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Language teaching was originally considered a cognitive matter that mainly involved memorization. It was later thought instead to be socio-cognitive: language can be learned through the process of social interaction. Today, however, the dominant technique in teaching any language is communicative language teaching (CLT).<ref name=":8" />
ItAmerican waseducator [[NoamClifford Chomsky]]'sPrator theoriespublished a paper in the1965 1960s,calling focusingfor onteachers competenceto andturn performancefrom inan languageemphasis learning,on thatmanipulation gave(drills) risetowards tocommunication communicativewhere languagelearners teaching,were butfree theto conceptualchoose basistheir forown CLTwords. was<ref>Prator, laidClifford inH. the"Development 1970sof bya theManipulation-Communication linguistsScale. MichaelNAFSA Halliday,Studies whoand studiedPapers." howEnglish languageLanguage functionsSeries are10 expressed(1965).</ref> throughIn grammar1966, andthe sociolinguist [[Dell Hymes,]] who introducedposited the ideaconcept of a wider [[communicative competence]] insteadconsiderably ofbroadening out [[Noam Chomsky]]'s narrowersyntactic linguisticconcept of competence. Later in the 1970's British linguist [[M.A.K. Halliday]] studied how language functions are expressed through grammar.<ref name=":8">Littlewood, William. ''Communicative language teaching: An introduction''. Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 541-545</ref> The rise of CLT in the 1970s and the early 1980s was partly in response to the lack of success with traditional language teaching methods and partly by the increase in demand for language learning. In Europe, the advent of the [[European Common Market]], an economic predecessor to the [[European Union]], led to migration in Europe and an increased number of people who needed to learn a foreign language for work or personal reasons. Meanwhile, more children were given the opportunity to learn foreign languages in school, as the number of secondary schools offering languages rose worldwide as part of a general trend of curriculum-broadening and modernization, with foreign-language study no longer confined to the elite academies. In Britain, the introduction of [[comprehensive schools]], which offered foreign-language study to all children, rather than to the select few of the elite [[grammar schools]], greatly increased the demand for language learning.<ref name=":0" />
The increased demand included many learners who struggled with traditional methods such as [[grammar translation]], which involves the direct translation of sentence after sentence as a way to learn the language. Those methods assumed that students aimed to master the target language and were willing to study for years before expecting to use the language in real life. However, those assumptions were challenged by adult learners, who were busy with work, and by schoolchildren who were less academically gifted and so could not devote years to learning before they could use the language. Educators realized that to motivate those students an approach with a more immediate reward was necessary,<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=Communicative Language Teaching in Practice|last=Mitchell|first=Rosamond|publisher=Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research|year=1988|isbn=978-0-948003-87-5|___location=Great Britain|pages=23–24, 64–68}}</ref> and they began to use CLT, an approach that emphasizes communicative ability and yielded better results.<ref>Richards, Jack C. ''Communicative language teaching today''. SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, 2005.</ref>
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