The Approaches and Practices in Language Teaching
Communicative Practices in Language Teaching
What is communicative language teaching (CLT)? Brown (2014, p. 236) offered the following four interrelated characteristics as the definitions of CLT:
1. CLT helps students develop the four competences instead of merely focusing on their linguistic competence or grammatical competence
2. CLT enables learners to use the language for meaningful purposes in authentic situations. Learning language forms are not the aim of the approach, but to enable them to engage in authentic interactions
3. Fluency and accuracy activities complement each other as is seen in the underlying communicative techniques.
4. Students are expected to use the language naturally and in unrehearsed contexts
It’s important to engage students in doing some communicative practices. Richard (2006) explained that communicative practices are those activities that focus on exchanging real information and using language in an authentic context, thus the communication is based on the specific situation and not predictable. Communicative language teaching has been proven to be effective in improving students’ communicative abilities and other language skills. Richards and Rodgers (2001) also wrote that an important goal of communicative language teaching is to help students improve their communicative competence and other language skills. This indicates that the communicative activities can help language learners
Communicative Language Teaching builds good interactions between teacher and students which caused by the combination of fluency and accuracy practice that can be done by the teacher and the students, and the exact roles of the teacher and the students. Initially, in CLT there is a combination of fluency and accuracy practice to develop significant and tolerant interaction of the teacher and the students. First, fluency practice happens in every classroom activities in which students and teacher build an interaction with ongoing communication within them together sharing and negotiate the information. On the other hand, accuracy refers to the correctness of using language in grammatical context or not (Richard, 2006). While fluency supports students to be free to interact but still appreciate the differences of knowledge of each student, accuracy allows students and teacher to see on the context of interaction. Hence, it’s better to use both of this practice to create meaningful and tolerant interactions in teaching-learning process. For example, students are divided in some groups to do a role
1. How effective are CLT activities ( language games, role plays, problem-solving tasks, information gaps, and interviews) used in class on improving students’ communicative competence?
Students have enough opportunities to practice the target language, in pairs, individually and as a whole class. They practice the language in speaking and written form.
Along with benefits for the entire class, ELL students also benefit from whole-class discussions. The effective use of whole-class discussions allows for ELL students to hear and practice language in an authentic and academic setting, encouraged and supported by the teacher. “The
A fundamental goal of learning a foreign language is to communicate. Today, the need of interacting in English effectively, is increasing. This is needed to be able to interact with both native and non-native speakers. A reason can be the diversity in populations which is growing because of migration and many adult learners study English because they need it in workplace settings, where they communicate with English-speaking colleagues or just for English environment. These learners would benefit from a wide repertoire of the learning language to communicate meaningfully.
students expect it and it is likely to be beneficial for their language development” (276).
How can language and content instruction be coordinated to generate acquisition of social and cognitive academic languages?
In the classroom where formal learning takes place, learners are engaged in a lot of listening and speaking activities. The quality of listening and speaking activities affects the quality of learners’ communication competence. This somehow affects succeeding tasks that are dependent on the speaking and listening skills. A teacher may favor more activities on reading, writing and listening skills to reduce the classroom noise but it is equally vital to provide speaking activities as the development of the speaking skill is invaluable in the everyday interactions with people and eventually in the workplace.
There has been a big shift in teaching languages away from the old traditional ways to the notion of CLT, but like any modern notion, it should not be followed blindly by all institutions in all parts of the world. To make the decision of whether or not it should be used in a particular class, so many variables need to be examined including; the aims for learning and teaching a language, the actual teaching process, the cultural acceptance and appropriateness of CLT, and the readiness for teachers to use it.
More than 90% of the students at both levels believed that the communicative teaching approach focuses on speaking skills (because students are exposed to various communicative activities, such as group discussions, role playing, and debating). However, the components of communicative competence, which are linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competence (Dai & Chen, 2008; Hedge, 2000), and the purpose of CLT are far more complicated While Looking at English language as the accepted international means of communication and thus become the second language of non-English speaking countries, educators and governments in East Asian countries are intensively addressing the need to increase the number of people in their population who can communicate effectively in
When it comes to the debate about the advantages and disadvantages of learning languages in a classroom, SLA researchers also put emphasis on the distinction between the terms ‘learning’ and ‘acquiring’. Stephen Krashen (1982), a prominent linguist in the field of SLA, considers these two terms to be connected to two different ways an individual can reach proficiency in a foreign language. He sees learning as a process which includes rules and conscious attention to form, and acquisition as a process similar to the way children learn their first language, which means that they do not consciously pay attention to language form (p. 17).
Questions to be dealt in this article with include what is emphasized communicative approach in communicative language teaching and analysis of definition which helps explain communicative language teaching, the next point is how do the roles of the teacher and student change in communicative language teaching and importance of particular roles within the teaching-learning group, and there have been highlighted a few clear benefits like allowing the students to contemplate about some topic and express their views, which train in real life the ability to utilize language to communicate and some unfavorable features in communicative language teaching like focusing too much on oral skills in consequence of not enough emphasis on the correction of pronunciation and grammar errors. Examples of issues that can be used with a communicative approach are described, and sources of appropriate materials are provided.
Having in mind the topic of this article, Nihat (2008) explains the importance of acquiring communicative competences inside the classrooms as an important fact of English Language Teaching. He stated that more than grammatical rules and structures, students should know how to use their second language, in order to
One of the purposes above asks the students to develop their competency in communication both in the oral and written form. The communication skill is obtained through the development of the four language skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing. These four language skills need to be practiced frequently in order to attain the purpose of the curriculum. However, as stated by Harrys and Valette (2003) "Of the four language skills, writing may be considered the most sophisticated". In line with Harrys and Valette, Richards and Renandya (2002) stated that:
classes. Many of the students are Spanish speakers and learned English as their second language. Because of this I have made a strong effort to allow students to receive directions and instruction through multiple learning avenues. Every assignment in this learning segment will be presented verbally by either me or through a student who will be asked to read the directions. The directions will also be projected onto front of the class, and students will also be given either a physical or digital handout that has the directions and instruction written for them. This allows students to process visually or orally and gives them the opportunity to read through the directions if they need additional time to process what is being asked of them. This process is an extension of Cummins (1984) who defines secondary language acquisition through Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). While many of my students have been reclassified and appear to have strong BICS, they have a difficult time with the less common and more complex CALP language that is required to be successful in school. By giving written and oral instructions, students are able to develop an increased understanding of new vocabulary and content while also having the ability to refer back to the instructions at a latter point if they