A New Approach to English as a Foreign Language Education: Further Discussion

My previous article pointed out the inefficiencies of traditional oral production-based English language education models that start off with relatively well-structured vocabulary and grammar-based contents followed by increasingly ill-structured opportunities in conversation-based, trial and error learning. It is my argument that the former course of English education which focuses on vocabulary and grammar misleads learners in becoming overly dependent on algorithmic pathways to English communicative competence. Later students spend many years in conversation-based classes hoping to finally master the procedures they learned. In this article, I suggest that a translation-based approach to speaking places an unnecessarily heavy cognitive burden on the speaker taking away opportunities to utilize available cognitive capacities for other communicative purposes. Also, I propose an argument against EFL instructional design that uses translated forms of the target language for the purpose of semantic comprehension. It is my view that in order to achieve a natural proficiency of the target language, semantic processing has to be done within the target language contents.