Using the Balanced Activity Approach in Teaching Phrasal Verbs to Saudi College Students: A Review of the Literature

To this day, the issue of how best to teach a foreign language is still unsettled and quite controversial. Many theories and counter theories have emerged during the last few decades, and each has claimed to have the key to effective EFL teaching and learning. The last twenty years or so have seen an unprecedented interest in what is called the Communicative Method. On a closer look, however, this method is found to be based on ideas of teaching real-life language that are as old as language-teaching itself. There is ample evidence that its basic principles had been utilized subconsciously long before it was officially recognized by linguists as an effective teaching technique. Since 1984, the Communicative Method, now generally called the Communicative Approach (CA), has been accepted and utilized by a sizable segment of the EFL teaching profession (Kailani, 1995). To be sure, the CA focuses initially on language use rather than formal aspects of language-acquisition. It is also characterized by certain practices and processes such as role-playing, jigsaw tasks, and information-gap activities. On the negative side, the Communicative Approach is frequently accused by its detractors of having little or no muscle as teachers attempt to control the structural complexities to which languagelearners are exposed (Carter and Nunan, 2001).

Eyraud et al. (2000) are also advocates of student involvement. They believe that meaningful EFL instruction should include explicit teaching of word meanings as well as a range of instructional activities in which the students can actively and consciously expand their vocabulary knowledge. Indeed, there is a steady increase in the number of linguistics teachers who whole-heartedly embrace the view that structural and communicative approaches must go hand in hand in foreign language teaching. The application of this two-thronged technique, or Balanced Activity Approach (BAA), as it is called, has

been gaining ground in recent years. It seems particularly promising for EFL teachers of college-level students, including many Saudis who fall into this category.