Language is an important aspect of any learner’s education (Banegas, 2012). Vocabulary plays an even important and crucial role in the learning of language (McBain and Mhunpiew, 2014). Over time, learners usually develop difficulties in both receptive and productive language use which usually results from the lack of adequate vocabulary (McBain and Mhunpiew, 2014). Fortunately, scholars and researchers alike developed various teaching approaches that would ultimately ensure that learners do not experience difficulties in their learning and they are able to develop to a prolific level of language use with the specific language (McBain and Mhunpiew, 2014). This paper is aimed at analyzing two of the language teaching approaches, the difficulties associated with them and offer solutions that teachers can apply to solve these problems.
CLIL is an educational approach aimed at using an additional language in learning and teaching both content and the language itself (Nkuna, 2015). In essence, it is a dual-focused approach that allows the introduced language to be taught to the students and at the same time ensure that they learn content using the same language. Therefore, it ensures that students not only learn the new content being offered to them, but they are also able to build their vocabulary related to the language and they can, therefore, increase their prowess in the language (Shin, 2013). Additionally, it helps them to develop more liking for the language and understanding as they end up using it in most of their academic work therefore with this much practice, they become better at the language.
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Therefore, the framework allows teachers to essentially kill two birds with one stone (Nkuna, 2015). In addition, the framework ensures that the students actually use the language they are being taught thus removes the need to ensure that they practice therefore practice becomes an assurance as they must practice in order to understand the new content being taught. Therefore, students end up being left with no choice other than practising to ensure they understand the content being taught. In addition, with the use of different content, the monotony in teaching language is alleviated and therefore makes the teaching more enjoyable and students are more likely to enjoy the language than with the use of the previous methods (Jantassova, 2015).
While CLIL ensures that the students are immersed inside the language and actively engage in it; thus ensuring that they actually learn and get better in not only the language but also the content, various problems can be encountered while applying it. One of the major problems one might face is in the instance whereby the teacher might lack sufficient knowledge on the subject whose content is being taught or in the language itself (Shin, 2013). Therefore, this might prevent the teacher from adequately teach either thus voiding the advantages one would have obtained in using the methods. In addition, once one utilizes the framework, the teacher might be left at a crossroad in deciding whether to test the content from the other subject, the language or both (Shin, 2013). Fortunately, these can be solved by the teachers always ensuring that they are knowledgeable in both the language and the subject whose content is being taught. School administrators should also strive to ensure that the teachers are knowledgeable in both fields to avoid instances which the teachers cannot fully teach in either (Shin, 2013).
Additionally, when the method is used, administrators can develop methods that ensure that both the language and the content is tested to ensure that the learning of the student is tracked. This can be done by ensuring that when testing the content, the test is made language sensitive and therefore only students with the best understanding of the language will pass in the tests.
Task-based learning is a learning approach that is centred at using various tasks or activities to enable students to gain knowledge on a subject which in this case is language (Giguashvili, 2017). Various tasks can be utilized such a doctor visit, discussion of various topics in groups in the language being taught, among other methods (Giguashvili, 2017). Some tutors even utilize music, movies and plays to ensure that students are learning the various languages being taught. This method is efficient and effective as it not only enables the students to practice on the language; thus ensuring learning and retention, but also allows teachers to identify where the students are not doing well and work on these areas later, and also enable the students to obtain more vocabulary as they undertake the tasks (Calvert and Sheen, 2014). During the tasks, which can either be real-life experiences or just mimics or the real-life instances, new words may be mentioned thus increasing the students’ repertoire. There are various types of activities for instance, activities which require the student to provide information, those that require them to reason and communicate using the language, and those which require them to offer up information based on their opinions of a situation presented in the language (Ellis, 2010).
While the method is effective in teaching language, it is also faced with various problems which the teachers experience during teaching. For instance, by the mere fact that the framework places too much attention on the tasks, students might end up placing more attention on communication skills and forget the content involved in the language (Ellis, 2010). Therefore, they may fail to place importance on the various important aspects of language other than speaking. Teachers are therefore met with the challenge of ensuring that the students are continuously adequately motivated to work on other aspects of the language other than speaking which is dominant in the tasks (Calvert and Sheen, 2014). Fortunately, a solution can be sought in which the teachers utilize other forms of tasks, and mix the tasks which require the students to speak and those which will require them to utilize the internal concepts within the language, such as syntax (Hoang, 2016). Teachers can utilize listening tasks whereby the students can learn sentence construction among other important aspects of language (Harding, 2014). In addition, tasks that are geared towards the students noting the differences that exist within sentences or information based on the wording and punctuation can be used (Harding, 2014). Therefore, teachers will have ensured that there is a balance in the students learning.
In conclusion, both the methods above can be seen to be beneficial in teaching language and they would greatly influence how language is taught. In addition, vocabulary still comes out as an important aspect of language which the two frameworks seem to adequately handle. This is due to the fact that they both expose the students to environments in which they can learn more vocabularies in the languages they are being taught. However, as there still exists more problems related to the frameworks, more research is required to ensure that they are perfected.
