TEACHING ENGLISH WITH A COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH.

There are many aspects to be included when teaching children. When planning, we teachers have to be in accordance with the official curriculum but this curricula is general and does not take into account the particular needs of our students.

 

We, as teachers, deeply believe in the importance of the integral development of the children, including not only the contents but also their personal needs and feeling. We must start from a humanistic approach in which the affective and human values are taking into consideration; we also believe a language can be taught through communicative purpose.

Humans are social and in this aspect communication is inherent and essential to its being. Through communication children can develop techniques to solve problems, cohabit, tolerance… in other way; they learn to live in community.

According to Littlewood and Johnson (1981, 1982), the theory of learning of this communicative approach principles can be discerned from their practices. So that, when planning an activity one should take into account the following:

1.      The communication principle: activities that involve real communication promote learning.

2.      The task principle: activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning.

3.      The meaningfulness principle: language that is meaningful to the learner supports the learning process.

If we focus learning from interaction and communication, as these are its primary function, we may succeed into a meaningful learning and into reaching the basic competences.

Also to be consider is the support we use to show our children the contents they are about to learn. Our students will need to learn the linguistic forms of the language, its meaning and how to use it or its function.

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The notional-functional approach gives the children an adequate method for the acquisition of the basic structures to communicate in different context: greetings, descriptions, complaining, etc.  

This methodology can easily fail in discordance with our pupils interests and self-needs of communication. That is why a teacher will have to produce activities that will be complemented by other approaches. An eclectic approach when teaching will be more connected also with the multiple intelligence theory, which says that different people learn through different ways (8 different intelligences).

Following, we show and activity where the notion and function of the language we are going to teach are exposed through an audiovisual support and using repetition (some drills can be useful especially at early stages) and with a purpose that connects with the children interests and needs; to play a game.