On The Development Of Communicative Approach In English Teaching

Communicative Approach or Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) began in Britain in the late 1960s as a replacement of the earlier structural method, called Situational Language Teaching. The emergence of CLT is the result of social development and the development of FLT method. CLT is a teaching approach that is not only to foster learners' language competence but also, more importantly, to foster their communicative competence, which has been becoming significant in both foreign language research and teaching practice since the late 1980s. It claims that socio-cultural competence is the essence of language use. This paper reviews the historical background and development of some major FLT methods, the trend of FLT in the past decades, provides a historical perspective of the emergence of CLT and its main characteristics, points out the basic principles of CLT, and tries to account for CLT as the contemporary direction of FLT. This paper is divided into nine chapters, exploring CLT in different approaches by way of documentation, analytic probes, observation and investigation through questionnaires and face-to-face interviews. In view of international communication, social development, curriculum reform, teachers' professional development, an apparently bold assumption comes to our mind: CLT has been developing in the direction of increasing importance and betterment.