week 5

group memebers: Peggy,Hiro,James,Aziz,Mata

We thought that the Family Activity is very good but there are issues of time and how useful it is in some cases.  

For some of us, when considering the exams which students have to take, we ought to say that the ‘ACCESS to fluency’ is not really needed because the exams do not include speaking and fluency.  Therefore teachers have to focus on teaching the other 3 skills (which are tested) within limited time; besides, deviation from the curriculum is not that easy.  If we do not have to consider the time issue, The Family Activity can be used because we suppose that speaking and communicative competence can contribute to other language skills such as listening, reading and writing.

For others communication is very important since it is both required and tested.

The activities which we have used in our own classrooms are not so communicative as described in the article although they have some communicative features in, for example, role play, information gap task, jigsaw and even teachers’ questions in order to introduce new grammatical points.  

Using real language in the classroom and real situations are very helpful for students but the teachers should always adapt the context of CLT to students’ needs, cultural background , age, and  their interests .