VoyForums
[ Show ]
Support VoyForums
[ Shrink ]
VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, [4] ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 05:30:13 06/11/03 Wed
Author: Renata Tunes Santos
Subject: Task 6

Task 6

Describe the design of a prototypical communicative course

Objectives/goals

One of the main objectives is to help learners to become effective users of the foreign language which implies a set of actions designed to achieve the expected outcomes,to communicate in the target language with suitable fluency and accuracy; to develop the four basic skills from a communicative standpoint; to train the learners in the ability to express not only ideas and opinions but also judgements and needs, develop their confidence in speaking, encourage them to negotiate information between each other (interactional).

Learner roles

Students are viewed, first of all, as managers of their own learning process. It is up to them to make decisions as to what they want from the language, how they can learn from it, when to develop some aspects and not others, and to what extent they may get in language performance.
Secondly, learners have the capacity to monitor their learning and help classmates to do the same which is rather a cooperative function. This interdependence is manifested in the learners' relations not only with their peers but also with the teacher who seems in this case to be a weak influence in their learning decisions.
Thirdly, learners possess specific characteristics that make them different from each other: personal goals, learning styles, interests, and motivation are among those worthy of mentioning. These differences drive the students to cope with other members of the class and it is then that he assumes the role of negotiator– coming to terms about the sort of language to be used, the kind of relationship to be established, and the social context to be considered.

Teacher roles

Referring to the role of the teacher, Marton (1988:40) comments that “Instead of being a task-master who is hard to please, he is rather an understanding colleague, always ready to encourage even the faintest and the least successful attempts at spontaneous speaking.”
Teachers play a variety of roles in the Communicative Approach. To begin with, teachers are responsible for facilitating the students' learning through the organization of tasks and activities that really motivate them to communicate in the foreign language.
On the other hand, teachers need to present and have the learners develop these activities which will have to be checked as to the degree of performance.
With regards to this, Breen and Candlin (1980) express some roles of the teacher in the following way: “The teacher has two main roles: the first role is to facilitate the communication process between all participants in the classroom, and between these participants and the various activities and texts. The second role is to act as an independent participant within the learning-teaching group.... A third role for the teacher is that of researcher and learner, with much to contribute in terms of appropriate knowledge and abilities, actual and observed experience of the nature of learning and organizational capacities”. (quoted in Richards and Rodgers 1986:77).



Materials

The materials are a support of the learners' language use and their corresponding communicative activities. These activities may be organized in graphic form
(booklets, textbooks, magazines, newspapers, leaflets, etc.) as well as in visual or oral form (pictures, charts, graphs, cassettes, videotapes).
All the activities are aimed at presenting and practising language in an authentic way. With respect to this conception, Larsen-Freeman (1986:135) points out that “To overcome the typical problem that students can't transfer what they learn in the classroom to the outside world and to expose students to natural language in a variety of situations”.

Activities

The oral activities are organized in such a way that they range from controlled or guided to totally free. Among the procedures used to achieve oral proficiency are:
the presentation of a dialogue with its corresponding motivation;
the practice of dialogues (along with their repetition, discussion and conveyance meaning),
practice of the lines of the dialogue through questions and answers(yes-no, information),
dialogue making use of personal questions and recurring to the learner's needs,
generalization derived from the practice of forms/functions that are found in the dialogue,
For the exploitation of the dialogues and the performance of other language exchanges, pair and group work is encouraged so that the students may negotiate meaning between themselves.The meaning then is clarified by the use of pictures, real objects or dramatization. Oral and written activities are chosen on the basis of their usefulness for achieving real, genuine communication. Therefore, information gap activities (e.g. when two persons possess different kinds of information and they agree to share it), and those that offer the learners different possibilities of choice are among the most commonly suggested.

Setting
The classroom arrangement ( individual, pair work, small group work and whole class)
are determined by the activities.

References:

Breen, M. P. and C. N. Candlin. 1980. The essentials of a communicative curriculum in language teaching. Applied linguistics 1 (2): 89-112.
Brumfit, C. 1984. Communicative methodology in language teaching: The roles of fluency and accuracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Larsen-Freeman, D. 1986. Techniques and principles in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Littlewood, W. 1981. Communicative language teaching: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marton, W. 1988. Methods in English language teaching: Frameworks and options. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall International Ltd.
Richards, J. and T. Rodgers. 1986. Approaches and methods in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]
[ Contact Forum Admin ]

Forum timezone: GMT-8
VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB:
Before posting please read our privacy policy.
VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems.
Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved.