Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen

by James F. Lee

Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen is the first title in a professional series of Foreign Language Teaching Methods texts. Written by well-known and respected teachers and researchers in the field of Second Language Acquisition, Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen addresses important questions such as what it means to teach communicatively, what are proper roles of input and output in the classroom, how do learners read and write in a second language, and what approaches to testing and evaluation are appropriate for the communicative classroom. Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen begins by defining communicative language teaching and proceeds to explore its underlying assumptions, to examine the roles of teachers and learners, to discuss theoretical and research issues relating to it, and to offer practical suggestions. A Student Manual accompanies the text.

Genres: Teaching, Nonfiction, Linguistics, Language

250 pages, Hardcover

First published January 26, 1995

Reviews

[Petter Nordal · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's a useful look at how audiolingual method teaching can be hyped into communicative language teaching, giving students more input and teachers more of a guiding role. I appreciated the firm grounding in published research, avoiding the anecdotal "inspirational" discourse which sometimes makes its way into teacher texts, and the emphasis on planning, making it clear that knowing a foreign language and speaking it to your students will not help them learn it as well as planning for their interests and their communication. The organization of the text is obnoxious, with gray boxes titled "Pause to consider . . " and rhetorical questions. There's also an annoying habit of providing elaborate examples of different kinds of instruction in lists such as "activity A" followed by "activity B" all the way through "activity d" and only then providing the through discussion of various aspects of the activities. Examples are obfuscatory when their arrangement impedes their use as illustrations of principles.