The Modern Communicative Language Teaching

Mainstream language teaching today is still largely based on the Communicative Language Teaching in most part of the world in the so-called Post-Methods Era. In the 1970s the idea of communicative competence was brought out by Hymes and the importance of it in second language learning was emphasized instead of linguistic competence, which deals with grammatical knowledge. Teaching should be based on ways of how people learn. Valuing the view of language being fundamentally social that a second language should be learnt through communication thus knowing what to say and how to say it appropriately in various social contexts in the target language is the goal of teaching and learning. The Post-Methods Era has a flexible and selective use of approaches and methods but mostly with a focus on communicative competence, which means not to totally abandon the old brand-name methods such as the grammar translation method and audio lingual method but to know how to adapt the advantages of each methods into the teaching and focus on all the four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. How the Communicative Language Teaching is adapted in the modern day teaching and issues involving the use of L1 and explicit grammar teaching will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

Communicative Language Teaching is considered as an approach but not a method because it does not provide teachers with any specific techniques. 'It is a unified but broadly based theoretical position about the nature of language and of language learning and teaching', says H. Douglas Brown in his Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. Methods such as Content-Based Instruction and Task-Based Language Teaching are different versions of the communicative approach realized in practical and specific techniques sharing the same theoretical foreground. The Communicative Language Teaching provides a guideline and a principle. Thus it is very flexible and can be broadly adopted in various types of classrooms; it has had a longer shelf life than other approaches and continues being the main approach being used. However it has its own strengths and weaknesses in modern day teaching, teaching different languages and teaching different aspects of languages. Therefore it is critical for teachers to know well about the methods and to know which ones to use in what type of classroom.

Learning a second language is no longer viewed as a habit formation through drilling and making grammatically correct sentences under teacher-centred classrooms where error correction happens immediately after an error is made. Richard wrote in 2006 that 'in recent years, language learning has been viewed from a very different perspective. It is seen as resulting from processes such as: - Interaction between the learner and users of the language - Collaborative creation of meaning - Creating meaningful and purposeful interaction through language - Negotiation of meaning as the learner and his or her interlocutor arrive at understanding - Learning through attending to the feedback learners get when they use the language - Paying attention to the language one hears (the input) and trying to incorporate new forms into one's developing communicative competence - Trying out and experimenting with different ways of say things.' Learners now participate actively in a communicative classroom involves different activity types such as peer discussion, games, role-plays and group work etc. They are encouraged to learn independently and to learn from each other with emphasis placed on the process of learning. Meaningful tasks and conversations are considered to be promoting and motivating learning with the content relevant to the current society and the students' personal lives. After the communicative language teaching started to be the mainstream approach, there has been a shifts in the thinking about teachers, learning and teaching, according to Jack C. Richards, in his Communicative Language Teaching Today, he pointed out that individual differences of students were taken more into consideration in education, the schools were much more connected to the world than before, teaching should help students to understand the purpose of learning and develop their own purpose and the promoting of life long learning rather than learning in order to take exams etc. The techniques and the shifts in thinking reflect each other and help to improve with teaching.

The use of L1 is forbidden in traditional communicative language teaching classrooms that strictly stick to the principles. Using the target language throughout the lesson is seen as adding to the input of the target language exposure for the students. The teacher's language spoken in the target language could be seen as a model for the communicative use of the language. The view that L1 should be avoided has been taken for granted by many teachers. It denies the benefits of L1 being a resource for learning the target language. Second language learners in many ways learn differently from a child acquiring their first language because they already have another language (L1) in mind when they are learning. However, even being within a communicative language teaching environment, L1 could be used for giving instructions about activities, translating and checking comprehension, individual comments to students, giving feedback to students and maintaining discipline in the classroom, according to Ernesto Macaro (1997). It should be noted that only comprehensible input for students are helpful for the learning, using purely the target language may be time consuming since it may not be comprehensible to the learners. The differences and similarities in grammar and meaning between the target language and the learner's L1 can also aid the learning to help the learner with their understanding of the target language. The communicative language teaching also places an importance on the learner's confidence and self-esteem if the class is only in the target language and the learner does not understand what the teacher says it may cause a lose of confidence and enthusiasm that the learner would be hesitant to speak. This debate does not mean that L1 should be used at a large percentage of the class; it should be considered by the teachers how much L1 use is suitable for their classes to maximize the effectiveness of learning.

The teaching of grammar is also much debated in the using of communicative language teaching approach. Krashen persistently points out that conscious learning, which means the learning of grammar rules is not necessary for language acquisition and he says that normal conversation does not allow the speaker to have enough time to think about and use rules. When grammar is taught as a subject matter in a situation that the students are interested in learning about grammar and the language of instruction is conducted in the target language is the only instance the teaching of grammar can result in language acquisition; but it is only an illusion that the acquisition happens when the instructional language acts as the comprehensible input. The challenge of language teaching today is seen as moving 'significantly beyond the teaching of rules, patterns, definitions' in order to teach the students to 'communicate genuinely, spontaneously, and meaningfully'. These may lead to fluency at the expense of accuracy. It is necessary to re-think the role of grammar in language teaching and learning; of course it does not mean moving away from the principles of Communicative Language Teaching. Vivian Cook writes in her book Second Language Learning and Language Teaching: '.many graduates of European universities who learnt English by studying traditional grammars turned into fluent and spontaneous speakers of English.they still sometimes visualized verbs paradigms for English to check what they were writing. This at least suggests that the conversion of conscious rules to non-conscious processes does take place for some academic students'. The teaching of grammar also helps with raising language awareness, which helps with the learning. Grammar could be taught inductively in a Communicative Language Teaching environment in a way that it is integrated in a communicative task that the students would have to use specific items of grammar.

In conclusion, there are many language teaching methods that have been in and out of fashion and today the mainstream teaching is based on the Communicative Language Teaching approach, which allows flexibility to suite to each teacher, learner and classroom with the room for adjustment in order to achieve the goal of acquiring communicative competence. The use of the learner's first language should not be totally forbidden; instead, it could be a beneficial resource to help with the learner's understanding and in giving feedback to the learner. Grammar teaching is avoided in some teaching methods such as the Audio-Lingual Method that it is seen as unnecessary in the process of acquiring a language, however it can be taught inductively to raise language awareness and it is useful for students who learn the best through logic and discovering rules. Language teaching today has placed much greater attention on learner autonomy, the social nature of learning, diversity of learners, critical thinking and teachers as facilitators, which suggested by Jacobs and Farrel. There is no single method or model of the Communicative Language Teaching is viewed as being able to meet the requirement of gaining the four skills in teaching languages. Therefore teachers need to incorporate various techniques, activities and teaching strategies that fall within the framework of Communicative Language Teaching into the classroom that equip the learner with the skills to use the language outside the classroom.

References:

Brown, H.D. (2000) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. 4th edition. New York: Longman.

Cook, V. (2013) Second Language Learning and Language Teaching. 4th edition. New York: Routledge.

Krashen, S.D. (1982) Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Larsen-Freeman, D. and Anderson, M. (2011) Techniques & Principles in Language Teaching. 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Richards, J.C. and Rodgers, T.S. (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. 2nd edition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J.C. (2006) Communicative Language Teaching Today. New York: Cambridge University Press.