COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING (CLT) TODAY Jack C. Richards

What is Communicative Language Teaching?
1. It is defined by a set of principles about the goals of language teaching taking into account the following aspects:
  1. The Goals of Language Teaching:
    1. The aim of CLT is the teaching of communicative competence which includes:
      1. Knowing how to vary our use of language according to the setting and the participants
      2. Knowing how to use language for different purposes and functions
      3. Knowing how to produce and understand different types of texts
      4. Knowing how to maintain communication despite having limitations in one’s language knowledge
  2. How Learners Learn a Language
    1. It is seen as resulting from processes such as:
      1. Creating meaningful and purposeful interaction through language between the learner and users of the language
      2. Collaborative creation of meaning
      3. Negotiation of meaning as the learner and his or her interlocutor arrive at understanding
      4. Learning through attending to the feedback learners get when they use the language
  3. The Roles of Teachers and Learners in the Classroom
    1. In CLT Teachers and learners had a new role:
      1. Learners now had to participate actively in activities based on a cooperative approach and they took part in their own learning process
      2. The teachers´role was as facilitator and monitor making students produce plenty of error-free sentences
The Background to CLT
1. Language teaching has seen many changes in ideas about syllabus design and methodology in the last years. Here, there are three phases in Language Teaching
  1. Phase 1: Traditional Approaches (up to the late 1960s)
    1. They gave priority to grammatical competence as the basis of language proficiency and with a methodology that made much use of repetitive practice and drilling.
      1. Techniques employed : memorization of dialogs, substitution drills, and various forms of guided speaking and writing practice.
      2. Great attention to accurate pronunciation and accurate mastery of grammar was stressed from the very beginning stages of language learning
      3. Audiolingualism and Situational Language Teaching were examples of traditional approaches
2. Current communicative language teaching.
  1. It was argued that learners learn a language through the process of communicating in it, and that communication that is meaningful to the learner provides a better opportunity for learning
    1. The overarching principles of CLT methodology can be summarized as follows:
      1. Make real communication the focus of language learning.
      2. Provide opportunities for learners to experiment and try out what they know.
      3. Be tolerant of learners’ errors as they indicate the learners´progress
      4. Provide opportunities for learners to develop both accuracy and fluency.
      5. Link the different skills such as speaking, reading, and listening together, since they usually occur so in the real world.
      6. Let students induce or discover grammar rules.
3. Phase 2: Classic Communicative Language Teaching (1970s to 1990s)
  1. Reaction to traditional Languge Teaching (L.T) approaches began and attention shifted to the knowledge and skills needed to use grammar and other aspects of language appropriately for different communicative purposes
    1. What was needed in order to use language communicatively was communicative competence.
      1. With CLT language teachers and teaching institutions all around the world soon began to rethink their teaching, syllabuses, and classroom materials. New approaches to language teaching were needed.
Classroom Activities in CLT
1. Accuracy Versus Fluency Activities
  1. Fluency: activities in which students must negotiate meaning, use communication strategies, correct misunderstandings, and work to avoid communication breakdowns
  2. Accuracy : which focuses on creating correct examples of language use.
2. The activities must be framed in CLT principles methodology and to develop Accuracy and Fluency
  1. Teachers were encouraged to make greater use of small-group work. Pair and group activities gave learners greater opportunities to use the language, develop fluency and other benefits like:
    1. They can learn from hearing the language used by other members of the group
    2. Their motivational level is likely to increase.
    3. They will produce a greater amount of language
  2. Some examples in CLT are: Information-Gap and Jigsaw activities, Opinion-sharing and Task-completion activities
3. They make use of content that connects to students’ lives and interests.
4. They provide opportunities for both inductive as well as deductive learning of grammar
Current Trends in Communicative Language Teaching
1. Second language learning is facilitated when learners are engaged in interaction and meaningful communication.
2. Language learning is a gradual process that involves creative use of language, and trial and error.
3. 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 interpersonal exchange.
4. The classroom is a community where learners learn through collaboration and sharing.
5. Learners develop their own routes to language learning, progress at different rates, and have different needs and motivations for language learning.
6. The move from teacher-centered instruction to learner-centered instruction.
7. The move from product-oriented to process-oriented instruction.
8. A whole-to-part orientation instead of a part-to-whole approach
9. CLT gives learners greater choice and responsibility over their own learning
10. New forms of assessment are needed to replace traditional multiple-choice
Process-Based CLT Approaches
1. Content-Based Instruction CBI
  1. “the teaching of content or information in the language being learned with little or no direct or explicit effort to teaching the language itself separately from the content being taught.”Krahnke (1987,65)
2. Task‑Based Instruction TBI
  1. Language learning will result from creating the right kinds of interactional processes in the classroom, and the best way to create these is to use specially designed instructional tasks.
3. Two current methodologies that can be described as extensions of the CLT
Product-Based CLT Approaches
1. Text-Based Instruction
  1. It sees communicative competence as involving the mastery of different types of texts.
2. Competency-Based Instruction
  1. It seeks to teach students the basic skills they need in order to prepare them for situations they commonly encounter in everyday life
    1. A focus on successful functioning in society. The goal is to enable students to become autonomous individuals capable of coping with the demands of the world.
    2. A focus on life skills
3. Approaches which focus more on the outcomes or products of learning as the starting point in course design than on classroom processes.

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COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING (CLT) TODAY Jack C. Richards

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