Page 44 - Teaching English at Primary Level: From Theory into the Classroom

Approaches to Language Teaching

them.Severalinformation gaptaskscan also beeffectivelyusedwith YL,such
as simple guessing games based on ‘yes/no’ questions or activities based on
partially completed charts or grids. For example, when practicing family re-
lationships, teachers may give one pupil a family tree chart with some infor-
mation and the other pupil a chart with the rest of the data. The pupils then
work together to make one, complete family tree by asking questions, such
as ‘Who is Leo’s mum?’ ‘Who is Sarah’s uncle?’ etc.
CLT has been examined critically by several authors. One of the main crit-
icisms is that by giving absolute priority to fluency, it does not give enough
attention to form, resulting in learners’ low accuracy level in communication.
In addition, it has been criticised for favouring native-speaker instructors, ex-
pecting the teacher to be able to respond competently in the second lan-
guage in a variety of situations which may come up in the classroom. Simi-
larly, CLT proponents have typically disregarded the positive influence of the
learners’L1,usuallyfavouringEnglish-onlyclasses.TheCLT methodologywas
supposed to work in different contexts worldwide, regardless of local vari-
eties and contexts in which the teaching takes place. Bax (2003) also talks
about a special ‘CLT attitude’ according to which there is only one right and
proper way of learning an FL. Despite these drawbacks, however, CLT has had
a huge influence on language teaching practice round the world and has de-
veloped in many directions since its emergence in the 1970s.
The approaches discussed in this chapter differ in a variety of aspects: the
teaching focus, the importance of communication, how much attention they
pay to pronunciation and grammar, which language skills are foregrounded,
their attitude towards error correction and the way they conceptualise the
relationship between teachers and learners (Table 2.2).

The Roles of the Teacher
Different teaching methods have implied different roles of the language
teacher and different teacher-learner relationships. As Richards and Rodgers
(2001, p. 29) point out, these relationships may be either asymmetrical, as
the relationship between a conductor and an orchestra member, a therapist
and a patient, or a coach and a player, or based on more equal relationships,
seeing teachers and learners as friends, colleagues or teammates. In line
with the communicative perspective, the teacher’s role is that of ‘facilitator’
rather than a source of knowledge. If the traditional role of the teacher was
that of an expert whose main role was to transfer knowledge to the learners,
the facilitators’ role is to create an environment in which learners acquire
knowledge by doing activities themselves. In a typical classroom example,

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