Teaching English as a foreign language today integrated approach versus communicative approach

Abstract

Discovering the methodology that suits your students best is the most important element in the process of teaching especially when it comes to teaching English as a foreign language. With the phenomenal introduction of the communicative approach, the traditional approach has occupied a relatively lower status in most of the language classes. This paper aims at showing that an amalgam of approaches is better than adopting one single approach. Experience and practice have shown that employing both the communicative approach and the traditional approach is more effective and efficient. While the communicative approach provides learners with the cultural context of the target language, the traditional approach introduces the functions of language and its structure mainly grammar. In most of my classrooms, teaching grammar and sentence structure has proved to be fundamental and essential since the grammar and sentence structure of Arabic (the native language) is different from that of English (the target foreign language). Hence, to improve the quality of teaching and to gain better results, the two approaches should be used. The paper also gives a brief overview of the historical background of the two teaching approaches and highlights the most important advantages and disadvantages involved in implementing the communicative and traditional approaches.