• provide opportunities for active communicative interaction among students • make language learning meaningful for the students • encourage the students to use English in an authentic context
BACK
Activities
• What teachers and students should do in a communicative class?
For communicative activities to take place, the teacher needs to start from controlled structural activities to social problem solving activities.
1.Definition
Language is a tool to Communicat -e with others
Core
Communi cative functions
Give students a real environment
2.Background
Origins: changes in the British language teaching tradition dating from the late 1960s. British applied linguists began to call into question the theoretical assumptions underlying Situational Language Teaching. Noam Chomsky: Syntactic Structures(1957) current standard structural theories of language---incapable to account the creativitiy and uniqueness of individual sentences . British applied linguists: emphasize on the functional and communicative potential of language. E.g. Christopher Candlin and Henry Widdowson: British functional linguists; American work in sociolinguistics; work in philosophy.
3.2 Hymes’ view(1972) A person who acquires communicative competence acquires both knowledge and ability for language use with respect to: • 1.whether(and to what degree) something is formally possible • 2.whether(and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy,successful) in relation to a context in which it is used and evaluated. • 3.whether(and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy,successful) in relation to a context in which it is used and evaluated. • 4.whether(and to what degree) something is in fact done, actually perfomed, and what its doing entails
• For Buyers: • 1. How much is it? / How much does it cost? / What is the price? • 2. I want to find a book. • 3. Look, there’s something wrong with it. • 4. Give me a discount. / Is there any discount? • 5. Wow, too / pretty expensive. Could you go down a little? • 6. Don’t try to rip me off. I know what this is worth. • 7. Give me the real price, boss. • 8. I’ll give you half that price. ……
Summary
1.Definition
municative approach refers to the theory of teaching according to the principle that the students and teachers should genuinely communicate with each other using the target language.
5.2Disadvantages
3 1 2
⑴Difficult to tailor syllabus to students’ needs
(2)Fossiliza tion of learners’ errors
⑶Unclear about how rules of use can be taught
5.The advantages and disadvantages of communicative approach
5.1Advantages • ⑴Wider considerations of what is appropriate and what is accurate • ⑵Wider range of language • ⑶Realistic and motivating language practice • ⑷Drawing on learners’ knowledge and experience
Activity: In the bookstore
• For Sellers: • 1. Can I help you? / What can I do for you? • 2. This model’s less expensive than that one. But, of course, it’s not as good as the expensive one. • 3. How do you like these books? • 4. You’ll find our books (are) the best among others. • 5. It comes to two hundred and fifty yuan. • 6. Just 10 yuan each. A steal! • 7. Could you go up a little? 8. You drive a hard bargain, 20 yuan, and that’s my final offer. ……
3.Theoretical basis
3.1 Chomsky’s theory
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitation, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.
1. the communicative principle: Activities that involve real communication promote learning. 2. the task principle: Activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning (Johnson 1982). 3. the meaningfulness principle: Language that is meaningful to the learner supports the learning process.
Summary:
Altogether, CLT is best considered an approach rather than a method. It refers to a diverse set of principles that reflect a communicative view of language and language learning and that can be used to support a wide variety of classroom procedures.
4.Principles