3 articles

         In one of the articles, Hatch says, “One learns how to do conversations, one learns how to interact verbally, and out of this interaction, syntactic structures are developed.” I thought this statement was very true within a classroom. The more the students are speaking the target language and interacting with each other verbally, the better they will become at the target language. I struggled in my Spanish class to develop good syntactic structures because I did not interact with my classmates in the target language; we would speak to each other in English and only interacted with the teacher in Spanish. The more practice any student has with their target language, the easier it is going to be for them to speak, write, listen to, etc. their target language.

         One thing I found in the articles was how they continuously talked about how interaction is a necessity for these learners. Interaction allows the learners to practice the language with their classmates or teacher and it also allows them to receive feedback from their speaking partner. Having interaction allows students to receive feedback about their grammar errors, mispronunciation, incorrect sentence structures, and much more. I always found it helpful in my classes to have students help/correct me when making a mistake because than I would learn the correct form and fix it. It always helped me to hear the mistake from someone else otherwise I would continue to make the same mistakes. It concerns me and makes me wonder, what if a teacher taught a class without student interaction? I have been in classrooms where teachers have very limited interaction and I never did well.

         Also, I found the talk about how CLT is the solution to language learning to be very interesting. They talked about how there is no better method, they ignore other people’s views, and they ignore all other aspects as being irrelevant. As we have discussed before, there is not one best method to teaching and saying that CLT is the only way could affect students dramatically. It is necessary to pull from many different ideas and thoughts in order for students to develop good language skills.

         They talked about how some priorities for CLT was that it gives students fluency, purposeful communicative activities, and student-student interaction. These are many important characteristics while teaching a language to a group of people, but there are many other ones that are not included. It is important to pull different characteristics from other methods as well. How are teachers supposed to decide whether CLT is good for their classroom or not?

         I agreed with and found interesting that it talked about how the context approach disagreed with the CLT approach. The context approach believes there are many other ways to learn languages and CLT is not the only way. There is no proof that CLT is the only method that is good because there are other approaches and methods that are equally valid. Also, I agreed that methodology is only one factor in language learning. There are many outside factors that can affect one’s learning.