Communicative Language Teaching purposes to apply the theoretical perspective of the Communication Approach by making communicative competence the goal of language teaching and by acknowledging the interdependence of language and communication. Nevertheless, we will follow our usual way of understanding the theory and associated practices by visiting a class in which a form of Communicative Language Teaching is being practiced.
To do this method, students need knowledge of the linguistic forms, meaning and functions. Communication is a process: knowledge of the forms of language is insufficient. The teacher facilities communication in the classroom. During the activities he acts as an adviser, answering students’ questions and monitoring their performance. He might make note of their errors to be worked on at a later time during more accuracy- based activity. At other times he might be a “communicator” engaging in the communicative activity along with students (Littlewoods 1981). Activity that are truly communicative, according to Morrow (in Johnson and Morrow 1981), have three features in common: information gap, choice, and feedback. In communication, the speaker has a choice of what she will say and how she will say it. True communication is purposeful. A speaker can thus evaluate whether or not his purpose has been achieved based upon the information she receives from his listener. Students interact a great deal with one another. They do this in various configurations: pairs, triads, small groups, and whole groups.
One of basic assumptions of Communicative Language Teaching is that by learning to communicate students will be more motivated to study a foreign language since they will feel they are learning to do something useful with the language. Also, teachers give students an opportunity to express their individuality by having them share their ideas and opinions on a regular basis. Students work with language at the suprasentential or discourse level. They learn about cohesion and coherence. Students work on all four skills from the beginning. Just as an oral communication is seen to take place through negotiation between speaker and listener, so too is meaning thought to be derives from the written word through an interaction between the reader and the writer. About evaluation, a teacher evaluates not only the students’ accuracy, but also their fluency. A teacher can informally evaluate his students’ performance in his role as an adviser or co-communicator. For more formal evaluation, a teacher is likely to use an integrative test which has a real communicative function. In order to students’ writing skill, for instance, a teacher might ask them to write a letter to a friend.
