Communicative methodology
This redefinition of goals had a knock-on effect in terms of methodology: the focus on communicating
messages – as opposed to rehearsing structural patterns – created the need for
activities that encouraged some kind of meaningful exchange, as in information-gap tasks, and,
in order to practise functional language, role plays and simulations became standard practice.
And since communicative competence implies the capacity to communicate one’s meanings
irrespective of formal accuracy, fluency was prioritized, reinforcing the trend towards incorporating
less-controlled production activities within the PPP format. For similar reasons, the
use of authentic reading and listening materials was promoted, and classroom procedures for
minimizing the difficulties of these – such as the use of skimming and scanning strategies –
became commonplace. The first mainstream coursebook to embody these principles was the
‘Strategies’ series (e.g. Abbs et al. 1975).
More radically, some scholars, such as Allwright, were arguing that, ‘if communication is
THE aim, then it should be THE major element in the process’ (1979: 167, emphasis in original).
A much-cited attempt to implement this ‘strong form’ of CLT was the Communicational
Teaching Project, better known as the Bangalore Project (Prabhu 1987), whose syllabus
consisted entirely of a succession of tasks, and was the forerunner of what became known as
the task-based approach, or task-based language teaching (TBLT). Various versions of TBLT
have been proposed (e.g. Willis 1996; Ellis 2003), with greater or lesser degrees of explicit
language focus, but all subscribe to the basic principle of ‘learning by doing’, a principle that
also underpins the whole language movement in North America (Freeman and Freeman 1992).
Nevertheless, task-based learning, while attracting considerable theoretical interest, has not
been widely adopted, partly due to the perception that it requires sophisticated classroom
management skills as well as a high degree of target language proficiency on the part of the
teacher (Ellis 2003).
Moreover, the selection and grading of syllabus objectives that are semantic and procedural,
rather than structural, has proved a challenge to course designers. EFL contexts are typically
too heterogeneous to provide accurate predictions of learners’ communicative needs. Attempts
to base syllabuses on word frequency data, now more readily available thanks to developments
in corpus linguistics, were short-lived (Willis and Willis 1988). A lexical focus was also urged
by Lewis (1993), who argued that the distinction between vocabulary and grammar was an
artificial one. Despite being promoted as an ‘approach’, Lewis’s recommendations were absorbed
into mainstream courses mainly in the form of a greater emphasis on lexical ‘chunks’ and
formulaic language.
A creative compromise was to interweave several strands – grammatical, lexical, and functional –
into one integrated course design (e.g. Swan and Walter 1984), thereby offering a more comprehensive
blueprint for communicative competence. Even so, the problem of how to grade
semantic categories, compared to the relative ease with which structures can be graded, meant that
multilayered syllabuses of this type tended to privilege form over function as the main organizational
criterion. By 1986, with the publication of (the notionally communicative) Headway
Intermediate (Soars and Soars), the grammatical syllabus had all but reasserted itself. In a
sense, a focus on grammar within a communicative framework had already been sanctioned in
Littlewood’s (1981) model of lesson design, which proposed a sequence of activities from precommunicative
to communicative, with ‘structural activities’ included in the former. Effectively,
this was the old PPP model by another name. It seemed that not a lot had changed since the
situational courses of the 1970s, the main differences being the greater use of authentic
(or ‘semi-authentic’) texts, more skills work generally, and a greater range of production activities,
including role plays and information-gap tasks, in which meaning is ‘negotiated’ (Long 1983).