==Skill-getting in the classroom vs Skill-using in real life
Communication is an exchange, between people, of knowledge, ideas, opinions or feelings.
Communication is full of surprises. It is this element of unpredictability and unexpectedness to make communication what it is.
You cannot prepare the student for a communication in a foreign language by conventional teaching methods.
Stimulus/Response drills and making students memorize and practice using set of of ready-to-use replies can help in the beginning to just “get the tongue round”
We use language to communicate. And we don’t just communicate facts to each other - we wanna convey our feeling about those facts as well. That’s why not only verbal communication is important but also non-verbal: gestures, head-nods, bodily contact, facial expressions, are very crucial when communicating.
Teachers must do more than just giving learners a number of language structures to manipulate.
We need to demonstrate how those language items are used and in what context and situation they are appropriate.
We must teach students the “use” of language as well as its “usage”
Linguistic competence vs Communicative competence
The classroom environment by its very nature makes genuine communication almost impossible / elusive
- “Jigsaw” listening/reading - students have half of the whole text so they swap information to know the rest
**Accuracy vs Fluency**
Are we gonna allow our students to make mistakes?
If yes, to what extent and of what kind?
Related
Topic - Speaking and Pronunciation · Information-gap design - convert any exercise into a two-way task · Why pairwork fails - fix the task, not the students