COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

Goals of the teacher To facilitate and create opportunities for

authentic communication in the target
language
To guide and support students
To provide meaningful contexts for language
use
To foster a learner-centered and interactive
classroom environment
Role of the teacher Act as a facilitator and guide rather than a
lecturer
Create communicative activities and tasks
that encourage interaction
Monitor and provide feedback on students’
language use
Help students develop strategies for effective
communication
Role of the students Active participants
Engange in communicative activities
Collaborate with peers to achieve
communicative goals
Use the language for authentic purposes
Characteristics of the teaching/learning Focus on real communication and using the
process language to convey meaning
Use the language creatively to solve
communication challenges
Authentic materials and tasks integrated into
the curriculum
Errors are a natural part of the learning
process
Nature of students vs interaction Students are seen as individuals with unique
language needs and backgrounds
Interaction is essential for language learning,
it allows them to negotiate meaning, clarify
misunderstandings and work to avoid
communication breakdowns, also practice
language in context
Feelings of the students Positive and supportive environment
Success in communication is celebrated
Students are encouraged to take risks using
the language
Area of language emphasized 4 skills
Vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation in
the context of communicative activities
Evaluation Observation of students’ participation in
communicative tasks, portfolios of their
work, presentation and self-assessments.
Teacher responds to students’ errors Natural part of the process
Corrective feedback in a way that does not
discourage the student from communication
Correction focused on help to understand
 and correct one’s errors.

The development of CLT

There are two interacting sources of influence that shape the field of language teaching, one
comes from outside the profession and reflects the changing status of English in the world
(there is increasing demand worldwide for language programs that deliver the foreign language
skills and competencies needed by todays’ global citizens and demand from governments for
more effective approaches to the preparation of language teachers. At the same time there has
often been a perception that language teaching policies and practices are not providing an
adequate response to the problem.
The second source of change is internally initiated, it reflects the language teaching profession
gradually evolving a changed understanding of its own essential knowledge base and
associated instructional practices through the efforts of applied linguistics, specialists and
teachers in the field of second language teaching and teacher education.
CLT was the result of a questioning of the assumptions and practices associated with
Situational Language Teaching and the change of educational realities in Europe in the 1960s
and 1970s. The need to develop alternative methods of language teaching was considered a
high priority.

Versions of CLT

o Wilkins: He prepared a preliminary document analyzing the communicative meanings

that a language learner needs to understand and express. He attempted to
demonstrate the systems of meanings that lay behind the communicative uses of
language. He described two types of meanings: notional categories (concepts such as
time, sequence, quantity, location, frequency) and categories of communicative
function (requests, denials, offers, complaints)
o Both American and British proponents: described CLT as an approach that aimed to
make communicative competence the goal of language teaching and develop
procedures for the teaching of the four language skills that acknowledge the
independence of language and communication. Language and communication are
interdependent in the sense that language must serve the purpose of communicating
the speaker’s objectives.
o Howatt (1984) distinguished between a strong and a weak version of CLT, the weak
version stressed the importance of providing learners with opportunities to use their
English for communicative purposes and attempted to integrate such activities into a
wider program of language teaching while the strong version advanced the claim that
language is acquired through communication by stimulating the development of the
language system itself.

There are some more but all versions have in common that CLT is a theory of language teaching
that starts from a communicative language use -a focus on achieving a communicative purpose
as opposed to a control of structure- and that seeks to translate this into a design for an
instructional system.
Theory of language
Starts from a functional theory of language -focusing on language as a means of
communication-. The goal of language teaching is to develop what Hymes referred to as
communicative competence.
Characteristics:
o Language is a system for the expression of meaning
o Absent of infrequent correction of errors
o The primary function of language is to allow interaction and communication
o The structure of language reflects its functional and communicative uses
o The primary units of language are not just its grammatical ands structural features but
categories of functional and communicative meaning as exemplified in discourse.
o Communicative competence entails knowing how to use language of r a range of
different purposes and functions as well as the dimensions of language knowledge:
- Knowing how to vary use of language according to the setting and the participants
(knowing when to use formal and informal speech)
- Kowing how to produce and understand different types of texts (narratives,
reports, interviews, conversations)
- Knowing how to maintain communication despite having limitations in one’s
language knowledge (using different kinds of communication strategies)
Authors:
o Hymes: linguistic theory needed to be seen as a part of a more general theory
incorporating communication and culture, it was a definition of what a speaker needs
in order to be communicatively competent in speech community.
In contrast to Chomsky whose linguistic theory was to characterize the abstract abilities
speakers possess that enable them to produce grammatically correct sentences in a
language.
o Hallydays: theory of the functions of language. He described seven basics functions
that language performs for children learning their first language:
- Instrumental function (using language to get things)
- Regulatory function (using language to control the behavior of others)
- The interactional function (using language to create interaction with others)
- Personal function (using language to express personal feelings and meanings)
- Heuristic function (using language to learn and to discover)
- Imaginative function (using language to create a world of the imagination)
- Representational function (using language to communicate information)
o Henry Widdowson: presented a view of the relationship between linguistic systems
and their communicative values in text and discourse. His focus was a practical one, as
opposed to a purely philosophical one and emphasized the learner’s use of speech acts
or functions for a communicative purpose.
o Canale and Swain: four dimensions of communicative competence:
- Grammatical competence (linguistic competence. Domain of the grammatical and
lexical capacity)
- Sociolinguistic competence (understanding of the social context in which
communication takes place)
 - Discourse competence (interpretation of individual message elements in terms of
their interconnectedness and of how meaning is represented in relationship to the
entire discourse or text)
- Strategic competence (coping strategies that communicator employs to initiate,
terminate, maintain, repair and direct communication)

Theory of learning
o Three main elements:
- Communication principle: activities that involve real communication promote
learning
- Task principle: activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks
to promote learning.
- Meaningfulness principle: language that is meaningful to the learner supports the
learning process. Learning activities are selected according to how well they
engage the learner in meaningful and authentic language use.
o Savignon (1983): surveyed second language acquisition research as a source for
learning theories and considers the role of linguistic, social, cognitive and individual
variables in language acquisition.
o Johnson and Littlewood (1984): proposed an alternative learning theory. A skill learning
model of learning, the acquisition of communicative competence in language is an
example of skill development.
o Language learning is seen to result from:
- Interaction between the learner and uses of the language
- Collaborative creation of meaning
- Creating meaningful and purposeful interaction through language
- Negotiation of meaning as the learner and his or her interlocutor arrive at
understanding.
- Learning through attending to the feedback learners get when they use the
language.
- Paying attention to the language one hears and trying to incorporate new forms
into one’s developing communicative competence.
- Trying out and experimenting with different wats of saying things
- Learning as social mediation between the learner and another during which
socially acquired knowledge becomes internal to the learner.
- Learning facilitated through scaffolding by an expert or fellow learner.
- Learning though collaborative dialogue centering on structured cooperative tasks.

Design

Objectives in courses and materials may relate to very general language learning goals or to
those linked to learners with very specific needs, depending on this, objectives will reflect the
type of syllabus framework used or seek to operationalize the notion of communicative
competence into more specific descriptions of learning outcomes. In recent years objectives for
communicative courses are often linked to the learning outcomes described in the common
European framework of reference.

In the case of courses developed for learners with more specific needs, objectives will be
specific to the contexts of teaching and learning. These needs may be in the domains of
listening, speaking, reading or writing, each of which can be approached from a communicative
perspective.

The syllabus:

- The notional-functional syllabus: it specified the semantic-grammatical categories

and the categories of communicative function that learners need to express. The
Council of Europe expanded and developed it including descriptions of the
objectives of foreign language courses for European adults, the situations in which
they might typically need to use a foreign language (e.g. travel, business), the
topics they might need to talk about (e.g. personal identification, education,
shopping), the functions they needed language for (eg., describing something,
requesting information, expressing agreement and disagreement), the notions
made use of in communication (e.g., time, frequency, duration), as well as the
vocabulary and grammar needed.
- Other syllabus proposals: The only form of syllabus which is compatible with and
can support communicational teaching seems to be a purely procedural one -
which lists, in more or less detail, the types of tasks to be attempted in the
classroom and suggests an order of complexity for tasks of the same kind. This
approach to a syllabus has been developed in Task-Based Language Teaching -
which many see as an extension of the principles of CLT.
- English for specific purposes: Advocates of CLT also recognized that many learners
needed English in order to use it in specific occupational or educational settings.
For such learners it would be more efficient to teach them the specific kinds of
language and communicative skills needed for particular roles (e.g., that of nurse,
engineer, + flight attendant, pilot, biologist, etc.) rather than just to concentrate on
more and more general English. This led to the process of needs analysis focused
on determining the particular characteristics of a language when it is used for
specific rather than general purposes.

Types of learning and teaching activities

Rethinking of classroom teaching methodology. It was argued that learners learn a language
through the process of communicating in it, and that communication that is meaningful to the
learner provides a better opportunity for learning than a grammar-based approach.

- Focus on real communication.

- Provide opportunities for learners to experiment and try out what they know.
- Be tolerant of learners' errors as they indicate that the learner is building up his or
her communicative competence.
- Provide opportunities for learners to develop both accuracy and fluency.
- Link the different skills such as speaking, reading, and listening together, since they
usually occur together in the real world.
- Let students induce or discover grammar rules.

Use of activities that required learners to negotiate meaning -processes speakers use to arrive
at a shared understanding of meaning- and to interact meaningfully, and that developed
fluency in language. Focus on completing tasks that are mediated through language or involve
negotiation of information and information-sharing.
Teachers were recommended to use a balance of fluency activities and accuracy and to use
accuracy activities to support fluency activities.

Instead of a predominance of teacher-fronted teaching, teachers were encouraged to make

greater use of small-group work.

Common activity types in CLT:

- Jig-saw (class divided in groups and each one has part of the information needed
to complete an activity)
- Task-completion (puzzles, games, map-reading and other kinds of classroom tasks
in which the focus on using one’s language resources to complete a task)
- Opinion sharing (students compare values, opinions and beliefs)
- Information-transfer (taking information that is presented in one form and
representing int in a different one)
- Reasoning gap (deviring some new information from given information through
processs of inference, practical reasoning, etc.)
- Role plays (students are assigned roles and improvise a scene or exchange based
on given information or clues)

Learner roles

o Active participants in communication

o Negotiator between the self, the learning process and the object of learning
o Expected to interact with their peers and become comfortable with listening to each
ither rather than relying on the teacher for a model
o Greater degree of responsibility for their own learning

o Emphasis on interaction, negotiation of meaning, and real life situations.

o Learners engage in pair or group activities to practice language context.

Teacher roles

o Facilitator and monitor

o To act as an independent participant within the learning-teaching group
o Researcher and learner with much to contribute in terms of appropriate knowledge
and abilities.
o Encourages and facilitates communication among learners
o Provides opportunities for authentic language use

Instructional materials roles:

o Promoting communicative language use, focus on real world usage

o Task based materials to promote communication: exercise habdbooks, cue cards,
activity cards, pair communication practice materials and student interaction practice
booklets
o Realia based materials: Authentic/from life materials like newspapers, videos and real
life situations
o Technology-supported materials: interaction in the modes of reading and writing than
in listening and speaking. Chat rooms, discussion boards, teleconferencing
 Characteristics:
o Increased participation on the part of the students
o Increased access o to comprehensible input
o Increased opportunities for negotiation of meaning
o Group-based learning since CLT created a context for interaction
o The creation of a social learning environment that promotes language learning

Procedure:

o Preparation: teachers select authentic materials and design tasks that simulate real
world language use
o Introduction: introduce the topic and the task. Creating a context for communication
o Task performance: learners engage in activities that require communication such as
information gap taks or problem solving tasks
o Feedback and analysis: reflect on performance, identify areas for improvement and
receive feedback from peers or the teacher
o Language focys: address specific language points that emerged naturally during the
task

Criticisms of CLT:

o It promotes fossilization
o It reflects native-speakerism
o It’s not applicable in different cultures of learning
o It reflects a western-based top-down approach to innovation
o Insufficient focus on grammar: some crisitics argue that CLT may not adequately
address the explicit teaching of grammar structures
o Limited applicability in exam settings: CLT may face challenges in preparing learners for
standardized language exams that have a more traditional format

Conclusion:

CLT is considered an approach rather than a method and refers to a diverse set of principles
that reflect a communicative view of language learning and that can be used to support a wide
variety of classroom procedures:

- Learners learn a language through using it to communicate

- Authentic and meaningful communication should be the goal of classroom
activities
- Fluency is an important dimension of communication
- Communication involved the integration of different language skills
- Learning is a process of creative construction and involves trial and error

CLT appealed to those who sought a more humanistic approach to the interactive processes of
communication perceived priority and it has passed through a number of different phases:

- Teaching/learning phase: the primary concern was the need to develop a syllabus
that was compatible with the notion of communicative competence, it led to
proposals for the organization of syllabuses in terms of notions and functions
rather than grammatical structures.
 - Second phase: focused on procedures for identifying learners’ needs and it
resulted in proposals to make needs analysis an essential component of
communicative methodology.
- Third pase: focused on the kinds of classroom activities that could be used as the
basus of communicative methofdology, like group work- task work and information
gap activities.
o CLT emphasizes communication as a central goal in language learning
o It seeks to prepare learners for real life situations and interactions
o While it has received praise for its learner-centered approach, it has also faced criticism
for its perceived limitations in certain areas such as grammar instruction