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5o. _BACHILLERATO CIENCIAS Y LETRAS CON ORIENTACION EN

COMPUTACION_DISEÑO_EDUCACION_INGLES_IVAN VILLATORO
The communicative approach

The communicative approach is based on the idea that learning language successfully
comes through having to communicate real meaning. When learners are involved in real
communication, their natural strategies for language acquisition will be used, and this will allow
them to learn to use the language.

The communicative approach is based on the idea that learning language successfully
comes through having to communicate real meaning. When learners are involved in real
communication, their natural strategies for language acquisition will be used, and this will allow
them to learn to use the language.

Principles of the Communicative Approach:

1. Language learning is learning to communicate using the target language.

2. The language used to communicate must be appropriate to the situation, the roles
of the speakers, the setting and the register. The learner needs to differentiate
between a formal and an informal style.
3. Communicative activities are essential. Activities should be presented in a
situation or context and have a communicative purpose. Typical activities of this
approach are: games, problem-solving tasks, and role-play. There should be
information gap, choice and feedback involved in the activities.
4. Learners must have constant interaction with and exposure to the target language.
5. Development of the four macroskills — speaking, listening, reading and writing —
is integrated from the beginning, since communication integrates the different
skills.
6. The topics are selected and graded regarding age, needs, level, and students’
interest.
7. Motivation is central. Teachers should raise students’ interest from the beginning
of the lesson.
8. The role of the teacher is that of a guide, a facilitator or an instructor.
9. Trial and error is considered part of the learning process.
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10. Evaluation concerns not only the learners’ accuracy but also their fluency.

Communicating meaning is the main goal, and language is seen as a tool for learners to
reach this aim. For this reason, the syllabus of courses that adopt a Communicative Approach to
teaching favor lesson aims that will help students practice and develop their linguistic
competence, rather than their grammatical competence. In order to achieve this, different types
of syllabi were created, amongst them, the functional-notional syllabus, that enables learners to
focus on the meaning (function) of language and practice it in a realistic setting:

1. Introducing yourself
2. Ordering food at a restaurant
3. Making a hotel reservation
4. Apologizing and responding to apologies
5. Making prediction about the future
6. Making a complaint
Besides that, the syllabus might also include work on the four skills (Reading, Writing,
Listening and Speaking), as their development is vital for students to perform real-life goals. The
skills are many times worked with simultaneously in what is known as integrated-skills approach.
For instance, in a listening lesson, students can be asked to watch a video online and post their
opinion about it in the comment section. Instead of just asking learners to leave their comment,
the teacher might work on the appropriate language, vocabulary and register for this text
explicitly, integrating the writing skill in a listening lesson.
This is desirable when adopting the Communicative Approach because it seems more
realistic: in genuine communication, skills are seldom employed in isolation, and an integrated-
skills approach simulates what happens in real life. The source of the texts in skills lessons is also
important. In the Communicative Approach, authentic texts are usually favored, as they might
provide learners with exposure to a more genuine use of language.
Fluency and accuracy practice
In order to help learners improve their communicative competence, it is important to
provide a range of practice activities. Although the ultimate aim is genuine communication, there
is room for activities and exercises that ensure students practice language in a more controlled
manner, focusing on the development of accuracy. These should not, however, be the only source
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of language practice. Activities that focus on the development of fluency are a vital part of a
Communicative Approach lesson, as they give learners the opportunity to communicate meaning.
Here is a video that complements the communicative approach:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFKKkLkBcn0

The Grammar Translation method is a very important point that language learners have
always tended to apply language analysis to the learning of language; in fact, some of the first
descriptions of a language were made for the purpose of it. Adds that from the point of view of
learning a new language.

Individual factors in foreign language learning:

• Role learning ability is the ability to store and recall partly arbitrary language material
accurately and assign associations between sounds and meaning, and retain them.

• Inductive language learning ability is the ability to infer regularities from language
material, identify patterns of relationships involving meaning and grammatical form. The notion of
motivation is linked to the study of attitudes and motivation by Lambert and Gardner in Canada in
1972. Their research was conducted in the framework of social psychology to explore the
relationship between attitudes towards the target language group and learning outcomes in
Montreal, a French English bilingual setting. Gardner and Lambert (1972) distinguished two kinds
of motivation: integrative, which is connected with a positive attitude to the target language group
and a desire to become its member, and instrumental, which is connected with utilitarian goals for
language learning, such as obtaining a better paid job or possibility of travel.

Initially, Lambert and Gardner thought that successful language learning is linked to
integrative motivation, but it turned out that the relationship is much more complex. Certainly,
motivation is not a causal factor in language learning. It may be claimed nowadays that the source
of motivation is not as important as the fact that it is activated. Equally important is the concept of
intrinsic motivation, which is the energy, activated for the purpose of conducting a given task and
bringing it to its completion. Research on motivation in foreign language learning nowadays
focuses not so much on the learners' attitudes towards speech communities of the target
language - with English as a world language - but on the much more specific concept of attentional
policy in various learning tasks, defined by Keller (1983:389) as 'the choices people make as to
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what experiences or goals they approach or avoid, and the degree of effort they will exert in that
respect.' It follows that the notion of motivation refers to the deployment of the cognitive
resources by the learner, the degree of effort and the extent to which it is sustained in the long
run. Current interest in motivation is much more classroom-oriented, whereas the view of
motivation is much more dynamic. The teacher's responsibility is to raise the level of motivation
and maintain it this way as long as possible.

Forisha-Kovach (1983:124) defines intelligence as 'the ability to learn from experience, the
ability to acquire and retain knowledge, and the ability to respond quickly and successfully to a
new situation.' She stresses that to be considered intelligent, behavior must be rational and
purposeful, as well as meaningful and valuable. Two factors have been defined in measures of
intelligence: the general ability known as the 'g' factor and specific abilities known as the’s’ factor.
Results of intelligence tests are usually presented as Intelligence Quotient (IQ), which expresses
how a person compares to other members of his or her age group. Average scores are computed
for each age group which provides the basis for determining the mental age.

The IQ score is computed by dividing the mental age by the chronological (actual) age of
the person and multiplying by 100. The factors that affect intelligence are both heredity, which
imposes a certain ceiling which we may or may not reach, and environment, especially differential
practice. The role of intelligence in foreign language learning is increasingly recognized nowadays
in view of the perception of language learning and use as strategic behavior.

Verbal communication is a constitutive human property:

All human beings have the ability of verbal communication; they are born with the instinct
to communicate. Processes of verbal communication are localized and executed in our mind, in
our information processing system, to be exact. Human information processing is specialized for
our cognitive (learning) processes which enable us to observe our environment, learn intentionally
and unintentionally, form concepts, solve problems, reason, engage in abstract thought and use
symbols, perform mathematical operations, and, last but not least, participate in verbal
communication. Human information processing (HIP) system consists of such subsystems as:
perception, attention, memory, planning, retrospection, anticipation, monitoring and feedback.

Perception is the opening of our nervous system onto the environmental information.
Although perception is aimed at receiving the external information, it is not passive. Even at this
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stage, it is structured and organized on the basis of our previous experience. This subsystem is
specialized as modalities, among which the auditory and the visual modalities are the most
significant in language learning and use. The next stage in information processing is attention, a
narrowing of our information processing system, which may be viewed as our cognitive energy
available at a given time, indispensable in guiding intentional behavior. Since its resources are
limited, attention is a selection mechanism: when we focus on a task, we cannot at the same time
perform other tasks well, if at all.

In order to learn grammars structures the students most know how to learn with all this
components, and first understand what English grammar is. Grammar is the system of a language
that defines away in which meanings are encoded into wordings in the English language. This
system can be further divided into the following parts:

 Noun:
Nouns are people, places, or things; they tell us what we are talking about. The words cat,
Ram, rock, india, & it are nouns.

 Adjective:
Adjectives modify, or describe, nouns. The words tall, beautiful, irresponsible, & boring
etc. are adjectives.

 Adverbs:
Adverbs modify adjectives, verbs, or other adverbs. They tell us how, when, and where
things happen. They express quantity, intensity, frequency, and opinions. Example: She ran
quickly.
 Determiners:
Articles, quantifiers, and other determiners modify nouns. They resemble adjectives in
that way. Determiners help us say what we are talking about.

 Verbs and Verb Tenses:

Verbs are action words. They tell us what is happening and when (past, present, future).
Verbs can also express possibilities and conditions.

 Speech:
When we report what someone says, we can cite the person directly or indirectly. Indirect
speech rules are an important area of grammar.

 Punctuation:
Punctuation is not part of oral grammar, but it is essential to master in written English.

 Relative Clause:
Relative clauses are used to create more complex and precise sentences.
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General English is learnt to strengthen formal and informal communication, both oral and
written, in English. Following topics are needed to be learnt to have command on general English:

 Basic Sentence Structure (Affirmative, Negative and Interrogative.)

 Rules of Tenses (Past, Present and Future.)

 Rules of correctly using parts of speech ( Articles, Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives,
Verbs, Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions)
 Rules of punctuation.
 Word Power (Synonyms, Antonyms, Phrases and Idioms, One word Substitutes.)

Just like English vocabulary, a good command of grammar comes from your consistent
usage and massive practice in your everyday life and/or workflow activities, involving real
communication with real people, as much as you can: conversations, dialogues, meetings,
discussions, presentations, writing emails or reports or proposals or blogs, copy-writing, web-
casting, pod-casting, public speaking.

Among the vast number of stimuli which reach us from the environment, we can process
only about a fraction (1/3) so we constantly make deliberate or subconscious choices as to which
information or task to attend to and which to ignore. Some psychologists regard attention as
concentration of our consciousness, which has a focus as well as periphery. Attention is viewed as
equivalent to working memory which is a transitional stage of information processing between
perception and permanent memory. Working memory is also seen as a decision center which is
responsible for the policy of dispatching our cognitive resources and launching intentional
behavior, as opposed to the subordinated system which executes these decisions and which runs
on fast automatic processes. Automatic processes are characterized by having been practiced to
the point that they no longer diminish our pool of attentional resources. Their disadvantage,
however, is that once they are formed they are rather inflexible.

Controlled processes, those which remain within the range of our awareness and
attentional control, on the other hand, are relatively slow, but flexible. Resource-demanding
controlled processes are essential for bigger units of our strategic intelligent behavior, whereas
the less demanding but subordinated automatic processes are functional only if they have been
integrated with, yet subordinated to the higher order controlled decisions. Attentional limitations
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make it necessary to prolong time on complex tasks and/or to repeat the contact with complex
materials to allow more information to be perceived and processed from the given input.

Memory is the store in which information is categorized and organized. It is a very

complex structure where the essential position is taken up by our mental lexicon. Bodies of
organized information, knowledge, are retrieved from and committed to memory as a result of our
cognitive and communicative activities, so that memory comes to represent our individual history
and life experience. Information is initially registered in the form in which it has been perceived,
for example as iconic memory trace (visual image) or echoic (auditory) trace. Specifically linguistic
information takes either the graphemic form, as visual language signs, graphemes and their
clusters, or the phonemic form, auditory language signs, phonemes and their clusters.

In this well-organized memory structure psychologists distinguish episodic and generic, or

semantic memory. The former is a chronological representation of events in our personal
experience, while the latter a more abstract, hierarchically organized representation of
categorized universal knowledge of meanings, relations, propositions, etc. The better organized
our knowledge the easier it is to retrieve and use it. We naturally tend to process the incoming
information for meaning. If we cannot assign any meaning to it, the information is not committed
to permanent memory and fades away. The deeper our processing for meaning, for example, the
more levels of interpretation evoked for the purpose, the better it is remembered. In an attempt
to remember some information exactly we may rehearse, chunk or elaborate it. Rehearsal is a
deliberate repetition of some information in an attempt to strengthen its memory trace; chunking
is organizing information into categories, whereas elaboration is retrieving our existing knowledge
relevant to the task to establish various associations with the target material.

Any instance of human information processing, especially verbal communication, requires

knowledge activation to bring to bear on the task at hand. Most of the instances of information
processing are based on categorizing and recognizing the incoming information, bottom-up
processing, on the basis of the what we already know, top-down processing, which testifies to the
fundamentally interactive nature of our cognitive operations.

Organized bodies of information represented in our memory have been referred to as

knowledge, which brings us to an important distinction between declarative and procedural
knowledge representations. Declarative representations, 'knowledge, that', are available to
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retrospection and contain factual (content) information. Procedural representations, 'knowledge,

how', are not so readily available to insight but can be demonstrated by performing operations
which require their use. Procedural representations are called upon in skilled comprehension and
production in the process of verbal communication.

Language as a special code of verbal communication:

Keeping in mind the common location of human cognitive and communicative processes,
as well as their constant informational exchanges, we must not lose sight of the language
specificity of verbal communication. From the point of view of verbal communication, language is
a tool for interaction with others. From the point of view of cognition, language is an object of
reflection, a source of insight and understanding. The interactive processes in verbal
communication are other, socially-oriented, in that the whole point is to send an encoded
message out, whereas the cognitive processes of learning are storage-oriented, i.e. they are aimed
at retaining the information in the mind of the individual.

From the point of view of its units, language is a system of signs, i.e. arbitrary meaningful
entities. From the point of view of its function, it is a code, a highly organized system of
transformations for encoding and decoding the content of our mental life, especially ideas, notions
and thoughts, images, symbols, emotions, values, and attitudes. A characteristic feature of signs,
as opposed to other forms of information such as signals, is that they are emitted intentionally, i.e.
they imply a sender and an addressee. Language signs consist of their substance, or the vehicle
(auditory or visual), form (the shape or mould assigned to the substance by the code), and
meaning (the reference of the form to entities outside the code).

Language code is characterized by double articulation, which is to say, the smallest

meaningful unit is the morpheme consisting of an arrangement of phonemes or graphemes which
have their form, but do not yet have meaning in the sense of reference outside the code. The
meaning or function of phonemes and graphemes can be identified within the code. On the other
hand, morphemes carry meaning which can be identified outside the code, through association
with concepts and real world objects.

The language code/tool is a strictly organized system with distinct levels:

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Phonological, morphological, syntactical, lexical, semantic, and pragmatic. This

organization is often formalized and described by rules. The signs used by the code at different
levels of organization derive their identity from their place in the system, i.e. mutual relationships,
contrasts, oppositions, subordination, superordination, etc. Their form, therefore, is of utmost
importance. Once emitted, signs, or rather their arrangements, carry information across time and
space. This information is structural (regarding forms) as well as semantic (regarding meanings),
and pragmatic (regarding the relationships between signs and their users). Language signs are
arbitrary, i.e. unmotivated and conventional in the sense that there is no reason why they are the
way they are, so their users must know their form, meaning, arrangements and pragmatic use to
identify and produce them properly. To master the language code for the purposes of verbal
communication, a foreign language learner must learn the requisite skills for emitting (articulating)
and receiving (recognizing) the signs, the lexical units and their sequences, the combinatorial rules
to construct and recognize their arrangements, and the ability to assign forms to meanings
(lexicalize) for the role of the sender, and meanings to forms (semanticize) for the role of the
addressee (Dakowska, 2001, 2003).

Reasoning processes available to the language learner:

In addition to the most fascinating processes of verbal communication sketched above,

people learning how to communicate in a foreign language have one other resource to rely upon
in this complex task: their reasoning processes, such as problem solving, analysis, synthesis,
analogy, comparison, contrast, ordering, generalization, induction, deduction, inferring,
formulation of laws, finding exceptions to them. Let me explain them briefly.

Problem solving is a mental activity in which the initial set of information, called problem
space, contains a missing element. Solving a problem involves the diagnosis of what is missing to
be supplied by the subject. Problem solving is a very demanding and constructive form of
reasoning because the solution must be generated rather than found in the available data. Special
difficulty is involved in solving ill-defined problems, which require a definition to begin with (i.e.
subsuming them under some relevant categories), a creative act in itself, as well as their solution
(i.e. providing the missing link in the information).

Analysis and synthesis are two complementary reasoning operations. In analysis we

investigate a given body of information by breaking it into smaller components to single out their
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individual properties, whereas in synthesis we integrate the most important information into a
larger unit so that it makes up a qualitatively new whole. Mental analysis and synthesis are
possible even on objects which cannot be physically dissected (Matczak, 1992).

Analogy is a process of perceiving similar or parallel (structural) properties, individual as

well as in arrangements, in different sets of materials. Comparison is mentally placing two objects
of thought side by side to find their similarities and differences; contrast, on the other hand,
involves looking mainly for their differences. It is essential in this operation to be able to use a
common criterion or point of reference (this ability gradually emerges in human development)

Ordering is the operation of sequencing certain elements according to some features, for
example according to its growing intensity. Generalization is the process of drawing inferences
from certain instances and making them applicable to other instances. Generalization is similar to
induction.

The whole-person involvement in verbal communication and learning in which we proceed

from the particular (specific) to the general. Deduction is a reverse process which starts with the
general information, from which we draw inferences about the particular information.

Inferring is an act of drawing conclusions on the basis of the available data, as a result of
which new propositions are constructed. Formulation of laws is the process of identifying relations
between various occurrences in time, which can be categorized as causal. The nature of causal
relations is such that event A is said to cause event B, if B always follows A, and it never occurs
without A. Exceptions to laws are counter evidence to the statement contained in the law. The
learner can use these reasoning processes to operate on communicative as well as other
information material to come up with more processed, i.e. categorized, generalized, explicit
knowledge about various aspects of the language code, verbal communication and the social
environment in general.

The extent to which we make use of reasoning during the act of communication depends
on the availability of surplus cognitive resources, i.e. attention. Foreign language learners certainly
do not have problems with attentional surplus, just the opposite. We may also engage in them
retrospectively focusing on various aspects of our personal or observed communicative
encounters represented in memory and available to our reflection with various degrees of
explicitness.
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The learner's creative and constructive involvement:

The language learner in a communicative act makes decisions in the sense of choices from
the mental options relevant to the situation thus contributing to the dynamics of communication.
The learner's role is constructive, it requires building new units of communication - the discourse
in a given communicative encounter is tailor-made for the purpose - even if its elements are
known, as well as strategic, it requires the optimal choices of action under the circumstances, with
the available resources, and in view of the goal to be reached.

Hagen., B. S. (2014.). Fundamentals of English Grammar. U.S.A: Pearson Longman.

Joan Saslow, A. A. (2011). Fundamentals . U.S.A: Pearson Education ,Inc.

Kagan, M., & Laurie Kagan, S. K. (1995). Classbuilding . San Clemente California.: kagan
Cooperative Learning.