Chapter II elt methods: a basic Appraisal 1 Humanistic Approaches

Step I The teacher says the commands as he himself performs the action.
Step 2 The teacher says the command as both the teacher and the students then
perform the action.
Step 3 The teacher says the command but only students perform the action
Step 4 The teacher tells one student at a time to do commands
Step 5 The roles of teacher and student are reversed. Students give commands to
teacher and to other students.
Step 6 The teacher and student allow for command expansion or produces new
sentences.
In-class reflection
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The Communicative Approach
All the "methods" described so far are symbolic of the progress foreign language teaching ideology underwent in the last century. These were methods that came and went, influenced or gave birth to new methods - in a cycle that could only be described as "competition between rival methods" or "passing fads" in the methodological theory underlying foreign language teaching. Finally, by the mid-eighties or so, the industry was maturing in its growth and moving towards the concept of a broad "approach" to language teaching that encompassed various methods, motivations for learning English, types of teachers and the needs of individual classrooms and students themselves. It would be fair to say that if there is any one "umbrella" approach to language teaching that has become the accepted "norm" in this field, it would have to be the Communicative Language Teaching Approach. This is also known as CLT.
. . .
CLT is a generic approach, and can seem non-specific at times in terms of how to actually go about using practices in the classroom in any sort of systematic way. There are many interpretations of what CLT actually means and involves.
The goal of communicative language approaches is to create a realistic context for language acquisition in the classroom. The focus is on functional language usage and the learners communicative competence to express their own ideas, feelings, attitudes, desires and needs. Open ended questioning and problem-solving activities and exchanges of personal information are utilized as the primary means of communication. Students usually work with authentic materials (authentic realia) in small groups on communication activities, during which they receive practice in negotiating meaning.