A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

Languages
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TOWARDS A COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH TO
LANGUAGE LEARNING
These insights have contributed to the development of a communicative approach to
the teaching of modern foreign languages which is nowadays to be found in various
guises in all educational sectors. The past 40 years have seen a number of different
approaches to modern language teaching. Grammar-based language teaching, such
as grammar-translation and audio-visual/audio-lingual methodology, adopted a
rigid, graded approach to structures. Textbooks written in these traditions (and there
are still a lot of them about) present items in what is considered to be a logical sequence
(e.g. present tense before past, nominative case before dative), intended to teach learners
to acquire certain items before progressing to other, supposedly more complex ones.
Such an approach fails to take account of the insights from SLA outlined above. It
precludes, for example, the teaching of such central communicative expressions as
je voudrais or ich möchte until learners have covered the conditional and the subjunctive
respectively.
An approach to language based on communicative need starts instead from a
consideration of what learners are likely to have to do in the foreign language and then
builds in the vocabulary, expressions and grammar needed to perform these ‘functions’
(see Wilkins (1976) for an introduction to functional-notional syllabuses). As a result, the
same grammar points are revisited frequently throughout a language course. This
acknowledges that grammar is not acquired in a linear fashion or in discrete chunks
digested one at a time, but rather in a developmental process which cannot be regimented
or rushed. The difficulty of a functional-notional syllabus is, however, predicting precisely
what learners’ future needs in the language will be. In formal language-learning situations
the teacher has often to work hard to contrive such needs, and it is vital that the learner
also develops a generative system to cope with future unknown needs.
The principal aim of the communicative approach is to facilitate independent
communication by the learner (Pachler and Field, 1997: 70). The communicative classroom
is therefore characterised by the following:
• grammar as a facilitator of communication
• phased development from pre-communicative to free communicative exercises
• inductive learning of grammar
• maximum use of the target language
• a focus on meaning
• language used for a purpose
• the foregrounding of learners’ needs
• personalisation of language
• the creative use of language
• learner interaction
• the use of authentic language and materials
• a mixed-skills approach to teaching and assessment.