Communicative course books 1.

Aims of communicative language teaching Communicative language teaching has become the accepted orthodoxy of TEFL over the past ten years or more, and many, but not at all, general courses refer to communicative goals, communicative practice or communicative methodology. Blueprint one (Abbs and Freebairn 1990), for example, highlights the students need to communicate effectively: students need to know that the language they are going to learn will enable them to communicate their needs, ideas, and opinions. Motivation comes from knowing that language activities in the classroom are at all times meaningful and aimed at real-life communication. The new Cambridge English course (swan and walter 1990) recommends that language practice should resemble real-life communication, with genuine exchange of information and opinions, whilst formula one (white and Williams 1989) aims at providing an ability to use the language for communicative purposes and grapevine (viney, p. and k. 1990) gives as one of its principles an emphasis on communicative goals. Flying colours (garton-sprenger and greenhall 1991) gives communicative aims for all its lessons and there are expressed as a mixture of communicative activities and language functions in terms such as the following: Giving instructions Describing a sequence of actions Criticizing Expressing obligation Headway intermediate (soars, J. and L. 1986) in its teachers book outlines usefully what its view communicate methodology amounts to: Headway incorporates and encourages what is generally considered to be a communicative methodology: Students are challenged cognitively They are involved in learning process They are asked to contribute their own opinions, experiences and feelings They take a part real in real or realistic activities They are encourage to work closely with peers

They are encouraged to assume a certain responsibility for their own learning, and to develop learning skills The teacher adopts differing roles (informer, monitor, resource consultant) according to stage of the lesson. Richards and Rodgers (1986) consider communicative language teaching to approach rather than method. The distinction that they are making is that there is no one accepted methodology communicative language teaching: it can be carried out in different ways, and its breadth and comprehensive nature make it bigger in scope than other approaches and methods: there is no single text or authority on it, nor any single model that is universally accepted as authoritative. Its aims, according to Richards and Rodgers, are twofold: to make communicative competence the goal of language teaching and to develop procedures for the teaching of the four language skills that acknowledge that interdependence of language and communication. Its theoretical base, again according to Richards and Rodgers, includes these characteristics: 1. Language is a system for the expression meaning 2. The primary function of language is for interaction and communication 3. The structure of language reflects its functional and communicative uses
4. The primary units language are not merely its grammatical and structural features,

but categories of functional and communicative meaning as exemplified in discourse