Acceso usuarios
Franca Maestri
The traditional grammar‐based language lesson and the communicative approach have only too readily been placed at the two far ends of a cline. As non‐native speaker teachers, we have unwittingly contributed to turning language teaching into two watertight compartments: we have gone in either for the seemingly safe foothold of grammatical correctness for its own sake, or for what has wrongly been understood as a welcome means of doing away with the constraints of the formal system of the language. However, we seem to have overlooked the fact that neither approach in its own right can be said to fulfil our aim: teaching the language as a tool with which to communicate effectively. Adopting a less prescriptive approach to the formal system of the language and gradually training students to see the printed text as yet another form of interaction will greatly contribute to developing a sensitivity for the implications of language in use.
