Didactics: Teaching, Learning, and Methods
Didactics: The Art and Science of Teaching
Didactics is a discipline concerned with the description of teaching and learning processes, and their relation to different elements in the classroom.
Didactics can be defined in two ways:
- The art of teaching.
- The discipline about teaching.
It explains the process as the “practical cognitive quality, the inner skill to produce specific tasks” (Gutiérrez, 2001:14).
It is the ability teachers show to communicate knowledge to others, making it easier for students to understand the content they are learning.
The Learning Process
Learning is the active engagement of exploring and retaining new knowledge. Once the knowledge is retained, it involves utilizing it, applying it to situations, and experiencing it in context to further enhance understanding.
Learning styles influence how students learn, how teachers teach, and how the two interact. Each person is born with certain tendencies toward particular styles, but these biological or inherited characteristics are influenced by culture, personal experiences, maturity level, and development.
Teaching Methods
Method: A systematic set of teaching practices based on a particular theory of language.
It’s an overall plan for the orderly presentation of language.
The method is a process, an order to teach.
Considerations Before Choosing a Method
Some of the first considerations teachers should make before analyzing which methods and techniques they would apply in class are: my future students’ background, the English level, the course, age, multiple intelligences, length of the course, availability of resources, books.
To choose a specific method or a mixing of them, teachers should know and explore certain important documents related to the course assigned to teach:
- The curriculum.
- The syllabus: contents and linguistic organization of the subject.
- Types of learning and teaching activities.
- Instructional materials.
What kind of goals should teachers pursue throughout the application of the right methods?
- Provide maximum opportunities for student participation.
- Make learners, and not the teacher, the focus of the lessons.
- Teach learning strategies.
- Promote cooperation among learners.
- Develop learners’ confidence.
The Grammar-Translation Method
By the 19th century, the way to study Latin in the past was the approach to get the foreign languages: lesson organized around the grammar points, explanation of rules, and illustration by sample sentences.
The first records of a method were developed during the Renaissance period in Europe, when the dominant language was Latin.
Description
This method was known in the United States as the Prussian method and dominated Europe from the 1840s to 1940s. In a modified form, this method is still used in many places around the world.
The excesses of memorizing endless lists of unusable grammar rules and vocabulary, and attempting to produce perfect translations, made this method refused and distasted by many schools. It creates frustration for students and makes few demands on teachers.
Key Features
The standard system was similar to the system for teaching Latin.
Rather than speaking, the goal was for students to be able to read literature in the target language and benefit from the mental discipline of studying a language.
Textbooks combined abstract grammar rules, vocabulary lists with translations, and sentences for students to translate.
Sentences were chosen to illustrate grammar, with no relation to actual communication.
During lessons, the teacher presented grammar structures, rules were studied, and the students worked through translation exercises.
Grammar-Translation was influential until the 1950s. Often the frustration of language learners who experienced this method is that they spent years studying but still could not speak the language.