Communication-oriented language teaching: Where are we now? Where do we go from here?

Abstract

In its early days, CLT was widely promoted as suitable for all contexts, but many questions have since been raised about what it really means and what versions of it (if any) are suited to specific learning situations. Experiences in Asia, where educational traditions and current realities often contrast strongly with those where CLT originated, have provided a major impetus for this questioning and the process has been reinforced by developments in the wider context, such as the postmethod perspective in language teaching and the decline of centre-to-periphery conceptions of modernization. CLT now serves not so much as a label for a specific approach as an umbrella term to describe all approaches that aim to develop communicative competence in personally meaningful ways. It also provides a framework for defining issues that research and exploratory practice need to address in the years ahead.