Kunthi Talibrata (09004498) Scientific
Writing/P
Patria Handung Jaya (09004503)
COMMUNICATIVE
LANGUAGE TEACHING: THEORY,
PRACTICE
AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
What
is Communicative Language Teaching?
We already realized that there are
so many methods for teaching English. However, most of them are still centered
to the teacher. It doesn’t give benefit for the students because they become
passive learners. In 1960, a new method called Communicative Language Teaching
was revealed. The origins of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) are to be
found in the change in the British language teaching tradition dating (Richards
2001: 153). Some experts believe that this is the best method for teaching
English, because CLT means little more than an integration of grammatical and
functional teaching (Richards 2001: 155). It means that CLT not only focuses on
grammatical uses and how teacher lecturing, but also focuses on how the
students improve their skill and practice directly in four-language skills.
Before
applying CLT in learning process, the teacher should comprehend what CLT is.
Based
on Savignon (2002: 7) Communicative
language teaching (CLT) refers to both processes and goals in classroom
learning. Here, teachers should focus not only on the students’ result, but
also the teacher should consider the process how the student achieve the goal
of learning process such as by doing discussion, pair work, etc. By this
method, the students’ role is more important and the learning process can be
student-centered.
CLT
in Practice
It is not easy to apply CLT, because this method consists of
four-language skills, so it means that all activities done by teachers should
contain all aspects of four-language skills. In his paper “Communicative
Language Teaching Today”, Richard states some class activities in CLT, such as
task-comletion activities, information gathering activities, opinion-sharing
activities, information-transfer activities, reasoning-gaps activities and role
play.
From
all activities, role play is considered the most interesting activities. Based
on Whitebread (2008) role play is play a part (either their own or somebody
else’s) in a specific situation. It becomes interesting, because it contains
writing (writing a script), reading (memorizing the script), speaking
(delivering the dialogue), and listening (get and understand the point of what
other character say). Finally, role play is one of a whole gamut of
communicative technique which develop fluency in language students, which
promotes interaction in the classroom and which increases motivation (Whitebread;
2008).
Role play is one of the techniques
which emphasize the student to be more active in the learning process. From the
explanation above, we can conclude that by using CLT method, the students will be
easy to get the learning goal and they can improve more their basic skill in
the class. In this method, teachers only facilitate the communication process
among the learners in the classroom. It means, we can make the class more focus
on student-centered.
Reference
Richard, Jack C & Theodore S. Rodgers. 2001. Approach and Methods in Language Teaching. United
Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Whitebread, D., and Penny
coltman. 2008. Teaching and Learning in
The Early Years. Newyork: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group
http://www.professorjackrichards.com/pdfs/communicative-language-teaching-today-v2.pdf ( December 16th 2011)
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