Objectives

By the end of the course, students will be aware of:

• the most significant changes in ELT methodology and their causes

• the views on language, language learning and the roles of teachers and learners that underpin CLT

• the key distinguishing features and principles of CLT in the classroom

• the characteristics which make a task communicative

• the ways to create conditions and facilities for CLT in an English language classroom

and will be able to:

• reflect on their own experience of learning a foreign language and analyse tasks and lesson plans in terms of CLT.

The content of the course embraces the main principles and features of CLT (language as a means of communication, teaching language in a meaningful context (specifying notions, functions, functional exponents based on the learners’ needs analysis), priority meaning over form, focus on skills, task-based learning, focus on sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence as well as linguistic competence, the correlation between accuracy and fluency, the role of grammar, errors as learning steps, the roles of a teacher and a learner); characteristics of a communicative task; implications of the communicative approach for classroom practice (creating conditions for communication in the classroom).