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COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

Article  in  English Education English Journal for Teaching and Learning · December 2017
DOI: 10.24952/ee.v5i2.1180

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 54
English Education
Vol. 05 No. 2. JULy 2017

COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

By: Sojuangon Rambe, S.S., M.Pd

ABSTRAK

Communicative Language Teaching merupakan pendekatan pembelajaran

yang merupakan reaksi terhadap metode-metode sebelumnya yang dianggap
tidak komunikatif dalam hal bahan ajar maupun teknik mengajar, terutama
GTM dan ALM yang popular pada masa sebelum 1970an. Dua komponen
yang dirombak oleh CLT adalah bahan ajar yang diganti menjadi bahasa
yang sebenarnya dipakai dalam kehidupan sehari-hari, di samping kegiatan
belajar menjadi kegiatan berbahasa yang dilakukan oleh siswa di dalam
kelas, sebagai pengganti pengajaran dan pembelajaran tata bahasa pada
metode-metode sebelumnya.
Kata Kunci: Communicative, Language, Teaching, Communication, Real
Life

A. BACKGROUND
Historically, CLT originated from the dissatisfaction of the linguist to the
traditional methods which emphasis on grammar: GTM, ALM and SLT, emerged
in 1970s. The centrality of grammar in language teaching (emphasized in these
three methods) was questioned, since it was argued that language ability involved
much more than grammatical competence1. Linguists began to look at language, not
as interlocking sets of grammatical, lexical, and phonological rules, but as a tool of
expressing meaning2. Language was no longer seen as abstract grammatical rules,
but of having applications in social contexts and as such it is not just about
‘grammar’ but also about functions and notions3. Nowadays, it is difficult to
imagine any practitioner, anywhere, arguing against this. Generally stated that the
emergence of CLT signed the major change of the view on language philosophy
from grammar rules to communication rules.

1
Jack C. Richards, Communicative Language Teaching Today, (Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge, 2006), p. 9.
2
David Nunan, Methodology, in David Nunan (Ed): Practical English Language Teaching,
(McGraw Hill: Singapore), 2003), p. 6.
3
H. Jarvis and S.Atsilarat, Shifting Paradigms: from a Communicative to a Context-Based
Approach, (Asian EFL Journal, 2006), p. 3.
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The teaching of language in the previous methods was seen to be error. It

was argued that their practices not quite useful to make students able to
communicate due to the lost of contexts. The students were not learning enough
realistic, whole language, even without appropriate social norms, gestures or
expressions4, because the traditional practices did include information of this kind5.
In short, it is strongly suggested that context must present in teaching of language.
Therefore, to make learners able to communicate in a language, the
advocates of CLT propose that teaching language must be to develop students’
‘Communicative Competence’. Other than defining what language to be targeted in
the classroom, communicative competence suggests the teaching of language
integrated with all the complete components of communication. The common
components of communicative components in the field of language teaching today
are: linguistic, sociocultural, actional, strategic and discourse competence. This
shift requires the teaching of language change from the presentation of grammatical
rules of a language towards performing communication activities in the classroom:
listening, speaking, reading and writing performances. The five components of
communicative competence will be embedded in every performance
communication activities.
The philosophy of CLT was very soon spread and accepted by linguists and
practitioners worldwide. It has been the most dominating paradigm in the world of
language teaching ever since. Even though many other methods emerged at the
same time such as The Silent Way and Suggestopedia got fame at that time, they
soon lost popularity. CLT keeps the most domination in language teaching until
today. The other emerging approaches remaining such as CBI, CBLT, TBLT and
the GBLT are actually those which adopt the same paradigm but take different
directions in developing communication ability in part of students. This is what
Richards identified as ‘The Current Trends in Communicative Language
Teaching’.6 They are grouped upon an umbrella called ‘The Communicative

4
Richards, J. and W.A. Renandya, Methodology in Language Teaching, (Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge, 2002), p. 22.
5
Jack C. Richards, Op. Cit., p. 9.
6
Ibid.
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Approaches’7. Therefore, this paper presents theoretical description of the

communicative language teaching as itself.

B. DISCUSSION
Lexically the term ‘communicative’ is derived from the word
‘communicate’, which means to express ideas, feelings or information from one to
another. Therefore, the addition of affix ‘ive’ changes the verb to be adjective, that
is to make something posses certain characteristic. Accordingly, the term
‘communicative’ should mean ‘to make students communicate’ or ‘to make
students express ideas, feelings or information each other’ in the classroom.
As opposed to the grammar based approaches, in planning language courses
within a communicative paradigm, grammar is no longer the starting point of
language teaching program. It shifts to communication ability covering all
possibilities of situation and purposes that we can encounter in real world; from
daily life to work places, from monolog to dialog, from interpersonal to
transactional communication and so on. Aspects of materials should include factors
which gives meaning to language at the time happening (contexts), besides
provisioned with abilities required to express and to understand language being
used (the communicative competence). Therefore, the goal of language teaching
shifts from mastery of grammar to the development of communicative competence
in part of students. In general term, the goal of CLT is argued to develop students’
communicative competence.
To arrive at the goal, Alexander in Richards requires CLT material
development to cover the following features:
1. As detailed consideration as possible of the purposes for which the learner
wishes to acquire the target language. For example, using English for business
purposes, in the hotel industry of travel.
2. Some idea of the setting in which they will want to use the target language. For
example in office, on an airplane, or in a store.

7
Jack C. Richards and T. Rodgers, Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 2001), p. 233.
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3. The socially defined role the learner will assume in the target language, as well
as the role of their interlocutors. For example as a traveler, as a sales person
talking to a client, or as a student in a school setting.
4. The communicative events in which the learners will participate: everyday
situations, vocational or professional situations, academic situations, and so
on. For example making telephone calls, engaging in casual conversation,
or taking part in a meeting.
5. The language functions involved in those events, or what the learner will
be able to do with or through the language. For example making introductions,
giving explanations, or describing plans.
6. The notions or concepts involved, or what the learner will need to be able
to talk about. For example leisure, finance, history, religion.
7. The skills involved in the "knitting together" of discourse: discourse and
rhetorical skills. For example story telling, giving an effective business
presentation.
8. The variety or varieties of the target language that will be needed, such as
American, Australian, or British English, and the levels in the spoken and
written language which the learners will need to reach.
9. The grammatical content that will be needed.
10. The lexical content or vocabulary that will be needed8
This characterization leads to composing appropriate syllabus in 1970s and
1980s. Richards9 identifies the two major syllabus proposed to advocate CLT in
that era: 1) Skill Based Syllabus which focus on the four communicative skills;
reading, writing, listening and speaking, and breaks each skill down into its
components microskills, and 2) Functional Syllabus which organized according to
the functions the learner should be able to carry out in English, such as expressing
likes and dislikes, greetings, thanking, introducing and giving explanations.
In addition to making the appropriate syllabus, communicative language
teaching encouraged to classroom methodology. The principles derived from the
arguments that learners should learn language through the process of
communicating in it, and that meaningful communication provides better
8
Ibid., p. 10.
9
Ibid., p. 11.
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opportunity to learn than the grammar based approach. Richards summarizes the
principles of CLT at this time as follows:
1. Make real communication the focus of language learning
2. Provide opportunities for learners to experiment and try out what they
know
3. Be tolerant of learners' errors as they indicate that the learner is building
up his or her communicative competence
4. Provide opportunities for learners to develop both accuracy, and fluency
5. Link the different skills such as speaking, reading and listening, together,
since they usually occur together in the real world
6. Let students induce or discover grammar rules10

1. Language Theory
In the view of CLT, language is perceived as communication11, which, in
one side is argued to be attached with all surrounding situations—event,
participants, purposes, location and so on—at the time it happens. Consequently,
the teaching of language should be the teaching of communication provisioned with
contextual elements which influence the way people express and perceive meaning
of the messages.
The other important belief about language upon communicative language
teaching is ‘the language use’ which means that language should be taught and or
used as it is. It is contrast to the other view called ‘language usage’ which means
grammatical language. Advocates of CLT believe that language should be taught in
form which the native speakers use when they communicate in reality. Grammatical
incompleteness rising in the communication is not viewed as mistakes, they are
perceived rather as surface structure resulted by the surrounding contexts keeping
the deeper structure, which is understood by the communication participants. In
spite of the ‘incomplete forms’, language that are used at the situations fulfills the
purpose of message transfer and perception.

10
Ibid., p. 12.
11
Richards and Rodgers, Op. Cit., 159
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2. Learning theory
One of the best known learning theory of CLT is ‘people learn language
best when using it to do things rather than through studying how language works
and practicing rules12’. It signs the reaction to the previous learning practices which
focused on learning grammatical rules but the students failed in oral
communication. An interesting statement relating to this principle is from Brown13,
who reminds that teacher should not expose students to learn grammar too much,
because students are to be English communicator, not grammarians.
A rather comprehensive package of learning theory in CLT is summarized
by Richards and Rodgers14, as follows:
a. Activities that involve real communication promote learning.
b. Activities in which language used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote
learning, and
c. Language that is meaningful to the learners supports the learning process.
Consequently, Richards and Rodgers15 add that learning activities should be
selected according to how well they engage learner in meaningful and authentic
language use (rather than merely mechanical practice of language patterns). They
must involve real communication, have students carry out meaningful tasks and use
meaningful language.

3. Principles
The basic features of CLT was described by Nunan16 (2000: 279), in which
he list five features that are generally accepted by most linguists and practitioners in
their explanation about CLT today. These features are:
a. An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target
language.
b. The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation.

12
Jack C. Richards, Op. Cit., p. 2.
13
Brown, D. H., Teaching By Principles. Prentice Hall Regents: New Jersey, 1994., p. 114.
14
Richards, J. and T. Rodgers, Op. Cit., p. 161.
15
Ibid.
16
David Nunan, Language Teaching Methodology, (Newman: London), p. 279.
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c. The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on the language but
also on the learning process itself.
d. An enhancement of the learner's own personal experiences as important
contributing elements to classroom learning.
e. An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activation outside
the classroom.
Richards17 underlines the core assumptions or variants in practices of CLT as
follows:
a. Second language learning is facilitated when learners are engaged in interaction
and meaningful communication.
b. Effective classroom learning tasks and exercises provide opportunities for
students to negotiate meaning, expand their language resources, notice how
language is used, and take part in meaningful intrapersonal exchange.
c. Meaningful communication results from students processing content that is
relevant, purposeful, interesting and engaging
d. Communication is a holistic process that often calls upon the use of several
language skills or modalities
e. Language learning is facilitated both by activities that involve inductive or
discovery learning of underlying rules of language use and organization, as
well as by those involving language analysis and reflection
f. Language learning is a gradual process that involves creative use of
language and trial and error. Although errors are a normal product of
learning the ultimate goal of learning is to be able to use the new
language both accurately and fluently
g. Learners develop their own routes to language learning, progress at
different rates, and have different needs and motivations for language learning
h. Successful language learning involves the use of effective learning and
communication strategies
i. The role of the teacher in the language classroom is that of a facilitator,
who creates a classroom climate conducive to language learning and provides
opportunities for students to use and practice the language and to reflect on

17
Jack C. Richards, Op. Cit., p. 23.
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language use and language learning

j. The classroom is a community where learners learn through collaboration
and sharing

4. Goal
As having been described above, the goal of CLT is to develop
communicative competence in part of students. There have been a number of
theories about it, but the best known elements of the competence in communication
are as follows:

a. Linguistic competence. It is also commonly acknowledged as grammatical

competence, which concerns with mastery of language elements: grammar,
vocabulary and morphology.
b. Sociocultural competence. It also known as sociolinguistic competence, which
demands the appropriate use of language toward social values and system.
c. Strategic competence. It concerns with strategies which can be used to maintain
communication and or to communicate effectively.
d. Actional competence. It concerns with physical performance of communication
when one does speaking, for example: pronunciation.
e. Discourse competence. It is also known as pragmatic competence, which refers
to shaping language and communicating purposively in different genres, using
cohesion (structural linking) and coherence (meaningful relationship in
language) elements appropriately.
Therefore, every language teaching material is considered to be as means to
develop the five components of communicative competence above. Materials
designed to involve all the elements above in activities that are to be conducted in
the classroom.

5. Techniques and Procedure

Technique for teaching language in CLT is actually open to varieties as far
as they fulfill the CLT principles. However a number of them which are very
common in the classroom summarized from Richards18 as follows:

18
Ibid., p. 14-20
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a. Fluency versus accuracy activities

Fluency activities are those which expose students to use language
naturally by engaging them in meaningful interaction and maintain
comprehensible and ongoing communication despite the limitation in their
communicative competence. To acquire fluency the students are required to
use communication strategies, correct misunderstanding and work to avoid
communication breakdown. While fluency focus on natural production of
language, accuracy activities engage students to use language accurately in
term of grammar and pronunciation.

b. Mechanical, Meaningful and Communicative Practice

1) Mechanical practices are those which expose students to use language
successfully although without understanding of it. This is the common
practice used in ALM or Army Method.
2) Meaningful practices engage students to communicate by involving
meaningful choices to a contextual set of communication. At this activity,
a teacher is required to create the context and task of communication, from
which students explore language to express ideas.
3) Communicative practices are those which engage students to use language
freely from their own source and their own real life situation and
experience. At this activity the teacher is expected to use students’
knowledge and experience as integral part of learning activities.
At the time of learning in the classroom, experts recommend that those
three kinds of activities conducted after a brief grammatical explanation, in the
order of mechanical-meaningful-communicative practice.

c. Information Gap Activities

This activity is derived from reality fact in which people often ask for
information from other people, which they do not have. This condition is
imitated into classroom practice by giving students two or more package of
related information, which one students possess different package from the
other. Communication occurs as they are requesting information from the
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other. This activity usually is facilitated by the use of media, such as list,
picture or series of pictures.

d. Jigsaw activities
This activities demand students to be divided into groups. Every group
has certain piece of information. Every group is given task to share information
they have to the other groups. The process of interaction becomes like jigsaw,
at the time they transact information.

e. Task completion activities

This activity make student complete a task, such as puzzles, games, map-
reading, by using their own language resource.

f. Information gathering activities

At this activity, students are required to conduct surveys, interviews to
collect information.

b. Opinion sharing
This is the activity in which students are engage to compare values,
opinions, beliefs. Example, the students are given task to make order of
important qualities to choose someone to be wife or husband.

c. Information transfer activities

This activity engage students to take information that is presented in
one form, and represent in a different form. For example, students are given
task to read a travel experience. After that, they are asked to draw a map of it.

d. Reasoning gap-activities
This activity demands students to derive some new information from
source information through process of inference, practical reasoning, and
conclusion and so on. For example, working out a teacher’s timetable on the
basis of a given class timetable.
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e. Role plays
This is the activity in which students are assigned roles and improvise a
scene or exchange based on given information or clues. For example, one
student is given a task to be a doctor with knowledge about certain disease and
the symptoms. The other student is given a task to be a patient with certain
symptoms to be talked to the doctor.
Procedure of teaching in CLT is not package as we can find in the previous
methods. Many procedures may work. How they are designed, merely depend on
the nature of communication activities taken from the real life into practices in the
classroom. Different communication activity may need different technique and
procedure to make it happen. Last but not least, to apply the recommended
practices or teacher-created practices in the classroom, Richards19 identifies a
number or characteristics that they should posses, as follows:
a. They seek to develop students' communicative competence through linking
grammatical development to the ability to communicate. Hence grammar
is not taught in isolation but often arises out of a communicative task,
thus creating a need for specific items of grammar. Students might carry
out a task and then reflect on some of the linguistic characteristics of their
performance.
b. They create the need for communication, interaction, and negotiation of
meaning through the use of activities such as problem solving, information
sharing, and role play.
c. They provide opportunities for both inductive as well as deductive learning
of grammar.
d. They make use of content that connects to students' lives and interests
e. They allow students to personalize learning by applying what they have
learned to their own lives.
f. Classroom materials typically make use of authentic texts to create interest
and to provide valid models of language.

19
Ibid., p. 26.
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6. Material development
Development of material in CLT is very widely open as far as they fulfill
the principles. However, the shape and or media used to make the communication
activities happen in the classroom will be very closely bound with the topic and
teaching techniques to be applied in the classroom. At this point of view, a teacher
must understand the nature of every communication activity, techniques of teaching
and to make relevant material and media to perform in the classroom. A simple
description of the elements is as follows:

Techniques Media Topics

- Role Play Task sheets for different roles Any topic

- Interview Interview guide for interviewer Any topic
- Information gap Task sheets with missing information Any topic
- Information transfer Reading, listening, video materials Any topic
- Games Depends on game type Any topic

7. Evaluation
Evaluation in CLT focus on covers students’ mastery of language and their
ability in communication. Since the purpose of teaching is different according to
the lessons and proficiency levels, the emphasis and elements of evaluation can be
vary broadly. For example: for beginner level, the focus of development is on the
fluency rather than accuracy; it should demand the teacher not to take too much
attention to grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary choices while they do
communication orally or written while the teacher scores the performance. In
contrast, the focus will be different if the teacher is to evaluate students in
intermediate levels.

C. CONCLUSION
Communicative Language Teaching is a reaction to the GTM and ALM
which was considered uncommunicative in term of language and teaching
techniques in 1970s. Linguists and practitioners at that age began to view language
as what people actually use in real life communication other than what is written in
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grammar books. This view was actuated in the slogan ‘language as

communication’, which recommend the teaching of language directed to provide
real life language use in the society.
Teaching techniques for classroom use of language was also required to
make students use the language in real communication. This principle lead to the
creation of language use teaching techniques which can make students use the
language features for real communicative purposes, such as role play, games,
information gap, and other teacher-created techniques. Thus the evaluation focus
should be graded from fluency before accuracy.

BIBLOGRAPHY

Brown, D. H. Teaching By Principles. Prentice Hall Regents: New Jersey, 1994.

Jarvis, H and S. Atsilarat. Shifting Paradigms: from a Communicative to a Context-
Based Approach. Asian EFL Journal, 2006.
Nunan, D. Language Teaching Methodology. Newman: London, 2000.
Nunan, David. Methodology. In David Nunan (Ed). Practical English Language
Teaching. McGraw Hill: Singapore, 2003.

Richards, J. and T. Rodgers. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching.

Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2001.
Richards, J. and W.A. Renandya. Methodology in Language Teaching. Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 2002.

Richards, Jack. Communicative Language Teaching Today. Cambridge University

Press: Cambridge, 2006.

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