Rabat – In recent years, the importance of teaching a foreign language has become increasingly acknowledged. One of several reasons behind this trend is the need to communicate with other people who speak other languages.
Applied linguistics has shed much light on different aspects of foreign language teaching and learning by putting different theories into effect.
In teaching foreign languages, pedagogical methods have been designed to facilitate the process of instruction. There have been several studies on different methods, attempting to decide if one method is better than the other.
Generally, classroom instruction should provide some sense of organic exposure to learners. The way the teachers proceed in teaching and in engaging learners has to be meaningful enough to keep this exposure as natural as possible. What is grammatically correct in a foreign language may possibly be unusual or deviant in actual conversation (Coulthard, 1985: 146). And explicit explanations must be reduced to keep the contexts approximately relevant to the communicative nature of language.
The new communicative approach has dominated the foreign language teaching scene, drawing on the principle that the prior property and function of any language is mutual communication. The new focus has been on the functions of the target language.
The communicative approach takes time away from the lecture, adding time to group conversation. But academic studies have (Willis, 1985) suggested that though the courses emphasize conversations and improvised drama, the created situations still bear little resemblance to natural language (P: 216).
Redistributing the power between learners and teachers is crucial in reducing the artificiality of the prepared content. Learners have become a central part of the teaching and learning operation; teachers, on the other hand, work hard to prepare the ground for learners to assume their responsibility in their learning; they are prepared to learn how to learn and become gradually autonomous learners.
More traditional teaching methods are normally reflected in textbooks and dictate methodology for the teaching operation. Now, the teacher can adapt methodologies other than the textbooks’, to reduce the fossilization of the foreign language learning. By doing so, the foreign language learners can be exposed to meaningful lifelike situations and learn to produce usual communicative structures.
Humans take on different roles on a daily basis in a way that keeps them connected with their surroundings. Mostly, it is the way we communicate in those roles that determines our success in carrying them out. If foreign language classroom’s situations are meant to be natural, roles have to vary according to the type of the ongoing interaction. More importantly, the roles as a teaching and learning tool helps teachers and learners in many ways.
In traditional foreign language classrooms, where the instructions are formal and the exposure is artificial, interaction can only provide so much meaningful input. To make this interaction more natural, it has to touch on different aspects of the foreign language. In this way, the monotony of teaching and learning operation can be broken by adopting roles on the part of teachers, and assigning different ones to learners.
The roles maintain the flow of interaction between the participants of this operation. The teacher’s roles in different tasks help learners gain not only meaningful use, input and feedback of language but also gradual autonomy and self-confidence in their learning. After all, language learners need to experience new teaching styles in order to become better learners (Riley, 1985: 256).
Foreign language learners are aware of what is best for their learning. They adapt and become stronger students over time. As a result, foreign language teachers keep the motivation among students high simply by bringing new materials and roles into the foreign language classrooms. The new roles that teachers adopt in foreign language classrooms break the monotony of teaching, enhance learning and keep motivation higher.
The tasks that teachers assign to foreign language learners foster foreign language learners’ communicative abilities and facilitate learning through the roles those tasks determine. Also, autonomy and independence in learning are all results of the role-taking process.
