Rabu, 09 Mei 2012

Communicative language teaching


Have you ever heard about CLT? I hope my essay about that will be useful. U can check it below. :)


Advantages and Disadvantages of Communicative Language Teaching
Nowadays, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) method has become one of the basic in Indonesian teaching learning process. The principles of CLT have implicitly included into Indonesia Basic Curriculum, especially in the General Principles of Curriculum Development and combine with another method. “The Goal [of CLT] is to enable students to communicate in the target language.”(Larsen,2000). We can infer that CLT is not only focuses on mastering language elements, but it more emphasizes on the use of the target language communicatively. It has brought many advantages for the improvement of the English education process, however there are also some disadvantages that following.
    The implementation of CLT has brought a lot of advantages for English learning process. One, it stimulates students to improve their ability of using English by themselves. Meaning that, it provides students with assignments that allow them to improve their own ideas about what they are going to talk and how they are going to express that. In this activity, the biggest role of the teacher is to facilitate and maintain the students’ activities. Students work by themselves and communicate with others to overcome the assignment.
CLT also engage their students with realistic communication to reach success on the use of English. It is beneficial because by knowing the use of the communication in the real life, students do not feel that what they are learning is useless. There are real circumstances that related to the use of the language. It brings the real life situation of the native English into classroom activities such as role-play and simulation. As Harmer state, “ The teacher will not intervene to stop the activity and the materials he or she [students] relies on will not dictate what specific language students use either.” (Harmer,2007) It means that teachers let the realistic activity completed, because in the real life, there is no one that intervenes in the middle of conversation just to dictate them the language that should be used.
    Besides the advantages above, there are also some disadvantages of using the CLT method. Using CLT restrict students’ understanding about smaller elements of the language, for instance, grammar and syntax system. As an article that published in the internet by Teaching English For All, it presents one of the disadvantages of CLT:
Some people believe that with CLT there is a danger of focusing too much on oral skills at the expense of reading and writing skills, and that there may be too much focus on meaning at the expense of form. It is felt that there is not enough emphasis on the correction of pronunciation and grammar errors.(English For All, 2011)
We can infer that, delivering of language elements in CLT is only happened through inductive way which students understand them only from specific contextual materials. Teachers do not explain the elements directly, but they include the elements in order to reach function of what they are going to use, such as order, refuse, etc, therefore it sometime left miss understanding in students’ mind. 
    Another disadvantage is that CLT needs longer communicative process. CLT activities need a lot of outputs. But if the students do not have sufficient background or knowledge about the activities, teachers have to provide them models to support the activities of communication.  Therefore, they are able to process the materials to organize their need to communicate what the classroom activities asked. If it compared with the earlier methods such as Grammar Translation Method and Direct method, it needs longer time of learning process. In traditional teaching system, for instance, Grammatical Translation Method, teachers are the one who give materials, whether what the students need is only receive what the teachers are given.
    There are must be advantages and disadvantages following the development of a system or method, like what is happened in CLT. However, the most important thing is to understand how to optimize the advantages and compress the disadvantages properly in order to achieve the general goal, in this case is to reach the well teaching learning process.


Reference
Harmer, J (2007). The Practice of English Language Teaching. England: Longman.
Larsen, D. Freeman (2000). Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. New York: Oxford
Teaching English 4 All (2011). Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and the Post -Method Era. Retrieved from http://teachingenglish4all.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/communicative-language-teaching-clt-and-the-post-method-era/ [accessed 29/04/2012]


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