By Ressie Jan Marie G. Manginsay
One of most exigent and tedious tasks relentlessly facing language teachers today is how to capture the interest and to stimulate the imagination of the students so that they will be more motivated to learn. There is an unending search for, and the development of meaningful teaching materials, which often can be used to supplement the textbook for a course, is a critical planning activity to be done by teachers. When we talk about classroom, we usually think of the usual routines teachers and students do. But the question of how to develop effective communicative skills brings the attention to the methods we use and the type of materials we introduce to our learners. The main aim and goal of the language lessons that we prepare is to allow our learners to engage into communicative situations not just in school setting but also in the true and actual world.
In response to the challenges in teaching language skills of today’s world, many researchers and teachers created and innovated instructional materials that would cater to the growing needs of the learners to grasp knowledge and skills in communication not just for academic purposes but also in later stages of life. That’s why we need authentic task-based instructional material. The emergence of the communicative language teaching is our new era today, and this has changed the types of materials and methodologies that teachers need to shape for the effective development of communicative skills of the learners. Instructional materials today should be authentic and should elicit communicative competence to promote fluency and proficiency of the target language. These materials should provide an avenue for activities that would expose the learners to the real thing that happens in everyday life. Teachers and students should create a classroom environment enjoyable, fun, engaging, and advantageous for both teaching and learning. The activities should reflect the realities of situations that students are more likely to encounter in their personal life. Because in some research findings, they become incompetent in conveying what they want to share because they lack confidence, for the reason that it might be the first time that they will encounter the situation. This issue shows that learners of the language need to be exposed to the language conventions of everyday life through engaging them in collaborative language tasks that would provide them the avenue to practice their reading, listening, speaking and writing skills for the development of their holistic communicative competence.
Holistic communicative competence will not be developed only by drills that ordinary instructional materials provide. Communicative competence will only be developed by the task-based activities that teacher-prepared instructional materials give, with the authenticity of communicative state of affairs. And in order to do that, teachers should bring the real world into the classroom, for surely it would build the learners’ growth in properly expressing themselves and learning how to follow the social and cultural rules appropriate in each communicative circumstance.
If teachers will be able to convert the classroom into a real world environment, we will be confident that the main goal of every teacher and educational institution to make students more active in the learning process and at the same time make their pace of learning more meaningful and fun for them will be achieved.
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