Didactics : Summary 1

The importance of a class contract:

✓ It influences the classroom atmosphere directly and positively

✓ It reflects the teachers’ trust in their students.
✓ It shows the teachers’ willingness to involve the students in class
discipline.
✓ The teachers encourage the students to reflect on the rules that are
possible to elaborate and on the role of the teacher as a mediator.
✓ It sets a democratic atmosphere in the classroom.
✓ It makes the students responsible and helps in accountability

What is Didactics?

✓ The science, art, or practice of teaching.

✓ Theory of teaching, and in a wider sense, a theory and practical
application of teaching and learning.
✓ A field of pedagogy that deals with theories, ideas, principles and
instructions directed at successful conduction of educational process.
✓ Didactics in planning and management refers to:
o Objectives
o Teaching
o Learning
o Motivation
o Discipline
o Communication
o Methods
o Techniques
o Evaluation
o Etc
What is an approach?

✓ A philosophy of language teaching at the level of theory and principles.

✓ A number of theoretical views on the nature of Language, and the nature
of Language teaching and learning based on research.
✓ An « approach is an integrated set of theoretical and practical beliefs,
embodying both syllabus and method » Michael Lewis (1993). The
Lexical Approach
✓ The « why » of the teaching-learning operation.
✓ Much more comprehensive than a syllabus
✓ The principles determine
o kind of content
o Kind of procedure

Example: Communicative Language Teaching

✓ The set of beliefs and views are not arbitrary. They might emanate from:
o Philosophical principles on the nature of language
o Psychological principles on the nature of language learning
o Socio-political educational principles informing the purpose of
education.

What’s a method?

✓ How to conduct teaching and learning.

✓ In the early 70s, there was a paradigm shift: innovative approaches are
more concerned with how to facilitate learning rather than how to
conduct teaching.
✓ School manuals may use different methods.

Example: Audio Lingual Method

What is a technique?

✓ Implementation/ It is a particular trick, stratagem, or contrivance used to

accomplish an immediate objective.
✓ A way of carrying out a particular task

Examples: Spider map/ mind map/brainstorming, jigsaw…

What’s an exercise?

✓ A way of practicing what has been presented

Examples: (Fill in the blanks/ matching/Rewrite sentences…)

What’s a task?

✓ It is a synthetic way of handling content; it presents samples of language

organized into the purposes for which students need to learn a language,
but allows them to find the patterns, or structures

Example: In groups discuss an action plan which you think will bring about
positive changes in your school (Gateway 2, p. 45)

What is a syllabus?

✓ A way of organizing the course and materials. There are different ways
of organizing and planning language, teaching and learning. They may
be organized according to any of a number of possible approaches, such
as structural, functional, or thematic.
✓ The “what” of the learning-teaching operation
✓ Traditionally, syllabuses were grammar-based. Currently, there’s more
focus on developing skills and competencies

(The content is transposed in the map of the book)

Curriculum Vs. Syllabus

✓ The syllabus is a descriptive list of topics/concepts, etc. to be covered in a
fixed year. It can vary from a teacher to a teacher and be tailored to suit
the requirements of a particular class. It gives details on the schedule,
assignments, projects, evaluation.
✓ The curriculum is set of prescriptive guidelines that are established to
help the educators decide on the content of a course. It states the
objectives, the content, and the different methods, approaches,
techniques, etc. to attain objectives. It should also consider the kind of
assessment to use in order to check progress. It is the same for all
teachers.

Multiple Intelligences (Howard Gardner (1999)

✓ Logical/ mathematical

✓ Visual/spatial

✓ Body/kinesthetic

✓ Musical/rythmic

✓ Interpersonal

✓ Intrapersonal

✓ Verbal/linguistic

✓ Naturalist

✓ existentialist
 What are learning styles?

✓ Learning styles are simply different approaches or ways of learning.

✓ « Learning styles refer to an individual’s natural, habitual, and preferred
ways of absorbing, processing, and retaining new information and skills.
These learning styles persist, regardless of teaching methods and content
areas »
Reid (1995:preface)
✓ “Learning style refers to any individual’s preferred ways of going about
learning. It is generally considered that one’s learning style will result
from personality variables, including psychological and cognitive make-
up, socio-cultural background, and educational experience”
Nunan (1991:168)

Right and left brain orientation

Intellectual Intuitive
Remembers names Remembers faces
Responds to verbal instructions and Responds to demonstrated, illustrated, or
explanations symbolic instructions
Experiments systematically and with control Experiments randomly and with less restraint
Makes objective judgments Makes subjective judgments
Planned and structured Fluid and spontaneous
Prefers established, certain information Prefers elusive, uncertain information
Analytic reader Synthesizing reader
Reliance on language in thinking and Reliance on images in thinking and
remembering remembering
Prefers talking and writing Prefers drawing and manipulating objects
Prefers multiple choice tests Prefers open-ended questions
Controls feelings More free with feelings
Not good at interpreting body language Good at interpreting body language
Rarely uses metaphors Frequently uses metaphors
Favours logical problem solving Favors intuitive problem solving
Styles Vs Strategies:

‘Learning style’:

• a person’s general way or approach to learning

• depends on a person’s cognitive, affective and behavioral characteristics

‘learning strategies’:

The actions and behaviours a person undertakes to learn.

Thoughts to consider:

“We teach who we are” Parker Palmer

“The student’s job is to learn the language; the teacher’s job is to learn the
students” Caleb Gattegno

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write,
but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn” Alvin Toffler

“Much of the material presented in schools strikes students as alien, if not

pointless” Howard Gardner