Translation vs Communicative methodologies

TASK 2

Translation has been an important part of English language teaching for a long time, but it has been abandoned since communicative methodologies became dominant.

By Sandra Manchola

Translation has a huge importance at high levels of learning, since it allows communication and understanding between strangers (Ross, 2000) promoting awareness of the target language in relation to their mother tongue, also according to J. Harmer (2001), students use the mother tongue in class if they are linguistically incapable of activating vocabulary for a chosen task. 

However, this language teaching technique was displayed by communicative language methods that focus on the language as a tool to communicate, based on the language usage rather than on the structure of it, placing translation as a less effective and not accurate approach for language learning.

Furthermore, when translating word to word from L1 to L2 or backwards, the learner needs a huge knowledge of both languages to keep sense of the idea that is being translated, this process may take a while and cannot give effectiveness and fluency to the speaker, which is completely opposite to what is promote with communicative methods where it is reinforce the usage of sentences and expressions to convey meaning and to communicate in certain moments according to the context of the language.

As a conclusion even though translation has taken an important part of English language teaching and learning, depending on the need of the learner and the level of him/her has this technique can be used, making communicative approaches more accessible and suitable for all type of learners as well as more effective for the language learning process.

REFERENCES

Harmer, J. (2001). The Practice of English Language Teaching. Longman.

Ross, N. J. (2000). Interference and Intervention: Using Translation in the EFL Classroom. Modern English Teacher, No 9(3). p. 61-66.