Final essay by Maruja Velazquez

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

ESSAY

According to Brislin (1976: 1) translation is a general term referring to the transfer of thoughts and ideas from one language to another, whether the language is in written or oral form, whether the languages have established orthographies or not; or whether one or both languages is based on signs.

Translation has been an important part of English language teaching, but in the last decades it has gone unnoticed because new teaching methodologies have emerged. The teaching of the language was based on the Grammar - Translation method which incorporated the translation as an active element and turned it into a natural way of teaching foreign languages. However, in this method the student had a little participatory role, was limited to attend, memorize, read and translate (Lois Lugilde,2012), had no space for communication, or worked on aspects of oral language.

The emergence of new pedagogical theories put aside this method to make way for new pedagogical models that completely eliminated the use of the mother tongue.

Additionally, the trend of progressivism in education provided further pressure for educators to change their methods. Progressivism holds that active learning is more effective than passive learning; consequently, as this idea gained traction, in schools there was a general shift towards using techniques where students were more actively involved, such as group work, role play interviews. Foreign-language education was no exception to this trend, and teachers sought to find new methods, such as CLT, that could better embody this shift in thinking (Rosamond, 1988).

 According to the British council the communicative approach or communicative language teaching is based on the idea that learning language successfully comes through having to communicate real meaning. When learners are involved in real communication, their natural strategies for language acquisition will be used, and this will allow them to learn to use the language.

as a conclusion and in my opinion the new communicative methodologies help the student to acquire the necessary skills for the learning of the English language, such as speaking, listening writing and reading, although there are still many who think that with the method of translation also It is possible to teach and learn English.