A major issue that continues to challenge language teachers is how to ensure that learners develop accuracy and complexity in their speaking, as well as fluency. Teachers know that too much corrective feedback (CF) can make learners reluctant to speak, while not enough may allow their errors to become entrenched. Furthermore, there is controversy…

Communicating and collaborating in online contexts can be quite different from face-to-face situations and requires students to acquire multiple literacies in addition to foreign language skills and intercultural communicative competence. This paper looks at how the development of multiliteracies can be included in the EFL classroom through the…

This article reports on a teacher-talk training course for Japanese primary school teachers, who are preparing to teach "communicative English" for the first time. The article argues that teacher-talk training is important for communicative classes with young students because most of the input and interaction is by default teacher centred. In our…

ELT history is often viewed as a succession of methods, but such a view tends to rest on a "packaging up" and labelling of complex and often contested past developments. This process ignores both continuity with earlier developments and diversity of contemporary opinion and often seems to serve as a way to clear the ground for self-proclaimed…

In line with a communicative curriculum for English, it is claimed that communicative competence involves knowledge about when and how to display affectivity in talk-in-interaction. Typically, interjections have been described as a lexical means for expressions of emotion. A survey of textbooks canonical of EFL at German elementary and secondary…

Socio-pragmatic skills have been identified as important components of communicative competence in the workplace, yet relatively few studies have undertaken an evaluation of the effects of classroom-based support in developing both cognitive control and social competence in these areas of language proficiency. This paper reports on a collaborative…

The primary aim of this paper is to explore a common dichotomy that characterizes debate about what has come to be termed "appropriate methodology". It is that between "traditional" and "communicative" approaches to language teaching, a distinction that persists despite arguments by some that the term "communicative" should be superseded or even…

Despite long-standing recognition of the importance of sociocultural context in meaning making, criticisms have been levelled at communicative language teaching (CLT) for failing to effectively address this at the level of classroom practice. In fact, it has been argued that the way CLT presents content reveals a fundamentally reductionist view of…

The National Education Act of 1999 in Thailand mandated a transition from teacher- to learner-centred instruction for all subjects including English. This shift was associated with the development of communicative ability in English to meet the needs of globalization. The current study investigated the policy behind and implementation of the…

This paper reports the findings of three qualitative studies which were carried out in university level EFL classes in Germany. The three groups used various combinations of communication technologies such as email, web-based message boards, and video conferencing in order to engage in online exchanges with different partner classes in Ireland and…

Recent articles in the "ELT Journal" offer interesting debates on CLT. On one side, Bax (2003) proposes that CLT should be abandoned since the methodology fails to take into account the context of language teaching. On the other side, Liao (2004) suggests that CLT is best. However, within the broad theoretical position on which CLT is based,…

This study briefly reviews Chomsky's and Hymes' ideas on competence and links them to Dubin's notions of autonomous and ideological communicative competence. Based on interviews with high school EFL teachers, the study hypothesizes that some of these teachers have an indistinct view about communicative competence that moves between autonomous and…

A study of the impact of a major recent language education reform project in Italy employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, some of which could inform other studies of language learning and teaching. Impact study findings suggested interesting differences between the perceptions of learners and teachers on…

In his paper titled "The Need for Communicative Language Teaching in China," Xiaoqing Liao (2004) holds an absolutist view on the appropriacy of CLT for Chinese EFL classrooms, and claims that the methodology "is best for China." The absolutist claim is based on a problematic assumption of CLT's universal effectiveness/appropriacy, and ignores the…

Situated evaluation views learning as a phenomenon which occurs in socioculturally specific contexts (Bruce and Rubin 1992). Its proponents recognize two forms of curriculum: one is a documented version, which proposes idealized teaching practices across various teaching situations; and the other is a realized version of curriculum implementation…