Methods, Approaches and Techniques

Methodological organization of teaching practices

Methodology informs teachers about different ways to organize teaching practices. Harmer (2001), for example, suggests that there are four levels of organization at the level of methodology, namely, approach, method, procedure, and techniques. The following description is inspired by this framework. Many elements of this framework are also discussed by Anthony (1963) and Richards and Rodgers (1986).

Before, describing our framework of the organization of teaching practices, let’s first review briefly Anthony’s and Richards & Rodgers’ models.

The following table shows how approach, method, procedure, and technique have been viewed by Anthony (1963) and Richards & Rodgers (1986).

Antony’s model	Approach	Theory of language
Method	An overall plan for the orderly presentation of language material, no part of which contradicts, and all of which is based upon, the selected approach
Technique	The actual implementation in the language classroom
Richards and Rodgers model	Method	Approach	Theory of language
Design	Objectives Syllabus type Activity types Learner Roles Teacher Roles Role of materials
Procedure	Techniques Practices Behaviors

For the sake of the simplification of the above models, approach, method, procedure, and technique are viewed in the following description as flowing in a hierarchical model. First, an approach, which provides theoretical assumptions about language and learning, informs methods. Each method shouldn’t contradict the approach on which it is based. Similarly, procedures are ordered sequences of techniques that have to be aligned with the theoretical assumption a method aspires to put into practice.

Approach

An approach refers to the general assumptions about what language is and about how learning a language occurs (Richards and Rodgers, 1986). It represents the sum of our philosophy about both the theory of language and the theory of learning. In other words, an approach to language teaching describes:

• The nature of language,
• How knowledge of a language is acquired,
• And the conditions that promote language acquisition.

Method

A method is a practical implementation of an approach. A theory is put into practice at the level a method. It includes decisions about:

• The particular skills to be taught,
• The roles of the teacher and the learner in language teaching and learning,
• The appropriate procedures and techniques,
• The content to be taught,
• And the order in which the content will be presented.

Procedures

Jeremy Harmer (2001) describes ‘procedures’ as “an ordered set of techniques.” They are the step-by-step measures to execute a method. A common procedure in the grammar-translation method, for example, is to start by explaining the grammar rules and exemplifying these rules through sentences that the students then had to translate into their mother tongue. According to Harmer, a procedure is “smaller than a method and larger than a technique.”

Technique

Implementing a procedure necessitates certain practices and behaviors that operate in teaching a language according to a particular method. These practices and behaviors are the techniques that every procedure relies on. Techniques, in this sense, are part and parcel of procedures. They are the actual moment-to-moment classroom steps that lead to a specified outcome. Every procedure is realized through a series of techniques. They could take the form of an exercise or just any activity that you have to do to complete a task. For instance, when using videos, teachers often use a technique called “silent viewing” which consists of playing the video without sound and asking students to figure out what the characters were saying.

In this table we could get the knowledges of the approach, method, procedure, and technique that have been viewed by Anthony and Richards & Rodgers, they investigate and discover these knowledge to can understand better how we have to be in the classroom and how we have to teach to other people, is very important look this to learn about they, we have to much methods that we can put in practice to teach, but also we have to know when one of this is necessary, for each level the method and the approach, going to be different, we don’t going to use the same method that we use with kids with men and women, so for that reason we have to study and understand the difference methods and how put these in practice.