Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach

The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach is a set of learning and teaching principles. However, CLT quickly took on the nomenclature of an EFL methodology. CLT started from the late 1970s and was prominent in late 1970s and early 1980s (Hunter, 2009; Karunakaran & Babu, 2013) “as a reaction against” (Hunter, 2009, p. 22) the Audio-lingual method. The primary goal of CLT is to develop communicative competence, to move “beyond grammatical and discourse elements in communication” and probe the “nature of social, cultural, and pragmatic features of language” (Brown, 1994b, p. 77).

The aim of the CLT approach is to develop learners’ foreign language, or second language, communicative competence; and it includes procedures for teaching of the four language skills known as listening, speaking, reading and writing. The CLT approach encourages activities involving real communication to be incorporated into meaningful tasks. The term communicative competence was first coined by Hymes (1966, 1972) and later refined by specialists such as Canale and Swain (1980). For Hymes (1966, 1972), the acquisition of communicative competence meant not only

29 the acquisition of the knowledge about linguistic rules and also the ability to apply these rules to use language appropriately. Thus linguistic skills and communicative abilities should be seen distinct in language teaching (Widdowson, 1978). Canale and Swain (1980) developed the meaning of the communicative competence, defining the term of the communicative competence as the relationship and interaction between grammatical competence and sociolinguistic competence. They proposed that the communicative competence was:

[…] one in which there is a synthesis of knowledge of basic grammatical principles, knowledge of how language is used in social contexts to perform communicative functions, and knowledge of how utterances and communicative functions can be combined according to the principles of discourse. (Canale & Swain, 1980, p. 20)

In 1983, Canale modified the definition of the term communicative competence. For him, communicative competence encompassed four components: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence:

 Grammatical competence refers to knowledge of the rules of morphology,

syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, lexical items, and phonology “to determine and express accurately the literal meaning of utterances”(Canale & Swain, 1980, p. 30).

30 produce and understand language within a particular social context” (Hoekje & Williams, 1992, p. 250).

 Discourse competence refers to how to integrate grammatical competence and sociolinguistic competence to “produce and interpret cohesive and coherent discourse” (Hoekje & Williams, 1992, p. 254).

 Strategic competence is “described by Canale as the mastery of verbal and

nonverbal strategies that can either be used to compensate for deficiencies in other areas of competence or to increase communicative effectiveness in general” (Hoekje & Williams, 1992, p. 257).

Another feature of the CLT approach is the communicative syllabus (Richards & Rodgers, 2001). The CLT approach has a functional and notional syllabus in many European countries, rather than the more traditional categories of grammar and vocabulary. Notional categories include concepts such as time, location, frequency, and quantity; and functional categories include communicative acts such as offers, complaints, denials, and requests.

In a CLT classroom, a foreign language, or second language, teacher is expected to be a needs analyst, a counsellor and a group processes manager. The teacher is expected to analyse students’ needs in teaching and learning processes; respond to students’

needs; facilitate and organise classroom communication and communication activities; and act as an independent participant within the learning-teaching group. A CLT

31 classroom is student-centred; a student is a negotiator between himself or herself, the learning processes and the object of learning. A student has to be an inter-actor, interacting not only with the teacher but more frequently with all the other students. A student should be a speaker rather than a listener in the CLT approach, one who receives and give information.

The CLT approach has made language learners more enthusiastic about speaking out about what they want to express; and it has changed the education from the traditional master-servant relationship into a harmonious interaction between teachers and students. By applying pair work and group work to make classroom activities more motivating and meaningful, students can learn from hearing the language used by other learners; students can speak more than in a traditional teacher-centred language classroom; students can be more activated as the teaching content has become more meaningful for them; and finally they can increasingly develop their foreign language fluency.

However, the CLT approach was criticised for having a number of disadvantages (Richards & Rodgers, 2001). First, it is hard for the teacher to monitor and correct students’ errors, especially in classrooms with a large number of students. In the CLT

approach, students are allowed to make mistakes. However, they need corrections from teachers to help improve their language proficiency. If too much attention is given to activities among students, rather than interactions between teachers and

32 students, students can not immediately get corrections from their teachers. Secondly, low level language learners often find it difficult to participate in classroom activities. Understanding between learners and teachers, as well as among learners, is a must. However, it is hard for low level learners to understand classroom activities and then express themselves in pair work or group work if they have limited vocabulary and language skills. Finally, not all teachers can meet the requirements in the CLT approach. In this teaching method, a foreign language or a second language teacher should first be a very knowledgeable person in both the students’ first language and

the target language. This is an unrealistic expectation. Furthermore, the teacher should have a good monitoring ability during the teaching processes so that the teacher can correct students’ errors when needed. In large classes this is also an unrealistic

expectation. Moreover, a foreign language teacher should try to make the teaching content creative and motivating in order that students become eager to practise in the target language.

Although the CLT approach gained widespread acceptance in the area of language teaching, and it is still used in current language teaching, it has been criticised by researchers. Questions have been raised with regard to its applicability to the teaching of languages, such as whether the CLT approach can be applied at all levels in a language program, or whether it is equally suited to ESL and EFL situations (Richards & Rodgers, 2001).

33 The language teaching methods discussed above each represents a combination of teaching beliefs and has focused on one or several specific issues in teaching practices, therefore it is inevitable that such methods have inherent drawbacks. Motivated and inspired to develop new methods which would be more effective, specialists have been working on the new teaching methods for foreign language or second language teaching from the 1960s to the present. Some of these new methods are well known in the history of foreign language or second language teaching method development. In addition, some methods are still widely applied in practice today. In the next section, some of these methods are introduced, they include the Total Physical Response (TPR) method (Asher, 1977), the Silent Way method (Gattegno, 1972), the Community Language Learning (CLL) method (Curran, 1972), and Language Immersion method (Cummins, 1983, 2007).

Paralleling the CLT approach was a collection of other EFL teaching and learning methods: the Total Physical Response (TPR), the Silent Way, Community Language Learning (CLC) and the Language Immersion methods. These will be briefly covered in the next sections.