Communicative Language Teaching Method (CLT)

Background:
The origins of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) are found in the
changes in the British language teaching tradition in the late 1960s.
Situational Language Teaching (SLT) was the major approach to
teaching English as a FL.
Language was taught by practicing basic structures in meaningful
situation-based activities.
British applied linguists rejected the theoretical assumptions underlying
SLL because the focus on language teaching was the mastery of
structures rather than on communicative proficiency.
Scholars who advocated this view of language: British functional linguist
Halliday, American sociolinguist Dell Hymes and work in philosophy J.
Austin.
There was a need in Europe to teach adults the major languages of the
European Common market, and in 1971 a group of experts began to
investigate the possibility of developing language courses, in which
learning tasks are broken into units.
In 1972, D. A. Wilkins proposed a functional or communicative syllabus
for language teaching. His contribution was an analysis of the
communicative meanings that a language learner needs to understand
and express.
Approach:
Theory Of Language
The Communicative Approach in language teaching starts from a theory
of language as communication.
The goal of language teaching is what Hymes (1972) referred to as
communicative competence. Hymes coined this term in order to
contrast a communicative view of language and Chomskys theory of
competence.
In Hymes view, a person who acquires communicative competence
acquires both knowledge and ability for language use with respect.
This theory of what knowing a language entails offers a much more
comprehensive view than Chomskys view of competence, which deals
primarily with abstract grammatical knowledge.
Another linguistic theory of CLT is Hallidays functional account of
language use. Halliday elaborated a powerful theory of the functions of
language. He described seven basic functions that language performs for
children learning their first language.
Theory of Learning:
Little has been written about learning theory in contrast to the amount of
that has been written about CLT literature.
Elements of an underlying learning theory can be discerned in some CLT
practices as follows:
One element is the communication principle: activities that involve real
communication promote learning.
Another element is the task principle: activities in which language is used
for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning.
A third element is the meaningfulness principle: language that is
meaningful to the learner supports the learning process.
Objectives:
The following are levels of objectives in a communicative approach:
An integrative and content level (language as a means of expression)
A linguistic and instrumental level (language as a semiotic system
and an object of learning)
An affective level of interpersonal relationships and conduct
(language as a means of expressing values and judgments about
oneself and others)
A level of individual learning needs (remedial learning based on error
analysis)
A general educational level of extra-linguistic goals (language
learning within school curriculum.
Syllabus:
One of the first syllabus models to be proposed was described as a
notional syllabus (Wilkins, 1976), which specified the semantic-
grammatical categories and the categories of communicative function
that learners need to express.
The Council of Europe expanded and developed this into a syllabus that
included the following:
description of the objectives of FL courses,
situations in which they might typically use an L2 (travel,
business),
topic they might need to talk about (education, shopping),
functions they needed language for (requesting information,
expressing agreement & disagreement),
The notions made use of in communication (time, frequency,
duration), as well as vocabulary and grammar needed.

Learner roles:
The learner is a negotiator (between himself, the learning process, and
the object of learning). The implication is that the learner should
contribute as much as he gains, and learn in an interdependent way.
Students are expected to interact primarily with each other rather than
with the teacher.
Students give and receive information.
The Role Of Instructional Materials:
A wide variety of materials have been used to support communicative
approaches to language teaching.
CLT view materials as a way of influencing the quality of classroom
interaction and language use.
The primary role of materials is to promote communicative language use.
There are three kinds of material currently used in CLT: text-based, task-
based, and realia.
Conclusions:
CLT is best considered an approach rather than a method.
Approach refers to a diverse set of principles that reflect a
communicative view of language and language learning used to support
a variety of classroom procedures.
CLT has passed through a number of different phases to apply its
principles to different dimensions of the teaching/learning process.
The first phase was the need to develop a syllabus that was compatible
with the notion of communicative competence. This led to proposals of
syllabuses in terms of notions (a context in which people communicate)
and functions (a specific purpose for a speaker in a given context).
The second phase, CLT focused on procedures for identifying learners
needs and this resulted in proposals to make needs analysis an essential
component of communicative methodology.
In the third phase, CLT focused on the kinds of classroom activities that
could be used as the basis of a communicative methodology, such as
group work, task-work, and information-gap activities.