The Role of L1 in CLT

Ch.3 provides helpful guidelines for designing communicative activities that focus on fluency and authentic practice. Most of you can see the benefits of using communicative practice to motivate learners and fulfill their learning needs. I have a question though. Remember I talked about the relation between L1 and L2 last Tuesday. Since our students are so eager to use their native language (i.e. Chinese) in the classroom, are we going to ask them to take off all L1 and use English only in any classroom communicative practice? Would that be practical? How are we going to enforce it? How about the low beginners? I guess this is a common problem for most mono-linguistic classrooms like ours. Do you have any suggestions?

The Background of CLT

That was a good reading and discussion of chapter 2. Now it boils down to this: Are we teaching the students the English language skills they will use to conference with their kids' school teachers, ask for a raise from their American boss, bargain with a native-speaking car dealer for a deal, and so forth? They certainly need the language to communicate and fulfill their needs. But what language? The language which is grammatically correct but sounds bookish or the everyday usage which may not be grammatically correct but delivers the meaning? Shall we do both? Let me hear your comments.

Again, you can post your answers to the tasks here.

Off to a great start!

I think we had a great start on CLT Tuesday. I have a question though. Is teaching 'communicative language skills' the same as teaching 'interactive language skills'? Which one is a bigger concept/term? Let me know what you think.

We kind of finished chapter 1. So please write your responses to the tasks (I think we either did not have enough time for task 3 last time or didn't have a classroom text with us in the room) on a piece of paper or post them as a comment here. You can also create your own blog and let others know and respond to it. Any of the options will be fine.

Next Tuesday when we'll have more time, we'll study chapter 2 together. Remember to bring the little red book with you!