Teaching Journal: Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching - Ch. 9-10

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Authors and summary: Written by Larsen Freeman on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and content-based, task-based, and participatory approaches.

Chapter 9

• a Canadian teacher works on predicting with a class
• looks at the class observation and principles underlying each observation
• the goal is to enable students to communicate in the target language
• teachers are facilitators and students are communicators
• communicative activities have an information gap, choice and feedback
• CLT activities often use authentic materials and small groups
• One of the basic assumptions of CLT is that by learning to communicate students will be more motivated to study a foreign language since they will feel they are learning to do something useful with the language. (p. 130)
• learners need knowledge of forms and meanings and functions
• students work at the discourse or suprasentential level

Chapter 10

• content-based instruction focuses on using subject matter content for language teaching 
• the Whole Language Approach calls for language to be regarded holistically
• "The central purpose we are concerned with is language learning, and tasks present this in the form of a problem-solving negotiation between knowledge that the learner holds and new knowledge."
• in regards to task-based instruction, "The 'departure from CLT [in such lessons] ... lay not in the tasks themselves, but in the accompanying pedagogic focus on task completion instead of on the language used in the process' (Long and Crookes 1993: 31)." (p. 146)
• Prabhu identified three types of tasks: information-gap, opinion-gap, and reasoning-gap
• what happens inside the classroom should be relevant to what happens outside in the students' lives
• the participatory approach focuses on learning about the students' lives outside the class and using the language classroom to work on solutions to problems or interests the students are actually dealing with

Thoughts: This was very informative. I really like the task-based and participatory approach described. I would certainly agree that I am more motivated to learn when creating something of real value or purpose. It also is an easier way to connect lessons to the students' cultural, social, or economic realities as the curriculum can react to what is going on in their lives, especially with the participatory approach.