Societal influences The rise of CLT in the 1970s and the early 1980s was partly in response to the limited success with traditional language teaching methods and partly by the increase in demand for language learning. In Europe, the advent of the
European Common Market, an economic predecessor to the
European Union, led to migration in Europe and an increased number of people who needed to learn a foreign language for work or personal reasons. Meanwhile, more children were given the opportunity to learn foreign languages in school, as the number of secondary schools offering languages rose worldwide as part of a general trend of curriculum-broadening and modernization, with foreign-language study no longer confined to the elite academies. In Britain, the introduction of
comprehensive schools, which offered foreign-language study to all children, rather than to the select few of the elite
grammar schools, greatly increased the demand for language learning. and they began to use CLT, an approach that emphasizes communicative ability and yielded better results.
Academic influences Already in the late 19th century, the American educator
John Dewey was writing about learning by doing, and later that learning should be based on the learner's interests and experiences. In 1963, American psychologist
David Ausubel released his book
The Psychology of Meaningful Verbal Learning calling for a holistic approach to learners teaching through meaningful material. American educator Clifford Prator published a paper in 1965 calling for teachers to turn from an emphasis on manipulation (drills) towards communication where learners were free to choose their own words. In 1966, the sociolinguist
Dell Hymes posited the concept of
communicative competence considerably broadening out
Noam Chomsky's syntactic concept of competence. Also, in 1966, American psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote that learners construct their own understanding of the world based on their experiences and prior knowledge, and teachers should provide scaffolding to promote this. Bruner appears to have been influenced by
Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist whose
zone of proximal development is a similar concept. Later in the 1970s British linguist
M.A.K. Halliday studied how language functions are expressed through grammar. The development of communicative language teaching was bolstered by these academic ideas. Before the growth of communicative language teaching, the primary method of language teaching was
situational language teaching, a method that was much more clinical in nature and relied less on direct communication. In Britain, applied linguists began to doubt the efficacy of situational language teaching, partly in response to Chomsky's insights into the nature of language. Chomsky had shown that the structural theories of language then prevalent could not explain the variety that is found in real communication. In addition, applied linguists like Christopher Candlin and
Henry Widdowson observed that the current model of language learning was ineffective in classrooms. They saw a need for students to develop communicative skill and functional competence in addition to mastering language structures. Canale and Swain (1980) defined communicative competence in terms of three components: grammatical competence,
sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Canale (1983) refined the model by adding discourse competence, which contains the concepts of
cohesion and
coherence. A survey of communicative competence by Bachman (1990) divides competency into the broad headings of "organizational competence," which includes both grammatical and discourse (or textual) competence, and "pragmatic competence," which includes both sociolinguistic and "
illocutionary" competence. Strategic competence is associated with the interlocutors' ability in using communication strategies. ==Classroom activities==