Communicative

Language Teaching
 In this report, you will
learn…
 Communicative Language Teaching
Definition

 Background: Historical and Theoretical

 Activities in CLT

 Learner and Teacher Roles

 Role of Instructional Materials
 What is Communicative
Language Teaching (CLT)?
A set of principles about:


› The goals of language teaching

› How learners learn a language
› The kinds of activities that best facilitate
learning
› The roles of teachers and learners in the
classroom

 The goals of Language
Teaching



 The Teaching of Communicative
Competence.
 Grammatical Competence
versus
Communicative Competence
Grammatical Communicative
Competence competence
 The ability to produce sentences in a  knowing how to use language for a
language range of different purposes and
 functions
 The knowledge of the building blocks  knowing how to vary our use of
of sentences (e.g. parts of speech, language according to the setting and
tenses, phrases, clauses, sentence the participants
patterns) and how they are formed 
Grammatical Communicative
Competence competence

 The unit of analysis and practice is  knowing how to produce and

typically the sentence understand different types of texts (e.g.
 narratives, reports, interviews,
 conversations)

 knowing how to maintain

communication despite having
limitations in one’s language knowledge
(e.g. through using different kinds of
communication strategies)
 While grammatical competence is an
important dimension of language
learning, it is clearly not all that is
involved in learning a language.

 This latter capacity of grammatical
competence is understood by the
term communicative competence.
 How Learners learn a
Language
 Interaction between the learner and
users of the language
 Collaborative creation of meaning
 Creating meaningful and purposeful
interaction through language
 Negotiation of meaning as the learner
and his or her interlocutor arrive at
understanding

 Learning through attending to the
feedback learners get when they use
the language
 Paying attention to the language one
hears (the input) and trying to
incorporate new forms into one’s
developing communicative
competence
 Trying out and experimenting with
different ways of saying things
 The Kind of Classroom
Activities that Best facilitate
Learning
 the use of the following:


› pair work activities

› role plays
› group work activities
› project work.
 The roles of teachers and
learners in the classroom
 Learner Roles:
 They have to participate in classroom
activities
 become comfortable with listening to
their peers in group work or pair work
tasks, rather than relying on the
teacher for a model.
 They were expected to take on a
greater degree of responsibility for
their own learning
 Teacher Roles:
 They have to assume the role of
facilitator and monitor
 the teacher had to develop a different
view of learners’ errors and of her/his
own role in facilitating language
learning.
 As a needs analyst
 As a counselor
 As a group process manager

 BACKGROUND


 Historical
 Language Teaching can be viewed in
three parts:
 I. Traditional approaches (up to the late
1960s)

 II. Classic communicative language
teaching (1970s to 1990s)

 III. Current communicative language
teaching (late 1990s to the present)

 Traditional approaches
(up to the late 1960s)

 gave priority to grammatical

competence as the basis of language
proficiency.
 based on the belief that grammar could
be learned through direct instruction
and through a methodology that
made much use of repetitive practice
and drilling.

 Techniques:
› memorization of dialogs,
› question and answer practice,
› substitution drills
› various forms of guided speaking and
writing practice.

 Approach: Deductive
› students are presented with grammar rules
and then given opportunities to practice
using them, as opposed to an inductive
approach in which students are given
examples of sentences containing a
grammar rule and asked to work out the
rule for themselves.

 Greatattention to accurate
pronunciation and accurate mastery
of grammar
 Methodologies:
› Audiolingualism (in north America)
(also known as the Aural-Oral
Method)
› the Structural-Situational Approach
in the UK (also known as Situational
LanguageTeaching).
› P-P-P (Presentation, Practice,
Production) Methodology
 Under the influence of CLT theory,
grammar-based methodologies such
as the P-P-P have given way to
functional and skills-based teaching,
and accuracy activities such as drill
and grammar practice have been
replaced by fluency activities based
on interactive small-group work. This
led to the emergence of a ‘fluency-
first’ pedagogy (Brumfit 1984) in
which students’ grammar needs are
determined on the basis of
performance on fluency tasks rather
than predetermined by a grammatical
syllabus.
Classic Communicative Language
Teaching
(1970s to 1990s)
 attention shifted to the knowledge and
skills needed to use grammar and
other aspects of language
appropriately for different
communicative purposes:
› making requests,
› giving advice,
› making suggestions,
› describing wishes and needs and so on.
  What was needed in order to use language
communicatively was communicative
competence.

 The notion of communicative competence
was developed within the discipline of
linguistics (or more accurately, the sub-
discipline of sociolinguistics)

 Advocates of CLT argued that
communicative competence, and not
simply grammatical competence, should
be the goal of language teaching.


 
CLT created a great deal of
enthusiasm and excitement when
it first appeared as a new
approach to language teaching in
the 1970s and 1980s, and
language teachers and teaching
institutions all around the world
soon began to rethink their
teaching, syllabuses and
classroom materials.




 Grammar was no longer the starting
point. New approaches to language
teaching were needed.


 Principles of CLT
(Berns, 1990)

 1. Language teaching is based on a view

of language as communication. That is,
language is seen as a social tool that
speakers use to make meaning;
speakers communicate about something
to someone for some purpose, either
orally or in writing.
2. Diversity is recognized and accepted as


part of language development and use

in second language learners and users,
as it is with first language users.


3. A learner’s competence is considered



in relative, not in absolute, terms.

4. More than one variety of a language is


recognized as a viable model for

learning and teaching.


5. Culture is recognized as instrumental in



shaping speakers’ communicative

competence, in both their first and
subsequent languages.
 6. No single methodology or fixed set of
techniques is prescribed.


 7. Language use is recognized as serving

ideational, interpersonal, and textual
functions and is related to the
development of learners’ competence in
each.


 8. It is essential that learners be engaged

in doing things with language—that is,
that they use language for a variety of
purposes in all phases of learning.

 Background

 Theoretical
 Theory of Language


 The Communicative Approach in

language teaching starts from a
theory of language as
communication
 Noam Chomsky


 held that linguistic theory is concerned

primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in a
completely homogeneous speech
community, who knows its language
perfectly and is unaffected by such
grammatically irrelevant conditions as
memory limitation, distractions, shifts of
attention and interest, and errors in
applying his knowledge of the language in
actual performance.
 The focus of linguistic theory was to
characterize the abstract abilities speakers
possess that enable them to produce
grammatically correct sentences in a
language.
 Dell Hymes


 Histheory of communicative
competence was a definition of what
a speaker needs to know in order to
be communicatively competent in a
speech community.
 Held the view that linguistic theory
needed to be seen as part of a more
general theory incorporating
communication and culture.
 Michael Halliday


 Theory: the functional account of language

use
 “Linguistic is concerned with the description
of speech acts or texts, since only though
the study of language in use are all the
functions of language , and therefore all
components of meaning brought into
focus.”
 He has elaborated a powerful theory of the
functions of language, which complements
Hymes’s view of communicative
competence for many writers on CLT.
 Seven basic functions: instrumental,
regulatory, interactional, personal,
heuristic, imaginative, representational.
 Canale and Swain


 Introduced four dimensions of communicative

competence: grammatical competence
(grammatical and lexical capacity), sociolinguistic
competence (understanding of social context and
the communicative purpose for interaction),
discourse competence (how meaning is
represented in relationship to the entire
discourse or text) and strategic competence
(coping strategies that communicators employ to
repair, redirect, etc. communication)

 Their extension of the Hymesian model of
communicative competence was inturn
elaborated in some complexity by Bachman,
whose model, in turn, was extended by Celce-
Murcia, Dornyei, and Thurrell.

 Characteristics of the
Communicative View of
Language
 Language is a system of the expression of
meaning
 The primary function of language is to
allow interaction and communication
 The structure of language reflects its
functional and communicative uses
 The primary units of language are not
merely its grammatical and structural
features, but categories of functional
and communicative meaning as
exemplified in discourse.

Activities
 Fluency vs Accuracy
Fluency Activities Accuracy Activities
reflect natural use of language reflect classroom use of
focus on achieving language

communication
require meaningful use of Do not require meaningful
language Communication

require the use of communication focus on correct formation of

strategies examples of language

Produce language that may not

be predictable Choice of language is controlled

Seek to link language use to

context practice language out of context
 There should be balance between
fluency and accuracy activities

 Accuracy activities should support
fluency activities
 Sample Activities
 FLUENCY ACTIVITY:


 A group of students of mixed language

ability carry out a role play in which they
have to adopt specified roles and
personalities provided for them on cue
cards. These roles involve the drivers,
witnesses, and the police at a collision
between two cars. The language is entirely
improvised by the students, though they
are heavily constrained by the specified
situation and characters.
  ACCURACY ACTIVITY

 Students in groups of three or four
complete an exercise on a grammatical
item, such as choosingbetween the past
tense and the present perfect, an item
which the teacher has previously
presented and practiced as a whole class
activity. Together students decide which
grammatical form is correct and they
complete the exercise. Groups take turns
reading out their answers.
  

Information Gap activities



 This refers to the fact that in real
communication people normally
communicate in order to get
information they do not possess.
 Sample Activity:
 Students practice a role-play in pairs.
One student is given the information
she/he needs to play the part of a clerk
in the railway station information booth
and has information on train departures,
prices etc. The other needs to obtain
information on departure times, prices
etc. They role play the interaction
without looking at each other’s cue
cards.
 Jig-saw activities
 based on the information-gap principle
 the class is divided into groups and
each group has part of the
information needed to complete an
activity.
 the class must fit the pieces together to
complete the whole.
 they must use their language resources
to communicate meaningfully and so
take part in meaningful
communication practice.
 Sample activities
 The teacher takes a narrative and
divides it into twenty sections (or as many
sections as there are students in the class).
Each student gets one section of the story.
Students must then move around the class,
and by listening to each section read
aloud, decide where in the story their
section belongs. Eventually the students
have to put the entire story together in the
correct sequence.
 task-completion
activities

 puzzles, games, map-reading and other
kinds of classroom tasks in which the
focus was on using one’s language
resources to complete a task.
 information gathering
activities

 student conducted surveys, interviews
and searches in which students were
required to use their linguistic
resources to collect information.
 opinion-sharing activities

 activities where students compare
values, opinions, beliefs, such as a
ranking task in which students list six
qualities in order of importance which
they might consider in choosing a
date or spouse.
 information-transfer
activities
 these require learners to take
information that is presented in one
form, and represent it in a different
form.
 example: they may read
instructions on how to get from A to B,
and then draw a map showing the
sequence, or they may read information
about a subject and then represent it as
a graph.
 reasoning gap-activities
 these involve deriving some new
information from given information
through the process of inference,
practical reasoning etc.
 example: working out a teacher’s
timetable on the basis of given class
timetables.
 role-plays

 activitiesin which students are
assigned roles and improvise a scene
or exchange based on given
information or clues.
 Why the emphasis on pair
work and group work?
 Learners will obtain several benefits:

 they can learn from hearing the
language used by other members of
the group
 they will produce a greater amount of
language than they would use in
teacher-fronted activities

  theirmotivational level is likely to
increase


 they will have the chance to develop

fluency

Role of Instructional
Materials
 

 Promote communicative Language
use

 Practitioners of CLT view materials as a
way of influencing the quality of
classroom interaction and language
use.
 Three kinds of Materials:
(Richards & Rodgers, 2002:168)


 Text-based materials

 Tasked-based materials

 Realia
 Text-based Materials
 Textbooks designed to direct and
support CLT
› Texts from Syllabuses
A typical lesson consists of:
› Theme (e.g. relaying information)
› Task analysis for thematic
development (e.g., understanding the
message, asking questions to obtain
clarification, taking notes, etc.)
›
 A practice situation description (e.g., “a
caller asks to see your manager. He does
not have an appointment. Gather the
necessary information from him and
relay the massage to your manager.”
A stimulus presentation (e.g., in the
preceding case, the beginning of an
office conversation scripted and on tape)
Comprehension questions (e.g., “Why is
the caller in the office?”
Paraphrase Exercises


 Task-based Materials

 Exercise handbooks
 Cue cards
 Activity cards
 Pair-communication practice materials
 Some provide drills and practice
materials in interactional formats
 Realia: A Push for
Authenticity
 Based from the belief that language
classroom is intended as a
preparation for survival in the real
world
 Use of “authentic,” “from life” materials
in the classroom
› LANGUAGE BASED REALIA: signs,
magazines, advertisements,
newspapers
› GRAPHIC & VISUAL SOURCES: maps,
pictures, symbols, charts, graphs
 Current Communicative
Language Teaching
(1990s to the present)
 Since the 1990s the communicative
approach has been widely
implemented.
 Communicative language teaching has
continued to evolve as our
understanding of the processes of
second language learning has
developed.
 Ten core assumptions of current
communicative language
teaching


1. Second language learning is
facilitated when learners are
engaged in interaction and
meaningful communication
2. Effective classroom learning


tasks and exercises provide

opportunities for students to
negotiate meaning, expand their
language resources, notice how
language is used, and take part
in meaningful intrapersonal
exchange
3. Meaningful communication


results from students

processing content that is
relevant, purposeful,
interesting and engaging
 4. Communication is a
holistic process that
often calls upon the use
of several language skills
or modalities
5. Language learning is facilitated


both by activities that involve

inductive or discovery learning of
underlying rules of language use
and organization, as well as by
those involving language analysis
and reflection
6. Language learning is a gradual


process that involves creative

use of language and trial and
error. Although errors are a
normal product of learning the
ultimate goal of learning is to be
able to use the new language
both accurately and fluently
7. Learners develop their own


routes to language learning,

progress at different rates,
and have different needs and
motivations for language
learning
8. Successful language learning


involves the use of effective

learning and communication
strategies
9. The role of the teacher in the


language classroom is that of a

facilitator, who creates a
classroom climate conducive to
language learning and provides
opportunities for students to use
and practice the language and to
reflect on language use and
language learning
 10. The classroom is a
community where learners
learn through collaboration
and sharing
 Extensions of CLT
 Process-based methodologies
› Content-Based Instruction (CBI)
› Task-Based Instruction (TBI).


 Product-based methodologies
› Text-Based Instruction
› Competency-Based Instruction
