comment on Albie's posting

I tried to post a comment on Albie's posting, but I could not do it again. This is just my comment on his posting ‘a virtual world environment for group work’.


I also read this article.

I mentioned in my second reading report in this blog that it seems that there is a tendency to recur Communicative language Teaching (CLT) in SL world. Since it seems that learner-centered teaching is emphasized, I think such tendency also can recognize in this article. The brief background is as follows.

In the CLT, it views that communicative competence acquisition as an implicit process which has no description about the grammatical rules (Van Den Branden, 2006) for engaging the interpretation, expression, and negotiation of meaning (Savignon, 2005). Therefore, this methodology is learner-centered, and the key roles for the teachers are: facilitator of the communication process, including the roles of organizer and guide, and participant with the learning (Breen & Candlin, 1980, as cited in Knight, 2000). However, there has been an acknowledgement that acquisition can be accelerated, if learners’ attention is drawn to specific linguistic features of the target language explicitly and directly (Long, 1991, as cited in Knight, 2000).

Therefore the post CLT methodologies attempt to not only focus on meaning, but also focus on form (Long & Norris, 2000, as cited in Knight, 2000), and then, these methodologies, such as Genre-Based Teaching (GBT) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT), are more teacher-centered than CLT (Knight, 2000).


References

Knight, P. (2000). The development of EFL methodology. In C. N. Candlin & N. Mercer (Eds.), English language teaching in its social context: A reader (pp. 147-166). London: Routledge.

Savignon, S. J. (2005). Communicative language teaching: Strategies and goals. In E. Hinkel (Eds.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (pp. 635-650). Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Van Den Branden, K. (2006). Introduction: Task-based language teaching in a nutshell. In K. Van Den Branden (Eds.), Task-based language education: From theory to practice (pp. 1-16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.