Book Review

Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen by James F. Lee and Bill VanPatten.

This book is used at Michigan State for ROM 803: Current Approaches to Romance Language Instruction. I believe that they've been using the book for a few years now but I just recently took ROM 803 in the Fall of 2011, which was coincidentally the same semester when Bill VanPatten came to MSU and took over as professor of the course. The book is what some might call a "methods textbook" but I think Professor VanPatten thinks of it as more of an anti-methods book. The goal of this book is to pull language teaching back from the abyss of drilling and teachers telling you to that it's okay to make things up as long as respond to their questions in Spanish.

I have made subtle references to "Communicative Language Teaching" throughout our course. The book sets out to correct the errors in the ways of modern language instruction. It reinforces the need to spend time working with written texts before ever expecting learners to compose in the language, similarly to how you would never ask a first grader to begin writing short stories the same week they began learning to read, something I think I've touched on in a previous blog entry.

Another example, one of my classroom learning goals was to "focus on communication of information rather than on accuracy of language use". Well, that idea comes from this book. Instead of the ideology some teachers have where it doesn't matter what you say as long as you say it in Spanish, this book promotes just the opposite. The main goal of an SLA classroom should be to effectively communicate information. I'll work backward to explain this better.

Think back to my presentation at our symposium. In my presentation of my family tree, the most important aspect, the thing that the students were quizzed on at the beginning of the next class period, was actually remembering the names of my family members. The goal of my presentation was to effectively communicate the information about my family to my students. I did this through periodic comprehension checks, stopping to run through the whole family each time before adding a new branch to the tree. Now, in a non-communicative language taught classroom, imagine that students would get a list of new vocabulary covering family members. The "say whatever you want as long as you say it in Spanish" teacher may ask a student what his mom's name is and he could say "my mom's name is Helen" and she wouldn't care if that really was his mom's name or not and maybe he didn't even know what he said, all he knows is that he assigned a name to a noun. Nothing anyone says in that classroom has any value. A student in my classroom would actually be making a tie between a name and a noun, especially once they catch on to the fact that I will give them quizzes to reinforce their comprehension (comprehension quizzes, don't act surprised when I tell you that they're something I picked up from this book). Honestly though, a month after I give my family tree presentation, my students still remember the names of my family members. Focusing on meaning helps make meaningful connections.

The book also focuses on having all activities in a unit be building toward one big final goal, or one final activity. No minute of class time is ever wasted on an activity that isn't working toward the big picture. Anyway, the book doesn't specifically pertain to teaching with technology but the methodology here is very important to any SLA classroom, technologically enhanced or not. This book has helped me apply what I'm learning about using technology in the classroom from our current class into my current pedagogy. Even using the same materials, and mediums, me and that hypothetical aforementioned teacher could have different end results because of our differing values of communication versus production.