English has become an international language, i.e. lingua franca, facilitating communication and cooperation of people from all over the world. The need of so many to know and be able to speak it encouraged research into the most effective ways to teach it.
Among the teaching methods used are the following:
The Direct Method
The Grammar-Translation Approach
Audio Lingual Method
The Structured Approach
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and other.
Every method has its strong and weak points and it is possible to learn the language using each of them separately or a combination of them. However, we, at Yazlingo, follow Communicative approach and consider it the most efficient for the purposes the world around us sets.
Why this approach? It is aimed at enabling the learners to communicate effectively and appropriately in different situations. In order to do that a person needs to have a grasp of Grammar, Vocabulary and Pronunciation, but those by themselves are not enough. It is a common mistake often made by schools (definitely by my school) to teach rules and do the exercise and think that the language was taught and the student knows exactly what to say and how to say it. This is far from reality.
Skills are an essential part of language command and they need to be taught as well. CLT curriculum includes lots of reading, listening, writing and speaking practice. In addition, English-speaking environment is created by the teacher who uses the language as the tool to explain and the means to communicate with their learners. Thus, the learners acquire the focus language (taught at the lesson) alongside the language they pick up while interacting with the teacher. Course books based on CLT method pay attention to Social English (Functional English) that provides the people with understanding of the culture and the phrases that are appropriate for that particular situation. This gives independence and self-sufficiency for the person as you do not have to be proficient in English in order to check into a hotel.
To summarise, communicative approach is effective as it foresees the idea of immersion because the lesson is held using the language being taught, it provides language practice as well as skills one, and it includes a focus on specific phrases used in particular situations to help learners fit in.