Importance of using eclectic approach in teaching

Abstract EN

Comprehensive English course at the university level.

The new approach to ELT described combines strengths from the traditional teaching, communicative language teaching (CLT) and the context approach (CA) (Bax, 2003) in order to suit the current English as a foreign language (EFL) at the university level.

It consists of three interrelated stages in teaching English majors the Comprehensive English course: pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading, and each stage focuses on different and specific dimensions.

The new approach treats language teaching and learning as an organic process and includes reading at the syntactical level (bottom-up stage) and reading at the textual and discourse level (top-down stage).

The top-down stage is more significant in language teaching because it is this stage that enables the progression of a synthesized approach to take place.

The proposed eclectic model is different from traditional teacher-centred practices in which teachers tend to treat new words, phrases and sentence structure patterns as discrete language points and elaborate upon them over-meticulously while the gist of the text is usually overlooked.

Furthermore, the proposed approach is aimed at helping teachers to overcome the weakness of teacher-centeredness.

In this eclectic approach, the prevalent methods of teaching comprehensive courses are the starting point and CLT and CA are employed to complement them.

The purpose for such a synthesis is to cultivate learners‟ communicative competence as required by the revised curriculum for English majors at the university level.