e-journal 4

On the first session of the next two weeks, a new method was taught by Zahra Ghelichkhani and Hanie Tabatabaee, Communicative Language Teaching. There was also a discussion about integrating the skills in language teaching. On the second week I was absent again and unfortunately missed Kousar and Kimia's presentation about Content-Based Instruction, part of the presentation of course (the act out); because, as I was informed, they couldn't open their power point file to explain the rest of the lesson and they were to present it the next week when I could attend the class. Anyway I missed the second discussion too; focus on form vs. focus on forms.

The first method, Communicative language teaching, focuses on learning language to use it. It is the weak version of communicative approach and stresses the importance of providing learners with opportunities to use their English for communicative purposes. I also learnt about the principles and techniques used in this method and found out that a communicative activity has to have three elements; information gap, choice and feedback. Then I had the chance to get to know ways of integrating the four skills in FL teaching. At the end, I don't have anything to add about the Content-based Instruction because I was absent!

Zahra and Hanie could perfectly handle their presentation and I really enjoyed the way they did it. I believe the method was a useful one and I may want to try it out in my future classes. The discussion about integrating skills was also really helpful. Such a bad luck I couldn't attend the class on the second session.