Essentials for Successful English Language Teaching

Thomas S. C. Farrell, George M. Jacobs

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350093416
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is about how to teach English as a second language and how second language students learn. With Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) at its centre, it takes a practical approach to second language teaching backed up by clearly explained theory. Presenting eight essential principles across twelve chapters, the book covers Learner Autonomy, Social Learning, Integrated Curriculum, Meaning, Diversity, Thinking Skills, Alternative Assessment and Teacher Co-learning, and shows how technology and reflective teaching can be used to support and enhance these essentials in the classroom. Combining theory and practice, Essentials for Successful English Language Teaching explains how these principles interweave and support each other within the CLT paradigm, demonstrating why they are best implemented as a whole, rather than one at a time. Now revised and brought fully up to date, this new edition includes: - A brand new chapter covering technology and cooperation in teaching practice and how they support CLT-based activities
- Vignettes for each essential principle to consolidate theory and demonstrate best practice
- Updated real world examples, drawing on teaching experiences from North America, Africa and Asia Taking a 'big picture' view that assumes no prior knowledge of linguistics or language education, Essentials for Successful English Language Teaching is an energising and fun guide for language practitioners.

Chapter 1

Essentials for Successful English Language Teaching

Chapter Outline

Introduction

Communicative Language Teaching

Understanding Communicative Language Teaching

Implementing Communicative Language Teaching

Eight Essentials for Successful English Language Teaching

Teaching English as a Second/Foreign Language

Conclusion

Introduction

Since the 1970s communicative language teaching (CLT) has been one of the most popular teaching methodologies around the world in second language education. Before that, the more traditional teaching methods (e.g., Audio-Lingual Method; Grammar-Translation Method) that were employed focused more on producing accurate, grammatically correct target language. CLT, however, began to change the emphasis to where learners produce the language with a focus on meaning and where errors are seen as being part of development. In traditional classes, teachers are seen as the knowledge providers and sole controllers of the class. In the CLT approach second language teachers share this control and “facilitate” learning rather than only dispensing knowledge. So CLT represents a major change and is considered one of the most recommended approaches to second language education today (Richards, 2005). Jacobs and Farrell (2001, 2003) label this major change to learning and teaching second language a paradigm shift because in order to successfully implement the CLT approach, we must shift our thinking about teachers and students, and about learning, and teaching a second language. They observe that there is a tendency for practitioners to innovate in isolation, and thus change is implemented piecemeal. This, of course, assumes that change should (or could) be implemented. The idea of shift in focus is illustrated by the story of the “Cricket and the Coin.”

One pleasant summer day at lunch time two colleagues, A and B, were walking along a busy street in Atlanta when A turned to B and said, “Do you hear that cricket across the street?” to which B replied, “How could I possibly hear a cricket with all this traffic.” Her colleague confidently said, “Let’s cross the street and I’ll show you.” They carefully made their way through the traffic to a flower box on the other side where, sure enough, there was a cricket. B was astounded. “How could you hear a little cricket amid all this noise? You must have super-human hearing!” “The key,” A explained, “is not how well we hear but what we listen for.” To illustrate, she took a coin from her purse, threw it in the air, and let it drop on the sidewalk. Soon, the sound of braking vehicles filled the air, as cars came to a halt. Drivers and pedestrians turned to look for the rattling coin. As A reached to retrieve her coin, B smiled and said, “Now, I see what you mean; it’s all a matter of focus.”

This chapter outlines and describes the Eight Essentials of second language education that fit with the focus that is essential to the CLT paradigm shift. The subsequent chapters of this book then each concentrate on one of the Eight Essentials and the final chapter concludes the discussion. These Eight Essentials are as follows: encourage learner autonomy, emphasize the social nature of learning, develop curricular integration, focus on meaning, celebrate diversity, expand thinking skills, utilize alternative assessment methods, and promote English language teachers as co-learners. We argue that in second language education, although the CLT paradigm shift was initiated many years ago, it really has been only partially implemented. There are two reasons for this partial implementation: (1) by trying to understand each essential separately, second language educators have weakened their understanding by missing the larger picture; and (2) by trying to implement each essential separately, second language educators have made the difficult task of shift or change even more challenging.

We now give a brief orientation to CLT and how we should really understand and implement it as a real paradigm shift.

Communicative Language Teaching

CLT can be seen as a set of “principles about the goals of language teaching, how learners learn a language, the kinds of classroom activities that best facilitate learning, and the roles of teachers and learners in the classroom” (Richards, 2005, p. 1). CLT has been the “in” approach to second language education since its beginning in the early 1970s and has now become the driving force that affects the planning, implementation, and evaluation of English Language Teaching (ELT) throughout the world (Richards & Rodgers, 2001). That said, not many English language teachers or second language educators are in agreement or even clear in their own minds as to what exactly CLT is, and there exist as many diverse interpretations as there are language teachers and others in second language education. This wide variation in the implementation of CLT is not, as we discuss in Chapter 6 on celebrating diversity, necessarily a bad thing. Rather, it is a natural product of the range of contexts in which second language learning takes place and the range of experiences that students, teachers, and other stakeholders bring with them.

In its early inception CLT was seen as an approach to teaching second or foreign languages for the purposes of enabling second language learners to be able to use language functionally, meaningfully, and appropriately, instead of the previous emphasis on correctness (e.g., Finocchiaro & Brumfit, 1983). However, over the years, ESL and EFL teachers have interpreted the CLT approach to language teaching in many different ways, with many teachers thinking that the teacher just forms groups in their classes and lets the students practice speaking the second language. The end result that teachers using this approach were seeking was that their students become competent in speaking that second language. Richards (2005) called this Phase 1 of the CLT movement, and he says it continued until the late 1960s. In Phase 1, the previous traditional approaches that gave priority to grammatical competence as a foundation for language proficiency gave way to functional and skill-based teaching that had a “fluency over accuracy” pedagogical purpose. The next phase of CLT according to Richards (2005) was the classic CLT period from the 1970s to the 1990s. In this phase the place of grammar in instruction was questioned because it seemed to result only in grammatical competence that produced grammatically correct sentences under controlled conditions but did not, according to many, enable oral production that embodied communicative use of language. So what was really called for at that time was communicative competence where students could actually communicate orally in the second language; for example, Hymes (1972) suggested that Chomsky’s ideal native speaker with linguistic competence includes the sociolinguistic component of the communicative competence of knowledge of and ability for language use with respect to four factors: “Possibility, feasibility, appropriateness and accepted usage” (p. 19). More recently, Richards (2005, p. 1) suggests that communicative competence includes the following aspects of language knowledge:

• Knowing how to use language for a range of different purposes and functions

• Knowing how to vary our use of language according to the setting and the participants (e.g., knowing when to use formal and informal speech or when to use language appropriately for written as opposed to spoken communication)

• Knowing how to produce and understand different types of texts (e.g., narratives, reports, interviews, conversations)

• Knowing how to maintain communication despite having limitations in one’s language knowledge (e.g., through using different kinds of communication strategies)

Since the 1990s CLT has continued to evolve by drawing from different educational paradigms and diverse sources with the result that, as Richards (2005, p. 24) maintains, there is still “no single or agreed upon set of practices that characterize current communicative language teaching.” Rather, he suggests that CLT these days refers to “a set of generally agreed upon principles that can be applied in different ways, depending on the teaching context, the age of the learners, their level, their learning goals.” In addition, Brown (2000) has maintained that CLT should include the following:

• Classroom goals are focused on all the components of communicative competence and not restricted to grammatical or linguistic competence.

• Language techniques are designed to engage learners in the pragmatic, authentic, functional use of language for meaningful purposes.

• Fluency and accuracy are seen as complementary principles underlying communicative techniques.

• In the communicative classroom, students ultimately have to use the language, productively and receptively, in unrehearsed contexts (p. 266).

Richards (2005) maintains that if we ask ESL/EFL teachers today who say they follow the CLT approach what exactly they do, or what they mean by “communicative,” their explanations will vary widely from an absence of grammar in a conversation course to a focus on open-ended discussion activities. In our view, the key problem lies in the fact that not enough teachers are implementing CLT and some of those who do implement it do so too infrequently, too often returning to the traditional paradigm. Later in this chapter, we examine reasons for this.

Understanding Communicative Language Teaching

In second language education, the CLT paradigm shift over the past fifty years, which Long (1997) likens to a revolution, flows from the positivism to post-positivism shift in science (see also Chapter 10) and involves a move away from the tenets of behaviorist psychology and structural linguistics and toward cognitive, and later, socio-cognitive psychology and more contextualized, meaning-based views of language. Key components on this shift concern the following:

1. Focusing greater attention on the role of learners rather than the external stimuli learners are receiving from their environment. Thus, the center of attention shifts from the teacher to the student. This shift is generally known as the move from teacher-centered instruction to learner-centered or learning-centered instruction.

2. Focusing greater attention on the learning process rather than on the products that learners produce. This shift is known as a move from product-oriented instruction to process-oriented instruction.

3. Focusing greater attention on the social nature of learning rather than on students as separate, decontextualized individuals.

4. Focusing greater attention on diversity among learners and viewing these differences not as impediments to learning but as resources to be recognized, catered to, and appreciated. This shift is known as the study of individual differences.

5. In research and theory-building, focusing greater attention on the views of those internal to the classroom rather than solely valuing the views of those who come from outside to study classrooms investigate and evaluate what goes on there, and engage in theorizing about it. This shift is associated with such innovations as qualitative research, which highlights the subjective and affective, the participants’ insider views, and the uniqueness of each context.

6. Along with this emphasis on context comes the idea of connecting the school with the world beyond as a means of promoting holistic learning.

7. Helping students to understand the purpose of learning and develop their own purposes.

8. A whole-to-part orientation instead of a part-to-whole approach. This involves such approaches as beginning with meaningful whole texts and then helping students understand the various features that enable texts to function—for example, the choice of words and the text’s organizational structure.

9. An emphasis on the importance of meaning rather than drills and other forms of rote learning.

10. A view of learning as a lifelong process rather than something done to prepare for an exam.

As mentioned earlier, the CLT paradigm shift in second language education is part of a larger shift that affected many other fields. (See Voght [2000] for a discussion of parallels between paradigm shifts in foreign language education at US universities and paradigm shifts in education programs in business and other professions.) Oprandy (1999) links trends in second language education with those in the field of cit...