Z E S Z Y T Y N A U K O W E UNIWERSYTETU RZESZOWSKIEGO

S ER IA F ILOLOGIC Z NA
ZESZY T 85 / 2014 S TUDIA AN GL IC A R E S OVIE NS IA 11

Mariya OLKHOVYCH-NOVOSADYUK

Ivan Franko National University of Lviv

olkhovych28@gmail.com

COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING:

MANAGING THE LEARNING PROCESS

Abstract: The article deals with the issues of the nature of communicative language teaching.
Changing views on the nature of language and learning in relation to theories, objectives, syllabus,
classroom activities and the roles of learners, teachers and material which led to the emergence of
communicative language teaching are analyzed.
Methodology as a communicative process is investigated as well as communicative abilities
of interpretation, expression and negotiation. The roles of the teacher and the learners within a
communicative methodology are identified. Moreover, the concept of learner-centeredness is
analyzed within the learning process domain.
A learner-centered curriculum has been compared with the traditional one pointing out
similarities and differences between them. It is argued that communicative language teaching has
had a major influence on language curriculum development. Therefore, curriculum decision-making
in high-structure and low-structure contexts at the planning, implementation and evaluation stages
is outlined in this paper. One of the main issues to be considered within curriculum content is needs
analysis which provides a basis for setting goals and objectives. Hence, the salient characteristics
of the three approaches to needs analysis are presented according to their educational rationale, the
type of information collected, the method and the purposes of data collection.
The last issue considered in this article is the role and characteristics of evaluation within the
communicative curriculum. Also, the problems and prospects of a communicative methodology
have been identified.

Keywords: communicative language teaching, communicative methodology, learner-centeredness,

communicative curriculum, needs analysis, curriculum content, evaluation, metacommunication.

Introduction

At a time when there is a recognized need in language teaching to give adequate

attention to language use as well as language form, various ‘notional-functional’ or

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so-called ‘communicative approaches’ to language teaching are being advocated.
The present paper is offered in an effort to define the nature of communicative
language teaching.
The communicative curriculum defines language learning as learning how
to communicate as a member of a particular socio-cultural group. The social
conventions governing language form and behaviour within the group are,
therefore, central to the process of language learning.
Communication in everyday life synthesizes ideational, interpersonal, and
textual knowledge – and the affects which are part of such knowledge. But it is
also related to and integrated with other forms of human behaviour. The sharing
and negotiating of potential meanings in a new language implies the use and
refinement of perceptions, concepts and affects. Therefore, it makes sense for
the teacher to see the overall purpose of language teaching as the development
of the learner’s communicative knowledge in the context of personal and social
development.

Communicative language teaching

Communicative language teaching emerged from a number of disparate

sources. During the 1970s and 1980s applied linguistics and language educators
began to re-evaluate pedagogical practice in the light of changed views on the
nature of language and learning, and the role of teachers and learners consequently.
The contrast between what we have called “traditionalism”, and communicative
language teaching (CLT) proposed by David Nunan (1992), is shown in Table 1.
The table presents contrasts in relation to theories of language and learning, and
in relation to objectives, syllabus, classroom activities and the roles of learners,
teachers and material.

Table 1. Changing views on the nature of language and learning.

Teaching Traditionalism Communicative language
Theory of language Language is a system of rule- Language is a system for the
governed structures hierarchi- expression of meaning: pri-
cally arranged. mary function – interaction.
Theory of learning Habit formation; skills are Activities involving real
learned more effectively if oral
communication; carrying out
precedes written; analogy not meaningful tasks and using
analysis. language that is meaningful to
the learner promote learning.
Objectives Control of the structures of Objectives will reflect the
sound, form and order, mastery needs of the learner; they will
over symbols of the language; include functional skills as
goal – native speaker mastery. well as linguistic objectives.

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Syllabus Graded syllabus of phonol- Will include some or all of the
ogy, morphology, and syntax. following: structures, func-
Contrastive analysis. tions, notions, themes and
tasks. Ordering will be guided
by learner needs.
Activities Dialogues and drills; repetition Engage learners in com-
and memori-zation; pattern munication; involve process
practice. such as information sharing,
negotiation of meaning and
interaction.
Role of a learner Organisms that can be directed Learner as negotiator, interac-
by skilled training techniques tor, giving as well taking.
to produce correct responses.
Role of a teacher Central and active; teacher- Facilitator of the communica-
dominated method. Provides tion process, needs analyst,
model; controls direction and counselor, process manager.
pace.
Role of materials Primarily teacher oriented. Primary role of promoting
Tapes and visuals; language communicative language use;
lab often used. task based, authentic materials.
Source: Nunan and Lamb 2001:31

The insight that communication was an integrated process rather than a set of
discrete learning outcomes created a dilemma for language education. It meant
that the destination (functioning in another language) and the route (attempting to
learn the target language) moved much closer together, and, in some instances (for
example, in role plays and simulations), became indistinguishable. In educational
terms, a useful way of viewing this emerging dilemma in language education is in
terms of high- and low-structure teaching. High-structure tasks are those in which
teachers have all the power and control. Low-structure tasks are those in which
power and control are devolved to the students. However, we do not equate high-
structure with non-communicative and low-structure with communicative tasks.

Methodology as a communicative process

Language learning within communicative curriculum is most appropriately

seen as communicative interaction involving all the participants in the learning
and including the various material resources on which the learning is exercised.
Therefore, language learning may be seen as a process which grows out of the
interaction between learners, teachers, texts and activities.
This communicative interaction is likely to engage the abilities within the
learner’s developing competence in an arena of cooperative negotiation, joint
interpretation, and the sharing of expression. The communicative classroom can

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serve as a forum characterized by the activation of these abilities upon the learners’
new and developing knowledge. This activation will depend on the provision of
a range of different text-types in different media – spoken, written, visual and
audio-visual – which the participants can make use of to develop their competence
through a variety of activities and tasks.
Communicative abilities of interpretation, expression and negotiation are the
essential or “primary” abilities within any target competence. Also, they continually
interrelate with one another during communicative performance and are complex
in nature. They will involve psychological processes, for example – and they
may contain within them a range of secondary abilities such as “coding”, “code
substituting” and “style-shifting” (Bernstein 1971, Hymes 1971, Labov 1972).
The use of these communicative abilities is manifested in communicative
performance through a set of skills. Speaking, listening, reading and writing skills
can be seen to serve and depend upon the underlying abilities of interpretation,
expression and negotiation. The skills are the meeting point between underlying
communicative competence and observable communicative performance; they are
the means through which knowledge and abilities are translated into performance,
and vice versa.
In order to allow for differences in personal interest and ease of access, or to
permit the search for alternative perspectives on the content, learners should be
offered the possibility of working with one or more of a range of media. Learners
would be expected to act upon text-types in the appropriate medium: written texts
would be read, spoken ones listened to, visual ones seen. Just as communication
is governed by conventions, so we can see that different media represent and obey
conventions specific to themselves.
Classroom procedures and activities can involve participants in both
communicating and metacommunicating. By metacommunicating we imply
the learner’s activity in analyzing, monitoring and evaluating those knowledge
systems implicit within the various text-types confronting during learning.
Such metacommunication occurs within the communicative performance of the
classroom as a sociolinguistic activity in its own right.

The roles of the teacher and the learners

within a communicative methodology

Within a communicative methodology the teacher has two main roles. The
first role is to facilitate the communicative process between all the participants
in the classroom, and between these participants and the various activities and
texts. The second role is to act as an independent participant within the learning-
teaching groups. These roles imply a set of secondary roles for the teacher: first,
as an organizer of resources and as a resource himself. Second, as a guide within

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the classroom procedures and activities. This guidance role is ongoing and largely
unpredictable, so the teacher needs to share it with other learners. Related to
this, the teacher – and other learners – can offer and seek feedback at appropriate
moments in learning-teaching activities. In guiding and monitoring the teacher
needs to be a “seer of potential” with the aim of facilitating and shaping individual
and group knowledge and exploitation of abilities during learning. In this way the
teacher will be concentrating on the process competences of the learners.
A third role for the teacher is that of researcher and learner – with much to
contribute in terms of appropriate knowledge and abilities, actual and observed
experience of the nature of learning, and organizational capabilities.
As an interdependent participant in the process, the teacher needs to actively
share the responsibility for learning and teaching with the learners. This sharing
can provide the basis for joint negotiation which itself releases the teacher to be-
come a co-participant.
On the other hand, all learners of a language are confronted by the task of
discovering how to learn the language. All learners – in their own ways – have to
adopt the role of negotiation between themselves, their learning process, and the
gradually revealed object of learning.
A communicative methodology is characterized by making this negotiative
role – this learning how to learn – a public as well as a private undertaking. Learn-
ers also have an important monitoring role in addition to the degree of monitor-
ing which they may apply subjectively to their own learning. In expression and
negotiation, the learner adopts the dual role of being, first, a potential teacher for
other learners, and, second, an informant to the teacher concerning his own learn-
ing progress.

Learner-centeredness

The concept of learner-centeredness has been invoked with increasing frequency

in recent years. The philosophy of learner-centeredness has strong links with
experiential learning, humanistic psychology and task-based language teaching.
Table 2 shows how the continuum can apply to the learning process domain.
Once again, we see that learner-centeredness is not an all-or-nothing process, but
can be implemented in a series of gradual steps.
A learner-centred curriculum will contain similar elements to those contained
in traditional curriculum development, that is, planning (including needs analysis,
goal and objective setting), implementation (including methodology and material
development) and evaluation. However, the main difference between learner-
centered and traditional curriculum development is that, in the former, the
curriculum is a collaborative effort between teachers and learners. Therefore,
learners need to be systematically taught the skills needed to implement a learner-
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centred approach to pedagogy. In other words, language programs should have dual
goals: language content goals and learning process goals.

Table 2. Learner-centeredness in the learning process domain.

Level Learner action Gloss
1 Awareness Learners identify strategy implications of pedagogical
tasks and identify their own preferred learning styles /
strategies
2 Involvement Learners make choices among a range of options.
3 Intervention Learners modify / adapt tasks.
4 Creation Learners create their own tasks
5 Transcendence Learners become teachers and researchers.
Source: Breen and Candlin 2001:170

Language curriculum development

As we can see from Table 3 (Source: Nunan and Lamb 2001), communicative
language teaching has had a major influence on language curriculum development.
First, curriculum development has become much more complex. Whereas twenty
or thirty years ago, the point of departure for curriculum development tended
to be restricted to the identification of the learner’s current level of proficiency,
with the development of communicative language teaching and the insight that
curricula should reflect learners’ communicative needs and learning preferences,
much more information about and by learners came to be incorporated into the
curriculum process. The other major modification occurred with the emergence of
the communicative task as a central block within the curriculum. Instead of being
designed to teach a particular lexical, phonological or morphological point, tasks
were designed to reflect learners’ communicative needs. Language focus exercises
were developed as a second-order activity.

Table 3. Curriculum decision-making in high-structure and low-structure contexts.

Curricular elements Management Issues
High-structure contexts Low-structure contexts
At the planning stage What does the institution tell How do I design / adapt my
Course design me to teach? own content / goals / tasks?
What are the managerial deci-
sions entailed in the teacher’s
manual?
Needs analysis How can I identify the How can I involve my
learning preferences of my learners in identifying
students? and articulating their own
needs?

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Collegial How can I cooperate with col- What opportunities exist for
leagues in course planning? team teaching?
How can I get the most out of
staff meetings?
How can staff meetings con-
tribute to effective planning?
Resources How do I manage use of set How do I modify / adapt
text? the text?
How do I create my own
resources?
How do I design split in-
formation tasks that will be
effective in my context?
At the implementation stage What are effective strategies What questioning strategies
Talk / interaction for direct instruction? facilitate learner contribu-
How do I give feedback on tions to low-structure tasks?
high-structure tasks How do I give feedback in
low-structure tasks?
What types of teacher
questions maximize student
output?
Learner language How do I correct learner How can I provide language
errors? models in small group role
plays in which the principal
focus is on the exchange of
meanings?
Learner attitude How do I deal with group
conflicts?
How do I deal with student
resistance to learner initi-
ated tasks?
Group configuration How do I organize controlled How do I set up small group
practice? learning?
How do I manage teacher- What strategies exist for
fronted instruction effec- setting communicative tasks
tively? in which students work
independently?
At the evaluation stage What techniques will help me How can I help my learners
Learner assessment to assess the achievement of develop effective techniques
my learners? for self-assessment?
Self-evaluation of the learning
process
Formal evaluation How can learners be im-
proved in providing input to
the evaluation process?

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 In summary, we can argue that curriculum development represents a delicate
juggling act involving the incorporation of information about the learner, about the
language, and about the learning process.

Setting goals and objectives

In the content domain, needs analysis provides a basis for setting goals and
objectives. There are basically three different approaches to needs analysis.
Brindley (1989) calls these approaches the language proficiency orientation, the
psychological/humanistic orientation and the specific purpose orientation. The
three approaches are differentiated according to their educational rationale, the
type of information collected, the method of data collection and the purposes for
which the data are collected. The salient characteristics of the three approaches are
presented in Table 4 (Source: Brindley 1989: 67–69).

Table 4. Approaches to needs analysis.

Language proficiency orienta- Psychological/humanistic ori- Specific purpose orientation
tion entation
Educational rationale Learners learn more effectively Learners learn more effec-
if involved in the learning pro- tively if content is relevant to
Learners learn more effec- cess. their specific areas of need/
tively if grouped according to interest.
proficiency.
Type of information Attitudes, motivation, learning Information on native speaker
strategy preferences use of language in learners’
Language proficiency/language target communication situ-
difficulties ation
Method of collection Standardized forms Language analysis
Observation, interviews and Surveys of learners’ patterns
Standardized forms/tests surveys of language use
Observation
Purpose So learners’ individual charac- So that learners will be
teristics as learners can be given presented with language data
So learners can be placed in due consideration relevant to their communica-
groups of homogeneous lan- So learners can be helped to tion goals
guage proficiency become self-directing by being So motivation will be
So teachers can plan language involved in decision making enhanced by relativeness of
content relevant to learners’ about their learning language content
proficiency level

A major purpose for conducting needs analysis is to categorize and group

learners. This grouping process facilitates the specification of content and learning
procedures.

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 Goal and objective setting are important tasks in most educational contexts,
because they provide a rationale for selecting and integrating pedagogical tasks, as
well as providing a point of reference for the decision-making process.
An interesting set of specifications was developed in Australia by Scarino
et al. (1988). Called the Australian Language Levels (ALL) guidelines, these
specifications were intended to be general enough to help material writers and
teachers working in a range of second and foreign languages. The ALL guidelines
take as their point of departure a number of broad goals that are refined into specific
goals, as shown in Table 5 (Source: Scarino et al. 1988).

Table 5. Communication and learning-how-to-learn goals.

Broad goal Specific goals
Communication To be able to use the target language to:
By participating in activities organized around - establish and maintain relationships and dis-
use of the target language, learners will acquire cuss topics of interest (e.g., through exchange
communication skills in the target language, of information, ideas, opinions, attitudes, feel-
in order that they may widen their networks of ings, experiences, plans);
interpersonal relations, have direct access to - participate in social interaction related to solv-
information and use their language skills for ing a problem, making arrangements, making
study, vocational and leisure-based purposes decisions with others, and transacting to obtain
goods, services, and public information;
- obtain information by searching for specific
details in a spoken or written text and then
process and use information obtained;
- obtain information by listening to or reading
a spoken or written text as a whole, and then
process and use the information obtained;
- give information in spoken or written form
(e.g., give a talk, write an essay or a set of
instructions);
- listen to, read or view, and respond person-
ally to a stimulus (e.g., a story, play film, song,
poem, picture, play).
Learning-how-to-learn To develop:
Learners will be able to take a growing respon- - cognitive processing skills (to enable them
sibility for the management of their own learn- to understand values, attitudes and feelings to
ing so that they learn how to learn, and how to process information, and to think and respond
learn a language creatively);
- learning-how-to-learn skills;
- communication strategies (to enable them to
sustain communication in the target language).

Most curriculum documents based on a goal and objective approach contain

a limited number of goals that provide a basis for the development of objectives.
Formal performance objectives specify what learners should be able to do as a
result of instruction. Formal objectives should contain a performance, conditions
and standards.

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 The content within communicative methodology

The communicative curriculum will adopt criteria for the selection and organization
of the content which will be subject to, and defined by, communicative learning and
teaching. The content of any curriculum can be selected and organized on the basis of
some adopted criteria, which will influence five basic aspects of content: its focus, its
sequence, its subdivision, its continuity, and its direction (or routing).
The content within communicative methodology is likely to focus upon
knowledge – both cognitive and affective – which is personally significant to
the learner. Such knowledge would be placed in an interpersonal context which
can motivate personal and joint negotiation through the provision of authentic
and problem-posing texts. If content is to be sensitive to the process of learning
and to the interpersonal concerns of the group, it needs to reflect and support the
integration of language with other forms of human experience and behaviour.
Traditionally, content has been subdivided into serialized categories of
structures or ‘functions’. Content would be subdivided in terms of activities and
tasks to be undertaken, wherein both knowledge and abilities would be engaged in
the learners’ communication and metacommunication.
Within a communicative methodology, continuity can be identified within four
areas. First, continuity can reside in the activities and the tasks within each activity;
and from one activity to another. Second, continuity potentially resides within
communicative acts during the learning and teaching. Third, continuity is provided
through the ideational system. At the macro level the learner may have access to
continuity of theme, while at the micro level – to conceptual or notional continuity.
Fourth, continuity can reside within a skill repertoire or a cycle of skill-use during
an activity. A communicative methodology would exploit each of these areas of
continuity as clusters of potential continuities, rather than exploit any one alone.
These kinds of continuity offer two important advantages. They can serve the full
process competences of learners – knowledge systems and abilities – and they can
allow differentiation.

Evaluation of the curriculum process

The communicative curriculum insists that evaluation is a highly significant part

of communicative interaction itself. We judge “grammaticality”, “appropriateness”,
“intelligibility”, and “coherence” in communicative performance on the basis of
shared, negotiated, and changing conventions.
A genuinely communicative use of evaluation will lead towards an emphasis
on formative or ongoing evaluation, rather than summative or end-of-course
evaluation which may be based on some prescribed criteria.

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 Therefore, the essential characteristics of evaluation within a communicative
curriculum would be that such evaluation is itself incorporated within the
communicative process of teaching and learning, that it serves the dual role of
evaluating learner progress and the ongoing curriculum, and that it is likely to be
formative in the achievement of dual role.

Conclusions

Communicative curricula need – through time and according to situation – to

be open and subject to ongoing developments in theory, research, and practical
classroom experience. Communicative curricula are essentially the means of
capturing variability. Variability will exist in selected purposes, methods, and
evaluation procedures, but variability must also be seen as inherent in human
communication and in the ways it is variously achieved by different learners
and teachers. The classroom – its social-psychological reality, its procedures
and activities – is potentially a communicative environment where the effort to
pull together such variability is undertaken. The learning-teaching process in the
classroom is the meeting-point of all curriculum components and it is the place
where their coherence is continually tested. The learning-teaching process in the
classroom is also the catalyst for the development and refinement of those minimal
requirements which will underlie future curricula.
A communicative curriculum with its emphasis on the learning and teaching
of communication highlights a communicative process whereby the interrelating
curriculum components are themselves open to negotiation and change.
Traditionally, learners have been expected to follow the direction implicit
in some prescribed content. A communicative methodology would not exploit
content as some pre-determined route with specific entry and exit points. In this
case, content ceases to become some external control over learning-teaching
procedures. Choosing directions becomes a part of the curriculum itself, and
involves negotiation between learners and teachers, and learners and text.
A communicative methodology will exploit the classroom as a resource with
its own communicative potential. The classroom is only one resource in language
teaching, but it is also the meeting-place of all other resources – learners, teachers,
and texts. Each of these has sufficiently heterogeneous characteristics to make
classroom-based negotiation a necessary undertaking. The authenticity of the
classroom lies in its dual role of observatory and laboratory during a communicative
learning-teaching process.

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