“The Communicate Approach is the way to do it, no matter where a yoare, no matter what the context” (281). While Bax notes that no person explicitly comes out and says this regarding CLT, the author writes that this way of thinking about teaching language is still deeply imbedded in the minds of many people. Perhaps it is because I have been exposed to many different approaches and methods, but I just cannot believe that some educated people would take such a stance in regards to thinking. It seems like common sense to me to take the context of the teaching, to take where a person comes from and the ideologies that go with that, into account. But, as I said before, this is perhaps just because I have been exposed to many different ideas.
And yet, even great institutions such as the Chinese government apparently do not understand the idea of taking into the account of the context of their own people. Hu’s article highlights just how different the Chinese school system is from that of the one found in many places in America. Our “student-centered” way of thinking here is replaced with a “teacher-centered/almost absolute authority” approach over there. “Normal” activities in the U.S. such as discussions and debating amongst ourselves are replaced with the “normal” thinking that true knowledge resides in written texts, that true learning comes from reading books, not from discussions.
Neither way of thinking about learning is correct. What is highlighted above simply goes to show, once again, that one single method can never work for language teaching. There are far too many factors involved for that to ever work—with context being an extremely important one. I believe that what both of these articles indirectly do is place great importance on the use of critical pedagogy, on examining social, culture, and political factors that surround all forms of education, including language learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment