Курінний Олексій Вячеславович

викладач кафедри іноземних мов Сумського національного аграрного університету

Патока Юрій Юрієвич

викладач кафедри іноземних мов Сумського національного аграрного університету

Principles of Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative language teaching is not one method; it is an approach. This means we choose various ways to teach language based on our understanding of 1) what we know when we know a language and 2) how we learn a foreign language. We choose or create the materials, activities, and classroom atmosphere that we think will best help students succeed. We will look at some ideas and models that help explain what we think it means to know a language and how we think a foreign language is learned today.

In the years since World War Two, globalization has required us to communicate with people around the world. Already in the seventies, language scholars began to focus on what helped people learn to communicate better in a foreign language. They began to see language as a social process rather than just a linguistic code. In 1980 Canale and Swain helped to describe this wider view of language knowledge by making a model that added discourse, sociolinguistic, and strategic competence to grammatical competence. Together these competencies make up communicative competence.

• Grammatical competence: Knowledge of the vocabulary and sentence structure of a language.
• Discourse competence: The ability to recognize different patterns of discourse (e.g. a newspaper article, a university lecture, a scolding), to connect sentences to an overall theme or topic; the ability to get meaning from larger texts.
• Sociolinguistic competence: The ability to use language appropriate to a context, taking into account the participants, the setting and the purpose of the interaction.
• Strategic competence: The ability to compensate for limited language knowledge, for fatigue, or distraction; the effective use of coping strategies to maintain or improve communication.

In 1982 Stephen Krashen explained how he thought we learn foreign languages. There are five hypotheses in his model.
1) He believes we take in language in two ways: through acquisition which happens during conversation when we are not paying attention to form, and through learning where we pay conscious attention to form and error.
2) He believes that this learned system acts like a monitor of how we speak if we have sufficient time, pay attention to form, and know the rules.
3) He believes there is a natural order in which the rules of a language are acquired and it does not relate to what has been taught or how simple the rule is (e.g. third person -s is acquired late though the rule is easy to understand).
4) Krashen says that we acquire language only by receiving "comprehensible input," language that is just a little more difficult than the learner's current level of understanding.
5) Finally, he suggests that acquisition can be helped or hurt by what he calls an affective filter, an imaginary wall that is "up" and blocks input when the learner is stressed, angry or bored and which is "down" and permits acquisition when the learner is comfortable.

Principles of communicative language teaching (by Finocchario & Brumfit)

· Meaning is most important.

· Dialogs, if used, centre around communicative functions and are not normally memorized.

· Language is always in context.

· Language learning is learning to communicate.

· Drilling may occur occasionally, but only as necessary for helping communication.

· Comprehensible, not native-like, pronunciation is appropriate.

· Anything which helps learners is accepted.

· Attempts to communicate may be encouraged from the very beginning.

· Judicious use of the mother tongue is accepted where feasible.

· Translation may be used only when students need or benefit from it.

· Reading and writing can start from the beginning if appropriate to learner's goals.

· The target linguistic system will be learned best through the process of struggling to communicate.

· Communicative competence is the desired goal.

· Materials and methods should show linguistic variation.

· Sequencing of material is based on maintaining learner interest.

· Teachers help learners in any way that motivates learners to work with the language.

· Trial and error is a normal way to create and learn language.

· Fluency and acceptable language is the primary goal.

· Learners are expected to interact with other people.

· The teacher cannot know exactly what the learner wants to say.

Language teaching changed as a result of the work of people like Canale and Swain, Krashen, and Savignon. This new kind of classroom was described as communicative.