Language Teaching Methods

Berlitz, still is a well-known method of language teaching all over the world. The Direct method was developed throughout decades by many scholars and other methods such as Oral method of language teaching. Also in other hand the Direct method has influenced many language teaching methods. Even though Berlitz introduce language as an oral phenomenon, the Direct method see the importance of developing the pupil’s power of analysis and synthesis. It keeps the priority on eye-work and development of book based knowledge. It is true that, the Direct method lessons are totally held/instructed in the target language but, the learner tend to work more on developing the reading and writing skills. Therefore he misses the chance of speaking and

In his book “The Oral Method of Teaching Languages”, he emphasizes that ‘going among the natives’ and ‘mixing with them’ is one of the most important fact to get improved your skills. It is true that a pupil who learns a foreign language outside that country finds it harder than someone who lives surrounded by the native speakers. Therefore Palmer thought that anybody who starts learning a foreign language, should start as like a baby does in its critical period (starts from around 2 years up to teenager). Same as the Direct method, Palmer also claimed that all the instructions, work should be done by the target language but, he refused to teach grammar in the early ages of learning. What he thought was, first the pupil should get used to the language by listening and communicating. Then after he/she can learn how to write in the correct form of what they speak or hear. Therefore, he introduced the Phonetic Alphabet, where learners can pronounce the words correctly and more native like. Furthermore, Palmer thought that unless the learner communicate in the foreign language, there is no use of studying advanced grammar or literature. In his first book of Oral Method, he quotes some words from E.C. Kittson’s Theory and Practice of Language Teaching, “Learning to speak a language is always by far the shortest road to learning to read it and to write it….By using the language as speech, the pupil will cover something like twenty times as much ground in a given time as he would by doing written exercises…Living languages should be taught as living speech, that is, they should be taught