Communicative Language Teaching drawbacks

CLT has been criticised on many grounds. Firstly, like any other L2 teaching method, CLT constitutes a “limited understanding” (Pennycook, 1989) of ELT since it is based on a particular Western view, and represents its social, cultural, political, and historical context. Holliday (1994) notes that Britain, Australasian, North American (BANA) specialists and materials do not take into ---

9) _{“Scaffolding involves the interactive work participants engage in to highlights accomplish a task}

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account local teaching realities and, thus, the applicability of CLT in non-English speaking countries can be questionable. Secondly, it has been pointed out (Holliday, 1994; Hinkel, 2005) that the CLT teaching approach does not meet the learning expectation of non-Western country students and teachers who are used to teacher-centred learning, and teaching practices. Thirdly, one can argue that the implementation of CLT in big classes can generate much noise, and the teacher can find it hard to make sure students use the L2 to complete the task. Fourthly, EFL students usually lack outside opportunities for using the target language. This factor can also lead to a lack of motivation to learn (Tomlinson, 2005).

CLT might also pose challenges for EFL teachers. Indeed, EFL teachers new to CLT can find it difficult to make an informed choice about how and what to teach from this framework in their classes since “CLT can be seen as an umbrella term that describes a change in thinking about the goals and processes of classroom language learning with a number of interpretations of how this might be realized in practice” (Hall, 2011:93). Advice about CLT pedagogy has often been conflicting and therefore confusing. To illustrate the point, some CLT experts (Caroll and Swain, 1993) argue that errors should be predicted and treated before they are made; others suggest on-the-spot feedback and clarification requests (Pica, 1997; Lyster and Ranta, 1997); others recommend a delayed feedback (Edge, 1989; Ferris, 2002); whereas others (Truscott, 1996; Loewen, 1998; Krashen, 2004) claim that error correction does not accelerate learners’ L2 acquisition at all. In addition, the L2 proficiency level of non-native speaker (NNS) EFL teachers can be another limitation (Jeon and Hahn, 2006).

Lastly, the theoretical foundations on which CLT is based have also been questioned. As seen above, in a CLT perspective, “communication" means achieving a purpose or expressing a notion. Therefore, L2 students are encouraged to choose a grammar or lexical item in accordance with meaning (i.e. function/notion) they want to express. A number of scholars (Widdowson, 1979; 1993; 1998; Benati, 2009) have pointed out that this correlation between forms and meaning might be misleading because not all grammatical/lexical items have explicit illocutionary associations. Communicative language teaching has, of course, influenced not only L2 teaching around the world, but also the production of commercial EFL textbooks. In the next section, I discuss “communicativeness” in EFL textbooks.

53 2.9 Communicativeness in published textbooks

In this section, I explore the main types of textbooks used in CLT classes, and explain what is meant by “communicativeness” in EFL textbooks. The insights obtained from this literature review, coupled with the current state of knowledge on CLT discussed in the previous section, helped me to investigate how communicatively the four participating teachers in this study used the textbook in their classes. This body of knowledge will also help readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the concept of “communicativeness” both in communicative classes, and in communication-based materials.

The three main syllabi developed for CLT, and commonly used in communicative classes around the world, are skills-based, functional-notional, and task-based (Richards, 1990; Brown, 1994). The former focuses on the development of four skills. The content pages of skills-based course-books are often set out according to reading/speaking/listening/writing micro-skills, such as recognising language that signals a new idea, asking for clarification, and so on. A notional-functional syllabus, as the name suggests, is based around notions(i.e. time, quantity, measurements) and functions (i.e. the purpose for which language is used) L2 students need to perform for each different context (Richards and Rogers, 2001). For example, the notion of socialising involves several language functions, such as greeting, being polite, and so on, and students are required to perform all/some of these functions while socialising with each other in class. The task-based syllabus, according to Nunan (2004), lays out the tasks students should perform during each class, such as booking a hotel room, applying for a job, and so on.

Reflecting a movement towards an L2 teaching/learning approach based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) work (Halliday, 1994), text-based syllabi have also been designed and used particularly in the Australian ESL context. A text-based syllabus typically “uses text as the basis for developing tasks and activities for the classroom” (Burns, 2006:237). It is based around text-types (e.g. narratives, opinion texts, descriptions, procedures, and so on) used in different social contexts. It teaches how grammar, vocabulary, and functions are structured in relation to those contexts. The syllabus also outlines and teaches grammar, reading, writing, and communication through the mastery of text. Text-based syllabi have not been widely used in Europe and North America.

Most commercial textbooks claim to approach the teaching of English communicatively. Nevertheless, the extent to which the key tenets of CLT inform the content and organisation of published course books has been strongly questioned. Firstly, rather than using authentic language – which prepares learners to participate in “real-world” language events by developing strategies for dealing with its

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complexity (Rilling and Dantas-Whitney, 2009) - most course books use tailored texts to help learners’ understanding of the target language (Gilmore, 2007). Secondly, mirroring the components involved in real communication, i.e. - engaging in meaningful interaction to get new information, producing language that might not be predictable, seeking to link language to context, and maintaining comprehensible and ongoing communication (Richards, 2006) - the majority of commercial textbooks contain communicative tasksthat aim to put learners in a position where they have to use their linguistic and communicative resources in order to obtain purposeful information (e.g. imaginary shopping at a grocery store). However, while these tasks put learners in realistic simulations of real-world situations, they are not classroom-based communication tasks that involve the skills used in real life, as would be the case when one student asks another student to correct the mistakes the teacher found in her writing. Therefore, one can argue that communication-based textbooks contain many tasks that are not real for students. Thirdly, most commercial textbooks contain visual clues, colourful pictures, authentic texts, and interesting topics to enable learners’ appropriate responses to materials. Since CLT is a learner-centred approach, the importance of obtaining a positive response from learners is understandable. Yet, for obvious reasons, textbooks published for international use cannot cater to the learning and linguistic needs of particular students who live in a particular place, and share the same particular culture and particular social norms. Therefore, it can be argued that all commercially published materials lack authenticity (Mishan, 2005).

Ideally, a CLT practitioner would see L2 as a complete communication system with four interacting aspects (phonological/syntactic/semantic/pragmatic) which equally contribute to the basic function of making meaning. Consequently, to develop students’ knowledge, there is a need to use language activities that integrate different skills, and invite learners to discover new lexical, grammatical, sociolinguistic, and discourse features with the ultimate goal of increasing their meaning-based communicative competence. Commercial textbooks are criticised in this respect because they do not “make enough use of engaging and intensive reading and listening texts” (Masuhara et al., 2008:310) to stimulate multi-dimensional (sensory, cognitive and affective) responses in learners.

Concluding, many researchers (for example, Van den Branden, 2006; Tomlinson, 2007; Burns and Hill, 2013) are of the opinion that the majority of commercial course books “are largely stuck in the behaviourist Presentation-Practice-Production (PPP) way of working” (Burns and Hill, 2013:244). PPP-based syllabi have been criticised for simplifying L2 grammar structures to the point that learners are exposed to a straightforward L2 grammatical system based on rule generalisation

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rather than on the real, problematic L2 grammar system (Willis, 1990; Evans, 1999). In addition, decisions made by material writers regarding the language and skills to include in a PPP-based syllabus, as well as the order of grammar presentation, have also received criticism as they are merely based on the intuition of the textbook authors (Brown, 2007).

56 2.10 Part 3 summary

In part 3 of this literature review, I discussed the concept of communicativeness in both communicative classes and communication-based textbooks. The major themes identified in this discussion are: 1) CLT can mean different things for different people, and EFL teachers can have difficulties in defining and implementing it; 2) despite claiming to base their methodology on CLT, the majority of commercial course books are stuck in the behaviourist teaching methodology. These themes emerged from a careful and complete look at the academic books, articles, and research documents related to communicativeness in CLT classes and communication-based textbooks. The scope of the review in part 3 was driven by the research focus of the present enquiry. So was the scope of the review in part 1 (i.e. understanding the process of teacher decision making), and part 2 (contextualising the present project). The knowledge obtained by the literature reviewed in all three parts of this chapter connects the present study to previous research in the domains of teacher decision making, EFL teachers’ use of communication-based materials, and CLT implementation in EFL contexts. It places existing work in the context of its contribution to the understanding of how and why EFL teachers use communication-based materials in their classes. At the same time, the knowledge obtained by the literature reviewed in this chapter places the present project within the context of existing research in these three domains by identifying areas of controversy that need further research. Indeed, there is a lack of empirical research studies investigating how EFL teachers use communication-based textbooks in their classes by taking into account both conscious and unconscious teachers’ decisions, as well as by investigating all the factors that facilitate the interaction between materials and the other elements of the classroom ecology. This study adds to the current literature by taking steps towards fulfilling these gaps. To fully understand the instructional decisions of Albanian EFL teachers, in the next chapter, I describe in detail the particular context in which the learning and teaching of English takes place in Albania, and discuss how the internal and external factors identified in this chapter affect Albanian EFL teachers’ practices.

57 Chapter 3

ENVIRONMENTAL CONSTRAINS AND OPPORTUNITIES