Communicative language teaching
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) originated from the changes in the British Situational Language Teaching approach dating from the late 1960s. Stemming from the socio-cognitive perspective of the socio-linguistic theory, with an emphasis on meaning and communication, and a goal to develop learners' "communicative competence", Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach evolves as a prominent language teaching method and gradually replaced the previous grammar-translation method and audio-lingual method. From the literal meaning, we can know that the main emphasis of "Communicative Approach" is "communication." So the main task of teachers is to teach students how to communicate in English efficiently. Under this precondition, "communication" is divided into several kinds of "functions," such as asking directions, ordering dishes at restaurants, buying airline tickets or chatting on the Internet. Each one is regarded as a function. When introducing one function, teachers give students some key words, sentences or phrases and design some activities for students to practice what they learn. The purpose is to train students to ask directions, order dishes at restaurants in English by themselves.
" After finishing each semester, students can take a post-test. Moreover, another problem of CLT is that teachers may have difficulty in evaluating students' performance. When students play activities like "paired practice", "group work" or "role-playing", a good teacher knows how and when to move around, provide immediate help and collect students' mistakes to discuss late after the activities are over. In contrast, language teachers are no longer viewed as the authority of the knowledge, playing a dominant role. In socio-cognitive perspectives, language is viewed as a vehicle of conveying meaning, and knowledge is transmitted through communication involving two parts, for example, speakers and listeners, and writers and readers, but is constructed through negotiation. As a consequence, "communication is not only a matter of following conventions but also of negotiating through and about the conventions themselves. It is a convention-creating as well as convention-following activity. Based on this perception, when applied to language learning, "functional activities" and "social interaction activities" are consequently selected according to how well they engage the learner in meaning and authentic language use; learning is interpersonal to learn to communicate; attempt to communicate may be encouraged from the very beginning; dialogues, if used, center around communicative functions and not normally memorized; and conceptualization is basic premise; drilling may occur, but peripherally; any device that helps to communicate and understand is acceptable . Many students are too concerned about their mistakes in pronunciation and grammar when speaking English. Then according to the comparison, teachers can make an objective evaluation. Usually at schools, students' grades mainly come from the results of written tests. CLT is conditioned to ESL (English as a Second Language). Teachers can see whether students' mistakes have been corrected or not and whether students' communicative ability has been improved. Teachers should teach students the functions that they can use immediately after learning in native environment. The spirit of encouragement sounds ideal, but it may result in some problems.
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