COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

Since the advent of the European Common Market, in the history of language teaching the attention has shifted once more to necessity for real communication among people with diverse mother tongues. It is almost the same need for international communication that arose, for instance, during the Reinassance, when Latin was no longer the lingua franca and commerce became the core of the economy of increasingly cosmopolitan cultures. The seek for a universal language led the Council of Europe to promote English as the "trade language". That is why formal accuracy is not absolutely necessary and use is more relevant than analysis within the communicative approach; also, notions and functions prevail over structures. Communcative Language Teaching is not a method, but an approach, since there is not a single referent author, textbook or syllabus. As a matter of fact, its flexibility allows the coexistance of several trends as result of different interpretations; one can find Task Based Instruction, Strategies Based Instruction, Content Based Instruction, etc within CLT, and that they are sometimes combined to align either a weak position of learning to use English or a strong position of the use of English to learn. The latter is inspired in the way children begin to acquire their language at the same time they start constructing their knowledge of the outside world (Brunner declares that language mediates intellectual development). As it was said before, CLT is not a method. The search for a single method as the panacea for all the issues concerning language teaching and learning has ended up in a Post-

method era, according to Richards and Rodgers. Kumaravadivelu retakes this concept and extends it in his Post-method Pedagogy as a detailed proposal to become free of the limitations imposed by sticking to one method and to become context sensitive, in terms of considering that a learner carries much more than the pencil to the classroom. He exposes about what he considers it has to be a pedagogy of particularity, practicality and possibility; that is to say that we learn by living, by experience, and we live in communities with particular socio-cultural contexts that shape our development since the linguistic identity we acquire; that teachers should develop their own methodologies according to an eclectic relationship between theories and practice; and that the learner must believe he or she is able to achieve his or her goals, even challenging the status quo when it is oppressive and unfair regarding ethnic aspects or socio-economic class as well as gender issues. So, language is not seen as a simple set of rules, but as being a dynamic resource for interpersonal communication. We are allowed to construct and transmit meanings through its systems of sounds, forms and also structures, all of them cultural conventions; then, language is a symbolic system. As a consecquence, non-linguistic features should be taken into acount too, since much meaning is often implicit in conventions given by the general and immediate context of social interaction. Besides, as in everyday exchanges we can certainly figure the meaning out of ungrammatical utterances, grammar is considered essential only to the extent that it could obscure meanings and interfere with comprehension. It is important to note that language shapes conception about the world, since human beings "think in words" and learn things via linguistic exchanges, so learning a new

language may, in fact, lead people to develop a new persona, a new way of viewing and feeling everything.

Learning is considered around three main principles: the communication principle, the meaningfulness principle and the task principle. Also, is regarded as a process in which cognitive and affective aspects of human psychology converge, with the undeniable influence of Roger's Hummanistic Learning that tries to avoid deffensive learning and to appeal students by motivating them. Communicative skills are to be acquired via real interaction, to conform communicative competence. Hymes picked up Chomsky's distinction between linguistic competence and performance, but he highlighted that competence for him was solely grammatical, intrapersonal and context-reduced, and that something else was necessary in order to take into account the fact that competence is better described as an interpersonal construct embedded of cultural background. Then, Canale and Swain analysed competence in terms of four dimensions: grammatical competence (the one described by Chomsky), discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence. Besides the acquisition of the system of symbols at a sentence level, there it was the ability to use it coherently, cohesively and fluently, the influence of specific situations and cultural ideas (cultural awareness and flexibility) on the communicative exchange, and even the capacity of mantaining the conversation going in spite of potential interferences. The meaningfulness principle is related to Ausubel's

meaningful learning theory (cognitive), which proposes that we do not actually learn anything by rote memorisation and repetition as behaviourists argued; on the contrary, human beings learn by associations of new experiences with knowledge they have stored about similar prior experiences. Thus, meaningfulness configures a sort of peg which retains or subsumes newcoming knowledge into one's whole cognition, by means of structuring a hierarchical and coherent corpus of notions. If the relationship among them is not understood or is contradictory, it means they are not anchored and consequently they gradually disappear. If learning (long-term) did actually take place, time only causes the forgetting of detalis in favour of more global conceptions ("systematic forgetting" for Ausubel and "cognitive prunning" for Brown), saving cognitive effort for new information to be subsumed. That effort is also saved when declarative knowledge ("knowing that") turns into procedural ("knowing how" put it in practice) when it is internalised. All these could also be related to the phenomenon of transfence of concepts from L1 to L2: regarding postitive transfer, features of the target language appear meaningful if they have some kind of equivalents in the mother tongue; however, negative transfer also takes place, mostly when learners overgeneralise and thatr attachment to drawing analogies with previous knowledge interferes with the learning. Applying the meaningfulness to affective considerations, it could be fair to relate it to the importance of belonging, and esteem Freire and Kumaravadivelu show in their ideas of diversity, community work and possibility. That is the reason for the basement of communication on each student's history, a tendency which led to the appearence of textbooks that focus on Uruguayan culture, for instance.

So, in terms of exposure, as it was said by Krashen, it becomes essential a comprehensible input (as it is meaningful) which goes one step forward the knowledge learners have, so that they learn when they enter into what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal devolpment. Input may be made comprehensible with the aid of body language and gestures, exemplification and practical demonstration, repetition of concepts with simplified syntax and vocabulary, slowering of speech rate, clear enunciation and frequent pausing, writing of key concepts on the board, and even the use of the native language. It is also important to establish a good rapport with students: to be authentic, keep eye contact, show interest, check their understanding and offer a respectful feedback.

The task principle relies in a characteristic in common with Community Language Learning, that this approach is learner-centred, although in a lesser degree, of course, and is experience-based, as well. As Dewey believed, classroom resembles society as it is a place of social interaction, too, but it is designed to provide students with specific experiences for them to learn actively.That is why CLT has emphasised the role of the task within classroom's activities: learning by doing means the possibility of using the language, which according to Piaget is essential for learning it, and also facilitates subsumption. So, we have that one of the most important tendencies within CLT is Task-Based Learning.

Tasks are considered experiences to cope with the target language organised by the teacher through realia (non pedagogical) or pseudo-authentic materials; because in real life language is not limited to drills and typical classrooms activities, that is why it must become as authentic as they could find those materials and experiences in everiday situations outside the classroom. It is a goal-oriented activity, or more precisely, sequence of activities, in which students have to cooperate in order to solve problems, taking their own decisions and using the information they already have and the one they gather from the materials. They are ventured to take risks, to negotiate meaning among themselves (Interactionist Hypothesis) beyond memorised patterns. A communicative task could be defined in short words as a piece of meaning-focused work, which implies students' understanding, manipulating, free interaction and finally production, drawing on any resource they have in the target language. But unlike a linguistic excercise as it could be filling in the blanks, the task has a non-linguistic outcome, that means they have to develop an activity via language exchanges but which result is not focused on mastering one single aspect or skill of the target language, but for instance doing a little research about human rights that ends with a classroom presentation. When designing tasks, most teachers follow Willis' model, that suggest a pre-task, the task cycle and a later focus on language. The pre-task phase signifies topic introduction, allowing learners to be exposed verbally or not to some useful information and forms and also of recalling things they know. Then, the task itself takes place in small groups,

almost in private, allowing them to experiment with no shame of possible mistakes. When the task is complete, they start planning a report for the rest to know what each group did, and as it becomes a more public instance, teacher can give some linguistic advice to those students that become more aware of form. Reports are often presented orally or in written form, and then they analyse and discuss new vocabulary or patterns related to the topic, note them down and put them into practice. Errors are corrected positively by teacher with some feedback where students can perceive the correct relationship between meaning and form, notice their errors and repairing them, constantly judging their own success. As inside the classroom there are people with different interests, needs and learning styles, the teacher must take this into account and provide diverse kind of activities, because the wider is the variety of tasks, the greater are the chances of involving all of them. The six most useful tasks are listing (as brainstorming for what cannot miss at a party), ordering and sorting (as ranking items' importance), comparing (types of parties), problem solving (organising it), sharing opinions and personal experiences (telling anecdotes and selecting the funniest) and creative work as projects (as having the party indeed). It is possible to combine them into a small set (because of matters of time and students' capacity of attention) in a coherent sequence.

A syllabus is a list of concepts, structures, skills and contents about the target language that the learner is supposed to master in order to be able of an efficient handling of it. Syllabi are central to CLT and are based on the processes of

both communication and learning rather than any repertoire of products, so many of them focus on functions and interaction. Nonetheless, grammar is recognised to play an important role in the communicative process, so that is not neglected and functions are accompanied by structures (as in Wilkins'). It is difficult to state where the objectives end and the methodologies begin, because they are supposed to be integrated in a very flexible manner. Most used types of syllabus in CLT are task-based, contentbased, skills-based and strategies based. The latter inspire Strategies-based Instruction and try to provide the students some helpful awareness about the learning process and some learning strategies such as studying techniques to those who do not apply them naturally and even unconsciously as many other do. This issue is highly related to becoming conscious of what type of learners they are (visual, auditory, etc) as self-testing, for instance, and to order and memory strategies. TRIAL AND ERROR
RAPPORT interaction hypothesis Long negotation of meaning