A Communicative Approach to Language Teaching - Origins and Development

The origins of Communicative Language Teaching are to be found in the changes in the British language teaching dating from the late 1960s. Until then, the Situational Language Teaching represented the major British approach to teaching English as a foreign language. In the Situational Language Teaching, language was taught by practising basic structures in meaningful situation based activities. The main characteristics of the approach were as follows.Language teaching begins with the spoken language, the material being presented orally before being presented in the written form. The target language is the language of the classroom and the new language items are introduced and practiced situationally. Vocabulary selection procedures are followed in order to ensure that an essential general service vocabulary is covered while items of grammar are graded following the principle simple forms should be taught before the complex ones. As to reading and writing they are introduced once a sufficient lexical and grammatical basis has been established.By the end of the 1960s it was clear that the situational approach was worn out and that there was no future in language teaching by predicting language on the basis of situational events. Two important points of view led to a new approach to language teaching. Noam Chomsky in his 'Syntactic Structures' pointed out that the standard structural theories of language were incapable of accounting for the fundamental characteristics of language, that is the creativity and uniqueness of individual sentences. On the other hand, British applied linguists emphasized another fundamental dimension of language, that was inadequately addressed in the current approaches to language teaching at that time, that is the functional and communicative potential of language. They realised the need to focus in the language teaching on the communicative proficiency rather than on the mere mastery of structures.With the changing educational realities in Europe and the increasing interdependence of European countries, there came the need to teach adults the major languages of the European Common Market and the Council of Europe. In this new background, the British linguist D. A. Wilkins proposed a functional or communicative definition of the language that could serve as a basis developing communicative syllabuses in language teaching. His contribution to language teaching was a deep analysis of the communicative meanings that a language learner needs to understand and express, in other words the systems of meanings that lay behind the communicative uses of the language. He described two types of meanings: one of notional categories including concepts such as time, sequence, quantity, location, frequency and another one for categories of communicative function including requests, denials, offers, complaints.The Communicative Language Teaching, also called the Notional or Functional Approach, is seen rather as an approach than a method in language teaching that aims to make the communicative competence the goal of language teaching and to develop procedures for the teaching of the four skills that acknowledge the interdependence of language and communication. The Communicative Language Teaching is more comprehensive than any other approaches or methods; it is different in form and status. There is no single or authority on it, nor any single model that is universally accepted as authoritative.For some, Communicative Language Teaching means just a little more than an integration of grammatical and functional teaching. In this respect Little wood in his 'Communicative Language Teaching' in 1981 states that one of the most characteristic features of communicative language teaching is that it pays systematic attention to functional as well as to structural aspects of the language. …