The practice of communicative teaching

Edited for the ELT Documents series by Christopher Brumfit and published in 1986, this book complements an earlier volume on General English Syllabus Design, looking at the implementation of communicative syllabuses.

In the first section of this book, on Specific syllabuses, JPB Allen calls for a variable focus curriculum which provides both for analytical work on functions and structures and an experiential view of language (fully communicative activities based on ‘authentic language data’), while Janice Yalden describes the ‘proportional’ – or adjustable – model of ‘frameworks’ she had been using in work with Indonesian teachers. The second section looks at Materials and methodology. HG Widdowson describes problems in developing communicative teaching materials, while JT Roberts examines the use of dialogues in teaching transactional competence, and Alan Maley addresses the total teaching context, asking if communicative competence really can be ‘taught’. The third section, on Criticism and research, comprises two papers, by Dawei Wang, and Rosamond Mitchell and Richard Johnstone, respectively. The importance of the kind of systematic classroom research into implementation which characterises this final paper is highlighted by Brumfit in his Introduction.

This book is free to download below as a pdf file.

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