The Communicative Approach.

  Here is a power point presentation made by my classmates Franco Rubiera, Claudio Contreras and me. We explained in class the main goals of the Communicative Approach.

     To this presentation, we added a role play where I was the teacher and my class was Franco and Claudio. The lesson activity was a game called “who is the best liar” The participants had to make three sentences about personal information, two of them TRUE and one FALSE, at the time of share the information the other members of the class have to guess what of the sentences is the “lie”.

    With this role play we tried to exemplify that, in this approach is more important the act of communication than the content or the topic of the conversation. When learners are involve in real conversations their language learning acquisition are all active and the use of the language is encourage by the motivation of the speakers to communicate their ideas, thoughts or feelings.

   The teacher’s role, as the images of the presentation says, “teachers will find themselves talking less and listening more” in this approach teachers are facilitator or guides in the conversation, giving instructions, making questions or shearing “clues” to follow the conversation.

   Students are the active ones here, that means, students are encourage to use the language no matter if they make mistakes, or if they forget words or even grammar. The importance here is the communication between students, to receive unconscious feedback in the moment of speak.

   Mistakes are view as a part of the learning process, so every mistake is view as a positive experience. Teachers are recommended to keep those mistakes in mind to correct them at the end of the class or to check them in a reinforce class.

   One of the most relevant advantages of this approach, in my personal opinion, is that all the skills can be involve in just one lesson; speaking, listening, writing and reading. As teacher you can plan your lesson with the communicative approach and “squeeze” your student’s English language knowledge as much as possible, engaging them with a hooking topic according with their level and personal likes and dislikes, what makes the English language easy to learn in terms that students learn easily when they have the disposition. Other advantage of this approach is the autonomous work among students, as a group or pairs, letting them being responsible of their knowledge, creating an unconscious chain of feedback among them, correcting themselves pronunciation, fluency and grammar. As far as we can see, the communication approach has numerous advantages for teachers and obviously to the students pushing their skills to the top to fulfill the AIM of the lesson.