T.E.C.

2° Year
Date: 01/02/2025 – 08/02/2025 – 15/02/2025 – 22/02/25

Topic: “COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING”

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is an approach that aims to achieve

communicative rather than linguistic competence through learner interaction. Born, in
the 1980´s, this strategy to language teaching is based on the philosophy that, in order
to learn a language, one must practice using that language to communicate meaning to
others.
Teachers who use the CLT approach in English as a Second Language (ESL)
classrooms encourage students to use English. To promote meaningful language use,
ESL teachers can utilize activities that encourage students to speak in the performance
of meaningful tasks. Interaction is both the method and the goal of ESL education.
In an ESL classroom that uses the CLT method, students do most of the talking. This
enables students to practice communicating in English, continuously talking with each
other, rather than listening to an instructor’s lecture. ESL teachers can encourage
students to interact with each other with minimal direct correction. The intent behind the
communicative approach to speaking is to have students practice English without fear
of awkwardness or making mistakes when learning a new language.
Instead of interrupting or correcting students when they make mistakes, instructors who
utilize the CLT approach might use indirect feedback or conversational redirections that
do not interrupt a conversation. They might reform faulty grammar (e.g., “his shoes is
old” can be answered with, “yes, his shoes ARE old”) to give students clues for further
conversation. However, variables such as age and proficiency can influence how
effective indirect and direct feedback are in classrooms that utilize the CLT approach.
REAL-LIFE SCENARIOS.
Encouraging meaningful interactions, ESL teachers can utilize a wide variety of
individualized activities and meaningful tasks. Students might engage in role-playing
based on real-life scenarios such as discussing hobbies and popular culture, negotiating
prices when shopping or describing the plot of a book or movie they have recently
enjoyed.
The focus is on utilizing real-world situation to allow students to practice using language
for context and content rather than learning about grammatical rules and structure.
Techniques include modeling, repetition, pair and group work to help students develop
communicative competencies
WORKING TOGETHER
CLT activities are most effective when they allow students to work together in pairs or
groups. This mimics realistic communication that encourages fluency over grammatical
competence. Research has found ESL students usually feel more confident and
comfortable practicing their language skills and ideas when working with other students.
Since they are working with fellow English language learners, they often feel safer
communicating without fear of mistakes.
Another thing that you have to keep in mind is to prepare always your class, It doesn´t
matter If you already thought another group in the past. The group will be different.
FACTORS THAT AFFECT LANGUAGE LEARNING.
1. THE GOAL.
If you just want to speak to another people or interact, two years are enough…
Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) (1-2 years)
- The surface level – Here and Now
- Familiar Content
- Face to face Conversation
- High Frequency Vocabulary – 200 words
- Simple Sentence Structure
- Low Pressure.
Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) (5 or more years)
- Experience and exposure to culture.
- Lectures, formal, written test, specialized technology, humor, culture, idioms,
textbook language, social appropriateness, non-verbal communication.
- Limited interaction (textbook)
- More Abstract
 - Less familiar content
- Decontextualized
- Low frequency vocabulary
- High states (lots of pressure)
2. AGE
When you are younger is better for you to learn a language because you don´t have a
lot of information in your brain yet
- The older, the more time it takes (but it´s not impossible)
- May never be able to achieve native-like pronunciation (and that is OK!)
3. PERSONALITY
Are you introverted or extroverted? When you are extroverted, you learn quickly
because you practice and speak more the language
- Introverted students are less likely to try to make new friends, practice speaking,
afraid of making mistakes. Rather from learn from books
4. MOTIVATION.
- Intrinsic (inside motivation)
 Like to learn and study
- Extrinsic Motivation.
 I need to pass TOEFL
 Enter a university
 Get a good job
 Communicate better with workers7boyfriend/wife
 Support from family, friends, teachers
 My parents just sent me here…
 My government gave me a free scholarship, so…
5. PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE/EDUCATION
- L1 (language 1) knowledge helps L2 (language 2 or 3) learning.
 Grammar, reading skills, listening and speaking.
 - More knowledge about topics helps understand the same topics in another
language.
 Maybe this is why American history readings on the TOEFL are the
hardest!
- More experience with other cultures, traveling to other countries, learning other
languages!
6. Cognition
- Some people are just better at languages than otters!
 Male vs Female?
 Right vs left brain?
First Language vs Second Language.
- Its easier for: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Swedish, Norway etc.
native speakers to acquire and speak English.
- Its more difficult for Chinese, Japanese speakers
7. Level
- Always be at the “n+1” level – not too hard, not too easy.
- Too hard = won´t learn, discourage you
- Too easy = won´t learn, bore you.
8. Immersion and environment.
Grouping and pairing students also encourages engagement with in-class activities. For
example, one might have students work together to play a game where they must
describe an object to each other in English so their peers can guess what that object is.
Having students work together not only encourages them to engage with the language
meaningfully, but it also holds the potential to gamify the ESL classroom and incentivize
active participation.
INTEGRATE READING, WRITING AND SPEAKING
However, studies have found that these pairing and grouping conversational techniques
alone are not enough to promote active participation in ESL classrooms. Instructors
utilizing the CLT approach might also include work reading, writing and listening, as
these skills are also vital to ELLs´ development as English language speakers.
The integrated-skills approach to CLT brings these major language talents together in
activities. For instance, teachers might ask students to watch a video online (listening),
post their opinion about it in the comment section (writing) and describe others´ opinions
from the comments sections (reading).
Activities that integrated multiple language skills can enhance communication-based
ESL education by offering students the chance to practice multiple skills while also
offering teachers a chance to demonstrate best practices in each of these modes.
CLT aims at achieving communicative competence
Communicative competence is defined as competence in three areas of language
learning: grammatical, sociolinguistic and strategic competence.
Note. The meaningful
CLT aims at achievement of the grammatical, sociolinguistic
use of the language
and strategic competence. for communication =
Teaching Grammar in
1. Grammatical competence.
Context
Includes knowledge of lexical items and rules of morphology,
syntax, sentence-grammar, semantics and phonology.
- Lexical items include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and others parts of
speech as well. In every sentence, lexical items carry specific meanings, which is
most important for understanding any sentence.
- Morphology is the study of words and their parts. Morphemes, like prefixes,
suffixes and base words, are defined as the smallest meaningful units of
meaning, Morphemes are important for phonics in both reading and spelling as
well as in vocabulary and comprehension.
- Syntax is the study of the rules that control how language is structured first into
clauses and then sentences.
- Semantics is the study of how meaning is created by words. It is
sometimes compared with syntax, which concerns the rules that
dictate how sentences are formed. Semantic change is when a word changes
meaning. It can become wider in meaning or narrower, or more positive or more
negative.
- Phonology is the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across
languages. Put more formally, phonology is the study of the categorical
 organization os speech sounds in languages; how speech sounds are organized
in the mid and used to convey meaning.
2. Sociolinguistic Competence.
The ability to produce utterances appropriate to the social situation in which they are
spoken.
An UTTERANCE is a bit of spoken language. It could be anything from “Ugh!” to a full
sentence. To utter means “to say”. So, when you´re saying something, you´re making
utterances.
3. Strategic competence
Aims at being able to express oneself successfully in a conversation and overcoming
any difficulties or challenges that may occur which may lead to communication
breakdown. It can be enhanced by developing skills such as using fillers, going off the
point, paraphrasing and circumlocution.
CIRCUMLOCUTION is a communication strategy (CS) that allows language learners to
express themselves even when there is a gap in their linguistic knowledge.

Grammatical Competence Will be an important concern for any communicative approach

whose goals include providing learners with knowledge on how to determine and express
accurately the literal meaning of sentences. Communication activities that focus on these
three skills help learners build their confidence level, improve creative thinking skills and
augment linguistic creativity.

LINGUISTIC have criticized other methods of teaching language, especially those

that focused on helping students produce grammatically correct sentences. This is
because accuracy of form was promoted rather and gave rise to another weak method.
This was the translation method that failed to promote meaning, which is essential in
improving fluency and effectiveness in speaking and precursor to effective
communication skills.

Since the 1960s, several linguistic have commented on the social aspect of language
learning.
The term communicative competence was proposed to defined language as a social
behavior, which should be learned in a social context by observing sociolinguistic norms
of behavior.
OBJECTIVES IN A COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH:
1. An integrative and content level (language as a means of expressions).
2. A linguistic and instrumental level (language as semiotics system and an object
of learning).
3. An effective level of interpersonal relationship and conduct (language as means
of expressing values and judgments about oneself and others).
4. A level of individual needs (remedial earning based on error analysis)
5. A general education level of extra-linguistics goal (language learning within the
school curriculum)
Classification of communicative syllabus type:
1. Type of learning and Teaching Activities.
The range of activities is extensive, what matters is that the activities/exercises should
enable learners to attain the communicative objectives of the curriculum, engage in
communication, and require the use of such communicative processes as information
sharing negotiation of measuring and interaction.
2. Learner´s Role.
Discussing about learner´s role, there have been examinations about it within CLT as
negotiator between the self, the learning. Where it emerges from and interacts with the
role of joint negotiator within the group and within the classroom procedure and
activities which the group undertakes.
3. The teachers Role.
The teacher has two main roles in CLT: first, to facilitate the communication process
between all participants in the classroom, and between these participants and the
various activities and text; second, to act as an independent participant within the
learning-teaching group. Other roles assumed for the teacher is to be a manager.
4. The role of instructional materials.
A wide variety of materials have been used to support communicative approaches to
language teaching.
Practitioners of CLT view materials as a way of influencing quality of classroom
interaction and language use. It´s considered three kinds of materials currently used in
CLT, they are: text-based materials, task-based materials and reality.
Date: 22/02/25

The goal of the teacher in CLT is Communicative competence

 Principals of CLT

1. Communication Principle: activity that promotes real communication.

2. Task Principal: activity where they use language in their daily basis activity
3. Meaningfulness Principle: activity that is meaningful for the student.
Examples of learning Activities:
- Interactive language games
- Information sharing
- Task based.
- Social Interaction.
- Functional Communication.
APPROACHES AND METHODS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING (Richard and Rodger –
Cambridge 1986)
- Communicative activities should be fun, meaningful, interactive, and routine.
1. FUN.
This activity
2. MEANINGFUL

3. INTERACTIVE

4. ROUTINE

Characteristic of CLT
CLT is usually characterized as a BROAD APPROACH to teaching rather than as a
teaching method with a clearly defined set of classroom practices. As such

Five features of CLT.

1. An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target

language.
2. The Introduction of authentic texts into learning situation.
3. The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on language but also
on the learning management process.
4. An enhancement of the Learner´s own personal experiences as important
contributing elements to classroom learning.
5. An attempt to link language learning with language activities.

Broad approach: method often divided into two categories.

1. Teacher – centered method (also called direct instruction)
2. Learner – centered method (also called indirect instruction or inquiry – based
learning)