“écoutez et répétez !” If you learned French at school, you’ll be familiar with this instruction: Listen and repeat!
At City Lit, our courses follow a different and more modern language teaching method. Our qualified tutors follow something called the Communicative Approach or Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).
From Listen & Repeat to Listen & Respond
In the past, listening and repeating was what most language learning involved. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, many schools had “Language Labs”. Students would sit with oversized headphones on, listening and repeating phrases from a cassette.
This method wasn’t confined to secondary schools – it was also good enough for future monarchs. In 1969, the then Prince Charles was famously pictured in language lab while studying Welsh at Aberystwyth University.
Apps: The modern language labs
In some ways, the language lab is still alive and kicking. Most language teachers and programs often have students repeat after a model in class. Nowadays the listen and repeat method is digitized for online learning.
Many popular language learning apps have a strong repetition element. Such apps present words and sentences multiple times and ask learners to reproduce words and phrases in speech or writing.
They also place high importance on accuracy. If you don’t conjugate a verb correctly, or if your pronunciation doesn’t match with the template, you’ll lose points and won’t progress onto the next level.
At City Lit, our courses follow a different and more modern method for acquiring language skills. Our qualified language tutors follow the Communicative Approach also known as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).
What is communicative language teaching?
Communicative language teaching (CLT) is a language teaching approach which focuses on interaction and communication in real world situations. CLT helps students learn languages by doing activities together and using the language in real-life situations.
The goal of communicative language teaching is to get students to do things in the language and to use it independently. More specifically, it’s about fostering communicative competence.
What is communicative competence?
Communicative competence means the ability to cope with different 'situations' and 'styles'.
Situations
A ‘situation’ is a real-life scenario involving the exchange of information. This could be to get something done, like ordering a coffee or checking into a hotel. But it could also be something like speaking with a new colleague at work in your second language or engaging in a bit of small talk at a bus stop.
That's why many second language courses arrange their content by theme or situation, for example. going on a holiday, at the office, or moving house.
Styles
By ‘styles’, we mean adjusting our language so that it’s appropriate for a given context. This could be recognising when saying “God kväll mina damer och herrar!” might be appropriate. Perhaps because you’ve got a job in a pretentious Stockholm restaurant or because you’re saying it to some close friends for the purposes of humour or irony.
Knowledge of styles can take some getting used to. For example, understanding that swearing in the US is seemingly a taboo but in Sweden you can swear away in English or Swedish in contexts that would be unacceptable in most English-speaking countries.
What happens in a CLT class and what are the benefits?
We use authentic material
To simulate real life communication activities, CLT activities use as much 'authentic material' as possible. This helps to maximise students’ exposure to situations and styles.
Authentic material is real material in the target language. For example, extracts from actual newspapers or television clips instead of resources designed specifically for learners.
Using real materials in a language learning environment helps you speak like a native, not like you're in a classroom. It prepares you for the real world.
You take part in group work
Generally, students work cooperatively. You’re not sitting passively listening to the teacher. Instead you're actively participating by listening and responding to your fellow students, typically in small group discussions.
Communicative classroom tasks typically include lots of dialogues and speaking work such as ‘information gaps’. An information gap task is where your partner has some information that you must ask for and vice versa.
You learn grammar naturally
Communicative-orientated language classes don’t have a great deal of focus on grammatical competence. There is no grammar translation. Instead you focus on how to communicate your ideas and keeping the conversation going without switching to English.
When you leave a communicative language class, you should be able to ‘do’ something new in the language, rather than ‘know about’ the language or some abstract grammar point.
This doesn’t mean that grammar is completely side-lined of course. Instead, grammar is usually presented incidentally. This means you will focus on completing a real-world task first, such as ordering a coffee, before you then consider the points of grammar needed to do so. Put simply, it’s communication first, grammar second.
You take part in role play
It’s also common for communicative teaching to involve lots of role plays or simulations. For example, at the café, collecting a hire car, attending a work meeting, or taking part in a debate. This is also prepares you to speak the languages on the street.
The focus of all teaching and learning in a communicative classroom, then, is communication. The central idea is that you’ll learn by negotiating and conveying meaning in scenarios that mirror real-life ones or by considering authentic texts.
Afterall, isn’t this the goal? We are learning a language because we want to speak and interact with people in the real-world. We want to order a coffee in Italian, be able to negotiate a business deal in French or ask for meal recommendations at a restaurant in Japan.
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