Approaches to Language Teaching: Criticism from Theory to Practice

The criticism of any approach should be based on clear regulations. When we criticise any theory, our intention is that this criticism should meet some crucial requirement that should be systematic and not sporadic. “Systematic”, means that it is based on a specific set of principles or criteria, which are the same set of principles that are used in such a way as to evaluate all the existing teaching/learning theories. These principles are described as psychologically motivated principles, which are the richness of the input, the building of the students’ competency, and their involvement in meaningful communicative acts. The exhibition of an approach such as the Audiolingual methodology pushes us to investigate the question, what is problematic with it in the light of the learning criteria? One of the Audiolingual methodology’s apparent weaknesses is the output and the comprehensibility of the input. The Communicative Approach is good, but it is criticised because it does not provide a rich input. How can students communicate if the teachers fail to expose them to some linguistic stimulus? The Total Physical Response is known for the richness of the input, but the performance is poor. This paper is about learning how to criticise any language teaching approach and how to define a good one. The evaluation is not based on the students’ outcome, but on the benefit of finding out why a certain approach did not work in terms of what is taking place in the learners’ mind during the learning process.