Skip Navigation

ELT Journal 1987 41(4):248-256; doi:10.1093/elt/41.4.248
© 1987 by Oxford University Press
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Morrow, K.
Right arrow Articles by Schocker, M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Articles

Using texts in a communicative approach

Keith Morrow and Marita Schocker

Keith Morrow is Director (Education) of the Bell Educational Trust, involved in developments in methodology and materials in the six EFL schools run by the Trust in Britain, as well as in projects overseas.
Marita Schocker teaches in a secondary school (Realschule) in West Germany. For the past three years she has been on attachment to the P.H. (teachertrainin college) in Freiburg, running seminars in methodology and preparing materials.

Several ways in which texts are used in ‘communicative’ EFL classrooms are considered, and it is argued that in important ways they fail to offer the student the possibility of personal involvement of the sort that would be normal with a text in the native language. Suggestions are made for using texts in a way which encourages such involvement and is thus more truly communicative.

The use of texts is probably one of the defining characteristics of classroom language teaching. In much current ‘communicative’ teaching, however, there seems to us a danger that an over-restricted view is taken both of the types of text that may be used, and of the exploitation activities that may be based on them. Three conventional ‘communicative’ uses of texts will serve to illustrate our concern.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.