THE IMPLEMENTATION OF COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING AND ITS ACHIEVEMENTS: A STUDY OF CLS MALANG’s IN-COUNTRY PROGRAMMING FROM 2013-2014

Indonesia, ID CLEaR2015-252;  This paper overviews the multiple factors which contribute to the success of the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) in-country program facilitated in Malang, Indonesian in 2013 and 2014. As such, this paper will focus on the effective implementation of the Communicative Language Teaching approach and detail the learners’ rapid achievement of communicative competence as certified by the Oral Proficiency Interviews. For the purposes of this paper, two superordinating research questions are posited: (1) How is the communicative language teaching approach facilitated at the CLS program in Indonesia? (2) What achievements and language gains did participants demonstrate? Data were compiled from (1) observation of active classroom participation, (2) interviews with the learners, peer tutors, and instructors involved in the CLS Malang programs facilitated during the summers of 2013 and 2014, and (3) documentation resulting from the administration of the Oral Proficiency Interviews provided by the American Councils of International Education. Research findings showed that (1) the effective implementation of the communicative language teaching approach was effective in combining classroom instruction with extracurricular activities in significantly increasing participants’ creative use of the Indonesian language in meaningful, “real-world” contexts. Enabling participants to practice the Indonesian language via real-life interactions resulted in their achievement of higher scores on OPI interviews. Higher levels of participant achievement were predicted to result from this approach because the OPI interviews emphasize oral proficiency based on communicative and cultural skills in real-life settings.

Key Words: implementation, communicative language teaching, achievement, CLS, in-country programming