The Present:

An Informed
Approach
 Approach

▪ Your approach: rationale for language learning

and teaching.
▪ Approach includes a number of basic principles
of learning and teaching.
▪ The interaction between your approach and
your classroom practice is the key to dynamic
teaching.
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 1. Communicative Language Teaching

▪ The characteristics:
1. Classroom goals are focused on all of the
components (grammar, discourse, functional,
sociolinguistic, and strategic) of communicative
competence. Goals must intertwine the
organizational aspects of language with the
pragmatic.
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 2. Language techniques are designed to engage
learners in the pragmatic, authentic, functional
use of language for meaningful purposes.
Organizational language forms are not the
central focus, but rather aspects of language
that enable the learner to accomplish those
purposes.
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 3. Fluency and accuracy are seen as
complementary principles underlying
communicative techniques. At times fluency
may have more importance than accuracy in
order to keep learners meaningfully engaged in
language use.

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 4. Students in a communicative class have to use
the language in unrehearsed contexts outside
the classroom. Classroom tasks must therefore
equip students with the skills necessary for
communication in those contexts.

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 5. Students are given opportunities to focus on
their own learning process through an
understanding of their own styles of learning
and through the development of appropriate
strategies for autonomous learning.

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 6. The role of the teacher is that of facilitator and
guide. Students are encouraged to construct
meaning through genuine linguistic interaction
with others.

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 Caveats of CLT
1. Beware of giving lip service to principle of CLT.
2. Avoid overdoing certain CLT features: engaging
in real-life, authentic language in the classroom
to the total exclusion of potential helpful
controlled exercises, grammatical pointers or
analytical devices.
3. Remember there are numerous interpretation
of CLT.
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 Learner-centered Instruction

1. Techniques that focus on or account for

learners’ needs, styles, and goals;
2. Techniques that give some control to the
student;
3. Curricula that include the consultation and
input of students and that do not presuppose
objectives in advance;
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 4. Techniques that allow for student creativity
and innovation;
5. Techniques that enhance a student’s sense of
competence and self-worth.

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 2. Cooperative and Collaborative
Learning
▪ In Cooperative Learning, students and teachers
work together to pursue goals and objectives.
▪ In Cooperative Learning models, a group
learning activity is dependent on the socially
structured exchange of information between
learners.

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 ▪ In Collaborative Learning, the learner engages
with more capable others (teachers, advanced
peers, etc.).

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 3. Interactive Learning

▪ Characteristics:
1. Doing a significant amount of pair work and
group work;
2. Receiving authentic language input in real-
world contexts;
3. Producing language for genuine, meaningful
communication;
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 4. Performing classroom tasks that prepare them
for actual language use;
5. Practicing oral communication through the give
and take and spontaneity of actual
conversations;
6. Writing to and for real audiences.

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 4. Whole Language Education
The emphases are:
1. The “wholeness” of language as opposed to
views that fragmented language into bits and
pieces of phonemes, graphemes, morphemes,
and words;
2. The interaction and interconnection between
oral language and written language;
3. The importance of the written code as natural
and developmental.
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 ▪ Two interconnected concepts:
1. The wholeness of language implies that
language is not the sum of its many dissectible
and discrete parts. First language acquisition
research shows us that children begin
perceiving “wholes” well before “parts”.
2. Whole language is a perspective “anchored in a
vision of an equitable, democratic, diverse
society” (Edelsky, 1993).
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 5. Content-based Instruction

1. CBI is the integration of content learning with

language teaching aims (Brinton, Snow, and
Wesche, 1989).
2. CBI may yield an increase in intrinsic motivation
and empowerment, since students are focused
on the subject matter that is important to their
lives.
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 6. Task-based Instruction
▪ According to Peter Skehan (1988), task is an
activity in which:
1. Meaning is primary;
2. There is some communication problem to
solve;
3. There is some sort of relationship to
comparable real-world activities;

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 4. Task completion has some priority
5. The assessment of the task is in terms of
outcome.

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 ▪ A task is a special form of technique.
▪ In some cases, task and techniques may be
synonymous: a problem-solving task/technique,
a role-play task/technique.

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 ▪ In other cases, a task may be comprised of
several techniques. For example a problem-
solving task may include grammatical
explanation, teacher-initiated questions, and a
specific turn-taking procedure.

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 ▪ Types of tasks that enhance learning: open-
ended, structured, teacher-fronted, small group,
and pair work.

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 ▪ Consider the techniques and check for
important pedagogical purposes:

▪ Do they ultimately point learners beyond the

forms of language alone to real-world contexts?
▪ Do they specifically contribute to
communicative goals?

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 ▪ Are their elements carefully designed and not
thrown together?
▪ Are their objectives well specified so that you
can at some later point accurately determine
the success of one technique over another?
▪ Do they engage learners in some form of
genuine problem-solving activity?

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 Thank you

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