Today, I would like to tell you about one of teaching approaches that I’m really into and

this approach has a major impact on my teaching. It’s Communicative Approach.

My talk will answer two questionsWhat is the Communicative Approach? And how
to adopt this approach to teaching English for students?

To answer the first questions, unlike other approaches, communicative language teaching
makes use of real-life situations that necessitate communication. The teacher sets up a
situation that students are likely to encounter in real life.

So, it is about helping students develop communicative competence, which means the

ability to use proper grammar and linguistic structure in different  real-life contexts and
the ability to adapt to different situations.

If CA is applied, the role of teacher and students and interaction between them will
change. Teacher plays a role as a guide, a facilitator or an instructor. In term of students’
roles, they are communicators who actively engaged in trying to make themselves
understood and in understanding others. Since communicative competence is our aim, it
is essential that students be given every opportunity to practice communicating.
Therefore, teacher talking time (TTT) must be kept to a minimum. Learners will interact
with each other in pairs or groups, to encourage a flow of language, and maximize the
percentage of talking time, rather than just teacher to student and vice versa.

So, how teacher should do to apply CA to their teaching effectively?

If using this approach, teachers have present a grammar topic in a meaningful context.
For instance, with the new topic of Past Simple Tense , the teacher may show pictures of
her trip last month and tell the students something like: “I went on a holiday with my
friends last month”.

With the Communicative Approach, teachers can integrate a grammar or vocabulary

lesson with receptive and productive language skills. It is one of outstanding benefit of
CLT. For example, if teacher adopt CA to teach students Present Simple Tense, some
activities in the stage of Production aims at help students using this tense to talk about
their daily routine or facts.
Next, when it comes to learning activities. Activities in CLT typically involved students
in real or realistic conversation where the successful achievement of the communicative
task they are performing is as important as the accuracy of their language use. Therefore,
role play and simulation is very popular in CLT. For instance, students might simulate a
TV programme or a scene at an airport or solve a puzzle by sharing information. It gives
students a chance to have constant interaction with and exposure to the target language.

In terms of materials, teacher should use authentic materials which allows teachers to
supplement or replace the boring ESL textbook. Some examples for authentic materials
are short texts from advertisements, brochures or videos from movies, TV commercials
and so on.

To sum up, because language learning is learning to communicate, by applying CA, I can
prepare my students to be confident communicators for different real-life context,
through repetive oral practices and student-student cooperation.

Follow-up questions:

In my opinion, to enhance effectiveness or quality of the lesson, I want to apply

technology to teaching English for my students in real classroom in case my
classroom must be fully equiped with projector, computer and Internet access. In
addition, all of my students can use their phones so that they can participate in some
online games to reinforce vocabulary like Kahoot, Quizizz or Wordcloud. They may
join some platform like Polleverywhere, Nearpod to share their ideas with the whole
class. Or I can let them compete with each other. I believe that if these changes are
done, my lesson will be more enjoyable and I can boost Ss’ motivation and their
concentration for my lesson.