A Critical Comparison Between Clt English Language Essay

A Critical Comparison Between Clt English Language Essay In the case of communicative language teaching, students do not know how to communicate using appropriate social language they have studied, so teachers need to engage them in all sorts of activities like: role playing, problem-solving tasks, discourses and so on, in order to practice some real-life communication problems with one another. As for the direct method, teachers who use it think that a student has to learn how to think in the target language and then to be able to communicate successfully with others. They also think that students need first of all to associate the meaning with the target language. In order to do this, they use in class pictures, pantomime, sounds, gestures and so on, without translating a word into the student’s native language. In the direct method students learn how to speak when they are given some real situations like the following: they are in England and they have to go shopping. They have no food and only some clothes for the summer and th ey have to handle this particular situation where they have to speak to the cashier and to the shop assistants. The teacher and the learner’s roles in CLT and DM method : The direct method was established in Germany and France around 1900 and the communicative language teaching began in Britain in the 1960s as a replacement to the earlier structural method, called Situational Language Teaching. Both methods resemble in the fact that they refrain from using the learners’ native language and just use the target language. Their oral communication skills are built up in a carefully and progressive, they are both organized around question-and-answer exchanges between teachers and students in small but quite intensive classes. To the extent of learning a foreign language through the communicative language teaching, students need to have some knowledge about linguistic forms, meanings, structures and functions. The teacher is the developer or the promoter of student’s learning abilities. He manages all the activities in the classroom and he answers all the student’s questions, he is engaged in the conversations and he supports them all along. On the other hand, with the direct method, the teacher uses first some evidence, he shows his students pictures, he has the role to make them understand the meaning of things; he explains them facts with the use of pantomime and so on. One of the most conclusive characteristics of the CLT method is that all the activities are done communicatively and when they end, they also receive a feedback. Some other characteristics of this method are: the use of authentic materials, activities done in small groups of people, interaction between students is favored, etc. Same goes for the direct method too, the materials used (pictures, books, posters, bills, tickets and so on) should be authentic, to make students acquire new vocabulary words or phrases correctly in the target language. When a goal of these meth ods is to teach students grammar or the ability to produce sentences structurally correct in a language, the direct method comes with an inductive approach (i.e. having learners find out rules through the presentation of adequate linguistic forms in the target language) same goes for the communicative approach where students formulate the rules themselves (inductive learning) rather than teachers (deductive learning). Learners should not be overwhelmed with linguistic terminology (Brown, 2001), grammar rules will be clearer and be remembered better if they are taught in digestible segments bearing the cognitive process in mind.