AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF TEACHING ENGLISH THROUGH DIRECT AND TRADITIONAL METHODS AT SECONDARY LEVEL

Method plays an important role in the teaching of language. It is a planned and systematic effort of the teacher for establishing sequence in the various parts of the teaching. The direct method, as its name suggests, is teaching the foreign language without the interference of mother tongue. It is also called "natural method" because the students learn the foreign language in the same way as they learn their mother tongue. In this method, not the word but the sentence is the unit of the grammar, while the traditional method aims at teaching English by word-to-word translation in mother tongue. The child begins to develop his vocabulary from a single word. The Solomon four-group design was used for the treatment of the data. The students of Federal Government boy's secondary schools of Islamabad were the population of the study. In this design:\ud \ud Subjects were randomly assigned to four groups. Two groups received the experimental treatment (T) One experimental group received a pretest (O1). Two groups (control) received treatment (C). One control group received a pretest (O3). All four groups received posttests (O2 O4 O5 O6)\ud \ud Intelligence test was administered to determine the level of each student before treatment and to equalize the students of four groups. Experimental groups were taught by direct method while the Control groups were taught by traditional method for a period of three months. At the end of the treatment, a posttest was administered and scores of pre-test, posttest and intelligence test served as data of the study. Applying t-test and analysis of variance tested to know the significance of difference between the scores of groups at 0.05 levels. The main objectives of the study were: (a) to determine the role of direct teaching in the academic achievement of student in English at secondary level, (b) to determine whether the direct teaching method is more effective than traditional method in teaching of English, (c) to examine the effects of direct teaching on the academic achievement of high achievers and low achievers, (d) to investigate whether the students can retain the learning for a longer time when taught through direct method, (e) to give recommendations for improvement of suitable method of teaching English at secondary level.\ud \ud To achieve the objectives of the study, null hypotheses were formulated and tested. Obtained data was analyzed, interpreted and concluded that direct teaching method was more effective as a teaching-learning technique for English as compared to traditional teaching method. Students in the direct teaching method outscored than students working in traditional learning situation. Low achievers in direct teaching showed significant superiority over low achievers learning English by the traditional method. Thus direct teaching was found to be more effective method for teaching English to the low achievers as compared to traditional method of teaching. High achievers, whether they were taught English by direct method or traditional method, retained learnt material at the same rate. Low achievers taught English by direct method retained more material as compared to low achievers taught by traditional method of teaching. Therefore direct teaching seemed to be more effective teaching learning technique for low achievers