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233MERITS AND DEMERITS OF COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING
APPROACH
Zaxro Mirbabayeva
Master Uzbekistan State University of World Languages
ABSTRACT
The article is devoted to the study of the advantageous and disadvantageous sides of implementing CLT in EFL classroom. In fact, a whole lot of techniques, methods and approaches have been in vogue in the field of foreign language teaching but every method and approach has its own upsides and downsides, and so is the case with task based learning approach. The research has been done in the area of communicative language learning and various techniques are suggested to improve vocabulary, automaticity of learning and ultimately the performance of learners in developing their language abilities.
Keywords: communicative language teaching, communicative competence, language structures, fluency, interaction, experiential learning, learner-centered classroom
When we talk about a method or approach being used in a language teaching environment, we cannot avoid discussing its strength and weaknesses. Among the strengths that the observer managed to identify with regards to communicative language teaching (CLT) methodology was the active participation in the classroom. Like many traditional and contemporary theories and approaches within the fields of language teaching and learning, the CLT approach offers a significant set of advantages for both teachers and students to enjoy the progress of learning (Harmer, 1988; Savignon, 2002).
Below are some of the possible advantages. Firstly, unlike the Grammar-Translation Method and the Direct Method (Baugh, 1993; Emerson, 1971; Howatt & Widdowson, 2004) the CLT approach tends to be a student-centred and situation-oriented language teaching practice (Da Silva Cintra & Bittencourt, 2015; Dos Santos, 2019a; Dos Santos, 2019b; San-Valero et al, 2019). Within the situation practices, teachers tend to develop some related activities within student living communities and societies. With these clear and familiar backgrounds and with understanding of the vocabulary and application of the sentences, students are more likely to share their thinking with their peers [1-5]. Also, the situational practices in speaking may not have a strong focus on grammar and sentence translation accuracy. However, with these approaches, students may increase their understanding and knowledge of language use, feasibility and communication abilities. Secondly, one of the other significant advantages of the CLT approach is the
interaction between teachers, students and peers. For the CLT approach, the relationships between both peers and teachers are significantly increased and highly considered (Savignon, 2002). The CLT approach allows both teachers and students to transfer their traditional teaching and learning beliefs into an innovative teaching and learning approach. For example, a well-known educator (Dos Santos, 2019a; Dos Santos, 2019b) in language learning advocated that today's students like to use technological-assisted materials and tools for language learning, such as social media platforms and internet chat groups. In order to meet the needs of these students, such visual and interpersonal communicative tools must be created and employed. Thirdly, the CLT approach usually increases the overall teaching and learning interests of students. Unlike the Grammar-Translation Method (Howatt & Widdowson, 2004) students were the sole listeners of the lectures. Also, when students are allowed to participate in some real-life stories and exercises, this could develop the interests of the students beyond the classroom environment. Also, the related stories, exercises, problem-based materials and case studies are more closely related to daily activities. In other words, students became the protagonists instead of the audiences. Moreover, related activities do not only work in the classroom but also allow students to bring classroom activities into applications and the workplace after completion of the lessons (Jiménez, García, & Pearson, 1996; Liao & Yang, 2012).
According to Richards and Rodgers, one of the principles of CLT is to promote learning
(Guangwei Hu, 2002). The teacher managed to engage the classroom with the usage of
visual displays and sentence strips [6]. Not only that, the personality of the teacher
contributed to the active participation by the students. The teacher plays an important
role not only in the aspect of producing a good lesson plan but also in reaching out to
the students. When students are comfortable in a learning environment, they will be
motivated to be part of it. Additionally, the role of teacher and students have changed in
CLT. The teacher becomes the facilitator while students are expected to participate in
classroom activities collaboratively rather than individually (Richards, 2006). There was
also a lot of two way communication where students are expected to pose questions for
further understanding and give feedback to the tasks being done.
Let it be repeated again that as opposed to the traditional direct method where grammar
is taught inductively, CLT does not merely focus on grammar teaching. The main focus
of CLT is the communicative competence. If a student is able to use the target language
outside a classroom setting, then the goal of CLT has been achieved.
All in all, the following major advantages of CLT can be summarized below:
(a) It motivates students to improve their ability of using English by themselves since it
emphasizes on fluency in the target language. Meaning that, it provides students with
assignments that allow them to improve their own ideas about what they are going to
talk and how they are going to express. This enables the learners to be more confident when interacting with other people and they also enjoy talking more (Brown, 2001).
(b) CLT focuses on and aims at communicative competence. Thus, enabling the learners to use the language in a communicative situation to satisfy their needs in real-life communication is a priority in CLT (Richards, 2006). In other words, it brings the real life situation of the native English in to classroom activities such as role-play and simulation (Harmer, 2007).
(c) The major portion of the learning process is not upon the teacher thus illustrating that CLT classes have moved from teacher-centeredness to learner-centeredness. In other words, much more time issued by the learner that the role of the teacher is just to facilitate the learning process. Thus, the learner should exercise and communicate enough in the CLT class to achieve communicative competence (Brown, 2001).
The Communicative Language Teaching approach provides a great number of advantages for teachers and learners to participate in effective language learning environments. However, some possible obstacles may serve as disadvantages within the teaching and learning environment. The following section indicates some of the possible obstacles. Firstly, lack of language proficiency. In fact, some teachers may be unable to answer detailed question about the target language, sociolinguistics or culture as they arise from interactions in the classroom [7]. The CLT approach encourages teachers to employ related teaching and learning materials and tools from living communities and societies (Dos Santos, 2019a). However, the range of these related materials could be large. Therefore, even if teachers prepared the lessons, some questions and challenges could be missed. Secondly, in some countries, the CLT approach has been widely employed in many of their language learning classrooms. In the United States, for example, international students from all over the world, including students from both Eastern societies and Western communities, may be assigned into language learning environments and classrooms. However, due to the variety of social and cultural perspectives and backgrounds, many of these students tend to believe that traditional teaching and learning strategies (e.g. Direct Method, teacher-centred) are the only effective ways of teaching and learning. In other words, these students tend to focus their interests on memorising vocabulary and grammar. For a large number of students, traditionally, learning a new language is about memorising vocabulary and intensive reading of materials after completing each lecture. Therefore, many students are unwilling to fully accept the CLT approach due to their traditional views of language learning techniques (Ahn & Kang, 2017; Lee & Lee, 2019). Thirdly, the pressures and requirements of standard examination guidelines may also influence the application and employment of the CLT approach. For example, in the United States, secondary school students are recommended to take the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) as one of the university entrance requirements. Such university entrance exams are also widely
employed in many international locations and schools, such as the ALevel, and the General Certificate of Education (GCE). It is worth noting that many of these university entrance examinations do not require any type of oral language proficiency [8]. Therefore, learners may not have any strong interest in participating in additional communicative training due to the requirement of these examinations. Fourthly, learner behaviour would be highly influenced by the practice of the CLT approach in a classroom environment (Archambault, Vandenbossche-Makombo, & Fraser, 2017; Baker, Grant, & Morlock, 2008; Dos Santos, 2018). Unlike students in Western societies, learners from Eastern countries are not as motivated as other students even in the same classroom due to their social and cultural perspectives and practices (Ahn & Kang, 2017; DeWaelsche, 2015; Kim, 2017; Lee & Lee, 2019). For example, East Asian students tend to be passive learners due to their cultural background. In many circumstances, East Asian students defer any arguments to their peers and teachers due to the social and cultural respectfulness to their teachers, even if they made mistakes. Therefore, based on learner behaviour, the CLT approach may have potential limitations to some groups of learners due to social and cultural backgrounds and perspectives. Fifthly, classroom size and student enrolment numbers for each individual classroom significantly influence the outcomes and performances of the CLT approach. In some circumstances, language learning courses could enrol more than 50 students in a large sized lecture hall. Such large sized lectures offer no opportunities for students to interact and communicate with their peers, as in a silent and concentrated environment. Also, teachers can usually not handle additional demands, questions, improvements or corrections for each individual student (Weiner, 2012; Weiner. & Jerome, 2016). Sixthly, psycho-linguists and social-linguists advocate that regardless of the age, gender, nationality or background of language learners, awareness of grammar acquisition and understanding of the language grammar, both systematic and progressive, is that it would be carried out in a certain order (Vygotsky, 1978, 1981). When teaching grammar with the CLT approach, teachers tend to create a situation which outlines ideas in a specific context in order to seek communicative functions, such as questions, ordering etc. (Dos Santos, 2019a; Dos Santos, 2019b; Vygotsky, 1981). Under this direction, the syntax of the systematic and progressive is subject to a certain degree of neglect, and can give people a disorderly understanding (Pratt, 1992; Wagner et al., 1994).
Overall, there have been various criticisms on the principles of the communicative approach to teaching and learning language, the followings can be summarized about the disadvantages of CLT:
(a) The approach gives priority to meanings and rules of use rather than to grammar and rules of structure. In other words, it is felt that there is not enough emphasis on the correction of pronunciation and grammar error. It is because too much focus on
meaning at the expense of form. It is believed that with CLT there is a danger of focusing too much on oral skills and less emphasis is given to reading and writing skills, (Al-Humaidi, n.d.as cited in Keithley, Kumm(2013).
(b) The CLT approach focuses on fluency but not accuracy in grammar and pronunciation. According t o Hughes ( 1983) communicative language teaching leads to the production of "fluent but inaccurate" learners. What is predicted to happen here is the danger of giving priority to fluency over accuracy in CLT classes [9-12].
(c) The CLT approach is great for intermediate student and advanced students, but for beginners some controlled practice is needed Students with low levels of proficiency in the target language may find it difficult to participate in oral communicative activities and, if the exams used by any institution are grammar based, communicative fluency may not be appropriate.
(d) The monitoring ability of the teacher must be very good. Despite teachers' best efforts, classroom activities are not actually real-life and it can be difficult to reproduce truly authentic language use and to facilitate genuine interaction. Moreover, a major principle underlying this approach is its emphasis on learners' needs and interests. This implies that much more effort is expected that every teacher should modify the syllabus to correspond with the needs of the learners.
(e) CLT is sometimes difficult to be implemented in an EFL classroom due to the lack of sources and equipments like authentic materials and native speaker teachers as well as large size of the classes. In addition, suitable classrooms are not available that can allow for group work activities and for teaching aids and materials (Burnaby and Sun, 1989).
Issues and Challenges in Implementing CLT in ESL Classroom The main purpose of carrying out CLT is for the learners to be able to use English as Second Language for different purposes. Even so, there are also identified the problems that hinder the implementation of CLT:
Large class size. Many researchers agreed that large class size is one of the contributing problems in CLT (Anderson 1993; Li 1998; Littlewood 2007; Liao 2003; Suhaily Abdullah & Faizah Abd Majid 2013). Besides that, Butler (2011) also stated that large number of pupils in Asian classrooms caused difficulties for the teachers to monitor their pupils' behaviour in the tasks assigned throughout the learning process. This leads to failure to make sure everyone is listening to the teacher's instruction even the simplest English instruction was used because they tend to use their mother tongue when discussing about the given tasks or things that are not related to the lesson. Mixed abilities groups. Recent years, schools are not allowed to do class-streaming among the learners; thus, mixed abilities classrooms are practised in Malaysia. There are positive and negative sides of this strategy. Baker (2006) argued that it is not about numbers of students in a class, but about having so many different ability levels that
provides biggest challenge. She further claimed that in mixed-ability classes it can be hard to keep track and attention to all learners. Learners might have their own way of learning, and the weaker ones probably would have difficulties working in a communicative, noisy atmosphere since they are usually more easily distracted ones. Thus, their motivation in communicative, interactive and active classroom can be so poor and teachers too can be affected; to easily get frustrated because he or she does not have enough time to attend the weaker learners.
Fluency vs accuracy. CLT was criticized by many about how it leads to the production of fluent learners but inaccurate. Fluency happens because speakers are mostly engaged in a meaningful communication and they are able to maintain a comprehensible and ongoing communication (Richard 1996). This is supported by Hughes (1983) who stated that priority in CLT is given to fluency over accuracy. That is why, error correction is not recommended and has no significant place in teaching and learning process. Thus, teachers who play the role as facilitator will just let the learners engaged in the communicative tasks and never disrupt or correct the learners' mistake during the process. During CLT lessons; which speaking and listening skills are integrated, minimal error correction is encouraged to be practiced and thus may encourage the teachers to not correct the learners' mistakes at all and just focus on the learners' fluency rather than accuracy.
Pupils' ESL Proficiency Level. English language proficiency among the local learners is another issue highlighted based on the past researches. Shabnam (2012) concluded in her research that low English proficiency level is one of the issues in CLT implementation in Bangladesh. However, she mentioned that the teachers involved in the study did not see this as a big issue. That is why, this research is carried out to investigate if this problem hinders the implementation of CLT. Meanwhile in Bakhtiarvand (2011) study, it was reported there that pupils who lack of English proficiency level faced difficulties in delivering their ideas, thus, hindering them from improving their English language skills. This can be related to Malaysian ESL primary school pupils who are learning English where CLT is being integrated. This research will help future researchers to identify and investigate further if primary school pupils who have low level English proficiency affect the implementation of CLT. Teacher's Language Competency. According to Nishino and Watanabe (2008), the lack of sufficient teacher training in CLT has also caused problem in its implementation in the classrooms. According to the two researchers again, some of the teachers were not competent or confident in their ability to speak in English, thus disabling them to conduct effective communicative tasks. Meanwhile in another research conducted on Japanese English teachers, the findings indicated that less than 50% of the teachers met the national anticipated level. Training is very important as it equips the teachers to be competent to teach the learners. A research carried out by Chang (2011) agreed that
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training is an important factor in making sure full implementation of CLT in the classroom.
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