Lecture 2 English Education CLT

Communicative Language Teaching 

　　　Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is holistic. It focuses on all the skills and knowledge needed to communicate. As the structuring becomes more and more sophisticated, the activities become more fun and more challenging. These activities are very important in the early stages of language acquisition and are useful for later activities as well. However, care must be taken not to make them too suffering for the students as they increase in difficulty. Teachers need to think about the extent to which they will allow students to make errors.

　　　Intermediate and advanced learners can use more structured exercises to increase their language repertoire. Flexibility of expression can be improved by avoiding the use of limited vocabulary and language patterns.

　

　　　The problems with CLT are that teachers think they should mainly teach grammar, they do not know the real meaning of CLT, and they lack the skills to teach communication. There is no provision in the current CLT methodology for advanced proficiency in the use of language through repeated practice.