Task 2. Essay

by Désirée Rosas Cubillos

Postulate E

Translation has been an important part of English language teaching for a long time, but it has been abandoned since communicative methodologies became dominant.

How much time do you need to invest for learning a new language? In past years learning a new language consisted in a lot of time practicing the four skills and translating from or for your mother language. Nowadays people need a more efficient and faster method for learning a language, they demand for more active learning method in which they understand and put that knowledge in practice at the same time. That’s why translation become a ghost method in which people, students and teachers, believe it is not that necessary in the process of teaching-learning process.

The communicative approaches become the most useful tools for learning English because they emphasize in the interaction for acquiring a new language. These are teaching learning processes that are more accepted and required for the students because they are more active or in motion, in other words these approaches are not boring at all, an important quality the translation method doesn’t have. The idea of using different books or tools for make a translation produce an entire laziness and make the learning time a more depressing one, students these days not only desire a more active class but is the most productive way for them in order to remember and understand the topic they are seeing.

In conclusion, the translation method becomes for many students a boring tool to use in the learning-teaching process, especially when you can find web tools that can do that for you, but even with this help students still use this method in or out the classes, including in the most recent communicative methods. It is true that today the classes are not focused on doing translations for learning English, the communicative methodologies became predominant and have more demand.