Communicative language teaching method (CLT)

The origins of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) are to be

found in the changes in the British language teaching tradition dating
from the late 1960s.

Although the movement began as a largely British innovation,

focusing on alternative concepts of a syllabus, since the mid-1970s the
scope of Communicative Language Teaching has expanded.

Until then, Situational Language represented the major British

approach to teaching English as a foreign language. In Situational
Language Teaching, language was taught by practicing basic structures in
meaningful situation-based activities.

British applied linguists emphasized another fundamental dimension

of language, i.e. the functional and communicative potential of
language.

They saw the need to focus in language teaching on communicative

proficiency rather than on mere mastery of structures.

Both American and British proponents now see it as an approach (and

not a method) that aims to:

A- Make communicative competence the goal of language teaching.

B- Develop procedures for the teaching of the four language skills that
acknowledge the interdependence of language and communication.

The goal of language teaching is to develop what Hymes (1972)

referred to as "communicative competence." Hymes's theory of
communicative competence was a definition of what a speaker needs
to know in order to be communicatively competent in a speech
community.

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Taylor (1983) lists five characteristics:

1 – Students should participate in extended discourse in real context.

2 – They should share information that the others do not know.

3 – They should have choices about what they are going to say and how
they are going to say it.

4 – They should communicate with a define purpose in mind.

5 – They should talk about real topics in real situations.

Communicative approaches to teaching challenge our

understanding of the goals of instruction. According to Sanders, an
emphasis on meaningful use over form means that accuracy and
acquisition of the formal features of the [second language] are less a
measure of successful language learning than are fluency and an ability
to get something across comprehensibly to a native speaker. In order to
encourage meaningful language use, many popular communicative
activities involve elements of puzzle-solving, role play, or simulation.
They encourage learners to do things with information such as: guessing,
searching, matching, exchanging, collecting, sharing, combining, and
arranging.

Characteristics and principles of CLT:

CLT has become popular and widespread in second foreign language
teaching. Contrary to the teacher-centered approach, in which teachers
are regarded as Knowledge-givers and learners as receivers, CLT reflects
a more social relationship between the teacher and learner. This
learner-centered approach gives students a greater sense of
“ownership” of their learning and enhances their motivation to learn
English.

CLT emphasizes the process of communication and leads learners to

roles different from the traditional approach. The role of the learner is
negotiator between the self, the learning process, and the object of
learning. Learners are actively engaged in negotiating meaning by trying
to make them understood and in understanding others within the

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classroom procedures and activities. Teachers also take particular roles
in the CLT approach. First, the teacher facilitates the communication
process between all participants in the classrooms. The teacher is also a
co-communicator who engages in communicative activities with the
students. In addition, the teacher acts as analyst, counselor, and group
process manager.

The role of teacher in that approach:

In such an approach, the teacher has two main roles: the first role is
to facilitate the communication process between all participants in the
classroom, and between these participants and the various activities and
texts. The second role is to act as an independent participant within the
learning-teaching group. The latter role is closely related to the
objectives of the first role and arises from it. These roles imply a set of
secondary roles for the teacher; first, as an organizer of resources and as
a resource himself, second as a guide within the classroom procedures
and activities.
Other roles assumed for teachers are needs analyst, counselor, and
group process manager. The CLT teacher assumes a responsibility for
determining and responding to learner language needs.
Another role assumed by several CLT approaches is that of
counselor, similar to the way this role is defined in Community Language
Learning. In this role, the teacher-counselor is expected to act as an
effective communicator seeking to maximize the meshing of speaker
intention and hearer interpretation, through the use of paraphrase,
confirmation, and feedback.
CLT procedures often require teachers to acquire less teacher-centered
classroom management skills. It is the teacher's responsibility to

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organize the classroom as a setting for communication and
communicative activities.

Advantages and disadvantages of (CLT) and how to improve it.

The advantages of Communicative Language Teaching:

The communicative approach of teaching has the following three

advantages:

(1) The interaction between students and teachers. Communicative

teaching is becoming increasingly clear feature is the change in the way
as the internship; students develop the subject, initiative and become
increasingly important. Teacher-student relationship is an interactive,
harmonious relationship, rather than the traditional education, the kind
of master-servant relationship.

(2) To impart the basic knowledge and ability to skillfully combine the
development. Traditional classroom teaching of English in the main body
of the expense of home study, only emphasized the teachers on the
knowledge of the systematic and integrity, which is a teacher-centered,
knowledge-centered from the medieval "scholastic" teaching teaching
methods inherited One consequence of the neglect of student ability.
The communicative teaching emphasizes the learner's cognitive ability
and operational capabilities, which allow the students themselves to
think about and express their views, thus trained in real life the ability to
use language to communicate.

(3) Greatly enhanced the student's interest. Communicative teaching

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.

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Communicative Language teaching defect:

Communicative Approach is a new teaching methods to meet the

demands of the times, its emphasis on interpersonal skills, better than
the traditional method to stimulate students interest in learning,
stimulate students to communicate their enthusiasm, it is than trying to
teach the entire language is more formal system of traditional law quick,
but also save time and effort, but it also has its downside.

First of all, using communicative approach to grammar teaching,

grammar, learning systematic and progressive to a certain extent, be
affected. Psycholinguistic experiments show that, regardless of language
acquisition of children, or adults in second language acquisition, their
awareness of grammar acquisition and understanding of the project is
carried out according to a certain order. Communicative grammar
teaching practice is often used features an outline of ideas to focus on
teaching how to make the students in a specific context, in order to
achieve specific communicative functions, such as: inquiry, instruction,
order, refused the request and so on, the correct who graciously to use
these linguistic forms. In this system, the syntax of the systematic and
progressive to a certain degree of neglect, and sometimes give people
with disorderly feeling.

Second, the communicative approach to grammar teaching,

grammar items account for a large proportion of the output, which is a
lot of time for students to communicate in conversation to understand
the consolidation of the phrase v points.

Compared with the traditional teaching of grammar, syntax

knowledge, and communicative input ratio of relative reduction.

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Communicative English Language Teaching Improvement and
Optimization:

Communicative Language Teaching mainly related to communication

in the process of language learning related to the purpose of this
teaching is to help learners acquire "communicative competence." To do
this, language, form and function have been must be emphasized that
the proper use of language is "communicative competence" and part of
it: language fluency and accuracy are equally important: teaching
materials and practical communicative activities should be true as far as
possible.

This allows students and teachers are adding to a lot of pressure.

Therefore, in order to better use of communicative foreign language
teaching, the author proposes several improvements following methods:

First of all, English teachers should continue to learn advanced

teaching theory, improve their professional qualities and professional
competence, correct understanding of "communicative competence"
principle, understanding the substance of communicative English
language teaching should be familiar with the English-speaking country's
social and cultural. Understanding of student learning and mastering the
psychological ability to develop ways and means of communication, so
as to correctly use the communicative approach to English teaching.

Secondly, in the teaching process, teachers should correctly handle

the students listening and speaking ability, and the relationship between
reading and writing skills, to encourage students to the language
environment as much as possible to participate in oral and written
communication, not only to learn English to meet their current needs,
And to meet their future use of English for effective communication
needs.

In addition, teachers should correctly deal with the teaching of

communicative English grammar teaching, the allocation of an

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appropriate amount of classroom time systems taught grammar,
teachers should find ways for students to create, to provide some
meaningful and communicative drills opportunity for students to both
learn grammatical structure. Can train their communicative competence.

Ten assumptions of current(CLT) :

1- Learners should engage in interaction and meaningful

Communication.

2- Effective classroom learning tasks should include:

• Negotiate meaning.
• Expand language resources.
• Notice how language is used.
• Meaningful intrapersonal exchange.

3- Meaningful communication from relevant, purposeful, interesting,

and engaging content.

4- Communication is a holistic process.

• It uses several language skills or modalities.

5- Language learning is facilitated by activities involving:

• Inductive or discovery learning.
• Language analysis and reflection.

6- Language learning is gradual means that there are:

• Creative use of language and trial and error.
• Errors are normal while learning.
• Goal is to use new language accurately and fluently.

7- Learners develop their own routes to language and they should have
different needs and motivations for language learning.
8- Effective learning and communication strategies.
9- Teacher is a facilitator who makes:
• Climate conducive to language learning.
• Opportunities for Ss to use and practice language.
• Opportunities for Ss to reflect on language use and language learning.

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10- The classroom is a community where learners collaborate and share.
[

The implementation of (CLT) in teaching English :

Applying (CLT) to develop speaking skills in EFL
classrooms.

To help students develop communicative efficiency in speaking, the

teacher can use a balanced activities approach that combines language
input, structured output, and communicative output. Now many
linguistics and ESL teachers agree on that students learn to speak in the
second language by “interacting”. Communicative language teaching
(CLT) approach serves best for this aim. CLT approach provides activities
and combinations as mentioned above.

There are some classroom activities in (CLT):

1- Information-gap activities.
2- Jigsaw activities.
3- Task completion activities.
4- Information gathering activities.
5- Reasoning –gap activities.
6- Role plays activities.
7- Opinion-sharing activities.
8- Class Survey.

Teaching speaking Procedure through Information-gap and Role-play.

There are two activities which are used in teaching speaking by using
the communicative language teaching; information-gap and role-play.
The following procedures purposed by SEAMEO (2003).

Information-gap activity:

-Pre-activities (10 minutes)

-The brain storming (5 minutes)

The teacher asks some questions related to the topic to recall the
students` previous knowledge about the topic.

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-Motivation (5 minutes)

The teacher mentions the functions or the benefits of learning the

topic.

-Whilst-Activities (70 minutes):

A- The teacher pairs the students and has them face each other across a
desk. One student becomes ( A) and the other becomes( B).

B -The teacher gives two different piece of information. Give out part A
to students A and part B to student B. Make sure that the students do
not look at each other papers.

C- The teacher reads the student instructions out loud and goes through
an example so students clearly understand what they do.

D- The teacher explains to the students that they must not look at
their partner paper. Make sure they understand that they have to
listen very carefully to their partner and to talk about what their
partner says.

-Post-Activities (5 minutes):

The teacher or the students conclude what has been learned.

- Information-gap as an activity used in (CLT)

approach:
Highlights: In this activity two learners share information to complete a
task. In one-way gap activities, one learner has all the information (e.g.,
one learner describes a picture and the other learner draws it). In two-
way gap activities, both learners have some information and must share
it with the other to complete the task. Because this activity usually
combines speaking and listening with reading and writing, all the skills
are practiced.

Objective: Learners find and share information by asking and answering

questions in order to complete a task.
Context: This activity can be used in all levels or with multilevel groups.

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 It is suitable for general ESL classes as well as specific classes such as
family literacy or workplace classes.
Estimated time: The time varies, but usually ranges between 20 and 35
minutes.
Materials: The teacher prepares a master handout based on
information, language structures, and vocabulary the students have
been working on.
Then, the teacher deletes pieces of information on two sets of
handouts. For example, Handout “A” will have some information deleted
that handout “B” will provide. Handout “B” will have other pieces of
information deleted that handout “A” will provide. For example, in a
workplace context the master could be a weekly schedule or list of work
tasks. The teacher can make one side more challenging than the other,
to meet the needs of learners at different levels.
Procedure:
1- Pre-teach and practice vocabulary and structures for the particular
task. Learners should also be familiar with question and answer
formulas (e.g., “What time is ___” and “It’s at ___”), and ways to ask
for clarification (e.g., “Excuse me, can you repeat,” or “I’m sorry, I
don’t understand”). These can be introduced in the beginning days of
a class, and recycled, adapted, and extended over time.

2- Explain the information-gap procedures by modeling a sample gap

activity with an able volunteer from the class.

3- Have learners work with a partner. One learner in each pair gets
Handout “A” and the other gets Handout “B”. Ask two learners to
model the asking and answering of questions in the gap activity
before the whole class begins the activity.

Notes: For a multilevel class you can make the “A” form more difficult
than the “B” form. Be sure to pass out the papers to the appropriate
person. The first time you do this activity, some learners may be
somewhat confused, but as you reuse this activity in other contexts,
learners will feel comfortable. Ask learners not to show each other the
forms, but don’t worry when that occurs.
4- Learners ask and answer questions and record answers until both
form “A” and form “B” have been completed.
5- Ask learners to compare their papers with each other.

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6- To complete the activity as a whole group, you can ask volunteers to
come up to the board or overhead to fill in information they’ve gathered
from their partner. This helps solidify the knowledge and gives some
slower learners or pairs a chance to catch up and check their work
without stress.
Evaluation: Walking around the room observing learners during the
activity will let you know how well individual learners use and
understand English in the activity.
Variations: The handouts may be menus, store ads, maps, pictures, or
charts, as well as readings.

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