Total Physical Response (TPR)
The goal of the teacher is to facilitate comprehension by reducing the stress and anxiety experienced by students when learning a foreign language. The role of the teacher is primarily that of an instructor that gives commands, but the teachers are also expected to demonstrate/act out the behaviour being commanded simultaneously so that the students know what the command is and so they can imitate the action being commanded. This method embodies the meaning as a method for facilitating natural acquisition of the foreign language as close as it can to the way a child acquires language from its parents.
The role of the students is to imitate and act out the commands given them by the teacher until such a time as the students feel they are ready to attempt to issue the commands themselves. TPR does not force students to produce speech until the students voluntarily do so. The teaching/learning process involves a lot of repetition but to offset the repetition of a relatively small number of actions, the addition of extra vocabulary in the form of variations on those actions makes the repetitions less tedious for the students.
The teacher interacts with students as a group and on an individual basis throughout the lesson. Given the aforementioned voluntary speech production expectation, the teacher is responsible for almost all the speech in a lesson until such a time as the students begin to produce speech along with the imitative actions they are performing. The student to student interactions happen more when the students have enough confidence to produce speech and issue commands to either each other or the teacher.
TPR was formulated around psychological studies that support the theory that elevated levels of anxiety and stress prevent or interfere with the acquisition of language. To this end, TPR is focused on keeping the lessons fun and engaging by using interactive games and enactments, and teachers do not correct the utterances of students if they are incorrect to ensure that for the students there is no focus on failing or being wrong. Instead, teachers may repeat the command in a non-threatening way and allow the student/s to have another attempt.
Language is viewed as being primarily spoken/heard but there is an embodied physical element to the acquisition process which increases retention of the content being taught.
Written language is very much secondary to the oral/aural aspects and is mostly used for home practice. TPR is vocabulary and construction focused as a methodology and uses physical reinforcement to impart meaning. The skill of comprehension is prized above all else as competent comprehension leads naturally to competent production.
The students’ native language plays almost no role in a TPR lesson. By observing the students’ actions, teachers can gauge if students are comprehending the language being taught/demonstrated. To mitigate anxiety and stress from the classes, the error correction for students is very minimal at the commencement of learning, but as the students progress and gain confidence teachers can bring more scrutiny to bear on student errors but still in a non-threatening way.
Suggestopedia
The goal of teachers employing Suggestopedia is to expedite language learning by applying the psychological study of suggestion to remove psychological barriers that learners possess which prevent them from learning a 2nd/foreign language. The role of the teacher in the classroom is one of supportive and encouraging authority; the teacher is clearly the person in charge in the classroom but the environment the teacher is expected to create is one where the student’s pre-existing (conscious or unconscious) limitations can be “suggested away” as it were.
The students’ role in the classroom is to be relaxed and to gain confidence in themselves to become less inhibited and participate more. The teacher is meant to earn the trust and respect of the students which in turn allows the teacher to boost the students’ confidence and desuggest any doubts they might have. The classroom is supposed to be filled with lots of stimuli relevant to the syllabus being taught and is expected to vary over time to ensure that the students don’t get bored by the “same old” classroom week in, week out.
Unique to this methodology is the use of music during the lessons, the music is meant to activate the right hemisphere as part of the language learning process to create more “memory anchor points” in the non-linguistic hemisphere at the same time as the linguistic (left) hemisphere is being activated by the linguistic content of the lesson. The teacher is also expected to deliver the same content in several different ways, some of which may require the students to participate and others that don’t. Games and other activities are useful in delivering the same content in different ways that don’t bore or overwhelm the students.
The teacher is main initiator of interactions with both the entire class and individuals, there is no restriction however on students who wish to initiate interaction with the teacher. The students’ emotional wellbeing and stability in the classroom is carefully considered by the teacher, this is made evident by the focus of the teacher on mitigating sources of stress, anxiety and bolstering the students’ self-confidence.
Language is one of two plains in the process of communication; the first plain is the linguistic plane which roughly corresponds to the left hemisphere and the second plane is the “everything else” plane which includes all non-linguistic pattern recognition. Students are often exposed to the “fine art” of the target language’s culture as part of the education on what everyday life involves for most of the people from that culture.
Suggestopedia focuses on vocabulary primarily and only minimally addresses grammar. Literacy skills are also focused on in Suggestopedia classrooms, students are asked to read (aloud and to themselves) and to write in the target language regularly.
The native language may be used by the teacher to begin with, but this will decrease as the students’ ability increases. To consistently maintain a relaxed and non-threatening classroom environment, there is no formal testing; teachers instead evaluate the students’ ability based on their normal in-class participation/performance. Also, to this end, any errors made by students are only to be gently corrected by the teacher.
The Silent Way
The goal of the teachers is to provide minimal input for the students, i.e. only enough input to promote learning in the students – this is meant to build self-reliance and independence in the students. The role of the teacher is to be a guide for the students learning. The teacher should respect the intelligence of his/her students and allow them to relate and interact with hurdles along the way autonomously. As previously stated, the teacher serves as a guide to focus the students’ awareness to facilitate more effective learning.
The role of the students is to actively participate in the lessons and be completely focused on using what they know and then overcoming any challenges which might distract them from the task at hand.
The Silent Way makes use of many visual learning aids, the Fidel Chart is one such aid that is specific to the Silent Way; the Fidel Chart is one tool which helps the students focus on pronunciation and the correct production of the phonemes of the target language (including the allophones). The Fidel Chart makes use of colour coded words to denote same/similar sounds between words.
Students are expected to gain autonomous language control by exploring the language and passively directing the flow of the lesson. The teacher in a Silent Way classroom is, as the name would suggest, largely silent. However, he/she is expected to make use of non-verbal gestures and any teaching aids available to “force awareness” in the students. The students are encouraged to engage with each other as a way for them to learn from each other. The students’ feelings are significant to the teacher, if a student is experiencing a mental barrier then it’s up to the teacher to help the student find a way to overcome it.
The Silent Way considers the language and culture of any country to be so intrinsically linked, as to be inseparable. The primary focus of the Silent Way in terms of skills is the correct pronunciation of the target language, although it does place some importance on the structure and grammar of the target language, these two aspects are not centrally important, in fact grammar rules are never to be explicitly articulated to the students. Vocabulary that is taught is initially limited but as the students’ autonomous ability increases, the vocabulary must increase to accommodate the students’ need to express new thoughts, ideas and perceptions.
The native language of the students is not totally disregarded, it can be used by the teacher to give clear instructions (in the early lessons) and at other times the native language of the students can also be used to improve pronunciation if the teacher has sufficient knowledge of the students’ native language.
This methodology is concerned with facilitating steady progress broadly across the entire class and instead of having typical formal testing, the teacher is expected to be assessing evaluating students all the time. One way that Silent Way teachers can gauge whether students have learned is to observe their ability to take what they might have learned in one context and apply it to a new/different context. Students are not discouraged (nor are the encouraged) from making mistakes, instead mistakes are a natural consequence of the students exploring the new language and they are used to direct the teacher to areas of the language that require more attention.
Community Language Learning
The goals of the teacher in a CLL classroom are to teach the students to use the target language communicatively so that it is relevant to everyday usage. They also want the students to develop a sense of responsibility and direction with regards to their own learning so that they’re motivation will be “fed” by this sense, helping them to achieve better results quicker.
This methodology (like the others aforementioned) focuses to some degree on lowering anxiety and stress for the students by consciously considering the students’ emotional wellbeing, only less so than the previously discussed. The teacher’s role in the classroom is somewhat different to other methods discussed. The role is more of a counsellor in that they guide the students in the learning and are consciously aware of the stresses and anxiety the students may be experiencing. The teacher is expected to play a more directly supportive role initially, this helps the students relax and acclimatise to the learning environment (including being comfortable around their peers).
The CLL methodology makes substantial use of repetition and tends to focus more on spoken language rather than literacy, however literacy is by no means neglected – it still features heavily in the classroom. There is active error correction all throughout the classes by the teacher, but it’s done with a “light touch” to avoid creating anxiety or stress in the students. There is also a clear focus on correct pronunciation in CLL which is demonstrated by repetition and correction repeated back to back, but with a slight twist where the student is given the decision of when to stop. This enables the students to “put the brakes on” when they are feeling overwhelmed or frustrated.
The teacher engages directly with the students to obtain feedback about the lesson and techniques used. This really helps to build the community environment within the classroom and encourages feelings of belonging, trust and security in the students. The teacher is obviously in charge of the classroom but there will be clear moments in lessons where the student also appears to “take charge” in that they have to ability to slow the lesson down if necessary.
The students are encouraged to interact with each other frequently and unconsciously by doing this the students also teach each other; this would certainly make the class group feel more like a small community for both the students and the teacher.
In this approach, the students’ feelings are of high importance; the teacher must sustain empathy with the students throughout the entire lesson to ensure that they are aware of any increases in anxiety, stress of frustration. This methodology holds that the purpose of language is to communicate, and culture is thought of as intrinsic to language.
The skill most focused on by CLL is spoken language which is practical, however the methodology does not neglect literacy and has significant time spent reading and doing some writing, but grammar does not appear to be explicitly articulated and taught. The students’ native languages are more important when the students are beginners and the native language is used as a bridge of sorts between what the students know and don’t.
Assessment in this methodology is not clearly defined and appears to be largely up to the teacher and the students to decide between themselves. Whatever methods for testing are agreed upon, the teacher has an obligation to ensure that the students are well prepared and given ample opportunity to communicate their concerns to the teacher prior to any assessment. In this approach, teachers are free to correct students at any point so long as it is carried out in a non-threatening and supportive manner.
The Natural Approach
The goal of the teachers in the NA is to achieve foreign language competency by a process of acquisition as opposed to teaching/learning. To do this, teachers must create an environment free of the anxiety and stress which normally occurs in foreign language classes. The teacher’s role in a NA classroom is threefold; the teacher is expected to provide comprehensible input for the students in the target language at a difficulty level just above that of the students; they are expected to deliver the input in a classroom environment that is free of anxiety and stress – the classroom should have a friendly ambiance and the input should be interesting and relevant; the teacher is expected to provide a variety of activities and materials which address all of the aforementioned.
This method employs TPR amongst other techniques to encourage unconscious acquisition. A NA classroom is characterised by a low stress/anxiety approach which at the beginner level avoids explicitly articulated grammar tuition and at the intermediate and advanced levels strictly limited any kind of articulated grammar tuition. The classes are all delivered in the target language, making use of various other methods (TPR, etc.) which also focus on low anxiety/stress environments.
The absence of the traditional repetition (and its variants) method and textbooks are distinct characteristics of a NA classroom, instead teachers should employ a wide variety of activities using content that is relevant and interesting to the students. It is also of paramount importance that students are not coerced or prompted in any way to produce speech before they are psychologically ready to do so.
The teacher’s role has largely been described above as has the students’ role. However, we can expand upon the aforementioned; the students’ role will change as their competency grows and they start acquiring the foreign language. At the beginner level there are almost no expectations of the student, they are free to choose their level of participation (even if it is to not participate) and it normally begins with gestural communication like pointing to items and acting out commands given by the teacher. At the intermediate level, students are expected to be able to produce short utterances such as one to three-word utterances in response to stimuli, of course there is no coercion, the students still control their levels of participation. At the advanced level, students are generally confident with short utterances and should be starting to form longer more complete sentences, this is when the complexity of the activities for students begins to take the form of short role plays and expressing their opinions about any topic of interest.
The emotional wellbeing of the students is of central importance in the NA, the fifth hypothesis (The Affective Filter) addresses this importance directly; in attempting to emulate the way children naturally acquire their first language the NA attempts to completely lower the Affective Filter (the psychological barrier that prevents language acquisition) and create an environment that minimises anxiety and encourages confidence and motivation.
Language is viewed as an unconsciously acquired behaviour which is not able to be explicated from the culture. The NA focuses primarily on comprehension as the area of language that will yield acquisition (both aural and written comprehension). Krashen and Terrell hypothesised that aural comprehension leads to spoken communicative competency and that reading comprehension leads to competency in more complex syntactic constructions (such as those of any specialised register e.g. academic register).
The NA also places importance on vocabulary as the area of language that contains the most meaning, i.e. content words contain the significantly more meaning than function words. The students’ native language plays no role in a NA classroom, the lessons are conducted entirely in the target language and structured such that the input tailored to be comprehensible but almost slightly out of the range of comprehension of the students – this is how the students unconsciously acquire new parts of their target language.
Students in a NA classroom (just as children do with their native language) acquire all facets of the target language simultaneously (phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics) and “imprint” the cortical columns (pattern recognition modules) in the respective areas of the neocortex responsible for the parsing and processing stimuli input by type (visual, linguistic, non-linguistic pattern recognition, auditory, haptic) entirely in the target language.
Evaluations of student progress in the NA focus on communicative competence as the metric to evaluate as opposed to linguistic competence, hence testing is centred around demonstrated comprehension primarily in the early stages of acquisition. Any testing should be situational as opposed to abstract and the situations tested should all be familiar to the student. The aim of the NA during the early stages of acquisition is to develop communication skills not grammatically correct speech. As such, teachers do not correct errors but instead will restate what he/she believes the student has said in the correct form.