Communicative Language Teaching | Objectives and Characteristics

Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative language teaching has been one of the best and most popular methods of learning a second language throughout the 20th century. Global communication is increasing day by day and, in some case,s rapidly.

In this modern era, we can easily connect from one country to another and even from one culture to another. The third industrial revolution made our lives easy and super fast, and we currently live in a period of globalization.

Language plays a vital role in global communication, especially the English language. That’s why teachers and researchers have been searching for the best ways of teaching a second or foreign language.

The concept of communicative language teaching originated in the United Kingdom in the early 70s. In the late 60s, British linguists analyzed the importance of communicative language teaching rather than grammatical, lexical, and phonological rules.

Objectives

CLT is deployed to develop communicative proficiency, and it has some primary objectives to improve communication skills. Some of the objectives of communicative language teaching are given below:

• CLT improves communicative proficiency in all skills, including reading, writing listening and speaking.
• Gradually, it focuses on the grammatical, discourse, functional, and sociolinguistic of communicative competence.
• It is used to engage the learners in the pragmatic and functional use of language.
• It enhances the productivity of the language in scientific ways.
• CLT usually encourages the learners to engage in linguistic interaction with real-life objectives.
• Fluency is the first priority rather than accuracy.

Characteristics of Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative language teaching is a learner-centered method mainly focusing on language learning through communication. The significant characteristics of communicative language teaching are given below:

• CLT emphasizes engaging the learners in real-life situations in the classroom so that they can understand how to communicate in the real world.
• It gives the importance of the necessity of the learners and attempts to explain it.
• In communicative language teaching, errors are considered a natural phenomenon.
• Normally, CLT focuses on the learners’ fluency rather than the grammar’s accuracy, and learners acquire their accuracy gradually and naturally.
• CLT also believes that communication is the fundamental objective of language,e and the learners need to develop all the skills of language (reading, writing, listening, and speaking).
• It offers the opportunity to join in teacher-learner and learner-learner interaction in the classroom.
• It focuses on the use of techniques that encourage the learners to participate in the natural environment, such as group and pair work.
• CLT agrees with the perception of individual work.
• In communicative language teaching, grammar is the second option for the learners, and they discover and internalize the grammatical rules and functions themselves.
• It uses authentic language materials so that the students find the similarity between the classroom activities and the real world.

Classroom activities in Communicative Language Teaching

The classroom activities of communicative language teaching (CLT) are given below:

• Learners interact with other people through pair and group work.
• Students are encouraged to concentrate on communication.
• Reading and writing may start on the first day.
• Interaction between teacher and students should be applicable.
• Teachers motivate the students so that they can easily interact with them.
• The teaching methods must be learner-centered.
• Students should be engaged in several activities so that they can be able to generate new ideas.

Teachers role in CLT

Teachers play a very significant role in CLT. However, the teacher’s roles in CLT is given below:

• Teachers remain in the classroom to facilitate the communication process among all participants. They also encourage learners to participate in various activities.
• As a professor, a teacher answers students’ questions and also cares about their performance and activities.
• The teacher also plays the role of a communicator in the learning process. He or she also cooperates with the learning-teaching group.
• Sometimes, the teacher plays the role of a guide in the classroom activities. He/she monitors the errors of the students and delivers some positive feedback to the learners.

Students’ role in CLT

Students also need to play some roles in CLT. These are given in the below:

• The learners have to create some groups among themselves for their learning purpose and take care of how they are able to perform in the classroom.
• The students must cooperate and support each other in the group to complete their all tasks assigned by the responsible teacher.
• The learners should be involved in interaction and conversation with the teacher and other learners in the classroom.
• The students should be more interactive and create an interactive environment in the classroom to make learning more easy and attractive.

To sum up, it can be said that communicative language teaching (CLT) is the most valuable and modern method to acquire the best ways to learn a second language quickly.

Students get enough opportunities to interact with the teacher and remove their misconceptions. The primary and exciting thing is that communicative language teaching tolerates errors as a natural phenomenon.