Reflection on Tutorial Task Week 3 (Materials Development)

PERSONAL REFLECTION

I felt that this week’s tutorial is much more difficult compared to last week. I guess it could be due to the fact that there are 3 articles on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) for us to read. I find Savignon’s article is more difficult to understand compared to Spada’s and our lecturer’s unpublished thesis.

From what I read, I am starting to see how my teachers back in my secondary schools implement CLT into our lessons. I have a more vivid memory on my English language learning in secondary school compared to primary school. From what I recalled, my Form 5 English language teacher, Miss Chew did manage to bring in/applied the communicative approach into the lessons. For instance, in terms of linguistic competence, she emphasized a lot on our grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. She wanted us to do corrections for every single grammar mistakes we made in exam. She even went to the extent of providing dictionaries for us during class lessons which I am grateful for sometimes. However, I dislike it when she wanted us to learn the phonetic symbols at that time. I have problems in recognizing and memorizing the symbols. She would also give us grammar exercises once or twice in a week. 

Besides that, the element of discourse competence can be seen when my teacher asked us to write an essay or construct a short paragraph. She emphasized a lot on the rhetorical organization of an essay and also the cohesion between sentences. I still remember her saying that the first paragraph must be introduction and it should have the topic sentences and a little background information about the topic. She gave us a list of connectors and discourse markers to be used when writing essays. During our oral test which would be held twice a year, she would comment and corrected our mistakes right after the test.

As for pragmatic competence, I could not really remember when it was implemented into the lessons. However, I remembered the textbook did have chapter on cultures in Malaysia. Often, my teacher would divide us into groups and gave us tasks. Example of tasks given were essay writing, creating a conversation (based on certain topics), drawing a poster, fill in the blanks (mostly were grammar exercises) and a lot more. There were also times when we would exchange and marked our exercises among ourselves (giving feedback to each other in written form).

Strategic competence involves the usage of non-verbal or verbal strategy such as hand gestures or replacing words with phrases. My form 5 English language teacher emphasized more on the verbal strategy (replacing words with phrases). We used that strategy mainly in our writing task as I felt that in secondary school, writing is often the main focus in learning the English language. Speaking and reading will come when we were doing role plays and also oral tests. My teacher will only give dictations once in a while (listening).

After going through all the CLT articles, I am truly convinced that the curriculum in the English language in Malaysia is established to help students in communicating using English. In my opinion, this is quite a good approach to be used in our education system (communicative approach). However, I do not find it very effective as Malaysia is a multi-racial country. Back in my secondary school, a lot of my friends including I, myself would speak in ‘Manglish’ rather than using fully English in conversing. In addition, there were a lot of grammatical mistakes as we did not really pay any attention to it. Our main intentions were just to get our points across. From what I understand, the existing curriculum did have the intended focus to produce students who can communicate in English. But, it somehow gives me a perception that it is good enough for students to be able to converse in English, there is no need to focus too much on the grammar and sentence structures used by them.

Although the use of textbook is a compulsory in lesson teaching, I have to admit myself that the learning based on textbook is really boring. I could not imagine teaching the same thing every year using the same materials only. At the end, this would be more like a habit and the passion in teaching will definitely disappear.

So, as a future English language teacher, I will remind myself often to adapt always discover new materials in teaching. For instance, technologies are now quite popular among students and teachers as teaching equipment. In addition, I figured that being able to converse in English with fluency but no accuracy is not good enough. I would assume that there are teachers out there who are think like that. They are doing it (teaching) just for the sake of their job. I do not want to be like that and will definitely try my best not to end up being one of them. And so, I think maybe there should be some adjustment being done to the curriculum or textbook to attract students’ interest in learning English. I would say some of them are unwilling to speak/learn as they are afraid they might make mistakes and end up being laughed at by their peers. Malaysia, being a multi-racial country has students from different races. Their mother tongue will further affect their English language learning progress following the fact that they are more comfortable in speaking using their mother tongue. This is a problem most teachers will probably face in class. They have to find a way to solve this issue so that students will be able to communicate comfortably in class using English. This will also help teachers in applying the communicative approach into lessons.

Group Discussion

Our first discussion on the topic of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) was not very fruitful. It could be said that all of us were quite blur and was unable to understand what CLT exactly was. Furthermore, there were 3 articles for us to read. At last, we divided the task into a few parts and each of us would be doing different pats, focusing on our own question. During the progress, we realized no matter which part we were doing we would still have to read up all the 3 articles. So, during our second discussion, we discussed the problems each of us faced together and finally reached an agreement on how to do it.

Later, during our tutorial with the lecturer, we were given more detail explanations on how CLT worked in the teaching of English language in Malaysia and how it is being implemented into lessons. From what I understand, the textbook act as a source/ facilitates the learning activities of students. Using the textbook, activities can be carried out to suit all the four competences namely linguistic, pragmatic, discourse and strategic.