Learning Chinese: Approach or Method?

Week 2 of my journey prompted a question many learners ask but don't quite understand: what's the best learning method?

This is week 2 of the Learning Chinese journey, and I wanted to address a question I’m asked frequently. In fact, when I visit schools in Brazil as an educational consultant, I often hear parents, while talking to a front desk employee, blurt out the (in)famous question:

What method does the school use?

And that’s not even the worst. I cringe when private teachers claim they have created their own method. Their “method”, they say, is better than anyone else’s because it’s based on:

Take your pick

1. neuroscience

2. years of experience living in the country

3. research conducted by a mysterious, often nameless, scientist from Harvard (or MIT)

4. personal enlightenment

5. a secret traditional schools (or teachers) don’t want you to know

I even wrote about these claims of “creating one’s own method” in this blog. Here’s an excerpt:

“In fact, you might not know this, but this obsession with finding the perfect method in ELT is old. In Jack Richard and William Renandya’s Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology in Current Practice (2020), the first chapter was written by H. Douglas Brown, and it starts like this:

“In the century spanning from the mid-1880s to the mid-1990s, the language teaching profession was involved in what many pedagogical experts would call a search. That search was for a single, ideal method, generalizable across widely varying audiences, that would successfully teach students a foreign language in the classroom”

After all, what method am I using?

Well, well, well. I hope you don’t take me as a hypocrite. I did mention at the beginning of this journey that I would use Science of Learning strategies to help me learn more effectively. So, in a way, I’m using a method based on neuroscience and psychology. But, before we go further and I can answer the question about what method I’m using, we need to focus on the differences between APPROACH and METHOD. Here’s an excerpt from my book “The Owl Factor: Reframing your Teaching Philosophy”

Let’s focus on teaching. An approach sets the beliefs and ideals teachers should embrace. Here we can think of words such as constructivism – when students are regarded as co-constructors of their knowledge and, thus, active agents – or behaviorism – which regards students as passive individuals who learn from external stimuli or reinforcement mechanisms (Hedlund, 2020). A method provides teachers with a set of procedures to follow in their classes, therefore it should have different stages with different aims.

That being said, let’s look at two major concepts in Language Teaching.

1. Audiolingual Method

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Audiolingual Method rose to prominence. It was shaped by the theories of behaviorism and structuralism and rooted in the so-called “Army Method” of World War II. The whole point was to develop quick oral proficiency through intensive drills (and that means lots of repetition), memorized dialogues, an implicit take on grammar (taught or noticed through models), and the strict use of the target language in class. Speech was prioritized over writing, and students progressed from sounds to words to sentences in a bottom-up system.

So, basically, in an audiolingual lesson, the teacher says something like:

-I EAT

Then all the students repeat that in unison. The teacher repeats it a few more times (translating it) and then works on some vocabulary to go with that:

-BREAD, CHEESE, HAM, etc.

Then the teacher gets students to form sentences like:

-I EAT BREAD, I EAT CHEESE, I EAT HAM.

The teacher might add a few extra phrases or conjunctions:

-AND, IN THE MORNING, EVERY DAY

Then the sentences get a little bit more complex, like:

-I EAT BREAD AND CHEESE, I EAT HAM IN THE MORNING, I EAT CHEESE EVERY DAY

And we can see how behaviorism was the main source of inspiration here. Correct responses would be rewarded, while errors would be immediately corrected. It makes sense if we consider habit formation.

2. Communicative Language Teaching Approach

According to Jack Richards in “Communicative Language Teaching Today”:

Communicative language teaching can be understood as a set of principles about the goals of language teaching, how learners learn a language, the kinds of classroom activities that best facilitate learning, and the roles of teachers and learners in the classroom

He goes on:

Communicative language teaching sets as its goal the teaching of communicative competence […] While grammatical competence is an important dimension of language learning, it is clearly not all that is involved in learning a language since one can master the rules of sentence formation in a language and still not be very successful at being able to use the language for meaningful communication

That means instead of mechanical habit formation through drills and memorization, CLT emphasizes things like interaction, collaboration, and the negotiation of meaning. So we can say that learners will make progress by “trying the language out”, so to speak. That is, when students experiment with the language and receive feedback (input), they’ll expand their communicative competence.

What does that look like in a real classroom? Teachers will often take on the role of facilitators and guides, while students work together in pairs and groups to create meaningful exchanges and, most importantly, to use (produce) the target language. That also means trying to strike a balance between fluency and accuracy, depending on the activity, always bearing in mind the idea of purposeful communication.

What's the verdict?

Which approach should we embrace? What method can speed up things when it comes to language learning? Well, I should probably start by saying that people generally cannot become incredibly proficient in a matter of weeks or even months. I wrote about it in the blog:

The Audiolingual Method began to decline by the late 1960s as both research evidence and new theories of language learning challenged its foundations. Noam Chomsky’s critique of behaviorism was particularly influential, as he argued that language learning was not habit formation but a creative process guided by innate structures of the mind - he even had a name for the device responsible for acquiring a language (the famous Language Acquisition Device - LAD). Cognitive psychology also emphasized the importance of understanding over rote memorization, showing that students needed deductive explanations and meaningful context to internalize language. Studies further revealed that ALM students often failed to develop spontaneous fluency, especially in reading and writing, when compared to learners taught by more traditional or communicative approaches.

That’s what’s quite prevalent today, by the way. Go to any major language academy or your neighborhood’s English school, and chances are they’re using the communicative language teaching approach. But it’s worth mentioning that, although the audiolingual method has lost its popularity, its legacy persists in modern classrooms (just think of drills, pronunciation practice, dialogues, and lots of repetition. These are still used as supportive activities, but now they are integrated into eclectic, communicative frameworks rather than serving as the core of instruction.

I’m being eclectic. And there are elements to consider, too. As Curtis Kelly, my guest on the Learning Cosmos Podcast, puts it:

Learning […] to use the words of my friend Robert Murphy, “Emotion drives learning”. […] I studied Japanese in America before I went to Japan. I knew it would be important, but my brain said “naaah, this is … no, no… forget it”. Then I arrived in Japan and in order to eat, I had to speak Japanese. And suddenly, all of these words would flow into my head… I didn’t have to study so much

In other words, as the Mind, Brain, and Education Science principle goes:

Learning is what the brain does

Whether we adopt this or that method based on this or that approach, we can learn. We’ve all seen it happen. People have learned (and are still learning) languages following different paths.

Want to check out my path? Watch the video below.