Lingua et Linguistica
Vol. 1.1, 2007
ISBN 978-1-84753-625-9

On the Implementation of the Discovery Method in Communicative Language Teaching

Eriko Sato
State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA

Abstract

The communicative approach has been the leading educational philosophy in foreign language teaching since the 1970's, replacing the traditional approach symbolized by the grammar-translation and audio-lingual methods. The communicative approach umbrellas a variety of methodologies, but places its focus on communication and rejects explicit grammar instruction in classrooms. However, accuracy development is as important as fluency development, and how to implement grammar teaching within the framework of the communicative approach has been intensely discussed in recent literature. The latter issue becomes particularly crucial in a foreign language classroom when the learners are adult beginners and their target language and their native language are linguistically and culturally substantially different. For example, teaching Japanese to beginners in a college-level classroom in English-speaking countries is a tremendous challenge when effective grammar teaching is absent.

This paper proposes the implementation of the discovery method in the framework of the communicative approach. The proposed foreign language classroom model allows each class to have a continuous flow of the students' active learning process, including observation of authentic conversation, analyses, hypothesizing, discovery, and communication.

pp.58-67

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