Communicative Language Teaching: State of the Art

This paper looks briefly at the beginnings of what has come to be known as communicative language teaching (CLT), then discusses current issues and promising avenues of inquiry. The perspective is international. CLT is seen to be not a British, European, or U.S. phenomenon, but rather an international effort to respond to the needs of present-day language learners in many different contexts of learning. Not long ago, when American structuralist linguistics and behaviorist psychology were the prevailing influences in language teaching methods and materials, second/foreign language teachers talked about communication in terms of language skills, seen to be four: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. These skill categories were widely accepted and provided a ready-made framework for methods manuals, learner course materials, and teacher education programs. They were collectively described as active skills, speaking and writing, and passive skills, reading and listening. Today, listeners and readers are no longer regarded as passive. They are seen as active participants in the negotiation of meaning. Schemata, expectancies, and top-down/bottom-up processing are among the terms now used to capture the necessarily complex, interactive nature of this negotiation. Yet full and widespread understanding of communication as negotiation has been hindered by the terms that came to replace the earlier active/passive dichotomy. The skills needed to engage in speaking and writing activities were described subsequently as productive, whereas listening and reading skills were said to be receptive. While certainly an improvement over the earlier active/passive representation, the terms productive and receptive fall short of capturing the interactive nature of communication. Lost in this productive/receptive, message sending/message receiving representation is the collaborative nature of meaning making. Meaning