Advantages And Disadvantages Of Clt Method 332r41

“Advantages and disadvantages of CLT method”

The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is a method that focuses in the developing of communicative skills in learners, this method has different points of views in which has advantages and disadvantages depending of the needs of each teacher and each classroom, but there are more advantages of this method than disadvantages, it has useful features that can help us to teach English easily and effectively, we can go over those disadvantages if we know how deal with the problems this method could have. One advantage this method has is it seeks to personalize and localize language and adapt it to interests of learners making them to get motivated in the learning or acquisition of language because the meaningful language is always more easily retained by learners and it encourage learners motivation about language; Motivation is not only related to engaging students but also includes confidence building, if the students have confidence they will participate actively in the class improving their communicative skills but is important, first, to create and environment of trust and confidence, or as Belchamber. R. (N.D) Said: “If there is a climate of trust and in the classroom, the students are likely to contribute”. Another advantage it has the class is not teacher-centered where only the teacher has the last word and everything that he says is right, it is not like the traditional method but is more student-centered, where the thoughts and feelings of students are important and are taking into , it is a space where the students can freely speak about they think and also CILT method makes students to use the language in real-situation that they live each day by speaking about their context or certain situation that affects them, or as Ahmad, M. (2014) Said: “The communicative teaching emphasizes the learner's cognitive ability and operational capabilities, which allow the students themselves to think about and express their views, thus trained in real life the ability to use language to communicate”. One possible disadvantage in the CLT is the communication according to ability, because as we know the CLT method tries to improve the communicative skills of students, but what happens with those students who do not have enough vocabulary in order to maintain or sustain a conversation? So, according to this is not possible to use this method in low classes where the vocabulary is not enough to express what students think and if they express something it will not be authentic conversations, because they are repeating or saying things they do not understand, but this is not a total disadvantage, because everyone starts learning the language like this. If we see the natives speakers when are in the first steps of developing language they do not have enough vocabulary for maintaining a conversation but with practice and time they will be developing their communicative skills and also the confidence that will help them to improve their skills, or as Belchamber, R. (N.D) Said: “The aim is that the length and complexity of exchanges, and confident delivery, will grow with the student's language ability”.

Another possible disadvantage is this method focuses more in fluency than in accuracy, so, in this method the teachers play a role of facilitator where they do not pay much attention in the errors students do, thus, as teachers do not correct students, students are likely to maintain errors in the grammar structure or perhaps in the pronunciation or in other errors that learners usually have, or as Javad, M. and Hosseini, A. (2014) Said: “the teachers would try not to stop the learners repeatedly to correct their grammatical errors so that they can achieve the goal of speaking effortlessly. In this case, accuracy is ignored and "fossilization".”. Keeping this in mind, we as teachers in order to avoid the “fossilization” of accuracy, we should correct the learners in a way they do not lose their confidence of speaking, so while they are speaking we should correct them by emphasizing the word they said incorrectly. Finally, CLT method has a lot of advantages and disadvantages, we have seen the most relevant of each one, and we can conclude that this method is very useful in the language teaching lessons, if we want students internalized language and that It be a meaningful learning also, to create an environment where students can freely express themselves, we should use this method for making easily learning and teaching a language, furthermore, we have to take into some disadvantages that it has and we can solved those problems and make it more viable to use in our lessons class.

References Ahmad, M. (2016). EFL Teachers’ Perceptions on the Usefulness of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). In: English Lecture. Abu Dhabi: Syscoms College.

Belchamber, R. (n.d.). The Advantages of Communicative Language Teaching. In: The Internet TESL Journal, 13th ed. Hosseini, A. and Javad, M. (2014). COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING: CHARACTERISTICS AND PRINCIPLES. In: 6th ed. Shiraz, Iran: Islamic Azad University, pp.442-443.