What is communicative teaching?

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is about learning a language in order to communicate. As a result, there is a greater emphasis in the classroom on speaking and listening than on reading and writing. Students are at the centre of the class and pairwork and groupwork are an important part of the lesson. Activities focus on using language purposefully, for example, to exchange ideas, to find out information about other students, to buy something in a shop or to tell a story.

Key aspects of a lesson are that they:

• Are student-centred

• Involve all the students

• Are interesting and challenging

• Include communicative activities

• Include tasks that measure how much the students have learnt during the lesson.

All lessons presented on these pages follow these principles.