Communicative Approach In Elt

Introduction
Nowadays the Communicative Approach, also known as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), is the most influential model so as to teach English as a foreign language; nonetheless, as all the methods and approaches that preceded it, CLT has strengths and weaknesses that teachers of English to speakers of others languages (TESOL) have to take into account before selecting one approachon which to base their lessons. In the following essay, the historical development and the main features of the Communicative Approach are going to be explained.
To begin with the discussion, the goal of the CLT is to develop communicative competence in the students by recognizing the interdependence of communication and language, accordingly, there are some methods that have influenced TheCommunicative Approach in its generation, such as The Task Based Learning, The Lexical Approach among others.
CLT emerged in the 1970s as a response to the current models of those days, namely, Audiolingualism and the Situational Language Teaching, both, in turn, became the most important approaches to teach English as a foreign language in the 1960s inThe United States and Britain respectively.CLTincorporates the system of meanings, according to Wilkins, two types of meanings can be described: notionaland functional categorieswhich could be useful in order to develop a communicative syllabus for language teaching. Moreover, there are two versions of the approach which are known as a “strong” and a “weak” version of CLT. A distinction between both will be done further ahead in this essay. Forthe time being, the key characteristics of the CLT will be exposed i. e. the students and teacher’s role, techniques and materials employed, and the activities.
Finally, after considering all those elements and my own experience as a pre-service teacher, I am going to decide whether the CLT is appropriate for English Language Teaching, justifying my choice and mentioning how I would put it intopractice in a specific context and with a specified group of learners.
Firstly, the communicative approach favors the communicative nature of language, somehow it incorporates the linguistics aspects of the language, although some linguists stated that it is not only necessary for the students to master the linguistics structures, but also it is required that they become able to use thelanguage, since it was observed that students could produce sentences in a lesson, but they were not able to use them in a real context; therefore,it can be noticed that this approach looks for a meaningful learning. Widdowson, Wilkins and Hymesstudied the issue of knowing how to use the language in real communicative contexts: “Students may know the rules of linguistics usage, but be unable to use thelanguage” (Widdowson, 1978). “It became clear that communication required that students performed certain functions as well, such as promising, inviting, and declining invitations within social context” (Wilkins, 1976). “In short, being able to communicate required more than linguistics competence; it required communicative competence” (Hymes, 1971)
Aside from developing the communicativecompetence, it is admitted that there is a relation between language and communication which means that language depends on communication and vice versa. The term “communicative competence” was coined by Hymes (1972). In his theory, he mentions what a speaker needs to know in order to be communicatively competent in a speech community. According to Hymes, a person who acquires communicative competenceacquires both knowledge and ability for language use.Not only Hymes has referred to CLT and communicative competence in their theories, but also there are many others writers namely Halliday, Widdowson, Chomsky, Canale and Swain among others who have contributed to the development of the communicative approach.
Some of the characteristics of this communicative view of language follow:
1. Language...