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What is Communicative Language Teaching?
Communicative language teaching is an approach to teaching foreign languages that focuses on giving students realistic situations to practice. The theory of the approach is that this is far more similar to how people learn their first language, by using it to communicate their needs, wants, and thoughts to others for a purpose.
Sometimes called “the second childhood” this approach is based on learning in ways that are more natural for the brain rather than studying language in an abstract way through grammar construction rules and worksheets. While this approach to language learning can be tons of fun, it can often require a lot of planning and work from the teacher for the situations to be realistic enough, especially when learners are total beginners.
However, research shows that if teachers can at least occasionally implement activities that utilize the communicative language teaching approach, students can greatly improve their speaking abilities. Though beneficial, communicative language teaching is not always the best approach.
This article will give a solid overview of the approach, cover a new literature review that was just released this year, and give teachers some example activities they could try in their classrooms.
Connections to Total Physical Response
Communicative Language Teaching is often confused with Total Physical Response, and for good reason. Both theories are focused on making learning activities more realistic for learners so that they are better prepared to use their skills in the real world.
However, total physical response is a much broader theory that is focused on activating sensory systems in the brain during learning. Communicative language teaching looks to make language learning more realistic through ensuring the parts of the brain involved in communication, such as Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are active and working while students learn.
So, total physical response is an approach that can be implemented in any subject area while communicative language teaching is mostly meant to be applied in language learning classes. Teachers wanting more details on total physical response can refer to this earlier article on the topic.
Research on Communicative Language Teaching
A new literature review published just this year found that communicative language teaching was very effective for teaching speaking skills. (Gharfar, et al.)However, it was significantly less effective at improving students’ writing abilities.
Literature reviews do not just look at the data from a single study, but look at all research answering a specific question. Across the studies, it was clear that communicative language teaching is more effective than other approaches at building students speaking abilities.
Despite communicative language teaching being highly effective for teaching speaking, in other domains the data was less clear. Many studies found strong increases in listening and reading while using communicative language teaching approaches, but results showed that it was no more effective than other approaches at teaching writing skills and was occasionally shown to be clearly less effective for writing.
So the research is quite clear on how communicative language teaching can improve students’ language abilities. While it may be very effective for speaking, it should not be used exclusively as students will still need other approaches to target their writing abilities.
The brain learns best by being given a variety of examples and approaches. Rather than looking for a single “best” approach, communicative language teaching approaches should be implemented in classes along with other approaches to help students see how to use language in a wide variety of situations.
Examples of Communicative Language Teaching
So what would a communicative language teaching activity look like? There are a wide variety of activities that teachers could implement and creativity is the only real ceiling here.
However there are a few basic and well known activities that definitely can fall under the umbrella of communicative language teaching. Though not an exhaustive list, it should help teachers to understand the basic principles of the approach and then be able to design classroom activities that work for them and their students.
Roleplays
By far the most common, roleplays can be a fantastic way for students to practice communicating with one another in a realistic setting. However, it is important to design roleplays in such a way that students are required to actually successfully communicate something to their speaking partner rather than simply being a reading exercise where each student simply reads their lines without understanding or focusing on what their partner has communicated to them.
Rather than giving students a complete roleplay dialogue, give students basic building block phrases that require students to add information that their partner must respond appropriately to. For example, teachers could give students templates like “I would like a ___, please” rather than “I would like a glass of water, please” and “I would like a cup of coffee, please.”.
Then the teacher could give the students either real glasses of water and cups of coffee or pictures of them. Then students can ask each other for the drinks and their partner must respond by handing them the appropriate beverage.
This is obviously just a very simple example, but sometimes even a very simple roleplay can be really effective, especially for beginner students. Roleplays are good as the teacher can simply model them at the front in the target language and does not need to rely on explaining complex grammar points in the students’ mother tongues.
By leaving blanks and giving students many options that could fill those blanks, they actually have to make choices to communicate that their partner must fully listen to in order to be able to respond appropriately. This ensures that students are actually communicating with one another rather than simply reading their lines, which is exactly what the research suggests is most effective about communicative language teaching.
Roleplays are often quite fun for students as well as long as they have a partner that they feel comfortable with. Though initially it is important that students feel safe to do roleplays with a partner they know will be supportive and friendly, eventually it is good practice to encourage a wide variety of partnerships to accustom students to a wide variety of voices and accents.
Think-Pair-Share
Another fairly common practice in many classrooms is the Think-Pair-Share activity where students first think about their answer to a question posed by the teacher, discuss with a partner and then share with the whole class. This activity too must be planned in a specific way in order to be truly effective as a communicative language teaching approach.
Rather than having students share their own answers to the questions, students can be asked to share their partners’ responses. For example, if students are asked “What is your favorite movie?” they can think about their answer, and tell their partner their favorite movie, but then share their partner’s answer rather than their own.
This requires them to listen and then report accurately what they have heard. The complexity can easily be increased by having students give a summary of the plot to their partner and their partner must share the plot with the class.
Teachers can give a wide variety of prompts that suits the day’s topic or grammar, but as long as the prompts require students to listen in detail to their partner and report back what they have heard accurately, then it will reap the benefits of the communicative language teaching approach.
Challenges and Games
Another way to give students realistic situations is by giving them challenges or games to play together. For advanced students, the sky’s the limit for the types of games they could play together.
One that is great fun for advanced classes is called “Mafia” or in Europe it is called “Werewolf”. In this game students all receive different roles at random and must work together to win the game. The rules are too complicated to fully explain here but here is a link to a full description.
For less advanced students there are still fun games they can play. Easy games like Go Fish are great for students to have to listen to the numbers requested and respond appropriately. Ambitious teachers could even create their own custom Go Fish decks with their own flash cards so students can practice other vocabulary words.
This article can’t list all of the possible games a language class could use, but teachers can easily Google, ask their colleagues, and use their imagination to come up with games that will work for their contexts, students, and lesson objectives.
Conclusion
In conclusion, communicative language teaching is a versatile and beneficial approach to learning that language teachers should implement mindfully into their curriculum. It is most effective at teaching speaking, and least effective for writing practice.
The most important takeaway of communicative language teaching is that students should need to successfully utilize their target language with another person in order to elicit an appropriate response. This is exactly how we learn our first language, by interacting with our families and friends in order to express our needs, wants, and thoughts.
If teachers can implement activities that utilize communicative language teaching, their students will be better prepared for real life speaking situations much more readily than those taught using traditional methods such as rote memorization or worksheets. However, these traditional methods still have their purpose and can be particularly useful for students needing to prepare for tests or focus on their formal writing abilities.
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References
Ghafar, Zanyar Nathir, et al. “Impact of Communicative Language Teaching Method on Students’ Speaking and Listening Skills: A Review Article.” International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, vol. 6, no. 1, 2023, pp. 54–60., https://doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2023.6.1.8.
