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: 19:46:10 06/13/03 Fri
Author: Alexandra Accoroni gonçalves
Subject: task 6 - a prototypical communicative course

Universidade federal de Minas gerais
Faculdade de Letras
Communicative approach course (online)
Vera Menezes

When researchers started questioning the level of success of some theories on language learning in the 70's they noticed that most theories were good for a classroom environment use only. Students were able to produce sentences accurately but they couldn't communicate for real outside the classroom. That's when they proposed the communicative approach as a way to teach students how to produce grammatically correct sentences in real life. They noticed the students needed also some social context and not only the grammar knowledge.
The main goal of communicative approach is to facilitate the learning on how to communicate in a foreign or second language but not leaving the grammar structures aside. The focus of a communicative classroom is the students.
In the classroom , the teacher must provide students with as much English as they need to learn the language. The explanations must be done in the second language in a way the student can understand and imply this new knowledge. The teacher must give activities related to the learners self-experiences so they can talk and give their opinions and bring up new ideas to enrich the class. Some writing and listening activities must be done too because all four skills must be prepared to a real life communication situation.Reading, writing, listening and speaking shall and can be done in the same casroom. The teacher is a guide to the students learning. He gives activities related to the "authentic language" - as it is used in real life. He explains the activity and give the students to learn by themselves adding their own experiences as a non native speaker to the class. The teacher brings up discussions about some text in order to make students practice their communication competences. English (in our case, the target language) is the way used to communicate in class and not only an object of study (Larsen-Freeman, page 125).
So the "focus of the course is on the real language use(...). The emphasis is on the process of communication rather than just mastery of language forms." (Larsen-Freeman, page 126).
Some activities that make a communicative classroom interesting are the ones with games, puzzles, some songs, pair-work, discussions about some nowadays subject, play roles , activities that make the students more interested in their own learning process because of the social context of the course. In this case, as said previously, the teacher is a guide, a facilitator to the learners. He advises, monitors, guide students, answer their questions but he has never a dominant role in class.

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

Replies:

[ 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.