Are We Teaching Languages Communicatively?

CUNY Graduate Center, Rooms 9204/9205

Sponsored by the Faculty Development Program of the City University of New York and by the Queens Consortium on Languages Other Than English

Organized by Antonella Ansani (Queensborough Community College) and Eva Fernández (Queens College)

Focusing on the theory underpinning communicative language teaching, and on the variation in practices grounded on this popular but frequently misunderstood approach, this colloquium's overarching goal is to foster truly communicative language instruction across CUNY.

First language acquisition and second language acquisition are at their core the same.  Learning a language involves dependency on communicative input to trigger the development of a grammar constrained by universal principles.  The experimental evidence has demonstrated these processes to be impervious to explicit instruction. Such findings are potentially very informative with respect to making language teaching truly communicative.

This presentation will address the effectiveness of literature as a communicative teaching tool.  The use of literary texts permits even high-beginner learners to meet communicative and proficiency goals, which go beyond simple reading comprehension and which at the same time promote the appreciation of literature.

Italian opera can be utilized as a context to promote students' progressive functioning in situations that approximate the complexity of real communication.  Incorporating the study of language and culture, and fusing form and content, the opera medium provides a context where active learning leads to mastery of communication skills and to a naturalistic development of competence.

Incorporating the world-wide web into all levels of language and literature courses has become a valuable endeavor.  This presentation will survey sample exercises and materials, guidelines and tips for identifying and using web-sites in courses, student feedback, benefits to students and instructors, and work-load issues.

Learning the system for personal reference in Japanese is highly context dependent.  First and third person pronouns exist but are far from mandatory; second person pronouns are actually rude.  Students must therefore learn not to use words like 'I' or 'you' when expressing themselves, and to learn how to follow a conversation without the expected cues to indicate who is talking to whom.  When two people are talking, it is obvious who is talking to or about whom only within a context.  Without an actual setting, however, the specifics of a normal conversation are often impossible to determine.

In evaluating the developing proficiency of students in a communicative classroom, wholistic scoring has been successfully used as a principled way of grading free writing that encourages student creativity and improves accuracy. Rubrics---the key concept in wholistic scoring---list evaluation parameters, each spelling out different degrees of performance. Wholistic scoring makes it possible to pay non-stifling attention to students as language learners through the most advanced levels.