Communicative language teaching:

unity within diversity

Pham Hoa Hiep

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Recent articles in the E LT Journal offer interesting debates on CLT. On one side,
Bax (2003) proposes that CLT should be abandoned since the methodology
fails to take into account the context of language teaching. On the other side,
Liao (2004) suggests that CLT is best. However, within the broad theoretical
position on which CLT is based, different understandings of CLT exist, and it
is not clear what version(s) or element(s) of CLT these authors reject or
advocate.
This article presents what are considered to be the key theoretical tenets of CLT. It
then discusses the meanings of CLT theory in classroom practices, showing the
dynamics of context that construct these meanings. Drawing on a study of
teachers’ beliefs and implementation of CLT in Vietnam, the article argues that
inherent in CLT is a view of language, of language learning, and teaching that
most teachers aspire to. When C LT theory is put into action in a particular context,
a range of issues open up, but these issues do not necessarily negate the potential
usefulness of CLT.

Communicative Since its birth in the early 1980s, definitions of CLT and the matter of its
language teaching appropriateness in certain cultures have constantly been debated. Brown
(1994) notes that CLT is based on a broad theoretical position about the
nature of language and of language learning and teaching. This broad
theory has generated many different ways of understandings, descriptions,
and uses of CLT, challenging what it actually means to classroom teachers.
This article first identifies the common tenets of CLT as proposed by the
main scholars in the field, and discusses the potential meanings of CLT in
classroom practice. It then documents how a group of teachers in one
context define and appraise CLT, and how they struggle to implement the
key aspects of CLT they value. The findings imply that ongoing debate,
exchange with peers and students, support from policy makers and from
teacher education courses can empower teachers in their aspirations to
develop communicative techniques appropriate to their context.

The theoretical Current understandings of CLT can be traced back to Hymes (1972), who
tenets proposed that knowing a language involved more than knowing a set of
grammatical, lexical, and phonological rules. In order to use the language
effectively learners need to develop communicative competence—the

E LT Journal Volume 61/3 July 2007; doi:10.1093/elt/ccm026 193

ª The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
 ability to use the language they are learning appropriately in a given social
encounter. Hymes’ notion of communicative competence was elaborated by
a number of practice-oriented language educators, most notably by Canale
and Swain (1980) who contended that communicative competence
comprises grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse
competence, and strategic competence.
While North American scholars focused on communicative competence as
the goal of second language learning, British educators tended to view CLT
in terms of syllabus and methodology. For example, Breen and Candlin

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(1980: 98) set out the essentials of a communicative classroom which:
. . . can serve as a focal point of the learning-teaching process . . . [it] no
longer needs to be seen as a pale representation of some outside
communicative reality. It can become the meeting place for realistically
motivated communication-as-learning, communication about learning,
and meta-communication. . . . A communicative methodology will
therefore exploit the classroom as a resource with its own communicative
potentials.
Savignon influenced even further reflections on CLT. Drawing on the
implications of Canale and Swain’s definition of communicative
competence, and elaborated over two decades, Savignon emphasized that
CLT put the focus on the learner: ‘Learner communicative needs provide
a framework for elaborating program goals in terms of functional
competence’ (2002: 3). She continued to propose five components of
a communicative curriculum which would help support both the theoretical
and practical foundations of CLT:
1 Language arts includes those elements that teachers often do best; it may
be all they have been taught to do including exercises used in mother
tongue to focus attention on formal accuracy.
2 Language for a purpose is the use of language for real communication
goals.
3 Personal English language use relates to the learners’ emerging identity
in English.
4 Theatre arts means to teach in a way that can provide learners with the
tool they need to act in new language such as to interpret, express, and
negotiate meaning.
5 Beyond the classroom refers to the need to prepare learners to use the
language they learn in the world outside the classrooms.
The scholars above illuminate views of what CLT should be within the
communicative theory of language and language learning. All see the
essence of language learning to be based on real communication rather than
simply on learning the vocabulary, grammar, and structure of a language. In
other words, their common agreement is that the need for meaningful
communication supports the language learning process, and thus
classroom activities should focus on learners’ genuine communication.
While communicative activities are considered to be the means to develop
learners’ communicative competence in the second/foreign language, these
activities cannot take place without the control of grammar, but situate

194 Pham Hoa Hiep

 grammatical competence within a more broadly defined communicative
competence (Savignon op. cit.).

How to develop What varies, however, is how real communicative competence is to be

communicative developed. While Savignon believes that even exercises in the mother
competence tongue can be one of the many ways to develop communicative competence
so long as these exercises are not overused, others posit that communicative
competence will emerge naturally from practice in communicative
interaction that has meaning. In either case, the issue left for classroom

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teachers to discover is what communication means, and how it can be
created within their context. The implication is that teachers need to work
that out for themselves. As Richards and Rodgers (1986: 83) put it very
early on:
Communicative Language Teaching is best considered an approach
rather than a method. Thus although a reasonable degree of theoretical
consistency can be discerned at the levels of language and learning theory,
at the levels of design and procedure there is much greater room for
individual interpretation and variation than most methods permit.

CLT in practice As seen above, although the theory of communicative competence on which
CLT is based is uniform, it is broad. As a result, what C LT looks like in
classroom practices may not be uniform. These practices may vary
depending on the dynamics of a certain context which constructs the actual
meaning of communicative competence as well as the tools to develop it.
In the Western English speaking context, where immigrants learn English
in order to conduct their present and future life in communication with
native and other competent English speakers, the English language
classroom operates on the principle of immersing learners in Anglo-Saxon
society. It is, thus, important in the Western classroom to establish what
Holliday (1994: 54) calls ‘the learning group ideal’ or ‘the optimum
interactional parameters’, within which, learners, by interacting with each
other on meaningful things, can best develop the communicative skills they
immediately use in their real life. To facilitate this learning group ideal
Brown (op. cit.) describes the practices to be used in the classroom such as:
1 A significant amount of pair work and group work is conducted.
2 Authentic language input in real life context is provided.
3 Students are encouraged to produce language for genuine, meaningful
communication.
Nunan (1989: 194) also stresses the use of ‘activities [that] involve oral
communication, carrying out meaningful tasks, and using language which
is meaningful to the learner’, and the use of ‘materials [that] promote
communicative language use; they are task-based and authentic’.
However, when the above practices are used in Vietnam or China, a range
of issues emerge, given that the socio-cultural, political, and physical
conditions of these countries markedly differ from those in the UK or the
USA. For example, in Vietnam, English language students share the same
mother tongue and thus do not have the immediate need to use English in
the classroom. Nor do many of them have this need outside the classroom.

CLT: unity within diversity 195

 The principle of doing tasks in the classroom which are applicable to the
world outside the classroom is thus questioned. When Vietnamese students
are asked to use English to conduct a ‘real life’ game in pairs, the question
raised is whether they are really engaged in genuine communication.1
Furthermore, the use of ‘authentic’ material, meaning authentic to native
speakers of English can be problematic in the Vietnamese or Chinese
classroom. As Kramsch and Sullivan (1996) point out, what is authentic in
London might not be authentic in Hanoi. Also, the large class size in
Vietnam (between forty and sixty) also challenges the use of pair work and

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group work.
For the past 15 years, researchers and writers (for example, Pennycook 1989;
Holliday op. cit.; Kramsch and Sullivan op. cit.) have continued to argue that
it can be problematic to take a set of teaching methods developed in one part
of the world and use it in another part. These authors point out that
education is situated in a particular cultural environment, and that within
this environment, the definition of ‘good teaching’ is socially constructed. In
this way, assuming that what is appropriate in one particular educational
setting will naturally be appropriate in another is to ignore the fact that E LT
methodology is grounded in an Anglo-Saxon view of education. This, as
Pennycook (op. cit.: 611) notes, constitutes ‘cultural imperialism’ in English
language education, carried out by the ‘many Western teachers abroad [who]
blithely assume superiority of their methods’. More recently, Bax (2003)
strongly criticizes what he terms as the CLT attitude—the assumption that
CLT is modern, most progressive and always works across contexts.
However, while there are certainly problems in the transfer of CLT methods
from the Western contexts to others, it is questionable whether these
problems negate the potential usefulness of the CLT theory. Larsen-
Freeman (2000: 67) warns that in the combat against imported methods,
‘we may fail to understand the cause of the problem and run the risk of
overacting and losing something valuable in the process’. Undoubtedly, CLT
originates in the West, but to decide a priori that this teaching approach is
inappropriate to a certain context is to ignore developments in language
teaching, and this might lead to the de-skilling of teachers.
As noted at the beginning of this article, C LT theory proposes a focus on
learning; it holds that learning is likely to happen when classroom practices
are made real and meaningful to learners. CLT sets the goal of language
learning to be the teaching of learners to be able to use the language
effectively for their real communicative needs, rather than simply to provide
learners with the knowledge about the grammar system of that language.
This goal is consistent with the long-term goal, if not the immediate goal, of
English language instruction in many contexts of the world. Thus, while
teachers in many parts of the world may reject the CLT techniques
transferred from the West, it is doubtful that they reject the spirit of CLT.
While many common Western C LT practices as well as issues associated
with the use of these practices are well identified and criticized in the
literature, what these practices and issues mean for the local teachers’
thinking and actions has yet to be fully explored. What are teachers’ beliefs
and values about CLT? How do teachers go about implementing the
significant aspects of CLT they espouse, if there are any, and how are they

196 Pham Hoa Hiep

 challenged in this process? Is it possible for teachers to incorporate the
theoretical tenets of CLT without using common Western practices?

Teachers’ beliefs The data reported here are drawn from part of a study which sought to
and use of CLT: a address some of the questions raised above. The study was conducted in
case study a micro setting in Vietnam but it seems likely that the findings can still
illuminate some issues of CLT that other teachers working in similar
contexts may encounter.

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Participants The three teachers in this study comprised two senior teachers and one
junior teacher. They were teaching at a university in Vietnam. Two of them
had completed an MA degree, and one a Postgraduate Diploma in TESOL in
Australia. While the teachers did not represent the full diversity of potential
participants, and all were female, they did represent diversity in ages,
seniority, teaching specialization, and length of experience.
The data presented here are sourced from 13 recorded 60-minute
conversations, conducted at intervals of 2–3 weeks, with these teachers, and
observation of their classes during a 12-week semester. Conversations and
observations were interwoven.
I acknowledge that the data presented below are necessarily selective and
partial. In the attempt to present to the readers what I have found significant
to the inquiry, I have chosen to include in the teachers’ quotations, excerpts,
and classroom incidents that I believe best represent their thoughts and
behaviour. In doing so, I was aware of reporting the data from my own
perspective.

Beliefs about CLT All three teachers in the study highlighted the potential usefulness of CLT,
stressing that CLT primarily meant teaching students the language
meaningful for their future life, and helping to improve the classroom
atmosphere. For example:
I am aware that the point of teaching [English] is for people to succeed in
real life communication. So CLT is considered the best method in this
regard . . . Think of our students’ motivation. Most of them want to work
in a foreign company, some want to become a tour guide, others wish to
work in an international N G O. These jobs require good English
communicative skills. (Xuan)2
I have no doubt that CLT is the right method, not only for teaching
English but the spirit of it can also benefit teaching other subjects. It aims
to teach things practically useful to students in a relaxing manner. (Thao)
Students can learn best if the learning atmosphere is fun, stimulating and
stress-free. They should not feel that learning imposes on them. So I feel
that CLT is a good teaching method as it aims to create such an
uninhibited atmosphere in the classroom. (Lien)

Implementation The major C LT principle of teaching shared by the three teachers was the
of CLT need to create meaningful communication to support the learning process.
Xuan said this meant to ‘encourage students to use the language in
a meaningful way not necessarily in an accurate form’. Thao claimed it was

CLT: unity within diversity 197

 ‘to create a fun, stimulating and stress-free atmosphere . . . to facilitate
meaningful communication’. Lien emphasized that the use of task-based
materials promoted communication among students.
However, when talking about the techniques to realize these principles, the
teachers were more ambivalent. For example, Thao was conscious that the
many CLT techniques that she had learnt in Australia contradicted her
teaching context:
I know that C LT can be promoted by the activities such as pair work, group

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work, role-play or simulation. Yet, I find it difficult to use these activities
in my class. A major challenge is the lack of a real environment for
the students to use English . . . When asked to sit together to prepare
for a role-play, a report, or to write a story, the students usually use
Vietnamese to do the work . . . . Since the teacher is Vietnamese, the
students are Vietnamese, there is no motivation, no reason for them to
use English. It’s not like the context in Australia . . . where we are obliged
to speak English because our teacher speaks English, the students from
different countries all speak English . . . . It’s quite difficult to motivate
students to speak English in our condition.
Xuan noted that pair and group work are difficult to use because her
students:
only want to pass exams for a university degree . . . . This piece of paper,
you know! Though everyone claims they wish to speak English well, to
write English well . . . they seem to care more about passing exams . . . .
You know how structure-based our exams are!
Lien saw the issue of culture challenges group work:
I always want the students to interact more with each other; they should
rely less on the teachers. But when I give them opportunities to do that,
for example, when they sit in pairs or groups to exchange opinions about
their answers to an exercise, they usually quarrel and cannot come to
a compromise. One tends to think that his/her idea or way of doing things
is better than his friends’. I wonder if this is part of our [Vietnamese]
classroom culture. People of the same status are not willing to collaborate
with each other, to accept criticism from their equal, while they feel more
tolerant to accept ideas and suggestions from someone with a higher
status . . . . They just want me to tell them what I think, to show them my
ideas, rather than listen to their friends.
The challenges the teachers envisaged and experienced in implementing
the common CLT techniques such as pair and group work made all of them
talk about the need to adapt rather than simply adopt C LT. However, they
appeared to lack confidence or skills to generate independent CLT practices.
Lien admitted:
I have trouble identifying what I do is C LT, what is not. When I prepare for
a particular activity, I open the methodology book, read again about CLT
theory, and see if the technique I want to use is CLT.

198 Pham Hoa Hiep

Thao wondered if she was really using CLT when she did something that did
not look exactly like a Western communicative technique. She confided, for
example:
I keep asking myself if I am using CLT when I allow the students to use
Vietnamese for their group discussion, then one [group member]
presents [the work] to the whole class in English. They prefer this way.
The observation data showed all these three teachers tried hard to realize the
CLT principles they espoused. For example, Xuan encouraged students to

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read texts without understanding the meaning of all the words, then shared
their responses with the whole class. Thao used role-play and group work
in her class. Lien used current Vietnamese newspapers as prompts for
students’ discussions in English. However, the teachers felt that these
communicative activities were, in general, not very successful. The failures
can be attributed in part to the factors reported above such as large class size,
or lack of motivation to use English, and the concern for examinations.
However, it was also clear that some teachers lacked repertoires to realize
CLT techniques such as group work in their context, as shown for example,
in Thao’s class:
T repeated the instructions several times asking Ss to form groups. Still
Ss could not organize themselves to form the groups. The class became
really chaotic, with many Ss walking around, asking and explaining to
each other about what they were supposed to. After some 20 minutes,
T finally managed to get about half of the Ss in the room to form new
groups. Yet, many others were still sitting in the wrong place . . . . T looked
tired and desperate.
However, there was a positive note as she reflected on the event:
I wish I have a chance to see how group work could be done successfully
with large classes, with low-motivated students. Maybe, there is some way
to do it, but I don’t know . . .
Unlike Thao, Lien did not experience the difficulty in getting students into
groups. However, her students did not have enough English to
communicate with each other, and were not accustomed to doing so. The
following was noted in her class:
During the work [where Ss were asked to play a role play], some pairs were
seen to be writing the script for the task. Others spoke in Vietnamese,
asking each other how to say some Vietnamese word or phrase in
English. . . . The teacher moved around to ensure that the students did the
work. She kept reminding the students: ‘Try to speak English, no
Vietnamese, no writing please’ . . . . After the students finished, T asked
a couple in the front to perform their work. The students stood up and
read from their notes.
Xuan’s problem with using CLT had more to do with the teacher
herself—she unconsciously retained her authority in the classroom.
Although she said ‘I keep encouraging students to talk more and do more
with English . . . I give them more choice’, some classroom exchanges such
as the one below seemed to be underpinned by a very different power in the
teacher-student relationship:

CLT: unity within diversity 199

 T: Everyone should work, try to speak English. I will randomly point at
some pairs and you must present your work to the whole class. If you do it
well I will add a credit to your semester mark. Remember that, class
participation, as I said before, will make up to 30 per cent of your final
mark . . . . So be vocal.

Conclusion The data indicate that teachers tend to hold certain beliefs about their work.
Contrary to what Bax (2003) suggested, many teachers embrace C LT, not
simply because C LT represents a modern and progressive way of language

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teaching. Neither do they embrace it simply because they want to please the
educational policy makers. The teachers in this study espouse firmly the
primary goal of CLT—to teach students to be able to use the language—
believing that this is consonant with the students’ ultimate goal of learning
English in their context.
However, when it comes to the level of practice, teachers often encounter
many difficulties. Their desire to implement CLT, which is manifest
through efforts to promote common Western CLT practices such as pair
work and group work, conflicts with many contextual factors. These factors
range from systemic constraints such as traditional examinations, large
class sizes, to cultural constraints characterized by beliefs about teacher and
student role, and classroom relationships, to personal constraints such as
students’ low motivation and unequal ability to take part in independent
active learning practices, and even to teachers’ limited expertise in creating
communicative activities like group work.
Harmer (2003: 292) notes that the concerns of CLT are not with the
methodology itself, ‘rather with how they [CLT ideas] are amended and
adapted to fit the needs of the students who come into contact with them’.
The teachers cited here are not successful, at least in their eyes, in realizing
certain Western techniques such as pair work and group work. This failure
can lead to their rejection of these techniques. However, they do not reject
the communicative approach, believing that learning must have a goal,
and learning can best take place when the learning task is meaningful. In
their aspirations to implement C LT, the teachers are going through
a process of becoming reflective—they have become conscious of their
own instructional practices, have started to question their own
understandings of what CLT actually means, and are seeking alternative
ways of action. Of course, how they can best be assisted and supported in
the process to make communicative techniques become apparent and ‘real’
to their students within the potentials and constraints of their context, is
an issue that needs further investigation.
CLT should not be treated as a package of formulaic, prescriptive classroom
techniques. Teachers in Vietnam or elsewhere need to make further efforts
to develop and generate, within the communicative approach, classroom
techniques appropriate to their condition. However, teachers should not be
left alone in this process. Support from peers, students, from policy makers,
from training courses as well as findings from empirical research on the
use of C LT in certain contexts, particularly in non-Western contexts (for
example, Kramsch and Sullivan op. cit.) is deemed important in this
process. As Bax (2005: 90) says, teachers are capable of determining the

200 Pham Hoa Hiep

 best way to teach the lesson, ‘so long they are empowered, encouraged and
helped to do so’. But the best lesson is no doubt the one in which teachers
feel satisfied in their aspirations to create the learning atmosphere to teach
the language and the skills they believe are useful for their students.
Revised version received April 2005

Notes Kramsch, C. and P. Sullivan. 1996. ‘Appropriate

1 I understand the argument that within the pedagogy’. ELT Journal 50/3: 199–212.
classroom setting, regardless of E S L or E F L, all Larsen-Freeman, D. 2000. ‘On the appropriateness

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communications/interactions taking place of language teaching methods’ in J. Shaw,
through role plays, games, or simulations are D. Lubeska, and M. Noullet (eds.). Language and
artificial, since they do not take place in the real Development: Partnership and Interaction. Bangkok:
settings, such as the shopping centre or the post Asian Institute of Technology.
office. However, in many E S L classrooms, the Liao, X. 2004. ‘The need for Communicative
need to communicate in English even for Language Teaching in China’. E LT Journal 58/3:
simulations or exercises is real, at least because 270–3.
students from different language backgrounds Nunan, D. 1989. Designing Tasks for the
cannot understand each other unless they use Communicative Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge
English. University Press.
2 All the names of teachers cited in this article are Pennycook, A. 1989. ‘The concept of method,
pseudonyms. interested knowledge, and the politics of language
teaching’. T E S OL Quarterly 23/4: 589–618.
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Applied Linguistics 1/2: 89–112. The author
Brown, H. D. 1994. Principles of Language Learning Pham Hoa Hiep is a lecturer in the Department of
and Teaching. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall English at Hue College of Foreign Languages,
Regents. Vietnam, where he teaches undergraduate and
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Harmondsworth: Penguin. Email: [email protected]

CLT: unity within diversity 201