COMPETENCY-BASED LANGUAGE TEACHING

According to what I read in chapter number 13 from the book Alternative approaches and methods, I can report that Competency-Based Education is explained from a comparison to different approaches in education. According to the author, CBE is a movement that focuses on outputs rather than on inputs. It is to say that the important thing for this kind of educational movement is what students produce rather than what they receive in order to produce. At the same time, I understand, that this movement states learners as the center of the whole teaching-learning process since they are active participants and not the ones who, once, only used to listen to the teacher, work on the materials brought BY the teacher, and do what the teacher wanted them to do.

The author also talks about the beginnings of “standards” among education fields. He says that this idea appeared when education specialists and authorities started to realize that the most important aspect to be taken into account in the process of teaching “something” is what students are able to do with that “something” and not just to have the knowledge of IT into their heads for NOTHING. Since this moment, education started to have the statement of what students should be able to do at the different levels of their education process and progress, and that’s what we know, nowadays, as standards.

From this perspective, the author starts relating CBE to the teaching of a second language and the movement that comes out from it is Competency-Based Language Teaching (CBLT), in which students are taught what to do with the language they learn and not only the language itself. In this sense, CBLT becomes an important element in the process of teaching a second language because it gives the opportunity for learners to learn the language in relation to real world situations and not the kind of language that they are never going to use and they find just unnecessary. Moreover, through the use of CBLT in our schools or institutions, learners could have the opportunity to learn communicative and USEFULL language that is going to allow them interact and participate in social and contextual situations in a natural and efficient way.

In order to make the idea of CBLT clearer, the author explains that competencies mix or bring together, as a complement of one another, knowledge, skills, behavior and attitude, to perform in a specific situation of real life. In this way, CBLT suggests that learners should be train to know what for and how to use the language they are being taught.

As a conclusion, CBLT and CBE, itself, enhances students’ production and it is totally learners’ centered. For this reason, I think this method should be used in every single educational institute where they pretend to teach a second language.
ALIX AMANDA GARCÍA CORDERO