English Language Teaching in its Social Context

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EFL METHODOLOGY 155Communicative Language TeachingCommunicative Language Teaching (CLT) can be said to be the current dominantmethodology. Even in countries where CLT has not been adopted in the state sector, mostministries of education appear to be moving in its direction. Many of its practitioners,however, would espouse it on intuitive rather than theoretical grounds. It has become anumbrella term which covers a wide range of classroom practices. Many teacher trainingcourses teach the classroom practices without explaining the underlying principles, whichhas led to a mistrust of theory among many teachers. However, it is the theoretical basisof CLT which is original; many of the classroom practices with which it is associated arefound elsewhere (see Figure 8.3 for examplc).If we look at the questions asked at the beginning of this chapter, we can answer thefirst, about the desired outcome, by saying that for CLT the desired outcome is that thelearner can communicate successfully in the target language in real situations, rather thanhave a conscious understanding of the rules governing that language. (It should beremembered that this was also the outcome sought by Audio-Lingualism.)Our second question looked at the model of language. For CLT the model of languageis one which considers language as it is used rather than as an abstract system.The conceptof‘communicative competence’ is the key to this (Widdowson 1978, Hymes 1971, Canaleand Swain 1980). A theoretical model of language was developed to include ideas abouthow language is actually used to communicate in real life situations. Chomsky had alreadyproposed a distinction between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’, the former being whatthe speaker knows and the latter being what the speaker actually does, with both seen inpurely linguistic terms. This idea was developed to include ideas of appropriacy and thesocial use of language, giving rise to the concept of ‘communicative competence’. In orderto define communicative competence, Hymes proposed a four point model concerned withwhat a speaker both knows and is able to use (Hymes 1971). The points of this model areas follows: what is formally possible in a language, what is feasible given the means ofimplementation, what is appropriate given the context, and lastly, what is in fact done.In an environment where the existing orthodoxy of Audio-Lingualism had beendiscredited, the concept of communicative competence helped shape new models oflanguage teaching and learning. CLT has been described as:an approach that aims to (a) make communicative competence the goal of languageteaching and (b) develop procedures for the teaching of the four language skills thatacknowledge the interdependence of language and communication. (Richards andRogers 1986: 66)These basic principles have been applied in a variety of ways. However, Richards and Rogershave isolated three key elements which they feel characterise CLT classroom practice andthe theory of learning underlying it:One such element might be described as the communication principle: Activities thatpromote real communication promote learning. A second element is the taskprinciple: Activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful taskspromote learning. A third element is the meaningfulness principle: Language thatis meaningful to the learner supports the lcarning process. (Richards and Rogers1986: 72)