Insight into profession

THE TEACHING OF MEANING

Talking Points:

1. How are meanings of new words to be taught in class? Can the teacher resort to translating the new words into the students' mother tongue or is it an error in method?

2. Which ways of meaning presentation are especially effective different study levels?

The meaning of words can be communicated or taught in many different ways. The following list includes most of the possibilities.

1. By demonstration; using an object, using a cut-out figure, us­ing gesture, performing an action.

2. By pictures: photographs, blackboard drawings, pictures from Books.

3. By verbal explanation: description, giving a word with the same meaning, giving a word with opposite meaning, putting the new word in a defining context, translating into another language.

Some people often criticise translation into the mother tongue as a way of communicating or teaching meaning. Their objections are generally like this:

1. There is usually no exact correspondence between one lan­guage and another.,

2. Translation into the mother tongue is indirect.

3. The use of the mother tongue takes time which could better be spent in using English.

All of these criticisms are true. But they can also be applied to the use of pictures, drawings, demonstration, and the use of real objects. For example, a picture for one group of learners does not always have the same meaning as it does for the teacher. The use of a picture to convey meaning is indirect because it requires decoding. Time spent using pictures could be better spent in using English.

Translation into the mother tongue, however, has certain features that can be used by the teacher to the learners' advantage. Here is a list of the лй'1п advantages.

(a) Translation call be done quickly. This is a disadvantage if the teacher wants to spend time on a word so that the learners will be sure to remember it. The speed of translation is an advantage, however, if the teacher wants to pass quickly over an unimportant word in a reading text. By giving the meaning quickly, using translation, the teacher has satisfied the learners and has avoided spending too much time on an unimportant word.

(b) Translation is not limited like pictures and objects to nouns, adjectives, and verbs. It can be used to explain many different types of words.

The teacher can ask the learners to respond by using transla­tion to see if they have understood something he presented in anoth­er way. Except where the teacher provides a multiple-choice list of definitions or pictures, there is not really any other way in which the learners can respond freely, quickly, and easily to show they have understood something.

It is true that the use of translation as a way of teaching meaning has its drawbacks. It is usually too quick, it takes away time that could have been used to expose the learners to English, often there are not exact equivalents of English words in the mother tongue. However, translation shares these drawbacks with other ways of conveying meaning. By careful use of translation in suitable teaching tech­niques many of these drawbacks can be avoided.

The exclusion of the mother tongue from the classroom as a way of communicating meaning robs the teacher of one useful technique of encoding. It also leaves the learners to make their own uncon­trolled and often incorrect translations.

(From: English Language Teaching Journal. L., 1978. Abridged.)

Answer the following questions:

1. What ways of teaching the meaning of words does the author suggest? 2. Which of the suggested ways do you consider more ef­fective for different study levels? (Give your reasons.) 3. What kind of meanings cannot be conveyed in any other way but by verbal ex­planation? What are the subtypes of this method? (Illustrate each subtype by examples showing how it is possible to convey this or that meaning.) 4. What are the usual objections against using translation as a way of teaching meaning? 5. What are the author's arguments in favour of using translation? 6. What is your opinion? 7. What are the drawbacks of the demonstration method of teaching meanings? 8. What are the drawbacks of using pictures? 9. Does verbal expla­nation in the target language always achieve the aim? Why can it sometimes fail? What should be done to prevent the failure? 10. How can translation be used to check the students' understanding? What do you think of the recommendation? 11. Do you think that the mother tongue should be absolutely excluded from a foreign lan­guage class? Give sound reasons for whatever you say.

I. Lifelong learning is vital for every individual. Only by continuous nourish­ment of the human mind, body and soul can man be adequate to the challenge of our time. "How to teach" seems to be a well-developed area in education. What about methods of learning?

1. a) Read the following:

You may think that study is an individual matter; that methods which suit some individual will not suit others; and that different methods are appropriate to different subjects. All this is true. Study remains an art. The best methods of learning medieval history will not necessarily be the best methods of learning chemical engineer­ing. But, whatever subject you are studying, there are nevertheless certain general principles which you should know about, and which

schemes of study more effectively, and with less trial and error.

Success in study depends not only on ability and hard work but also on effective methods of study. Some students can do more work in a given time than others, and do it more easily. This is largely a matter of ability, no doubt, but ability is by no means the only fac­tor. Important study skills such as note-taking, revising, and making plans and time-tables have to be learned and practised, yet very few students get any systematic instruction in these matters, Most have to rely on the study techniques which they learned at school, or to proceed by personal trial and error. Even the most gifted students can seldom discover unaided the most effective ways of studying.

Take a question which must concern all students: What is the most effective method of learning from textbooks? Several methods are possible, e.g. 1) simple reading and re-reading, 2) underlining the main points and important details in the text, 3) reading and then making brief outline notes.

Actual research studies of the effectiveness of these methods, as judged by examination success, have in fact been done on quite a large scale. Method (3) turned out to be the best, but only if the text was read over first in order to get the general sense, and if the notes were made in the student's own words. Without some practice and training in note-taking, method (3) was actually inferior to method (1).

You must thoroughly understand what you are studying. If you really understand a subject not only do you remember it easily, but you can apply your knowledge in new situations. The important thing is not what you know, but what you can do with what you know. The extra effort involved in getting a firm grounding in the essen­tials of a subject is repaid many times in later study.

How are you to achieve understanding? Understanding involves 1) linking new knowledge to the old and 2) organizing it and remem­bering it in a systematic fashion.

(From: Maddox H. How to Study. L, 1971.)

b) Answer the following questions:

1. Do you think that study is really an individual matter? Do you believe that you can become efficient in learning through proper organization and method? 2. Which of the three methods of learning from textbooks suggested by the author do you usu­ally stick to in your studies? Which do you personally find effective? 3. There is a most important general rule of learning given by the author in this extract. What is it? 4. How do students achieve understanding?

III. The average rate of success in learning a foreign language achieved by learners today is probably much higher than that of their parents. Still language teachers continue to speak of means to improve the ease and effectiveness of lan­guage learning through modifications in their ways of teaching.

Read the following text to figure out the author's approach to foreign language teaching. Do you think there is such a problem?

Every day I see advertisements in the newspapers and on the buses claiming that it is easy to learn English. According to these adver­tisements, with very little effort on the student's part, he will be able to speak the language fluently in three months or even ten days.

When I see advertisements like this I don't know whether to laugh or cry. If it were as easy to learn English as they say, I would have to look for another job, because very few qualified teachers would be needed. But a large number of people must believe these ridiculous claims, or else the advertisements would not appear.

It is natural for students to be attracted to methods that will teach them as quickly and efficiently as possible. But it is difficult for any­one to explain in simple language why one method is better than another, and it is no use pretending that anyone has discovered a perfect way of teaching English in every possible situation. Some experts even say that there are as many good methods of teaching a language as there are good teachers, because every teacher is an individual with his own personality. No doubt this is true to a certain extent, but it is not very helpful to students.

For a long time people believed that the only way to learn a lan­guage was to spend a great deal of time in a country where it was spoken. Of course it is clear that students who go to England to learn English have a great advantage over others, but a large number of students go to the opposite extreme and think they can teach them­selves at home with dictionaries. But it is wrong to assume that each work in English has a precise equivalent in another language and vice versa, and it is impossible for any translation method to provide stu­dents with the natural forms of a language in speech, let alone pro­duce good pronunciation and intonation.

A great deal of teaching is still based on behaviourist psycholo­gy. Behaviourists are fond of making students repeat phrases and making them do exercises where they continually have to change one word in a sentence. If we were parrots or chimpanzees, these methods might be successful. A large number of theorists seem to think it is a pity we aren't because it would make it easier to use their methods.

In my personal opinion, no one can ever learn to speak English or any other language unless he is interested in it. Human beings, unlike parrots and chimpanzees, do not like making noises unless they understand what the noises mean and can relate them to their own lives. It is worth remembering that language is a means of com­munication. What people want to say and write in another language is probably very similar to what they want to say and write in their own. What they listen to and read cannot be a formula. It must be real.

There is another relevant point worth mentioning here. We need other people to talk to and listen to when we communicate. If what we are learning is strange to us, it will be helpful if there are other students around us who can work with us and practise the unfamil­iar forms with us in real situation, talking to each other about real life in real language.

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