Week 15 (semester 2)

Learning Reflections

Seminar in English Language Teaching

    Today, the teacher taught me about communicative approaches that following;

1. Communicative approaches were influenced by functional linguistics.

Goal: To enable learners to develop communicative competence in order to use the target language in communication.

Classroom activities:

- Tasks that require students to share information and negotiate meaning

- Include problem-solving tasks, role-plays, simulates and games, and usually exclude use of L1

- Students are expected to play active roles through “negotiating for meaning” thus, they are expected to interact primarily with each other rather than with the teacher.

- Students have opportunities to experiment with new language.

-  Pair work and group work.

- Integrated skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing

- Use of authentic tasks and ”realia”/ authentic material to promote students’ communication

Teacher’s role

Been and Candlin(2001) specifics a variety of role:

- Facilitator

- Interdepentdent participant

- Organizer of resources, a resource, and a guide

- Researcher

Richard and Rodger(2001)

- Analyst

- Counselor

- Group process manages

Learner-centeredness

Learner-centeredness has four central characteristics:

1. Learner participant in the whole process of the course               content and selecting learning procedures

2. Learner participant in the design of language activities

3. Learner are encouraged to take responsibility to a great            degree of their learning

4. Enhancing learner autonomy

Constraints of CLT

-          Focus on fluency over accuracy

-          Learner and teacher roles

-          Cultural appropriacy: ESL and EFL

-          Student’s lack of target language exposure

-          Traditional teaching and learning culture

-          Teacher expertise and student English proficiency level

-          Lack of learning resource/ support

-          Class size

       Before we finished the class, the teacher assigned us to read about "Sociocultural Theory as an Approach to Aid EFL Learners" and The relevance and implications of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory in the second language classroom and summarize to present next class.  

       My problem for today is my friends and I were not clear about this research so, we use long time to summarize and discuss it.