COMMUNITY LANGUAGE

LEARNING
Charles Curran
a Jesuit priest, specialist in
counselling, and a professor of
psychology at Loyola
University, Chicago.
 Community language learning (CLL)
is a language-teaching approach in which students work together
to develop what aspects of a language they would like to learn.

Learner - "client", "colaborator"

Teacher - "counsellor", "paraphraser"
Counselling learning - is the method, which aims to alleviate the
anxiety and threat so often felt by language learners.

It emphasizes the sense of community in the learning group,

encourages interaction as a vehicle for learning, and considers as
a priority the students' feelings and the recognition of struggles in
language acquisition.
It was primarily designed for monolingual conversation
classes.

It's a method that is based on English for communication

and is extremely learner-focused.

Although each course is unique and student-dictated, there

are certain criteria that should be applied to all CLL
classrooms, namely a focus on fluency in the early stages,
an undercurrent of accuracy throughout the course and
learner empowerment as the main focus.
 Principles of Community
Language Learning
 It is important to establish a mutual relationship between
the learner and the teacher in order to create
a safe learning environment; students tend to learn more
effectively when they feel secure.
 Language is for communication. Therefore, students
should be encouraged to communicate as frequently as
possible during the lesson.
 The teacher stands behind the students in order to facilitate
the learning process.
 The teacher should respect the learners’ level of
confidence and transmit to them what needs to be
done to be successful.
 Learners need to know the limits of a teaching
activity so that they feel more secure.
 As the teacher and the learners are whole
persons, they can share learning experiences, thus
getting
to know one another and building a sense of
community.
In the CLL classroom, students and teachers collaborate to
conduct various instructional tasks and activities,
as there is not a ready-made syllabus and teaching material to
follow.

A group of learners sitting in a circle,

not more than 12 (Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2011), initiate
the conversation in the native language and
the teacher translates it into the target language.

These student-generated chunks are recorded so that

learners can hear and discriminate their voices in the target
language during the reflective listening stage.
Later on, the recorded chunks in the target language are
transcribed by the teacher on the board, thereby providing
linguistic and lexical forms to practice and analyze.

One of the fundamental activities peculiar to this method is

students’ presumably sincere reflections on their learning
experience.

Reflections are
gathered through either individual or group representation
which, it is assumed , eventually helps students
to become independent learners.
Role of the Teacher
The teacher in CLL is regarded as a “counselor” or
“knower” whose role is to respond to the “client”
(learner) calmly and non-judgmentally in a supportive
manner, and help him/her understand his or her
problems better by providing opportunities to sort out ,
order and analyze problems (Richards &Rodgers,
(2002).
Role of the Students
In CLL, students are not viewed as learners who are
required to produce communication from the
beginning , but as clients who become members of a
community where they can interact with other
members and learn by working collaboratively. The
students’ feelings are key to success, and this issue
should be
emphasized by the teacher.
Learning Goals
The main goal of learning is to be able to use the
target language communicatively in an environment
where the students are provided with stress-free,
non-dependent, value-respecting teaching
circumstances (Cook, 1991)
Pros
CLL works especially well with lower levels who are struggling to
produce spoken English.
This method is designed to counter anxiety and negative emotions that
the learner experience towards learning a new language.
The class often becomes a real community. Students become much more
aware of their peers, their strengths and weaknesses and want to work as
a team.
Cons
In the beginning some learners find it difficult to speak while
others might find that the conversation lacks spontaneity.
Teachers can find it strange to give students so much freedom and tend
to intervene too much.
The teachers will let their students become independent learners by
neglecting their need for guidance.
 Presenter:
Jamellah Federizo
BaELS -2