Communication-oriented language teachingWhich way ahead..pdfVIP

Communication-oriented language teaching:Which way ahead? William Littlewood wlittlewood9@ What is ‘Communicative Language Teaching’?  ‘The answer to this question seems to depend on whom you ask.’ (Spada, 2007)  ‘The problem with CLT is that the term has always meant a multitude of different things to different people’. (Harmer, 2003)  ‘Everyday classroom practices can appear to be quite different when CLT principles are applied in differing social and educational contexts.’ (Hall, 2011) 2 Two dimensions of learning Analytic Dimension ←→ Experiential Dimension Instruction (main focus: ←→ Communication (main focus: form + meaning) meaning + message) ↓ ↓ Conscious learning and ← → Subconscious learning and practice integration ↓ ↓ Increasing automaticity of ←→ Increasing correctness of correct language spontaneous language ↓ ↓ Communicative Competence 3 CLT: The ‘wea ’ and ‘strong’ versions  From the beginning there has been confusion from two versions of CLT: ◦A ‘weak version’ of CLT: we can teach people to ‘do things with words’ through analytic as well as experiential strategies ◦A ‘strong version’ of CLT: if people ‘learn by communicating’, students should communicate all the time