whether to teach by telling students to memorise?
While the former is about enriching our understanding as to processing info, the latter is more about arguing for the truth-value as to what should work. I can imagine though that there will be a difference in students’ ways of relating and dealing with information thus possibly creating a situation where teaching either towards memorisation of whatever there can be memorised or teaching toward some other goals will be right or wrong to some students. The choices that we have to make are then these of selecting between approaches which call for methodology of: (a) “rough tuning” (Ellis, 1991, :40 or so, Widdowson, 1990, and many others, like Breen, Nunan, “task based teaching” etc) or (b) making no decisions on behalf of the learners as to the what, how, and when (Lian, 1983, 1985, 1987 etc). Language teaching traditions always go for the first model: – direct method: “first things come first: Diller, 1971 (ab. :80) – ALM you only know the language when you know its grammar structures
