II-The Algerian Educational System and approaches to
English Teaching
knowledge; he should play a set of roles which make him
actively involved in the learning process like; setting goals, making choices
and decisions, sharing and cooperating with others, solving problem- situations
and using different strategies to overcome such situations. In other words, the
learner is totally responsible for most of the learning tasks, and so he sees
himself as the real supervisor of his own learning. As stated by Edwards:
«...When students are compelled to assume greater
responsibility for directing their learning, they will gradually learn to see
themselves as the controllers of their own learning. Learning is seen as
self-initiated and not other-initiated». (Edwards, 1998:80)
Hence, the CBA reshapes the learners' roles and responsibilities,
and brings a radical
change in their attitudes towards knowledge and learning. These
roles can be summarized as
follows:
- Take charge of their learning process.
- Collaborate and interact with each other.
- Assess their progress and themselves (self- evaluation).
- Create learning situations.
- Acquire problem-solving skills.
- Discover and construct knowledge.
- Develop a critical thinking.
- Contributes to information and process.
Generally, these are the roles advocated by the CBA which
brings considerable changes to challenge traditional ways of learning and even
teaching. Now, the change which is coming into education is the shift of the
center of gravity. Whether or not these roles are really played by learners in
the Algerian middle education, we cannot assert this firmly. We may say that
they are to a large extent keeping the traditional way of learning, simply
because they used to do so, and they are neither ready to accept these new
roles nor informed how to play them.
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II-The Algerian Educational System and approaches to
English Teaching
5-The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
approach
Although Algeria was one of the pioneers in implementing CLT,
little was done to prepare the schools for the necessary changes and to provide
the appropriate conditions required by the communicative approach. English
classrooms rarely met the criteria of purposefulness and contextualization that
defined CLT tasks at the level of the intended aims and objectives. Such a
situation was due to the pedagogical constraints, i.e., the incongruence
between the intended and implemented syllabus. What is more, the communicative
approach has always been controversial in Algerian educational institutions in
the sense that it challenges the traditional conceptions of good teaching and
learning, i.e., fluency at the expense of accuracy. Worse still, many teachers,
especially the more experienced, still do point to communication-based teaching
as a reason for declining English standards in Algeria and in many parts of the
world. (Benmoussat:2018)
Needless to recall, in the 1980s, CLT became a buzz term and a
cliché which was used here and there rightly and wrongly, most of the
time, with no precise perception in the principles it embodied in popular
literature and common parlance among EFL teachers. This is another way of
saying that this approach to language teaching has become so over-used that it
has begun to lose its meaning. The following is an attempt to give a list, a
non-exhaustive one, of the characteristics underlying communicative language
teaching. In sum then, and according to Larsen-Freeman (1986), CLT is
characterized by the focus on communicative competence, orientation towards
learner-centeredness, emphasis on the role of teachers as facilitators and
providers of a secure, non-threatening atmosphere, introduction of group
activities, and finally, use of authentic materials. A related point worth
noting here is that originally, the term «communicative competence»
was used to refer to what a speaker needs to know in order to communicate
effectively in culturally significant situations (Hymes, 1974). It has become
the rallying call of CLT. The Council of Europe (2001, p. 9) defines it as
«a person's ability to act in a foreign language in a linguistically,
socio-linguistically and pragmatically appropriate way.»
(Benmoussat:2018).
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