Communicative Language Teaching (CLT): Concept, Characteristics, History, Merits, Demerits, Activities

 

Communicative Language Teaching  (CLT): Concept, Characteristics, History, Merits, Demerits, Activities

What are Functional Approaches?

A shift from grammar based to Function based approaches

Methods and approaches such as Grammar Translation, Audio-lingualismand Situational Language teaching are based on the presentation and practice of grammatical structures and, essentially, a grammar-based syllabus. In 1972, the British linguist D.A. Wilkins published a document that proposed a radical shift away from using the traditional concepts of grammar and vocabulary to describe language to an analysis of the communicative meanings that learners would need in order to express themselves and to understand effectively. This initial document was followed by his 1976 work Notional Syllabuses, which showed how language could be categorized on the basis of notions such as quantity, location and time, and functions such as making requests, making offers and apologizing.

The functional view of language originated in 1920 from the works of Bronislaw Malinowski, a professor of anthropology at the University of London. His works provide two important concepts to the functional approach: the context of situation as indispensable for understanding language; and the reference to social and emotive functions in communication (Yalden, 1987).

This approach visualizes language as a tool that performs a number of essential functions or tasks in the community, which uses it.

A functional approach asserts that we need to learn how to choose our language to meet the particular needs of a situation.

Focus is on the use of language in real situations (performance) as well as underlying knowledge (competence).

Concept of Communicative Language Teaching

“One can master the rules of sentence formation in a language and still not be very successful at being able to use the language for meaningful communication.”

(Richards 2006)

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is an approach that aims to achieve communicative rather than linguistic competence through learner interaction. Born in the 1980s, this strategy to language teaching is based on the philosophy that, in order to learn a language, one must practice using that language to communicate meaning to others.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is an approach to language teaching, not a specific method

Brown (2007) gives his definition of CLT as “an approach to language teaching methodology that emphasizes authenticity, interaction, student-centered learning, task based activities, and communication for the real world, meaningful purposes”

In this approach, students are given tasks to accomplish using language, instead of studying the language.

Communicative language teaching (CLT) is an approach to the teaching of second and foreign languages that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language. It is also referred to as “communicative approach to the teaching of foreign languages” or simply the “communicative approach”.

The goal of CLT is to make use of real-life situations that require a person to communicate with others using the “target language” (in our case, English)

Dell Hymes’s (1974) theory of communicative competence was a definition of what a speaker needs to know in order to be communicatively com­petent in a speech community.

History of Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative language teaching emerged in the 1980s as a response to the growing demand for a language curriculum that would enable learners to use the second language in real-life situations. Previously, foreign language teaching has predominantly had its emphasis on grammatical competence, rather than actually focusing on developing students’ communication and interaction skills.

The communicative approach could be said to be the product of educators (Sandra J. Savignon, Christopher Candlin, D.A. Wilkins and Henry Widdowson) linguists who had grown dissatisfied with the audiolingual and grammar-translation methods and Situational Language teaching approach. SLT consisted in internalizing the structures of a language.  Mostly, learning grammar rules without vocabulary development.

The Communicative Approach emerged in the early 1970s as a result of the work of the Council of Europe experts. A group of experts saw the need to focus in communicative proficiency rather than mastery of structures. 

D.A. Wilkins (1972) proposed a functional or communicative definition of language that served as a basis for developing communicative syllabuses for language teaching.

 Principle of Communicative Language Teaching

The communicative approach in language teaching starts from theory of language as communication. “The goal of language teaching is to develop communicative competence”.

Basic Functions that Language performs for children learning their first language.

The instrumental function.

The regulatory function.

The interactional function.

The personal function. 

The heuristic function.

The imaginative function 

The representational function.

The goal is to enable students to communicate in the target language. To do this students need knowledge of the linguistic forms, meanings, and functions. They need to know that many different forms can be used to perform a function and also that a single form call often serve a variety of functions.

Language is for communication. Linguistic competence, the knowledge of forms and their meanings, is just one part of communicative competence. So, learners need knowledge of forms and meanings and functions

Characteristics of Communicative Language Teaching

David Nunan identified five key elements to the CLT approach:

An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language.

The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.

The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on the language but also on the learning process itself.

An enhancement of the learner's own personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning.

An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activation outside the classroom.

The teacher facilitates the communication in the classroom, and he also acts like an adviser and a guide.

Students are communicators. They are actively engage in trying to make themselves understood and in understanding others. Students interact a great deal with one another. They do this in various configurations: pairs, triads, small groups, and whole group

Dialogues, if used, center around communicative functions and are not normally memorized.

Drilling may occur, but not so important. Comprehensible pronunciation is sought.

 Students’ native language is permitted in CLT. Translation may be used where students need or benefit from it.

Emphasized language skills: Students work on all four skills from the beginning. Just as oral communication is seen to take place through negotiation between speaker and listener, so too is meaning thought to be derived from the written word through an interaction between the reader and the writer.

 Teacher’s response to errors: Errors of form are tolerated during fluency based activities and are seen as a natural outcome of the development of communication skills.

CLT focuses on the fluency of the learners rather than the accuracy of the grammar and learners acquire their accuracy gradually and naturally.

In communicative language teaching, grammar is the second option of the learners and they discover and internalize the grammatical rules and functions themselves.

It uses authentic language materials so that the students find the similarity between the classroom activities and the real world. Students read or listen to authentic texts related to real-world contexts

Classroom goals are focused on all of the components of CC (communicative competence) and not restricted to grammatical or linguistic competence.

Learner-centered approach to teaching. The teacher considers all students’ backgrounds, language needs, and goals when planning what to teach and how to teach

Merits of Communicative Language Teaching

Students become competent communicators, able to use the right grammar, vocabulary and sentence structure in different real-life contexts. communicative language teaching is that of the increase of fluency in the target language. 

CLT typically places less emphasis on rote learning of detailed grammatical rules in favor of gaining greater fluency in the target language.

This approach also enables learners to quickly gain confidence when interacting with other people, which helps them enjoy using their new-found language skills.

CLT approach tends to be a more student-centred and situation-oriented language teaching practice. Communicative approach is much more pupil-orientated, because it is based on pupils’ needs and interests.

CLT approach usually increases the students’ engagement and enjoyment of their lessons.

CLT is a powerful teaching approach to encourage the development of the four macro skills in language learning— speaking, listening, reading and writing. The approach also leads to gains in the areas of grammatical/sociolinguistic/discourse/strategic competence through communication.

The interaction between students and teachers. Teacher-student relationship is an interactive, harmonious relationship, rather than the traditional education, the kind of master-servant relationship.

Greatly enhanced the student’s interest. Communicative language teaching encourage students to participate in, sometimes accompanied by scenes or simulated scenarios, so that students more close to life, the students became the main character, naturally they were interested in the English language, to learn English as a pleasure.

Communicative approach seeks to personalise and localise language and adapt it to interests of pupils. Meaningful language is always more easily retained by learners.

Seeks to use authentic resources. And that is more interesting and motivating for children.

Demerits of Communicative Language Teaching

 there is no text, grammar rules are not presented, classroom arrangement is nonstandard.

Students are expected to interact primarily with each other rather than with the teacher, and correction of errors may be absent or infrequent.

CLT approach focuses on fluency but not accuracy. The approach does not focus on error reduction but instead creates a situation where learners are left using their own devices to solve their communication problems. Thus they may produce incoherent, grammatically incorrect sentences.

Students with low levels of proficiency in the target language may find it difficult to participate in oral communicative activities and,

If the exams used by an institution are grammar based, communicative fluency may not be appropriate.

 large class size is one of the contributing problems in CLT. it is difficult for the teacher alone to check the language use of every student, especially in a big class.

It depends on the teacher how motivating or boring the lesson will be. The teacher needs to prepare the material at home and needs to make it as motivating and creative as possible so that the students find the tasks meaningful and motivating, and are eager to communicate with each other.

Process/ Activities in Communicative Language Teaching

Oral activities are popular among CLT teachers, as opposed to grammar drills or reading and writing activities, because they include active conversation and creative, unpredicted responses from students. Activities vary based on the level of language class they are being used in.

The Role Of Instructional Materials Realia Many proponents of CLT have advocated the use of “authentic,” “from life” materials in class. These include: signs, magazines, advertisements, newspapers, pictures, symbols.

 Process/ Activities in Communicative Language Teaching

Role-play

Interviews

Group and pair work

Information gap

Opinion sharing

Scavenger hunt

Scrambled sentences

Language Games

Jigsaw activities

Simulation of real life situations

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