Ted Power

The Communicative Approach

Its history and theoretical background

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'Communicative' and 'Natural' have long been attractive marketing terms for people and institutions offering services to language learners. In fact, different versions of what we now call the 'communicative' approach can be traced back several centuries.

It is unsurprising that educators who describe their methods as 'natural' tend to emphasise people's natural capacity to learn languages. In A History of English Language Teaching, A. P. R. Howatt with H. G. Widdowson group together several labels, including the Natural Method, Conversation Method, Direct Method and Communicative Approach. They suggest that these approaches share the hypothesis that the conditions which awaken people's natural capacity to learn a language are: (a) someone to talk to, (b) something to talk about, and (c) a desire to understand and to make yourself understood.

The continuing importance of syntax in language syllabus design

The version of the Communicative Approach that emerged during the 1970s was presented as a major change of direction. Different proponents placed different emphases on what this change should involve. Some appeared to believe that the Communicative Approach should replace the Structural Syllabus. This, however, has not happened. Most major English course books continue to retain a structural thread, particularly at lower levels of proficiency.

The complete abandonment of the structural syllabus would make language learning and teaching difficult, if not impossible. There is an important distinction between acquiring a first language from birth and learning a second language later in life. The two experiences are clearly not the same. Nevertheless, research into first-language acquisition examines every level of linguistic development, from the ability to produce early phonemes such as "Ma Ma" and "Da Da" to the stage at which an English-speaking child can produce the third-person singular -s on the end of a verb.

Books exploring the relationship between syntax and meaning in English

The relationship between the choice of syntactic forms (syntax) and meaning (semantics) is so important that it is the main focus of books which I would highly recommend to language learners and teachers:

  1. Meaning and the English Verb by Geoffrey Leech [2004]
  2. A Communicative Grammar of English by Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik [2003]

Focus on sentence-level syntax in Berlitz's 'Natural' Method

Berlitz's Natural or Direct Method, used from the end of the nineteenth century, depended very heavily on a structural syllabus. The pattern drills in its course materials involved a considerable amount of sentence-level question and answer practice. It is therefore difficult to reconcile Berlitz's Natural Method with some of the more recent approaches that have also been described as 'Natural'.

Focus on discourse in more recent 'Natural' Methods

One of the important advances made by versions of the Communicative Approach in the 1970s was a greater focus on discourse. Reference skills, for example, need to be developed in the context of paragraphs as well as individual sentences.

It is fair to say that the Audio-Lingual Method, coupled with the Structural Syllabus, was one of the main approaches used in private language schools during the 1960s and much of the 1970s. It tended to push discourse into the background.

Major course books for lower-level students, such as L. G. Alexander's successful First Things First and Practice and Progress, and Geoffrey Broughton's Success With English, which contained longer texts, often used anything resembling a paragraph mainly to contextualise newly introduced structural items. Although these authors could write skilfully, many texts in course books of this period contained few cohesive devices and lacked coherence. At worst, longer texts consisted of a series of disconnected sentences.

The dialogues also lacked many of the features of natural spoken English conversation. Instead, they were often exchanges of what might be called structure-speech: language that sounded stilted because it had been constructed primarily to present and practise particular grammatical patterns. To be fair to the authors, however, this was deliberate. Their aim was to present language patterns in a controlled environment so that learners could practise and eventually adapt the patterns for their own generative use.

There were also some good materials on the market for learning to write well-constructed prose, usually intended for learners at higher levels of proficiency. One which remains a favourite of mine is From Paragraph to Essay: Developing Composition Writing by Maurice L. Imhoof and Herman Hudson [1975].

For higher-level learners with time to develop their writing skills, the offering from US publishers was noticeably better than that of their UK counterparts. By the late 1980s, the growing number of students from non-English-speaking countries attending US and UK universities had encouraged the production of more language-learning materials focusing on discourse.

By the late 1970s, British universities were calling upon private language schools for ideas about setting up learning centres offering language support for L2 learners. At the same time, private language schools were recognising that more of their students were preparing to study at UK universities and that there were purposes for reading and writing other than practising structural patterns at sentence level.

Some early ELT reading-skills materials which I particularly like are:

To meet the rapidly growing interest in English for Academic Purposes, private English language schools needed to offer more accurate models of both written and spoken English discourse.

Alongside titles such as Tom McArthur's Reading and Thinking in English: Discovering Discourse [1979], materials for teachers also appeared, including Gillian Brown's Listening to Spoken English [1977; revised edition 1990]. This theoretical work alerts teachers to the fact that listening involves much more than simply knowing the meaning of the words being heard. Stress, intonation, voice quality and gesture can all contribute to meaning. The book also offers a useful analysis of why many second-language users find native speakers difficult to understand.

The much-maligned Grammar-Translation Method focused on passages of text as well as sentences

It should also be remembered that the Grammar-Translation Method extended beyond sentence level in the tasks learners were expected to perform. Some of our best linguists can be found among people who earn their living as translators.

Awareness of both semantic and grammatical relationships within longer sections of text is critical to good translation. Translators today keep databases containing examples of text that they have previously translated successfully. If they have particular customers requiring specific genres, such as the language of social history or industrial relations, similar content is likely to recur, whether in the form of individual words, complete sentences or methods of developing a topic within a paragraph.

Great progress has been made in textual analysis as a result of the power of modern computers, including concordancers and frequency data. It is now well recognised that good stylistic analysis needs to be both structural and functional: it should consider both usage and use.

For a structural approach to analysing text, see Investigating English Style by David Crystal and Derek Davy [1973]. For an approach combining structural and functional analysis, see The Language of Advertising by Angela Goddard [2002].

Terminology used in the 1960s and 1970s to argue the case for communicative language teaching

Competence and performance – Chomsky's terms [1965]. Competence refers to the native speaker's idealised knowledge of the abstract system of rules of a language: knowledge capable of producing and understanding an infinite number of sentences.

Performance – the actual use of language in concrete situations.

Communicative competence – a term used by Campbell and Wales [1970] and Hymes [1972] to refer to the relationship between grammatical competence, or knowledge of the rules of the language, and sociolinguistic competence, or knowledge of the rules governing language use. It is distinguished from communicative performance, which is the realisation of these competences in actual speech in real situations.

Usage and use – terms used by Widdowson [1978] to distinguish two aspects of communicative performance:

  1. the ability to produce correct sentences, or manifestations of the linguistic system = usage;
  2. the ability to use knowledge of the rules for effective communication = use.

Signification and value – terms used by Widdowson to distinguish two kinds of meaning associated with usage and use:

  1. the meaning attached to a sentence as an instance of language usage, isolated from context = signification;
  2. the meaning a sentence takes on when it is put to use for communicative purposes = value.

For example:
Question: "Could you tell me the way to the bank?"
Answer: "The rain destroyed all the crops."

The response has signification but no value in this context.

Other contrasting concepts

Linguistic categories versus communicative categories

Widdowson used these contrasting concepts to distinguish between language as a formal system and language as effective communication.

From the Notional/Functional Approach to CLT

Teaching Language as Communication [1978], together with D. A. Wilkins's Notional Syllabuses [Oxford, 1976], was one of the most influential works in explaining the rationale for changes in the L2 curriculum and in language-teaching methods.

Some earlier Direct Method approaches had emphasised syntax at the expense of semantics. Widdowson argued for greater attention to meaning and use. A preoccupation with patterns and forms can take meaning out of lesson content. However, there are dangers in simply casting patterns and forms aside, since different selections of structures, such as verb tenses, are used to express different meanings.

For example, she lived may refer to a completed period in the past, whereas she has lived can suggest that she may still live there. See Meaning and the English Verb by Geoffrey Leech [2004]. This book is concerned as much with meaning and communication as with the structure of language.

One of the key areas of knowledge for anyone learning or teaching a language is therefore the ability to relate language function to syntax or form. For example: "What are the main uses of the Present Perfect?"

Making it 'lingual' and 'structural' as well as 'communicative'

Versions of the Communicative Approach which put semantics at the expense of syntax are just as deficient as versions of the Audio-Lingual Approach which put syntax at the expense of semantics. In both cases, one important dimension of language can be neglected.

There are, in fact, some arguments for using language for display or practice. For example, repeated pronunciation of English words and phrases without necessarily knowing their meaning may strengthen the organs of articulation and help learners become familiar with unfamiliar sound patterns.

Works such as English Pronunciation Illustrated use pictures to explain the different meanings of minimal pairs. However, the appropriate use of a word often depends on its linguistic context, the situation and the degree of formality. One-to-one associations between a picture and a word therefore have limited value when teaching language in use.

Getting your tongue around the target language

One shortcoming of some English-language course books that claim to put meaning at the centre of the syllabus is that they omit activities, such as pattern drills, which provide opportunities for pronunciation practice and active use of the target language.

An Audio-Lingual approach based on syntax may still prove more useful than a course book based primarily on semantics if the main utterances learners are required to produce amount to little more than choosing A, B, C or D.

It is possible to focus on meaning while requiring very passive behaviour from learners. The effort required of teachers may be considerably less, and classroom management may be smoother, if learners are spared the challenge of speaking the target language. Teachers and learners may even be unaware of how little English is actually being learned if the examination they are preparing for consists largely of multiple-choice questions, since this format encourages passive behaviour.

Language teachers need only a little experience to recognise that considerable energy goes into teaching at lower levels of proficiency. A great deal of pattern practice and repetition is needed to model, practise and consolidate the entry points into an unfamiliar language system. To a large extent, these entry points will consist of basic structures.

The structural syllabus therefore cannot simply be absent if we take learners' level of proficiency seriously. However, the presence of a structural syllabus does not exclude the need for a parallel functional syllabus and vocabulary selection that serves learners' communication needs, rather than selecting words merely because they make basic syntax easier to teach.

What about the 'Input Hypothesis'?

One justification for not giving learners opportunities to produce the target language has been the 'Input Hypothesis': learners need authentic materials and large amounts of comprehensible input.

This justification has become less convincing in the age of the Internet, when learners can obtain extensive exposure to authentic uses of their target language, including audio and video, on their own computers before they set foot in a classroom.

When learners pay for help from a native speaker of the target language, they will normally expect some modelling of the language as well as opportunities to practise using it actively.

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