Article+reflection+by+Alp+Kaan+KILINÇ

I read the article titled **“when communicative approaches don’t work”** and i will make my comments on this study in this paper. The author of the article is Ning Liu. He examines the reasons why communicative approaches don’t work in some contexts and attempts to give several solutions to these problems. He claims that communicative approaches in EFL classrooms don’t work sometimes. There are many reasons behind it. First of all, there is a difference between ESL and EFL classroom environments. In EFL classrooms, teachers use the imported materials which are designed for ESL environment. One of these imported materials is textbooks which i discuss later on. The other reason is the social environment. In ESL classrooms, students are exposed to target language’s input in and out of the classroom. However, the situation is quite different in EFL classrooms. Students are not exposed to the language entirely in classroom and almost never out of the classroom. Because of this reason, the dialogues and other similar activities in textbooks may not attract students’ attention or they don’t see them as necessary exercises because they don’t think that they will get a useful output. In other words, they believe that they won’t benefit from these activities as they won’t use what they have learnt outside of the classroom. Also, there are some cultural and traditional reasons which affect students’ perceptions towards the communicative approaches. They tend to stick to traditional methods such as memorizing, focusing on form rather than meaning and the like. Therefore, they may believe that they don’t learn anything at all in an environment where communicative approach is implemented. The author lists the problems and one of these problems is textbooks as i mentioned above. According to the writer, textbooks should provide students with a bridge between their own culture and the target culture. If not, textbooks don’t arouse students’ interests as they are not connected to their lives. Another problem is when students read a passage about a famous person like Charlie Chaplin, they want to learn some background information related to his life rather than how he dressed, how he acted etc. The author states that this is an example for the problem of not linking a familiar topic for students to the target culture and therefore, students get bored. The teachers and students are expected to be familiar with communicative approaches. However, this is not what happens in many EFL classrooms. Students generally study a foreign language to enter a university exam in high schools and therefore, when they attend a university, they have difficulties in adaptation to communicative approaches especially during the first year. They think that they don’t learn anything this way and they want the traditional approaches back. The same problem also takes place in teachers’ side. According to a survey among foreign teachers in US middle schools, 30% of the teachers don’t understand the basis, rationale, and methodology for the CA so they continue the traditional methods. In some situations, students don’t accept the communicative approaches even though they know what to do. One of the reasons behind it is cultural. According to the author, students in the Eastern culture are more reluctant to ask questions and solve problems. Also, there is a relationship between teacher and students which depend on mutual respect so physical proximity and first names may be problematic. As i mentioned before, another problem is the social environment for EFL students. They don’t live in an English spoken country and so they are not exposed to the target language. Therefore, what they have done in a communicative-approach-applied classroom become meaningless. The author suggests some solutions to these problems. He suggests teachers adapt their cultural values to the curriculum and textbooks or select new ones. The author believes that authentic materials in communicative language teaching helps students’ self-confidence as well as their motivation so they should be used as much as possible. According to the author, foundation courses to improve students’ listening, reading, writing and speaking skills should be added to the curriculum to help students get familiar with CA. Students are more motivated in student-centered environment so teachers should implement student-centered way of teaching. Technology may fill the deficiency of not living in an English spoken environment as it has lots of opportunities to interact with the target language. Therefore, internet-based tasks like forming an e-forum can be applied.
 * Textbooks**
 * EFL Teachers’ and Students Familiarity with CA**
 * EFL Students’ Acceptance of CA**
 * EFL Students’ English Speaking Environment**
 * Ways to solve problem**
 * Revision of curriculum and textbook**
 * Using Authentic Materials**
 * Adding Foundation Courses to Curriculum**
 * Creating a Student-Centered Environment**
 * Creating On-line Forums**

I appreciate the authors’ opinions and agree with him on most of the ideas. I believe that textbooks are not very suitable for other cultures. It’s true that we are exposed to the target culture but the activities are not enjoyable and attractive for the most part. Therefore, instead of textbooks, teachers should bring different materials which are more interesting and familiar for students. In many schools in Turkey, teachers and students are not familiar with the communicative approaches. Therefore, it is mostly preferred to follow the traditional methods. This makes it hard to implement these approaches. To solve this problem, as the author suggests, CA may be incorporated into on-the-job training even though i don’t believe that it will work in our system as it is exam-based. In our country, the implementation of communicative approaches, especially in pre-university period, are very limited and not helpful. We are an example for this situation. Even though, in university we have been exposed to these approaches more and more, we have still difficulties in speaking and listening skills because we are still stick to the traditional approaches and we couldn’t improve the necessary skills in a period which was more suitable to do than university years. As i said, i agree with the author. His suggestions to solve the problems are really appropriate for universities or some private courses. However, in our high schools, they don’t work because in our high schools communicative approaches don’t work. As long as we have a university exam, we cannot expect students to take these approaches seriously. They will want us to hand out exams, questions and teach the form. This is how our system functions. Therefore, i don’t believe that a communicative approach may be carried out well in our high schools.
 * Conclusion**