Tutorial Task Week 3 Materials Development (REFLECTION)

For this week’s task, I was able to attend this tutorial. Despite the fact of being there, I have zero understanding on what is going on. My brain went all blank as I went through the tutorial class. We had to read 3 articles regarding Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), which is like a dictionary to me (Big, Thick and Wordy!!).

However, as I went through the articles briefly, I found out that teachers have it hard when it comes to teaching students. Learning about CLT is one thing, but to be able to implement it into classes and lessons. I used to hate when we were told to participate in classes especially when there is correction to be done. We were to discuss with each other and come up with an answer. I felt that this wasted time and was not really into discussing with my peers. Now that I’ve learnt about CLT, I can see why my teachers did that and how would it actually helped students.

For the elements of competence which are discourse competence, pragmatic competence and strategic competence, I can relate to what and how my teachers taught during my schooling days. The memories are a bit hazy but yet, the important parts are still there. Well, most of it anyways.  For instance, the element of discourse competence is implemented when my teacher taught us how to write an essay. She focused a lot on getting us to remember the organization of the essay or the so-called ‘format’. For pragmatic competence, we did a lot of group works based on certain topics and also discussion or feedbacks among out works. Strategic competence is the usage of verbal or nonverbal strategies such as hand gestures or replacing words with phrases. During my younger years, school doesn’t seem as boring as my teacher would teach us different movements in order for us to learn more efficiently. For example, when we create a sentence or writing a story-based essay, we were prompted to act out or do some actions to present our works.

In my opinion, I feel that the curriculum in the English language in Malaysia is constructed to implement CLT in the lessons. However, the effectiveness does not help as there are a lot of students who lack the confidence as well as competence to really communicate and participate in class. This will create a huge gap in the students’ proficiency level whereby the less participating ones would be slowly left out. In my opinion, it is up to the teacher to adapt the curriculum and try to get all students to learn equally as well as participate in class. Thus, having new and different teaching materials will help a lot in teaching various types of students. By being able to adapt accordingly, the teacher is able to bring out the most out of the students especially through communicative English.

Group discussion

Our group discussion did not go so well at first. Each of us were facing problems as we do not really understand what the question needed as well as having 3 articles to read is very straining. As we discussed, we came up with conclusions that everyone agreed.

During tutorial class, Mdm JC’s explanation made us realize some part of our work was not really correct. With a bit of guidance, we did another discussion and in the end, managed to finish our task. We learnt that by using the textbook, activities can be carried out to suit all the four competences namely linguistic, pragmatic, discourse and strategic. But sometimes it also depends on how the teacher relates and adapts the textbook.