Approaches to develop teaching/ instructional material for TEFL Communicative Approach, By Alessandra Santana 3 4 5 6 Important Considerations: 7 ● Why do students need to learn English? ● What are the goals of the language program? ● Materials and methods cannot be seen in isolation when planning an English Language program. Design of Materials and Methods p. 6 methodology and materials design The Communicative Approach ● Communicative Language Teaching (1970s and 1980s) ● Foundation for other approaches/materials. ● Challenged the structural view of language (1960s). ● Innovated many aspects of course design. 11 ● Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is based on a set of principles that reflect a communicative view of language. ● It has evolved over the years: ● Phases: focus on communicative competence (notions and functions); procedures to identify learners’ needs ( needs analysis ); focus on activities (group work, task-work, information gap). 12 ● Communicative design criteria can still be found in coursebooks and materials. ● Categories such as ‘functional language’ and the four skills show its influence in many coursebook designs. ● It represented a significant change in language teaching. Communicative competence: “real-world” use of language considering the dimensions of context, topic, and roles CLT shifted the goal of language teaching from mastering linguistic properties ( such as pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar) to acquiring communicative competence. 13 ● The change in the view of language (how it is used and how it may be learned and taught) led to a change in methodology and materials ● CLT helped shape not only teaching materials but also the way teachers manage their classrooms. Implications for teaching materials: 15 ● Language Focus = communicative functions. ● Functions = practical uses of language ● Communication as the goal of language education. ● Syllabus based on communicative functions. ● Complex form-function relationship. Form and Function: p. 25 17 ● A grammatical structure can perform a number of different communicative functions : an imperative, for example, might be a command or a suggestion; a conditional might be selected to threaten, to warn or to give advice. ● And a single function can be expressed in a number of different ways. To make a suggestion, for instance, we can say: ‘You should . . .’, ‘You ought to . . .’, ‘Why don’t you . . . ?’, ‘You’d better . . .’, ‘I think you should . . .’, and other possibilities. Implications for teaching materials: 18 ● Being communicative = concept related to what a language has the potential to mean, and also to its formal grammatical properties. ● Categories of communicative meaning : notional (semantico-grammatical) and functional (functions; uses of language). ● Notions = frequency, duration, dimension, location, quantity, etc. 19 ● Expressing frequency involves tense selection and adverbial construction: “They often used to visit friends”, for example. ● Functions: practical uses of language, related to the question: ‘what was the speaker’s intention in saying it? ’ ● Functions: greetings, offers to help, giving advice, warnings, making suggestions and requests, asking for directions, etc. Implications for teaching materials: 20 ● There are other important dimensions of communication to consider: context, setting, topics (transport, work, etc), roles (friends, colleagues, customers, strangers, and so on) ● These factors are interconnected and need to be considered in materials. ● Authenticity: the selection of authentic language material, activities and practices has raised debate regarding criteria.