CLT: Communicative Language Teaching

Basically, the term of CLT covers a variety of approaches that all focus on helping the students to communicate meaningfully in a target language. Communicative language teaching is being developed nowadays. CLT is now being applied in many non-English countries where English is treated as a foreign language because the worldwide increasing demand for good communication in English. It is in line with what Professor Jack C. Richards states in his book Communicative Language Teaching Today that “…the ever growing need for good communication skills in English has created a huge demand for English teaching around the world, as millions of people today want to improve their command of English or ensure that their children achieve a good command

They are (1) classroom goals are focused on all of the components of communicative competence and not restricted to grammatical or linguistic competence, (2) language techniques are designed to engage learners in the pragmatic, authentic, functional use of language for meaningful purposes so that organizational language forms are not the central focus, but rather, aspects of language that enable the learner to accomplish those purposes, (3) fluency and accuracy are seen as complementary principles underlying communicative techniques in which at times fluency may have to take on more importance than accuracy in order to keep learners meaningfully engaged in language use, and (4) in the communicative classroom, students ultimately have to use the language productively and receptively, in unrehearsed contexts (Brown, 2007:241). Thus, EFL teachers have been encouraged to implement CLT to develop students’ English abilities appropriately in context due to the awareness of English being the most widely spoken language in the world and used in various areas such as technology, science, and

The communication activities in CLT is basically intended as a preparation for survival in the real world. This underlines what Clarke and Silberstein (1977) viewed that “classroom activities should parallel the ‘real world’ as closely as possible. Since language is a tool of communication, methods and materials should concentrate on the message and not the medium. The purposes of reading should be the same in class as they are in real life.” It is clear that the teachers should be able to provide the exposure to real language, appropriate methods and materials when they are applying the communicative language teaching. That is why the teaching of certain English skills should be based on the purpose of each skill and directed to the use of English in everyday life. The main reason of reading, for example, is to obtain the information being needed from the text and that information should be beneficial to the students’ real