Week 4 Learning Circle---Developments in TESOL Methodology
Group members: Aziz, Deman, Evelyn, Janet, Kate, Noora

1. This article was written 20 years ago. To what extent does it appear 'dated' or modern to you?

Most of us think that it’s still “fresh” and we haven’t experienced lots of changes during these 20 years actually which appears a huge difference compared to the the period of 1960s and 1980s with sprouted new teaching theories or ideas every minute.

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.

By using communicative teaching approaches, Mayley claimed that teachers have to shoulder the responsibility of creating a learner-centred learning environment; meanwhile, students have to participate the class correspondingly- with more freedom and more responsibility.

Reflecting to Maley’s prediction, Demon was a well example of being a student who attended the class correspondingly. The story happened when she was in high school, she refused to be a passive learner and was trying to provide a better lesson for her class. After the brilliant performance, her teacher not only praised her with her work, but also gave her a chance to be a teacher for that lesson and she still remember every single word in that book even after such a long time. Moreover, some teammates also mentioned that sometimes a lesson leaded by students was more fun and the contents and examples given by present students were easier for their classmates to understand.

Those case and examples given shows that teachers and students could lead the class in a different and more efficient way by using communicative approaches which give students more motivation, freedom and space to practice and extend their abilities inside and outside of the classroom.

(achieving better learning and teaching results)

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).

We thought that the advantage of using the communicative approaches partly outweigh disadvantages because even if there are some drawbacks of it, but those ones are all changeable or can be modified and adjusted by authorities or teachers. For instance, the main problems will be the quality of teachers which obviously can be solved by providing more teacher training, workshops or seminars.

In contrast, the benefits maintained are essential and irreplaceable owing to the communicative competence is necessarily cultivated because we situate in the global village and the motivation generated during the process of using this approach is crucial for learners to become self-directed and gaining more interests to achieve higher proficiency in English. Furthermore, students can learn English relatively efficiently and happily which generally is hard to achieve by using the dated grammatical focused method.

4. Maley lists six problems (pages 91-2). In the light of you experience, can you rank these problems from 1 (most serious) to 6 (least serious).
   
   We decided to have 4 5 6 as our first 3, input and intake problem ranked first and individual difference and government influence placed at the second and the third one. 1,2,3 all ranked at the forth place.
   



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).

6 placed the first one cause most of us think that providing authentic samples is really important and left ones are hard to put a rank on because they are all important in some extent in different aspects.