The Foundations of the Communicative Approach and Three of Its Applications

Year 2011, Volume: 7 Issue: 1, 0 - 71, 27.04.2011

Mehmet Demirezen

Abstract

As the quality education develops in the world, foreign language teaching confronts many challenges. The most popular foreign language teaching methods of 1960s like Grammar Translation Method, Audiolingual Method, and Direct method developed a command of grammar rather in language forms and rules, but could not develop the speaking abilities of the non-native speaking learners that were based on memorizing language forms. So there was a need of an approach which could help the students grasp how to use target language to communicate appropriately, fluently, and effectively by being more concerned with students' initiative and interaction rather than simply with teacher-centered direction The most waited approach came up in the late 1960 was called the Communicative Approach (CA). It was originated from the changes in British language teaching tradition dating back from the late 1960s and got its basic premises expanded in mid-1970s. The goal of the Communicative Approach is to improve student’s communicative competence, which is widely accepted to consist of grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence (Kachru,1989; Koike and Tanaka,1995). Thus, it can be claimed that CA brought about the relevant change of teaching method under the name Communicative Language Teaching in which communicativeness became one of the outstanding characteristics of 1970s.

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