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Communicative Language Teaching

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Writing Assignment #1 – Communicative Language Teaching
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is a learner-centered theory of language teaching that starts from a communicative model of language and language use, and that creates a de-sign for an instructional system, for materials, for teacher and learner roles and behaviors and for classroom activities and techniques (Richards, Rodgers, 1986: 69). CLT is generally re-garded as an approach and not a method, because the main principles can be applied in many different ways. The main goal of CLT is to develop the communicative competence (Richards, Rodgers, 1986: 71). Teachers have the possibility to use lots of different methods to achieve “communication competence” and they have a large flexibility in how they apply the princi-ples of CLT to their own contexts. The teacher should adjust his teaching to the needs and interests of the learners to encourage communication and cooperation. Pronunciation, vocabu-lary, grammar and structure are not priority, it is more about satisfaction and self-confidence of the learner. The teacher is the manager, co-participant as well as motivator and competent speaker in the classroom. Language problems should be solved through communication so the teacher should either tolerate/respect or support learner’s utterance. For the learner it is im-portant to communicate and discuss at every chance. It is not important to understand every-thing, it is more desired to compromise and take risks and if it is necessary the learner is even allowed to use his/her mother tongue. Classroom teaching and group work are the preferred social forms for CLT. The implication of materials should provide coherence and help com-munication and cooperation e.g. describing a picture with own words instead of filling words in blanks.
One way to check listener’s comprehension was shown in the mini lesson. The teachers asked the students for pro and contra arguments concerning the topic “smart phones” which is an interesting topic for the learners. To narrow the discussion the teachers divided the class into tow halves. One half of the class should talk about pro and the other half about contra argu-ments. With this restriction of the discussion (pro and contra) a teacher can check the compre-hension of the listeners through their arguments. On the one hand, it is important to involve the whole class and on the other hand, it is necessary to encourage the knowledge of one indi-vidual (Williams, Burden, 1997: 48). The whole class gets involved through the argument of one individual. If student ‘A’ mentions a pro argument student ‘B’ may add his point and this is how a discussion gets started provided that all arguments are comprehensible.

According the core curriculum for 7/8 graders of the Realschule students should be able to understand the main information of a conversation (topic and statements of speaker) to be able to communicate (Nidersächsisches Kerncurriculum, 2006: 12). The teacher’s level of lan-guage should of course be above the students level but not too much to provide comprehensi-bility. It is important to put the students in a comfortable atmosphere where he/she doesn’t feel restricted to produce language. As already mentioned it is also necessary to provide a top-ic the students can talk about. A possible task could be to take the main information of an audio or video tape to check if the students understand what they have listened to. The learn-ers can take notes, work on a multiple choice task or answer right or wrong questions (Nieder-sächsisches Kerncurriculum, 2006: 28)

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