English 345: Tuesday, September 13

"Activities that are truly communicative," Larsen-Freeman's article notes, "have three features in common: information gap, choice, and feedback" (129). I find that Communicative Language Teaching, at its heart, appears to be a good idea. Language learners should know when and how to say what to whom, not just learn language in a vacuum in the academic classroom. However, the "information gap" noted above represents one of the issues that I take with this method, especially in relation to the examples given in the article.

The article features a high-intermediate level of adult immigrants in Canada, so, as adults, doing "real world" things such as looking at newspaper articles and deciphering what real world situations are represented on picture cards appear to be a good idea. However, I am rather unsure about the use of role playing, a technique that the article seems to consider an important part of CLT. I can see the good in role playing, of someone being the worker and someone being the boss, getting to practice dialogue that would be used in those situations. However, I just cannot see this being that effective in the classroom. A language learner knows that the person whom they are talking to is not really their "boss," so, no matter how hard they try to make it "real," real life situations such as the one mentioned above simply cannot be duplicated in the classroom.

A better way to create these "real life" language situations is brought up in Kumaravadivelu's Chapter Three. The authors gives examples of some learning opportunities outside of the classroom, ways in which language learners can connect to the outside community. These examples, such as following a local news story then interviewing local citizens to get their reactions or having the students choose one student service group and talk to people about that, appear to be much better real life language situations--because they truly are real life language situations, ones that take relevant issues in the community and allow the learners to get involved while still working on their language skills--a combinationt that "critical pedagogy" would be proud of.