Teach and travel with TEFL/TESOL

The Core literacy in the 21st century is to develop students’ critical thinking and doing, creativity, collaboration and communication. Communicative competence is one of the important aspects. Because Linguistic competence will help learners achieve accuracy in the grammatical forms of the language. Pragmatic competence will help learners learn the relationship between grammatical forms and functions. Discourse competence will help learners take turns in speaking, use discourse markers and learn how to open and close conversations. Strategic competence will help learners enable learners to clarify themselves. So, Communicative Language Teaching is very important for learners. The communicative approach leads comprehension preceding production. Production emerges in stages. The goal is meaningful communication. Affective filter is lowered. Language is “acquired” through interaction as well as “learned” from the teacher.

When teacher prepare communicative approach lessons, they have to think about the activities that involve real communication promote learning. This is the Communication principle. Next, they have to follow the Task principle: Activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning. Thirdly, they have to take consideration into Meaningfulness principle: Language that is meaningful to the learner supports the learning process.

In the communicative approach lessons, students will practical real life situations and focus on functions of language. Students will cooperate into groups, pairs, peer-tutoring to increase interactions. There is no restrictions placed on using of L1.

On the other side of the communicative approach, sometimes teacher will have to face the problem: how to connect the language form with the function? Students will not learn the grammar point systematically. And the accuracy of the language will face challenge by finishing some communicative activities. So, this approach will be used combined with other approaches to achieve learning objects. During the classroom activities, teacher should focus on the language output, try to lead students to practice some key grammar points instead speaking to much other kind of grammar point languages.