Criticisms on "Vison 1" Based on CLT Approach

By Meysam Hashemi and Shahim Mir

Poledokhtar branch of Lorestan university

1- Abstract
In this paper we began to examine the content of "Vision 1" according to the
CLT approach and based on case study and descriptive method and how
helpful it is for students and teacher to achieve the educational purposes

2- Keywords : vision1, students book

3- Introduction
According to the Islamic Republic of Iran's national education plan students at
the age 16 (high school 1st grade) must be able to read short passages and
understand the meaning and their ability to write a short essay must be
strengthen and also maintain the necessary abilities to communicate and using
resources at intermediate level causing new books to publish which to fill the
biggest gap of national education system which is foreign language teaching.

3.1- What is CLT?

This new textbooks claimed to be based on CLT approach hence we are about
to test this claim. According to Freeman and Anderson (2011) CLT attends to
achieve the following goals :
 To achieve the mastery of language functions.
 Have the active knowledge of using language for different situations and
different participants.
 Having understand and producing different forms of sentence, dialogue,
and discourses.
 Maintaining the knowledge of how to make and keep a communication
with limitations in language knowledge(using different communication
strategies)
 In CLT the emphasize is on using valid teacher kits instead of the old
traditional methods which the emphasize was on the memorizing a static
number of sentences and dialogues. In-pair, group work and role-play is
important in order to get the mastery over the communication skills like
listening and speaking which will prepare them for the future situations which
they may encounter in the real life and also increases their flexibility in facing
different situations. This will changes the role of both teacher and students in
the classroom.
The teacher facilitates the communication in the classroom. In this role one of
his major responsibilities is to stablish situations likely to permute
communications. During the activities he acts as an advisor answering
student's questions and monitoring their performance … Students are above
all, communicators . they are actively engaged in the negotiating meaning
even when their knowledge of language is incomplete(Freeman and Anderson,
2011).

3-2 Introduction To Vision 1:

This book is consist of 4 lessons, each of which containing 11 sections as
follows:
1. Impact page : This section is aimed to activate the background
Knowledge of student.
2. Get Ready : This section is for having the student to realize the lesson's
purpose and reviewing the words they have learned.
3. Conversation : This section provides comprehensible input.
4. New Words : Here we study the new words.
5. Reading Comprehension : As the name states this section is related to
reading comprehension.
6. Grammar : this is the section where the students are exposed to the
grammar structures that are supposed to learn in the lesson.
7. See Also : this section contains the elated materials to the lesson.
8. Pronunciation : This is the section where students encounter the
different forms of pronunciation.
9. Writing : the section related to writing skills of the lesson.
10.What you learned : At this section the students review all the lesson in a
summarized form.
 11.Workbook : Workbook practices.
We will discuss each 11 section based on CLT.

4- Criticisms
The first point is that according to CLT the lessons should be authentic while
the reports of students says that the lessons are too complicated and hard to
study and boring. The second valid point is that there is no complete reference
for the new words of each lesson while we have a section in each lesson for
the new words and expressions, many other words with ambiguous meaning
have been observed in other sections such as in grammar and reading sections,
thus according to CLT the friendly atmosphere that should be provided in the
class for learners is compromised by the stress of being mistaken in
understanding the meaning and therefore in expressing it. Despite of the fact
that the four skills beside grammar and vocabulary are provided in this book
the lack of spelling as another subskill in both of workbook and student book is
observed. Also in the conversation we observe that two native Iranians are
speaking English. It is very rare that you find two persons with the same native
language that are speaking English. To provide a more authentic situation it is
better to have at least on side of the conversation as a speaker of other
languages rather than both with the same mother-tongue language for
example having a student speaking with a tourist would be more
communicative and authentic.

4.1.1- Lesson 1 : Impact page

At this section all pictures are about the lesson topic which is "Saving Nature"
except the last picture which is a polar bear. This picture causes ambiguity
because there is nothing in this picture that is related to saving the nature, in
other words, it's just a bear.
4.1.2- lesson1 : Getting ready
Again all the pictures are related to the lesson topic except the picture that is
about the bullfighting, which we all know that bullfighting is a game in some
countries and therefore it is not considered as a threat to the nature. Also the
terms "cutting trees" means to hurt a tree by something sharp but not totally
cutting it down, therefore the right form is "cutting down trees"
4.1.3- Lesson 1 : Conversation
Here we have two Iranian (Maryam and Mr. Razavi) which are talking English!.
4.1.4- Lesson 1 : New Words
The pictures don't fit the characteristics of the animal, for example the tiger in
the sentence "The tiger is wild animal" is extremely calm and does not reflect a
concept of wild animal. Also the Iranian lion's picture is an alive picture of
Iranian lion which causes problem in understanding the concept of "dying out".
According to CLT the purpose of this method is first of all communication but
At this section repeating the names of some random animals and places do not
help the student to maintain a communicative knowledge. Instead This section
could contain words about nature, for example, atmosphere, organism, etc.
4.1.5- Lesson 1 : Reading Comprehension
Saying "Choose the best answer" could cause stress and anxiety for the
learner. According to Freeman and Anderson(2011) CLT provides the student
with a chance to express their ideas and opinions it is suggested to use a
sentence like "answer this questions according to the text" which has no
negative or stressful connotation for the learner.
The question 3 is not related to the lesson and learners can answer without
even studying the lesson.
4.1.6– Lesson 1 : Grammar
The first thing that comes to the mind when we observe this section is too
many new words presented here. This will make the learning harder and
processing both grammar and meaning of new words is also becomes harder.
The B section contains an accuracy error and must be correct: "This animal will
increase" to "They will increase in number".
The E section contains an error and must be correct: "He takes photos from
animals" to "he takes photos of the animals".
4.1.7- Lesson 1 : Writing
At this level The word "brother" should be user not "my brother". The A part of
the section is a huge time consuming process
4.2.1– Lesson 2 : Conversation
Based on CLT the pair work and group work is essential in the learning process.
Having such long sentences is hard to practice in a pair or groups. Also again
we observe two Iranians speaking English which we observe in all lessons.
4.2.1– Lesson 2 : Reading Comprehension
"body parts" could be replaced with "organs" which is used in many different
contexts as CLT is about, to prepare the students for various context of
communication with a limited knowledge of language.

5– Conclusion
We have reviewed the "Vision 1" based on the CLT method. Beside the fact
that there are a number of advantages lies within those pages like dialogue
based content, localization of the words and expressions, no inductive teaching
for grammar and including four skills and two subskills of language teaching, a
number of disadvantages like less authentic conversations, having no full
reference for new words while there are many new words in many section like
grammar for each lesson were also observed. According to CLT this causes
ambiguity in meaning and understanding the content and therefore makes
student less-interested in stating their opinions or expressing themselves
(Freeman and Anderson, 2011).Other kinds of error were also observed but
since we are only interested in the framework of CLT approach we ignored
them.

Reference
Diane Larsen Freeman and Marti Anderson. 2011. 'Techniques and Principles
in Language Teaching(third edition)'