Real Life Simulations

Communicative language teaching makes use of real-life situations that necessitate communication. The teacher sets up a situation that students are likely to encounter in real life. Unlike the audio-lingual method of language teaching, which relies on repetition and drills, the communicative approach can leave students in suspense as to the outcome of a class exercise, which will vary according to their reactions and responses. The real-life simulations change from day to day. Students' motivation to learn comes from their desire to communicate in meaningful ways about meaningful topics. Margie S. Berns, an expert in the field of communicative language teaching, writes that "language is interaction; it is interpersonal activity and …show more content…
The principle applied here is that grammatical competence and lexical knowledge are not enough to enable students to operate efficiently in the target language. They must be able to use the language appropriate to the speech event they find themselves in. Some variables that decide the appropriateness of their language use are: the purpose of their interaction, the role relationships between them, the topic they are engaged in and the shared knowledge they have. In other words, by considering who they are talking to, what they are talking about, when, where, and why they are talking, speakers know what words to …show more content…
Students have many pedagogical needs which often necessitate a different approach to teaching. For example, learners need to engage in psycholinguistic and meta-linguistic processes such as repeating, noticing forms, hypothesizing and conceptualizing rules, which have been found by research as being conducive to the language acquisition process. For this reason, David Nunan distinguishes between two kinds of tasks: Real-world tasks and pedagogical tasks . Real-world tasks are designed to emphasize those skills that learners need to have so they can function in the real world. Such tasks normally simulate authentic task behavior, and their primary focus is often the achievement of an end product. For such reasons, these kinds of tasks normally make up the final goal of a lesson or a unit. In contrast to real-life tasks, pedagogical tasks are intended to act as a bridge between the classroom and the real world in that they serve to prepare students for real-life language usage. Such tasks are often referred to as “preparation” or “assimilation” tasks. They are designed to promote the language acquisition process by taking into account a teacher’s pedagogical goal, the learner’s developmental stage and skill level, and the social contexts of the second-language learning environment. They often have an enabling character -