Abstract
The late 1970s witnessed the emergence of a widespread movement that expressed its reaction against the approaches and methods which focused too much on the teaching of discrete items. That was clearly stated by applied linguists, teachers and educators who virtually all contended that traditional methods which used translation and systematic grammatical analysis left the language learners little time to practice the spoken language and to enhance their communicative abilities. As a direct outcome of such reaction, a concern developed to make foreign language teaching, not least English “communicative”. Communicative Language Teaching, henceforth CLT, has attracted a worldwide interest. Regrettably, seldom is testing processed “communicatively”; most Algerian EFL teachers prefer to cling tenaciously to the teach-to-the-test approach “principles”. This preference is closely related to the notion of “achievement” which means nothing more than giving the opportunity to the learner to score well on standardized tests and high-stakes exams. This dimension indicates the extent to which the teach-to-the-test approach acts as the “sword of Damocles” hanging over ELT in Algeria converting EFL keep-pace learners into set-the-pace swots.
Highlights
Algeria was one of the pioneers in implementing CLT, little was done to prepare the schools for the necessary changes and to provide the appropriate conditions required by the communicative approach
The communicative approach has always been controversial in Algerian educational institutions in the sense that it challenges the traditional conceptions of good teaching and learning, i.e., fluency at the expense of accuracy
The shift from using English language teaching materials imported from Britain to using home-made ELT textbooks is an indication of the processes of localization that come along the communicative approach (Tam & Weiss, 2004)
Summary
Algeria was one of the pioneers in implementing CLT, little was done to prepare the schools for the necessary changes and to provide the appropriate conditions required by the communicative approach. In the 1980s, CLT became a buzz term and a cliché which was used here and there rightly and wrongly, most of the time, with no precise perception in the principles it embodied in popular literature and common parlance among EFL teachers This is another way of saying that this approach to language teaching has become so over-used that it has begun to lose its meaning. A related point worth noting here is that originally, the term “communicative competence” was used to refer to what a speaker needs to know in order to communicate effectively in culturally significant situations (Hymes, 1974) It has become the rallying call of CLT. The Council of Europe (2001, p. 9) defines it as “a person’s ability to act in a foreign language in a linguistically, socio-linguistically and pragmatically appropriate way.”
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