Lecture Method of Teaching Focus, Applications, Merits and Demerits

What is Lecture Method of Teaching

Lecture strategy is the oldest traditional strategy originated from idealism philosophy. It is also known as communication strategy.

Focus, Structure and Principles

It is mainly focus on cognitive objectives. Main emphasis of this strategy is on the presentation of the content. Teacher is more active and learners are passive listeners. The teacher plans and controls the whole teaching learning process. He may take help of audio-visual aids to make lecture interesting. It is based on certain principles.

  1. Whole to part maxim of teaching is followed in content presentation.
  2. Students learn better through listening
  3. Subject matter can be correlated with other subjects
  4. New knowledge is given related to previous knowledge

Applications

Through it cannot be useful at primary level of education. It can be used at secondary and higher level of education to teach any subject. To make lecture more interesting and effective, audio-visual aids can be utilized and question answer strategy can be added.

Lecture Method of Teaching Merits and Demerits

Advantages of Lecture Method

Following are the advantages of this teaching strategy

  1. It is economical with regard to time
  2. It helps in developing habit of concentration among the students.
  3. It helps in achieving even high order cognitive objectives (i.e. application, analysis, synthesis and emulation)
  4. It is also flexible and teacher may use different types of teaching material at one time.
  5. New subject matter can easily be introduced.
  6. A good teacher can use his full knowledge and verbal communication skills while teaching to students.

Disadvantages of Lecture Method

  1. As learners are passive listeners, lecture fails to draw attention of the learners for a long time
  2. It creates boredom to the learners and thus results in unfruitful teaching
  3. More emphasis on presentation rather than the participation of the learner
  4. Individual differences are not taken into consideration
  5. It cannot be used for achieving higher affective objective psychomotor objectives
  6. It does not have a rigid out line of teaching, so, a teacher may deviate from teaching points
  7. Teachers do not take pains in planning the teaching before hand and therefore, they are not able to communicate the content so effectively.

Precautions

  1. The teacher should mastery over the subject
  2. He must follow maxims of teaching to implement strategy successfully
  3. He must aid this strategy with questions answers to motivate students and by use of audio-visual aids to make lectures more effective.
  4. The teacher must know the psychological factors of the learners before the plans or delivers the lecture
  5. He must impart new knowledge relating to previous knowledge
  6. He must use simple, effective and meaningful language

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