Teaching a topic to students often requires us to think and plan. Our textbooks give us some materials and guidelines, but we, as teachers, know our students and our context the best. We are aware of our students' sociocultural backgrounds, economic status, exposure to English outside the classroom, English language proficiency, and the purposes for which they need English. We face challenges like lack of time and resources. So, most of the time, we have to make our plan to ensure that our students learn the language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) and components (grammar and vocabulary) they need. This is where methods and techniques come in. We can say that a method is a plan to implement a syllabus and use teaching materials, including the textbook, in the classroom. It can be following how the textbook tells us to teach a topic through various tasks and activities it provides. Think of it as a map that helps us guide students on a learning journey. Techniques are the tricks, steps and strategies we adopt or develop to teach that topic to the students. For example, if you have to teach your students reading skills, you may have to use an interactive method when teaching the chapters provided in the textbook. You can use techniques such as silent reading, oral summaries, and short quizzes for teaching reading.
Are you looking for the best method to teach English? By 'the best method', if you mean the method that will ensure that your students develop their language skills in your classroom context, then you can have 'the best method'. However, there is no 'the best method' that works across all types of classrooms and students. Often, we use a combination of methods and various techniques to achieve the syllabus objectives and successfully meet the learning outcomes. Practically, no single method can work in every context with all learners. This brings us to the idea that perhaps the best method isn't one method. It is a mixture of methods and techniques curated and applied by the teacher based on their understanding of the learners, the context, and the resources. We may be teaching similar skills and components with the same textbook, but our choice of methods and techniques should be whatever results in the best outcome for our learners. For example, when teaching listening skills to students in a government school in Sundarbanas and students in a famous private school in Delhi, even with the same textbook, we will require different methods and techniques, keeping in mind the differences between the groups of learners, their exposure to English, the purposes for which they are learning English and the resources available in the school. The best method, then, is a recipe of techniques we develop as per our teaching-learning context that results in the best learning outcomes for our students.
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