Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
CLT is a powerful teaching approach to encourage the development of the four macro skills in language learning— speaking, listening, reading and writing. These are a core part of CLT from the very start, since active communication serves to integrate the different skills. The use of authentic or real teaching materials (brochures, flyers, timetables, menus and magazines) also helps ensure that students develop relevant grammar and vocabulary while working through activities that build these core skills.
MASTER THE GERMAN LANGUAGEStudents become competent communicators, able to use the right grammar, vocabulary and sentence structure in different real-life contexts and are flexible enough to adapt as circumstances dictate.Students are assessed on their level of communicative competence rather than on their ability to regurgitate information. This approach also enables learners to quickly gain confidence when interacting with other people, which helps them enjoy using their new-found language skills.
Given that the teacher will not be available to help students when they’re out in the real-world, it’s appropriate that they should take the lead in developing their core language skills and find ways to prioritise communication and conversation.
In the language classroom, learners also need to engage in learning activities in a cooperative rather than individualistic manner - it’s vital that they work together to build effective conversations and to complete the pair / group tasks that are at the heart of the CLT approach. As such, teachers can develop more creative language learning activities that go beyond the traditional repetition and the memorization of sentences and grammatical patterns.
Interaction in the target language is both the means and ultimate goal of learning a language. This is the approach used by Evolanguage, which together with the Instructional Scaffolding (view below), helps the student learn a foreign language effectively in heterogeneous classes. The main features of CLT are the following: