ELT Journal Volume 59/1 January 2005 © Oxford University Press
Readers respond |
‘CLT is best for China’— an untenable absolutist claim
Guangwei Hu holds a PhD, and teaches at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He worked as an English language teacher educator for 15 years in China before he took up his current teaching job. His recent papers on language teaching and learning have appeared in international journals such as the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Language, Culture and Curriculum, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and Teachers College Record. Email: Gwu{at}nie.edu.sg
In his paper titled ‘The need for Communicative Language Teaching in China’, Xiaoqing Liao (2004) holds an absolutist view on the appropriacy of CLT for Chinese EFL classrooms, and claims that the methodology ‘is best for China’. The absolutist claim is based on a problematic assumption of CLT’s universal effectiveness/appropriacy, and ignores the diverse contexts of ELT in China. The arguments put forward by Liao to support his claim are specious, and the evidence presented is both scarce and unconvincing. Furthermore, the paper reveals a narrow, dogmatic understanding of what constitutes a proper method, and in the words of Harmer (2003: 288), exemplifies ‘an insensitive insistence on a rigid methodology at the expense of classroom and learner realities’.