INTRODUCTION TO METHODOLOGY

What is methodology?

Methodology is the study of the system or range of methods that are used in teaching. It also implies procedures and practices. In the practices there are strategies, activities and a design. There must be a great coherence among strategies, activities and the design we develop. All this has to do with the Curriculum and plans.

There are different types of methods such as grammar translation,          the audio-lingual, the silent way, communicative language teaching, task bases and genre pedagogy.

How are we teaching English in Chile?

It’s important to emphasize that teaching English in Chile depends on many factors, such as the type of school (private, public and particular subensionados) and their objectives or goals.  For example, in public schools, the schedule does not have enough hours for the teaching- learning process in English.  Therefore, students can’t achieve the development of the four linguistics skills, and, on the other hand, there is  a  lack of material resources.  One of the interesting videos we saw showed results two students from different schools: one of them had studied in a private school since she was a child and she achieved better results than the other student that had studied in a public school.

It’s important to notice that the lack of committed teachers is reflected in the low students’ motivation. The activities in class are not fun and there isn’t any interactive teaching to develop the linguistic skills necessary for communication, essential for students if they want to be  inserted in today  globalized world.

What is the role of textbooks?

I think that textbooks help teachers to provide his/her students a good graded material, from the simplest grammatical structures to the most complex. Besides this, students will be better motivated with such a nice material with beautiful pictures and interesting activities prepared by specialists. Textbooks also provide additional material to develop students’ linguistics skills, in class and at home (Audio-CDS, CD-Roms, videos, games, songs, etc.).

However, in my opinion, teachers should add other contents and activities if their students need it, or skip any of them if they don’t fit their students’ necessities. Therefore, teachers shouldn’t depend so much on textbooks, because they could lose creativity.