Yabancı Dil Öğretim ve Öğreniminde Eski ve Yeni Yöntemlere Yeni Bir Bakış (Seri A)

During the early years of the millennium, it will be useful for us to understand better the future of learning and teaching of foreign languages by scanning shortly what happened in the last quarter of the 20th C. just before making predictions about what kinds of trend and novelty will take place in them. Indeed, the facts experienced in the last quarter led to some drastic changes in our beliefs about the nature of language and learning as well as the theories in education, and which has led inevitably to change in the ways of practice in classroom due to the novelties concluded by the scientific research. Before the assessment of the principal methods, we should know something about the traditional three-fold concepts of teaching and learning such as approach, method and technique and about their reconceptualized forms called approach, design and procedure respectively. The results achieved through the traditional methods and approaches in the field of foreign language teaching and learning have satisfied no one in spite of the unending efforts by students and teachers, great cost to schools and parents. Most of the students who spent their years in classrooms to learn a foreign language cannot use the language or go on repeating the predictable responses by grammatical patterns and certain vocabulary unaware of the communication expected of them outside the classroom. Although the students have got considerable knowledge about the language, they do not know how to use that knowledge for communication. That is why they should be helped with the teachers who will tell them that language is not only of grammatical patterns and some vocabulary, and who bring in classroom the examples of authentic language of the real outer world, and who will have the students use the language communicatively, and who are equipped with the novel ideas, trends and creative practices through new approaches, designs and procedures.