Read the text to answer question:
Today, many of the pedagogical springs and rivers of
the last few decades are appropriately captured in the term
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), now a catch
phrase for language teachers. CLT is an eclectic blend of
the contributions of previous methods into the best of what a
teacher can provide in authentic uses of the second language
in the classroom. Indeed, the single greatest challenge in
the profession is to move significantly beyond the teaching
of rules, patterns, definitions, and other knowledge “about”
language to the point that we are teaching our students to
communicate genuinely, spontaneously, and meaningfully in
the second language.
A significant difference between current language
teaching practices and those of, say, a half a century ago, is
the absence of proclaimed “orthodoxies” and “best” methods.
We are well aware that methods, as they were conceived of
40 or 50 years ago or so, are too narrow and too constrictive
to apply to a wide range of learners in an enormous number
of situational contexts. There are no instant recipes. No
quick and easy method is guaranteed to provide success.
As Bell (2003), Brown (2001), Kumaravadivelu (2001),
and others have appropriately shown, pedagogical trends
in language teaching now spur us to develop a principled
basis—sometimes called an approach (Richards & Rodgers,
2001)—upon which teachers can choose particular designs
and techniques for teaching a foreign language in a specific
context. Every learner is unique. Every teacher is unique.
Every learner-teacher relationship is unique, and every
context is unique. Your task as a teacher is to understand the
properties of those relationships and contexts.
(BROWN, H. Douglas. Principles of language learning and teaching. 5. ed.
Londres: Longman, 2006)
What central role is assigned to the teacher in modern
language teaching, according to the views expressed in
the text?
