University of Southeastern Philippines

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION

Inigo Street, Obrero Campus, Davao City

Final Examination

LITERATURE REVIEW

COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH IN TEACHING ENGLISH GRAMMAR:

THE PHILIPPINE SETTING

Submitted by:

LYRA R. SORROSA

Submitted to:

DR. VELMA S. LABAD

June 20, 2020

I. INTRODUCTION

The question what needs to be learned by language acquirers

always solicits an easy answer: they need to learn the grammar of

the target language. This, in turn, raises another question: how is

grammar taught? Language teaching across the years have seen the

coming and going of language-teaching trends from the rise of

‗scientific‘ oral approaches at the beginning of the 20th century

(Brown, 2006) to the elaboration of what has come to be called

communicative language teaching or CLT (Savignon, 2006). Albert

Marckwardt (1972 in Brown, 2006) aptly saw these ―changing winds

and shifting sands as a cyclical pattern in which a new method

emerged about every quarter of a century‖ (p.1). In a sense, the

approaches as well as the methodologies of language teaching

across cultures and boundaries undergo changes, re-inventing, and

rehashing.

Language teaching in the Philippine secondary education is

synonymous to grammar and the teaching of literature of various

countries/continents. It is a common observation that in the

elementary and secondary levels of the Philippine educational

system, the teaching of grammar is the bulk of the instruction, if not

the focus. English teachers from both the private and public

educational systems would unanimously answer grammar‘ when

asked what they teach in their English classes. Grammar,according

to Kaplan (1995), means the rules governing how a language is

 supposed to be used‖ (p.1). This view, as Kaplan (1995) expounded,

is prescriptive in a sense because grammar is viewed as a set of rigid

prescriptions focusing on error correction.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

Grammar is an essential part of the use of language process,

both in spoken and written language. The grammar of a language is a

description of the ways in which the language uses patterns of

structure to convey the meaning, so it would be impossible to learn

language effectively without knowing the grammar, because grammar

helps learners to identify grammatical forms, which serves to

enhance and sharpen the expression of meaning.

The teaching of language structure (grammar) dominated foreign

language instruction for many years (Rutherford & Smith, 1988). This

emphasis on the structural aspects of language reflected structural

linguistics and behaviorism consideration of language as a set of

linguistic rules students master to use a language (Nassaji & Fotos,

2011). However, a dramatic change took place with the appearance

of modern linguistics and the popularity of sociolinguistic and

pragmatic studies. For instance, the sociolinguist Hymes (1972)

postulates that speakers of a language speak and write according to

the social context and situation in which they are using language.

Peoples’ use of a language is influenced by what is socially

acceptable and what is not. Stated differently, language production

defers to social norms. In the words of Hymes (1972, p. 15), “there

are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless

just as rules of syntax can control aspects of phonology, and just as

semantic rules perhaps control aspects of syntax.” Students need to

know how grammar works in a certain situation and context

(Thompson, 1996).

In Philippines, the common method of teaching grammar is the

traditional method wherein the teachers just analyze the structure of

the sentence to teach grammatical rules. The focus is on grammatical

parsing, like the form and inflection of words. To some, it is enough

that students just pass the quiz which is more on knowledge

formation like underlining and identifying rather than using it for

communication.

Consequently, English course for students at the undergraduate

level does not bring them the required competence in all areas of the

language the moment they graduate. Many students are not proficient

in communication and generally lack the growing demands of the

workplace competency. It was found that majority of them regarded

themselves as good in reading and listening but need help in

speaking and writing skills As cited by Larcen-Freeman (2006), the

researcher now agrees that it is essential to integrate some form of

grammar instruction within a communicative framework if students

are to attain high levels of target language accuracy. As an

alternative to delivery of a formal grammar lesson, the communicative

task has been recommended to supply students with communicative

use of target grammar points. Moreover, as mentioned by Celce-

Murcia ( 2006), the use of purely communicative tasks which

nonetheless require comprehension and production of target

grammar points has been recommended.

However, when CLT was first introduced to Filipino teachers in

the 1980s, it was largely misunderstood and found to be

pedagogically unclear. This may be attributed to the top-down fashion

of presenting CLT to Filipino teachers of English (Valdez 2011: 74).

Among Filipino teachers today, there are different interpretations of

the CLT approach to teaching English. In a survey in which 76 private

and public high school teachers of English were surveyed in 2012, it

is found that teachers who claimed to be practicing CLT also reported

that they still taught grammar explicitly to their student. Although the

survey involves a small sample, the results illustrate that among

Filipino teachers of English, CLT is interpreted as having practices

that the approach was not originally intended to observe. For

instance, the teachers did not seem to see grammar-

focused teaching as incompatible with CLT. In focused group

discussion, some teachers reported that they allowed the use of the

mother tongue during group activities and occasionally introduced

grammar games in their lessons. CLT remains as the most popular,

almost the default, ELT framework in the Philippines.Lesson plans

and textbooks continue to be written following the principles of CLT.

Moreover, there is another study that has been conducted on

teachers’ perception and implementation of communicative language

teaching (CLT) in Asia specifically in Philippines. Ten experienced

tertiary teachers from a private university in the Philippines were

purposively selected to participate in the study to determine the

beliefs, practices, student’s reactions, and problems encountered

pertaining to CLT. The findings revealed that teachers did not

extensively integrate the principles of CLT into their beliefs. The

results also reflected how they implement CLT in their respective

classrooms. Findings further showed that teachers did not extensively

employ tasks, syllabus, and materials that would realize CLT in

language classrooms. Interestingly, Audiolingual Method remains to

have some influence in teachers even if they claim to use CLT.

In conclusion, although Communicative Language Teaching

(CLT) is the most influential language teaching methodology in the

present world after passing many years in Philippines how much

change CLT has brought to the learners to use English in real life that

remains a big question. The situation points to effective

implementation of CLT in classrooms.Though it is believed that

educational institutions are trying to follow the CLT method to teach

the students communication in English, the reality may be different.

Most of the private institutions seem to work for earning profit. The

authorities of both private and government institutions do not know

how CLT is implemented in their institutions, whether there is any

need to bring change in the implementation. They do not concern

how learners learn English and how far they are successful in real

communication.So I want to investigate how CLT is implemented in

 the classrooms and what are the obstacles behind the

implementation of this in my thesis probably.

III. REFERENCES

Abad, Gemino, Susan Butler, Marjorie Evasco & Christina

Pantoja Hidalgo. 1997. Standards in Philippine English: The writers’
forum. In Maria Lourdes S. Bautista (ed.),  English
is an Asian language: The Philippine context , 163–176.Manila: The
Macquarie Library.

Bolton,Kingsley.2011.The study of Philippine English:The

contribution of corpuslinguistics.InMariaLourdesBautista(ed.), Studies
of Philippine English: Exploring the Philippine component of the
International Corpus of English , xi-xiv.Manila: Anvil Publishing.

Canale, Michael & Merrill Swain. 1980. Theoretical

bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching
and testing.  Applied Linguistics 1(1). 1–47.

Nolasco, Ricardo M. 2008. The prospects of multilingual

education and literacy in the Philippines. In Allan B.I. Bernardo(ed.),
The paradox of Philippine education and education reform: Social
science perspectives , 133–145. Quezon City:Philippine Social
Science Council.

Tupas, Ruanni. 2004. The politics of Philippine English: Neo-

colonialism, global politics, and the problem of postcolo-nialism.
World Englishes , 23(1). 47–58