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Principles of Communicative Language Teaching

This document outlines the key principles of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach. It discusses that the goal of CLT is to teach students communicative competence through meaningful communication activities. Students practice the target language through tasks that require information sharing, choice, and feedback. The teacher acts as a facilitator who sets up communicative situations. Emphasis is placed on using language pragmatically rather than just studying its forms. Students are actively engaged in group work and have opportunities to use all four language skills. Errors are tolerated when the focus is on fluency over accuracy.

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95 views

Principles of Communicative Language Teaching

This document outlines the key principles of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach. It discusses that the goal of CLT is to teach students communicative competence through meaningful communication activities. Students practice the target language through tasks that require information sharing, choice, and feedback. The teacher acts as a facilitator who sets up communicative situations. Emphasis is placed on using language pragmatically rather than just studying its forms. Students are actively engaged in group work and have opportunities to use all four language skills. Errors are tolerated when the focus is on fluency over accuracy.

Uploaded by

HoticeVd
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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CLT PRINCIPLES

1. The goal of language teaching is enabling students to communicate in the


target language.
“Language is for communication, culture is the everyday lifestyle of people who
use the language”.
* Teaching of communicative competence:
- Knowing how to use language for a range of different purposes and
functions.
- Knowing how to use language according to the setting and the participants.
- Knowing how to manage the process of negotiating meaning with
interlocutors.
To do this, students need to know that many different forms can be used to
perform a function, and also that a single form can often serve a variety of
functions. What they have to do is choose from among these the most
appropriate form, given the social context and roles of the interlocutors.
One Function, Many Forms: Requests
1. Open that window for me.
2. Open that window for me, would you?
3. Can you open that window for me?
4. Would you open that window for me?
5. Could I ask you to open that window for me?
6. Would you be so kind as to open that window for me?
7. It’s pretty stuffy in here, don’t you think?
Many Functions, One Form: Imperative
Functions: Giving advice/ Giving an order/ Giving a warning when there is danger/
Making a polite request/ Politely offering something/ Giving
directions/instructions
2. Students use the target language through communicative activities:
- Information gap: exists when one person in an exchange knows something
that other person does not.
- Choice: speaker has a choice of what to say and how to say.
(E.g: in the role-play, students are to imagine that they are all employees of the
same company and one is the boss; they have to use sufficient choice of
communication in specific social context).
- Feedback: speaker receives immediate response from listener on whether or
not she has successfully communicated.
- Authentic materials -> introducing authentic language in real contexts so
that students can understand language as it is actually used. (E.g: The teacher
distributes a handout that has a copy of a sport column from a recent newspaper;
then in their homework, students are to find out about political candidates and to
make a prediction about which one will be successful in the forthcoming election)
- Students work in small groups -> Each member has allotted time for
communicating, so maximizing the amount of communicative practice they
receive.

Teacher
• Facilitator – major responsibilities is to establish situations likely
to promote communication (E.g: teacher gives groups of
students a strip story and task to perform)
• Co-communicator: engageging in the communcative activity
along with students.
• Advisor: teacher moves from group to group offering advice and
answering question

Learner
• Communicator – Active Interacting
• Own learning

3. The roles of teachers and learners:


Learner-Centered: actively engaged learning
Students are given chances to share their ideas and opinions on a regular basis.
(E.g: the studens are asked how they feel about the reporter’s predictions).
Students have opportunities to interact with their peers and the teacher (E.g:
through group works, teamwork boosts cooperative relationships among
students).
4. Although learning language forms is important, the emphasis of CLT is on the
process of communication rather than just mastery of language forms. (as I’ve just
mentioned above: one function can have many different linguistic forms, since the
focus of the course in on real language use, a variety of linguistic forms are
presented together).
5. Students work with language at the discourse or suprasentential level to learn
about cohesion and coherence.
Cohesion: The grammatical and lexical relationship between different elements of
a text which hold it together.
Coherence: clear relationship between parts. The ways a text makes sense to
readers & writer through the relevance and accessibility of its configuration of
concepts, ideas and theories.
Those properties of language which bind the sentences together.
E.g: In the lesson, students recognized that the second sentence of the scrambled
order was the last sentence of the original sports column because of its introductory
adverbial phrase “In the final analysis…”, this is a cohesive device that binds and
orders this sentence to the other sentences.
6. Students work on four skills.
E.g: The teacher tells students to read and underline the reporter’s predictions, then
figure out the reporter intention.
7. Student’s native language is judiciously used, while target language is a vehicle
for communication, not just an object to be studied.
E.g: The teacher uses target in communicative activities, gives the students the
directions for the activity, assigning homework.
8. Teacher evaluates not only the accuracy but also the fluency of students’
performance.
Actually, student who has the most control of the structures and vocabulary is not
always the best communicator.
Teachers can evaluate student’s performance informally in communicative
activities in class. They can also formally evaluate by using an integrative test
which has a real communicative function; or can ask students to write a letter to
assess their writing skill.
9. Errors of form are tolerated during fluency-based activities.
In this case, errors are seen as a natural outcome of the development of
communication skills. The teacher doesn’t correct the student, but simply noted the
error which he will return to at a later time during more accuracy-based activities.

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