Language Teaching Methods: Communicative Approach 10/5

Observing this lesson allowed me to see the Communicative Approach in action. This approach is all about students trying to make themselves understood and learning language in a way where communication is the primary focus. This was a class of around 17 adult learners in the Intermediate level. The teacher introduces the topic which is centered around ‘the best place to live’.

The students are presented with a scenario: The teacher has 2 siblings and all of these children have moved to different places. Their retired parents want to be closer to the children but need to decide whose place they would move to. With this context setting, they talk about the advantages and disadvantages of big city, town and country living.

Next, the teacher presents the structure of persuasion they are following – Opening, Strengthening, and Closing – to practice making a case. The students are provided with sentence examples to start them off in talking about where they live and what they like about it, such as “I like living in a big city because there are better jobs and a wider variety of people you can meet.” The students are then put into groups of 4 for the main role-play activity. They were to think of various reasons and present them in their small group work. The teacher acted as a facilitator and went around to assist each group when needed. I liked how if they need more reasons, the teacher has hints on cards available for them to look at, that way the emphasis is placed on practicing their fluency. The small group discussions seemed to go really well as they prepared for a final ‘family council’ at the end where each ‘parent’ decides which argument was the most convincing and report their decision to the class.

It was fascinating to see how well the students could do when they were engaged and when their focus was on expressing their opinions. When they had a basic guide (structure of persuasion) they were able to share their ideas and feelings with relative ease. I loved that at one point, after a student presented ideas about why their place was the best, the teacher was very encouraging and said “I’m ready to move there!”  The Communicative Approach is one where teachers are more concerned with teaching language functions and have students practice communicating using language that’s appropriate to the setting. I liked seeing that when the students in this class were using English for a specific purpose, they were able to forget about they don’t know and instead focus on getting the message across, in turn getting a lot of practice speaking, and actually using the language as opposed to just learning knowledge about the language.