Reaction paper

Applying communicative teaching method in English-teaching classroom

Student: Valentina Acua Z.

Applying communicative teaching method in English-teaching classroom.

According to what is stated in the article applying communicative teaching method in
English-teaching classroom, wrote by Hongzhi and Jiampin Wu, when it comes to
teaching a second language, we can use diferent methods and techniques related to
communicative language teaching. The authors state that authentic material are vital
to learn a second language.
To start with the communicated approach of Littlewood (1981) is necessary to divide
this approach into pre-communicative and communicative activities. At first sight,
structural activities appear mainly like grammar exercise in which the student must
follow a pattern given by the teacher, in order to learn how to use grammatical rules
in real life communication. A great way of relate the structure is quasi-communication
activities and some examples like dialogues, maps, food list, shopping list an so
forth, are very familiar to our way of studying a second language. Secondly,
communicative activities, in my opinion, become more effective because they
recreate daily routine situations and social interaction, mainly the students have to
solve routine problems using the language they are learning.
It is true that sometimes teachers tend to use the same type of material over and
over, in fact, as students we have seen teachers that use the same material every
year. Though the authors suggest that to teach a second language properly
authentic material are an important part in the learning process. Without going to far,
using one of the examples given in the article, we can say that students will become
more motivated if they can watch videos of interviews with famous people. According
to the authors this keeps the students aware of what is happening in the world
because teachers can find a way to connect contents with real experience learning
through newspapers, magazines, TV programs and all different types of media. A
constructive kind of learning using Krashen and terrel's (1983) method of I + 1,
becomes really helpful when it comes to improve student's English level.

Personally I think a group work is a great way of strengthen trust and fellowship
because students need to trust on one another. On the other hand it could lead to a
disaster, basically since students do not usually know how to handle leadership. That
is why the authors state some requirements for group work. Interdependence for
instance, comes as a requirement due to the fact that students need to understand
that their personal success is the group success, a great way of improving this is
giving each student an individual task to complete the entire work. I agree when the
concept of rewards mention by the authors, a healthy motivation can make the group
work more relevant to the students. In mi opinion students work in a better way when
each of them makes an equal contribution to the final work. And also, the teacher
should provide some rules such as responsibility and respect to give the students a
sense of personal responsibility.
To sum up, communicative language approach is both helpful and interesting to read
as a future teacher because it show us that the level of motivation and success of
our students depends on the kind of methods we use to perform a better learning
process.