Barriers in Community Language Learning

COMMUNITY LANGUAGE LEARNING

Disadvantages of Suggestopedia

Suggestopedia also has limitation since there is no single teaching method that is chategorized as the best based on some consideration such as: the curriculum, students motivation, financial limitation, number of students, etc.

The main disadvantages of suggestopedia are as follow:

§ Environment limitation. Most schools in developing countries have large classes. Each class consists of 30 to 40 students. One of the problems faced in utilizing this method is the number of students in the class. There should be 12 students in the class.

§ The use of hypnosis. Some people say that suggestopedia uses a hypnosis, so it has bad deep effects for human beings. Lazanov strongly denied about it.

§ Infantilization learning. Suggestopedia class is conditioned be child-like situation. There are some students who do not like to be treated like this as they think that thay are mature.

This language teaching method advices the teacher to consider they students as “a whole person” whereas teacher consider not only their students’ intelect, but also have some understanding of the relationship among students’ feeling, physical reaction, instinctive protective reaction, and desire to learn. The community language learning takes its principles from the more general counseling approach developed by Charles A. Curran. He was also influenced by Carl Roger’s humanistic psycology. Curran believed that a way to deal with the fears of the students is for teachers to become “ language counselors’.it means that the teacher recognizes how threatening a new learning situation can be for adult learners, so he skillfully understands and supports in their struggle to master the target language.

The teachers’ goal is the students learn how to use target language communicatively. In addition, they want their student to learn about their own learning, to take increasing responsibility of it, and learn how to learn from another. All of these objectives can be accomplished in a nondefensive manner if a teacher and learners treat each other as whole person, valuing both thought and feelings.

When learning a different language while in a multilingual community, there are certain barriers that one definitely will encounter. The reason for these barriers is that in language learning while in a multicultural community, native and nonnative groups will think, act, and write in different ways based on each of their own cultural norms. Research shows that students in multicultural environments communicate less with those not familiar with their culture. Long-term problems include that the foreign speakers will have their own terms of expression combined into the language native to the area, which oftentimes makes for awkward sentences to a native speaker. Native students tend to develop an exclusive attitude toward the nonnative speaker because they feel threatened when they do not understand the foreign language. Short-term problems include the fact that native students will usually lack in-depth knowledge of the nonnative cultures, which makes them more likely to be unwilling to communicate with the foreign speakers. Because these foreign students grew up and were educated in a totally different cultural environment, their ideologies, identities and logic that form in the early age cause different ways of expressing ideas both in written and spoken form. They will have to modify and redefine their original identities when they enter a multicultural environment (Shen, 459). This is no easy task. Consequentially, a low-level of social involvement and enculturation will occur for both native and nonnative speakers in the community.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11