Learning Reflection (12th) of Seminar in English Language Teaching Course

   Today I learned about CLT (communicative Language Teaching). So, what we learned today?

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) Which is an approach to the teaching of second and foreign languages, emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language. It is also referred to as “Communicative Approach”.

characteristics could be taken as a definition of CLT : 
1. Classroom goals are focused on all of the components of communicative competence and not restricted to grammatical or linguistic competence. 
2. Language teaching techniques are designed to engage learners in the pragmatic, authentic, functional use of language for meaningful purposes. Language forms are not the central focus but rather aspects of language that enable the learner to accomplish those purposes.
 3. Fluency and accuracy are seen as complementary principles underlying communicative techniques. At times fluency may have to take on more importance than accuracy in order to keep learners meaningfully engaged in language use.
 4. In the communicative classroom, students ultimately have to use the language, productively and receptively, in unrehearsed contexts (Brown, 1994: 245).

Notional / functional dimension of language

Applied linguists  and philosophers addressed another fundamental dimension of language: the functional and communicative potential of language.  The speech act theory showed that we do something when we speak a language. We use language ( cf Halliday 1975)

• to get things,
• to control behavior,
• to create interaction with others,
• to express personal feelings,
• to learn,
• to create a world of imagination,
• to communicate information.

Communicative competence

Canale and Swaine (1980) described four dimensions of communicative competence.

• Grammatical competence: refers to what Chomsky calls linguistic competence.
• Sociolinguistic competence: refers to an understanding of the social context in which communication takes place (role relationships, shared beliefs and information between participants …)
• Discourse competence: refers to the interpretation of individual messsage elements in terms of their interconnectedness and how meaning is represented in relationship to the entire discourse or text.
• Strategic competence: refers to the coping strategies that participants use to initiate terminate, maintain, repair and redirect communication

In the early stages of language learning, instructors and students may want to keep in mind the goal of communicative efficiency: That learners should be able to make themselves understood, using their current proficiency to the fullest. 

Teacher's role

   The teacher’s role will be to facilitate and then to monitor, usually without interruption, and then to provide feedback on the success or otherwise of the communication and, possibly, on the linguistic performance of the learners in the form of post-activity error correction. 

Students' role

 Students in a communicative language classroom are people whose objective is learning itself; and they are the active learner in learning process. Moreover, as the cooperative learning environment is the crucial of CLT class, there are some preconditions must be aware of and committed by the students as: positive interdependence; individual accountability; pro-motive interaction; and group processing.

Implication in Thai context

 CLT in Thailand must be used in conjunction with other teaching methods. If you only use the CLT learning landscape communication, it is inefficient. The students will be learning in a meaningful context and need. In order to understand and can use English outside the classroom.

    The difficult that I found, in the article research had many difficult words. The teacher said, don't know vocabulary every words, it can be read out. But for me, I don't understand.Sometime the vocabulary unseen for me. The solution is, I have to open the dictionary to find the meaning of the vocabulary. So, I can understand.