Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) can be said to be the current dominant methodology. Even in countries where it has not been adopted, most ministries of education appear to be moving in its direction.
Richards and Rodgers (1986) describe Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) as an approach rather than a method, since it is defined in rather broad terms and represents a philosophy of teaching that is based on communicative language use. Moreover, it emphasizes notional-functional concepts and communicative competence, rather than grammatical structures, as central to language teaching.
Its main goal is to communicate successfully in the target language in real situations, rather than have a conscious understanding of the rules governing the language; and it has been described as an approach that aims to make communicative competence the goal of language teaching and develop procedures for the teaching of the four skills that acknowledge the interdependence of language and communication.
This way, it has become an umbrella term which covers a wide range of classroom practices. Richards and Rodgers (1986) state that although CLT does not claim a particular theory of language learning as its basis, there are several theoretical premises that can be deduced from a consideration of the approach, three key elements of CLT classroom practice and the theory of learning:
1. The communication principle. Activities that involve real communication promote learning.
2. The task principle. Activities that involve the completion of real-world tasks promote learning.
3. The meaningfulness principle. Learners must be engaged in meaningful and authentic language use for learning to take place.
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