There
are some reasons why reading is considered to be the most important skill for
ESL students. First, reading helps them to learn new vocabularies, punctuation,
and grammar. It will improve their ability in writing. Second, reading helps
them to develop their language skill. When they want to learn a new subject or
find information, they will find it easy to understand both the subject and the
information if their ability to read is good. The last is reading can enrich
their knowledge. By reading, they can find anything about parts of the world
through books. Those are some causes that make reading the most important
skill.
Friday, November 25, 2011
COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING
Communicative
language teaching is best considered an approach rather than a method. It aims
to make communicative competence
the goal of language teaching and develop procedures for the teaching of the
four language skills that acknowledge the interdependence of language and
communication.
You may have
noticed that the goal of most of the methods we have looked at so far is for
students to learn to communicate in the target language. Some observed that
students could produce sentences accurately in a lesson, but could not use them
appropriately when communicating outside of the classroom. Wilkins’s
contribution was an analysis of the communicative meaning that a language
learner needs to understand and express rather than describe the core of
language through tradition concepts of grammar and covabulary.
There are two types of communicative
meaning:
·
Notional categories
e.g:
time, sequence, quantity, location, and frequency.
·
Communicative function
categories
e.g:
request, denials, offers, complaints, etc.
In short, being able to communicate required
more that mastering linguistic competence; it required communicative competence
(knowing when and how to say what to whom) (Wilkins 1971). Communicative
competence is the ability to engage in the interpretation, expresion, and
negotiation of meaning (Savignon).
There are four dimension of
communicative competence:
~
Sociocultural
An
understanding of the social context in which communication takes place,
including participants’ role, the shared knowledge/information and the function of the interaction.
~
Strategic
Coping
strategies that communicators
employ to initiate,
terminate, maintain, repair, and redirect communication.
~
Discourse
The
interpretation of individual message elements in terms of their
interconnectedness and of how meaning is represented in the relationship to the
entire discourse or text.
~
Grammatical
Focusing
on sentence-level grammatical structures and includes the recognition and use
of semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonoligical features of the new
language.
Non communicative activities
|
Communicative activities
|
No communicative desire
No communicative purpose
Form not content
One language item only
Teacher intervention
Materials control
|
A desire to communicative
A communicative purpose
Content not form
Variety of language
No teacher intervention
No materials control
|
Characteristic of CLT
The followings are six interconnected characteristics as a description
of CLT:
1. Classroom goals
are focused on all of the components (grammatical, discourse, functional,
sociolinguistic, and strategic) of communicative competence.
2. Language techniques are designed to engage learners in
the pragmatic, authentic, functional use of language for meaningful purpose.
3. Fluency and
accuracy are seen as complementary principles underlying communicative
techniques but fluency have to take on more important than accuracy.
4. Students in a communicative class ultimately have to
use the language, productively, receptively, in unrehearsed outside the
classroom.
5. Students are given opportunities to focus on their own
learning process through understanding of their own styles of learning and
through the development of appropriate strategies for autonomous learning.
6. The role of teacher is that of facilitator and guide,
not an all-knowing of knowledge. Students are therefore encouraged to construct
meaning through genuine linguistic interaction with other.
Principles
The principles
in CLT are:
1.
Learner learn language
through using it to communicate.
2. Authentic
and meaningful communication should be the goal of classroom activities.
3. Fluency
is an important dimension of communication.
4. Communication
involves the intergration of different language skills.
5. Learning
is a process of creative construction and involves trial and error. (the
teacher didn’t correct the student but simply noted the error which will be
return to at a later point)
6. Authentic
language as it is used in a real context shoul be introduced.
7. Being
able to figure out the speaker’s or writer’s intention in part of being
comunicatively competence.
8. The
target language is a vehicle for classroom communication, not just the object
of study.
9. The
emphasis is on the process of communication rather than just mastery of
language forms.
10. They
must learn about cohesion and coherence, those properties of language which
bind the sentences together.
11. Games
are important because they have certain features in common with real
communicative event so that speaker can recieves immediate feedback from the
listener on whether or not he or she has successfully communicated.
12. Students
should be given an opportunity to express their ideas and opinions.
13. Teacher
have to establish situations likely to promote communication.
14. Communicative
interaction encourages cooperative relationship among students. (it gives
students an opportunity to work on negotiating meaning.
15. Learning
to use form appropriately in an important part of communicative competence.
16. The
teacher acts as fasilitator in setting up communicative activities and as
advisor during activities.
17. In
communicating, a speaker has a choise not only about what to say but also how
to say it.
18.
The grammar and
vocabulary that the students learn follow from the
function, situational context, and the roles of the interlocutor.
Techniques
The techniques
of CLT are:
·
Authentic
material
In this lesson we see that the teacher
uses a real newspaper article. He also assigns the students homework, requiring
that they listen to a live radio or television broadcast.
·
Scrambled
sentences
The students are given a passage in
which the sentences are in a scrambled order. This type of exercise teaches
students about the cohesion and coherence properties of language. They learn
how sentences are bound together at the suprasentential level through formal
linguistic devices such as pronouns, which make a text cohesive, and semantic
proportions, which unify a text and make it coherent.
·
Language
games
Games are used frequently in CLT. The
students find them enjoyable, and if they are properly designed, they give
students valuable communicative practice.
·
Picture
strip story
In the activity we observed, one student
in a small group was given a strip story. She showed the first picture of the
story to the other members of her group and asked them to predict what the
second picture would look like.
·
Role
play
Role plays are very important in CLT
because they give student an opportunity to practice communicating in different
social contexts and in different social roles.
·
Presentation
and
discussion
Presentation of a brief dialog or several mini
dialogs,
preceded by a motivation and a discussion of the function and situation such as
people, roles, setting, topic, and the informality and formality of the
language which the function and situation demand.
·
Oral
practice
Oral practice of each utterance of the dialog segments to be presented that day.
·
Questions
and answers
It based on the dialog topic and situation itself andrelated to the students’ personal experience but
centered on the dialog theme.
·
Basic communicative expressions
Study one of the basic
communicative expressions in the dialog or one of the structure which exemplify
the function.
·
Learner discovery
Learner discovery of
generalizations or rules underlying the function expression and structure
should include at least four point: its oral and written form; its position in
the utterance; it’s formally or informally in the utterance; and its
grammatical function and meaning.
·
Oral recognize ( interpretative activities)
Two to five depending on the
learning level, the language knowledge of the students, and related factors.
·
Oral production activities
Proceeding from guided to
freer communicative activities
·
Copying of the dialog or mini dialogs or modules if they are not in the
class text
·
Sampling of the written homework assignment, if given
·
Evaluation of learning (oral only)
Teacher Roles
Several roles are assumed for
teacher in CLT:
1.
As a fasilitator
To
fasilitate the communication proess between all participants in the classroom,
and between these participants and the various
activities and texts.
2. As
a advisor
To
answer student’s questions and monitor their perfomance.
3. As
a communicator
To
act as an independent participant within the learning teaching group.
4. As a guide
To guide within the classroom procedures and activities
Learner Role
Students
are above all communicators. They are actively engaged in negotiation meaning
even when their knowledge of the target language is incomplete.
Advantages and disadvantages of CLT
Advantages
|
Disadvantages
|
Ø
Language
is acquired through communication
Ø
CLT allows learners to use the target language in meaningful context
Ø
CLT can be adapted to any level
|
Ø
Student may not see the value in learning English through group work,
games, and activities.
Ø
CLT does not focus on error correction.
Ø
Students don’t feel challenged
Ø
CLT focuses on fluently not accuracy. Thus student may produce
incoherent and grammatically incorrect sentence.
|
References
·
Richards, Jack C
and Rodgers, Theodore S. (2001). Approaches
and Methods in Language Teaching 2nd
Edition. USA: Cambrige
·
Richards, Jack C
and Rodgers, Theodore S. (1986). Approaches
and Methods in Language Teaching 1st
Edition. USA: Cambrige
·
Campbell, Rusell
N. (2000). Teaching Techniques in English
as a Second Language. UK: Oxford
·
Richard,
Patricia A and Amato. (2010). Making It
Happen: from Interactive to Participatory Language Teaching 4rd Edition.
USA : Longman
·
Harmer, Jeremy.
(2011). The Practice of English Language
Teaching 4rd Edition. UK: Longman
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