Theme: teaching and learning second language using information technology Contents Introduction Main part

2. Second language learning and language teaching styles
The term ‘education design’ is secondhand in most concerning this book as a broad cover term for the various exercises that continue in language education. Glosses on the main famous means are likely in Chapter 1 (see page 17). Various hints have happened suggest over the age for making the term ‘method’ more exact or for leaving behind it. The established quality is between overall approaches, to a degree the spoken approach, means, to a degree the audio-spoken design, and education methods, to a degree drill. Richards and Rodgers see approaches as accompanying through design to processes. Matron, in another way, talks about four overall education ‘strategies’: the open-minded policy, that relies generally on listening; the informative action, at which point pupils learn by trying to ideas; the reconstructive game plan, at which point the student participates in reconstructive endeavors established a textbook; and the general strategy, that integrates two or more of the possible choice. Allen et al. distinguishes experiential activities, which rely on language use within a situation, from analytic activities, which use language study and practice. To avoid the various associations and prejudices that these terms conjure up, I prefer the more neutral terms ‘teaching technique’ and ‘teaching style’, which will be used in this chapter. The actual point of contact with the students is the teaching technique. Thus, a structure drill in which students intensively practice a structure is one technique; dictation is another; information gap exercises another, and so on. A technique, as Clark puts it, is a ‘label for what we do as teachers. Teachers combine these techniques in various ways within a particular teaching style. Put a structure drill with a repetition dialogue and a role play and you get the audio-lingual style, with its dependence on the spoken language, on practice and on structure. Put a functional drill with an information gap exercise and a role play and you get the communicative style, with its broad assumptions about the importance of communication in the classroom. A teaching style is a loosely connected set of teaching techniques believed to share the same goals of language teaching and the same views of language and of L2 learning. The word ‘style’ partly reflects the element of fashion and changeability in teaching; it is not intended as an academic term with a precise definition, but as a loose overall label that we can use freely to talk about teaching. A faculty member the one power feels blameworthy exchanging from one ‘procedure’ to another or joining ‘means’ inside individual communication has less regret about changeful ‘styles’; there is no affecting assurance to a ‘style’. This stage looks at six main education styles: the academic education style accepted in academic classrooms; the visual and audio entertainment transmitted via radio waves-spoken style that stresses structured spoken practice; the informative style that aims at interplay between society both in the classroom and outside; the task-located learning style that gets graduates achievement tasks; the prevailing EFL style that connects facets of the possible choice; and, definitely, added styles that look beyond vocabulary itself. These six styles are lax labels for a off-course range of education alternatively definite splits. The first four are organized in about chronological order, accompanying the oldest style first. The range of styles focal points the plan that no alone form of education suits all undergraduates in addition teachers. Teachers should always remember that, despite the masses of advice they are given, they have a choice. All these methods, techniques and styles are still available for people to use, regardless of whether they are in fashion or not. Indeed, it is doubtless true that never a day goes by when they are not all being used successfully somewhere in the world. Before looking at these styles in detail, it is useful to assess one’s own sympathies for particular styles by filling in the following questionnaire. This is intended as a way in to thinking about teaching styles, not as a scientific psychological test.
An progressive prose communication in an academic circumstances frequently resides of an account passage taken from a regular, continuous publication containing information or complementary beginning, for instance, the lead account on the front page of today’s regular, continuous publication containing information under the head ‘PM inquires new curbs on strikes’. The scholar leads the graduates through the passage sentence by sentence. Some of the enlightening upbringing is elucidated apiece teacher, suggest the framework of act about strikes in England. Words that present questions are explained or interpreted into the juniors’ native language for one instructor or by way of the undergraduates’ dictionaries – ‘closed shop’ or ‘halt’, for example. Grammatical points of interest are considered accompanying the pupils, in the way that the use of the inactive voice in ‘A akin suggestion in the Conservative choosing proclamation was again deferred’. The pupils continue to a substitute grammatical exercise on the inactive. Perhaps for exercise they convert the authorization into their native language. Consider the position in a junior high school. In individual class the pupils are being proven on their exercise. The coach has composed a succession of sentences on the board:
The baby has (cross /hybridized /junction) the expressway. The youth was (help /assisted /helping) welcome father. … thus. Then they communicate: Teacher: What’s ‘adolescent’? Student: A nominal. Teacher: What’s ‘cross’? Student: A verb. Teacher: What’s ‘hindered’? Student: Past action word. Teacher: So, what do we voice? Student: The youth has betrayed the avenue. Teacher: Good.
The gist facets of these classrooms are texts, established grammar and interpretation. Conscious understanding of alphabet and knowledge of the links between the first and the second language are visualized as essential to education. The academic education style is sometimes famous as the syntax-rewording means accordingly. The style is similar in idea to Matron’s reconstructive plan or Allen and others’ logical activities. It is a traditional habit of education different vocabularies in Western culture, favorite in subordinate schools and extensive in the education of advanced juniors in academy schemes about the world. James Coleman pronounced that when he begun education in an English academy, he erects the grammar-rewording pattern ‘was evidently ultimate popular approach to prose education in the academies’. The academic style can include aspects of prose apart from syntax. A faculty member analyzes how to regret in the aim speech – ‘When you happen upon someone on place where stocks are bought you reply “sad”’; a faculty member depicts where to set the language to form the sound /θ/ in ‘anticipate’ – both of these are falling into an academic style place the pupils should think the abstract explanation before asking it to their own talk. The difference from later styles is that, in the academic style, explicit grammar itself is the main point of the lesson. Translation is the component of the style that has had the least effect on traditional EFL teaching. For historical reasons, EFL has avoided the first language, both in methodology and in the coursebooks produced in England. One reason is the use in many countries of expatriate native speaker teachers who do not know the first language of the students and so cannot translate, one of the handicaps for the native speaker teacher. The other is the prevalence within England of multilingual EFL classes, where the teacher would be quite unable to use the many first languages the students speak. So, the translation component of academic teaching tends to be found in countries that use locally produced materials with local teachers – the secondary school lessons mentioned above were actually observed in Gaza, where foreign coursebooks and native speakers of English are in short supply. The academic style does not straightforwardly educate family to use the word for few external purposes outside the classroom; rewording, for instance, is a method, not an end. To use the separation fashioned in Chapter 10 between worldwide, local and national aims, the academic style is apparently proposed generally at the individual aim of L2 education as an academic subject; namely, it aims to devise Lang5 linguistic ability in the scholars’ minds, alternatively entity expected secondhand directly. In addition, it frequently claims to train the graduates to remember better, to acknowledge added civilizations and to gain additional instructional advantages. But the academic style is however presumed to arrange the pupil for the real use of style. By evolving academic information, the student ultimately enhances capable to use the second dialect in positions outside the classroom. While the style does not straightforwardly practice style use itself, it aims to determine a basis for speech use when the graduate demands it. Hence the undisputed recognition between graduates of syntax books such as Basic Grammar common. Despite the lack of unambiguous alphabet private modern education systems, graduates continue to trust that this will help bureaucracy. The academic style sees the acquisition of competence as getting hold of traditional rules and lists of vocabulary. Its syllabus largely consists of a list of grammatical points and vocabulary items. One of the first courses I ever taught, Present-day English for Foreign Students, is organized around ‘sentence patterns’ such as ‘John has a book’, and ‘new words’ such as ‘John Brown’. The style values what people know about the language rather than what they comprehend or produce. Students are seen as acquiring knowledge rather than communicative ability. The learner progresses from controlled conscious understanding of language to automatic processing of speech. The language teaching classroom is similar to classrooms in other school subjects, with the teacher as a fount of knowledge and advice. The academic style is appropriate for a society or an individual that treats academic knowledge of the second language as a desirable objective and holds a traditional view of the classroom and of the teacher’s role. Its strengths, to my mind, are the intellectual challenge it can present some students, unlike the non-intellectual approach of other styles, and the seriousness with which it views language teaching: the pupils are not just learning how to get a ticket in a railway station, but how to understand important messages communicated in another language, particularly through its literature. The links to literature are then valued. ‘Culture’ is taught as the ‘high culture’ of poetry and history rather than the ‘low culture’ of pop music and football. At the time I was taught Latin I hardly appreciated this; nevertheless, it has remained with me in a way that the functional French I learnt has not. One trivial example is the way that Latin quotations come to mind:
Horace’s line, ‘Caelum non hostility mutation qui trans equine species current’, is pithier than some English citation, as is shown by Christopher Marlowe’s use of it in Dr Faustus. Likewise, the experience that I had intentional Cicero’s talks present me a good model for enjoying Fidel Castro’s trenchant armament at the court of those blamed in the attack on the Moncada barracks. In other words, I have surely had my profit out of education Latin in conditions of individual aims. One proneness in the academic style is allure writing of terminology. As Michael Halliday and others. indicated many times gone by, you cannot judge the use of syntax in the classroom as inadequate if family destitute secondhand correct grammars. The semantic content is customarily established syntax, alternatively more current or more inclusive approaches, described in Chapter 2. At state-of-the-art levels, it ventures into the explanatory alphabet heritage in English, e.g., Collins COBUILD Grammar. While the situation of jargon in idea exercises is broad, it is still disorderly; the teacher has to cover anything happens suddenly in the quotation. Though the academic style laudably strives to build up relationships between vocabulary items encountered in texts, it has no principled way of doing so. Despite being concerned with linguistic forms, it pays little attention to components of language other than grammar and vocabulary, and occasionally pronunciation. The same academic techniques could in fact be applied systematically to other areas, say listening comprehension or communicative function. The academic teaching style caters for academically gifted students, who will supplement it with their own good language learner strategies, and who will probably not be young children – in other words, they are Saehan’s analytic learners. Those who are learning language as an academic subject – the linguistics students of the future – may be properly served by an academic style. But such academically oriented students form a small fraction of those in most educational settings – the tip of an iceberg. Those who wish to use the second language for real-life purposes may not be academically gifted or may not be prepared for the long journey from academic knowledge to practical use that the style requires. When should the academic style be used? If the society and the students treat individual goals as primary, language use as secondary, and the students are academically gifted, then the academic style is appropriate. In a country where the learners are never going to meet a French-speaking person, are never going to visit a French-speaking country, and have no career needs for French, an academic style of French teaching may be quite appropriate. But the teacher has to recognize its narrow base. For the academic style to be adequate, it needs to include descriptions of language that are linguistically sound and descriptions that the students can convert into actual use. The academic style would be more viable as a way of L2 teaching within its stated goals if its grammatical and vocabulary core better reflected the ways in which language is described today. Little teaching of English grammar in the academic style, for example, makes use of the basic information about grammatical morphemes or principles and parameters. If the intention is that the students are able to use language at the end, the grammar it teaches has to be justified not only by whether it is correct, but also by whether the students can absorb it. Stephen Krashen makes the useful point that we should be teaching ‘rules of thumb’ that help the student, even if they are not totally true (Krashen, 1985). A quick remark by the teacher that English comparatives are formed with ‘-er’ for monosyllabic words (‘big /bigger’, ‘small /smaller’, etc.) and with ‘more’ for words of more than two syllables (‘intelligent /more intelligent’, ‘beautiful /more beautiful’), leaves the student only to puzzle out words with exactly two syllables, such as ‘lovely’ or ‘obscure’. The criterion will not placate the linguists, but it may help the students. While the individual aims of the academic style are conceivably deep, the hazard is that professors can lose sight of ruling class and visualize semantic clarifications as bearing no other part than giving correct information about alphabet. The other main aims of speech knowledge, mental preparation and the recognition of different breeding’s may not be achieved if the coach does not present ruling class particular consideration in preparation lessons and in accomplishing bureaucracy out. The name ‘visual and audio entertainment transmitted via radio waves-spoken’ is joined to a teaching style that attained allure peak in the 1960s, best sent in Robert Lado’s mindful book Language Teaching: A Scientific Approach (Lado, 1964). Its importance is on education the human language through talks and drills. A typical lesson in an audio-lingual style starts with a dialogue, say about buying food in a shop:
A: Good morning.
B: Good morning.
A: Could I have some milk please?
B: Certainly. How much?
The language in the dialogue is controlled so that it introduces only a few new vocabulary items, ‘milk’, ‘cola’, ‘mineral water’, for instance, and includes several examples of each new structural point: ‘Could I have some cola?’, ‘Could I have some mineral water?’ and so on. The students listen to the dialogue as a whole, either played back from a tape or read by the teacher; they repeat it sentence by sentence, and they act it out: ‘Now get into pairs of shopkeeper and customer and try to buy the following items …’ Then the students have a structure drill in which they practice grammatical points connected with the dialogue, such as the polite questions used in requests: ‘Could I …?’ This is handled by an adjacency pair of turns, to use terms. Mostly these are called stimulus and response, taken from behaviorist theory, but I have tended to use the more neutral input and output to fit in with processing theory. So, the teacher presents a specimen from a tape, or written up on a whiteboard in less strict audio-lingual classes:
Input: Could I have some milk?
Output: Milk.
The students now answer by constructing appropriate outputs from each input:
Output: Could I have some milk?
Input: Water.
Output: Could I have some water? … and so on.
The drill many times practices the building with alternative of jargon; the graduates learn an input and should maneuver it in miscellaneous habits to get an yield, here by fitting a glossary item into a place in the fundamental pattern. Drills grown historically into tractor trailer-realistic exchanges, by connecting the recommendation and harvest in talkative adjacency pairs:
Input: What about milk?
Output: Oh yes, could I have some milk?
Input: And cola?
Output: Oh yes, could I have some cola?
Input: And you might need some mineral water.
Output: Oh yes, could I have some mineral water?
Finally, skilled are exploitation actions to form the students include the dialect in their own use: ‘Think what you be going to buy contemporary and request your neighbor if you can have few.’ As Wilga Rivers puts it, ‘Some provision will ought for the graduate to administer what he has discovered in a organized ideas position.’ In Realistic English, we followed up the main visual and audio entertainment transmitted via radio waves-spoken talk accompanying ‘Things to do’. For instance, after undertaking a dialogue about a traffic disaster, the pupils had to create outline about the witnesses, to conceive what the detective would say to welcome companion when he gets home, and to help an associate to conceive recommendation to present a 5-year-traditional on how to cross the artery. Similarly, a drill about ‘action word accompanying negative’, practicing ‘And the mother /man/ automobile not to meet/ visualize /buy …?’ leads into an exercise: ‘Now offer each one recommendation about people as political whole you concede possibility see and the machines you bear buy. The visual and audio entertainment transmitted via radio waves-spoken style interprets this in two habits. One is temporary: anything the pupils gain must be perceived before being visualized, so the lecturer forever has to announce a new word loudly before novel it on the chalkboard. The additional loiter-term: the juniors must spend a ending utilizing only uttered abilities before they are introduced to the inscribed abilities; this might last any weeks or actually a whole period. This unending understanding in my occurrence led to most questions. Adult scholars the one was used to the inscribed paragraph as a cane did misunderstand reason it was captured from bureaucracy; I used to present talks only from tape as far as I taken the students record the manual under their desks; so, I determined that, if they were making use of have a composed theme anyway, my right relieved variant was favored to their amateur adaptation.
Audio-lingual teaching divided language into the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and grouped these into active skills which people use to produce language, such as speaking and writing, and passive skills through which they receive it, such as listening and reading. As well as speech coming before writing, passive skills should come before active skills, which leads to the ideal sequence of the four skills given in Figure 13.1: listening, speaking, reading, writing. So, students should listen before they speak, speak before they read, read before they write. Needless to say, no one now accepts that listening and reading is exactly ‘passive’. Of all the styles, the audio-lingual most blatantly reflects a particular set of beliefs about L2 learning, which is often referred to as ‘habit formation’. Language is a set of habits, just like driving a car. A habit is learnt by doing it again and again. The dialogues concentrate on unconscious ‘structures’ rather than the conscious ‘rules’ of the academic style. Instead of trying to understand every word or structure, students learn the text more or less by heart. Learning means learning structures and vocabulary, which together add up to learning the language. Like the academic style, language is seen more as form than meaning, even if its basis is more in structural than traditional grammar. Oddly enough, despite its emphasis on the spoken language, the structures it teaches are predominantly from written language. The goal of the audio-lingual style is to get the students to ‘behave’ in common L2 situations, such as the station or the supermarket; it is concerned with the real-life activities the students are going to face. In one sense it is practical and communication- oriented. The audio-lingual style is not about learning language for its own sake, but learning it for actual use, either within the society or without. While the appropriate undergraduate type is not delimited, the style is not limited to the academically intelligent. Indeed, its stress on practice can hurt those accompanying an examining bias. Nor is the visual and audio entertainment transmitted via radio waves-spoken style unmistakably catering for scholars of the age; persons may invite to do battle as cheerfully as kids. Its views of L2 learning are tightest to the dispose of models expressed in Chapter 12: accent is achievement belongings, misunderstand things. Partly this finds in allure importance on the tangible position: the talks illustrate word secondhand in positions in the way that the travel agent’s or the chemist’s shop. Most significance is ascribed to construction up the strength of the juniors’ reaction through practice. Little pressure is likely to the understanding of semantic makeup or to the creation of information. The strength to use prose is amplified step by step utilizing the alike type of learning continually. Grammar is visualized as ‘constructions’ like ‘Could I have few X?’ or ‘This is a Y’, inside that items of jargon are substituted. Courses and syllabuses are sorted about forms; drills practice particular buildings; talks present and exemplify constructions and dictionary in framework. The style demands a classroom that is faculty member-controlled, except that the definitive exploitation state when, as Lado (1964) puts it, the junior ‘has the patterns ready as clothing’s but he must practice using ruling class accompanying adequate consideration on calculated ideas. Until the exploitation phase of the cycle, students repeat, answer or drill at the teacher’s behest. Though they work individually in the language laboratory, all of them still use the same activities and teaching materials. The style demands students who do not expect to take the initiative. All responsibility is in the teacher’s hands. The different aspects of the audio-lingual method can be seen in the list made by Wilga Rivers.
In Europe, visual and audio entertainment transmitted via radio waves-lingualize took place to arrive from the USA at a period when the style lab enhanced technically feasible. Many of allure methods actually worked well at this moment supplies; recurrent sentences and trial recordings of your duplication, achievement drills and trial the right answer after your attempt, equipped in carefully accompanying the tape recorder and later the dialect lab. Recent styles that stress free result of speech and mutual ideas have establish language labs far harder to adjust, other than for hearing activities. Indeed, some browse matters for computer-helped vocabulary education (CALL) on computer network show that they are largely visual and audio entertainment transmitted via radio waves-spoken in their prominence on drill and practice, though they necessarily revolve around upon the human language because of the calculating’s restraints in handling talk. One virtue of the academic style is that if it does not solve allure subordinate goal of admitting the junior to ideas, its ability still has educational profit by way of allure goals of reconstructing thinking, advancing cross-educational understanding, thus.
The audio-lingual style has no fallback position. If it does not succeed in getting the student to function in the second language, there is nothing else to be gained from it – no academic knowledge or problem-solving ability. Lado does claim, however, that it teaches a positive attitude of identification with the target culture. Its insistence on L2 learning as the creation of habits is an oversimplification of the behaviorist models of learning that were scorned as explanations for language acquisition for many years. Many would deny that the unique elements of language are in fact learnable by these means; the ability to create or understand ‘new’ sentences is not acquired by practicing ‘old’ sentences. The principles of Universal Grammar, for example, are impossible to acquire through drills and dialogues. Syllabuses and textbooks in the audio-lingual style mostly see structures, phonemes and vocabulary items as the sum total of language. Though based on the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, the style pays surprisingly little attention to the distinctive features of each skill. The skill of listening, for example, is not usually broken up into levels or stages that resemble those seen in Chapter 7. Moreover, the communication situation is far more complex than the style implies. If communication is the goal of language teaching, the content of teaching needs to be based on an analysis of communication itself, which is not adequately covered by structures and vocabulary. Even if students totally master the content of an audio-lingual course, they still need much more to function in a real-life situation. Yet many teachers fall back on the audio-lingual style. One reason may be that it provides a clear framework for teachers to work within. Few other styles could be captured in four assumptions, as Wilga Rivers manages to do. Teachers always know what they are supposed to be doing, unlike more flexible or improvisational styles. Students can relax within a firmly structured environment, always knowing the kinds of activities that will take place and what will be expected of them. After education a group of novices’ audio-lingually for six weeks, I determined it was period to have a change by presenting some informative exercises; the pupils wanted to go back to the visual and audio entertainment transmitted via radio waves-spoken methods. Certain aspects of expression may accommodate themselves best to audio-spoken education. Pronunciation education has hardly altered allure visual and audio entertainment transmitted via radio waves-lingual style education methods in the way that repetition and drill, or allure academic style intentional reason in the past 40 age, different the accelerated change in different areas of education, possibly by way of lack of imagination by instructors, possibly cause the audio-spoken style is actually ultimate effective circumference. Lado’s articulation methods of ‘demonstration, substitution, props, contrast, and practice’ appear as inclusive as anything bestowed in Chapter 4. The style admonishes us that prose is in part material behavior, and the total terminology education operation must take this into report.
Though ostensibly out of fashion, the influence of audio-lingualize is still pervasive. Few teachers nowadays employ a ‘pure’ audio-lingual style; yet many of the ingredients are present in today’s classrooms. The use of short dialogues, the emphasis on spoken language, the value attached to practice, the emphasis on the students speaking, the division into four skills, the importance of vocabulary control, the step-by-step progression, all go back to audio-lingualize. Many teachers feel comfortable with the audio-lingual style and use it at one time or another in their teaching. The 1970s saw a worldwide shift towards teaching methods that emphasized communication, seen as the fundamental reason for language teaching. Indeed, communicative teaching has now become the only teaching method that many teachers have experienced; it was the traditional method from the twentieth century as grammar/translation was the traditional method from the nineteenth. To start with, this style meant redefining what the student had to learn in terms of communicative competence rather than linguistic competence, social Lang4 rather than mental Lang5, to use the terms introduced in Chapter 1. The crucial goal was the ability to use the language appropriately rather than the grammatical knowledge or the ‘habits’ of the first two styles. The informative act of native speakers dressed as the base for syllabuses that incorporated vocabulary functions, to a degree ‘inclining dignitary commotion entity’, and notions, to a degree ‘signifying point momentary’, that accepted precedence over the grammar and jargon established earlier as the appropriate qualification of the summary. Instead of education the linguistic structure ‘This is an X’, as in ‘This is a book’, scholars were instructed the informative function of ‘labeling’, as in ‘This is a book’. Though the building may end up accurately the alike, the action for education it is immediately very various, not grammatical information but talent to use alphabet for a purpose.
The elaboration of communicative competence into functions and notions affected the syllabus but did not at first have direct consequences for teaching methods. The fact that the teaching point of a lesson is the function ‘asking directions’ rather than the structure ‘yes-no questions’ does not mean it cannot be taught through any teaching style, just as grammar can be taught in almost any style. The course Function in English displayed a list of alternatives for each function categorized as neutral, informal and formal, and linked by codes to a structural index – clearly academic style. The coursebook Opening Strategies fashioned pupils substitute ‘bank’, ‘post office’, ‘outlet’, thus, into the sentence ‘Is skilled a forthcoming here?’, an visual and audio entertainment transmitted via radio waves-spoken drill in essence. To many people, nevertheless, completely dictates the resources: a aim expressed in conditions of ideas way basing classroom education on ideas accordingly leads to techniques that form the juniors ideas with each one. Consequently, ideas came to be seen more as processes alternatively motionless details like functions and desires. So, syllabuses started expected planned about the processes or tasks that students use in the classroom. Techniques of informative education the quintessential communicative method is a news break exercise. Touchstone uses parody maps of two invented neighborhoods; graduates should find the differences. Living with People secondhand pairs of photographs of Oxford roadway settings with slight distinctness’s – a butcher’s shop captured from two various angles, a sequence at a bus stop captured any seconds separate, and so on. Students examine individual or additional set of photos and should discover what the dissimilarities are, if some, by reprimand each other outside look at the additional set. This information break method introduced accompanying language growth exercises for native English elementary school youth in the 1970s, but it early enhanced a pillar of EFL teaching. Its ability use replica, tapes or models – really, anything place the faculty member manage intentionally engineer two sets of slightly distancing facts for fear that the students had an facts break to bridge. The point of the action is that the juniors have to invent the talk themselves to resolve their communicative task. They should use their own money to gain a informative goal accompanying added community, thus influencing ideas straightforwardly into the classroom.
The second standard communicative technique is guided role play. The students improvise conversations around an issue without the same contrived information gap. New Cutting Edge, for example, suggests: ‘Act out a conversation in the tourist information office’. One student role-plays an official, the other their normal character. The aim is practicing how to assume particular roles in situations. The situations themselves are virtually the same as those in the audio-lingual method – the doctor’s, the station, the restaurant – but instead of starting from the highly controlled, pre-set dialogues of the audio-lingual method, students try to satisfy communicative needs by talking for themselves; it is not the language of the station that is important, it is what you do with it – buying a ticket, asking for the time of a train, and so on. The third common method is tasks: scholars carry out tasks in the classroom accompanying a positive effect. For instance, in Lesson 14 of Atlas 1, pupils search a connected series of tasks on ‘bestowing reasons’, named a ‘task chain’.
First they admit to a taped dialogue and should tick how regularly they find out ‘why’ and cause’; before they get repeated to learn distinguishing reasons; in pairs, they equate their answers, and after the assistant has likely a ‘model’ dialogue, they duty-play equivalent discourses about ‘asking for belongings and giving reasons’. Finally, they review gang either it is from request additional crowd to do belongings like ‘buy you a drink’ in their own breeding’s. Students are cooperation to attain the task and to share their ends accompanying added juniors: the picture that follows this task chain is two laughing juniors reprimand each one, emphasize the classroom-internal character of the task. In individual sense, these three methods cover the alike ground. The news breach game merges accompanying the role play when the guy gambling absolutely connoisseur has facts the added undergraduates do not; the task enhances a role play when they practice fictitious requests.
The communicative classroom is a very different place from classrooms using the other two styles encountered so far. The teacher no longer dominates it, controlling and guiding the students every minute. Rather the teacher takes one step back and hands the responsibility for the activities over to the students, forcing them to make up their own conversations in pairs and groups – learning language by doing. A key difference from other styles is that the students are not required to produce speech with the minimum of mistakes in native terms. Instead, they can use whatever forms and strategies they can devise themselves to solve their communication problem, producing sentences that may be entirely appropriate to their task but are often highly deviant from a native perspective. The teacher stands by. While the teacher provides some feedback and correction, this plays a much less central part in his or her classroom duties. The teacher has the role of equal and helper rather than the wise expert of the academic style or the martinet of the audio-lingual. This jump from the traditional teacher-led class disconcerts or indeed alienates those from cultures who see education differently. The adoption of the communicative style in a particular place always has to recognize this potential cultural obstacle, however ideal communicative language teaching may be on other grounds. Here is a conversation taking place at a parents’ evening featuring an Inuk parent and a non-Inuit teacher: Teacher: Your son is talking well in class. He is speaking up a lot. Inuk parent: I am very sorry. To the teacher, it is obvious that it is a virtue to speak and contribute in class; to the parent, it is equally obviously that children who show proper respect for the teacher stay silent in class. A communicative style with its emphasis on spontaneous production by the learners is unlikely to go down well in cultures that value silence and respect.