Grammar-translation and audiolingual

We had our first two group presentations on English teaching methods on the first lesson of the week. One group taught us some French with the grammar-translation method, and the other one used the audiolingual method to teach English to us.

Grammar-translation seems a really outdated method, which relies heavily on individual written exercises and, therefore, is mainly aimed at developing reading and writing skills. It was interesting to see that most of us thought that this old fashioned method wasn't used at all nowadays, until one of our classmates pointed out that it is still very common and our teacher told us that our urge to translate English words into Basque or Spanish is a symptom of having been exposed to this method. Still, the exercise our classmates proposed (translating a French poem) was fun, but I guess that if we had done it individually instead of in pairs, it wouldn't have been half as nice.

I guess I felt comfortable with the method because I am familiar with it. It is quite amazing to realise that we can easily get used to doing things in a certain way, even if we don't particularly like it. "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't"...

For audiolingual, we repeated several times a small dialogue, and I also felt like traveling back in time. Repeating the dialogue piece by piece all together made me feel a bit silly, and brought religion to my mind, I don't know why. I didn't like that part, not because of anything my classmates did, but because of the vague memories it triggered. You never know what a melody, a situation or a dialogue will bring to other people's minds; an activity that seems harmless to you can be disturbing to somebody else, and something that you might fear will be too plain can be a blast for others. I guess you always have to leave some space for surprise when you are teaching (and learning!).

As for the classmates who did the presentations, I do know that there is more pressure and anxiety with the presentations this year, because they have to be done in English, but in general they seemed to be quite calm, although sometimes it was a bit more noticeable that one just to get there and finish up the presentation as quickly as possible.