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I'm a (relatively new) language teacher in the UK. In our training and in most schools we are encouraged to use "Sentence Builders" to teach. They are very in fashion right now. They're nothing new, but a re-branding of language substitution tables. I've attached an example. The idea is that they promote a "lexico-grammar" approach, the idea being that syntax and grammar are learnt implicitly. In theory they are intended for repreated recycling of the language to aid the student to acquire it naturally, to produce the language with support, and to use it for communicative purposes. I have mixed feelings about it myself. In early stages it certainly helps to give students lots of input, and to allow them to produce output relatively easily. In practice, however, they tend to be used largely for translation tasks. I'm of the opinion that translation, while useful to learn new vocabulary, is not a skill that one learns while acquiring a language. It's more the product of having already learnt the language. Many of the speaking activities which we are taught to use the sentence builders for are also severely limited in communication. Target language is not actually used as a means of communicating a message, but is more often used to score a point in a game, which I feel undermines our legitimising the language as a real form of communication. As students are required to learn more language, they can also become pretty cumbersome, particularly when students are required to learn oddly specific stock phrases that don't lend themselves to much manipulation. I tried to move away from Sentence Builders in my practice, towards a more comprehensible input approach, but this is extremely difficult to do with a group of 30 students with differing levels and behavioural issues. Given the state of language learning in the UK, I'm becoming increasingly cynical about whether languages can be effectively taught in a classroom setting. **TL;DR:**Do you think that something like in the attached image is useful for learning a language?How would you teach a language if you were a language teacher?If you are already a language teacher, what do you do? [link] [comments] |
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via Learn Online English Speaking
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