RECOGNIZED

UNIVERSITY OF SINDH
MIRPURKHAS CAMPUS
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
M.A ENGLISH PREVIOUS 2ND SEMESTER 2020
COURSE
ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING
TEACHER
SHEIKH AWAIS AHMED
M.A ENGLISH LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF MODERN LANGUAGES
The Communicative Approach
The ever-growing need for good communication skills in English has created a huge
demand for English teaching around the world. Since its inception in the 1970s, CLT has served as a
major source of influence on language teaching practices. It showed dissatisfaction with earlier
approaches of LT. The earlier approaches focused on the product rather than the process. Further, it
needs to focus on

• A communicative or functional approach to language teaching.

• What learners need to understand and express through the TL and not on the accumulation of
grammatical items and structures

Major Influences
Candlin and Widdowson drew on the work of British functional linguists (e.g., Firth,
Halliday), American work in sociolinguistics (e.g., Hymes, Gumperz, Labov) as well as work in
philosophy (e.g., Austin and Searle). The changing political and educational realities in Europe
also had their influence.

Aims of CLT
• Makes communicative competence the goal of language teaching

• Develops procedures for the teaching of the four language skills that acknowledge the
interdependence of language and communication.

Strong (learning to use) and Weak (using an L2 to learn it) CLT.

Principles of CLT
✓ Learners learn a language through usage and communication.

✓ Authentic and meaningful communication should be the goal of classroom activities.

✓ Fluency is an important dimension of communication.

✓ Communication involves the integration of different language skills.

✓ Learning is a process of creative construction and involves trial and error.

Major Functions of Language (Halliday)

Instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative, and
representational language errors are sometimes tolerated.
Activities

It is based on communicative processes such as information sharing, negotiation of

meaning, and interaction (completing a map/picture, dialogues, role plays, simulations, skits,
improvisations, and debates)

Role of a Learner

Negotiator – Between the self, the learning process, and the object of learning.

Contributor - Learner is not a passive recipient of knowledge.

Roles of a Teacher
• Facilitator - between all participants in the classroom, and between these participants and
the various activities and texts.

• Participant - within the learning - teaching group.

• Organizer, guide.

• Researcher, learner.

• Needs Analyst, counselor.

The Role of Instructional Materials

They ought to be authentic and from-life (signs, magazines, advertisements, and

newspapers, etc.) and graphic and visual sources (e.g., maps, pictures, symbols, graphs,
and charts).

Critical Appreciation
It is popular in many contexts since its inception. There is not a single, uniform
method that could be called ‘communicative’ – different techniques. There is no
textbook – virtually no formal teaching. It is difficult to implement – demands on a
teacher.

Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT)

TBLT can be regarded as a recent version or logical development of
communicative methodology and seeks to reconcile methodology with current theories of SLA.
It makes the use of tasks as the core unit of planning and instruction in language teaching. There
is focus on classroom processes.
Assumptions of TBLT (Feez, 1998: 17)
• Basic elements are purposeful activities and tasks that emphasize communication and meaning.

• Activities and tasks are related to learners’ real-life communication needs and pedagogical
purposes within the classroom.

• Activities and tasks of a task-based syllabus are sequenced according to difficulty.

• The difficulty of a task depends on a range of factors: the previous experience of the learner, the
complexity of the task, the language required to undertake the task, and the degree of support
available

The Concept of Task

It is an important element in syllabus design, classroom teaching, and learner

assessment. It is an activity or goal that is carried out using language, e.g., finding a
solution to a puzzle, reading a map, and giving directions, etc. It focuses on meaning.
Task involves two or more learners and calls upon the learners’ use of communication
strategies and interactional skills. It has an outcome and resemblance to real-life
language use.

Types of Tasks
• Listing, ordering and sorting, comparing, problem solving, sharing personal experiences, creative
tasks (Willis, 1996).

• Jigsaw tasks, Information gap, Decision-making.

• One-way or two-way, convergent or divergent, collaborative or competitive, simple or complex

processing, etc.

Roles of a Learner: Group participant, monitor, risk-taker, and innovator.

Roles of a Teacher: Selector and sequencer of tasks, preparing learners for tasks, consciousness-
raising.

Role of Teaching Materials: Dependent on a sufficient supply of appropriate classroom tasks.

Procedure: Sequence of activities, pre-task, task and post-task activities.

 Critical Appreciation
▪ Tasks provide both the input and output.

▪ Task activity and achievement are motivational. However, task development may require
considerable time, ingenuity, and resources.

▪ Many aspects of TBLT have yet to be justified (e.g., evaluation of tasks).

The Silent Way

It was devised by Caleb Gattegno and is based on the premise that the teacher should be
silent as much as possible in the classroom but the learner should be encouraged to produce as
much language as possible. It makes use of color charts and the colored Cuisenaire rods.

Assumptions
▪ Learning is facilitated if the learner discovers or creates rather than remembers and
repeats what is to be learned.

▪ Learning is facilitated by accompanying (mediating) physical objects.

▪ Learning is facilitated by problem solving involving the material to be learned.

Approach of Learning

What matters is grasping the “spirit” of the language, and not just its component forms.
“Spirit”- each language is composed of phonological and suprasegmental elements that combine to
give the language its unique sound system and melody. It is structural approach to the
organization of language to be taught. The sentence is the basic unit of teaching. Teacher focuses
on propositional meaning rather than communicative value. It emphasizes on learning th e
grammar rules through largely inductive processes.

Silence – the best vehicle for learning because it enables students to concentrate on the task to be
accomplished and the potential means to its accomplishment.
 Design and Objectives
✓ To give beginning-level students oral and aural facility in basic elements of the target
language.

✓ The general goal - near-native fluency: Correct pronunciation and mastery of the prosodic
elements of L2

✓ Basic practical knowledge of grammar

✓ Simple linguistic tasks in which the teacher models (minimal) a word, phrase, sentence.

✓ Learners create their own utterances by putting together old and new information.

✓ Charts, rods, and other aids may be used to elicit learner responses.

Learners are independent, autonomous, and responsible. They work cooperatively rather
than competitively. The teacher is like a complete dramatist: writes the script; chooses the props;
sets the mood; models the action; designates the players; and acts as a critic f or the performance

The Bilingual Method

It was developed by Dr. C.J. Dodson to improve audio-visual method. It is also a reaction
against the direct method. The excessive use of the DM would result in disappearance of the
vernacular in future. DM operates at the expense of the first language, and cannot make the
learner bilingual. The Bilingual method makes use of two languages - the mother tongue and the TL
and may be considered as a combination of DM and GTM. L1 is used to gloss difficult words and
not for translating the whole language as was done in GTM.

Assumptions
• L2 may be learnt with the help of L1 – provided it is not used as translation but as a means
to achieve communication ends.

• L1 is not considered as interfering with the learning process in L2

• Teacher may banish L1 from the classroom but not from the learners’ mind.

• Language is a way of making infinite use of finite means.

• L1 seems to be the ideal means of getting the meaning across completely and quick ly.
 Procedures of Bilingual Method

This approach aims to develop L2 spontaneously within a lesson cycle. Well -ordered
activities are to take the students up to a conversational level in the shortest possible time.
A teacher reads out a dialogue to the class just once which students listen to with their
books closed. The class repeats the lines with their books open.

Principles of the Bilingual Method

✓ Controlled use of the students’ mother-tongue

✓ Early introduction of reading and writing

✓ Integration of various skills

How Does it Differ from GTM?

Only the teacher uses L1 in BM to explain meaning. The pupils are given a lot of practice in
the drill of sentence patterns that is not provided in GTM.

Critical Appreciation
✓ Not an innovative method, still similar to GTM, L1 use.

✓ Demands on teachers – proficiency in both L1 and L2.

✓ Scarcity of good teachers with excellent command of spoken and written L2 may be a
difficulty in implementing this method.

The Post-Methods Era

Background

The notion of methods came under criticism in the 1990s. A number of limitations
implicit in the notion of all-purpose methods were raised. Mainstream language teaching
no longer regarded methods as the key factor in accounting for success or failure. Som e
spoke of the death of methods and approaches and the term “post-methods era” was used
 Criticism on Methods

Methods typically prescribe for teachers what and how to teach.

✓ Good teaching is regarded as correct use of the method

✓ The role of the teacher is marginalized. Moreover, learners are also sometimes viewed as
the passive recipients of the method, i.e. they must submit themselves to its regime of
exercises and activities.

✓ The concept of learner-centeredness and teacher creativity remains absent

✓ Methods remain less flexible and adaptive to learners’ needs and interests.

Role of Contextual Factors

Methods claim all-purpose solutions to teaching problems - useful in any context

and under any circumstance. Therefore, teachers ignore a careful consideration of the
context. This includes the cultural context, the political context, the local institutional
context, and the context constituted by the teachers and learners in their classrooms. It
talks about assumptions; about the roles of teachers and learners that are not necessarily
culturally universal, and cultural imperialism.

The Need for Curriculum Development Processes

▪ Curriculum planners debate over ‘teaching method’ as part of a broader set of educationa l
planning decisions

▪ Choice of method cannot, therefore, be determined in isolation from other planning and
implementation practices.

Lack of Research Basis

Approaches and methods are often based on the assumption that the processes of
L2 learning are fully understood. Much of such research does not support the often -
simplistic theories and prescriptions found in some approaches and methods.

Similarity of Classroom Practices

Many of the distinctions used to contrast methods did not exist in the actual practice
of classroom activities.
 Beyond Approaches and Methods
There is need to learn how to use different approaches and methods when they might
be useful teachers may develop their personal approach by realizing

1. Their role in the classroom and the structure of an effective lesson.

2. The nature of effective teaching and learning and the difficulties of learners and their
solutions.

3. Successful learning activities.

Compiled by:
(Sheikh Awais Ahmed)
M.A English Linguistics & Literature.