Which method is the best in teaching EFL?



The new generation, educated, free from all vestiges of the past young people today is the decisive driving force for democratization, liberalization, update, and sure progress of the country/

The first President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov

According to the decree of the first President of the Republic of Uzbekistan about “The Further improving system of learning foreign languages” which was adopted on December 10^th, 2012, more attention is paid to learning and teaching foreign languages. Everybody knows that the future lies in hands of educated specialists. High indices of globalization growth and the world market shows how knowledge of foreign languages are important for the economic and cultural sphere. This is a reason why learning English so actual around the world.

Nowadays teachers of foreign language have considerable independence in a choice of tutorials, creative judgment of the contents and ways of implementation of program requirements. It should be mention is that, leading position of training in a foreign language is held by the methods and technologies based on personally focused approach by recognizing existence of various methods in modern process, which has:

− To organize the atmosphere in which the learners feel themselves comfortable and free;

− To affect the learners’ personality at all and involve their sense into training session, encourage their speaking, cognitive, creative abilities;

− To create situations in which the teacher is not the central figure

− To teach learners to work on language independently at the level of their physical, intellectual and emotional capacities;

− To provide various form of work in a class: the individual, pair, and group, collective.

The importance of considering the methods and techniques in teaching foreign languages is due to several reasons, such as:

1. in today’s world of learning foreign languages need to be revised as a common methodology and specific methods and techniques to find the most effective methods and techniques;
2. the methods and techniques of foreign language teaching are important components of the educational process, as without the use of any of the methods is almost impossible to realize the goals and objectives of the decision of foreign language teaching, so each teacher must be able to competently use the necessary means for the educational process;
3. the most difficult is the search for such methods, which would be most fully consistent with its objectives. The problem of the correct choice of methods and techniques of teaching is quite complicated, since it is these problems cause some difficulties for many teachers.

But no one can not say which method is the best or worst. As K. T. Henson mentioned, “usually the methods are better for some purpose, for example, understanding, transfer, but there is no method simply the best for everything” [1]. And M. J. Wallace believes that “a central factor in the choice of methods is the learner’s needs and characters; some method works one person well, but the same method might not work at all for another person” [5].

Before the question of considering such issues as the choice of the most effective method of teaching foreign languages, let’s turn to the consideration of the concepts of “method” and “methodology”.

According to the Webster’s Third New International dictionary, Method is a procedure or process for attaining a goal or a systematic procedure, technique or a set of rules.

As A. N. Shukin interprets the term “method” (from the Greek “Methodos”-way of research or knowledge) it is “a way to achieve the goal. As the basic category of techniques, training methods are components of the training system” [4].

And I.Lerner has defined a method as a system of the teacher’s actions, organizing practical and cognitive activity of students, which is steadily leading to the assimilation of the content of education [2].

So, by examining some of the definitions, we can conclude that the method of teaching includes teaching job and the educational-cognitive activity of students in their relationship, as well as the specifics of their work to achieve the educational, developmental and educational training purposes. The relevance of these findings is that teachers often lose sight of the fact that the successful implementation of the methods will only happen if the methods and techniques of training are consistent with the objectives and targets set by the teacher.

And what is methodology? According to the Webster’s Third New International dictionary, methodology is a body of methods, procedures, working concepts, rules and postulates employed in the solution of a problem or in doing something.

One of the aims of any methodology in foreign language teaching is to improve the foreign language ability of learners. This definition can be used as an equivalent to the words teaching and strategy.

As Henson mentioned “strategies represent a complex approach to teaching which often contains a mixture of teaching methods, utilizing a number of techniques with each method” [1]. To sum up, we can say that methodology is a set of methods based on the same rules and having a common aim, to encourage students to use the language, involve the students in the lesson, or explaining the language to students who have to listen attentively.

In language learning process teacher’s may have a number of teaching methods in between traditional and modern. Everybody has their own understanding and conclusions on teaching English language. But there is not a marked line between different methods, there is mixture between them.

In this research work we tried to consider the main methods of foreign language teaching. And the purpose of this work was to suggest some useful teaching methods that can be attempted in imparting knowledge to the students. Basically teaching must include two major components sending and receiving information. So, a teacher tries to do his/her best to impart knowledge as the way he/she understood it.

The structure of the teaching method, according to I. P. Podlasiy [3], is follows:

The objective of the method is caused by the permanent provisions of the present in any method, regardless of its use by different teachers. It reflects the general provisions for all didactic, legal requirements and laws, principles and rules, as well as permanent components of the objectives, content, form of training activities.

The subjective part of the teaching method is due to the personality of the teacher, the features of the students and the specific conditions.

All methods have at least two things in common: their belief to be the best one and a set of prescriptions that teachers have to follow necessarily.

Here we tried to study the main differences between traditional and modern methods too. And by this, we came to conclusion that:

1. the traditional method focused on teaching rules and practises it in translating but Modern teaching is to teach the learner to communicate;
2. the traditional method prefers routines and limited number of methods, such as lectures, translation activities and others but modern method consists of a great number of activities with different aims which are balanced;
3. the traditional method relies on memorizing rules and isolated items of lexics. Modern method employs more contextualized information and practice real life situations which are attractive for students.
4. the traditional method claim that students learn well if they listen to the teacher and don’t make mistakes but modern method suggest that one has to experiment with the language, to learn using it.

So every teacher chooses his/her method of teaching foreign language himself/herself. He/she might use the both, traditional and modern method, in the teaching process completely and effectively. It depends on teacher’s professionalism and knowledge of using methods.

We think that teachers, who works with EFL classes, can found this work valuable and helpful for them.

References:

1. Henson, Kenneth T. “Teaching Methods: History and Status.” Teaching methods: Designs for learning. Vol.1, pp2–5, of Theory into Practice. vol. 19. 1980. Jstor. 5 Mar 2008
2. Learner I. Y. “Didactic base of teaching methods” 1981, p 186
3. Podlasiy I. P. “Modern pedagogy” 1998. p.265–266.
4. Shukin A. N. “Teaching foreign languages: theory and practices” 2004, p 416
5. Wallace, Michael J. Training Foreign Language Teachers. Glasgow: Cambridge University Press, 1991.