1. Definition
1.1. 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.
2. Goals
2.1. Communicative language teaching sets as its goal the teaching of communicative competence.
3. Background/History
3.1. Phase 1: traditional approaches (up to the late 1960s) Phase 2: classic communicative language teaching (1970s to 1990s) Phase 3: current communicative language teaching (late 1990s to the present)
4. Classroom Activities in Communicative Language Teaching
4.1. 1. Accuracy Versus Fluency Activities
4.1.1. Activities focusing on accuracy:
4.1.1.1. • Reflect classroom use of language • Focus on the formation of correct examples of language • Practice language out of context • Practice small samples of language • Do not require meaningful communication • Control choice of language
4.1.1.2. Activities focusing on fluency:
4.1.1.2.1. • Reflect natural use of language • Focus on achieving communication • Require meaningful use of language • Require the use of communication strategies • Produce language that may not be predictable • Seek to link language use to context
4.2. 2. Mechanical, Meaningful, and Communicative Practice
4.2.1. Mechanical practice refers to a controlled practice activity which students can successfully carry out without necessarily understanding the language they are using.
4.2.2. Meaningful practice refers to an activity where language control is still provided but where students are required to make meaningful choices when carrying out practice.
4.2.3. Communicative practice refers to activities where practice in using language within a real communicative context is the focus, where real information is exchanged, and where the language used is not totally predictable.
4.3. 3. Information-Gap Activities
4.3.1. This refers to the fact that in real communication, people normally communicate in order to get information they do not possess.
4.4. Other Activity Types in CLT
4.4.1. • Task-completion activities: puzzles, games, map-reading, and other kinds of classroom tasks in which the focus is on using one’s language resources to complete a task. • Information-gathering activities: student-conducted surveys, interviews, and searches in which students are required to use their linguistic resources to collect information. • Opinion-sharing activities: activities in which students compare values, opinions, or beliefs. • Information-transfer activities: These require learners to take information that is presented in one form, and represent it in a different form. • Reasoning-gap activities: These involve deriving some new information from given information through the process of inference, practical reasoning, etc. • Role plays: activities in which students are assigned roles and improvise a scene or exchange based on given information or clues.
5. Current Trends in Communicative Language Teaching
5.1. Communicative language teaching today refers to a set of generally agreed upon principles that can be applied in different ways, depending on the teaching context, the age of the learners, their level, their learning goals, and so on.
6. Process-Based CLT Approaches – Content-Based Instruction and Task-Based Instruction
6.1. 1. Content-Based Instruction
6.1.1. Krahnke (1987, 65) defines CBI as “the teaching of content or information in the language being learned with little or no direct or explicit effort to teaching the language itself separately from the content being taught.”
6.2. 2. Task-Based Instruction
6.2.1. Task-based instruction, or TBI (also known as task-based teaching), is another methodology that can be regarded as developing from a focus on classroom processes