Overview: Module 5

Over the last thirty years or so, attitudes to language learning have changed
dramatically. In the past, the focus was on grammatical accuracy and the minimisation
of errors. This meant that lessons were largely focused on learning grammar
mechanically through repetition of a rule. Drilling was also a technique used repeatedly
by most teachers and practice of the target language was very controlled; learners were
expected to memorise dialogues in order to reduce mistakes as much as possible.

Students, therefore, often had a very good understanding of the building blocks of a
language but couldn’t put them together themselves in real time. But in today’s society,
the need for people to be able to communicate effectively in English, whether for work
or travel, has altered the way we think about teaching. This has meant that the role of
teacher and student has almost reversed – the learners are now expected to be active
participants in the lesson and can increasingly shape their own learning. The teacher
has become a facilitator for learning rather than a regulator.

Compare the two lesson plans. What are the features which characterise each?
Which style do you think is an example of CLT? [2] All this has led to new approaches to
EFL teaching, one of the most popular modern methods being Communicative Language
Teaching (CLT) or the Communicative Approach. In this module we’re going to look at
what CLT actually is, the tasks and activities used in a communicative classroom and
error-correction techniques which are effective and don’t discourage communication.

Unit 1: Communicative Approach

The communicative approach emerged during the 70s and 80s as teaching began to
move away from audio-lingual methods (basically drilling grammar) and the focus was
on more meaningful and authentic language.

Most EFL teachers today would probably like to think that their classes are
"communicative" in the widest sense of the word. Their lessons probably contain
activities where learners communicate and where tasks are completed by means of
interaction with other learners. To this end there will probably be extensive use of pair,
group work and mingling activities, with the emphasis on completing the task
successfully through communication with others rather than on the accurate use of
grammatical form. During these activities the teacher’s role is to facilitate and then to
monitor, usually without interruption, and then to provide feedback on the success or
otherwise of the communication and maybe also on the linguistic performance of the
learners.

As for how the lesson is organised, Presentation Practice Production is giving way more
and more to Task-based Learning or Test Teach Test in communicative approach
lessons. Even the way you teach grammar can change: instead of presenting the verb
‘be’ via the grammar rule you could use basic introductions, requests and questions
(I am English, are you French?...) to enable learners to begin speaking in English right
from the start.

The idea behind CLT is maximising ‘communicative competence’ (i.e. knowing how to
maintain communication despite limitations and being able to produce appropriate
language for a range of purposes). This is done through minimising Teacher Talking
Time and making the lesson learner-centred. Interaction is generally student-student
where the teacher takes a step back and acts more as a resource and a facilitator than
somebody who inputs all the language.

However, there is a danger of going too far, being so obsessed with reducing teacher
talking time that the lesson has, or seems to have, no direction and is just a series of
speaking activities. That’s why Scrivener distinguishes between ‘strong CLT’ where the
role of explicit teaching is very limited and the students learn by doing communication
tasks, and ‘weak CLT’ where there is a variety of teaching and activities but with a bias
towards speaking/listening. Perhaps this weaker approach is more balanced because
there are opportunities for structural input but still with an emphasis on communication
in authentic contexts. Otherwise you may hear your students complaining “Why do I
have to talk all the time to my fellow students. I can do this in the pub”!
Many of the course books you will use are actually based, to some extent at least, on
the communicative approach and more often that not contain authentic material rather
than contrived texts/dialogues.

Look at the following extract from the course book New English File Upper-Intermediate.
Unit 2: Communicative Activities
Communicative Activities aren’t just speaking tasks which give oral practice. For real
communication we need interaction and an exchange of information, otherwise the
speech is meaningless. The only time you would ever describe a picture to someone
already looking at that picture, for example, would be in a classroom. So that’s not
particularly authentic. But the communicative approach is all about reflecting real-life
situations which language-learners may be faced with if they ever genuinely need to
converse in English.

The reason that describing a picture to someone who can see it in front of them is not a
communicative activity but describing a picture to someone who can’t see it is, is
because, here, information is changing hands. In the second scenario, the students are
interacting for a specific purpose and one which could reflect reality if they had to
describe something over the phone say. There are many different types of
communicative activities but they must include some kind of information exchange and
either reflect a real-life situation or reflect language that could be exploited in a real-life
situation. Some commonly-used ones are a variety of gap-fill style tasks, spot the
difference, problem-based discussions, board games and instruction giving.

Gap-fill
Aside from the non-communicative gap-fill tasks (such as completing sentences with the
correct form of the infinitive verb in brackets e.g. If the photos ____ good, I’ll send them
to you. (be)), there are many which can be used to promote effective communication. A
good one is getting students into pairs and giving them the same text but with different
information missing from each. They then have to ask questions to get the appropriate
information from their partner to complete their text.

There are many variations on this theme, including split crosswords, pictures with
different items missing from each, even timetables or schedules with different blank
spaces. You may have to monitor your students to make sure they don’t cheat though!

Spot the difference

A great task for practising detailed descriptions is a picture difference task (done by
communication, not looking, of course!). In this activity, pairs are given the same image
with a few slight differences, or big ones depending on the level of your class, and they
have to find them. Imagine you are a student, how would you describe image A to your
partner?
Problem-based discussions
Problem-based discussions can be anything from ‘desert island scenarios’ to ranking the
importance of certain statements or ideas. In discussions such as these, the teacher
really just acts as a facilitator for the discussion, introducing the problem and the
language needed to work on it before putting students into small or larger groups. You
then need to go around the class observing and supporting, occasionally joining a group
to stimulate discussion if necessary. It’s important not to dictate though, as you want
students to address the problem for themselves.

This kind of task is particularly useful for practising ways of presenting personal
opinions, agreeing and disagreeing politely and compromising. Put the following
procedures for a problem-based discussion into the correct order:
Board games

Board games are great in the EFL classroom because they can practise language in a
really fun way. There are lots of ready-made board games for English teaching or you
can even create your own using a template or your imagination! Introducing a
competitive element always gets students talking but to make sure the game is as
communicative as possible you can incorporate cards which get students to respond to
questions but also ask someone else in the class. Check out this great website for
printable and editable games http://www.eslgamesworld.com/

Unit 3: Error Correction

Sometimes it’s easy to think that because your students make errors that they’ve not
understood, or even that you’re a bad teacher. But this isn’t necessarily the case at all.
Error can actually often be a good thing because it shows that students are willing to
experiment with the language as they find out what works and what doesn’t.
In communicative classrooms it’s really important that students are allowed to
communicate without worrying about every tiny little detail of speaking accurately.
That’s not to say, however, that we should just let all their errors go unnoticed. After all,
how would they improve if that was the case? But there are certain techniques we can
use to correct errors without destroying learner confidence!

There are many different types of error that students can make when learning a
language and these can be either spoken or written. They may be to do with incorrect
grammar (tenses, word order, verb-noun agreement), lexis or pronunciation even. Or
sometimes the language itself may be correct but inappropriate in the situation given.

It’s also important to distinguish the difference between errors and mistakes/slip ups.
An error is when the student doesn’t know the correct form, whereas a mistake is
something said incorrectly by accident. If you correct every tiny little mistake then your
students will probably become very hesitant when speaking and always look to you for
confirmation and this isn’t something you want to encourage. It’s a balancing act
though; be aware that repeated mistakes can turn into errors, so still keep an eye on
slips that crop up time and again. A lot of research into the best ways of correcting
students in the EFL classroom exists but all focus on three main areas:

 what to correct
 when to correct
 how to correct

What to correct
When deciding what exactly you should and shouldn’t correct, you need to think about
your lesson aims. Is the objective to work on a particular grammar point or is it a skills
lesson? If it’s the former, then yes, it can be constructive to correct your students
because you’re working on producing accuracy. However, if a student has made a few
errors whilst speaking, it’s not always necessary to correct every one. Instead, you
should focus on errors made which relate to the target language you’re studying that
lesson. Especially for lower level students who are naturally going to make several
errors, you don’t want to overwhelm them, certainly if those errors relate to something
they haven’t even studied yet! Otherwise your correction isn’t particularly constructive.

For skills lessons (which focus on developing reading, writing, listening and speaking
proficiency), however, correction may not always be necessary. If the aim of the lesson
is to encourage fluency, then you jumping in to correct all the errors can really hinder
this and will actually work to obstruct your main goal of fluid spoken language.
Sometimes students just need to shake off their fear of speaking a foreign language and
a good way to do this can be to say, “okay for this exercise I just want you to speak as
naturally as possible, don’t worry about making mistakes, that’s not important today,
the aim is just to develop your fluency.” A lot of learners respond really well to this,
others may be a bit sceptical, but the important thing is to let students know that
exercises like these can be very useful (and that there’s a reason why you’re not
correcting them, not that their language was absolutely perfect and they don’t need to
improve at all!).

When to correct
As we’ve mentioned, for fluency exercises it can be really inappropriate to interrupt
students while they’re speaking by jumping in with corrections. There are ways of
correcting discreetly during conversation classes/exercises but we’ll look at those in
more detail in the next section. For speaking tasks, we can therefore decide to correct
at the end of the task, later on in the lesson or not at all (as in the example above). If
you decide to correct later then it’s important to use your listening skills to note down
any errors you overhear to discuss at a later stage or plan future tasks.

Choose an appropriate point to correct once the activity is over. With delayed
correction, though, you may want to make it anonymous so that students don’t feel
embarrassed in front of their classmates. There’s something about being singled out
directly in this way that is never pleasant! Aside from which, all students can always
benefit from more generalised error correction: just because it wasn’t them that
particular time isn’t to say that they never make that error.

For accuracy activities you may also want to correct afterwards or possibly on-the-spot.
This kind of immediate correction can be a bit trickier and you have to be more careful
so you don’t end up jumping on the student or slow down the pace of the lesson too
much. This requires you to be an active listener and there are various techniques we
can use to correct learner errors as we go along. Barnett also suggests that by
correcting in this way we can “give learners an experience of partaking in meaningful
dialogue” in order to inform and motivate them.

So once you’ve decided whether to correct or not and when exactly to do it, here are a
few different ways you can do it…

How to correct
There are several ways to correct errors as you go along but rather than saying outright
what the problem is, there are plenty of ways you can encourage student self-
correction. This can simply be through facial expressions; raised eyebrows, a frown, a
look of surprise perhaps to show the students that something is not quite right. If they
need more prompting you can repeat the sentence up to the error, for example ‘you
were waiting for a…?’ or perhaps a more direct question such as ‘tense?’ or
‘pronunciation?’

Other methods include repeating the sentence but placing stress on the problem word,
such as ‘last week you go to the cinema?’ or even saying directly ‘there’s an error in
that sentence’. Finger correction is also a useful technique which involves holding up
one hand and pointing to each finger with the other as you say each word of the phrase.
You can then hold on to the problem finger/word or skip a finger to indicate a missing
word.

If the student is unable to self-correct, though, we can use different types of

reformulating/recasting. This can be when we repeat a sentence but without drawing
the student’s attention to it directly, for example:

 Teacher “What did you do at the weekend?”

 Student “I go to the cinema with my friends”
 Teacher “Ah you went to the cinema, that’s nice. What did you see?”
We use this technique when we don’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation or
discourage the student from continuing to speak. To make it slightly clearer that an
error has been made, however, you can recast the sentence more obviously, for
instance,

 Student “I’m not agree with Sara, I prefer skiing”

 Teacher “Oh, so you mean you don’t agree with Sara, you disagree with her. Why
do you prefer skiing?”

Even when using on-the-spot correction it’s a good idea to make a note of any problems
to review afterwards. Sometimes, when we correct students, they may still make the
same mistake time and again because they haven’t really absorbed the correction.
That’s why it is good if you can prompt them to self-correct because if they learn for
themselves they tend to remember better. Yet, there are ways of drilling error
correction even when it was given by you, the teacher. Once you’ve laid the
groundwork in the initial task, you can do some drilling of the correct form afterwards:

 Teacher “Do you remember when you said ‘I’m not agree with Sara’? Yes? What
did I say instead?”
 Student “Erm, I don’t agree”
 Teacher “Good yes, who don’t you agree with”
 Student “Sara”
 Teacher “What about Sara, sorry?”
 Student “I don’t agree with her, with Sara”
 Teacher “Okay good, do you remember the other expression too? No? Okay well
just answer my questions. Do you agree with Sara?”
 Student “No”
 Teacher “What’s the opposite of ‘agree’? We can add a prefix to change the
meaning.”
 Student “Oh yes, disagree”
 Teacher “So do you agree with Sara?”
 Student “No, I disagree with her.”

When using delayed correction, on the other hand, some of the methods already
discussed can still be employed (i.e. finger correction, one word questions), but you will
obviously need to reintroduce the problem sentence. You could use examples of errors
the students made but unless several class members said very similar incorrect
sentences you may want to change the exact phrases to make them more anonymous.
Here, you could write the sentence on the board and ask the class to identify the
problem before eliciting the correction. Diagrams can help at this stage, for example a
line indicating past, present and future with an ‘x’ to mark ‘last weekend’, showing that
we can’t use “I go to the cinema with my friends” but instead need the past form of the
verb.

If your students have just learnt a grammar rule then sometimes all it takes is repeating
the rule and perhaps modelling an example sentence. Or for pronunciation errors, you
can indicate which syllable should be stressed “Japan” not “Japan”. Sometimes it’s
difficult to get students to self-correct pronunciation because you automatically correct
when you say the word! If your class is familiar with the phonemic chart, however, you
can indicate which sound they used and which one is correct by pointing or drawing the
symbol on the board.
Obviously any errors your students make in their writing have to be corrected
afterwards, but don’t be tempted to just give them everything on a plate; it is still
possible to encourage self-correction.

Look at this example of a student’s work and the symbols the teacher has written:

λ: I want tell you about my best friend. Her name is Christina and she
WO: has short blonde hair. Her favourite food is pasta but she hates
ag: salad. She go all the time to the cinema. Her favourite subject is
sp: history and her worst is fisics.

You could use a correction code like this and make a key at the beginning of the course
for your students to refer to. It will not only motivate them to discover and correct their
own errors but will save you time when marking.

So, before you jump in to correct a student’s error, think about the following things:

 is it appropriate to do so?
 is now the right time?
 can they self-correct with a bit of prompting?
 how can I correct without knocking their confidence? If you bear these things in
mind, hopefully your students will keep motivated and keep improving.