Communicative Language Teaching and its Relation to the Academic Performance of Grade 10 Students in the District of Cabuyao

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The need for good communication skills in English has created a huge demand for English teaching around the world. Employers insist that fluency in English is a prerequisite for success and advancement in many fields of employment in today's world. This worldwide demand for English has created an enormous demand for quality language teaching and teaching materials and resources. As a result, many Asian countries, where English is taught as a foreign language, have shifted to a new method of teaching which is Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). In connection to this, this research determined whether the use of CLT has an impact on the academic performance of Grade 10 students in English.

METHODS

The descriptive research design was utilized in this study to determine the observance of CLT by Grade 10 English teachers and students and its relation to student's academic performance. Through random sampling, 14 English teachers and 310 Grade 10 students were chosen as respondents. A researcher-made questionnaire patterned from the Communicative Language Teaching Theory of Canale and Swain was used to determine the teachers’ and students' observance of CLT while consolidated grade report was used to get the academic performance of the student-respondents. Mann Whitney U Test and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient were used as a statistical treatment for this study.

RESULTS

The results of the assessment on the observance of Communicative Language Teaching show that grammatical, strategic and sociolinguistic competence are all highly observed while discourse competence is observed. Moreover, there is a significant relationship between the observance of CLT and the academic performance of Grade 10 students in English but with a very weak correlation only. This result is supported by Savignon in 2007 that says "Language should be taught through communicative activities whereby students learn the language by using it in meaningful interactions and communicative activities that enable students to develop the competencies required in the target language."

DISCUSSIONS

The results imply that although both students and teachers highly observe the use of Communicative Language Teaching, it does not extremely affect the academic performance of the students in English. Therefore, educators and other experts in the field of education need to explore other new teaching approaches, methods, and strategies for the teaching-learning process to improve students' academic performance and communicative competence.