To Pee Or Not ….?

Welcome to all of you from everywhere. Thank you our readers and friends from the US & India. It’s been a great day full of surprises & what else? 😉

Is it a joke?

No, it’s not.

What is the communicative approach in learning English or any other language?
It’s the emphasis on communication! This is why it is called the communicative approach. The teacher has to focus on encouraging the student to speak the language, but to communicate while speaking not just saying non-sense.

There are elements that should be considered in this approach: pronunciation, vocabulary, comprehension, critical thinking, and grammar.

The grammar comes at the very end, because in the communicative approach the focus as we mentioned is on the speaking. Developing the speaking skill is tough to achieve, but it is the objective of the this approach.

Although speaking is getting a lot of attention in the communicative approach; however, the writing aspect is not ignored. On the contrary, it’s encouraged and managed along with other skills.

The only reason that the speaking skill is given the priority in the communicative approach, and this is my personal point of view, is that when we write, we actually speak in our minds what we intend to write. Writing comes as an expression to our innate ideas.

The ideas are inside of our minds, and the writing is the method through which we convey our thoughts to others on paper, if we do not deal with them face-to-face. The writing is the outcome of our thinking. In other words, our thoughts are being spoken in our minds, but it could get out either via speaking or via writing.

When we speak, sometimes our grammar is incorrect, we don’t care that much about the exact grammatical rules while we speak. The opposite is true when it comes to writing. We tend to proofread, polish, correct, and try to have the best grammatical rules applied to our prose.

There are some views about certain elements to be included or considered when using the communicative approach in teaching. One of them is as follows:

In conducting communicative approach in ELT classroom, some key elements should be taken into consideration: syllabus design; the relation between the teacher and learner, accuracy and fluency, learning and acquisition; teaching and learning activities in CLT including communicative tasks, materials employed in teaching, usual classroom activities, and typical communicative activities under this approach. With all these considered, can CLT be possibly carried on in ELT classroom fully and efficiently.

The activities in the class are versatile. It can be any educational materials that are tailored to meet the essential needs of the learners, which is mainly communication with others.

Pronunciation comes at the early stages of learning the language, just like the baby when she starts learning from her mom or dad new words. Repetition makes the students improve a lot in their pronunciation, but still the focus will be on conveying the right message to others.

Bad pronunciation sometimes put you in trouble, and we have few examples here:

. A student who said to his tour leader that he had allergy from “peas”, while in fact he meant “bees”. It’s even dangerous not to be able to express the “B” sound sometimes.
. A student asked if her classmates would like to eat “fees”, while she meant “fish”.
. A student who repeated well-known Shakespearean phrase “To pee or not to pee”, which turned the class into hilarious laughter. You understand why. 🙄