Talk:Community language learning

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1 Principles. Community language learning (CLL) was primarily designed for monolingual conversation classes where the teacher-counsellor would be able to speak the learners' L1. The intention was that it would integrate translation so that the students would disassociate language learning with risk taking. It's a method that is based on English for communication and is extremely learner-focused. Although each course is unique and student-dictated, there are certain criteria that should be applied to all CLL classrooms, namely a focus on fluency in the early stages, an undercurrent of accuracy throughout the course and learner empowerment as the main focus .How it works in the classroom: Stage 1- Reflection Stage 2 - Recorded conversation Stage 3 - Discussion Stage 4 - Transcription Stage 5 - Language analysis Stage 1- Reflection I start with students sitting in a circle around a tape recorder to create a community atmosphere. The students think in silence about what they'd like to talk about, while I remain outside the circle. To avoid a lack of ideas students can brainstorm their ideas on the board before recording. Stage 2 - Recorded conversation Once they have chosen a subject the students tell me in their L1 what they'd like to say and I discreetly come up behind them and translate the language chunks into English. With higher levels if the students feel comfortable enough they can say some of it directly in English and I give the full English sentence. When they feel ready to speak the students take the microphone and record their sentence. It's best if you can use a microphone as the sound quality is better and it's easier to pick up and put down. Here they're working on pace and fluency. They immediately stop recording and then wait until another student wants to respond. This continues until a whole conversation has been recorded. Stage 3 – Discussion Next the students discuss how they think the conversation went. They can discuss how they felt about talking to a microphone and whether they felt more comfortable speaking aloud than they might do normally. (This part is not recorded.) Stage 4 – Transcription Next they listen to the tape and transcribe their conversation. I only intervene when they ask for help. The first few times you try this with a class they might try and rely on you a lot but aim to distance yourself from the whole process in terms of leading and push them to do it themselves. Stage 5 - Language analysis I sometimes get students to analyse the language the same lesson or sometimes in the next lesson. This involves looking at the form of tenses and vocabulary used and why certain ones were chosen, but it will depend on the language produced by the students. In this way they are totally involved in the analysis process. The language is completely personalised and with higher levels they can themselves decide what parts of their conversation they would like to analyse, whether it be tenses, lexis or discourse. With lower levels you can guide the analysis by choosing the most common problems you noted in the recording stages or by using the final transcription. .2 Approach: Community language learning represents the use of counseling-learning theory to teach languages. As the name indicates, CLL derives its primary insights,& indeed its organizing rationale, from Regerian counseling (Rogers 1951).It draws on counseling metaphor to redefine the roles of the teacher(the counselor) & learners (the clients) in the language classroom. CLL techniques also belong to a larger set of foreign language teaching practices some times described as humanistic techniques (Moskowitz 1978). In sum, humanistic techniques engage the whole person, including the emotions & feelings (the affective realm) as well as linguistic knowledge & behavioral skills. "Language is people; language is persons in contact; language is persons in response."(La forge19883:4)CLL interactions are of two distinct &fundamental kinds: interaction between learners & interactions between learners &knowers. A group of ideas concerning the psychological requirements for successful learning are collected under the acronym SARD (Curran 1976), which can be explained as follows: S stands for security. Unless learners feel secure, they will find it difficult to enter into a successful learning experience. A stands for attention & aggression. CLL recognize that a loss of attention should be taken as an indication of the learner's lack of involvement in learning, the implication being that variety in the choice of learner tasks will increase attention &therefore promote learning. Aggression applies to the way in which a child, having learned something, seeks an opportunity to show his or her strength by taking over & demonstrating what has been learned, using the new knowledge as a tool for self _assertion. R stands for retention & reflection. If the whole person is involved in the learning process, what is retained is internalized & becomes a part of the learner's new persona in foreign language. Reflection is a consciously identified period of silence within the framework of the lesson for the student to focus on the learning forces of the last hour, to assess his present stage of development, &to re-evaluate future goals. D denotes discrimination. When learners have retained a body of material, they are ready to sort it out & see how one thing relates to another. This discrimination process becomes more refined & ultimately enables the students to use the language for purposes of communication outside the classroom. The central aspect of Curran's learning philosophy address not the psycholinguistic & cognitive processes involved in second language acquisition, but rather the personal commitments that learners need to make before language acquisition processes can operate. 3 The role of teacher &students The teacher's initial role is primarily that of a counselor. This does not mean that the teacher is a therapist, or that the teacher does not teaching. Rather, it means that the teacher organizes how threatening anew learning situation can be for adult learners, so he skillfully understands &supports his students in their struggle to master the target language. Initially the learners are very dependent upon the teacher. It is recognized, however, that as the learners continue to study, they become increasingly independent. CLL methodologist has identified five stages in this movement from dependency to mutual interdependency with the teacher. In stages 1, 2, &3, the teacher focuses not only on the language but also on being supportive of learners in their language process. In stage 4 &5 because of the students' greater security in the language & readiness to benefit from corrections, the teacher can focus more on accuracy.