The Competency-Based Approach: The Concept of Group in Benin EFL Teaching

The role of the teacher within the Competency-Based Approach (henceforth CBA) tradition is essentially to conduct his/her class as a group through his/her skills, to serve as a role model for the learner. In order to manage his/her learners, the teacher is expected to organize learners in groups. Given his/her incapacity to obtain young or budding leaders from each group, the teacher needs to select within each group a representative or/and a facilitator. Thus, the concept of group in this sense perceived by the majority of teachers does not correspond to the CBA as established by those who designed the program. An important rule of the CBA is that each teacher should realize his/her group. So the structure of the classroom realized by the teacher is expected to be modified by the teacher of Mathematics because the leaders in an English class are not necessarily the same as those in a Mathematics class. In addition, the idea that the teacher of English should obtain at least one leader for a group is not all the time maintained when it comes to having another teacher, say, a mathematics teacher in the same class. The goal of this article is to draw the teacher’s attention to the concept of group, to how sensible it is, and the major recommendation of this study is that the teacher should reconsider meaningful data and strategies while organizing his/her group in the classroom.