My Experience with The Communicative Approach- Tori Howe

I truly think the communicative approach is a great teaching style to adopt for any teacher.  I think it is the most interesting, engages the students’ interests, and is the most effective in terms of retaining classroom material.  There are so many different possible activities to create for lessons involving ESL students and they do not have to be very complicated.  Just conversing with others broadens the horizon because it gives students others opinions, which they may not have thought of on their own.  I think the communicative approach is very effective for language learning, but is also a great tool for teaching typical subjects to students in their first language.  I have always been a very hands-on learner and enjoyed class when we were able to get up and move around, or work in groups.

In my high school Spanish class, we had to do a project where we were broken up into groups of five people and we had to act out a restaurant scene using the vocabulary words we were learning during that week of class.  We had to make a script using characters in a restaurant, for example: I was the hostess, and then someone else was a waitress, a bus boy, and two people were pretending to be the customers.  We had to incorporate the vocabulary words into our script, and create a realistic dining scene.  We put together an entire set with a hostess stand, a table and chairs, silverware, napkins, dishes, menus, a bus tub, and appropriate costumes for our parts in the script.  Setting up the scene for the skit was one of the most important parts in my eyes, because when you are learning another language, it is most helpful to learn vocabulary and sentences when you can actually see the props as an audience, and when you use the props as the presenter.   Preparing for the skit was a good way for us to familiarize ourselves with the language, and put together different sentences and match them up so they will be able to reenact a realistic scene from a restaurant.

The skit was really fun for us to do, and it was also helpful when we watched other groups’ performances because we were able to see a bunch of different scenarios from a restaurant.  Not every restaurant experience will be the same so seeing different situations was really helpful in that sense.  Since it was a fun project to do, it did not feel like I was actually doing school work, and felt more like a challenge of who can have the best skit and understanding of the project rather than an assignment we had to turn in for grading. 

The communicative approach can be very effective when done correctly, and if the lesson is possible to use with this approach.  I understand that some lessons need to be lecture based or memorization based, such as spelling and conjugation of words, but when possible, I think it is in the teacher and students best interest to use the communicative approach.