ENGLISH LEARNING METHOD
Because commerce, travel, and academic activities frequently focus on English, it
is the most popular language in the world and has become the most important foreign
language (known as EFL) in many non-English-speaking countries. The ways in which
students' listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities can be improved are critical
issues in these countries. Therefore, developing effective and efficient approaches to
increasing practical opportunities in actual contexts, and thus, improving students'
English learning outcomes and motivation has become an extremely important.
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been accepted as an effective
approach by many language educators due to the major focus on developing learner
ability to use the language appropriately in context. Among all methods used and
practiced so far, CLT has been considered as the best practice in English language
teaching (ELT) because it offers ‘communication’ means enabling learners to develop
their communicative ability.
The first belief is learners are taught to be able to communicate in target language
(Larsen-Freeman, 2000). Based on this first belief, students should be accommodated
with five components of communicative language ability, that is, grammatical
competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic
competence. Grammatical competence includes learners’ ability in spelling,
pronunciation, vocabulary, word formation and grammatical structure. Discourse
competence requires learners to have the knowledge in dealing with the structure of
longer texts in speech and a piece of writing. Sociolinguistic competence is the ability
that learners should have in choosing the appropriate words or expressions in spoken
or written context of situation. For instance, when learn how to write formal or informal
ways of writing a letter and greeting someone. Strategic competence is the strategy of
learners to keep the communication going on, even the language production is not
perfect, for example, when learners unable to express what they want to say or they
want to clarify misunderstanding. However, in the implementation of CLT in the real
teaching, teachers incorrectly adopt this principle by avoiding teaching grammar.
Prabhu (1987) emphasized that “…grammar teaching is impossible because the
knowledge that a speaker needs in order to use a language is simply too complex (cited
in Thomson,1996, p.10). This avoidance of teaching such competence is due to several
factors. One of possible factors is teachers’ lack of communicative competence in
English.
The second belief is fluency and accuracy should be the goals of communicative
skills. According to Brown (2001) “sometimes fluency is more emphasized than
accuracy in order to encourage learners to speak in the language expressively and
naturally”. Similarly, Finocchiaro and Brumfit (1983) stated that one of the major
distinctive features of the audiolingual method and the communicative approach of
CLT is that in the audiolingual method, accuracy is the primary goal while in CLT;
fluency is the primary goal of teaching (cited in Richards and Rodgers, 1986). Due to
fluency, most teachers in ELT have misinterpreted the focus of CLT. Teachers
understand fluency as learners’ capability in engaging themselves in communicative
activities. Since teachers’ understanding is to make learners engaged in communicative
activities, teachers always try to motivate learners to use the language, especially in
beginner English class. They believe that if learners have already had the courage to
speak in the language, means all objectives of communicative activities can be
achieved. In reality, fluency is not a matter of just talking in the language, fluency
according to Fillmore (1979) included four abilities: the ability ‘to talk without
significant pauses for an extended period of time’, the ability to show ‘a mastery of the
semantic and syntactic resources of the language’, the ability to have ‘appropriate
things to say in a wide range of contexts’, and the ability to ‘creative and imaginative
in…language use’ (Cited in Brumfit, 1984, pp. 53-54). In other words, it can be said
that fluency means learners have to apply
all the required competences as discussed earlier in this essay. Additionally, teachers
sometimes are unwilling to correct learners’