Communicative Language Teaching
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is an approach to language teaching that gained traction in the 1980s. CLT emphasises the importance of all four language skills and aims to achieve "communicative competence" (rather than linguistic competence) through considerable learner interaction and communication of "real" meaning. It is an approach that tends to promote fluency over accuracy, the functional over the structural, and authentic materials over fabricated materials. Communication is seen as both the goal and the means. CLT is sometimes called "the Communicative Approach", and this may indeed be a better term since it is more a philosophy than a specific method. But whether called CLT or CA, the pervading idea is real, functional communication.
- Weak CLT lowers the learner into the shallow end and allows overt teaching of functions and form followed by practice ("learning to talk")
- Strong CLT throws the learner in at the deep end and expects that practice of the language alone will lead to learning ("talking to learn")
Typical features of a CLT lesson:
- target language/some mother tongue
- learner/teacher-centred
- presentation by teacher of new functional language, vocab or structure
- practice by learners moving from controlled to spontaneous
- pair-work, group-work
- worksheets and activity cards
- functional language exercises
- "real-life" interactive activities including information gap, role-play
- plenty of actual listening, speaking, reading and (homework?) writing
- games
- authentic materials
- realia