Communicative language teaching (CLT), or the communicative approach (CA), is an approach to language teaching that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of study.

Learners in settings which utilise CLT learn and practice the target language through the following activities: communicating with one another and the instructor in the target language; studying "authentic texts" (those written in the target language for purposes other than language learning); and using the language both in class and outside of class.

To promote language skills in all types of situations, learners converse about personal experiences with partners, and instructors teach topics outside of the realm of traditional grammar. CLT also claims to encourage learners to incorporate their personal experiences into their language learning environment and to focus on the learning experience, in addition to learning the target language.

According to CLT, the goal of language education is the ability to communicate in the target language. This is in contrast to previous views in which grammatical competence was commonly given top priority. and they began to use CLT, an approach that emphasizes communicative ability and yielded better results.<!--How exactly were the 'better results' established?-->

Academic influences

Already in the late 19th century, the American educator John Dewey was writing about learning by doing, and later that learning should be based on the learner's interests and experiences. In 1963, American psychologist David Ausubel released his book The Psychology of Meaningful Verbal Learning calling for a holistic approach to learners teaching through meaningful material. American educator Clifford Prator published a paper in 1965 calling for teachers to turn from an emphasis on manipulation (drills) towards communication where learners were free to choose their own words. In 1966, the sociolinguist Dell Hymes posited the concept of communicative competence considerably broadening out Noam Chomsky's syntactic concept of competence. Also, in 1966, American psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote that learners construct their own understanding of the world based on their experiences and prior knowledge, and teachers should provide scaffolding to promote this. Bruner appears to have been influenced by Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist whose zone of proximal development is a similar concept.

Later in the 1970s British linguist M.A.K. Halliday studied how language functions are expressed through grammar.

The development of communicative language teaching was bolstered by these academic ideas. Before the growth of communicative language teaching, the primary method of language teaching was situational language teaching, a method that was much more clinical in nature and relied less on direct communication. In Britain, applied linguists began to doubt the efficacy of situational language teaching, partly in response to Chomsky's insights into the nature of language. Chomsky had shown that the structural theories of language then prevalent could not explain the variety that is found in real communication. In addition, applied linguists like Christopher Candlin and Henry Widdowson observed that the current model of language learning was ineffective in classrooms. They saw a need for students to develop communicative skill and functional competence in addition to mastering language structures. Canale and Swain (1980) defined communicative competence in terms of three components: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Canale (1983) refined the model by adding discourse competence, which contains the concepts of cohesion and coherence.

A survey of communicative competence by Bachman (1990) divides competency into the broad headings of "organizational competence," which includes both grammatical and discourse (or textual) competence, and "pragmatic competence," which includes both sociolinguistic and "illocutionary" competence. Strategic competence is associated with the interlocutors' ability in using communication strategies.

Example:

  1. The instructor gives each student the same set of questions to ask a partner.
  2. Students take turns asking and answering the questions in pairs.

This activity, since it is highly structured, allows for the instructor to more closely monitor students' responses. It can zone in on one specific aspect of grammar or vocabulary, while still being a primarily communicative activity and giving the students communicative benefits.

Example:

  1. The class is paired up. One partner in each pair is Partner A, and the other is Partner B.
  2. All the students that are Partner A are given a sheet of paper with a time-table on it. The time-table is filled in half-way, but some of the boxes are empty.
  3. All the students that are Partner B are given a sheet of paper with a time-table on it. The boxes that are empty on Partner A's time-table are filled in on Partner B's. There are also empty boxes on Partner B's time-table, but they are filled in on Partner A's.
  4. The partners must work together to ask about and supply each other with the information they are both missing, to complete each other's time-tables.

Completing information gap activities improves students' abilities to communicate about unknown information in the TL. These abilities are directly applicable to many real-world conversations, where the goal is to find out some new piece of information, or simply to exchange information. Swan suggests that those theoretical issues lead to confusion in the application of CLT techniques.

Where confusion in the application of CLT techniques is readily apparent is in classroom settings. Swan suggests that CLT techniques often suggest prioritizing the "function" of a language (what one can do with the language knowledge one has) over the "structure" of a language (the grammatical systems of the language).

Ridge also notes that CLT has nonspecific requirements of its teachers, as there is no completely standard definition of what CLT is, which is especially true for the teaching of grammar, the formal rules governing the standardized version of the language in question. Some critics of CLT suggest that the method does not put enough emphasis on the teaching of grammar and instead allows students to produce utterances, despite being grammatically incorrect, as long as the interlocutor can get some meaning from them.

See also

  • English as an additional language
  • Grammar–translation method
  • Language education
  • Language exchange
  • Learning by teaching (LdL)
  • Notional-functional syllabus
  • Task-based language teaching
  • Teaching English as a foreign language
  • Target language (translation)

References

Further reading

  • Færch, C., & Kasper, G. (1983). Strategies in interlanguage communication. London: Longman.