The 'Communicative Language Teaching' Fraud Revealed!

[Londo Molari]

http://www.english-learning.co.uk/commcomp.html

http://www.english-learning.co.uk/jpel.html

http://www.english-learning.co.uk/geifr.html

http://www.english-learning.co.uk/geiil.html

Long live Amorey Gethin - the man who tells it like it is!

[fluffyhamster]

Interesting articles.

Gethin is right about the need for curiosity and careful observation of the language by the learner - being familiar with it will obviously help communication along - especially production - than just "practising" (the learner hoping to pick things up without any familiarity with any items that might come their way, or worse, be needed in the learner's own speech!)...but I think then just saying (as Gethin does) that students only need to "notice" and make time for serious, individual private study is a bit of a cop-out (I believe it is the teacher's responsibility to identify worthwhile texts and provide as much optimal input as possible, arranged in a progressive and logical fashion e.g. with regard to natural discourse structure and known vs. as yet unknown background information) - the educational establishment should be doing more, not less, to justify whatever money it charges for however many lessons etc. (Gethin's attitude is somewhat reminiscent of Zhuangzi's on the following thread: http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=2726 ).

It must also be said that CLT, especially its later offshoots (TBLT etc) does often pay serious attention to form (and obviously its function/meaning-use), whilst recognizing that perfection may not be a realistic goal (in less-than-ideal situations e.g. limited time to learn), hence the notion of "communicative competence" (which encompasses compensating strategies etc); that is, there is never a perfect way to express anything beyong the simplest of propositions - even if situation B is similar to a previous situation A, real-time and contextual factors will affect what is achievable, and compromizes will obviously have to be made. Yes, it's unfortunate there isn't more time for chalk and "talk", but CLT has always stressed "high surrender values" and, in the final "analysis", demonstrating that knowledge gained can actually be applied (this would seem a logically necessary "final" stage), and there is always the danger of learners edging towards the other extreme of "crippling" overanalysis, becoming too cerebral, talking about English rather than learning how to speak about things in English etc (Gethin alludes to the problems of extremes - overanalysis and translation versus rabid CLTing - in Japan, if one accepts his analysis that 'such misunderstanding is common throughout the world. But in most places this is offset, to a greater or lesser extent, by a practical intuition as to how one should go about learning a foreign language. In Japan this intuition often seems entirely lacking.').

[joshua2004]

This is fascinating reading, thanks again Londo!

[woodcutter]

Glad you got around to it, Mr.Molari (Gethin!?).

The thing is though, the books that academia promotes are full of dreary grammar exercises - they are not especially "communicative", though there are a number of conversational activities for which students are not adequately prepared. Everyone has been stealthily crawling away from full on hippy-dippy-grammar-teacher-is-evil style CLT.

It is horrible, admittedly, that I on my forthcoming on-line MA I shall no doubt have to waste hours of my life defining CLT when it is a chotic conceptual mess, given as a gospel on certain CELTA courses.

Of course, the point is, what's better? I have begun to accept that Koreans poor English learning skills (money spent#1/results achieved #111) truly is the result of most classes being given in full on grammar translation mode in the native language, and that if they did have the cultural aptitude for roleplays etc, it really would help a lot. (Though some say it is because those who can't do teach, those who can't teach teach TEFL, and those who can't teach TEFL teach in Korea!)

My solution is for students to be encouraged to choose between a number of methods, and take responsibility for their own progress, where possible. In that way, they will realize eventually that the most entertaining monkey is probably not the best teacher results-wise, and will gradually progress towards a method where there is a strong focus on suitable input, correct usage and wise recycling at the expense of out and out entertainment and goofy chat. Some method schools make a half-decent stab at this.

[fluffyhamster]

Turning now to the thread title...

It's easy to take exception to the 'T' in 'CLT' when little more than bingo or a shopping roleplay is the focus of classes, but at the other extreme, the 'C' is important and there does seem to be a need with oriental students especially for them to begin believing that yes, they have indeed learnt enough and can therefore perform satisfactorily (and so they really should try to perform) in (communicative) context A; and to say that proponents (all of them!) of CLT have been "fraudulent" is a bit much (I'd actually say that it is the serious consideration of the FUNCTION of language - the L that is the pivot point between the counterbalancing C and T - that has provided the basis for and made possible much of the enlightened and "radical" thinking of many a polemical writer).

[joshua2004]

I understand the idea behind CLT and it is good. How it is practiced and interpreted by teachers and administrators (more importantly administrators) is disappointing. Granted CLT, from what I've read is not necessarily something to be swallowed whole. Like most, I pick and choose what I like.

The idea behind learning a language by understanding why such a thing as a language exists; it is to communicate. The problem teachers face is not realizing that you don't learn a language by speaking, you mostly learn it from input (reading and listening). Administrators are the real perpetrators in my eyes. How can a teacher really apply CLT or any real comprehension based theory in a stifling system? I think we will see the benefits of the research in to CLT and other comprehension/communication based theories when we see teachers getting to practise in a professional and liberal environment. Once teachers begin opening schools. Well that's what I did.

[revel]

Good morning all!

Being one of those CLT teachers, being an entertaining "monkey" in the classroom, being a teacher who pairs up students and makes them do all the talking in class, my fur naturally got a little ruffled upon reading some of the comments made by this gentleman. I would not say that he tells things as they are, but rather as his own personal experience has led him to see them. His passionate writing style leads me to believe that he himself has suffered from being the only useful teacher in several teaching situations. He has worked in academies making just a bit over what the cleaning lady with the same employer makes each hour. He has had to share classes or students with teachers who probably shouldn't be teaching. He has a clear, firm, concise idea of how language is learned (probably based on his own L2 language experience) and bases his convictions on the "language is learned through observation, that is, reading and listening or listening and reading" school of thought.

I do agree with him on students having to take personal responsibility for language learning. I agree that the majority of the work is in the hands (or on the lips) of the learner and the teacher should be an informant or, as he puts it, a "guide". I don't agree at all that one learns through listening and reading, at least not the speaking skills, those are in good measure physical and need physical practice in order to become skilled at them.

There is no need to expose the fraud, it is not hidden. Parents know that their children are being kept in day-care-centers where a bit of English is thrown about. Others know that the reason that their kids are failing in school is because their kids are either lazy or apathetic or would just rather be playing with the Gameboy than studying, and they also know that though they are paying for tutoring, their kids will not do a lot better on their exams, but maybe one or two percentage points can be had and at least the parents are making the effort. The administrators are indeed in the business for the money and indeed are only concerned about quality in the classroom when a client complains about the lack of quality. None of this is new to any of us with any number of years of dedication to this work.

I do have a bit of a problem with a writer who asserts that "there is no other way". I hope that I don't say such things!

peace,
revel.

[woodcutter]

Seems like Mr.Hamster finds it hard to decipher my posts, and the feeling is mutual.

Let me try again then! Our hippy teacher trainers tell us "teacher talking time bad!"...."student talking time good!"

They then send us out in the real world with Headway, and have us do blackboard introductions to grammar exercises. There is not much "communicative language teaching". If there is a "fraud", it is that. They don't believe in CLT themselves, perhaps.

Londo's original satire seems to me to be about somebody going through the motions with Headway, not somebody trying to lead a lot of interesting classroom debates. (Not that that is especially great in any case)

[Londo Molari]

The similarity in our views and ways of expressing them is striking, but I am not Mr Gethin. Sorry to disappoint you there woodcutter.
'Of course, the point is, what's better? ' The point is, what ISN'T? CLT is a vile con! It is a way to allow langauge school to profit from the vast army of unrained, unqualified and ungifted 'teachers' who come to Japan for a year out after uni. The same with the government - all official bodies from the highest echelon to the klowly HRT have been brainwashed to believe that having foreigners around, singing, dancing and eating lunch with the kids will improve English levels in Japan. In a way, that stupidity means that they deserve all they get!
What's better? Gramar Translation followed up with Audio Lingual training. That will get you to a level where you are ready to start to engage in fre conversation but NOT before. Of course, both GT and AL are DIFFICULT whereas CLT provides the magic bullet, backed up with 'evidence' from niversity types who have a lot to lose if the truth were really known!

If yu give students a choice of method they will always go wit the easiest one and quit of they select the far more effective difficult one, by mistake. So CLT is here to stay, ineffective and moronic though it is.

[lolwhites]

As a satirical aside I can't fault Gethin's articles, but as a serious insight into the profession, they are nothing more than opinions presented as facts. I note the complete absence of a bibliography at the end of his articles so am not able to check up on any of the "research" he cites. He'll have to do rather better than that before I start listening to his pontifications.

It's true that CLT is heavily plugged on the CELTA courses. It might have occurred to him that the problem is not CLT, but teachers who've only had one month's training and precious little experience. Is it any wonder that schools in Japan that employ cheap CELTA newbies don't produce results? Any method will fail if the teacher is crap.

Grammar-Translation is how I learned French and Spanish. Sure, they gave me a base but they also meant I went out to Spain after 8 years and was still unable to communicate with native speakers. After that experience I resolved that my own students shouldn't have to go through that. Now that I teach multinational classes in the UK, what I find is that the students who were taught nothing but GT, often for years, speak broken, incomprehensible English. And how am I supposed to teach GT in multilingual classes when I don't know half the students' native languages anyway?

[woodcutter]

The majority of Koreans are doing grammar translation kind of stuff with native Korean teachers, as I mentioned. That's popular with many students, as it doesn't strain the brain, and is comprehensible. How terrible the results! Such English as is spoken in those classes is often spoken in a poor accent and with inaccurate grammar. I don't suppose Japan differs too much. Gethin stresses the importance of accurate input, and I agree, especially for phonetics. That's why they employ foreigners (though it is also because learning with foreigners is a cultural experience in itself). The lack of training is impossible to avoid. Nobody wants to train for ages to teach for peanuts, and people don't want to pay loads of money to employ Lolwhites when Lolwhites will only be better than any newbie rivals by a small degree, and may even be less suitable for a particular position. (Nor can even the mighty Lol teach grammar translation in Asia, I suppose!)

I think there is some idea in Asia that foreigners are there to supplement the normal grammar translation classes. In fact, horribly, CLT may even be propagated with Asia especially in mind. The trouble is, you need wise integration, and it doesn't happen.

I'm disappointed in Londo's solution providing skills, I must say! However, he is one more Star Trek character who thinks that CLT is not so wonderful, and that some other methods should be available. I'll try and count him as an ally......

[Londo Molari]

'Grammar-Translation is how I learned French and Spanish. Sure, they gave me a base but they also meant I went out to Spain after 8 years and was still unable to communicate with native speakers.'

You can't blame the methdology, any more than woodcutter can with the students in his classes. Dare I say, though, that the failing is in the person, NOT in the methodlogy. OK, so grammar-translation gives you the foundation. You will recall, though, that I suggest audio-lingual practice as an essential follow-up. Do not dismiss the value of this step - it is vital, and the GT you have done first makes up for the only step of the AL process that I would have deemed flawed i the past. Yes, it's hard, hard work, even for gifted linguists, but trust me and try it! It works. (1) GT, (2) AL, (3) free conversation. You don't see soldiers being sent into battle without (1) understanding (GT), (2) drilling (AL) and (3) experience. Interestingly enough AL was and is used by the army and because you are under orders not to give up, you can't just shut your books and go and watch TV.

woodcutter, do you and lolwhites have a history I should know about? I am detecting some animosity here. And (hee hee) you have been reading my posts elsewhere, haven't you? Star Trek indeed!

[revel]

Good morning all.

Several years ago, a friend of mine here opened an ESL academy. As there was little competition, he did rather well his first years drawing in clients, mostly kids. He was able to expand and open two more centers for studying ESL. As time passed, other academies began to pop up, from the small businessman hiring a couple of teachers to the Chain-Store Inlinguas. The market was overwhelmed by so much offering and he had to do something to both maintain his old clients and reel in the new ones being born every year. Sooo,

He gave an interview to the local newspaper about Krashen's "Natural Method", explaining how, if kids begin their ESL classes at 3 years old they will naturally learn more English than if they begin later on. The article, which probably appeared in the "Education" section of the paper more or less a month before school started, meaning the period of time when parents have to slot their kids into activities that will keep them busy and safe while they, the parents, are still at work, briefly outlined one of Krashen's hypolthosis about language learning. Parents flocked with their pre-schoolers to sign them up for this "miracle" in language learning. For a couple of years he was able to maintain the "farce" of the "natural approach", until one of his teachers, a bit fed up with his administrative practices (read, low pay long hours) left the academy and took 40% of his clients with her. She opened a new academy using the "story-telling" method, that is, she bought a good number of children's books and asked her teachers to simply give the kids imput through game-playing and story telling.

Meanwhile, a high-school English teacher paired up with a wandering Irishman and opened a small school to pick up the slack from other academies. The growth of this academy is solely based on the incredible talent of this High-school teacher as a salesperson (Brooklyn Bridge salesman). He, at least, hired a couple of qualified teachers among the generally unqualified staff and the important, show-case classes were given to those teachers. In all other cases, parents have been "fooled" into regestering their students year after year. Adult training classes have clear objectives written which have a lot to do with what the Administration (read local government) is trying to sell to the European Community in order to get grant money for training and have little or nothing to do with what actually goes on in class.

It has often been pointed out (and correctly) that the techniques that I describe in other threads probably work well in my classroom because I am in the pilot's seat rather than another teacher. Other teachers where I work have tried out my way with more or less capacity to make it work, but their own beliefs get in the way more often than not. There's the one who thinks that like-lists of vocabulary are much more important than basic structure and "grammar" manipulation. There's the other who really believes that students learn through reading articles from the "Times", underlining new words and listening to endless tapes of conversations and monologues. And there's me, who believes that students want to learn but don't always know how, need guidance in organizing their papers, thier thoughts, their effective and economic use of study time. The first two teachers mentioned will put a video on for their students and sit in the back marking exam papers. My students complain because I almost never put a video on, and when I do, I make them do some exercise. However, this year, at the end of the course, when offered a last class with coke and crisps while looking at the video or doing that "long-mysterious-game", my kids unanimously chose the game over the video. They want to learn and that is where the focus of any "method" should get its fuel.

There is no "one way" of doing this. It is too complicated a subject to reduce to a CLT or a Natural Method or a Berlitz Course. It seems that when one of these ideas is "sold" it becomes useless, teachers are never told what the parents are told and when the coincide it is always a happy coincidence. (Ooops, have said "never" and "always", opening myself up to heavy criticism....hehe). Let's blame the administrators. If they did not give work to those teachers who are not teachers then the few who are "good" teachers would be more in demand, would be able to demand better pay, would be more motivated, perhaps.

One "method" that is hardly discussed is the "send-your-kid-to-Ireland" method. Just this year, my boss commented that he would like to sell the local academy to someone else and concentrate his efforts exclusively on these short-term experiences in an English speaking country. Parents are always much more satisfied with this "method", thier kids are happy with the experience and often say that they learned more in the three weeks that they lived with an Irish family than during the entire academic year going to two hours of class a week and ploughing through another one of those silly textbooks with lots of pictures and little motivational material. Certainly not all who wish to learn English can take advantage of such an experience. I myself weighed the economic difference between taking classes or returning to the university to learn to speak and write in Spanish and simply moving my life to Spain and becoming part of the culture and, personal circumstances aside, found that the second was cheaper and more effective than the first.

Sorry, rambling there. I meant to speak about objectives and meeting objectives but this has gotten too long to go into that. Maybe later....

peace,
revel.

[lolwhites]

Londo - if by Audiolingual you mean the system they tried out in the '70s where the teacher played a tape and made the students watch an accompanying filmstrip, I had that as well and a fat lot of good it did. Admittedly, it made it impossible to gaze out of the window since the curtains were drawn, but I still found it more effective as a method for inducing sleep than teaching language. In retrospect it strikes me as TWALTing at its most blatant.

Incidentally, I passed my French and Spanish exams with flying colours, so from that point of view the teachers were excellent. Unfortunately the exams tested my ability to translate and write stories from picture prompts, neither of which I was ever called upon to do in real life. GT set my real-world progress in L2 back years by instilling in me the need to understand every single word.

[woodcutter]

I have no animosity for lol - but as one of the very few who did not enter the profession raw he/she (I'm still confused) is a committed newbie basher, and I like to stick up for them, since this profession is not one where a new teacher must necessarily be doing a poor job.

To teach grammar translation you need to have an excellent grasp of both grammars, right? So in reality, we are basically talking native teachers of the students language. In Korea, their level lacks something. If they were as good as their Dutch counterparts, I suppose we would all lose our jobs. However, they are not, and this country is still at the stage where the input they get from them is different enough from what hits Koreans in the west that native english speaking conversation teachers are employed to top up the input.

And that's just the problem. We are supposed to add the communicative icing on the cake. But we all find it doesn't work like that, don't we? In reality we need to provide input.

Londo, you seem to be like the notorious "Chinese" Roger, somebody who wishes to put yourself and the rest of us out of work!