Blog Post 5: The Essence of CLT

Blog Post 5

9-17-12

The End of CLT by Stephen Bax

Task-Based Instruction by Peter Skehan

Potential Cultural Resistance to Pedagogical Imports by Guangwei Hu

            The first article I read, The End of CLT: A Context Approach to Language Teaching, by Stephen Bax, discusses and problematizes Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). The author starts off by discussing how CLT does not meet all of the needs in language instruction, and just because a teacher, or institution does not use CLT does not mean that they are “backward.”

            I find the stories at the beginning of the article interesting because I was not aware of the idea that not using CLT is “backward” and that CLT is the modern way of teaching language.  “This in turn rests on the unspoken assumption that CLT is not only ‘modern,’ but is in fact the only way to learn a language properly” (Bax, 279). 

            Bax’s way of countering this common belief is stating that we need not think of CLT as the one and only, we must realize that there are many different approaches to consider and use when teaching, sticking with CLT alone is wrong.  The reason why it is wrong is because CLT lack the use of the context, which is what Bax calls “Context Approach.”  Bax uses this term because he believes that CLT needs to take a step down from the number one, and only spot, and take second place to the Context Approach, because CLT lacks a key aspect of language teaching, which is context. 

            The Context Approach disagrees fundamentally with CLT by arguing that methodology is not the only solution.  I like the idea of the Context Approach because it seems to not only observe that the whole context is of importance but that other approaches may be equally valid and implemented.  Any method or approach that claims that you should only use that specific method of approach and discard all others immediately raises a red flag in my head.  Nothing can be taught or solved using just one approach, especially because students are all different.  Teaching can’t be a one size fits all, and the Context Approach discusses that other methods and approaches may be equally valid.

            The second article, Task-Based Instruction, by Peter Skehan, discusses the concept of task-based instruction.  Over the course of the last fifteen years, researchers have made vast improvements in the methodological progress within the task-based area.  From my understanding after reading this article, during the 1970’s there were moves in instruction to move from language structure focus alone to a focus more on conveying meaning and information to one another and to develop the capacity to express meanings.  This in turn influenced a lot of things, which I believe one was CLT which in turn called for task-based approaches.  The term “communicative activity” was replaced with “task.”

            Something that I found very interesting was the discussion of cognitive perspectives on TBI.  Take the aspects of performance (complexity of language, accuracy, fluency).  There are two approaches here.  When we focus on one aspect of language, some researchers believe that there will be a trade off. Attending to one aspect will result in the suffering of another.  Other researchers believe that learners can access multiple and non-competing attentional pools.  It is unclear which is correct, more research is needed.

            The last article, Potential Cultural Resistance to Pedagogical Imports: The Case of Communicative Language Teaching in China, by Guangwei Hu, has really brought everything together for me as well as raise some important issues that may arise in classrooms.  The article discusses that communicative language teaching in China is important, however, it goes against the Chinese social culture of learning.  This is something I have never considered, but it is so obvious.  Not to stereotype, but it is common to see a Chinese classroom run by teacher centered approaches and traditional methods.  The Chinese students have primarily learned English through grammar-translation and audiolingualism but this approach has failed to develop an adequate level of communicative competence.  The question I have is this: Just because the Chinese are learning English does not mean that they have to adapt an American-like culture classroom, but how do they obtain the communicative competence they need?  How did they originally obtain their L1 communicative competence? Is the Chinese school structure not beneficial to the learning of an L2? Of course this can be, just as American classrooms cannot be.  But the main issue comes down to how do the Chinese students, even if they are in America, best learn communicative competence.

            In China there has been tremendous efforts to promote CLT; they have changed curricula and spent a lot of money on resources and materials to aid in the revamping of instruction. However, despite these efforts, CLT has not received the support that it was thought to gain and the traditional approach is still the dominant approach in the classrooms.  This is, as stated in the article, because of the “host of constraints on the adoption of CLT in the Chinese context which includes, among other things, lack of necessary resources, big class size, limited instructional time, teachers’ lack of language proficiency and sociolinguistic competence, examination pressure and cultural factors” (Hu 94).

            What I believe seems to be the biggest obstacle that the Chinese schools face is the cultural factors because Hu discusses that the conception of CLT is that of communicative competence, rather than linguistic competence alone.  Communicative competence consists of grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence.  With the lack of in-class communicative work, students will not practice and obtain these aspects.  I believe that unless Chinese classrooms completely change their culture of teacher lead and student submissiveness, which is unlikely due to the countrywide ideology, CLT cannot work in its totality.  Parts of it can be practiced and aspects can be altered but CLT in the true essence cannot be practiced.  Now as we learned from the previous article, CLT is not the end-all-be-all.  There are other methods and approaches that can be implemented.