Community Language Teaching

Communicative language teaching

Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics defines the Communicative Approach or Communicative Language Teaching as “an APPROACH to foreign or second language teaching which emphasises that the goal of language learning is COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE. ” (Richards et al 1992:65) According to the same dictionary, the approach which has been developed by British applied linguists as a reaction away from grammar-based approaches

Communicative language teaching (CLT), or the communicative

approach, is an approach to language teaching that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of study.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) originated from the changes in the British Situational Language Teaching approach dating from the late 1960s (Richards & Rodgers, 2001). 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 (Warschauer & Kern, 2000). Since the concept of “communicative competence” was first introduced by Hymes in the mid-1960s, many researchers have helped develop theories and practices of Communicative Language Teaching approach (Brown, 1987; Canale, 1983; Hymes, 1971; Littlewood, 1981; Nattinger, 1984; Nunan, 1987 &1989; Richards & Rodgers, 1986; Widdowson, 1990). Hymes coined this term in contrast to Chomsky’s “Linguistic Competence”. As Stern (1992) explicated, “Competence represents proficiency at its most abstract and psychologically deepest level” (p.73). Chomsky indicated that underlying the concrete language performance, there is an abstract rule system or knowledge and this underlying knowledge of the grammar of the language by the native speaker is his “linguistic competence”. In contrast, Hymes argue that in addition to linguistic competence, the native speaker has another rule system. In Hymes’ view, language was considered as a social and cognitive phenomenon; syntax and language forms were understood not as autonomous, acontextual structures, but rather as meaning resources used in particular conventional ways and develop through social interaction and assimilation of others’ speech (Warschauer & Kern, 2000). Therefore, speakers of a language have to have more than grammatical competence in order to be able to communicate effectively in a language; they also need to know how language is used by members of a speech community to accomplish their purposes (Hymes, 1968). Based on this theory, Canale and Swain (1980) later extend the “Communicative competence” into four dimensions. In Canale and Swain, “‘Communicative competence’ was understood as the underlying systems of knowledge and skill required for communication. Knowledge refers here to what one knows (consciously or unconsciously) about the language and about other aspects of communicative language use; skill refers to how well one can perform this knowledge in actual communication (Canale, 1983, p.5)”. From this perspective, what language teachers need to teach is no longer just linguistic competence but also socio-linguistic competence (“which utterances are produced and understood appropriately in different socio-linguistic contexts”), discourse competence (“mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres”), and strategic competence (“mastery of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action for compensating or enhancing communication”) (Canale, 1983, pp.7-11).

Classroom Activities

Classroom activities used in communicative language teaching include the following:

1. Authentic Material: to overcome the typical problem that students cannot transfer what they learn in the classroom to outside world and to expose students to natural language in a variety of situation, adherents of CLT advocate the use of language material authentic to native speakers of the target language. Teacher can use a real newspaper article. He also can assign the students homework, requiring that they listen to a live radio or television.

2. Role-play refers to the changing of one's behavior to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. While the Oxford English Dictionary offers a definition of role-playing as "the changing of one's behavior to fulfill a social role",[1] in the field of psychology, the term is used more loosely in four senses:

3. Interviews: is a conversation between two or more people where questions are asked by the interviewer to elicit facts or statements from the interviewee. Interviews are a standard part of journalism and media reporting, but are also employed in many other situations, including qualitative research.

4. Information gap: An Info Gap activity takes place between students, not between a student and a teacher, though a teacher can certainly demonstrate the activity. The two students will be asking each other questions to which they don’t know the answer; these questions are called referential questions. The goal of the activity is for the students to discover certain information, whether about the other person or related to a specific activity.

Info Gap activities are useful because they are very meaningful; all students are involved in the process equally and they are all moving towards a specific purpose. Each student has the task of finding out certain information, and therefore must find a way in which to ask for this information. Motivation is usually quite high in these activities. These activities help move the students from working in a more structured environment into a more communicative environment; they are hopefully using lots of the target language, and in the process discovering where they have gaps. Knowing where these gaps are gives them a direction in which to improve.

5. Games: is structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological

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