The Communicative Approach!

The Communicative Approach 

A communicative methodology should be based on the Communicative Approach or Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

What do we teach? We need to give special importance to language functions rather than grammar and vocabulary.

As Jeremy Harmer says in his book The Practice of English Language Teaching (2008) the activities "typically involve students in real or realistic communication, where the accuracy of the language they use is less important than successful achievement of the communicative task they are performing. [...] What matters in these activities is that students should have a desire to communicate something. [...] They should be focused on the content of what they are saying or writing rather than just one language structure. The teacher will not intervene to stop the activity; and the materials he or she relies on will not dictate what specific language forms the students use either"

"The emphasis of CLT is on functional communication, social interaction, and real-life language use. Addressing fluency and accuracy, this approach considers integrated components of communicative competence, including the grammatical, functional, and sociolinguistic. The major tenet of CLT is that language acquisition is achieved through using language communicatively, rather than from repetitious drills that are common in the grammar-based approach." (Pu, Chang 2008)

Activities you can use at class following this approach include:

• Role Play
• Interviews
• Information Gap
• Games
• Language Exchanges
• Surveys
• Pair Work
• Learning by teaching

• Harmer, Jeremy 2008: The Practice of English Language Teaching (4th Edition). Essex: Pearson Longman
• Pu, Chang 2008: "English as a Second Language (ESL) Approaches". Encyclopedia of Bilingual Education. SAGE Publications.