Remember Anything

Teaching techniques vary regarding teaching language to individuals, particularly when it comes to the process of teaching second languages to students. Communicative language teaching is different from other approaches because it focuses on student interaction with the teacher and other students as a means of creating language skills in a new language. This clearly is different from other forms of teaching language, first of all because its goal, as the name implies, is communication. Instead of long lessons of memorization and drilling in a new language, communicative language teaching relies on the participation of the student in conversation with the instructor and other students as a means of making the new language relevant to the student and therefore easier to learn and recall.

Communicative language teaching has been around for decades as one of the options available for educators and students trying to gain competence in a particular language. Its use primarily focuses on a second language, where students already have an original language. Students are given “real-life” situations that are often explored through role-playing exercises in which the student uses the new language. Conversations between members of the instructional group are also utilized in the training. The logic of such an approach is obvious because the benefit of immersion, where a person spends time in a place where a new language is spoken and begins to pick up the language, is a well-known aspect of language learning.

Communicative language learning facilitates learner memory of new language skills through its use of relevance. This refers to the fact that individuals will learn the new language for a range of different purposes. Further, the goal of such teaching is to create learner competence so that an individual feels ready to use the new language for communication. Often, such communication includes an introduction to reading materials that clearly use language differently, such as the language used in reports as opposed to the language used in magazines. In this way, all the techniques described in the use of communicative language teaching are familiar and the criticism of the approach often comes from what is NOT included, rather than the failure or fallacy of techniques that are used. Those who use grammar and drilling naturally critique the approach for its lack of emphasis on those aspects of language learning. The approach has also been criticized because of its reliance on the instructor and therefore, instructor dialect or mannerisms might be passed on to the student.

Language learning relies heavily on memory and memory techniques vary within a single language. The use of mnemonic devices, such as “All cows eat grass” to remember the bass clef notes, are familiar to most of us and certainly have their place in teaching language—in this case the language of music. The use of drilling also has its place, as does general repetition. In the consideration of techniques to use in teaching second-language skills, it seems that communicative language teaching does have the benefit of providing learners with immediate results in that they will begin to be able to communicate very quickly in the new language. This feature attaches to learner motivation, always a topic of interest to educators.

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