Five features that characterize Communicative Language Teaching:
- An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language (not just oral but all of four skills)
- The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation
- The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on language but also on the learning process itself: considering what kinds of strategies can I use to aid me (Rebecca Oxford has done a lot of research on this)
- An enhancement of the learner’s own personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning
- An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activities outside the classroom
From David Nunan (1991). Communicative tasks and the language curriculum. TESOL Quarterly 25 (2), 279–295.
The approach is well suited to mixed groups. You don’t have to be multilingual to use it.
Picking up this thread two days later… I can’t remember what we did in class. We broke into groups (jigsaw) to discuss our assignment for today about our CLT demonstration in the prior class. I think I got a little clearer about the “information gap.” “Go Fish” is a great example, when one person has info you need, and when you get it, you’re complete on that point. Aside from that I don’t recall aspects of the discussion that stood out.
Another part of the class involved reviewing what we’d written for the template, and again I don’t remember getting anything new from our discussion. Our final group exercise was to draw a visual representation of the “I, Thou and It” metaphor to communicative language teaching. It seemed that there was a great deal of overlap between the three, when the it was the thou was the I, or that a single facet (the context of a conversation) could be the thou and the it. I should’ve taken notes on what others said in their posters. One group talked about the “I, Thou, It” triangle not being equilateral, but that the thou and the it were closer (I think that’s what they said) and the I further away.
I’m still not sure about CLT: how much I understand. It seems to me that it would help to be fluent in the second language in order to teach it, but apparently it’s well suited for multilingual groups so I have to learn more about why it’s okay done only in the target language.
It wasn’t an exact fit with today’s conversation, but in the context of the information gap I thought about learning consisting of lots of little gaps that get filled one by one, each building on the prior. And as an illustration I told my story of my ride on the Mt. Washington Cog Railway the afternoon before. I’d gotten to chatting with the brakeman about how he learned. It seems to be a complicated thing, and beyond that, lives are at stake. I was interested in his response in the same way I always am about those things, but I noticed a new dimension that I wouldn’t have a few months ago: about the process of learning. Apparently it took him about six weeks to get trained. Each day he’d made four to six trips up and down the mountain with an experience brakeman. Each trip they’d give him something tiny, finite and distinct to do: “Okay, this time you get to put on the break for these ten feet as we come up over the rise.” Another time they told him to try a certain ten-foot stretch of track. Then they’d have him do a small section between. Little by little they’d increase the number of seconds he’d brake, or the section of track he worked on. “It’s really complicated so you could never get it all at once. There’s, like, nineteen things you have to do just in this one section.” But by adding bit by bit, and tying one facet to the next, eventually the full picture emerged, and he could do the whole mountain.
I don’t think that, as an analogy for language-learning, that applies specifically to CLT. But the ways in which it might are: hands-on, real-life experience, student active participant in learning process, cooperative and collaborative, teacher as guide and process manager, problem-solving.
Oh, there was one more thing we did: we discussed the Rebecca Belchamber article [The Advantages of Communicative Language Teaching (La Trobe University Language Centre, Melbourne, Australia)] which I thought was really useful because it was our first reading that compared the pros and cons of an approach. I should select bits of it to put here.
Here is an outline.
Elements of CLT
Communication – According to Ability
Challenge: how much can “communication” happen in a beginner setting? But she says that we can learn formulaic expression in the beginning — as all beginners do — and increase complexity with skill. Others ask how can exchanges be authentic and meaningful in a setting like a classroom. She argues that a classroom is a valid fill-in for the Real World: “Before a nurse gives a real injection, they have punctured many a piece of fruit to hone their technique.”
Accuracy as Well as Fluency
With the emphasis on fluency, some ask, what happens to accuracy? Accuracy is good for teachers “if they want to deal with students getting things right, take an opportunity for correction, or gauge the success of their teaching.” But CLT does address accuracy: “Accuracy practice is the bridge to a fluency activity. By implication, CLT involves equipping students with vocabulary, structures and functions, as well as strategies, to enable them to interact successfully.” She doesn’t see the two as mutually exclusive at all.
Promoting Learning
Promoting learning is the reason for the existence of CLT, according to its innovators Richards & Rogers. One thinker suggests we drop the distinction between learning and acquisition and focus instead on “language mastery.” And of course the student’s goal is crucial: do students want to pass and exam or communicate in English?
Motivation
Sometimes the desire to pass an exam (or learn to converse) is not enough. It involves engaging students, building their confidence, fostering trust and support in the classroom. One means to this end is lots of pair work. Students check their work in pairs before presenting to the whole classroom. Tasks, of course, have to be relevant, and teachers make sure that’s happening.
Conclusion
Too often new approaches eclipse old ones. It’s not necessary to trade off. Pull characteristics you want from CLT — they’re often compatible with other approaches — rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Hmmm… after summarizing this here I’m wondering if it was a different article we discussed. This one doesn’t seem very informative or profound. But I could swear this was the one that gave us a sense of the criticisms of the approach, as well as its strengths.
Yeah. It’s the one. Let me pull out a few more key points and quotations
- It’s good for diverse learner groups.
- The aim is that the length and complexity of exchanges, and confident delivery, will grow with the student’s language ability.
- With the emphasis on communication, there is also the implication that spoken exchanges should be authentic and meaningful; detractors claim that the artificial nature of classroom–based (i.e. teacher – created) interactions makes CLT an oxymoron.
- What we are doing with these exercises is exposing students to patterns which they can later activate.
- In fact, Canale and Swain’s model of communicative competence, referred to by Guangwei Hu, includes four sub-categories, namely grammatical, sociolinguistic discourse and strategic. They consider someone competent in English should demonstrate both rules of grammar and use.
- CLT addresses another area which constantly challenges teachers, the mixed-ability class. When the lesson progresses to a freer-speaking activity, students can contribute according to their ability and confidence, although I acknowledge both need to be stretched. So there is a challenge for the more capable students, while those with an average ability still feel their effort is valid. This compares with the less creative opportunities offered by some textbooks, where students read a dialogue, perhaps doing a substitution activity, for example.
- In practical terms, whether assisting mixed-ability classes, aiding motivation, leading from a focus on form to one of fluency, or supporting learning, it has a lot to offer the EFL teacher.
Okay, I’m done for tonight. I’ll go read the CLT in China exercise. I’m a little anxious about putting together my teaching plan for the next class and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because this approach SEEMS more complex than Silent Way (which is harder than it looks) and Community Language Learning. Maybe it’s because I didn’t think I’d really use the first two approaches in my teaching so I was less worried about them. I’ve planned my lesson already. I’m just not sure it’s going to touch on all the aspects that characterize CLT. I’ll tell you briefly what I plan:
All in Spanish I’ll teach about things you can buy. If I were being traditional, I’d do something like only fruits or clothes or something. And I think that would probably be the preferred method, because we like learning things in related clusters, as we like learning in collocations. While it’s not too late to change my direction to focused items, I don’t want to because I want to see what my students think of learning a variety of unrelated items. There will be a central theme: El Mercado. Without using a word of English, I’ll lay out eight or nine objects and say their name, and then (as Bev did on the BB in her Afrikaans lesson) place an index card with its name on it. Writing this is giving me a new idea. Maybe I’ll remove the cards at some point and have my “students” reassemble them in the right places. Anyhow, initially I picked this approach because I have a few Central American things that are fun to look at and less predictable than the usual sets we encounter in lessons. I have a little painted porcupine, a Virgen de Guadelupe and some fabric. I’ll also use more prosaic items with no cohesive theme among them but that are practical: a spoon (which is probably better taught in the cucharillo–cucharo pair but oh well), a hat and I forget what else. It’s all in the car. So I’m curious to see to what extent thematic clustering will affect my learners. I’m also doing it in Spanish because I’m curious to see — and speaking in Spanish will make me notice more — how much impromptu stuff I’ll have to do. CLT is noted for having lots of unexpected agendas pop up. If it happens in English I won’t notice much since my L1 is so automatic that I won’t notice when I’m being challenged to innovate.
I plan a few activities once we’ve spent some time with the nouns. I’ve made everything cost one peso(!) and will give everyone three pesos so they can ask to buy three things. I’ll also role-play the mercado dude a wee bit, just for some cultural context: un buen precio para ti!
I have to go to sleep now. So I’ve got my lesson plan mapped out, and have made sure that it includes each of the four skills as prescribed, involves hands-on and real-life scenarios, and other stuff that I don’t have in front of me.