Communicative language teaching

This article is devotedto propose in CLT also implied new roles in the classroom for teachers and learners. Learners now had to participate in classroom activities that were based on a cooperative rather than individualistic approach to learning. Students had to become comfortable with listening to their peers in group work or pair work tasks, rather than relying on the teacher for a model. They were expected to take on a greater degree of responsibility for their own learning. And teachers now had to assume the role of facilitator and monitor.

Communicative language teaching can be understood as a set of principles about the goals of language teaching, how learners learn a language, the kinds of classroom activities that best facilitate learning, and the roles of teachers and learners in the classroom.

Perhaps the majority of language teachers today, when asked to identify the methodology they employ in their classrooms, mention “communicative” as the methodology of choice. However, when pressed to give a detailed account of what they mean by “communicative,” explanations vary widely. Does communicative language teaching, or CLT, mean teaching conversation, an absence of grammar in a course, or an emphasis on open-ended discussion activities as the main features of a course? What do you understand by communicative language teaching? 

Task 1

Which of the statements below do you think characterizes communicative language teaching?

1. People learn a language best when using it to do things rather than through studying how language works and practicing
2. Grammar is no longer important in language
3. People learn a language through communicating in
4. Errors are not important in speaking a
5. CLT is only concerned with teaching
6. Classroom activities should be meaningful and involve real
7. Dialogs are not used in
8. Both accuracy and fluency are goals in
9. CLT is usually described as a method of

Communicative language teaching can be understood as a set of principles about the goals of language teaching, how learners learn a language, the kinds of classroom activities that best facilitate learning, and the roles of teachers and learners in the classroom.

Communicative language teaching sets as its goal the teaching of communicative competence.What does this term mean? Perhaps we can clarify this term by first comparing it with the concept of grammatical competence.

Grammatical Communicative Language Teaching Todaycompetence refers to the knowledge we have of a language that accounts for our ability to produce sentences in a language. It refers to knowledge of the building blocks of sentences (e.g., parts of speech, tenses, phrases, clauses, sentence patterns) and how sentences are formed. Grammatical competence is the focus of many grammar practice books, which typically present a rule of grammar on one page, and provide exercises to practice using the rule on the other page. The unit of analysis and practice is typically the sentence. While grammatical competence is an important dimension of language learning, it is clearly not all that is involved in learning a language since one can master the rules of sentence formation in a language and still not be very successful at being able to use the language for meaningful communication. It is the latter capacity which is understood by the term communicative competence.

Communicative competence includes the following aspects of language knowledge:

1. Knowing how to use language for a range of different purposes and
2. Knowing how to vary our use of language according to the setting and the participants (e.g., knowing when to use formal and informal speech or when to use language appropriately for written as opposed to spoken communication).
3. Knowing how to produce and understand different types of texts (e.g., narratives, reports, interviews, conversations).
4. Knowing how to maintain communication despite having limitations in one’s language knowledge (e.g., through using different kinds of communication strategies). 

Task 2

Consider the following sentences that are all requests for someone to open a door. Imagine that the context is normal communication between two friends. Check if you think they conform to the rules of grammatical competence (GC),communicative competence (CC), or both.

GCCC

1. Please to opens -
2. I want the door to be opened by -
3. Would you be so terribly kind as to open the door for me? -
4. Could you open the door? -
5. To opening the door for -
6. Would you mind opening the door? -
7. The opening of the door is what I -

How Learners Learn a Language. Our understanding of the processes of second language learning has changed considerably in the last years and CLT is partly a response to these changes in understanding. Earlier views of language learning focused primarily on the mastery of grammatical competence. Language learning was viewed as a process of mechanical habit formation. Good habits are formed by having students produce correct sentences and not through making mistakes. Errors were to be avoided through controlled opportunities for production (either written or spoken). By memorizing dialogs and performing drills, the chances of making mistakes were minimized. Learning was very much seen as under the control of the teacher.

In recent years, language learning has been viewed from a very different perspective. It is seen as resulting from processes such as:

• Interaction between the learner and users of the
• Collaborative creation of
• Creating meaningful and purposeful interaction through
• Negotiation of meaning as the learner and his or her interlocutor arrive at
• Learning through attending to the feedback learners get when they use the
• Paying attention to the language one hears (the input) and trying to incorporate new forms into one’s developing communicative
• Trying out and experimenting with different ways of saying

With Communicative language teaching began a movement away from traditional lesson formats where the focus was on mastery of different items of grammar and practice through controlled activities such as memorization of dialogs and drills, and toward the use of pair work activities, role plays, group work activities and project work. 

Task 3

Examine a classroom text, either a speaking text or a general English course book. Can you find examples of exercises that practice grammatical competence and those that practice communicative competence? Which kinds of activities predominate?

The Roles of Teachers and Learners in the Classroom. The type of classroom activities proposed in CLT also implied new roles in the classroom for teachers and learners. Learners now had to participate in classroom activities that were based on a cooperative rather than individualistic approach to learning. Students had to become comfortable with listening to their peers in group work or pair work tasks, rather than relying on the teacher for a model. They were expected to take on a greater degree of responsibility for their own learning. And teachers now had to assume the role of facilitator and monitor. Rather than being a model for correct speech and writing and one with the primary responsibility of making students produce plenty of error-free sentences, the teacher had to develop a different view of learners’ errors and of her/his own role in facilitating language learning. 

Task 4

What difficulties might students and teachers face because of changes in their roles in using a communicative methodology?

Communicative Language Teaching Today

In planning a language course, decisions have to be made about the content of the course, including decisions about what vocabulary and grammar to teach at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels, and which skills and microskills to teach and in what sequence. Decisions about these issues belong to the field of syllabus design or course design. Decisions about how best to teach the contents of a syllabus belong to the field of methodology. Language teaching has seen many changes in ideas about syllabus design and methodology in the last years, and Communicative Language Teaching prompted a rethinking of approaches to syllabus design and methodology.

Traditional approaches to language teaching gave priority to grammatical competence as the basis of language proficiency. They were based on the belief that grammar could be learned through direct instruction and through a methodology that made much use of repetitive practice and drilling. The approach to the teaching of grammar was a deductive one: students are presented with grammar rules and then given opportunities to practice using them, as opposed to an inductive approach in which students are given examples of sentences containing a grammar rule and asked to work out the rule for themselves. It was assumed that language learning meant building up a large repertoire of sentences and grammatical patterns and learning to produce these accurately and quickly in the appropriate situation. Once a basic command of the language was established through oral drilling and controlled practice, the four skills were introduced, usually in the sequence of speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Techniques that were often employed included memorization of dialogs, question-and-answer practice, substitution drills, and various forms of guided speaking and writing practice. Great attention to accurate pronunciation and accurate mastery of grammar was stressed from the very beginning stages of language learning, since it was assumed that if students made errors, these would quickly become a permanent part of the learner’s speech.

A reaction to traditional language teaching approaches began and soon spread around the world as older methods such as Audiolingualism and Situational Language Teaching fell out of fashion. The centrality of grammar in language teaching and learning was questioned, since it was argued that language ability involved much more than grammatical competence. While grammatical competence was needed to produce grammatically correct sentences, attention shifted to the knowledge and skills needed to use grammar and other aspects of language appropriately for different communicative purposes such as making requests, giving advice, making suggestions, describing wishes and needs, and so on. What was needed in order to use language communicatively was communicative competence.

New approaches to language teaching were needed. Rather than simply specifying the grammar and vocabulary learners needed to master, it was argued that a syllabus should identify the following aspects of language use in order to be able to develop the learner’s communicative competence:

1. As detailed a consideration as possible of the purposes for which the learner wishes to acquire the target language; for example, using English for business purposes, in the hotel industry, or for
2. Some idea of the setting in which they will want to use the target language; for example, in an office, on an airplane, or in a
3. The socially defined role the learners will assume in the target language, as well as the role of their interlocutors; for example, as a traveler, as a salesperson talking to clients, or as a student in a
4. The communicative events in which the learners will participate: everyday situations, vocational or professional situations, academic situations, and so on; for example, making telephone calls, engaging in casual conversation, or taking part in a
5. The language functions involved in those events, or what the learner will be able to do with or through the language; for example, making introductions, giving explanations, or describing
6. The notions or concepts involved, or what the learner will need to be able to talk about; for example, leisure, finance,
7. The skills involved in the “knitting together” of discourse: discourse and rhetorical skills; for example, storytelling, giving an effective business presentation
8. The variety or varieties of the target language that will be needed, such as American or British English, and the levels in the spoken and written language which the learners will need to
9. The grammatical content that will be
10. The lexical content, or vocabulary, that will be

A traditional language syllabus usually specified the vocabulary students needed to learn and the grammatical items they should master, normally graded across levels from beginner to advanced.

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