Communicative Language Teaching, called CLT.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT):

Origin:

Communicative language teaching began in Britain in the 1960s as a replacement to the earlier structural method, called Situational Language Teaching. This was partly in response to Chomsky's criticisms of structural theories of language and partly based on the theories of British functional linguistics, such as Firth and Halliday, as well as American sociolinguists, such as Hymes, Gumperz and Labov and the writings of Austin and Searle on speech acts.
The communicative approach could be said to be the product of educators and linguists who had grown dissatisfied with the audio-lingual and grammar-translation methods of foreign language instruction. They felt that students were not learning enough realistic, whole language. They did not know how to communicate using appropriate social language, gestures, or expressions; in brief, they were at a loss to communicate in the culture of the language studied. Interest in and development of communicative-style teaching mushroomed in the 1970s; authentic language use and classroom exchanges where students engaged in real communication with one another became quite popular.
In the intervening years, the communicative approach has been adapted to the elementary, middle, secondary, and post-secondary levels, and the underlying philosophy has spawned different teaching methods known under a variety of names, including notional-functional, teaching for proficiency, proficiency-based instruction, and communicative language teaching.

Definition:

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. Unlike the audio-lingual method of language teaching, which relies on repetition and drills, the communicative approach can leave students in suspense as to the outcome of a class exercise, which will vary according to their reactions and responses. The real-life simulations change from day to day. Students' motivation to learn comes from their desire to communicate in meaningful ways about meaningful topics.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).
This method is learner-centered and emphasizes communication and real-life situations.

Learner-Centered: The role of the instructor in CLT is quite different from traditional teaching methods. In the traditional classroom, the teacher is in charge and "controls" the learning. In CLT the teacher serves as more of a facilitator, allowing students to be in charge of their own learning. The teacher still sets up exercises and gives direction to the class, but the students do much more speaking than in a traditional classroom. This responsibility to participate can often lead to an increased sense of confidence in using the language. Putting the teacher in charge of everything in the traditional classroom has been compared to the Atlas Complex (Lee and Vanpatten, 1995). CLT relieves Atlas of his "burden."
Communication: Language is used for communication. For this reason, CLT makes use of communication to teach languages. Whereas traditional language teaching places a lot of emphasis on grammar rules and verb conjugations, CLT emphasizes real-life situations and communication in context (Galloway, 1993). While grammar is still important in the CLT classroom, the emphasis is on communicating a message.
In CLT, students practice real-life situations, for example, buying food at the market or asking someone for directions.
In these exercises, the goal is for the student to communicate his or her needs and thoughts, without worrying about having perfect grammar.

Social Context: CLT also stresses social and situational contexts of communication. For example, in many languages, the form of "you" changes depending on the age and status of the two speakers. Addressing a person in the proper way can make a big difference in having a successful exchange, even if the verb tenses aren't right.

Approach:

Theory of language:
The functional view of language is the primary one behind the communicative method, as well as.
Theory of learning:
Not a great deal has been written about the learning theory behind the communicative approaches, but there are some principles that may be inferred:
1. Activities that involve real communication promote learning.
2. Activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning language that is meaningful to the learner promotes learning.

Design:

Objectives:
Here are some of the objectives of communicative Language Teaching:
1. Students will learn to use language as a means of expression.
2. Students will use language as a means of expressing values and judgments.
3. Students will learn to express the functions that best meet their own communication needs.

The Syllabus:
Communicative language teaching often uses a fuctional-nacional syllabus. Yalden (1987) has classified a number of communicative syllabus types.
Types of learning techniques and activities:
Communicative language teaching uses almost any activity that engages learners in authentic communication. Littewood, however has distinguished two major activity types:
Functional communication activities: one aimed at developing certain language skills and functions, but which involve communication, and
Social interaction activities, such as conversation and discussion sessions, dialogues and role plays.

References:

http://coe.sdsu.ed/eet/Articles/comlangteach/index.htm.
http://www.sil.org/LinguaLinks/LanguageLearning/WaysToApproachLanguageLearning/CommunicativeLanguageTeaching.htm

how to teach pronunciation?

pronunciation:

(noun): the way in which we pronounce a wordpronounce. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1i0iM0D4yI&feature=related

(verb): to make the sound of a word.

http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/index.htm

How to Teach Pronunciation:
Pronunciation often gets ignored over grammar and vocabulary in ESL programs. However, it is just as important because with bad or garbled pronunciation, the spoken message gets lost. “I think” becomes “I sink,” to give a common example. With ESL learners across the world, each country and culture has its own verbal albatross. Here is how can you can begin to use pronunciation for your students’ needs.

There are seven steps that you can take into account:

Step 1
Get to understand why English words can be so problematic for non-native speakers of English to pronounce. Understanding this difficulty from your students' point of view will better equip you to help them overcome it.
Step 2
Obtain phonetic charts that have symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). These charts are available from teaching supply companies and books such as those in the English File series. Hang this up in your class, and familiarize your students with the pronunciation symbols. You can use these charts to teach pronunciation by helping your students understand the sounds that they get wrong, as well as the correct sounds for a given word or similar words.

Step 3
Keep your lessons as informal as possible. Students might initially be shy about pronunciation. By using fun, silly activities, it creates a more relaxed, effective atmosphere than strict practice. Tongue twisters are one such fun activity. See the Resources section for a link. http://www.eslcafe.com/search/Tongue_Twisters/index.html
Step 4
Use syllable races as an exercise to teach pronunciation. Get a "Snakes and Ladders" board game, and then prepare flash cards that each have a one-syllable, two- or three-syllable word written on it. Instead of throwing a dice, each player will draw a card and if she pronounces the word correctly, she gets to move as many spaces on the board as there are syllables in the word on the flash card. The winner is the player who gets to the end first.

Step 5
Get familiar with the different elements of the spoken word--word stress, minimal pairs, pronunciation, intonation and sentence stress--so that you will be able to explain them and be able to create your own lessons geared towards what your students find difficult.
Step 6
Use a feather to demonstrate the difference between aspirated and un-aspirated sounds, by holding it right in front of your lips as you say the word.
Step 7
Help your students differentiate between minimal pairs by reading phrases for them to draw. For example, have them draw sketches that depict: "A ship’s on the sea" and "A sheep’s on the shore."

http://www.ehow.com/how_4549513_teach-pronunciation-esl-learners.html

About grammar!

Some tips provided by NCLRC in their article: The essential of grammar teaching are:

1. Limit the time you devote to grammar explanations to 10 minutes, especially for lower level students whose ability to sustain attention can be limited.

2. Present grammar points in written and oral ways to address the needs of students with different learning styles.

3. Be sure the examples are accurate and appropriate. They must present the language appropriately, be culturally appropriate for the setting in which they are used, and be to the point of the lesson.

4. Use the examples as teaching tools. Focus examples on a particular theme or topic so that students have more contact with specific information and vocabulary.

Notice how this article recommends only 10-minute explanation. That is because, as María Ortíz pointed out, students tend to get bored.
Another point was to present grammar in both written and oral form. This is quite important; as you know, some students have the visual learning style more developed than the rest, some others have the auditory channel ready to learn while others the kinesthetic one, so you should give as many options as possible. Another reason is that while having grammar in written and oral form, the students are connecting information and their brains are working actively, that helps them memorize grammar easier.

Giving examples when explaining grammar is pivotal. But when giving them we should consider the cultural context. (i.e. if you are teaching English to religious people in a religious school, you should avoid the use of taboo)

The last point is integrating grammar with vocabulary. This point has been mentioned by Edelsy, Ivon, Ninoska and María Milagros Amodío. As we have discussed in class, grammar per se is just a waste of time so we have to adapt the examples and activities to as real-like situations in order to promote meaningful learning.

Teaching grammar, how?

* Use songs (María Ortiz's suggestion)
* Use a video (Ninoska's suggestions)

A proposal:

1st you expose your students to the structure in a natural way. (playing a video, some people talking and using the structure)
2nd you ask them questions about the video and use ocassionally the structure
3rd you ask your students if they know the structure they already saw in the video and heard from you and themselves.
4th you write on the board the structure and give a brief explanation (no longer than 10minutes)
5th you propose an activity to your students to put in practice the structure in oral and written form (The activities should be as real as possible)

contextualizing grammar

NOBEMBER 25th-2009
By Ninoska Gutiérrez.
According to some research second language grammar can be acquired naturally from meaningful input and opportunities to interact in the classroom. Moreover, each student needs specific time to be ready to start using that knowledge. .It means that the learners fist picks up specific features of the language and pays attention to then, they NOTICE items of the language and the way they are used ,them learners tend to use their capacity to analyzed new language, all these sequences bring us to the concept of readiness to learn that appears to be important.
Based on that analysis, there are three perspectives to use when presenting grammar: grammar as meaning, grammar in discourse and grammar and style. It means that it is important to contextualize grammatical structures and that the context in which grammar is embedded needs to be generally useful and appropriate to the needs of the learners. Context can be created through visuals, the teacher mining, dialogues, a text, a song, video or through situations Sep up by the teacher.

TEACHING GRAMMAR

Through the passing of the time the various methods for teaching grammar has been discussing, especially in schools and high schools. Teaching grammar is not an easy task, students have created an image of this as something tedious and boring, usually preferring to study other components before this. It is for that reason that we as future teachers should use interactive and entertaining methods to motivate students to attend classes so they have fun while they are learning, and it makes they not see grammatical structures as something difficult to understand. One of the techniques that could be implemented would be to work with songs that containing the different grammatical structures that help students to understand them better. It is important to state that grammar classes should never be repetitive and monotonous because students may lose interest in learning and practicing all they have learned before.

María Ortiz

Teaching grammar today.

Today, in spite of all those new theories in TGG about levels of grammatical representation from Noam Chomsky and SFG networks of meaning from Michael Halliday, many ESL teachers immediately recall to diagramming sentences and endless skill exercises, when heard the word “Grammar”. They perhaps embraced the notion of traditional teaching with a discrete set of rigid rules to be memorized, practiced and followed which probably make them be frustrated and baffled by the lack of grammar instruction in the classroom.

First, teachers are required to determine what students know. The next step is to determine what the students already know through an assessment. It is important to be careful with this assessment; it is easy to test surface knowledge of a grammar concept without testing the underlying knowledge. Many students will be able to recognize a sentence fragment as incorrect, but they may not know the concept by its correct name, why it is incorrect, or how to correct it. Teachers must design their assessment to reveal true understanding of the grammatical concepts.

One of the most important things to be taken into account is how the students are involved with grammar. Grammar instruction should be custom-made to meet the needs of students, and should interlace both prescriptive and descriptive practices into relevant and meaningful instruction.

As a final point, as TEACHING TODAY recommends, teachers must use the results of the pre-assessment to outline three to four grammar skills to focus on each week. The goal of effective grammar instruction is to weave it into the reading and writing that function as the backbone of the English curriculum. So, they have to consider their pacing guide and embed grammar concepts logically into it.

Teaching grammar can not be separated from teaching vocabulary, because teachers have to take in account that to develope grammar structures is need it to have enough vocabulary to create logical sentences in students´ production exercises. Students must handle a certain kind of common words which are usually used in similar structures and in daily life also. However their practice in the classroom it´s going to be the best activity to memorize new words and dictionaries too of course.

Teaching Grammar

Through the time it has been thought that grammar is just related to structures and that is the way in which it is taught in high schools, but specialists have been researching effective ways to get it better. Personally I think students need to practice every grammar structure orally and not only in the written form using some exercises which help them to produce beyond them.

As I read in The Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom book "practice can also contribute to explicit knowledge about language forms and begin the process of learners gradually developing the ability to use a rule accurately and automatically in production [1]" ........ That's what I'm in agreement with.

[1] Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom (p.167)
Tricia Hedge
Oxford University Press, 2000

How to teach grammar?

Grammar is an important tool to learn a second language, you have to take into account a sequence of specific contest and skill, grammar and pronunciation are friends and they cannot be separed, grammar is not easy to learn but there are specific techniques or strategies for teaching grammar.

Section Contents:

1.-Goals and Techniques for Teaching Grammar .

2.-Strategies for Learning Grammar.

3.-Developing Grammar Activities.

4.-Using Textbook Grammar Activities.

5.- Assessing Grammar Proficiency.

http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/grammar/grindex.htm

1.-Goals and Techniques for Teaching Grammar
The goal of grammar instruction is to enable students to carry out their communication purposes. This goal has three implications:
-Students need overt instruction that connects grammar points with larger communication contexts.
-Students do not need to master every aspect of each grammar point, only those that are relevant to the immediate communication task.

-Error correction is not always the instructor's first responsibility.

http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/grammar/goalsgram.htm

2.-Strategies for Learning Grammar:

Language teachers and language learners are often frustrated by the disconnect between knowing the rules of grammar and being able to apply those rules automatically in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This disconnect reflects a separation between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge.
http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/grammar/stratgram.htm

3.-Developing Grammar Activities:

For curricula that introduce grammatical forms in a specified sequence, instructors need to develop activities that relate form to meaning and use.
Describe the grammar point, including form, meaning, and use, and give examples (structured input)
Ask students to practice the grammar point in communicative drills (structured output)
Have students do a communicative task that provides opportunities to use the grammar point (communicative output)
For curricula that follow a sequence of topics, instructors need to develop activities that relate the topical discourse (use) to meaning and form.
Provide oral or written input (audiotape, reading selection) that addresses the topic (structured input)
Review the point of grammar, using examples from the material (structured input)
Ask students to practice the grammar point in communicative drills that focus on the topic (structured output)
Have students do a communicative task on the topic (communicative output)

http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/grammar/developgram.htm

4.- Using Textbook Grammar Activities:

Textbooks usually provide one or more of the following three types of grammar exercises.
Mechanical drills: Each prompt has only one correct response, and students can complete the exercise without attending to meaning. For example:George waited for the bus this morning. He will wait for the bus tomorrow morning, too.
Meaningful drills: Each prompt has only one correct response, and students must attend to meaning to complete the exercise. For example:Where are George’s papers? They are in his notebook.(Students must understand the meaning of the question in order to answer, but only one correct answer is possible because they all know where George’s papers are.)
Communicative drills, described in Strategies for Learning Grammar

http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/grammar/textgram.htm

5.- Assessing Grammar Proficiency:

1.- Authentic Assessment.

2.- Mechanical Tests.

http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/grammar/assessgram.htm

How to teach Grammar?

Teaching a foreign language is not an easy task. We, teachers, should face certain difficulties. However, it is our job to find ways to overcome such difficulties. I invite you all to share different strategies to teach grammar.

Welcome

Welcome to our new discussion scenario. Using this blog will allow us to share information and opinions about classroom activities. So let us take advantage of it!