Communicative language teaching: Difference between revisions

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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" />

Already in the late 19th Century, the American educator [[John Dewey]] was writing about learning by doing<ref>1897 My Pedagogic Creed</ref>, and later that learning should be based on the learner's interests and experiences.<ref>1910. How We Think.</ref> In 1963, American psychologist [[David Ausubel]] released his book ''The Psychology of Meaningful Verbal Learning'' calling for a holistic approach to learners teaching through meaningful material. American educator [[Clifford Prator]] published a paper in 1965 calling for teachers to turn from an emphasis on manipulation (drills) towards communication where learners were free to choose their own words. <ref>Prator, Clifford H. "Development of a Manipulation-Communication Scale. NAFSA Studies and Papers." English Language Series 10 (1965).</ref> In 1966, the sociolinguist [[Dell Hymes]] posited the concept of [[communicative competence]] considerably broadening out [[Noam Chomsky]]'s syntactic concept of competence. Also, in 1966, American psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote that learners construct their own understanding of the world based on their experiences and prior knowledge, and teachers should provide scaffolding to promote this.<ref>1966. Toward a Theory of Instruction.</ref> Bruner appears to have been influenced by [[Lev Vygotsky]], a Russian psychologist whose [[zone of proximal development]] is a similar concept.

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" />