Community Language learning

Community Language Learning

Ø The Meaning of Community Language Learning

Community language learning (CLL) is an approach in which students work together to develop what aspects of a language they would like to learn. The teacher acts as a counseller and a paraphrase, while the learner acts as a collaborator, although sometimes this role can be changed.

CLL is one of the so-called ‘designer’ methods which arose in the flurry of methodological experimentation in the 1970’s (along with The Silent Way, Suggestopoedia, TPR etc.)

Ø Background

The CLL method was developed by Charles A. Curran, a professor of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago.[1] This method refers to two roles: that of the knower (teacher) and student (learner). Also the method draws on the counseling metaphor and refers to these respective roles as a counselor and a client.

    Ø The foreign language learner's tasks, according to CLL consist of three:

(1) to apprehend the sound system of the language

(2) assign fundamental meanings to individual lexical units and

(3) construct a basic grammar.

In these three steps, the CLL resembles the Natural Approach to language teaching in which a learner is not expected to speak until he has achieved some basic level of comprehension.

   Ø There are 5 stages of development in this method.

-         “Birth” stage: feeling of security and belonging are established.

-          As the learners' ability improve, they achieve a measure of independence from the parent.

-          Learners can speak independently.

-          he learners are secure enough to take criticism and being corrected.

-         The child becomes an adult and becomes the knower.

  Ø Learner roles

In Community Language Learning, learners become members of a community - their fellow learners and the teacher - and learn through in­teracting with members of the community. Learning is not viewed as an individual accomplishment but as something that is achieved collaboratively. Learners are expected to listen attentively to the knower, to freely provide meanings they wish to express, to repeat target utterances without hesitation, to support fellow members of the community, to report deep inner feelings and frustrations as well as joy and pleasure, and to become counselors to other learners. CLL learners are typically grouped in a circle of six to twelve learners, with the number of knowers varying from one per group to one per student.

  Ø Teacher Role

At the deepest level, the teacher’s function derives from the functions of the counselor in Rogerian psychological counseling. A counselor’s  clients are people with problems, who in a typical counseling session will often use emotional language to communicate their difficulties to the counselor. The counselor's role is to respond calmly and non-judgmentally, in a supportive manner, and help the client try to understand his or her problems better by applying order and analysis to them. The counselor is not responsible for paraphrasing the client's problem ele­ment for element but rather for capturing the essence of the client's concern, such that the client might say, "Yes, that's exactly what I meant." "One of the functions of the counseling response is to relate affect... to cognition. Understanding the language of 'feeling', the coun­selor replies in the language of cognition". It was the model of teacher as counselor that Curran attempted to bring to language learning.