The Communicative Teaching of English [antikvár]

s ^ -^ r (U.iifj-, Preface The core of this book is a revised and expanded version of an Exercise Typology for Developing Communicative Competence by Ulrich Grewer, Terry Moston and Malcolm Sexton. This guide to materials development and evaluation lias been available in its original German form for some time, and has been successfully used in a wide variety of teacher in-service courses and workshops, as well as with planning groups and individuals concerned with curriculum change, it sets out a systematic collection of exercise-types for communicatively oriented English teaching. It does not, however, intend to offer a collection of foolproof 'recipes' but rather to present a pool of experience from which we hope readers will be stimulated to plan and develop their own English language teaching programmes within this communicative framework. The typology is arranged in five parts: Phase A: (Organising Information) Exercises in this phase focus on ways of encouraging learners to check their basic understanding of a variety of texts in a controlled way, using a range of matching and multiple choice exercises linked to various written, pictorial and heard stimuli. Phase B: (Implanting Skills) Here exercises introduce controlled simulations, designed to exploit the variety of social meanings contained within particular grammatical structures in different situations. Once again the exercises make use of a range of stimuli. Phase C: (Developing Skills) Exercises in this phase are intended to enable the learner to make productive use of his language, but still within controlled situations. Gradually, however, the exercises encourage language transfer to those situations and areas of interest which are personal to the learner. Phase D: (Using Skills) In this open-ended phase, exercises concentrate on language charts and discourse plans to stimulate the production of extended spoken and written communication. Chains This part of the Exercise Typology demonstrates how the various phases can be integrated so as to provide opportunities for individual learners to move towards personal communication in English. The Chains show how the arrangement of the phases and their exercises need not be from A to D in any fixed way, but how teachers and learners can make their own selection of learning paths through a principled choice of relevant exercises. In this way, the Typology offers learners the opportunity of relevant learning. The exercises in the various phases clearly have to be linked together to serve the teaching-learning process. We therefore include two sample Unit Charts which show how