Communicative Language Teaching

1. Classroom Activities in Communicative Language Teaching

1.1. Accuracy Versus Fluency Activities

1.2. Mechanical, Meaningful, and Communicative Practice

1.3. Information-Gap Activities

1.4. Jigsaw activities

1.5. Other Activity Types in CLT

1.6. Emphasis on Pair and Group Work

1.7. The Push for Authenticity

2. What Is Communicative Language Teaching?

2.1. 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.

2.2. Communicative language teaching sets as its goal the teaching of communicative competence

2.3. 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

2.4. With CLT 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.

2.5. Learners now had to participate in classroom activities that were based on a cooperative rather than individualistic approach to learning

3. The Background to CLT

3.1. Language teaching has seen many changes in ideas about syllabus design and methodology in the last 50 years, and CLT prompted a rethinking of approaches to syllabus design and methodology.

3.1.1. Traditional Approaches (up to the late 1960s)

3.1.1.1. 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.

3.1.2. Classic Communicative Language Teaching (1970s to 1990s)

3.1.2.1. The notion of communicative competence was developed within the discipline of linguistics and appealed to many within the language teaching profession, who argued that communicative competence, and not simply grammatical competence, should be the goal of language teaching

3.1.3. current communicative language teaching (late 1990s to the present)