Peer editing to Clarissa -- EnglishtextsM

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Date Posted: 16:49:02 06/18/07 Mon
Author: Marina
Subject: Peer editing to Clarissa

�The origins of the Communicative Language Teaching are to be found in the changes in the British language teaching tradition dating from the late 1960s.�(Richards & Rodgers, 2001). In the middle of the 1960s the Situational Language Teaching began to fall, since many researches, including Noam Chomsky saw that the focus in language teaching should be communicative proficiency rather than simply mastery of structures. Teaching grammar, differently from what many methods and approaches had been stating, is not merely teaching rules and the structure of the language, many times, meaningless to the students. It is possible to transform it to a meaningful experience to the students by using the issues provided by the communicative approach, which is focused in the idea that language is a tool of communication and should be taught as it. The teaching of grammar is much more than just teaching rules, and it is a very important step in the process of the second or foreign language acquisition. As Swan, 2002, pointed out it provides comprehensibility - knowing how to build and use certain structures makes it possible for the students to be comprehensible - as well as acceptability - a person who do not know how to use the structures may not be taken seriously or may be considered uneducated.
The purpose of the Communicative Approach concerning the teaching of grammar will depend on the circumstances and the aims of the students. The points to be taught are those needed to provide students communication. According to the communicative perspective, the process of teaching a language is closely related to the idea of interaction. Differently from the other methods and approaches, in which the classes are teacher centered and there is not an interaction between the students, the Communicative Approach purpose is the reduction in the centrality of the teacher in the process of teaching grammar. The teachers should create activities aiming getting the students involved in communicating not only with the teacher, but especially with the other students in meaningful ways. The process of teaching grammar through the Communicative Approach allows the students to interact. The grammar points are not meaningless to them and easily forget, explained as something isolated from the context they are living. The students are presented to the grammar points without even noticing it sometimes because they are introduced to it through the interaction. For instance, if the teacher wants to introduce the simple present she/he will not start by writing its forms on the board and asking the students to memorize it. The teacher may start by interacting with the students, by given examples of her/his routine and involving them in this interaction such as: �Every day I wake up at 7 o�clock. What about you?� The teaching of grammar has to be taken as an interactive process in which the teacher allows the students to express themselves in meaningful ways and give them the opportunity to negotiate meaning with each other and the teacher.
The purpose of the communicative approach is to work with task-based activities, differently from many other methods, which are focused in exercises, which focus only on forms. Tasks can be defined as �an activity or an action which is carried out as the result of processing or understanding language�The use of a variety of different kinds of tasks in language teaching is said to make language teaching more communicative.� (Richards, 1986) The tasks have a nonlinguistic outcome, while the exercise has a linguistic outcome. In relation to the teaching of grammar, it is really important in the sense that the students practice not only the structures, as many structural exercises used in other methods and approaches, but they are able to see meaning in what they are doing, the task is the reflection of what they had understood and not only memorized in relation to the target language. Students do not learn grammar as a set of rules to be memorized without any specific purpose. As Nunan, 1999, pointed out, the students use grammar to express themselves and are able to see the connection between form and function, using naturally the correct pattern to express different communicative meanings.
Communicative Language Teaching appeared at a time in which Situational Language Teaching and Audiolingualism were not felt to be appropriate methodologies and it has influenced many other language teaching methods and approaches. It certainly provides a different and interesting way of seeing the teaching of grammar and the purpose in teaching it, which is communication. Grammar is not only a set of meaningless rules and consequently it is taught through interaction, aiming communication, so then the students can understand and really use the language. �Task-based language teaching is more than just a means of learning a language. It�s a way of becoming a better communicator in the workplace, and in the social world beyond the classroom.� (Nunan, 1999)

I think your text is very good and clear. The thesis statemente as I understood is 'Teaching grammar, differently from what many methods and approaches had been stating, is not merely teaching rules and the structure of the language, many times, meaningless to the students', isn\t it?
I liked and as a student view I don\t have any changes to make. Although I think it has some elements of classification essay, but for my view I don\t think it is a problem.
Marina

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