Reflection on Communicative Language Teaching
Since one the most obvious characteristics of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is that almost everything is done with a communicative content, games are not only enjoyable but also good tools to practice this approach. Therefore, for this week, we did two different games related CLT in class.
The first game we played was to do a role-play, in which the students were divided into pairs and took turns learning how to “say no nicely” in a set up social situation. And the game seemed to go pretty well in each group. But in the later discussion with some classmates, it turned out that we all had the same question that if the game was played in the most proper way in terms of practicing CLT. Although authentic materials were used as a technique, we were hesitant about the pieces of paper given in each pair on which several “saying no nicely” replies were there. We thought those sentences had limited the possibility for the students to have choices of what to say and how to say. Everyone who was to take the role to reply all said something in one way, they weren’t given the chance to think nor to provide their own answers, and thus the exercise was not exactly communicative.
To have more practice of CLT, we also did the scrambled-sentences game. Again, the students were separated into small groups of about ten, and each group was asked to together unscramble the sentences that were originally in a certain order of a short story. Through the process, the students learned to communicate with their group members in order to work with one another. Also, when trying to unify those sentences into a correct order, the students at the same time learned how sentences are bound together cohesively and coherently in the target language. And thus, the students were able to think with the logic of the target language instead of their habitual ways to think with the logic of their mother language when communicating.
