Explain, as concisely as possible, five or six main differences between communicative and more traditional approaches to language teaching and learning.
Explain, as concisely as possible, five or six main differences between communicative and more traditional approaches to language teaching and learning.
Introduction
English language teaching has undergone a tremendous change throughout its history, especially during the twentieth century. This has been partly due to the recognition of changes in the kind of proficiency learners need, such as a rise of oral proficiency focus as opposed to reading comprehension, along with a change in the nature of language learning. Communicative Language Teaching, the latest of all approaches and methods we shall be dealing with in this essay, has largely resulted from the need for communication; it focuses on the teaching of this aspect of language through actual communication and not merely the theory of it. This is what distinguishes it from the rest of the approaches. Let’s look at this differentiation in more detail, though.
C.L.T
The Communicative Approach’s origins are to be found in Britain in the late 1960s, although it started to develop more prominently in the 1970s. Its main learning theory is that language is used for communication, so the aim has been to develop procedures for the teaching of all the four skills, focusing on real-life situations which encourage interaction, Therefore, meaningful and authentic tasks are considered to support the process of learning and thus, form a significant part of the syllabus of this methodology. What is more, focus is not placed on accuracy, that is on developing perfectly grammatical structures or acquiring native-like pronunciation, rather, on fluency; this means, on developing the ability to manipulate the language in such way as to create meaning out of it and vary its form according to the social context within which it occurs. This is what the American sociolinguist Dell Hymes defined as ‘communicative competence’ (Hymes, 1966); the learners’ ability to apply and use grammatical rules but also to form correct utterances and know how to use these utterances appropriately. This explains why pair and group work requiring negotiation and cooperation between learners, role-plays in which students practice and develop language functions and fluency-based activities that help enhance students’ confidence are often employed. As a result, a communicative lesson is one which is student-oriented, where the teacher’s role is, among others, to analyse the students’ needs and design an appropriate syllabus with the right tasks. Errors are not to be corrected since accuracy is not the focus, unless they interfere with comprehensibility and result in the emergence of communication problems. When that happens, correction is provided in the form of feedback after the task has been completed. Let’s now have a look at the methods that have preceded the Communicative Approach and form the basis of our contrastive analysis.
