Communicative Language Teaching

9 June 2012

Listening Reading

Speaking Writing

Passive

Active

Listening Reading

Speaking Writing

Receptive

Productive

Morphological Ambiguity

Mother: Why on earth did you swallow the money I gave you?Junior: You said it was my lunch money.

Lexical Ambiguity

Teacher: In this box, I have a 10-foot snake.Sammy: You can't fool me, Teacher … snakes don't have feet.

Contextual Ambiguity

Teacher: Ellen, give me a sentence starting with "I".Ellen: I is …Teacher: No, Ellen. Always say, "I am."Ellen: All right. "I am the ninth letter of the alphabet."

Contextual Ambiguity

TEACHER: ELLEN, GIVE ME PAST-TENSE SENTENCE FOR THE VERB “GO".ELLEN: MARY GO…..TEACHER: NO, ELLEN. THE PAST TENSE OF “GO” IS “WENT.”ELLEN: ALL RIGHT. “MARY GO WENT TO THE STORE.

Structural Ambiguity

Teacher: How can you prevent diseases caused by biting insects?Jose: Don't bite any.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.(structural ambiguity)

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.(lexical/morphological ambiguity)

What makes CLT difficult?You have to give up the belief that there are right/correct answers in language. Instead, all communication is dependent on context and interpretation.

How does CLT differ?

CLT game…

How does CLT differ?

1. It focuses on the process, not the product

(Habermas 1970)

Like: verb, to have or express affection for another.

Grace: So, how did your date with Raffy go?Shara: Well, I like him but I’m not sure if he likes me.Grace: Do you like him like him, or just like him.Shara: That’s the thing. I like him like him, but I think he just likes me. Grace: How do you know he doesn’t like you like you like him?Shara: Well, he said, “I like you,” but in his eyes, it was just like, “I like you.”

Raffy: Based on my sense of ethics, the death penalty is inhuman. Only God has the right to determine who should live or die.Jean Paul: You’re wrong. Showing mercy to convicted murderers is inhuman. What about the victims’ families? What about justice?Raffy: Justice is in God’s hands. Jean Paul: Maybe eternal justice is God’s. But if we don’t put murderers to death, it will cause greater injustice. And murderers will see no reason not to kill. Raffy:Why not go with life in prison? That gives justice, and it isn’t inhuman.

How does CLT differ?

1. Meaning is rarely fixed; instead it is a negotiation between communicators

(Piepho 1974)

“Kindly clampong the blackboard for me.”

Kiyoko Kusano HubbelL

“Many Japanese students have been taught that they have to really know every word in a sentence or phrase in order to understand a foreign language. They are not taught to use the strategies that they already use in their native Japanese, that is, to guess the meaning from context.

Kiyoko Kusano HubbelL

“When the blackboard is full of writing and I am busy in class, I ask a student, “Kindly erase the blackboard,” handing him an eraser and pointing to the dirty blackboard. If he does not move, it is not because he is offended. He just did not recognize the word “erase,” and to him that means he did not understand me. If he is willing to accept the ambiguity, he gets up and cleans the board.”

How does CLT differ?

1. Focuses not on language learning, but language behavior

(Halliday 1978)

Components of Communicative Competence

1. Sociocultural2. Strategic3. Discourse4. Grammatical

Sociocultural

“Just knowing something about the culture of an English-speaking country will not suffice. What must be learned is a general empathy toward other cultures. Sociocultural competence includes a willingness to engage in the active negotiation of meaning along with a willingness to susped judgment and take into consideration the possibility of multiple meanings.”

Strategic

“None of us knows all there is to know of English in its many manifestations, both around the world and in our own backyards. Communicative competence is always relative. The coping strategies we use in unfamiliar contexts, with constraints due to imperfect knowledge of rules or limiting factors in their application such as fatigue or distraction, are represented as strategic competence.

Discourse

“Discourse competence is concerned not with isolated words or phrases but with the interconnectedness of a series of utterances, written words, and/or phrases to form a text, a meaningful whole. This might be a poem, email, sportscast, telephone conversation, or novel.”

Grammatical Competence“Grammatical competence refers to sentence-level grammatical forms, the ability to recognize the lexical, morphological, syntactic, and phonological feature of a language and make use of those features to interpret and form words and sentences. This is different from the ability to state rules of usage.”

Does this focus on CLT?

Underlining the parts of speech in a sentence (subject, predicate, object)

Does this focus on CLT?

Reading and posting Facebook messages in War-English

Does this focus on CLT?

Singing videoke of “The Greatest Love of All”

Does this focus on CLT?

Reading Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”

Does this focus on CLT?

Students do spelling drills to prepare for the National Spelling Bee

Does this focus on CLT?

Role playing as call center agents, senators, beauty pageant contestants

Does this focus on CLT?

Students give instructions to each other for cooking, cleaning, transportation

Does this focus on CLT?

Reciting a famous poem by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1703-1748)

Does this focus on CLT?

Watching the movie, “Three Idiots,” with Indian pronunciation & English subtitles

Does this focus on CLT?

Memorizing vocabulary lists:abate, abash, abhor..

Does this focus on CLT?

Completing a worksheet on subordinate and coordinate conjunctions

Does this focus on CLT?

Debating the pros and cons of parental curfews for students