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What is the focus of the communicative language teaching approach?
Language teaching has passed through many phases of evolution and development. A new awareness in the field of language teaching-learning came up with the introduction of every new method or approach.
Unlike other methods, discussed earlier, is interpreted differently by different experts. There are a lot of controversies, among teachers about what we mean by the Communicative Method. The name emerged out of diverse language and language learning principles, which form a basis for a wide variety of classroom procedures and techniques. These principles are commonly discussed under one umbrella term, Communicative Language Teaching or CLT (terms like notional functional and functional approach are also used to denote the approach).
The origins of CLT can be traced to the dissatisfaction teachers felt with the earlier approaches to language teaching and learning- The Direct Method, Structural-Situational, etc. – because all of them focused on the product rather than the processes involved in learning a foreign language. Noam Chomsky, the prominent American linguist, in his classic book Syntactic Structures (1957) criticised the linguistic theories based on behavioural psychological principles for their failure to account for the creativity and uniqueness of language that enabled the speaker to create novel sentences which he might have never heard or used before. However, Chomsky, too, did not account for other characteristics of language – the functional and communicative potential – which were a part of the communicative proficiency of the learner. Language is not structured alone but it enables the user to do things in social settings and contexts. [n Britain, scholars like Christopher Candlin and Henry Widdowson, taking a cue from the work of John Firth, MAK Halliday, Dell Hymes, John Gumperz and William Labov and the philosophical works of Jane Austin and John Searle, advocated a functional approach to language learning that gradually gained currency and came to be known as CLT.
Another very important development that contributed to the emergence of CLT was the fast changing educational scenario in Europe.
European nations had come under one European Common Market and with the increasing interdependence of these nations there emerged the need to teach the adults the major European languages, thus, laying the foundation for a different approach to foreign language teaching.
The Council of Europe at Strasbourg, a regional. organisation for cultural and educational cooperation constituted a committee of experts whose job was to explore the possibility of developing a course that would satisfy the linguistic needs of the adults in member countries of the European Common Market. The committee studied the needs of European learners and proposed a language course, in 1972, which was based on a unit-credit system, a system in which learning tasks are broken into units or portions each of which corresponds to the needs of the learner. The course, took an opposite view of language learning, from that of earlier linguistic approaches. Here, the focus was on what the learner needed to understand and express through the target language, not on the accumulation of grammatical items and structures. For this purpose, two types of meanings were identified: notional categories such as time, sequence, location, frequency, etc and categories of communicative function such as request, denial, permission, offer, etc. These categories were later on
-documented, revised, expanded and published in the booking form titled Notional Syllabuses by one of the experts in the Council of Europe, DA Wilkins. This became pivotal in ushering in a new era in language teaching and learning in that not only were the new principles rapidly accepted by British teachers but also by textbook writers and curriculum designers. The foundations of Communicative Language Teaching or CLT were, thus, laid. Since then, many specialists (Henry Widdowson, Christopher Candlin, Christopher Brumfit, and Keith Johnson, to name a few) have suggested innovative techniques and procedures that now form the core of this approach. Most of them see it as an approach rather than a method.
