Week 4 Learning Circle----Developments in TESOL Methodology
Group members: Ebi, Trang, Peach, Cindy, David, Anna, Zoe

1. This article was written 20 years ago. To what extent does it appear 'dated' or modern to you?
The majority of us think the article is modern to us. The CLT approaches mentioned in the article are still quite popular in our countries and the implications for teaching make a lot of sense to the teachers. However, a few of members find some views of the author’s are dated. For example, the author says that carrying out reliable research into learners is difficult in the process of learning. Besides, we want to emphasize that though the theory of CLT is popular and accepted by most of the English teachers, the practice of CLT is quite difficult in the real situation, especially in some secondary schools and the schools which are exam-oriented.
2. Look carefully at the 'Implications for teaching' section on p. 89. Consider both your learning of English, and your teaching experience, and reflect on the extent to which Maley's predictions have ‘come true’ in your own learning/teaching context.
We have almost the same learning experience. When we were in the secondary school, our learning focused on grammar and forms. The teaching methods which our teachers used were something like Audiolingual and Grammar-Translation method. However, we benefited a lot from the communicative language learning in the universities and Maley’s predictions have come true in our learning process. As to the teaching experience, the predictions also have come true in Ebi’s class. He organized many task-based and learner-centered activities which were warmly welcomed by his students. Peach used to teach students in a communicative way, but it didn’t work because the final exam focused on the reading and writing skills and the CLT didn’t match the students’ needs. Trang and Zoe tried to make a balance between the CLT and the teacher-centered class in order to meet the students ’needs who wanted to gain high marks in the national exam and also to enjoy the language learning.

3. To what extent do the advantages listed on page 90 outweigh the disadvantages? Choose one of the following and justify it in light of your own experience (1 – advantages completely outweigh disadvantages, 2 – advantages partly outweigh disadvantages, 3 – neither outweighs the other, 4 – disadvantages completely outweigh the advantages).
Five of our members agree that advantages partly outweigh disadvantages because we are worried about the difficulty of implementing the CLT in the real class. It has some obvious limitations to implement, for example, we cannot apply CLT in a big class (more than 50 students with different levels). However, one of us thinks advantages completely overweigh disadvantages because she finds that the disadvantage (1) and (2) should not be the disadvantages. It is good to promote the profession training and the competence of the teachers and it is helpful and challengeable if the teachers do not just follow the prescription offered by the textbook.

4. Maley lists six problems (pages 91-2). In the light of your own teaching experience, can you rank these problems from 1 (most serious) to 6 (least serious).

We reached a consensus on this question. All of us think that No.6 is most serious and No.1 is the least serious. As to the former, we teachers are confined to do something that we are not willing to do, for instance, we have to focus on grammar and forms because the College
Entrance Examination is focus to examine the students’ mastery of them. As to the latter, we think it is common that we don’t know much about how languages are actually learnt because of the individual differences.

5. Look at Maley’s list of 14 'principled decisions' on pages 92-94. Choose the three which you think are the most important and rank them 1, 2 and 3 (1 being the most important).

Four members of our group think the NO.2 is the most important decision because a combination of the accuracy-focused and the fluency-focused is more practical in the real situation. Two of us think the NO.9 is the most important one because they find the students in their counties are passive who need the responsibility to engage themselves to the activities. Cindy regards the NO.10 as the most important one because she thinks we teachers should pay much attention to the students’ motivation and try our best to cultivate the students’ interests towards language learning.