Richards and Rodgers (2001) summarized the communicative view of language as:
- Language is a system for the expression of meaning;
- The primary function of language is to allow interaction and communication;
- The structure of a language reflects its functional communicative uses;
- The primary units of language are not merely its grammatical and structural features, but categories of functional and communicative meaning exemplified in discourse (p. 161).
Scope and Objective
This research seeks to investigate the applicability of newly adopted communicative approach of teaching two English papers of the class XI-XII in the colleges of Bangladesh. By applicability, I mean whether the context of Bangladeshi colleges is suitable for adopting communicative approach to teach the two papers of English. By the context, I mean every object t hat contributed in the language learning and teaching. This includes: a) Teachers, b) Students, c) Materials available, d) Institutions and so on. Downes (1994) opined that learning context includes: (a) External environment that includes classroom, teachers, working space etc. and (b) Internal environment that includes personal belief, hopes etc.
The CA of teaching English is developed by the western linguists to face the demand of a method for communication for the purpose of trade and commerce. This approach has been adopted in the syllabus of Bangladeshi education system. Here, the question lies that whether the approach that developed in a very different context—western context, can be applied the context of Bangladesh. Although CA was introduced as an approach of teaching English widely in Bangladesh, there is not much work on it.
The communicative approach assumes that the learners will be able to communicate socially. It considers the language in terms of the communicative functions that means how it performs in real circumstances. “The instrumental aim of a communicative approach is to produce students whocan communicate both orally and in writing with native speakers in a way appropriate to their mutual needs. The desired outcomes may range from functional tasks, such as greetings, to complex academic skills” (Ellis, 1996, p. 214). Piepho (1981) levels the objectives of CLT as:
- An integrative and content level: language as a means of expression.
- A linguistic and instrumental level: language as a semiotic system and an object of learning.
- An affective level of interpersonal relationships and conduct: language as a means of expressing values and judgments about oneself and others.
- A level of individual learning needs: remedial learning based on error analysis.
- A general educational level of extra-linguistics goals: language learning within the school curriculum (Cited in Communicative language teaching, 2012, para. 15)
The primary focus of CLT is to assist learners in developing their ability of meaningful communication. The success of learning a language depends on how well the learners have developed their communicative competence and how much they can apply it in their real life situations. CA of language teaching or CLT [Communicative Language Teaching] focuses on the communicative competence of language teaching. The goal of this method is to develop a learners skills over the four language skills, i) listening, ii) speaking, iii) reading, and iv) writing, in English. Hymes (1972) argued that the goal of language teaching is to develop communicative competence (quoted in Communicative competence, 2012). It focused on functional view of language teaching that the aim of teaching English is to enable students to use the language in practical life situations.
Savigon (2002) proposed five components of a communicative curriculum:
- Language arts includes those elements that teachers often do best; it may be all they have been taught to do including exercise used in mother tongue to focus attention on formal accuracy.
- Language for a purpose is the use of language for real communication goals.
- Personal English language use related to the learners’ emerging identity in English.
- Theatre arts means to teach in a way that can provide learners with the tool they need to act in new language such as to interpret, express and negotiate meaning.
- Beyond the classroom refers to the need to prepare learners to use the language they learn in the world outside the classrooms (p. 3).
She opines that essence of language learning should be based on real communication. Brown (1994) describes the practices to be used in the classroom such as:
- A significant amount of pair work and group work is conducted.
- Authentic language input in real life context is provided.
- Students are encouraged to produce language for genuine, meaningful communication (Cited in Hiep, 2007, p. 195).
Nunan (1989) stresses the use of ‘activities involve oral communication, carrying out meaningful tasks, and using language which is meaningful to the learner”, and the use of “materials promote communicative language use; they are task-based and authentic” (p. 194).
In CLT, teachers need to perform some certain roles by the principles of CLT. It is expected from a teacher that (s)he will, for the first, facilitate communication process in his/her classroom. The teachers also have to be co-participants of classroom activities. The teacher also needs to be resource, an organizer of resources, a motivator, a counselor, a guide, an analyst and a researcher. As a resource, teachers can provide students with ample reading materials, writing models, video or audio clips to develop their language skills. The CLT teachers also responsible to organize these resources and to relate them to their language learning. Teachers also need to encourage students to use the language both inside and outside the classroom. They are expected to assist learners to communicate effectively by giving feedback and advice to learners. Richardson (2006) said,
“Teachers now had to assume the role of facilitator and monitor. Rather than being a model correct speech and writing and one with the primary responsibility of making students produce plenty of error-free sentences, the teacher had to develop a different view of learners’ errors and of his/her own role in facilitating language learning” (p. 5).
However, a teacher should ensure whether his/her students can understand their responsibility to do a task. He might take notes on the difficulty that students face while carrying out classroom activities as well their errors to work on later time. A teacher does not have any direct role in classroom activities rather his role can be well said as ‘co-communicator’. In CLT, it is expected that a teacher will not be dominant over students. 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 (Communicative language teaching, 2012, para. 20)
CLT emphasizes on the process of communication rather than mastery of linguistic form. The prime role of learners is negotiating among themselves. Learners should learn in an interdependent way by contributing as much as (s)he gains. By participating in classroom interactions and activities, can recognize his/her responsibility for his own learning and share it with others. By this way, interdependency can be achieved.
Learners now had to participate in classroom activities that were based on a cooperative rather than individualistic approach to learning. Students had to become comfortable with listening to their peers in group work or pair work tasks, rather than relying on the teacher for a model. They are expected to take greater degree of responsibility of their own learning (Richards, 2006, p. 5).
The students do most of the speaking, and frequently the scene of a classroom during a communicative exercise is active, with students leaving their seats to complete a task. Because of the increased responsibility to participate, students may find they gain confidence in using the target language in general. Students are more responsible managers of their own learning (Larsen-Freeman, 1986, cited in Galloway, 1993, para. 20). In a communicative classroom, learners have the opportunity to express themselves as well as share their own views. Learners’ engagement is a priority of communicative approach of language teaching.
CA emphasizes on the use of language for communication purpose where direct involvement of teachers and students is must. An activity is in some way derived from the input and sets out what the learners are to do in relation to the input (Cheng-jun, 2006, p. 40). Nunan (1989/2000) proposes three general ways of characterizing activities: 1) rehearsal for the real world; 2) skills use; 3) fluency and accuracy (cited in Cheng-jun, 2006, p. 49). Sam (1990) describes communicative activities having the following characteristics:
- They are purposeful. They are beyond strictly practicing particular structure.
- They are interactive. The activities are often conducted with others and often involve some form of discussion.
- Authentic materials are used. The situation in which the learners have to use language should be as realistic as possible. The language models given should be authentic.
- They are based on the information gap principle (p. 2).
Classroom activities are designed to focus on tasks that involve negotiation and sharing of information. Littlewood (1981) grouped activities into two kinds: 1) functional communication activities that requires students to use their language resources to overcome an information gap or solve a problem, 2) social interactional activities that requires the learner to pay attention to the context and the roles of the people involved, and to attend to such things as formal versus informal language (cited in Richards, 2006, p. 18). The communicative classes might contain the following activities: information-gap activities, jigsaw activities, task-completion activities, information-gathering activities, opinion-sharing activities, information-transfer activities, reasoning-gap activities, role plays, pair work, group work and so on. The classroom activities should as far as possible mirror the real world and use real world or authentic sources as the basis for classroom learning (Richards, 2006, p. 20).
The classroom environment is very important in applying communicative approach. Every researcher put emphasize on the context where students have the chance to be exposed to real-life situations and to negotiate meaning. The main goal of learning a language has to be achieving the ability to communicate meaningfully.
Many researchers questioned the universal suitability of CA earlier like Ellis (1996)
“…universal relevance of the communicative approach to language teaching in view of the cultural conflicts arising from the introduction of a predominantly western language teaching approach to far Eastern cultures.” He further opined that “for the communicative approach to be made suitable for Asian conditions. It needs to be both culturally attuned and culturally accepted” (p. 213).
Context of learning and teaching is very important in ELT. “To be appropriate, a methodology must be sensitive to the prevailing cultures surrounding any given classroom” (Holliday, 1994, p. 161).
Communicative approach has several principles of language teaching; therefore, it requires a special kind of context where the language can be taught at its best. Breen and Candin (1980) embark the essentials of a communicative classroom:
…can serve as a focal point of the learning-teaching process…[it] no longer needs to be seen as a pale representation of some outside communicative reality. It can become the meeting place for realistically motivated communication-as-learning, communication about learning, and meta-communication…A communicative methodology will therefore exploit the classroom as a resource with its own communicative potentials (p. 98).
The concerns of CLT are not with the methodology itself, ‘rather with how they are amended and adapted to fit the needs of the students who come into contact with them’ (Harmer, 2003, p. 292). Therefore, the main consideration is whether CA can be adjusted and adopted in the context of Bangladeshi colleges.
Many researchers e.g. Pennycook (1989), Holliday (1994), Kramsch and Sullivan (1996) have been arguing that it can be problematic to apply teaching methods that developed in one part of the world in another part. They think that because of the cultural and environmental difference, the concept of ‘good teaching’ varies. Therefore, it is not justifiable to hope that any method that is successful in one part particular educational settings will be appropriate in another (Cited in Hiep, 2007, p. 196).
However, it is not justified to say that we should discard all the methods developed in the western world. It is our duty to check whether the particular method will work for us. If we are too rigid, we may lose something that would be impressive. Larsen-Freeman (2000) warns that in the battle against imported methods ‘we may fail to understand the cause of the problem and run the risk of overacting and losing something valuable in the process’ (p. 67).
As noted earlier, CA proposed a focus on learning: a learning that will take place by classroom practices and exposing the learners to the language. CA sets the goal of learning a language to be able to communicate with others meaningfully. Therefore, the spirit of CA is quite impressive and it was implemented throughout the world widely.
Outside the Bangladesh, many researches on the contextual appropriateness of CLT have been done and the findings are great. In Bangladesh, very few researches were carried out to investigate the matter and most of them were on the Bengali medium general schools. Colleges, the path of going ahead towards higher study, were not a consideration of these researches. However, some basic knowledge and intelligence is required to response the questionnaires. Therefore, I preferred college level over other level for my study.
Research Questions of this Study
In my research, I would like to investigate the aptness CA in the context of colleges of Bangladesh. The research questions of this study are:
- What does CA mean?
- What are the objectives of CA?
- What are the main principles of CA?
- What are the techniques to implement CA in classroom teaching?
- What factors are important when applying communicative approach in educational settings?
- In what kind of context is CA appropriate?
- What kind of teaching and learning environment exists in colleges of Bangladesh?
- What is the role of teachers in CA?
- What kind of views do college-teachers have about language learning?
- What attitudes do college-teachers have about CA?
- Do teachers encounter any problem in implementing CA in classroom teaching?
- What is role of students in CA?
- What kind of view do college-students have about language learning?
- What attitudes do college-students have about CA?
- Are there any difficulties college-students have in adopting CA?
- What kind of perception do college-Principals have about language learning?
- What perception do guardians of college students have about language learning?
- What are the activities need to be performed in classroom while implementing CA?
- Does our context favor these activities?
- How English is being taught in Bangladeshi colleges?
- Is CA really applicable in the context of colleges of Bangladesh?
Research Hypothesis
This is a research on “The aptness of CA in the context of colleges of Bangladesh.” I suppose the context of colleges would be friendly for implementing CA. CA is, no doubt, the most popular method of teaching language.
In order to apply CA in classes, teachers need to perform some special tasks—moderating, facilitating and so on. CA was introduced in the educational system of Bangladesh by 1990s. As it is not a very new approach in our context, teachers should have clear idea about CA and its element: communicative competence, communicative activities, learners’ roles, teachers’ role, communicative materials, communicative assessment etc. I hope find out that teachers are creating communicative environment for the students in the classroom by motivating and facilitating them. While teaching English, teachers expected to give emphasize on the all four skills equally. Teachers might have problem in implementing some techniques, but I hope they can apply most of them. Moreover, I am hoping to get an affirmative view of teachers toward CA.
The students also need to be very active and cooperative in classes. Since the students have already passed a board examination, I expect that the students have the clear idea about what their aim of learning English. They are expected to have interaction with his/her peers and teachers in English. I also expect the students’ active participation in classroom activities.
Furthermore, the institution or the learning and teaching context also need to be suitable for CA as teachers will required some materials to perform communicative tasks and activities in the class. As English is the popular and powerful language throughout world, I expect that institutions are supporting the teachers well and provide them the necessary equipment. I am also hope to see some scopes for teachers’ professional development that will enhance their motivation.
Besides, I am also expecting to find some problems in implementing CA. Some activities e.g. pair-work may not be possible to implement because of the large number of student in class. Since all students do not have the same ability, I am not expecting to get everyone’s equal participation or active involvement in communication. Some expensive tools e.g. multimedia projector, photocopier may not be possible to get everywhere. However, this approach is still new in our context therefore I am not hoping to get a trained teacher always. In our country, English is learned as foreign language not as a second language. For this reason, the students may not use English outside the classroom. Although CA does not permit use of L1 while teaching, I think I will encounter plenty of use of Bengali in classroom to make the students understand clearly. For the large size of class, I am not expecting the teachers to be engaged with the individual problems of students rather an overall caring for weak students. I also hope to find out that the teachers are tolerating students’ errors as long as they are not hampering the communication and also to stress on the function of the language rather than form of the language.
As the final fruit of my study, I am expecting to find out that there are some problems in implementing some activities of CA or sticking on few principles CA while most of them would be implementable. Everyone’s attitudes and perception will be affirmative towards CA and despite some difficulty; CA is possible to apply in the context of college of Bangladesh.
Methodology
To conduct this study, I will adopt a combination of qualitative and quantitative approach of research while collecting data from both primary and secondary sources. The qualitative approach is a way to gain insights through discovering meanings by importing our comprehension of the whole. This type of research analyzes data from direct field-work, observations, in-depth interviews, and written documents. Qualitative research is all about exploring issues, understanding phenomena, and answering questions (What is qualitative research, 2012, para. 1). Quantitative research generates numerical data or data that can be converted into numbers for a statistical review (Chris, 2011, para. 2).
There are many ways of collecting data: interactive interviewing, written responses to questionnaire, case study and observation. I have chosen the last three ways to collect data for my study that means there is a mixed approach for data collection as well as there might be some casual discussion. By questionnaire, people are asked to write description about their experience about the phenomenon of the study as response of a questionnaire. I prefer different questionnaires containing both close-ended and open-ended questions for teachers, students and institutional heads to find their know-how related with language learning and teaching as well as the learning context. The reason of choosing questionnaire is that “the knowledge needed is controlled by the questions; therefore, it affords a good deal of precision and clarity” (McDonough & McDonough, 1997, p. 171). I will observe at least one class of each institution to find out the al and non-verbal behavior of their classes. The observation will be a naturalistic observation—concerned with “the understanding of natural settings and representation of the meanings of the actors within that settings [sic]” (p. 114).
I would like select at least five colleges to conduct my study. I will take necessary permission before my field-work. I am expecting the participation of at least five students of class XI and/or XII and one teacher who teaches English in class XI and/or XII, and the head of each institution.
In order to get a good insight about CA before doing my field work, I would like to review a range of literature. The following is a list of literature I would like to review which might change in course of doing my study:
Ellis, R. (1999). Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: OUP.
Littlewood, W. (1981) Communicative Language Teaching. Cambridge: CUP.
Nunan, D. (1989). Designing tasks for the communicative classroom. Cambridge: CUP.
Nunan, D. (1991a). “Communicative Tasks and the Language Curriculum.” TESOL Quarterly, 25(2), 279-295.
Nunan, D. (1991b). Language Teaching Methodology: A Textbook for Teachers. London: Prentice Hall.
Richards, J. C., and T. Rodgers (2001). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Second Edition, Cambridge: CUP.
Richards, J. C. Curriculum Development in Language Teaching. Singapore: Regional Language Center.
Richards, J. C. (2006). Communicative Language Teaching Today. Cambridge: CUP.
Stern, H. H. (1992). Issues and Options in Language Teaching. Oxford: OUP.
This research is a combination of qualitative and quantitative approach. There are several ways of presenting the data of a qualitative research: 1) Natural, 2) Most simple to most complex, 3) First discovered to last, 4) Quantitative-informed, 5) Theory-guided, 6) Narrative-logic, 7) Most important to least, 8) Dramatic presentation, and 9) No particular order (Chenail, 1995, para. 36-44). To present the qualitative data, I would like to adopt the narrative-logic strategy of data presentation where the data are arranged with an eye of storytelling. Besides, some numerical presentation e.g. line-charts, column, pie-charts etc. will be used to present the quantitative data.
Organization
My paper will be divided into several sections, the most significant sections are: (a) Introduction that will include the research topic, research questions and background information; (b) Literature Review containing the findings from the secondary sources that will describes the background, principles, techniques of CA; role of teachers and students; teaching activities and so on elaborately; (c) Methodology that will describe the methods used to conduct this research; (d) Results and Discussion, contains the findings of this study with a critical review on the basis of literature review; (5) Conclusion, where the whole study will be summarized.
Duration of this Research
To conduct this research, I have to read a wide range of literature. I also need to do field work that includes interviewing teachers, students, instutional heads through questionnaires and class observation. After that I have to interpret and analyze the collected data by creating relationship between the variables.
I hope to complete the literature review by the end of September, and my data collection by mid-October. My final draft will be ready by the end of November and I will submit my final paper by the end specified deadlines towards the end of this semester.
Request for Approval
I am enthusiastic to do my research on “The aptness of CA in the context of colleges of Bangladesh.” I, therefore, request you to approve my proposal. If you wish to modify or improve anything of this proposal, I will submit it making necessary changes. I would be grateful for any suggestion or advice about my research. It is a great pleasure of mine to do my research under your supervision.
References
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Galloway, A. (1993). “Communicative language teaching: an introduction and sample activities.” Retrieved from on August 1, 2012.
Harmer, J. (2003). Popular culture, methods and context. ELT Journal, 57 (3), 287-294.
Hiep, P. H. (2007). Communicative language teaching: unity within diversity. ELT Journal, 61, 193-201.
Holliday, A. (1994). Appropriate Methodology and Social Context. Cambridge: CUP.
Larsen-Freeman, D. (2000). On the appropriateness of language teaching methods. In J. Shaw, D. Lubeska, and M. Noullet (Eds.). Languge and Dvelopment: Partnership and Interaction. Bangkok: Asian Institute of Technology.
McDonough. J. and S. McDonough (1997). Research Methods for English Language Teachers. London: Arnold.
Nagraj, G. (2008). English Language Teaching: Approaches, Methods, Techniques. Second Edition. Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Limited.
Nunan, D. (1989). Designing tasks for the communicative classroom. Cambridge: CUP.
Richards, J. C. and T. Rodgers (2001). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Second Edition, Cambridge: CUP.
Richards, J. C. (2006). Communicative Language Learning Today. Cambridge: CUP.
Sam, W. Y. (1990). Drama in teaching English as a second language—A communicative approach. The English Teacher, 19. Retrieved from on August 8, 2012.
Savigon, S. J. (2002). Communicative curriculum design for the 21st century. English Teaching Forum, 40, 2-7.
“What is qualitative research?” (2012). Retrieved from on July 01, 2012.