Personal Experience
The essay below is about my experiences with the language education system I was taught using different methods and I describe them below.
During my high school years, I have used multiple English methods. During the first three years, I was taught from Stepping Stones as are most students but in the last three years of vwo, I was tough using a method called alquin. This method had magazines and workbooks with exercises about the texts in the magazine. This method was complemented by finish up! in my last year. I think most of my learning experiences are based on a mix of methods and approaches.
Stepping Stones incorporates all the skills into one theme and teaches according to that theme. You learn grammar by repetition, vocab by wordlists and those words are also reoccurring in the texts you read. Most of the texts are unadulterated and help you read English as spoken/written by native speakers. This mostly resembles the audiolingual method with a hint of the silent way. You can learn the language by only using the book if you really needed to, but the teacher does help and explain things.
Alquin was a different type of method. It was based more on the reading approach with a focus on your reading skills. This was appreciated because the exam is also a reading based exam. The workbook would have multiple exercises with every text and have vocab and grammar as well as reading skill development. The upside of this magazine was that you read articles that were unadulterated and you learned about topics relevant to the ESW (English Speaking World). Alquin also had a literature magazine that we used in our English Literature classes. We only discussed early English literature and after that, we did Shakespeare and our own choices. The fact that I had an hour a week for literature is not something I have seen in other schools but loved! I was one of the few that loved the literature hours for our second languages (I also had it for French) but I think that it does stimulate you to read more books and maybe even classics.
Finish up! was a book that only included vocabulary. It was used in my final year and many people protested. We didn’t see the use of learning vocab from word lists and it only led to frustrated evenings on wrts trying to learn the given definitions of words that only applied to one type of situation. You needed to learn the definitions by heart and we did not really learn to use the words in multiple scenarios. This was taught in the silent way: we were given the book and told to memorise a certain amount of lists, after that we had a test.
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