What is linguo-cultural teaching and learning?

Grammar Translation Method activities

The method may be still implemented in today’s classrooms. Depending on whether your school tolerates the use of L1 (i.e., the student’s first language), you may adapt the method accordingly. Assuming that you are a bilingual teacher, here are some activities that you might try:

1. 
   Ask your students to memorize a rule and apply it to their own sentences.
   
2. 
   Invite students to memorize a short list of words each day in English and give their native language equivalent.
   
3. 
   Ask your students to pick five vocabulary words they like from a text and then translate them into their mother tongue.
   
4. 
   Ask the students to translate different language functions (e.g., inviting, making requests; offering help, asking for clarification, etc.) from their mother tongue to English.
   
5. 
   Ask students to identify a certain part of speech (e.g., verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc) from a text. Invite them to translate these words and then use a dictionary to find synonyms and antonyms.
   
6. 
   Assign different parts of a text to different groups of students to translate. When they finish, regroup them to produce the final version of the whole text making the necessary changes.
   
7. 
   Ask students to translate their favorite quotes, jokes, idioms, or poem from their mother tongue to English or vice-versa.
   
8. 
   Ask students to use google translate or any other translation application to translate texts and see to what extent the translation was good, making the necessary changes to improve it.
   

Ask your students to create a blog with different categories (e.g. poems, quotes, idioms, etc.) to publish their translations

14. 
    General background of direct method.
    

Around 1875, a French teacher François Gouin traveled to Hamburg, Germany, to experience the experience of learning a foreign language according to the method he used to teach his students (Howatt, 2000). Gouin (1992) endeavored to learn German through diligent study of its grammar, translation, and even memorizing classical works, only to find that he could not communicate with university students and other locals. After a year of frustrated attempts to learn the new language through the classical method, Gouin returned to France. Upon his return, he was surprised to see how easily his three-year-old nephew had learned to speak in that time interval, which made him ponder that perhaps the key to successful learning of a foreign language was in the process through which children learn their own language. After extensive observations of the process of constructing his nephew's language, Gouin concludes that learning a language consists of transforming perceptions into conceptions, and then using the language to represent those conceptions. Thus, language constitutes a tool of thought and representation of the world (Brown, 2001). From this premise, he published in 1880 the manual The Art of Learning and Teaching Languages (Gouin, 1992 quoted by Howatt, 2000), in which he developed a teaching method, which he called the Serial Method. The Seriado Method sought to carry out a direct and conceptual teaching of the foreign language, that is, without translation or explanation of grammar rules, through a series of sentences contextualized and connected to each other. This method encountered many barriers between teachers and scholars of the time, but eventually gave rise to the respected Direct Method, idealized by Charles Berlitz in 1878 (Howatt, 2000).
The Direct Method is a method “in which a new word or expression is connected in the pupil’s mind directly with what it stands for and not through the medium of vernacular.” According to Webster’s New International Dictionary, “Direct Method is a method of teaching a foreign language, especially a modern language through conversation, discussion and reading in the language itself without use of the pupil’s language, without translation and without the study of formal grammar. The words are first taught by pointing to object or picture or by performing action.”

15. 
    Online teaching and its pros and cons