TEFL

~ COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING ~

By

GEDE NOVALDY PRATAMA T. (2012027003)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION

FACULTY OF LANGUAGE AND ART

GANESHA UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION

SINGARAJA

2020/2021
 INTRODUCTION

The need for good communication skills in English has created a huge demand for
English teaching around the world. Millions of people today want to improve their English
ability or to ensure that their children achieve a good ability in English. Opportunities to learn
English are provided in many different ways such as through formal and non formal education,
as well as through the media and the Internet. The worldwide demand for English has created an
immense demand for quality language teaching and language teaching materials and resources.
Learners want to be able to master English to a high level of accuracy and fluency. As a result,
there are many teaching or learning methodology that appeared or suggested by the expert as a
response to this need. One of the methodologies is known as Communicative Language Teaching
or CLT.
It has been noticed that the goal of the most of the methods is to make the students able to
communicate in the target language. But in the 1970s, the educators tried to find out whether
they were going to meet the goal of the students in a right way or not. It had been observed that
students were able to write and read the sentences in target language correctly. But when it came
to communicate in the target language, they failed to do so. It made clear to the observer that to
make the students able to communicate in the target language, it required more than mastering
only the linguistic structures.
 DISCUSSION

A. WHAT IS COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING (CLT)?

The main purpose of foreign language teaching is to communicate with language.
Meanwhile, CLT is the effective way to achieve this goal. CLT emphasizes the importance of all
four language skills and aims to achieve "communicative competence" (rather than linguistic
competence) through considerable learner interaction and communication of "real" meaning. It is
an approach that tends to promote fluency over accuracy, the functional over the structural, and
authentic materials over fabricated materials. Communication is seen as both the goal and the
means. The goal is based on the communicative approach is an objective which better reflect to
student needs that are how to communicate well, the general purpose of language learning is to
develop students' ability to communicate (competence and performance). The communicative
teaching method views language as a medium of communication.
Richards and Rogers (2001) formulate the characteristics of CLT in the context of
language theory. Language is the system to convey meaning in social interaction and
communication, and this is the primary function of language. The structure of language is the
reflection of its functional and communicative uses, and its primary unit is not only its
grammatical and structural categories, but also functional and communicative meaning features
as represented in discourse.

B. OBJECTIVE OF COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

Communicative language teaching set its goal as communicative competence. What does
this mean? To answer it first we need to compare it with the concept of grammatical
competence. Grammatical competence refers to the knowledge we have of a language to produce
sentences in a language. It refers to knowledge of the building blocks of sentences (e.g., parts of
speech, tenses, phrases, clauses, sentence patterns) and how sentences are formed. Grammatical
competence is the focus of many grammar practice books, which typically present a rule of
grammar on one page, and provide exercises to practice using the rule on the other page. The
unit of analysis and practice is typically the sentence. While grammatical competence is an
important dimension of language learning, it is clearly not all that is involved in learning a
language since one can master the rules of sentence formation in a language and still not be very
successful at being able to use the language for meaningful communication. It is the latter
capacity which is understood by the term communicative competence.
While Communicative competence can be described as the ability not only to apply the
grammatical rules of a language in order to form grammatically correct sentences but also to
know when and where to use these sentences and to whom. According to Richards (2006)
communicative competence includes the following aspects of language knowledge:
 Knowing how to use language for a range of different purposes and functions
 Knowing how to vary our use of language according to the setting and the
participants (e.g., knowing when to use formal and informal speech or when to
use language appropriately for written as opposed to spoken communication)
 Knowing how to produce and understand different types of texts (e.g., narratives,
reports, interviews, conversations)
 Knowing how to maintain communication despite having limitations in one’s
language knowledge (e.g., through using different kinds of communication
strategies)

C. CHARACTERISTICS OF COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

Littlewood (1981) explained that one of the noticeable characteristics of CLT is that it
intensively focuses on functional and structural aspects of language and combines these into a
more fully communicative model. In relation with functional aspect CLT focuses on how to use
the target language, while in structural aspect it is related to system and rules of the target
language. Even though, in the real application functional aspect has more portion compare to
structural aspect due to the portion about the rules of language are not given directly, but implicit
in the learning process.

D. CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES IN CLT

The goal in communicative classroom is to develop fluency in the use of language.
Useful activities used in a communicative language teaching include the following:
1. Role Play
 Role Play refers to as an exercise of bringing a broad range of experience into
classroom learning situation, through stimulation of the learner’s imagination and
interaction with other learners. The aim is to stimulate real-life situation in order to
discover and master the best ways to of dealing with them.
2. Information Gap
An information gap task is a technique in language teaching where students are
missing information necessary to complete a task or solve a problem, and must
communicate with their classmates to fill in the gaps. The rationale behind this
activity is the fact that in real interaction, people generally need to communicate to
get information they do not have.
3. Games
Games have been widely applied in teaching, and there are a large number of games
used in CLT such as spelling bees, crosswords puzzle, riddles, etc. The nature of
games in language teaching is to make the learners concentrate on the activity they
are dealing with and use the language as a means to achieve the goal.
4. Pair Work or Group Work
To achieve the goal of CLT we need to create as much interaction as possible
between learners in the classroom, and this can be done by assigning individuals into
pair or small group work. In addition, the result shows that pair interaction can help
boost the learning opportunities for language learners as all individual is involved in
the social interaction.

E. ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF CLT

Advantages of Communicative Language Teaching
The implementation of CLT has brought alot of advantages for Teaching English as a
foreign/second language. Some expert suggested some of the major advantages of CLT
as follow:
1. It motivates students to improve their ability of using English by themselves since
it emphasizes on fluency in the target language. Its mean that the learning process
allowed them to boarding and improving their ideas about what they are going to
do and express. These enable to raise their confident and enjoy talking more.
 2. CLT focuses on and objectives at communicative competence. thus, allowing the
students to apply the language in a communicative situation to fulfill their needs
in actual-life communication is a priority in CLT . In different words, it brings the
actual life situation of the native English in to classroom activities such as role-
play and simulation.
3. The main part of the learning process is not upon the teacher for this reason
illustrating that CLT classes have moved from teacher-centeredness to learner-
centeredness. In different words, much more time issued by using the learner that
the role of the teacher is just to facilitate the learning process. for that reason, the
learner should exercise and communicate enough in the CLT class to attain
communicative competence.

Disadvantages of Communicative Language Teaching

There have been various disadvantages of Communicative Language Teaching.
1. The method offers priority to meanings and regulations of use rather than to
grammar and rules of structure. In different words, it is felt that there is not
enough emphasis on the correction of pronunciation and grammar error. it is
because too much attention on meaning at the expense of form. it's far believed
that with CLT there is a danger of focusing too much on oral skills and less
emphasis is given to reading and writing abilities.
2. The CLT approach focuses on fluency but not accuracy in grammar and
pronunciation.
3. The CLT approach is great for intermediate student and advanced students, but
for beginners some controlled practice is needed Students with low levels of
proficiency in the target language may find it difficult to participate in oral
communicative activities and, if the exams used by any institution are grammar
based, communicative fluency may not be appropriate.
4. The monitoring ability of the teacher must be very good. despite teachers’ best
efforts, classroom activities are not truly real-life and it can be difficult to breed
honestly authentic language use and to facilitate real interaction. furthermore, a
chief principle underlying this method is its emphasis on learners' needs and
 interests. this implies that much more effort is predicted that each teacher should
modify the syllabus to correspond with the needs of the learners.
5. CLT is sometimes tough to be implemented in an EFL classroom due to the lack
of sources and equipments like authentic materials and native speaker teachers as
well as large size of the classes. in addition, suitable classrooms aren't available
that can permit for group paintings activities and for teaching aids and materials.
6. Often, there is not text, grammar rules are not presented, and classroom
arrangement is nonstandard. Students are expected to interact primarily with each
other rather than with the teacher, and correction of errors may be absent or
infrequent. Student with low levels of proficiency in the target language may find
it difficult to participate in oral communicative activities and, if the exams used
by an institution are grammar based, communicative fluency may not be
appropriate.
 REFERENCES

Darwis, D. (2011). Orientasi Dan Pendekatan Belajar Berbahasa Inggris. LENSA, 1(1), 1-11.

Farid, A. (2015). Communicative Language Teaching : Implications for the Communicative

Classroom. Educate, 4(1), 47-56.

Febriyanti, R. H. (2017). Penggunaan Metode Communicative Language Teaching Dalam

Pengajaran Bahasa Inggris Pada Guru Tutor Di Bimbingan Belajar. Faktor Jurnal Ilmiah
Kependidikan, 4(3), 319-328..

Larsen-Freeman, D., Anderson, M. (2011). Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching.

Oxford University Press.

Richard, J. (2006). Communicative Language Teaching Today. Cambridge University Press.

Richard, J., Rodgers, T. (2001). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge
University Press.