The origins of Communicative Language Teaching (henceforth CLT) can be traced back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when several influential applied linguists, writing in journals and speaking at conferences, argued that language learners, despite their often rigorous study of language as a system (essentially grammar and vocabulary) and extensive practice in language structures (through e.g. audio-lingual language teaching), were unable to use language effectively in real-world communicative situations. Since this time, a central aspect of CLT has been how to understand the concept of com- munication and how it should inform language teaching. For this reason, the present chapter explores how CLT might be understood when considering communication from a number of different perspectives.
While communication is arguably universal, what forms of communication we engage in, how we understand communication, how it is affected by changes in technology and society, and how it is intertwined with context and cultures is more complex. Here we will approach this complexity from three perspectives: commu- nication as competence (generally regarded as the aim of CLT), communication as process (sometimes used to inform communicative methodology) and communication in context (addressing concerns about the ‘Western’ origins of CLT). Exploring CLT in this way is not meant to generate specific advice about communicative teaching techniques, or in any other way ‘tell’ teachers what or what not to do in the classroom. Rather, by exploring communication from these different perspectives, the chapter hopes to promote teachers’ own reflection on whether and how CLT may be appropriate in their own particular practice.
Describing communication as the goal of language teaching has, since the early 1970s, involved the development of increasingly refined definitions of communicative com- petence. Hence, understanding communicative competence is one way of understanding CLT.
Prior to the 1970s, the dominant view of language was structural, that is, language as consisting of discrete items (vocabulary) and rules (grammar). In the 1970s, a con- fluence of factors allowed applied linguistics to coalesce on a new view of language as communicative competence. Notable influences included Halliday’s (1973) work on the semantic potential of language, Hymes’ (1972) exploration of the relationship between language as a system and communication in social situations, and Wilkins’ (1976) development of the analytical notional/functional syllabus. Another important factor was the development of (British) applied linguistics as a field gen- erating ideas distinct from earlier structural and Chomskian theories. These various influences culminated in Canale and Swain’s (1980) widely used ‘standard’ definition
Communication
as competence
CONTENTS Communication as competence 53 Communication as process 55 Communication in context 57 Conclusion 58 Acknowledgements 58 References 58of communicative competence. According to these authors, and considering also Canale’s (1983) later revision, communicative competence includes not only gram- matical competence (in the Chomskian sense), it also includes sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competence. This means that speakers draw on a range of competencies when using language for communication.
One challenge to the usefulness of any definition of communicative competence is that it attempts to represent ‘in a few abstract constructs the complex realities of language use across an unforeseeable range of variation and situational contingency’ (Lee 2006: 351). The range of variability extends not only to the real-time unfolding of situations, but also to variation in patterns of communication across and within both small cultures (cohesive groups of people in particular societal settings) and large national cultures. Another challenge to the definitions of communicative competence is that they are usually formulated to represent communicative competence as something quite fixed. This means that the aim of language teaching is fixed as well (because communicative competence is the aim of language teaching). In reality, societies and technologies constantly change, and ways of communicating therefore keep changing. Hence, the aim of language teaching is something that may constantly change. Recent research into intercultural and computer-mediated communication has established particularly good examples of how communication is changing along with changes in society and technology. A final challenge to defining an aim for language teaching is that learners, across contexts and within any single classroom, may have widely different, and in some cases no clearly defined, future communicative needs. Some forms of language teaching, such as English for Specific Purposes, establish future needs directly through Needs Analyses (West 1994), commonly used to design courses for relatively homogeneous groups of students. However, teachers of English for general purposes, such as secondary school teachers, might find it harder to identify the future communicative needs of their students. These teachers may feel that they are teaching English for no particular purpose (Abbott 1980), that students need English to pass examinations that test mainly grammatical and lexical knowledge (Hu 2002), or that students’ future uses of English are for social mobility rather than any real commu- nicative purposes (Yong and Campbell 1995).
The real-world dynamics that challenge a stable or context-free definition of com- municative competence have given rise to a number of alternative views. For example, Alptekin (2002) argues that Canale and Swain’s native speaker grammatical competence is an inappropriate aim in contexts where students are more likely to use English with other non-native speakers. Alptekin suggests that a more appropriate aim is the kind of linguistic competence developed by successful learners of English. Smith (2002) proposes that exploring patterns of communication in social networks can help define communicative competence for groups of individuals. Moreover, Leung suggests that we should go back to the ethnographic bases of Hymes’ (1972) original formulation of communicative competence, arguing that language educators should ‘re-engage with the socially dynamic uses of English and continually re-work the contextual meaning of the concept’ (Leung 2005: 138).
Finally, communicative competence, whether the standard definition or a more recent one, is not a recipe for what should happen in classrooms. It may be possible to 54 Juup Stelma
argue that a de-contextualized focus on grammar and vocabulary is unlikely to result in learners developing sociolinguistic, discourse, strategic and/or intercultural com- municative competence. However, focusing exclusively on language use in context, without any focus on grammar, has more recently also been challenged (cf. Swain 1995). A more cautious interpretation, then, is that because communicative competence includes grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic (and if you like inter- cultural, computer-mediated and other) competence, language teaching should focus on all of these things. However, definitions of communicative competence do not help us decide how to focus on these things in actual classroom activity. As a perspective informing CLT, communicative competence may give us a sense of ‘where’ we are going; it does not tell us ‘how’ we get there.
To understand CLT methodology, or what should be happening in classrooms, the CLT literature has, more or less overtly, turned to models of the communication process. The implicitly held position is that you learn to use language through communicating. Hence, understanding what is involved in the process of communication is a second way of understanding CLT.
Maybe the most well-known model of the communication process is the linear model sometimes associated with the work of Claude Shannon, a US-based commu- nication theorist active in the 1940s and 1950s. Broadly speaking, the Shannon model deals with the transmission of messages, with one person sending information through some sort of channel of communication and another person receiving this information. This early notion of the communication process continues to have tremendous influence on how many of us understand language teaching. For example, productive and receptive language skills mirror the model’s focus on sending (producing) and receiving messages. We talk about (the) oral (channel of) commu- nication with speaking as the productive and listening as the receptive skill, and (the) written (channel of) communication with writing as the productive and reading as the receptive skill. More particular to CLT, the communicative nature of various information transfer activities suggested in the literature can be understood using this transmission model. Take Johnson’s (1982) five principles for communicative exercises: the information transfer principle, the information gap principle, the jigsaw principle, the task dependency principle and the correction for content principle. The first principle, that communicative exercises should encourage transfer of information from one participant to another, as well as the second principle (because it motivates information transfer), correspond directly to the transmission model. However, Johnson’s principles also illustrate at what point the basic transmission model is no longer useful. The jigsaw principle, which states that information should flow not only from one learner to another, but also both ways, corresponds to an interactive model of the communication process. An interactive model sees communication as a two- way process between individuals that share a common environment. Finally, Johnson’s correction for content principle implies that communication has to do with the meaning of messages rather than their form, further challenging the simple notion of transmitting information.
There are, then, potential correspondences between models of the communication Communicative language teaching 55