Community Language Learning: Is It a Method?

Abstract

Teachers of ESL/EFL are faced with a plethora of teaching 'methods' many of which are based on conflicting theoretical claims and widely varying designs and classroom procedures. A compara tively recent phenomenon, CLL emerged out of the humanism of modern counselling therapy as a reaction to the audiolingual pre scriptions of behavioural psychology and structural linguistics which had dominated previous decades. The principal barriers to successful adult foreign language learning are seen to lie in the anxiety and negative emotions of the human learning situation. Language should therefore be learned in small communities of learners whose motiva tion for learning is the desire to communicate with each other. A community nurtures the natural learning process which develops in a warm environment through mutual support and co-operation. Upon examination, CLL as a methodology evidences serious shortcomings. Among these are included a lack of specification of syllabus, model of linguistic competence or of the structural composition of language, and the high demands CLL places on the teacher with limited resources. While CLL's strength lies in its Approach, signifi cant flaws in its theoretical underpinnings — such as the stress on human affect at the expense of cognition — are also apparent.