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Communicative language teaching in the 21 st century : The ‘ principled communicative approach ’

Over the past two decades “communicative language teaching” (CLT) has become a real buzzword in language teaching methodology, but the extent to which the term covers a well-defined and uniform teaching method is highly questionable. In fact, since the genesis of CLT in the early 1970s, its proponents have developed a very wide range of variants that were only loosely related to each other (for recent overviews, see Savignon, 2005; Spada 2007). In this paper I first look at the core characteristics of CLT to explore the roots of the diverse interpretations and then argue that in order for CLT to fulfil all the expectations attached to it in the 21st century, the method needs to be revised according to the latest findings of psycholinguistic research. I will conclude the paper by outlining the main principles of a proposed revised approach that I have termed the ‘principled communicative approach’.