Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools
The techniques themselves and the design of the materials provide a permanent system for checking the learner’s progress. There is no need for correction by the teacher. Since the teacher’s role here is not to purvey knowledge, he can stand back and watch the students correcting themselves and making alternative suggestions to what is offered by their classmates. Marking can be reduced to gathering scores kept by the students themselves, plus an overall mark for the work done during a certain period of days or weeks. As tests are an integral part of the approach, there will be no difficulty in knowing objectively how far the students have moved. The worksheets are self-scoring and each student works on them at different stages of his progress. He can take up different challenges at different levels of his proficiency, and can measure what he knew earlier against what he knows now. After the first few weeks, we begin with the material described in Chapter 4 There again, because of the way we develop the powers of the learners, there will be no need for the teacher to do more than to watch, challenge, encourage and study the products of the individual and collective efforts of the learners. We have made sure from the outset that students listen to their own voices and watch all their utterances, both with respect to pronunciation and with respect to content. If this is properly carried out the immediate formation of the inner criteria will be obvious. Firstly, the students will have a really good diction in the new language, with a clear pronunciation of each word (as close as possible to that of natives) and an easy flow in sentence-
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