English Language Teaching in its Social Context

~ can~ cancan~ canTHE DEVELOPMENT OF EFL METHODOLOGY 157Read and answer the questions below as you listen.(You can’t answer them all!)Comprehension check1 Why did Jackie come to London?2 When did she come?3 Where is she living?4 Who is she living with?5 What’s she doing in London?6 What does her boyfriend do?7 What does she do at the weekend?8 What does she think of living in London?9 How often docs she keep in touch?IO What does she think of her parcnts?When you have answered your questions, find a partner from the other group.Compare your answers and swap information.What do you think?1 Is Jackie’s father right to be so worried about his daughter? Was Jackie right to leave home ateighteen?2Use your dictionary to find out what generation gap means. Is there a generation gap betweenyou and your parents? Between you and your children?3 In your country, at what agepeople get married? ~they vote?they smoke?they drive?It has been observed that CLT exists in both a ‘weak’ and a ‘strong’ version (Howatt 1984).Howatt suggests that:The weak version, which has become more or less standard practice in the lastten years, stresses the importance of providing learners with opportunities touse their English for communicative purposes and, characteristically, attemptsto integrate such activities into a wider programme of language teaching. (Howatt1984: 297)Whilst the ‘strong’ version:advances the claim that languagc is acquired through communication, so that it isnot merely a question of activating an existing but inert knowledge of the language,but of stimulating the developmcnt of the language system itself. (Howatt 1984:297)He concludes:If the former could be described as ‘learning to use’ English, the latter entails ‘usingEnglish to learn it’. (Howatt 1984: 297)