Some approaches to ELE

Audio Lingual Method:

                It is based on the linguistic and psychological tradition. It was founded in conditioning theories and habit formation. This method has a great deal of oral practice, grammar drills and conversation. There have been many adaptations of this method.

Community Language Learning:

                This method is based on the affective and social nature of language learning. The group has a great importance in the learning process, the interaction among its members makes learning easier and more supportive as a process. This diminishes the learning context anxiety. The distribution of the group is seated in a circle and the role of the teacher is to supervise the conversation, support the learners and if necessary to direct and teach some language rules. At some point the learner becomes independent and able to talk without the correction and guidance of the teacher.

Suggestopedia:

                In this method, comfortable situations and relaxed environments are fundamental. The learners are encouraged to act as children, to be relaxed and not to take authority too seriously.

The Silent Way:

                It is more based on the cognitive aspects than on the affective ones. The foundation of this approach to learning is problem solving. The learner is encouraged to discover learning rather than memorize things and repeat. Physical objects have a fundamental role in this approach; specifically rods of different lengths and colors.

Total Physical Response:

                This approach gives a great deal of importance to the listening stage as a previous stage for speaking, in the language learning process. The learners are asked to respond physically to what they listen, so they have to act out different commands. By listening and performing different actions, students will begin to feel comfortable with language and will start to produce verbal responses.

The Natural Approach:

                This approach proposes that speech has to emerge naturally, when the learner feels prepared to speak. The amount and quality of input are very important to language acquisition. The teacher has to provide her students with lots of comprehensible input so students become comfortable with the language and hopefully start speaking it at some point, whenever he feels prepared to do it. Three stages are identified in the language learning process: the pre-production stage (listening), the early production stage and the extending production stage.

Language Teaching Methods

As teachers we need to be informed of the theories and ideas which inspire the way we teach language. The beliefs about the nature of language and what we know about learning have effects on our teaching practice every day. Therefore it is very important to be aware and to know them.

There are two approaches to Language Teaching which come from the psychological tradition. These are Audio-lingualism and Cognitive Code Learning. 

Audio-lingualism derives from behaviorist psychology (Skinner) and from structural linguistics. Audio-lingualism emphasizes on the consequences of the stimulus or stimuli and not on the stimulus itself. Rules are not given much importance in this approach because the important thing is to teach the language and not to talk about the language. There is no meta-language in this approach. Learning a language is developing a set of habits, therefore we can learn the L2 in the same way we learn the L1. In the process of learning a language, repetition and language input are the most important things.

Cognitive Code Learning is another approach which comes from the psychological tradition. It has two sources: cognitive psychology and transformational grammar (Chomsky and Ausubel). It proposes that there are certain rules that have to be applied in order to learn a language, but there is also a certain amount of creativity that the learner has to apply. Also, prior knowledge is very important and should always be connected with the new one. Learning is an active process; therefore mistakes are very important for the learner. He learn from his mistakes.

My strengths and weaknesses in English

It is very difficult for me to say which one is my strongest and which one is my weakest ability in English. All of them are difficult for me. But if I had to identify one of them as the weakest and the most difficult for me,  I would say that speaking is the language ability in which I have more difficulty in English. I am able to understand everything when I read and when I hear other people speaking English. And writing is not specially difficult for me. I read and correct a hundred times everything I write, but I can express myself accuratley by writing. However many times I do not get to express what I want to say when speaking. Many times I tend to get confused and I help myself with movements and expressions.  This happens to me because sometimes I still try to translate from Spanish to English when speaking. There are some expressions that we have in Spanish that don't exist in English, but sometimes when I speak English I try to find the exact words that are used in Spanish and that is when I get confused and start to get nervious and stutter. I have realized that English is much simpler than Spanish regarding structures and grammar.
The best way to improve this weakness would be to be always aware that there are many different ways to express the same idea and that there is no need to use exactly the same words that would be used in Spanish. I think though, that I have improved my speaking a lot by practicing, so I have to keep on speaking and practicing to improve this ability.  

My experience as an English learner

When I think about my experience as an English learner, I could say that there have been three stages in my learning process. First of all, there was the school stage, where English was a subject and it wasn't really motivating or fun to learn English. At school I had a lot of grammar drills and repetition. We used to spend a lot of time doing exercises from a book and then we used to check them with the teacher. I wouldn't say that I learned lots of English in my school stage. But it helped me to realize that learning languages was not very difficult for me. I realized that I had a good ear for languages, at least for English. Then , the university stage came. I got to the university having a base in English, but not really knowing how to express myself in English. I wasn't really able to write or speak English very well or very accuratetly. In this stage I learned a lot of English and I improved a lot my writing and speaking, which were the most difficult areas for me. Also in this stage I did my internship in a bilingual school, where I learned a lot from all the teachers. The third stage began after I got out of the university and I began to work. I started working in a non bilingual school, but I had to speak everything in English to my students. Therefore, I maintained my English, but certainly not at the same level, because the English thta I used at work with small girls was much more basic than the one I used to speak at the University with my teachers and classmates. That is, in part, why I decided to get into this masters program, to maintain my level of English and avoid losing what I learned at university. 
I think that the most difficult areas for me are speaking and writing in English, so I am always focusing in improving those two areas. I hope I am able to do it during this masters program and I also hope to improve my teaching methodologies and strategies. I want to teach English in a fun way, not in the same way I was taught when I was a child.