My teaching approach
The Elenguage Method represents an innovative way for the understanding of the English teaching, considering the comunicative competence as the main aim of any language learning and presenting that language in real contexts. According to this idea, this method pretends students develop the major skills of the english language in each session due to be familiarised with the common use of the adquired knoweledge. In this sense, on the one hand, most of the grammar aspects will be shown from an inductive approach and, on the other hand, this new concepts will appear in the oral and written materials in order to present them in a context.
Attending to this intrduction, The Elenguage Method consists on working from a text given by the teacher before the class, in order to get a high level of comunicative competence, constitued by the four major skills that Henry Sweet, in the eighties, considered as the most important aspects for the adquisition of any language. These skills are known, on the one hand, as listening and Reading comprehension and, on the other hand, as writtn expression and oral expression or interaction.
It is important to consider that since the appearance of the Grammar-Traduction Method, teaching language methods have attended to the social issues, trying to be useful to the society of each historical moment. In that sense, The Elenguage Method appears in a society in which technologies are an important part of our dialy life and, as a consequence, the communication, both oral and written, has increased, not only with people from our same culture but also from abroad. This is one of the several reasons that explain why The Elenguage Method try to be aware about the neccessity of knowing not only the oral and written form of the language but also its use in real situations.
Attending to T. Perdergrast research, in the middle of the eighties, the use of the situation and the context is very helpful for children language adquisition. In this sense, we consider the use of the real context as a main tool for teaching not only english but every languages. Taking this idea into account, this methodology proposes, during the first 15 minutes, asking some questions to learners about the topic that correspondences to that lesson, in order to get pupils contextualised about what they are going to talk about during the rest of the lesson. This part is useful also for discovering new vocabulary, learning from the rest of the students and, furthermore, to avoid they are lost during the rest of the class. In addition to this, these questions will deal with previous knowledge, which are very important to be taken into account before adquiring new ones.
After this contextualization part, all the contents of the lesson will be shown through a text, containing real situations aspects such as dialogues that present both common language and local vocabulary, some local lexic and cultural aspects. This text will be played the next 15 minutes and at the same time, learners will be asked for reading it. According to this activity, it is important to observe how the oral and written english language are presented in a different ways. In fact, it is said to be very useful to practice listening and reading before a language lesson in order to prepare the phonological aparat, due to the fact that we can only produce those sound that we listened before. In addition to this, this listening will show different accents trying to get pupils familiarised with different varieties in order to get success when pupils communicate themself in the foreign language, in spite of doing this with native people from one or another place.
After that, the teacher will créate a conversation for interacting during 15 about this topic, highlighting new vocabulary, grammar concepts and colloquialisms. In this sense, learners will have the oportunity of observing new aspects in its real use. After that, teacher will spend half an hour to have a deeper treatment about these new grammar aspects and, sometimes, he will propose some grammar activities in order to practice this part but taking the real context into account.
Finally, during the last 45 minutes, pupils will be encouraged to do different activities to put in practice the new knowledge such as role-playing, creation of new dialogues and texts, etc. and everything have to be written in order to be corrected by the teacher when the lesson finishes.
The material that this method propose are texts, given by the teacher, with its listening in order to be practice whenever pupils need. Appart from that, learners will be asked for having some device that allow them to be connected on internet when could be useful.
To sum up, this method has been created due to get learners of english as a foreign language familiarised not only with english technical structures and vocabulary, but also with pragmatic aspects that allow them to feel confident using this language when they need.