Raoul's China Saloon (V5.0) Beta
The Bar Room => The BS-Wrestling Pit => Topic started by: Calach Pfeffer on May 25, 2017, 08:47:40 PM
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Upon whom does it rightly fall in a language classroom, the teacher or the student?
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"Communicative methods" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_language_teaching), as far as I understand them, represent an approach to language teaching that seeks to invoke the student's own natural language learning mechanisms. The student is placed in a somewhat realistic communication circumstance and asked to invest some of their own thought or feeling into whatever they produce. They do interviews, group work, role play, and so on. Which is to say, the burden of communication is placed on the freaking student for the love of shit....
I think in general this could be fine. It'd be more likely to work with people new to the language. For more advanced levels, the students would have to have some background in such methods to know what to do. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say by the time the student has had ten plus years of formal language education, communicative methods are unlikely to invoke any natural language-learning mechanism. Whatever language learning mechanism the student is using has been thoroughly drilled into them and reinforced by the student's own practice. If you want role play to be anything other than a game at that stage, you'll need something else to create the learning.
/imho