Promoting CLT within a Computer Assisted Learning Environment: A Survey of the Communicative English Course of FLTC

This study is based on a survey of the Communicative English Language Certificate (CELC) course run by the Foreign Language Training Center (FLTC), a Project under the Ministry of Education, Bangladesh. FLTC is working to promote the teaching and learning of English through its eleven computer-based and state of the art language laboratories. As Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is becoming increasingly popular in many EFL/ESL contexts, the fully computer based language teaching facilities offered by FLTC can be seen as a significant step towards implementing CALL in the soil of Bangladesh. However, any language course using technology alone may not always ensure the best practices of language teaching and learning; the advantages of technological advancements are to be adapted according to the pedagogic needs of the concerned language course. This paper, therefore, seeks to explore how aspects of CALL are being integrated within a framework of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). The survey was conducted on 425 learners who had completed the CELC course at the selected four centers of FLTC. This study provides a brief overview of how computers are being used for teaching communicative English. It is found that the trainees gave a positive response about the contents, facilities, and organization of the course but not completely satisfied with the teaching techniques and participants’ role as independent learners. It is recommended that there is a need for making the computer based learning materials more accessible to the learners so that they can use them more independently in and outside the language lab.