THEORETICAL ASPECTS IN THE FORMATION OF
PEDAGOGICAL SCIENCES
International scientific-online conference
61
THE ROLE OF CLT (COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING) IN
LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES
Tashmetova Aziza Sagdullayevna
MIA of the Republic of Uzbekistan
Tashkent academic lyceum №2
Senior teacher of the Department of Language
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14514201
Abstract
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been accepted as one of
the teaching methods by numerous language teachers due to its major
focus on developing learners’ communicative competence. This paper aims
to describe communicative language teaching, its practice and the factors
leading to teachers. It shows communicative skills, teacher’s role in
communicative activities, fluency and accuracy as the main goals and teaching
techniques. It then presents three reasons that might lead to teachers’
misinterpretations concerning the practice of CLT.
Key Words
: CLT (Communicative Language Teaching),
Misinterpretation, English language teaching (ELT), English for specific purpose
(ESP),
The recognition of English in the world has impacted English
language teaching worldwide. Various teaching methods have come into the
current trend and then disappeared. Among all methods used and practiced
so far, CLT has been considered as the best practice in both English language
teaching (ELT) and English for specific purpose (ESP) because it offers
‘communication’ means enabling learners to develop their communicative
ability (Power, 2003).
COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE
The first belief is learners are taught to be able to communicate in target
language (Larsen-Freeman, 2000). Based on this first belief, students should be
accommodated with five components of communicative language ability, that is,
grammatical competence
,
pragmatic competence, sociolinguistic competence,
and strategic competence
.
Grammatical competence includes learners’ ability in
spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, word formation, and grammatical structure.
Pragmatic competence requires learners to have the knowledge in dealing
with the structure of longer texts in speech and a piece of writing. Sociolinguistic
competence is the ability that learners should have in choosing the appropriate
words or expressions in spoken or written context of situation. For instance,
THEORETICAL ASPECTS IN THE FORMATION OF
PEDAGOGICAL SCIENCES
International scientific-online conference
62
when learn how to write formal or informal ways of writing a letter and greeting
someone. Strategic competence is the strategy of learners to keep the
communication going on, even the language production is not perfect, for
example, when learners unable to express what they want to say or they want to
clarify misunderstanding (Beale, 2002; Brown, 2000; Leung, 2005; Richards and
Rodgers, 1986). Generally speaking, this principle suggests that in teaching,
teachers should not teach learners with one competence only, for instance, to
master grammatical competence but also to apply the competence to
communicate in the real context of life. However, in the implementation of CLT
in the real teaching, teachers incorrectly adopt this principle by avoiding
teaching grammar. Prabhu (1987) emphasized that “…grammar teaching is
impossible because the knowledge that a speaker needs in order to use a
language is simply too complex (cited in Thomson, 1996, p.10). Sato and
Kleinsasser (1999) stated that most teachers agree that communicative
language teaching should be taught in a fun way and the preparation to make it
fun is really time consuming. In other words, teaching grammar in
communicative way needs to be prepared and requires lots of efforts. It is
therefore, it is hard for school or language institutions that only has one teacher
but has to teach many classes, because the teacher might think that this can be
additional burden for him/her.
THE ROLE OF TEACHERS IN COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES
The second belief is the role of teacher in communicative activities. In CLT,
teacher is facilitator and guide, not the one who knows everything in classroom.
This principle has replaced the traditional role of teacher as an information
provider. Learners not only receive the knowledge transmitted by teachers but
they should construct their own knowledge facilitated by teachers. The
construction of meaning in getting knowledge is done through linguistic
interaction with others (Brown, 2001). Additionally, the role of teacher
sometimes could be partners for communication in the class with students
(Littlewood, 1981, cited in Larsen- Freeman, 2000). Similarly, according to
Richards and Rodgers (1986) the role of teacher can be an independent member
in the learning-teaching group. In the practice of CLT, this principle leads to two
negative perceptions in classroom. The first negative perception is that teachers’
inattention in monitoring learners’ performance and activity in classroom. Some
teachers think that after designing a lesson plan, which can facilitate and
encourage learners practice their communicative skills in classroom, learners
can construct their own meaning naturally and automatically. However, teachers
THEORETICAL ASPECTS IN THE FORMATION OF
PEDAGOGICAL SCIENCES
International scientific-online conference
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forget that learners sometimes come from different background, which can
create diversity in classroom. For example, some learners may feel comfortable
and okay engage in activities without teacher supervision, but there are also
learners who still need intense guidance from teachers, especially for the class
that mixes abilities inside. Thus, despite of facilitating and guiding students,
teacher’s role also has to supervise or monitor her/his students’ activities in
class. Furthermore, some teachers also believe that they succeed in designing
activities if students participate cheerfully and happily in completing all
activities. Consequently, they use the noise in class as an indicator for the
success of their activities they have created. The fact that if learners are
interested in the activities they will engage in activities and leads to the
achievement of the purpose of giving the opportunity to practice the
communicative skills in classroom. In this case, teachers should eliminate their
belief that the more noisy the class, the more interesting the activities. However,
teachers have to ensure whether the noise is still in the right track that is
participating and enjoying the activities in accomplishing the lesson objective.
The other negative perspective is that the idea that learners should construct the
meaning through their own understanding through interaction has made
teachers believe that teaching explicitly is against the principle of CLT. Hence,
teachers do not use the handouts, worksheets or other forms of practice, as they
are afraid of making the lessons are not contextual and therefore not
meaningful. On the other hand, teaching in fully implicit way also will not be
advantageous for all learners for the reason that some of them may come from
different cultural and linguistic background. These differences would lead to
learners’ different responses towards the pedagogical practice, which has been
adopted by CLT in ELT and ESP. For instance, learners who come from the
cultural background that believe teachers are the one who knows everything or
fountain of knowledge will not be accustomed to the idea that learners should be
independent and be able to construct their own meaning through linguistics
interaction with others.
FLUENCY AND ACCURACY AS THE MAIN GOALS OF COMMUNICATIVE
SKILLS
The third belief is fluency and accuracy should be the goals of
communicative skills. According to Brown (2001) “sometimes fluency is more
emphasized than accuracy in order to encourage learners to speak in the
language expressively and naturally”. Similarly, Finocchiaro and Brumfit (1983)
stated that one of the major distinctive features of the audiolingual method and
THEORETICAL ASPECTS IN THE FORMATION OF
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the communicative approach of CLT is that in the audiolingual method, accuracy
is the primary goal while in CLT; fluency is the primary goal of teaching (cited in
Richards and Rodgers, 1986). Due to fluency, most teachers in ELT have
misinterpreted the focus of CLT. Teachers understand fluency as learners’
capability in engaging themselves in communicative activities. Since teachers’
understanding is to make learners engaged in communicative activities, teachers
always try to motivate learners to use the language, especially in beginner
English class. They believe that if learners have already had the courage to speak
in the language, means all objectives of communicative activities can be
achieved. In reality, fluency is not a matter of just talking in the language, fluency
according to Fillmore (1979) included four abilities: the ability ‘to talk without
significant pauses for an extended period of
time’, the ability to show ‘a mastery of the semantic and syntactic resources of
the language’, the ability to have ‘appropriate things to say in a wide range of
contexts’, and the ability to ‘creative and imaginative in…language use’ (Cited in
Brumfit, 1984, pp. 53-54). In other words, it can be said that fluency means
learners have to apply all the required competences as discussed earlier in this
essay. Additionally, teachers sometimes are unwilling to correct learners’
mistakes during the conversation. Error correction has also been the most
important cause of creating reluctant speakers in classroom. This can contribute
to the failure of the practice of CLT in ELT and ESP. Nevertheless, the absence of
error correction given by teachers will not affect on learners’ fluency. Due to the
error correction, there are some ways of giving feedback for learners, as error
correction is also a vital tool to improve learners’ competence in the language.
As Board of Senior Secondary School Studies (1996, cited in Sato and
Kleinsasser, 1999) mentioned that students can manage their own learning if
teachers give them informative feedback. Error correction done when learners
talk in the language, which teachers directly corrects the mistakes. Some
teachers believe that this is a very effective way because learners will remember
their mistakes. On the contrary, others prefer to give feedback after learners
have finished the speaking activity, they consider if they interrupt the speaking,
learners will not talk in the language naturally otherwise they are afraid of
expressing their ideas. Therefore, teachers should be more selective in choosing
the way they would correct learners’ error in order to let learners convey their
ideas freely and naturally.
TECHNIQUES OF TEACHING TO SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGE
LEARNERS TO ENGAGE IN COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES
THEORETICAL ASPECTS IN THE FORMATION OF
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International scientific-online conference
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The fourth belief is the techniques of teaching are designed to give
students opportunities to involve in the pragmatic, authentic and functional use
of language for meaningful purposes. Language forms are not the aim of study,
but the components required to achieve those purposes (Brown, 2000; Brown,
2001). Therefore, teachers who claim themselves CLT followers should provide
materials that include the four skills, that is, speaking, listening, reading, and
writing to support and encourage learners to engage in communicative
activities, not the skills in knowing the rules of grammar, memorizing patterns
and meaning of words. Additionally, the use of authentic language materials is
expected in order to solve the typical problem that learners are unable to
transmit what they learn in traditional classes to the real situation outside the
class. Also, using authentic materials can expose students to natural language in
a variety of situation (Larsen-Freeman, 2000). Moreover, authentic language
materials are potentially more interesting than texts, which have been specially
contrived for language teaching purposes (Nunan, 1999). Relating to supporting
communication in classroom, there are two types of communicative activities
that is ‘functional communicative activity’ and ‘social interaction activity’
(Littlewood, 1981). Functional communication activity means the completion of
task such as comparing sets of pictures and finding similarities and differences
etc. Social interaction activity refers to a social context that takes in conversation
and discussion, dialogues, role-plays etc. So, in classroom, for example, teachers
use an activity that can be done in pairs such as transactional task where there is
information gap between two learners and they have to fill in that information
gap. Another activity can be used is group work. Learners can work together to
solve a problem, to analyze the new language structures in a text, and to give
them a chosen topic from the authentic material for instance, newspaper article
to be discussed. It is believed that using pair work and group work to promote
communicative activities in class are more useful and flexible for learners
(Thomson, 1996). In addition, concerning to communicative activities, there are
four purposes of giving learners communicative activities. The first purpose is to
give them ‘whole task practice’ where learners can practice all the skills they
learn in one communicative activity. The second purpose is to improve their
motivation. This motivation is usually related to learners’ purpose in learning
English and most of them learn English in order to communicate English so it is
hoped that the communicative activity they are engaged would motivate them to
use the language. The third purpose is exposing them to natural learning.
Unquestionably, communication is the natural process of language learning.
THEORETICAL ASPECTS IN THE FORMATION OF
PEDAGOGICAL SCIENCES
International scientific-online conference
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Thus, the communicative activity whether inside or outside the classroom is an
essential part of learning process. The last purpose is helping learners to create
a context that supports learning. Communicative activity would help to enhance
the relationship among learners and between learners and teachers. The
reciprocal relationship established would support the learning process. The
vision that CLT focuses on aspects of language that enable learners to
accomplish their purpose to communicate gives teachers understanding that
speaking and listening are the most important skills that learners have to
communicate. This leads to undesirable implications on CLT in classroom. On
one hand teachers feel reluctant to teach reading and writing because these two
skills are assumed difficult to be taught in communicative ways. On the other
hand learners also feel that they do not really need to have reading and writing
skills for the simple reason that their teachers seldom teach them those skills. In
other words, teachers only put more emphasis on speaking and listening
abilities and seldom introduce the importance of reading and writing abilities in
the form of communicative activities. Equally, the activities that should promote
communicative abilities such as pair work and group work in the forms of
dialogue, discussion and games are seemed to be monotonous and tedious by
learners. It is not because of the principle of CLT supporting the use of these
communicative activities. Indeed, it is because teachers do not familiarize in
designing a variety of activities can be used in class. In other words, those
activities have no variation and for that reason learners are easily bored to be
involved in the activities.
CONCLUSION
To sum up, it is true that there are several misconceptions about the practice of
CLT by teachers in the classroom. It is also believed that those misconceptions
are caused by internal and external factors. The internal factors that are from
the teachers themselves, for instance, some teachers are reluctant to improve
their professional skills in teaching and also teachers’ lack of communicative
competence, whereas the external factors may be in the forms of insufficient
training given to teachers, inadequate resources for teaching, and the low salary
from teaching. On the whole, the implementation of CLT in ELT needed to be
improved in an inclusive way that requires the support and involvement of all
people in the school or institutions where CLT approach has been applied.
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PEDAGOGICAL SCIENCES
International scientific-online conference
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