meaning. It is a focus construction, which confers a different status on the receiver or recipient of an action than it would receive in the active voice. For example, the bank in sentence (1) is differently focused than it would be in the active sentence: (2) "The same gang robbed the bank."

When or why do we use the passive? When the receiver of the action is the theme or topic, when we do not know who the agent is, when we wish to deliberately conceal the identity of the agent, when the agent is obvious and easily derivable from the context, when the agent is redundant, and so on.

http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content4/grammer.morph.html

The Natural Approach
Was developed by Tracy Terrell and Stephen Krashen, starting in 1977. It came to have a wide influence in language teaching in the United States and around the world. it places less emphasis on teacher monologues, direct repetition, and formal questions and answers, and less focus on accurate production of target language sentences.
In the Natural Approach there is an em¬phasis on exposure, or input, rather than practice; optimizing emotional preparedness for learning; a prolonged period of attention to what the language learners hear before they try to produce language; and a will¬ingness to use written and other materials as a source of comprehensible input.
As part of the Natural Approach, students listen to the teacher using the target language communicatively from the very beginning. It has certain similarities with the much earlier Direct Method, with the important exception that students are allowed to use their native language alongside the target language as part of the language learning process. In early stages, students are not corrected during oral production, as the teacher is focusing on meaning rather than form (unless the error is so drastic that it actually hinders meaning).
Communicative activities prevail throughout a language course employing the Natural Approach, focusing on a wide range of activities including games, role-plays, dialogs, group work and discussions. There are three generic stages identified in the approach: (1) Preproduction - developing listening skills; (2) Early Production - students struggle with the language and make many errors which are corrected based on content and not structure; (3) Extending Production - promoting fluency through a variety of more challenging activities.
Krashen's theories and the Natural approach have received plenty of criticism, particularly orientated around the recommendation of a silent period that is terminated when students feel ready to emerge into oral production, and the idea of comprehensible input. Critics point out that students will "emerge" at different times (or perhaps not at all!) and it is hard to determine which forms of language input will be "comprehensible" to the students. These factors can create a classroom that is essentially very difficult to manage unless the teacher is highly skilled. Still, this was the first attempt at creating an expansive and overall "approach" rather than a specific "method", and the Natural Approach led naturally into the generally accepted norm for effective language teaching

Theory of language
The Communicative view of language is the view behind the Natural Approach. Particular emphasis is laid on language as a set of messages that can be understood
Theory of learning

The Natural Approach is based on the following tenets:
 Language acquisition (an unconscious process developed through using language meaningfully) is different from language learning (consciously learning or discovering rules about a language) and language acquisition is the only way competence in a second language occurs. (The acquisition/learning hypothesis)
 Conscious learning operates only as a monitor or editor that checks or repairs the output of what has been acquired. (The monitor hypothesis)

 Grammatical structures are acquired in a predictable order and it does little good to try to learn them in another order.(The natural order hypothesis).

 People acquire language best from messages that are just slightly beyond their current competence. (The input hypothesis)

 The learner's emotional state can act as a filter that impedes or blocks input necessary to acquisition. (The affective filter hypothesis)

These five hypotheses have obvious implications for language teaching.

1. THE ACQUISITION-LEARNING DISCTINCTION
Adults have two different ways to develop competence in a language: language acquisition and language learning.
Language acquisition is a subconscious process not unlike the way a child learns language. Language acquirers are not consciously aware of the grammatical rules of the language, but rather develop a "feel" for correctness. "In non-technical language, acquisition is 'picking-up' a language."
Language learning, on the other hand, refers to the "conscious knowledge of a second language, knowing the rules, being aware of them, and being able to talk about them." Thus language learning can be compared to learning about a language.
The acquisition-learning distinction hypothesis claims that adults do not lose the ability to acquire languages the way that children do. Just as research shows that error correction has little effect on children learning a first language, so too error correction has little affect on language acquisition.

2. THE NATURAL ORDER HYPOTHESIS
The natural order hypothesis states that "the acquisition of grammatical structures proceeds in a predictable order." For a given language, some grammatical structures tend to be acquired early, others late, regardless of the first language of a speaker. However, as will be discussed later on in the book, this does not mean that grammar should be taught in this natural order of acquisition.

3. THE MONITOR HYPOTHESIS
The language that one has subconsciously acquired "initiates our utterances in a second language and is responsible for our fluency," whereas the language that we have consciously learned acts as an editor in situations where the learner has enough time to edit, is focused on form, and knows the rule, such as on a grammar test in a language classroom or when carefully writing a composition. This conscious editor is called the Monitor.
Different individuals use their monitors in different ways, with different degrees of success. Monitor Over-users try to always use their Monitor, and end up "so concerned with correctness that they cannot speak with any real fluency." Monitor Under-users either have not consciously learned or choose to not use their conscious knowledge of the language. Although error correction by others has little influence on them, they can often correct themselves based on a "feel" for correctness.
Teachers should aim to produce Optimal Monitor users, who "use the Monitor when it is appropriate and when it does not interfere with communication." They do not use their conscious knowledge of grammar in normal conversation, but will use it in writing and planned speech. "Optimal Monitor users can therefore use their learned competence as a supplement to their acquired competence."

4. THE INPUT HYPOTHESIS
The input hypothesis answers the question of how a language acquirer develops competency over time. It states that a language acquirer who is at "level i" must receive comprehensible input that is at "level i+1." "We acquire, in other words, only when we understand language that contains structure that is 'a little beyond' where we are now." This understanding is possible due to using the context of the language we are hearing or reading and our knowledge of the world.
However, instead of aiming to receive input that is exactly at our level, or instead of having a teacher aim to teach us grammatical structure that is at our level, we should instead just focus on communication that is understandable. If we do this, and if we get enough of that kind of input, then we will in effect be receiving and thus acquiring out i+1. "Production ability emerges. It is not taught directly."
Evidences for the input hypothesis can be found in the effectiveness of caretaker speech from an adult to a child, of teacher-talk from a teacher to a language student, and of foreigner-talk from a sympathetic conversation partner to a language learner/acquirer.
One result of this hypothesis is that language students should be given a initial "silent period" where they are building up acquired competence in a language before they begin to produce it.
Whenever language acquirers try to produce language beyond what they have acquired, they tend to use the rules they have already acquired from their first language, thus allowing them to communicate but not really progress in the second language.

5. THE AFFECTIVE FILTER HYPOTHESIS
Motivation, self-confidence, and anxiety all affect language acquisition, in effect raising or lowering the "stickiness" or "penetration" of any comprehensible input that is received.
These five hypotheses of second language acquisition can be summarized: "1. Acquisition is more important than learning. 2. In order to acquire, two conditions are necessary. The first is comprehensible (or even better, comprehended) input containing, structures a bit beyond the acquirer’s current level, and second, a low or weak affective filter to allow the input 'in'."

Objectives
it is designed to help beginner become intermediates
It is designed to depend on learner needs.
The syllabus
The syllabus for the Natural Approach is a communicative syllabus.
Types of learning techniques and activities
 Comprehensible input is presented in the target language, using techniques such as TPR, mime and gesture.
 Group techniques are similar to Communicative Language Teaching.
 Learners start to talk when they are ready.