COMMUCATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

Communication is process knowledge of the forms of language is insufficient. The goal is enable students to communication in the target language. To do this students need knowledge of the linguistic forms, meanings, and functions.
In this role, one of his major responsibilities is to establish situations likely to promote communication. During the activities he acts as an adviser, answering student’s questions and monitoring their performance. He might make mote of their errors to be worked on at a later time during more accuracy-based activities. At other times he might be a communicator engaging in the communicative activity along with students. Students are, above all, communicators. They are actively engaged in negotiating meaning-in trying to make them understood and in understanding others-even when their knowledge of the target language is incomplete. Also, since the teacher’s role is less dominant than in a teacher-centered method, students are seen as more responsible managers of their own learning.
The most obvious characteristic of CLT is that almost everything that is done is with a communicative intent. Students use the language a great deal through communicative activities such as games, role, plays, and problem-solving tasks. Another characteristic of CLT is the use of authentic materials. It is considered desirable to give students an opportunity to develop strategies for understanding language as it is actually used. Activities in CLT are often carried out by students in small groups. Small numbers of students interacting are favored on order to maximize the smile allotted to each student for communicating.
The teacher may present some part of the lesson, such as when working with linguistic accuracy. At other times, he is the facilitator of the activities, but he does not always himself interact with the students. Sometimes he is a co-communicator, but more often he establishes situations that prompt communication between and among the students. Students interact a great deal with one another. They do this in various configurations: pairs, triads, small groups, and whole group.
One of the basic assumptions of CLT is that by learning to communicate students will be more motivated to study a foreign language since they will feel they are learning to do something useful with the language. Also, teachers give students an opportunity to express their individuality by having them share their ideas and opinions on a regular basis. Finally, student security is enhanced by the many opportunities for cooperative interactions with their fellow students and the teacher.
The culture is the everyday lifestyle of people who use the language. There are certain aspects of it than are especially important to communication-the use of nonverbal behavior, for example, which might receive greater attention CLT.
Students work with language at the suprasentential or discourse level. They learn about cohesion and coherence. Students work on all four skills from beginning. Just as oral communication is seen to take place through negotiation between speaker and listener, so too is meaning thought to be derived from the written word through an interaction between the reader and the writer. The writer is not persent to receive immediate feedback from the reader, of course, but the reader tries to understand the writer’s intentions and the writer writes with the reader’s perspective in mind. Meaning does not, therefore, reside exclusively in the next, but rather arises through negotiation between the reader and writer.
Judicious use of the student’s native language is permitted in CLT. However, whenever possible, the target language should be used not only during communicative activities, but also for explaining the activities to the students or in assigning homework. The students learn from these classroom management exchanges, too, and realize that the target language is a vehicle for communication, not just an object to be studied.
A teacher evaluates not only the student’s accuracy, but also their fluency. The student who has the most control of the structures and vocabulary is not always the best communicator. A teacher can informally evaluate his student’s performance in his role as an adviser or co-communicator. For more formal evaluation, a teacher is likely to use an integrative test which has a real communicative function. In order to assess students writing skill, for instance, a teacher might ask them to write a letter to a friend.
Errors of form are tolerated during fluency-based activities and are seen as a natural outcome of the development of communication skills. Students can have limited linguistic knowledge and still be fluency activities and return to them later with an accuracy based activity.