Communicative Language Teaching | Objectives and Characteristics

Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative language teaching is one of the best and popular methods of learning a second language throughout the 20th century. Global communication is increasing day by day and in some cases 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 life 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, the 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 of all the skills including reading, writing listening and speaking.
• Gradually it focuses on the grammatical, discourse, functional, sociolinguistic of communicative competence.
• It 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 appreciates 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 that mainly focuses on learning the language through communication. The significant characteristics of communicative language teaching are given below:

• CLT emphasizes to engage 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 in a natural phenomenon.
• Normally CLT focuses on the fluency of the learners rather than the accuracy of the grammar and learners acquire their accuracy gradually and naturally.
• CLT also believes that communication is the fundamental objectives of language 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 which encourage the learners in participating in the natural environment, for instance, group and pair work etc.
• CLT agrees with the perception of individual work.
• In communicative language teaching, grammar is the second option of 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-centred.
• 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 as a facilitator to be done the communication process among all the participants. They also encourage learners to join various activities.
• As a professor, a teacher answers the questions of the students and also care 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 among 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 taking care of how they are able to perform in the classroom.
• The students must have to cooperate and support each other in the group to complete their all tasks assigned by the responsible teacher.
• The learners should involve 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 for making the 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.