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Date Posted: 17:45:47 06/12/03 Thu
Author: Flávia da Cruz Moreira
Subject: Task 6

Task 6
Describe the design of a prototypical communicative course.

To designing a prototypical communicative course we have to establish the objectives, the activities and its purposes, and the way assessment will be done.

First of all we have to know who are the target group, in which situations they will need to use the foreign language, and for what purposes. According to J.A. van Ek (1) “specifying the situation means stating the roles a language user has to play, the setting in which he will have to play these roles, and the topics he will have to deal with.” The most important in a communicative approach is give the leaner the opportunity to express himself in order to learn the language.

After defining the situations in which the students will need to use the language we try to specify what they will have to be able to do in these situations, by establishing the language activities they will do. Divide the activities in the traditional way into 4 skills: speaking, listening, writing, reading may not be adequate in a communicative course, since all skills in real communication is frequently related to each other, and one lead to the other. For that reason the activities may vary as understand the weather-forecast on the radio or summarizing orally a written text.

When the nature of the activity is determined, we may try to specify for what purpose the student will want to use the language for. He may want to give information about facts, to express certainty or uncertainty, whether he considers something wrong or right, he may wish to express gratitude or apologize for something. To reach his purposes the student has to be able to give information about “something”. He will need the ability to refer and talk about things, people, events, etc. For that he should be able to handle a large number of notions in the foreign language. Depend on the topic he will have to deal with different notions, for instance, if he is dealing with the topic weather he will have to handle with notions such as fair, sunshine, to rain, etc. But there are some notions that are general and might be used in any situation like existence/non-existence, past/present/future, before/after.

After establishing the general notion and the specific notion which the learner will handle , we specify the language forms (structures, words, phrases) which the learner will use, and the degree of skill he will be able to perform.

The assessment in a communicative course it would be appropriate if it is done through the different activities performed in everyday classes, to give the teacher a feedback of the students progress more than just give grades.


Source cited:

(1) Ek, J. A. Van. The threshold level. In.Brumfit, CJ. & Johnson, K. The
Communicative Approach to language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1971.

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