Worksheet 1.

1
(Re)-positioning Grammar within the Communicative Approach
Titela Vilceanu
University of Craiova

Read the underlying principles of CA and decide what is the place of grammar
teaching as well as the teacher’s and learner’s roles and responsibilities:

Classroom activities should maximize opportunities for learners to use the target
language for meaningful purposes, with their attention on the messages they are creating
and the tasks they are completing, rather than on the correctness of language and
language structure.
Learners trying their best to use the target language creatively and unpredictably are
bound to make errors; this is a normal part of language learning, and constant
correction is unnecessary, and even counterproductive.
Language analysis and grammar explanation may help some learners, but extensive
experience of target language use helps everyone.
Effective language teaching is responsive to the needs and interests of the individual
learner.
Effective language learning is an active process, in which the learner takes increasing
responsibility for his or her progress.
The effective teacher aims to facilitate, not control, the language learning process.
(Mitchell, 1994: 38-39)

the status of the foreign language in the classroom, i.e. the extent to which it is used in
the instruction process.
attitude to error: what, when and how to correct? In the traditional model, error was
seen as a heavy impairment, being sanctioned immediately and error correction was the
teacher’s central pedagogic tool. In COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING,
there is tolerance to error, which is understood as a natural stage in the learner’s
linguistic development. authenticity of language: a wide range of authentic or real life
materials (realia) is used in the classroom. Besides exposing learners to real life
situational language, these materials also immerse them in the foreign language culture
and raise the learners’ motivation for learning the language of the other speech
community.
spoken and written language are treated as separate entities, requiring different teaching
techniques.
practice vs. real language: even if, to some extent, the learners still perceive the
classroom environment as not genuine, there is meaningful interaction in and through
the foreign language, relating back to the intention to mean and legitimacy of tasks.
(Grenfell and Harris, 1999:21)