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COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING IN CLASSROOM
Sarvinoz Baxtiyorovna Muslimova
Student, (KarshiSU)
Superviser: Saida Bozorovna Avlaeva (Karshi SU)
ABSTRACT
The article analyses the effectiveness of Communicative Language Teaching in classroom and discusses some methods of this approach, as well as it compares the main differences between grammar translation and CLT methods. This method claims to encourage learners to incorporate their personal experiences into their language learning environment and to focus on the learning experience
Key words: CLT, language skills, methodology, student-student corporation, communication, cohesion, pragmatic competence.
The ever-growing 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 command of English or to ensure that their children achieve a good command of English. And opportunities to learn English are provided in many different ways such as through formal instruction, travel, study abroad, as well as through the media and the Internet. The worldwide demand for English has created an enormous demand for quality language teaching and language teaching materials and resources. Learners set themselves demanding goals. They want to be able to master English to a high level of accuracy and fluency. Employers, too, insist that their employees have good English language skills, and fluency in English is a prerequisite for success and advancement in many fields of employment in today's world. The demand for an appropriate teaching methodology is therefore as strong as ever. In this article we will examine the methodology known as communicative language teaching, or CLT, and explore the assumptions it is based on, its origins and evolution since it was first proposed in the 1970s, and how it has influenced approaches to language teaching today. Since its inception in the 1970s, CLT has served as a major source of influence on language teaching practice around the world. Many of the issues raised by a communicative teaching methodology are still relevant today, though teachers who are relatively new to the profession may not be familiar with them. This booklet therefore serves to review what we have learned from CLT and what its relevance is today.
Communicative language teaching emerged in the 1980s as a response to the growing demand for a language curriculum that would enable learners to use the second
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language in real-life situations. Previously, foreign language teaching has predominantly had its emphasis on grammatical competence, rather than actually focusing on developing students' communication and interaction skills. At the end of the day, language does principally exist to make communication possible. CLT methods primarily focus on the interaction during a classroom-based foreign language class or online language learning session, in which students actually produce speech and conversation for most of the classroom time using the target language.
The main purpose behind communicative language teaching methods is to prepare students to be confident communicators for different real-life contexts, through repetitive oral practices and student-student cooperation. In CLT, communication is the end and the means of the teaching method.
Language teaching was originally considered a cognitive matter that mainly involved memorization. It was later thought instead to be socio-cognitive: language can be learned through the process of social interaction. Today, however, the dominant technique in teaching any language is communicative language teaching (CLT). Communicative language teaching (CLT), or the communicative approach(CA) , is an approach to language teaching that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of study.
Learners in environments using communication to learn and practice the target language by interactions with one another and the instructor, the study of "authentic texts" (those written in the target language for purposes other than language learning), and the use of the language both in class and outside of class.
Learners converse about personal experiences with partners, and instructors teach topics outside of the realm of traditional grammar to promote language skills in all types of situations. That method also claims to encourage learners to incorporate their personal experiences into their language learning environment and to focus on the learning experience, in addition to the learning of the target language.
Language teaching was originally considered a cognitive matter that mainly involved memorization. It was later thought instead to be socio-cognitive: language can be learned through the process of social interaction. Today, however, the dominant technique in teaching any language is communicative language teaching (CLT).
It was Noam Chomsky's theories in the 1960s, focusing on competence and performance in language learning, that gave rise to communicative language teaching, but the conceptual basis for CLT was laid in the 1970s by the linguists Michael Halliday, who studied how language functions are expressed through grammar, and Dell Hymes, who introduced the idea of a wider communicative competence instead of Chomsky's narrower linguistic competence.[4] The rise of CLT in the 1970s and the
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early 1980s was partly in response to the lack of success with traditional language teaching methods and partly by the increase in demand for language learning. In Europe, the advent of the European Common Market, an economic predecessor to the European Union, led to migration in Europe and an increased number of people who needed to learn a foreign language for work or personal reasons. Meanwhile, more children were given the opportunity to learn foreign languages in school, as the number of secondary schools offering languages rose worldwide as part of a general trend of curriculum-broadening and modernization, with foreign-language study no longer confined to the elite academies. In Britain, the introduction of comprehensive schools, which offered foreign-language study to all children, rather than to the select few of the elite grammar schools, greatly increased the demand for language learning.
The increased demand included many learners who struggled with traditional methods such as grammar translation, which involves the direct translation of sentence after sentence as a way to learn the language. Those methods assumed that students aimed to master the target language and were willing to study for years before expecting to use the language in real life. However, those assumptions were challenged by adult learners, who were busy with work, and by schoolchildren who were less academically gifted and so could not devote years to learning before they could use the language. Educators realized that to motivate those students an approach with a more immediate reward was necessary, and they began to use CLT, an approach that emphasizes communicative ability and yielded better results.
Additionally, the trend of progressivism in education provided further pressure for educators to change their methods. Progressivism holds that active learning is more effective than passive learning. As that idea gained traction, in schools there was a general shift towards using techniques where students were more actively involved, such as group work. Foreign-language education was no exception to that trend, and teachers sought to find new methods, such as CLT, that could better embody the shift in thinking.
The development of communicative language teaching was bolstered by new academic ideas. Before the growth of communicative language teaching, the primary method of language teaching was situational language teaching, a method that was much more clinical in nature and relied less on direct communication. In Britain, applied linguists began to doubt the efficacy of situational language teaching, partly in response to Chomsky's insights into the nature of language. Chomsky had shown that the structural theories of language then prevalent could not explain the variety that is found in real communication. In addition, applied linguists like Christopher Candlin
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and Henry Widdowson observed that the current model of language learning was ineffective in classrooms. They saw a need for students to develop communicative skill and functional competence in addition to mastering language structures.[7] In 1966, the linguist and anthropologist Dell Hymes developed the concept of communicative competence, which redefined what it meant to "know" a language. In addition to speakers having mastery over the structural elements of language, they must also be able to use those structural elements appropriately in a variety of speech domains. That can be neatly summed up by Hymes's statement: "There are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless."[5] The idea of communicative competence stemmed from Chomsky's concept of the linguistic competence of an ideal native speaker. Hymes did not make a concrete formulation of communicative competence, but subsequent authors, notably Michael Canale, have tied the concept to language teaching.[8] Canale and Swain (1980) defined communicative competence in terms of three components: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Canale (1983) refined the model by adding discourse competence, which contains the concepts of cohesion and coherence.[8]
An influential development in the history of communicative language teaching was the work of the Council of Europe in creating new language syllabi. When communicative language teaching had effectively replaced situational language teaching as the standard by leading linguists, the Council of Europe made an effort to once again bolster the growth of the new method, which led to the Council of Europe creating a new language syllabus. Education was a high priority for the Council of Europe, which set out to provide a syllabus that would meet the needs of European immigrants.[7] Among the studies that it used in designing the course was one by a British linguist, D. A. Wilkins, that defined language using "notions" and "functions," rather than more traditional categories of grammar and vocabulary. The new syllabus reinforced the idea that language could not be adequately explained by grammar and syntax but instead relied on real interaction.
In the mid-1990s, the Dogme 95 manifesto influenced language teaching through the Dogme language teaching movement. It proposed that published materials stifle the communicative approach. As such, the aim of the Dogme approach to language teaching is to focus on real conversations about practical subjects in which communication is the engine of learning. The idea behind the Dogme approach is that communication can lead to explanation, which leads to further learning. That approach is the antithesis of situational language teaching, which emphasizes learning by text and prioritizes grammar over communication.[9]
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A survey of communicative competence by Bachman (1990) divides competency into the broad headings of "organizational competence," which includes both grammatical and discourse (or textual) competence, and "pragmatic competence," which includes both sociolinguistic and "illocutionary" competence. Strategic competence is associated with the interlocutors' ability in using communication strategies.
1. Nunan, David (1991-01-01). "Communicative Tasks and the Language Curriculum". TESOL Quarterly. 25 (2): 279295. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.466.1153. doi:10.2307/3587464. JSTOR 3587464.
2. Bax, Stephen (2003-07-01). "The end of CLT: a context approach to language teaching". ELT Journal. 57 (3): 278-287. doi:10.1093/elt/57.3.278. ISSN 09510893.
3. Littlewood, William. Communicative language teaching: An introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 541-545
4. Richards, Jack C. Communicative language teaching today. SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, 2005.
5. Savignon, Sandra J. (1987-09-01). "Communicative language teaching". Theory into Practice. 26 (4): ISSN 0040-5841.
6. Bachman, Lyle (1990). Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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