Communicative language teaching (CLT): Language is communication (1970s–1980s)

Communicative language teaching (CLT) is the approach that has dominated language pedagogy since around 1980, and its founding claim fits in one sentence: language is communication, so the goal of learning is not grammar for its own sake but communicative competence — the ability to use language appropriately in real situations. CLT is an approach, not a method: no single inventor, no fixed techniques, no canonical textbook. It emerged in Europe in the early 1970s from a practical problem — adult migrants and workers in the Common Market needed usable language fast — and a theoretical vacuum, after Chomsky’s critique had toppled the behaviorist foundations of the audio-lingual method.

What CLT changed was not one technique but the unit of teaching itself. A traditional syllabus asks: which grammatical structures, in what order? A communicative syllabus asks: what does the learner need to do with the language? Everything characteristic of the modern language classroom follows from that reversal.

Genesis: the Council of Europe and the notional-functional syllabus

The institutional cradle of CLT was the Council of Europe, which in 1971 convened a group of experts to design a unit-credit system for adult language learning across Europe — courses built from units defined by what learners could do, not by chapters of grammar. The demand was concrete: labor migration in the emerging Common Market meant teaching shop assistants, engineers and nurses, not philology students, and grammar-translation instruction had little to offer them.

The intellectual blueprint came from the British linguist David Wilkins. In a 1972 working paper for the Council of Europe, expanded into Notional Syllabuses (1976), he proposed organizing teaching not around structures (the present perfect, the passive) but around two kinds of meaning: notions — semantic categories such as time, quantity and location — and communicative functions — things people do with language: requesting, refusing, inviting, apologizing. Rather than describing language through grammar and vocabulary, Wilkins tried to specify the system of meanings a learner needs to express.

The program’s most influential product was Jan van Ek’s The Threshold Level (1975): a detailed specification of the functions, notions, vocabulary and grammar needed to operate independently in everyday situations — written for English, replicated for other European languages, and the direct ancestor of today’s CEFR levels (B1 is still officially called “Threshold”).

Communicative competence: Hymes, Canale and Swain

The theoretical heart of CLT is communicative competence, coined by the sociolinguist Dell Hymes in 1972 as a deliberate correction of Chomsky. Chomsky’s competence — the internalized grammar that generates unlimited new sentences — was, Hymes argued, too narrow a picture of knowing a language: a real speaker also knows when to speak, to whom, in what register, and when to stay silent. In his famous formulation, there are “rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless.” (How Chomsky’s ideas reshaped teaching — and how CLT grew dialectically out of them — is the subject of the entry on Chomsky’s influence on language learning.)

Hymes’ idea was turned into a working model by Michael Canale and Merrill Swain (1980), later refined by Canale (1983), who analyzed communicative competence into four components: grammatical — the code itself: vocabulary, morphology, syntax, phonology; sociolinguistic — appropriateness: register, politeness, cultural conventions; discourse — building coherent talk and text longer than a sentence; and strategic — repair: paraphrasing, asking for clarification, getting around a missing word.

The consequence was profound: grammar did not disappear, but it was demoted from the whole target to one component of four. Testing changed with it — oral interviews and role plays entered examinations because a grammar test alone measures a quarter of the construct.

Principles in the classroom: strong and weak versions

From the beginning CLT existed in two strengths, distinguished by A. P. R. Howatt (1984). The weak version — “learning to use English” — keeps a planned syllabus and adds communicative activities to practice what has been taught; this is what most mainstream coursebooks have done since the 1980s. The strong version — “using English to learn it” — claims that language is acquired through communication itself, so classroom time should consist of genuine communication rather than practice of pre-selected forms. The weak version is an evolution of earlier methods; the strong version is a genuinely different theory of learning.

In practice, a communicative classroom is recognizable by a family of features:

Information-gap tasks — each learner holds part of the information (one has a map, the other the directions), so language is the only way to close the gap;
role plays — booking a room, returning a faulty product: rehearsals of situations the learner will actually face;
pair and group work — maximizing speaking time per learner;
authentic materials — timetables, menus, forms, rather than texts written to smuggle in a grammar point;
fluency work with delayed correction — errors during communication are noted and addressed later, not interrupted.

The teacher’s role shifts accordingly: from drill leader and error policeman to designer of tasks and facilitator of interaction.

Criticism and evolution: task-based teaching and focus on form

The first wave of criticism targeted CLT’s rhetoric. Michael Swan (1985) argued that the approach made sweeping claims on thin evidence and dressed common sense in new jargon. A subtler problem was dilution: by the 1990s “communicative” was the label every textbook and curriculum claimed, so it constrained almost nothing — an approach that describes everything describes nothing.

A second critique concerned context. CLT was designed for Western European conditions — small classes, conversational goals, teachers fluent in the target language. Stephen Bax (2003) provocatively announced “the end of CLT,” arguing that exporting it as a universal solution ignored local realities; William Littlewood documented the friction in East Asian classrooms: classes of fifty, high-stakes grammar exams, traditions in which open-ended pair talk reads as disorder. In much of the world the result is not prototypical CLT but hybrids grafted onto exam-oriented teaching.

The third critique came from research on learning itself. Canadian French immersion — the closest thing to a pure strong-version experiment — showed that learners exposed to years of meaning-focused communication became fluent but retained fossilized grammatical errors: meaning alone does not guarantee accuracy. Michael Long’s answer (1991) was focus on form: brief, timely attention to grammar inside communicative activity, when a problem actually arises. Meanwhile the strong version evolved into task-based language teaching (TBLT) — from Prabhu’s Bangalore project (1987) onward — in which the task itself (plan a trip, reach a decision) becomes the unit of the syllabus. Modern CLT is this settled synthesis: communication as goal and medium, with deliberate attention to form inside it.

What this means for language learning

Two lessons of CLT have survived every critique: the target of learning is the ability to do things with the language, and communication is itself a mechanism of learning — producing meaning under real-time pressure turns knowledge into skill. The immersion research adds a sobering third: input and interaction without systematic attention to form lead to fluent, fossilized error. The practical synthesis is to practice whole sentences that do communicative work — the meaningful units CLT put at the center — while consolidating the forms through active recall and spaced repetition, which is how the Taalhammer method combines the communicative insight with what memory research demands. For practical advice on studying under a communicative approach, see the companion article on communicative language teaching for language learners; for CLT’s ancestor in target-language-only teaching, the direct method of Maximilian Berlitz; and for the parallel acquisition-driven current of the same era, Krashen’s comprehensible input theory.

Frequently asked questions

Is communicative language teaching a method?

No — it is an approach: principles about what language is (communication) and what learning is for (communicative competence), implementable in many ways. Unlike the audio-lingual or direct method, CLT prescribes no fixed techniques — which is both its flexibility and the reason its definition has blurred over fifty years.

What is the difference between CLT and task-based language teaching?

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is the modern development of CLT’s strong version. In mainstream (weak) CLT, communicative activities practice language selected in advance; in TBLT, the task itself is the unit of the syllabus, and language emerges from what the task requires.

Does CLT mean grammar doesn’t matter?

No. In Canale and Swain’s model, grammatical competence is one of the four components of communicative competence — necessary but not sufficient. What CLT rejects is grammar as the organizing principle of teaching. Since immersion research showed that ignoring form produces fluent but persistently inaccurate speakers, modern communicative teaching includes focus on form.

Sources

D. A. Wilkins, Notional Syllabuses, Oxford University Press, 1976.
J. A. van Ek, The Threshold Level, Council of Europe, 1975.
Dell Hymes, “On Communicative Competence”, in J. B. Pride, J. Holmes (eds.), Sociolinguistics, Penguin, 1972.
Michael Canale, Merrill Swain, “Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing”, Applied Linguistics 1(1), 1980.
A. P. R. Howatt, A History of English Language Teaching, Oxford University Press, 1984.
Michael Swan, “A Critical Look at the Communicative Approach”, ELT Journal 39(1–2), 1985.
Michael H. Long, “Focus on Form: A Design Feature in Language Teaching Methodology”, in K. de Bot et al. (eds.), Foreign Language Research in Cross-Cultural Perspective, John Benjamins, 1991.
Stephen Bax, “The End of CLT: A Context Approach to Language Teaching”, ELT Journal 57(3), 2003.
Jack C. Richards, Theodore S. Rodgers, Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, 3rd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2014.