Communicative Language Teaching in Practice : Function versus form in teacher trainees´ lesson plans

This paper sets out to explore to what extent teacher trainees at a university in southern Sweden are influenced by communicative language teaching (CLT) approaches that the Swedish national syllabus for English, LGR 11, advocates. In addition, reliabilities regarding the level of institution (Junior High versus High School) will also be explored. The material consists of 20 lesson plans, two from each student equally split between Junior High and High School. These plans were submitted by the author’s classmates as part of an assignment during their teaching practice. The method for rating the lesson plans in terms of function versus form is based on a chart created by Thornbury (1999), although his chart has been adapted to better suit the methodology of this paper. The results showed that most of the lesson plans favored, to varying degrees, a communicative approach; the most popular one being a mixture of deep-end and shallow-end CLT approaches. Furthermore, the lessons in High school proved to lean slightly more towards deep-end CLT than their counterparts at Junior high