ELTWeekly Vol. 6 Issue#1 | January 6, 2013 | ISSN 0975-3036

Is Communicative Approach a sophisticated extension of the behavioural model of teaching? CLT has its critics. For example, an early critic of the approach, Michael Swan (1985), pooh-poohed the approach brilliantly in a pair of academic essays. His critique seems to be aimed at early dogmatic, almost evangelical writings on CLT. One of Swan’s criticisms is that “language learners already know, in general, how to negotiate meaning. They have been doing it all their lives. What they do not know is what words are used to do it in a foreign language. They need lexical items, not skills”. CLT has problems both at conceptual level and the operational level. The problem at the conceptual level is that it does not seem to account for the concept of language. It tends to explain the form of language by attributing a functional role to it namely, communication and fails to account for the phenomenon of language (Anandan, 2006).  Chomsky (1979) believes that language can be used to transmit information, but it also serves many other purposes: clarify, for play, for creative mental activity, to gain understanding, and so on…language serves essentially for the expression of thought”. (more…)