Communicative Language Teaching: An Overview

Communicative language teaching (CLT) as a systematic approach to organizing language instruction has been around for over thirty years. Since its beginnings, it has developed in a number of new directions and spawned several new movements. The purpose of this chapter is to survey the development of CLT, particularly in its relationship to Russian-language instruction in North America and to outline new trends in its development that can be productively applied to teaching Russian.

From a theoretical perspective, CLT rests on the notion that language learning can happen while learners are engaged in exchanging meaningful communication in the target language. Once learners are put into a context where they need to exchange information to accomplish some specific goal (e.g., tell something about themselves, order a meal in a restaurant, buy a train ticket), they will use the language resources that they have available to them and interact with speakers of the target language. If/when they encounter incomprehensible utterances from non-native learners, target language speakers will engage in a natural negotiation of meaning to ascertain the non-native learners' communicative purpose. “Good” CLT places learners in “real world” communicative contexts, provides learners with language input (models of how to accomplish communicative tasks) and then allows learners to perform communicative tasks, negotiating meaning when communication breaks down. From this negotiation of meaning, non-native learners receive feedback which can help them adjust their expression to match the norms of the target language more closely (Allwright1979; Richards and Rodgers 1986; Lee and VanPatten 1995).