Communicative language teaching (CLT), or the communicative approach, is an approach to language teaching that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of study.
Let's compare two ways we could teach the same lesson:
PRESS 2a Lesson 1: How to use regular verbs
Non-communicative method:
Goal: The lesson focuses on how to conjugate and use regular past-tense verbs.
Focus: The lesson is centered around the vocabulary and grammar in the textbook. It's not customized to the student's interests.
Grammar: The grammar point is the main feature of the lesson and is taught to the student even if they already know it.
Authentic materials: The audio script for the lesson was written by the teacher to model the grammar / vocabulary. Homework is conjugation practice of the grammar point.
Communicative method:
Goal: The lesson focuses on how to talk about what the student did last week.
Focus: The lesson is centered around the student. The topic and content is relevant to them. They can talk about things they actually did.
Grammar: The grammar point is not the main feature of the lesson and is only touched on when an error comes up. Any grammar point that is useful to the goal of the lesson can be introduced if necessary.
Authentic materials: Realia is used to model the target language e.g. a facebook post about what someone did last week. Homework is also authentic. e.g Writing a post about what you did last week.
A key aspect of the communicative approach is communicative competence.
This is neatly summed up by the linguist Hymes’s statement, “There are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless.”
communicative competence is commonly defined as:
grammatical competence: words and rules
sociolinguistic competence: appropriateness
strategic competence: appropriate use of communication strategies
This means in order to have meaningful interaction, the student needs to know the words and grammar necessary to convey their meaning, knowledge of how to structure what they are going to say logically, and what is an isn't appropriate to say.
Let's look at how we use the communicative approach at Rosetta Stone Learning Centers.
