Community Language Learning (CLL)

Community Language Learning is one of the so-called 'designer' methods which arose in the flurry of methodological experimentation in the 1970s, together with other methods The Silent Way, Suggestopedia, and TPR, that form part of the Humanistic Approach to language learning. This method is developed by Charles A. Curran and his associates. Curran was a counselor and a professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago. His application of psychological counseling techniques to learning such as Counseling-Learning. The Community Language Learning Method takes its principles from the more general Counselling Learning Approach.

This method is a classic example of an affectively based method . It is a method that seen learners as a "group"instead of "class". Learning will take place when group members first needed to interact in an interpersonal relationship in which both students and teachers joined together to facilitate learning in a context of valuing each learner in the group. 

Theoretical Assumptions 

• language is seen as a social process is different from language as communication 
• Communication is more than spreading the message that is being transmitted from a speaker to a listener 
• Speaker is both subject and object of his own message 
• Communication is very constitution of the speaking subject in relation to the other 
• Communication is also seen as an exchange that is incomplete without a feedback reaction from the density of the message 

Principles 

• create interpersonal relationships between teachers and learners to facilitate learning 
• ease the anxiety of EFL learners in the educational context and encouraged group dynamics when carrying out classroom activities. 
• The main aim of "Community Language Learning" is to involve the learner's whole personality. The teacher understands the learners fears and vulnerabilities as they struggle to master another language. 
• Learning tends not to take place when the material is too new or even too familiar. 
• Students reflect on what they have experienced
• At the early stage of this method, the 'syllabus' is generated by the students 

CLL was primarily designed for monolingual conversation classes where the teacher- counselor would be able to speak the learners L1. The intention was that it would integrate translation so that students would disassociate language learning with risk taking. 

Communication and Learner Focused 

• How it works in the classroom
  
  • Stage 1- Reflection
  • Stage 2 - Recorded conversation
  • Stage 3 - Discussion
  • Stage 4 - Transcription
  • Stage 5 - Language analysis
  • Length of stages
  
  
  
  
  
  
  How it works in the classroom

In a Community Language Learning lesson have five stages: 

Stage 1: Reflection

Teacher will start the lesson by making students to sit in a circle around a tape recorder to construct a community atmosphere. 

• The students think in silence about what they'd like to talk about, while I remain outside the circle.  
• To avoid a lack of ideas students can brainstorm their ideas on the board before recording. 

Stage 2 : Recorded conversation 

Once they have chosen a subject, the students tell me in their L1 what they'd like to say and 
the teacher discreetly come up behind them and translate the language chunks into English.

• With higher levels if the students feel comfortable enough they can say some of it directly in English and the teacher give the full English sentence. When  students feel ready to speak, they will take the microphone and record their sentence. 
• It's best if you can use a microphone as the sound quality is better 
• Here they're working on pace and fluency. Students instantly stop recording and then wait until another student wants to respond. This continues until a whole conversation has been recorded.   

Stage 3: Discussion

Next, the students will discuss how they think the conversation went. They can also discuss how they felt about talking to a microphone and whether students felt more comfortable speaking aloud than they might do normally. 

This part is not recorded 

Stage 4: Transcription 

Students will listen to the tape and transcribe their conversation. I will only involve when they ask for help. When teachers tried this with the class as students may have try and rely on the teacher a lot but teachers need to aim to distance from the whole process such as pushing students to do it themselves. 


Stage 5: Language analysis 

Teacher sometimes get students to analyse the language the same lesson or sometimes in the next following lesson. This involves looking at the tenses form and vocabulary used and why certain ones were chosen, but it will depend on the language produced by the students.

With this, students are totally involved in the analysis process in the higher levels. The language is completely personalised and with students then can make decisions on what parts of conversations they would like to analyse, whether it is tenses, lexis or discourse.

As for the lower levels, teacher can guide the analysis by choosing the most common 

problems that teacher noted in the recording stages or the final transcription. 

Length of stages 

The timing is based on the class, such as how fast do students respond to CLL, how long do they need to spend on the language analysis stage and how long the recorded conversations will be. But teachers need to bear in mind for not making the conversation too long as this makes the transcription very long. 

The goals of the teachers who uses the Community Language Learning Method

1. Teachers want their students to learn how to use the target language communicatively 
2. They want their students to learn about their own learning 
3. Teachers would also want their students to take increasing responsibility for their own learning 
4. They want their students to learn from each other and seek peer help

Role of the Teacher : The teacher main role is a counselor. This means that the teacher recognizes how threatening a new learning situation would be for adult learners, so the teacher will be skillful in terms of providing understanding and supports his students in their struggle to master the target language. 

Role of the students:  Initially, the learners are very dependent by the teacher. As the students continue to study, they become increasingly independent



  

Strengths 

1. Learners will appreciate the autonomy that offers by Community Language Learning and helps to improve analysing their conversations 

2. The affective advantage are evident 

3. Teachers allows learners to determine the type of conversation and to analyse the foreign language inductively 

4. Student Centred nature method can provide extrinsic motivation
5. To learn how to use the target language communicatively  

Weaknesses

1. Teacher or Counselor 5 becomes non- directive 

2. It relies heavily on the inductive strategy of learning 

3. The success of the CLL depends largely on the translation expertise of the teacher
4. Time control 
5. Teachers can find it strange to give students so much freedom and tend to intervene students learning. 

My Personal Views on using this method 

If teachers were to use the method, teachers will need some knowledge of counselling. While there is need some knowledge of counselling. While there is nothing in the conversation stage of the lesson that precludes it being used as a technique in a far more teacher- guided class, bear in mind that if the teacher intervene in more 'authoritative' way without being asked for help. For example, by deciding who will speak and what they'll talk about in stage one, or by giving spontaneous explanations and deciding what to practice in stage two, where teachers would not use CLL. 


I will end this blog entry with an interesting video on how "Community Language Learning (CLL) is used in adult learning classroom. 

http://youtu.be/tx_we_P3Pic

References 
Larsen-Freeman,D.(2011). Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching 3rd edition. New York:Oxford University Press