Over the years the pedagogy of language teaching and the perspectives regarding it have been considerably under diverse influences. The term, communicative, was one of those influential senses having been coined. A communicative view of teaching language, with considering the teacher as a co- communicator as well as a facilitator of learning, not just as a transmitter of knowledge, regards an inordinate number of responsibilities for a teacher. On the same line, the theory of mediation (Feuerstein 1980) acknowledges that the teacher as a mediator in an individual's learning and a provider of mediated learning experiences is a significant figure in promoting a learner's cognitive development. The teacher as a mediator should make her learners cognizant of some factors concerned with taking control of learning including a sense of competence, control of behavior, goal setting, challenge, awareness of change and a belief in positive outcomes as well as some factors concerned with fostering social development including sharing, individuality, and encouraging a sense of belonging.
Based on the notions of social constructivist approach to teaching, an approach to effective teaching lies within the area of teachers' beliefs, about themselves, about learning & its educational relevance and about learners, while the teacher as a reflective practitioner is a central notion to this kind perspective. As an enlightened teacher, and in order to have a dynamic way of teaching, a teacher must apply a principled approach using a number of general principles on which classroom practice is grounded: automaticity, meaningful learning, anticipation of reward, intrinsic motivation, strategic investment, language ego, self-confidence, risk taking, the language-culture connection, the native language effect, interlanguage, and communicative competence. Furthermore, a principled approach to language teaching encourages the language teacher to engage in a carefully crafted process of diagnosis meaning to identify the communicative and situational needs among learners, treatment meaning to diagnose special treatments for those learners in their specific context and for their goals, and assessment of what goes wrong and what goes right as well as the evaluation of the accomplishment of the objectives.
According to Zahorik(1986), the conceptions of teaching are classified into three main categories: science research conceptions which are derived from the research and experimentation and the examples of which are operationalizing learning principles, following tested model of teaching and doing what effective teachers do, theory-philosophy conceptions which are derived from what ought to work (theory based approaches) and what is morally right (values based approaches), and air-craft conceptions derived from the teachers' own individual skills and invention which seek to treat each teaching situation as unique, identify the characteristics of each situation, try out different teaching strategies and develop personal approaches to teaching.
Widdowson(1990) holds a different outlook toward pedagogic approaches by comparing the two views of medium and mediation. In medium perspective, the focus is on syntactic and semantic properties of the language itself and a text control and the learner as a receptor is dependent on the teacher as the transmitter of this knowledge while in the mediation perspective, creation of conditions for negotiation is of prime significance focusing on the learner as agent and generator of the conditions for the process of learning and a focus on task control. While in the former the syllabus is seen as primary, in the latter, methodology becomes primary. Structural and notional/functional syllabuses are both informed by a medium view of communication; communicative language teaching, on the other hand, is informed by the perspective of mediation. Moreover, language is a medium for the demonstration of meaning potential but this can only be realized by mediation. As a result, as far as language teaching is concerned, syllabus is a device for specifying meaning potential as incorporated within linguistic units and it is the methodology which realizes this potential of meaning.
Application
Considering the fact that the role of the teacher has dramatically shifted from a transmitter as some body whose task is to convey knowledge to an interpreter whose task is to give the chances of learning to the learners themselves, I should try to apply to my own classes initiative rather than initiation, and an autonomy of learning rather than an authority of teaching. I tend to believe that an art-craft approach with assisting me to create my own personal theories of teaching according to the constraints and dynamics of my classes and my own students' distinctive needs would be the most helpful conception of the three. In order to be an effective teacher, I endeavor to utilize the notions of a constructivist view of teaching with empowering my students, doing needs analysis, creating a negotiated curricula and strategies awareness and applying all those key features of mediation into my teaching and encouraging self evaluation, making choices, self initiation, self actualization, self awareness and self-esteem in my learners.
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