ESP and Communicative Language Teaching
It is vitually unanimously accepted that ESP is (should be) learner-centred and, in line with the tenets advanced by CLT from which it emerged, should focus on communicative competence.
Nevertheless, I have recently been doing peer observation and attended, amongst other classes, an ESP class for engeneering students which was more input-driven than I had anticipated. It consisted of a video (about optical fibres) and then exercises such as gap filling and sequencing which the students were doing in pairs. Although the materials were excellent and the teacher very experienced and knowledgeable I failed to see the communicative aspect of the lesson.
Do we, ESP practitioners, truly give opportunities for communication in the classroom? What challenges do we face in that respect?
Espie
Thanks Olwyn!
I think 'communicative mafia' is a good term to define the situation in which all ESP (and by extension ELT) is supposed to be communicative. This is not the same, in my view, as to say that the goal of language learning should be to be able to communicate in this language, which I do not question.
Espie
There is indeed a feeling in modern EFL that you have to be communicative. I think many people would be hard-pressed to define CLT properly, like say Brumfit or Grenfell have done, in which case it is difficult to be sure that you are involved in CLT anyway. But CLT is just another approach to teaching and should be selected in the same way as any other approach to teaching. And certainly don't be worried about not doing CLT.
Kevin
Kevin,
I agree and since most of the teaching I do is on in-sessional programmes with students who are studying very difficult subjects like actuarial maths or strategic project management, I have to be careful not to use typical CLT techniques which can seem childish in their eyes, e.g. jigsaw reading.
I have found, though that I can extend CLT ideas, e.g. about group working, and formalise these in team working. Students respond well to team assignments and peer feedback on their contribution to the team.
Basically they like to be challenged not nurtured and I think a lot of CLT and other types of ELT is too nurturing.
Olwyn
Hi all,
I found myself strongly disagreeing with the term 'communicative mafia' and, permit me to explain why.
CLT is not all about 'talking' and doing information gaps and doing jigsaw listening and mingling in classrooms,etc. but is a whole attitude to language use; listening and textual work do not lie outside CLT.
I don't see that the tasks described by Espie fail to satisfy criteria relating to communicative competence.
Comprehension of text/speech for the communicative purposes for which it was created, seems very much in line with CLT, and what these students seemed to be doing is not unlike what they will be doing with these texts in the real world.
CLT should not only be seen from its 'strong' unadelterated view of 'all things communicative' and nothing allowed of classroom practices introduced for pedagogical reasons.
As long as a reading/listening lesson satisfies at least some of the purposes for which a text was written, it should be seen as satisfying (at least some of) the criteria of CLT.
An approach to viewing this video which involved 'explication de texte' in the good old Grammar-Translation way and detailed lexical and grammatical analyses as well as translation by the teacher, might have merited Espie's comment but this lesson (although it is not described in detail) does not seem to be inappropriate for the needs of that group.
Were you bothered, Espie, because there was pre-listening and no follow-up discussion or communicative interaction at the end?
But that is more of a problem of poor lesson planning and not of CLT going wrong.
I think it would be useful to hear what people consider to be the criteria for CLT. Othwerwise, we may well be talking at cross purposes.
Kevin
Yes, in the lesson I used as example, there wasn't any pre-listening or follow-up discussion.
However what made me question its 'communicativeness' was that all the output was controlled, i.e. right or wrong depending on the set of predetermined answers to the established questions.
It did seem good old PPP to me (which in my view, there is nothing wrong with it as long as it serves a learning -not teaching!-purpose and is used in moderation ;-).
So, do you think that lesson was communicative? ...and if yes, can it be that, maybe sometimes PPP and CLT might overlap ???? and in that case, as per Kevin's post, where do we stand with CLT ?
Espie,
What you say suggests not even PPP, which I consider to be the more diluted, weaker version of CLT; pre-selected language embedded in some text or listening with the intent of practising & then "producing".
What CLT is has been pretty well defined in the relevant literature - the question is which version of it is more appropriate to an ESP class.
In my own view, and this is what we use in our own context, a TBL task cycle may contain text spoken or written as per creating the background or input for a holistic task, and within this framework, reading would be purposeful as there would be some other task, project or outcome dependent on getting information from it.
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Hi Espie,
I believe we should be careful not to let the 'communicative mafia' drive our whole approach to teaching. Sometimes it is necessary to go very deeply into a text (or video in this case) in order to really understand how it communicates its ideas. Students cannot get this deep understanding with the superficial approach to texts which communicative language teaching promotes.
Certainly the EAP side of ESP requires students to be able to recognise the organisation and linguistic features of texts at a very sophistocated level if they are to read and write academic texts. They will not get this deep understanding through games, role plays or endless presentations.
Am I being too hard on CLT?
Olwyn