Q & A on Communicative Teaching

1. Lightbrown & Spada examined the influence of form-focused instruction and corrective feedback on communicative teaching. What has previous research on this topic indicated? What do we learn about this important topic based on their results and conclusions?

As Lightbrown and Spada(1990) suggested that language teaching went through a major change from focusing explicitly on teaching of language to teaching language in use. Language used to be taught through its grammar, then the focus shifted to interaction and meaning. Krashen came with the idea of teaching language naturally as young children do in their L1. Savingnon (1972) was one of the first researchers who stated the greatness of communicative way of teaching. He found that the communicative taught students perform better than grammar-based taught student on the fluency and equally on grammar accuracy. In another study by Montgomery and Eisenstein (1985), they found that, student who took interactional way of teaching plus their grammar based classes outperform their mates who went through form-focused classes on the levels of: accent, grammar, vocabulary and comprehension. Other studies such as Allen, Swain, Harley, & Cummins, (1990) do support the findings of Montgomery and Eisenstein( 1985) on combining form and interactional based way of teaching. Brettea and Davis (1985) showed that learners in communicative classes in India surpass their counterpart students who took form-based classes on contextualised grammar. Spada (1988) showed that learners who received more grammar instruction in CLT classes perform better on grammar domain than their colleagues who have less grammar instruction. Therefore, combining CLT with grammar is more beneficial than only CLT or gra...

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...te definition. From that part we should not focus on one part of language and claim that, it is representative of the whole language. However the teaching the culture of the language cannot be acceptable by other culture learners. For example, a patriot North Korean student would not accept teaching him or her the American culture as s/he believe it is the enemies’ culture for him or her. Therefore, sometimes language should take off its culture for the sake of other people to learn it. This does not negate the importance of culture in language learning as I find it inseparable.

The problem with EA and CAH is that they claim that they are covering all language features. Language is difficult to cover, a simple example is that CAH cannot predict all learners’ errors. Error analysis classified errors but it leave us without any solution for treating such errors.