Kelompok 3

Hasan Zainuddin-Nur Faizzah-Nurul Ihsan

CC IN THE CLASSROOM : CLT AND TASK-BASED TEACHING

            We can look back over a century of foreign language teaching and observe the trends as they came and went. How willl we look back 100 years from now and characterize the present era?

COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

            The answer may lie in our recent efforts to engage in communicative language teaching (CLT). The “push toward communication” (Higgs & Clifford, 1982)has been relentless. Researchers have defined and redefined the construct of communicative competence.

            One glance at current journals in second language teaching reveals quite an array of material on CLT. Numerous textbooks for teachers and teacher trainers expound on the nature of communicative approaches and offer techniques for varying ages and purposes.

            CLT is best understood as an approach, rather than method (Richards & Rodgers, 2001).

The following four interconnected characteristics as a definiton of CLT :

1.      Classroom goals are focused on allof the components of CC and not restristed to grammatical or linguistic competence.

2.      Language techniques are designed too engage learners in the pragmatice, authentic, functional, use of language for meaningful purposes.

3.      Fluency and accuracy are seen as complementary principles underlying communicative techniques.

4.      In the communicative classroom, students ultimately have to use the language, productively and receptively, in unrehearsed contexts.

These four characteristics underscore some major departures from earlier approaches. CLT suggest that grammatical structure might better be subsumed under various functional categories. CLT pays considerably less attention to the overt presentation and discussion of grammatical rules than traditionally practiced. A great deal of use of authentic language is implied in CLT, as teachers attempt to build fluency (Chambers, 1997).

Moreover, in the last decade orso, we have seen a marked increase in English teacher’s proficiency levels around the world. As educational and political institutions in various countries become more sensitive to the importance of teaching foreign languages for communicative purpose. We may be better able, worldwide, to accomplish the goals of communicative languange teaching.

Task-Based Instruction

As the profession has continued to emphasize classroom interaction, learner-centered teaching, authenticity, and viewing the learner’s own experiences as important contributors to learning, task-based instruction draws the attention of teachers and learners to tasks in the classroom.

David Nunan (2004), among others (Skehan, 2003; Willis, 1996), is careful to distinguish between target tasks (uses of language in the world beyond the classroom) and pedadogical tasks (those that occur in the classroom). Tasks are a subset of all the techniques and activities that one might design for  the classroom and themselves might involve several techniuqes.

In order to accomplish a task, learner needs to have sufficient organizational competence.