On Communicative Language Teaching

Abstract

A communicative approach to language teaching involves the negotiation of meaning between speaker and listener or between author and reader. Meaning must be at the center of all communicative exchanges; indeed, it is impossible to communicate without meaning. Unfortunately, some foreign language instructors today continue to emphasize teaching and testing the linguistic features of language,^ such as grammatical structures and lexical items, often with little regard for their students' desire to express themselves in the language. Fortunately, many more instructors are more interested in helping students to acquire skills for using linguistic knowledge to express their inmdlvidual ideas, feelings and beliefs. At all levels of communicative language teaching, students need a great deal of exposure to the foreign language presented in contexts that are linguistically accurate and culturally appropriate. Teaching language in authentic contexts in the classroom should approximate as closely as possible language as it is used by native speakers outside of the classroom. One responsibility and challenge of instructors is, therefore, to create learning conditions that offer students opportunities to use the foreign language in a wide variety of realistic, communicative situations. For example, students could listen to radio announcements, watch movies and videos, read newspapers and magazines, write personal letters, and interact with visiting native speakers. Teaching language contextually subsumes teaching language for communicative purposes. Most community college students who enroll in a foreign language course want to use the language for specific purposes outside of the classroom. For example, in one study more than 91 % of 849 community college students of French, German and Spanish indicated that they had enrolled in their language course to travel abroad (Hendrickson andDenk, 1988). In addition, these students expressed a strong desire to communicate their most immediate needs: to greet and meet people, to express likes and dislikes, to ask for information, to express appreciation and satisfaction, and to make, accept and decline invitations. On the other hand, the students were least interested in using language to make threats, to declare solemn statements, to correct others, to propose toasts, and to talk extensively about the weather. From a strictly business standpoint, our students are our customers and as such, we must be aware of their communicative needs, their personal interests, their individual learning styles, and their levels of proficiency in the foreign language. Learning a foreign language is a dynamic, interactive process that involves creative expression on a personal level. Our students themselves must be at the core of this interactive process. They need to participate in communicative activities that are interesting to them, challenge their linguistic abilities, capture their imagination, and motivate them to continue acquiring and using the foreign language beyond the textbook and the classroom. Instructors should encourage students' creativity in a positive, nonthreatening environment by providing them with interesting, diverse and abundant communicative activities, particularly those designed for working in pairs and small groups. For example, depending on their level of proficiency in the foreign language, students could interview each other, describe their friends and family, narrate past experiences, role play scenes of cross-cultural conflict, play communicative language games, and tell interesting stories in the foreign language.1 Instructors should also encourage students to express their ideas without fear of making the inevitable errors that result from spontaneous communicative exchanges. For example, while students are participating in oral proficiency activities, instructors could walk around the classroom, listen to students' conversations, and make mental or written note of the kinds of errors their students produce. As a follow-up homework assignment, instructors could prepare a paragraph or a series of contextualized sentences containing a specific number of the most frequent errors that students made, then ask them to find and correct the errors. In the next class session, instructors could go over the answers of this assignment. As facilitators of the language acquisition